Housing, consumption and monetary policy: how different are the U.S. and the euro area?

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the U.S. and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices, residential investment and mortgage debt. It then presents evidence from Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) by focusing on the effects of monetary policy, credit supply and housing demand shocks on the housing market and the broader economy. The analysis shows that similarities outweigh differences as far as the housing market is concerned. The empirical evidence suggests a stronger role for housing in the transmission of monetary policy shocks in the U.S. The evidence is less clear-cut for housing demand shocks. Finally, credit supply shocks seem to matter more in the euro area.residential investment, house prices, credit, monetary policy

Housing, consumption and monetary policy: how different are the US and the euro area?

The paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and in the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market, such as the real house price, residential investment and mortgage debt on the two sides of the Atlantic. Then, it presents evidence from Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) by focusing on the effects of three structural shocks, (i) monetary policy, (ii) credit supply and (iii) housing demand shocks on the housing market and the broader economy. We find that similarities overshadow di¤erences as far as the role of the housing market is concerned. We find evidence pointing in the direction of a stronger role for housing in the transmission of monetary policy shocks in the US, while the evidence is less clearcut for housing demand shocks. We also find that credit supply shocks matter more in the euro area. JEL Classification: E22, E44, E52credit, House prices, monetary policy, Residential investment

Integrating Fronthaul and Backhaul Networks: Transport Challenges and Feasibility Results

In Press / En PrensaIn addition to CPRI, new functional splits have been defined in 5G creating diverse fronthaul transport bandwidth and latency requirements. These fronthaul requirements shall be fulfilled simultaneously together with the backhaul requirements by an integrated fronthaul and backhaul transport solution. In this paper, we analyze the technical challenges to achieve an integrated transport solution in 5G and propose specific solutions to address these challenges. These solutions have been implemented and verified with commercially available equipment. Our results confirm that an integrated fronthaul and backhaul transport dubbed Crosshaul can meet all the requirements of 5G fronthaul and backhaul in a cost-efficient manner.Special thanks to the 5G-Crosshaul and 5G-TRANSFORMER team, in particular to Jaime Jose Garcia Reinoso, Chenguang Lu, Daniel Cederholm and Jakub Kocur who helped during the experimentation. This work has been partially funded by the EU H2020 project "5G-TRANSFORMER: 5G Mobile Transport Platform for Verticals" (grant no. 761536)

Dataplane Measurements on a Fronthaul and Backhaul integrated network

Future transport networks serving next generation accesses are expected to carry both fronthaul (FH) and backhaul (BH) traffic simultaneously. This new concept of network which integrates the FH and BH traffic over the same transport substrate is called Crosshaul. A Crosshaul network will use heterogeneous technologies, such as fiber, mmWave, or microwave, and selects the most appropriates ones depending on the use case. Moreover, the softwarization/virtualization trend on the networking industry indicates that Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) will process and exchange both BH and FH data plane traffic. This paper presents performance measurements on promising technologies for the implementation of a Crosshaul network. We investigate to which extent the requirements to carry FH traffic are satisfied by mmWave links, software and multi-layer hardware switches

Housing, consumption and monetary policy: How different are the US and the euro area?

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the US and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices, residential investment and mortgage debt. It then presents evidence from Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVAR) by focusing on the effects of monetary policy, credit supply and housing demand shocks on the housing market and the broader economy. The analysis shows that similarities outweigh differences as far as the housing market is concerned. The empirical evidence suggests a stronger role for housing in the transmission of monetary policy shocks in the US. The evidence is less clear-cut for housing demand shocks. Finally, credit supply shocks seem to matter more in the euro area.Residential investment House prices Credit Monetary policy

Integrated Reconfigurable Silicon Photonics Switch Matrix in IRIS Project: Technological Achievements and Experimental Results

This paper reports the performances of a silicon photonics optical switch matrix fabricated by using large scale 3D integration. The wavelength selective optical switch consists of a photonic integrated circuit (PIC), with 1398 circuit elements, interconnected in a 3D stack with its control electronic integrated circuit (EIC). Each PIC element can be trimmed or reconfigured by using metallic heaters. The EIC is designed to drive the heaters and to read the signal of monitor photodiodes integrated into the PIC. Small footprint and high energy efficiency are achieved in the PIC and the EIC. Automatic wavelength alignment of the optical circuits in the PIC to the ITU grid and fine temperature tuning of each photonic element to optimize the switch insertion losses are obtained by an optimization routine. A fully packaged switch with input/output fibers is tested both for optical and electrical characteristics as well as for the system performances. Fiber to fiber insertion losses of about 20 dB and channel isolation of -35 dB are achieved. BER characteristics at 25 Gbps are evaluated. Perspective applications of the optical switch in optical transport and intra-data center networks are discussed

A 3D photonic-electronic integrated transponder aggregator with 48×16 heater control cells

An electronic integrated circuit (EIC) and a silicon photonic integrated circuit (PIC) are three-dimensional (3D)- integrated. The EIC using the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) part of STMicroelectronics’ BCD8sp 0.16μm technology controls all 768 switches in the PIC individually and monitors them with 84 transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs). A scalable analog-digital approach with a cell size of 100×100μm² for thermal control of optical ring resonator switch matrices is introduced. An electrical power consumption of 220mW for all electronic control circuits of the optical swi tch matrix is resulting in 5.5% of the power needed by a constant-voltage control approach

Integrated, scalable and reconfigurable silicon photonics based optical switch for colorless, directionless and contentionless operation

We demonstrate a BCD8sP electronic-photonic integrated device for low cost, low power, and mass-manufacturable optical switching. Our network on-chip has one thousand photonic components, each driven by a dedicated electronic control circuit. The architecture implements a transponder aggregator scheme that manages 12 200GHz-spaced wavelengths in 4 different directions and 8 add/drop ports. The 3D integration of the photonic and the electronic chips allows the complete system reconfiguration at microsecond regime. The packaged device shows a total insertion loss of-22dB, including input and output coupling, and a channel isolation better than 35dB, in a device with a chip area of less than 1cm2