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Differences in euro-area household finances and their relevance for monetary-policy transmission
(2019)
This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a financial asset and housing to match the large heterogeneity of households asset portfolios, observed in the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) for these countries. We then show that the heterogeneity in household finances implies that responses of consumption to changes in the real interest rate and in house prices differ substantially across countries, and within countries by household characteristics such as age, housing tenure, and asset positions. The different consumption responses quantified in this paper point towards important heterogeneity in monetary-policy transmission in the euro area.
We show that the size of collateralized household debt determines an economy’s vulnerability to crises of confidence. The house price feeds back on itself by contributing to a liquidity effect, which operates through the value of housing in a collateral constraint. Over a specific range of debt levels this liquidity feedback effect is strong enough to give rise to multiplicity of house prices. In a dynamic setup, we conceptualize confidence as a realization of rationally entertainable belief-weightings of multiple future prices. This delivers debt-level-dependent bounds on the extent to which confidence may drive house prices and aggregate consumption.