Giovanni Favara

Credit Supply and the Price of Housing

An exogenous expansion in mortgage credit has significant effects on house prices. This finding is established using US branching deregulations between 1994 and 2005 as instruments for credit. Credit increases for deregulated banks, but not in placebo samples. Such differential responses rule out demand-based explanations, and identify an exogenous credit supply shock. Because of geographic diversification, treated banks expand credit: housing demand increases, house prices rise, but to a lesser extent in areas with elastic housing supply, where the housing stock increases instead. In an instrumental variable sense, house prices are well explained by the credit expansion induced by deregulation.

Externalities and Macroprudential Policy

This note overviews macroprudential policy options that have been proposed to address the systemic risks experienced during the recent financial crisis. It contributes to the policy debate by providing a taxonomy of macroprudential policies in terms of the specific negative externalities in the financial system that these policies are meant to address, and discusses their interrelations and some key implementation issues.

House price dynamics with dispersed information

We use a user-cost model to study how dispersed information affects the equilibrium house price. In the model, agents are disparately informed about local economic conditions, consume housing services, and speculate on price changes. Optimists, who expect high house price growth, buy in anticipation of capital gains; pessimists, who expect capital losses, prefer to rent. Because of short-selling constraints on housing, pessimistic expectations are not incorporated in the price of owned houses and the equilibrium price is higher and more volatile relative to the benchmark case of common information. We present evidence supporting the modelʼs predictions in a panel of US cities.