演講者簡介 : Professor Liu received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Minnesota in 1997. He is currently a Senior Research Advisor and the Director of Center for Pacific Basin Studies, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. His research fields are Macroeconomics, Monetary policy, Credit and housing, International finance, Chinese economy.
演講摘要 : Housing demand shocks are an important source of housing price fluctuations and, through the collateral channel, they drive macroeconomic fluctuations as well. However, these reduced-form shocks in the standard macro models fail to generate the observed large fluctuations in the housing price-to-rent ratio. We build a tractable heterogeneous-agent model that provides a microeconomic foundation for housing demand shocks. Households with high marginal utility of housing face binding borrowing constraints, leading to a liquidity premium in the aggregated housing Euler equation that drives a wedge between the house price and the average rent. A relaxation of credit constraints leads to large fluctuations in house prices and the price-to-rent ratio. Thus, our model has no “price-to-rent” puzzle.
