D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics
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Home Equity Extraction and Household Spending in Canada
We use rich microdata to measure home equity extraction in Canada and track its evolution over time. We find home equity extraction has been rising in recent years and has likely contributed materially to dynamics in household spending. -
Flight from Safety: How a Change to the Deposit Insurance Limit Affects Households’ Portfolio Allocation
Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper. -
Reassessing the Growth of HELOCs in Canada Using New Regulatory Data
Using new regulatory data on residential secured lending from Canadian banks, we assess the growth rate of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs). -
Inequality in Parental Transfers, Borrowing Constraints and Optimal Higher Education Subsidies
This paper studies optimal education subsidies when parental transfers are unequally distributed across students and cannot be publicly observed. After documenting substantial inequality in parental transfers among US college students with similar family resources, I examine its implications for how the education subsidy should vary with schooling level and family resources to minimize inefficiencies generated by borrowing constraints. -
The Impact of Recent Policy Changes on the Canadian Mortgage Market
Recent policy changes are having a clear impact on the mortgage market. The number of new, highly indebted borrowers has fallen, and overall mortgage activity has slowed significantly. -
The Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment
Risk assessment models are an important component of the Bank’s analytical tool kit for assessing the resilience of the financial system. We describe the Framework for Risk Identification and Assessment (FRIDA), a suite of models developed at the Bank of Canada to quantify the impact of financial stability risks to the broader economy and a range of financial system participants (households, businesses and banks). -
A Look Inside the Box: Combining Aggregate and Marginal Distributions to Identify Joint Distributions
This paper proposes a method for estimating the joint distribution of two or more variables when only their marginal distributions and the distribution of their aggregates are observed. Nonparametric identification is achieved by modelling dependence using a latent common-factor structure. -
Interest Rate and Renewal Risk for Mortgages
In this note, we explore two types of risk faced by holders of mortgages and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) in the context of rising interest rates: interest rate risk and renewal risk. -
Did U.S. Consumers Respond to the 2014–2015 Oil Price Shock? Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey
The impact of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy is a topic of considerable debate. In this paper, we examine the response of U.S. consumers to the 2014–2015 negative oil price shock using representative survey data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. -
Home Equity Extraction and the Boom-Bust Cycle in Consumption and Residential Investment
The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.