NBER Publications by Veronica Warnock

We examine the extent to which markets enable the provision of housing finance across a wide range of countries. Housing is a major purchase requiring long-term financing, and the factors that are associated with well functioning housing finance systems are those that enable the provision of long-term finance. Across all countries, controlling for country size, we find that countries with stronger legal rights for borrowers and lenders (through collateral and bankruptcy laws), deeper credit information systems, and a more stable macroeconomic environment have deeper housing finance systems. These same factors also help explain the variation in housing finance across emerging market economies. Across developed countries, which tend to have low macroeconomic volatility and relatively extensi...

Foreign official purchases of U.S. government bonds have an economically large and statistically significant impact on long-term interest rates. Federal Reserve credibility, as evidenced by dramatic reductions in both long-term inflation expectations and the volatility of long rates, contributed much to the decline of long rates in the 1990s. More recently, however, foreign flows have become important. Controlling for various factors given by a standard macroeconomic model, we estimate that had there been no foreign official flows into U.S. government bonds over the past year, the 10-year Treasury yield would currently be 90 basis points higher. Our results are robust to a number of alternative specifications.