We study an equilibrium in which agents face surprise liquidity shocks and invest in liquid and illiquid riskless assets. The random holding horizon from liquidity shocks makes the return of the illiquid security risky. The equilibrium premium for such risk depends on the constraint that agents face when borrowing against future income; it is insignificant without borrowing constraint, but can ...

We study how a household borrowing constraint the the form of a down payment requirement affects house price dynamics in an OLG model with standard preferences. We find that in certain situations the borrowing constraint shapes house price dynamics substantially. The importance of the constraint depends very much on whether house price changes are driven by interest rate or aggregate income sho...

Financing Decisions of Firms and Central Bank Policy* This Paper aims to explain the sharp rise in unhedged foreign borrowing by South East Asian corporations in the few years prior to the crisis despite remarkably little change in fundamentals. The crucial element of our story is the complementarity between decisions of firms and of the central bank, which gives rise to multiple equilibria: wh...

Using data from the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), this paper estimates homeownership rates that would prevail in the United States if borrowing constraints were eliminated. These estimates are obtained by first identifying a group of unconstrained households in the SCF based on a unique set of survey questions. Housing tenure preferences are then estimated over unconstrained household...

The financial situation of undergraduate students remains a high-profile issue within the UK higher education sector, not least due to its perceived relationship with retention, well-being and success. This paper probes this question from a new direction, using concepts and approaches from the field of applied psychology to examine how students use various forms of credit and whether personalit...

This essay discusses whether “stealing” theories from other disciplines should always be avoided or whether there is any appropriate way of using theories developed in other disciplines in an information systems (IS) context. We take a look at the benefits and problems that have arisen in the IS field as a result of theory borrowing and suggest that – when done appropriately – such borrowing ma...

Language evolution is traditionally described in terms of family trees with ancestral languages splitting into descendent languages. However, it has long been recognized that language evolution also entails horizontal components, most commonly through lexical borrowing. For example, the English language was heavily influenced by Old Norse and Old French; eight per cent of its basic vocabulary i...

W herever one turns these days, one seems to run into comments about the financial condition of the American household. Most of these comments refer to sources of increasing stress on the American consumer, from the historically low household savings rate to the historically high rates of bankruptcy and debt delinquency. On top of all this, demographic trends are raising the prospect of having ...