by Calculated Risk on 9/03/2007 10:54:00 AM

Here are a couple more papers presented at the Jackson Hole conference. I'll be posting excerpts with comments from these papers during the week.

Housing and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism, by Frederic S. Mishkin, Fed Board of Governors.

Comments on Housing and the Monetary Transmission Mechanism, Professor James Hamilton, UC San Diego.

There was apparently quite an interesting discussion at the symposium of MEW (mortgage equity withdrawal) and the impact on consumer spending. Martin Feldstein argued that MEW has had an important impact on consumer spending. So did Professor John Muellbauer. Muellbauer presented a paper modeling the interaction between house prices, credit availability, and spending. Apparently Muellbauer found that the housing wealth effect has grown sharply in the US due to the recent period of easy credit.

I'll have more as soon as soon as the papers are available online at the Jackson Hole symposium site.

As an aside, Business Week mentioned us this week (see Blogspotting: Loan Smarts).