Wealth Effects and Consumption: A Panel VAR Approach

We provide new evidence on the comparison between the stock and housing wealth effects on consumption. Using a panel VAR approach applied to OECD data, we find evidence that the stock market wealth effect is generally the larger. However, with regard to the evolution of asset wealth effects over time, our findings show that the housing wealth effect has outweighed the share market wealth effect in the last decade. We further find that asset wealth has asymmetric effects on consumption, with stronger and more persistent effects from positive asset wealth shocks. Our results have important monetary policy implications for both stock and real estate markets, and offer timely insights into the desirability of current proposals to reduce house price volatility, such as through macro prudential regulations.     

The Relationship Between Saving and Credit from a Schumpeterian Perspective

After 1995, the United States experienced housing and mortgage booms, fuelled by increased lending from less regulated institutions, such as hedge funds. At the micro level, the housing boom may have left families with more wealth, but the mortgage boom may have increased their financial vulnerability. Using the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, we consider both wealth creation and a select number of financial vulnerability measures of homeowners. The data indicate that the housing boom was not only associated with larger house values, but also moderated wealth gains and substantially greater financial vulnerability of homeowners. Both trends were more pronounced among middleincome and Hispanic families, who saw larger wealth gains, but also greater increases in financial vulnerability than their counterparts. Given the breadth of the spread in homeowners’ financial vulnerability alongside sharply higher house prices, our results support the link between more deregulated financial markets and rising financial instability.     

Housing price and entrepreneurship in China

Housing price has increased dramatically in China during the past decade. The appreciation of house value could relax credit constraint and thus encourage entrepreneurship. However, a house serves as both an important investment channel and a prerequisite for marriage in China. The continuous high return of investment in housing and intensified marriage market competition make house purchase a priority for young people and their parents, which would crowd out entrepreneurial activities. Using two large datasets, we find that high housing price in general discourages entrepreneurial activities for urban adults. For house owners, while house value appreciation has a positive wealth effect, the ratio of mortgage over income has a negative effect. For non-owners, a higher ratio of housing price over income corresponds to a lower probability of entrepreneurship. This study highlights the negative consequences of surging housing price on entrepreneurship in developing countries.     

中国体制转型与城镇居民家庭财富分配差距——一个资产转换的视角

本文以中国城镇住房改革为例,从资产转换的角度研究了中国体制转型过程中城镇居民家庭财富积累及分配差距的产生。20世纪80年代以来的房屋政策鼓励工作单位将住房出售给现有居民,即住房商品化。通过1988、1995和2002年中国城镇住户收入调查的数据分析,20世纪90年代中期以来的住房商品化过程中,相对于私营部门居民家庭,干部和国有单位工作的家庭更容易以折扣价从工作单位获得住房。随着近期住房市场的繁荣,原有的以及住房商品化过程中产生的住房不平等,已经转化成国有和私营部门家庭财富的更大差距,而且干部的住房增值优势和国有部门家庭的财富优势随着市场化的推进有加速增加的趋势。     

资产价格波动、财富效应与居民消费——基于2000～2008年数据的实证研究

以我国2000~2008年第2季度的数据为样本,依据理论的推导,采用Johansen协整关系,对全样本进行协整检验,并对其进行格兰杰因果检验、脉冲响应函数与方差分解得出结论:短期来说,居民收入升高是居民消费增加的Granger原因;股票价格与房地产价格的波动互为Granger因果。从长期来看,居民收入的增加是我国居民消费增加的Granger原因,反向也成立;通过协整检验回归可知,居民收入与价格消费指数的变化,仍然是我国居民消费最有力的解释原因,我国资产市场存在一定的财富效应,但是效果很微弱;股票与房地产价格变动对居民消费的影响机制却截然不同,股票市场财富效应迅速,房地产市场的财富效应滞后且持久。     

个人主体性的释放:农村独子家庭分家实践研究——以江西省冈村为例

由于计划生育政策的推行,当今我国农村的主体家庭类型是独子家庭和纯女儿户家庭,以往分家研究中讨论的多子家庭的分家现象已经失去了普遍意义。以江西省冈村为例,主要从分家原因、分家实践特征这两方面考察了独子家庭的分家实践,讨论了独子家庭与多子家庭分家实践的差异。独子家庭的分家实践反映了家庭代际关系的变迁,实现了父子两代人均要追求独立自由的意愿。     

Financial market and housing wealth effects on consumption: a permanent income approach

The objective of this study is to examine the financial market and housing wealth effects on consumption. Housing has the dual functions as both a commodity yielding a flow of housing services and an investment asset yielding a flow of capital income. With the construction of an empirical framework based on the vector autoregression approach, the findings from this study suggest that a rise in housing price has both a positive wealth effect and a negative price effect on consumption. While the positive wealth effect is caused by an increase in capital income, the negative price effect is caused by an increase in the cost of housing services. In addition, the housing market wealth effect increases, at the expense of the price effect, with the level of housing-market leverage. These findings imply that the government policy of land supply aiming to stimulate the economy should strike a balance between the possible wealth and price effects of the housing market.     

Housing Wealth Effects: Cross‐sectional Evidence from New Vehicle Registrations

We investigate the relationship between housing wealth and consumption using postcode‐level variation in house prices and administrative data on new passenger vehicle registrations as a proxy for consumption. We find a robust cross‐sectional relationship, and in our preferred specification estimate an elasticity of new passenger vehicle registrations with respect to gross housing wealth of 0.4–0.5, which based on our preferred calibration implies a marginal propensity to consume for total consumption of less than 0.5 cents. Notably, we find evidence that the relationship between house prices and new vehicle registrations is heterogeneous in income.     

Capital Inflows and House Prices: Aggregate and Regional Evidence from China

Rising house prices in China have been of concern for investors and policymakers. Prices have risen substantially in the last decade, especially in large urban cities, and some economists have expressed concerns about the affordability of residential housing for young adults. This phenomenon becomes a major concern for policymakers, in terms of managing policies to balance the residential needs of individuals and the transition to a market economy. Theoretically, house prices ought to be linked to economic factors such as disposable income, availability of land to build and credit policy. However, it appears that traditional economic theories fail to appropriately explain house prices in China. We provide an explanation from the perspective of capital inflows into China. In terms of per capita remittances, China receives the highest inflow of foreign capital, and this may have a significant impact on risk adjusted returns in the Chinese market. To investigate this relationship, we use the vector error correction model to assess the impact of capital inflows on house prices. We find that capital inflows have a significant positive effect on house prices. The study makes important contributions to understanding the relationship between house prices and foreign remittances after controlling for other economic factors. China is a large economy. Because the impact of economic development in China has not been consistent across the country, we address the regional differences in the house price changes to capital inflows. Using regional data, we show that capital inflows have an asymmetric effect on the housing market across different provinces and cities of China. This has important implications for the development of economic policies in China that aim to provide fair access to residential housing for everyone. These findings are also relevant to investors in the housing market, whether investing for a personal residential home or as part of their diversified investment portfolio. It will also be informative to see how a reversal of capital inflows associated with tighter financing conditions in advanced countries will affect house prices in China.     

Can Anchoring and Loss Aversion Explain the Predictability of Housing Prices?

We offer an explanation of why changes in house price are predictable. We consider a housing market with loss‐averse sellers and anchoring buyers in a dynamic setting. We show that when both cognitive biases are present, changes in house prices are predicted by price dispersion and trade volume. Using a sample of housing transactions in Hong Kong from 1992 to 2006, we find that price dispersion and transaction volume are, indeed, powerful predictors of housing return. For both in and out of sample, the two variables predict as well as conventional predictors such as the real interest rate and real stock return.     

From real estate to consumption: the role of credit markets in the USA

The aim of this article is to test whether the credit market conditions affect the strength of transmission of real estate wealth effects on household consumption in the US economy. Although many different works have dealt with the analysis of the existence of a real estate wealth effect, most of them as a reaction to the dramatic increase of housing prices in several OECD countries, there are only few papers analysing whether the consumption response depends on the positive or negative sign of the wealth shock and, as far as we know, none of them takes the effects of credit market conditions on that asymmetric response into account. This article tries to fill the existing gap in the literature on this matter. From an econometric perspective, we estimate the asymmetries in the consumption response within the momentum threshold autoregressive model (M-TAR) proposed by Enders and Siklos (2001), but following Stevans (2004), it is applied to a multivariate framework. The main results show that the credit market conditions play a significant role in the transmission of changes in real estate wealth to consumption. In addition, we find that there exists an asymmetric behaviour in the US aggregate consumption spending responses to real estate wealth and credit market shocks, which is only significant when a negative shock takes place.     

Financial infrastructure and house prices

We argue that banks operating in a local market possess better information about the local housing market than do nonlocal banks. Possessing this information may influence their willingness to grant loans to house buyers and the specifics of the loan terms, which in turn may affect house prices because credit facilitation makes the housing market more efficient. Using a panel data set covering a period from 1993 to 2007 and involving 274 municipalities in Sweden, we establish a positive causal influence of local bank presence on local house prices. There are significant spatial and spillover effects, that is, banks in a municipality affect the housing markets in neighbouring municipalities, although to a lesser extent than in their own municipality. Similar results are obtained through a gravity model. The results are robust over time and municipality size.     

住房公积金导致了不平等吗*——来自中国家庭金融调查的证据

住房公积金制度作为一项政策性住房金融制度，能够缓解家庭购房金融约束、稳定住房金融市场，成为实现“房住不炒”的重要政策工具。本文以2015年实施的住房公积金信贷宽松政策作为外生冲击，从财富效应的角度研究了住房公积金制度对不同家庭购房行为的影响。利用双重差分的实证研究方法，本文发现目前住房公积金主要促进了缴存家庭的多套房需求，加大了缴存家庭与非缴存家庭的住房财富差距。住房信贷政策的针对性与多样性急需提升。     

Housing booms and media coverage

This article analyses news media coverage of the housing market. Building on theories of media influence where word of mouth is the final mechanism of opinion change but media initiate discourse, I examine the relationship between news media and the recent UK house price boom. Over 30 000 articles on the UK housing market from the period 1993 to 2008 are analysed, and it is found that media Granger-caused real house price changes, suggesting the media may have influenced opinions on the housing market. However, media sentiment on the housing market did not change with the secular increase in house prices in the 2000s, suggesting that the media did not contribute to the UK’s housing boom and may have helped constrain it.     

我国房地产市场财富效应探析

本文基于1999年第一季度至2009年第二季度的我国房地产销售价格指数、居民消费支出和收入有关数据,运用动态分布滞后模型和可变系数的状态空间模型,研究表明,房地产的边际消费倾向为正值,表现出对消费的促进作用,并发挥了理论预期中的积极的财富效应。政府应从政策导向上保持房地产市场的持续、稳定、健康发展,一方面打击人为的房地产炒作,另一方面限制房价过快增长,防止泡沫的过度膨胀和破裂的风险。     

THE ROLE OF HOUSE PRICES IN THE MONETARY TRANSMISSION MECHANISM ACROSS EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This paper provides a discussion of the ‘housing market’ channels of the monetary transmission mechanism and offers some evidence of institutional differences in the European housing and mortgage markets. Using a number of Vector Autoregressive models, estimated individually for nine European countries over the pre‐EMU period, we find that house prices are significantly affected by interest rate shocks. The relative role of these interest‐rate‐induced fluctuations in house prices for private consumption is then investigated. We show that house prices may enhance the effects of interest rate shocks on consumer spending in those economies where housing and mortgage markets are relatively more developed and competitive.     

Testing for rational bubbles in the US housing market

The presence of a bubble in the US housing market prior to the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis is investigated. This is done by looking into the relationship between house prices and rental prices, known as the price–rent ratio, which is an important measure of a potential deviation between house prices and its fundamental value. Additionally, the interest rate is taken into account since it is an important factor in determining demand for housing mortgages and thereby influencing house prices, and explosive behavior of house prices is considered. These relationships are investigated through a theoretical and econometrical framework. The empirical evidence suggests that there was a bubble in the housing market prior to the financial crisis, even when controlling for the decreasing interest rate and the fundamental information given by the rental price in the period. Explosiveness was the main source of the price increase, such that a bubble was present in the housing market after correcting for other fundamental factors. The econometric procedures used in the analysis may therefore be relevant for monitoring the housing market.     

利率上调对中国住房市场影响的动态分析

构建一个简单的住房需求供给模型,从未预测到中国人民银行对利率上调和已预早测到中国人民银行要对利率进行上调两方面来分析利率上调对中国住房市场的影响。研究结果表明,利率上调通过影响住房市场供求和房租这两个途径来影响中国的住房市场,并且当住房价格上升过快时,利率上调可以作为一个调控中国房价的有效手段。     

MEASURING POVERTY USING BOTH INCOME AND WEALTH: A CROSS‐COUNTRY COMPARISON BETWEEN THE U.S. AND SPAIN

We study the correspondence between a household's income and its vulnerability to income shocks in two developed countries: the U.S. and Spain. Vulnerability is measured by the availability of wealth to smooth consumption in a multidimensional approach to poverty, which allows us to identify three groups of households: the twice‐poor group, which includes income‐poor households who lack an adequate stock of wealth; the group of protected‐poor households, which are all those income‐poor families with a buffer stock of wealth they can rely on; and the vulnerable‐non‐poor group, including households above the income‐poverty line that do not hold any stock of wealth. Interestingly, the risk of belonging to these groups changes over the life‐cycle in both countries while the size of the groups differs significantly between Spain and the U.S., although this result is quite sensitive to whether the housing wealth component is included in the wealth measure or not.     

Population Ageing and House Prices in Australia

This article assesses the effect of population ageing on housing consumption and house prices. Using two approaches, this article finds that the ageing of the population may cause average real house prices to be between 3 and 27 per cent lower than they otherwise would be over the period 2008–2050. The first approach is an econometric estimation of house prices for Australia over the period 1980–2008. The second approach is a simulation of a life cycle‐optimising model with representative overlapping generations.