The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition articles

Recent articles from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition

Editors' summary.
September 22, 2008... THE BROOKINGS PANEL ON ECONOMIC ACTIVITY held its eighty-sixth conference in Washington, D.C., on September 11 and 12, 2008. Several of the conference papers examine aspects of the current financial crisis: the relationships among recent global financial imbalances, mortgage lending, and...

Financial crash, commodity prices, and global imbalances.
September 22, 2008... The current financial crisis has its origins in global asset scarcity, which led to large capital flows toward the United States and to the creation of asset bubbles that eventually burst. In its first phase the crash exacerbated the shortage of assets in the world economy, which triggered a...

Making sense of the subprime crisis.
September 22, 2008... ABSTRACT Should market participants have anticipated the large increase in home foreclosures in 2007 and 2008? Most of these foreclosures stemmed from mortgage loans originated in 2005 and 2006, raising suspicions that lenders originated many extremely risky loans during this period. We show...

The central role of home prices in the current financial crisis: how will the market clear?
September 22, 2008... This paper begins by describing some patterns in home price movements over recent decades. It then discusses some distinguishing characteristics of housing markets that will contribute to determining prices going forward: Housing is heterogeneous, making prices hard to measure. Home prices...

Beyond leveraged losses: the balance sheet effects of the home price downturn.
September 22, 2008... ABSTRACT This paper quantifies the impact of declining home prices, increasing mortgage credit losses, and the associated reduction in credit supply on real GDP growth. Using a state-level panel analysis, I first estimate the link between home prices and foreclosures. I estimate that an...