Topic: Housing Finance, Boom-Bust Episodes, and the Macroeconomy

Speaker: Carlos Garriga, Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Date: November 15th (Wednesday)

Time: 10:00-11:30am

Location: Building 4, Room 101

Language: English

Abstract:

This paper analyzes how arrangements in the in the mortgage market impact the dynamics of housing (boom-bust episodes) and the economy using a structural equilibrium model with incomplete markets and endogenous adjustment costs. In response to mortgage rates and credit conditions, the model can generate movements in house prices, residential investment, and homeownership consistent with the U.S. housing boom-bust. The propagation to the macroeconomy is asymmetric with much higher consumption sensitivity during the bust than the boom due to the endogenous fragility caused by mortgage debt. Mortgages with adjustable-rate increase the sensitivity of house prices to credit conditions relative to an economy with fixed-rate loans without refinancing. Macro prudential policies can mitigate fragility by reducing the magnitude of house price movements without curtailing homeownership.    

About the speaker:

Carlos Garriga is a Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Prior to joining the Federal Reserve Bank in 2007, he was faculty at the Department of Economics at Florida State University and at the Universitat de Barcelona. He has been a visiting scholar at the Sveriges Riksbank, the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and Atlanta and LAEF at the University of California Santa Barbara, CEDEC Washington University in St. Louis, the London School of Economics, and the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota. He has given lectures at Washington University in St. Louis, Abat Oliba CEU University, the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia (UNED).

He has published articles in the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, International Economic Review, Review of Economic Dynamics, European Economic Review, Journal of European Economic Association, Economic Letters, Economic Modeling, and chapters in books published by Chicago University Press and MIT Press.