Most Popular Books by Kurt E

We build a model of the U.S. economy with multiple aggregate shocks (income, housing finance conditions, and beliefs about future housing demand) that generate fluctuations in equilibrium house prices. Through a series of counterfactual experiments, we study the housing boom and bust around the Great Recession and obtain three main results. First, we find that the main driver of movements in house prices and rents was a shift in beliefs. Shifts in credit conditions do not move house prices but are important for the dynamics of home ownership, leverage, and foreclosures. The role of housing rental markets and long-term mortgages in alleviating credit constraints is central to these findings. Second, our model suggests that the boom-bust in house prices explains half of the corresponding swings in non-durable expenditures and that the transmission mechanism is a wealth effect through household balance sheets. Third, we find that a large-scale debt forgiveness program would have done little to temper the collapse of house prices and expenditures, but would have dramatically reduced foreclosures and induced a small, but persistent, increase in consumption during the recovery.

This dissertation contributes to recent scholarship on the cultural significance of the sea in pre-modern Britain by examining how writers from Chaucer to Marvell marshaled historically specific representations of seafaring to explore the intricacies of a basic problem that underlay such questions and that was becoming increasingly complicated by the momentum of religious reform, that of how and whether it was even possible to discern a divine reality that structured human existence. Moreover, during what might be called the "long" era of reform from the later Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, sea imagery gradually reveals the emergence of skepticism out of the theological controversies of that era--skepticism ranging from doubts about the medieval Church's claim to be the uniquely authentic representative of God on earth to anxiety that, rather than being organized by a beneficent divine providence, human life was a matter of weathering or navigating the vagaries of fortune in an indifferent cosmos.