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We explore the positive relationship between house prices and household spending by following a panel of Australian households. No evidence for 'traditional housing wealth effects' is found, with young homeowners exhibiting the largest wealth effects. Young renters also exhibit a positive consumption response to house prices, although less so than young homeowners. This suggests that increasing house prices raise spending via easing credit constraints and a common association between house prices and a third factor. Results from a cohort-level panel are similar to those using household-level data, suggesting that 'pseudo-panels' may be used as a partial substitute for actual panels.

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I explore how the intellectual ideas inside central banks have shifted over the first two decades of the new century. To do this I collect every research paper published by advanced economy central banks and examine them using tools from computational linguistics. The analysis points to a shift in the intellectual focus, from a relatively macroeconomic perspective towards a less aggregated view. In part, these changes seem to reflect lessons from the 2008 financial crisis-for example, that macroeconomic models can only get you so far and that microeconomic data are useful for teasing out the causes of aggregate fluctuations. There has been an increase in the amount of research dedicated to the banking and household sectors and a reduction in the amount of intellectual effort invested in modelling the macroeconomy-though some of these shifts had already begun before the crisis. Consistent with this, the similarity of central banking research to that published in top macroeconomic journals has been widening since the crisis.

This paper provides a retrospective assessment of the relationship between bank profitability and interest rates, focusing on the period when rates were very low or negative. To do this we use new confidential bank-level data covering about 1,500 banks operating in 10 banking systems, with most samples spanning the two decades up to the end of 2019. Our analysis confirms the empirical regularity that declining interest rates reduce banks' net interest margins. However, we find a smaller effect than in previous studies: on average across countries, a 100 basis point fall in short-term interest rates results in a 5 basis point decline in net interest margins in the short run. Notably, there are substantial cross-country differences, and, in some cases, the estimated effect is greater. Importantly, the effect of lower interest rates on net interest margins is larger than the effect on assets returns, suggesting that banks can shield overall profitability in the face of lower interest rates. For example, lower interest rates alleviate debt-servicing burdens and are associated with a fall in provisions set aside to cover losses on loans. There is therefore no one-size-fits-all result for the impact of low interest rates on overall profitability: in some jurisdictions banks maintained their level of profitability as the beneficial impact of lower rates on loan-loss provisions and other factors, including an increased focus on cost efficiencies and streamlining business models, materially offset the drag from lower interest margins.