HOUSING FINANCE AND MONETARY POLICY

Housing and Monetary Policy

When you look back over the past half-century in the United States you see a remarkable secular change in the housing cycle. Most importantly, the volatility or average size of the fluctuations in residential construction declined. The change occurred in the early 1980s. For example, compare two periods, the first before the early 1980s and the second since the 1980s. In the earlier period the ...

Monetary Policy and Housing Booms

A multitude of factors contributed to the housing booms and crashes experienced in many countries and the ensuing global financial crisis. Much of the existing research on these issues assumes that agents have complete information about the economic environment and form rational expectations. This commentary argues that models with imperfect knowledge and learning provide a potentially rich ave...

Housing and Monetary Policy in Japan

The first two methods seem appropriate for the measuring of the “cost of living,” as they cover the consumption of the service produced by housing. The payments method reflects the actual outlay for owning a dwelling for shelter purposes; it can be regarded as a simplified version of the user cost method. The user cost method, as adopted by Canada and Sweden, includes the opportunity cost of ow...

Islamic Finance and the Fluctuations of Investment and Output: The Role of Monetary Policy

The recent global financial crisis once again revealed the harmful effects of interest-based contracts in the conventional financial system. Islamic finance, as an alternative financial system, discourages interest rate and debt financing. This paper investigates the effects of two financial systems, namely the conventional and Islamic systems, on macroeconomic variables. To achieve this goal, ...

Housing Policy and Finance in China: A Literature Review