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In this paper we investigate the relationship between loose monetary policy, low inflation, and easy bank credit and house price booms.

Using a panel of 11 OECD countries from 1920 to 2011 we estimate a panel VAR in order to identify loose monetary policy shocks, low inflation shocks, bank credit shocks, and house price shocks.

We show that during boom periods there is a heightened impact of all three “policy” shocks with the bank credit shock playing an important role. However, when we look at individual house price boom episodes the cause of the price boom is not so clear. The evidence suggests that the house price boom that occurred in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s was not due to easy bank credit.

Shocks from the shadow banking system are not separately identified. These are incorporated into the fourth “catch-all” shock.

Our evidence on housing price booms that expansionary monetary policy is a significant trigger buttresses the case for central banks following stable monetary policies based on well understood and credible rules.

This paper uses historical evidence to evaluate the relative importance of three main causes of house price booms. Our results bring into question the commonly held view that loose bank credit was to blame for the U.S. house price bubble of the later 1990s.

The progressive limits to rights mobilization have become starkly apparent in the past two decades. No new suspect classes have been forthcoming from the Supreme Court since 1977 despite continued demands for legal recognition by lesbians and gays, indigenous peoples and others interested in expanding civil rights doctrine. Public tolerance for civil rights measures has likewise dried up. Since the 1960s, referenda on civil rights have halted affirmative action programs, limited school busing and housing discrimination protections, promoted English-only laws, limited AIDS policies, and ended the judicial recognition of same-sex marriage, among other issues. Nearly 80% of these referenda have had outcomes realizing the Madisonian fear of “majority tyranny”¹ and signaling the Nietzschean dread of a politics of resentment (Brown, 1995, p. 214; Connolly, 1991, p. 64).

This chapter examines the central role played by credit rating agencies in the production of “knowledge” about financial instruments. That “knowledge,” in the form of credit ratings, underpinned disintermediation in mortgage markets by giving investors confidence that they knew the risk-and-return properties of otherwise opaque collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities. Credit ratings helped to “standardize” structured financial products and create liquid markets. However, this cognitive machinery failed and liquidity collapsed during the current crisis. I use this failure to examine the role of institutionalized cognition in the production of market liquidity.

This paper reviews the thirteen-year record of Open Economies Review (OER), an economics journal specializing in issues of the open economy, both at the micro and macro levels. It first examines the journal’s output – defined by number and type of articles published, location of the authors’ institutional affiliation, recurrent themes, and rejection rates – and then critically assesses the development of big themes in international economics and finance, where OER authors have made a contribution. The main conclusion is that national border represents a big constraint to the expansion of the open economy, a point not lost by OER authors.

According to what is reported by the North America Oral History Association, oral history was established in 1948 as a modern technique for historical documentation when Columbia University historian Allan Nevins began recording the memoirs of people who had played a significant role in American public life. While working on a biography of President Grover Cleveland, Nevins found that Cleveland's associates left few of the kinds of personal records – private correspondences, diaries, and memoirs – that biographers generally rely on for their historical reconstructions. Nevins thus came up then with the idea of filling the gaps in the official records with narratives and anecdotes from living memory. Accordingly, he conducted his first interview in 1948 with New York civic leader George McAneny, and both the Columbia Oral History Research Office – the largest archival collection of oral history interviews in the world – and the contemporary oral history movement were born (Thomson, 1998).