中国城镇居民住房的需求与供给

本文研究了自1980年代后期中国城镇住房商品化以来城镇居民住房的需求与供给。我们从耐用消费品需求与供给的标准理论出发,在联立方程框架下估计城镇住房的需求与供给方程,得到了需求的收入与价格弹性及供给的价格弹性的估计值。通过对1987～2006年全国城镇总体水平年度数据的分析,我们发现城镇住房价格的快速上涨主要可由需求与供给的作用解释,即人均收入和建筑成本的变化决定了房价的整体趋势。城镇住房需求的(长期)收入弹性约为1,需求的价格弹性在0.5到0.6之间。住房存量总供给的价格弹性约为0.83。     

Housing Cooperatives in Sweden: The Effects of Financial Deregulation

The article focuses on transaction prices for recent movers in cooperative dwellings during the period 1980–1993. Prices increased by 80% in real terms up to 1990, then fell by 35% between 1990 and 1993. A hedonic analysis is used to analyze the impact of changmg macroeconomics and financial deregulation. The financial deregulation, which took place in 1985, seems to have caused increased loan-to-value ratios on the cooperative housing market. Using 1983 as a point of reference, a Tobit analysis reveals that the average LTV ratio in 1990 was 290% higher that year. After 1990 the LTV ratio fell by 45% due to credit constraints.     

我国商品房价格地区差异的分析及启示

近年来,随着房地产市场的快速发展,商品房价格持续快速上涨,房价成为政府和民众高度关注的一个问题。然而,商品房价格呈现明显的地区差异。文章以商品房价格运行理论为基础,分析了商品房价格的现状,通过建立商品房价格影响因素的实证模型分析地区差异的影响。提出在国家调控房地产市场和商品房价格的过程中,不仅局限于金融政策、财税政策、土地政策等,更要从根本上统筹安排,注重实施资源的均衡配置和差异化的调控政策,推进地区之间、城乡之间的一体化发展战略。     

关于资产价格与货币政策问题的一些思考

在全球金融危机的大背景下,货币政策是否应该对资产价格膨胀作出反应引起关注。本文对相关理论进行了归纳,并从通货膨胀机理的角度对资产价格与货币政策的关系进行了探讨,提出了建立和完善更加关注资产价格的货币政策框架的建议。     

Residential Construction Costs and the Supply of New Housing: Endogeneity and Bias in Construction Cost Indexes

Change in the level of residential construction affects macroeconomic conditions and is an important determinant of movements in house prices. Theory teaches us that increases in the cost of construction should reduce the supply of new housing. Yet empirical research has failed to find a consistent relationship between these costs and housing starts. This article introduces an entirely new set of micro-data on housing construction costs to study this issue. We develop quality-controlled, hedonic construction cost series from these data. Using this series, we estimate housing supply and construction cost functions for new single-family residences. This research demonstrates that bias in the commercial cost indexes used in existing housing supply studies is a likely cause of their poor performance in existing estimates of the supply of new single-family housing. The bias appears to be caused by an incorrect measure of labor costs and a failure to address the endogeneity of construction costs and construction activity. In contrast, starts regressions using the hedonic cost series generate much more sensible results. We find that housing starts are quite cost elastic; construction costs are endogenous in the new housing supply function, and the cost shares of material and labor in the structure of new residences are approximately 65 and 35%, respectively.     

The Co-op Discount

Cooperative and condominium housing differ in several ways that might be expected to influence their pricing. Most but not all of these differences argue for a higher valuation for condominiums. Hedonic equations estimated on a national sample indicate that the price differential on the average condo/co-op unit in 1987 was 12%. Condos maintain a price premium under a variety of specifications, although its magnitude depends on the bundle of attributes being priced.     

Housing consumption in Urban China

Abstract. In this article we examine the effect of social, political, and economic factors on consumption of housing in China. First, we present income elasticities using time-series and cross-section analyses. We then compare the results for China with income elasticities for other countries as reported in the literature. Our elasticities range between 0.317 and 1.48-quite similar to the earlier studies by Houthakker in 1957 and Chow in 1985. Our estimates are also comparable with results from other countries. Based on our analysis, we found that rent reform alone cannot successfully improve the Chinese housing situation.     

The Dynamic Impact of Macroeconomic Aggregates on Housing Prices and Stock of Houses: A National and Regional Analysis

This article analyzes the dynamic effects of four key macroeconomic variables on the housing prices and the stock of houses sold on the national and regional levels using a nonstructural estimation technique. The impulse response functions derived from the VAR suggest that macroeconomic variables produce cycles in housing prices and houses sold. The housing market was found to be very sensitive to shocks in the employment growth and mortgage rate at both the national and regional levels. In particular, regional housing prices reflect regional employment growth, as well as national mortgage rates. The study also reveals that the economic variables have a different impact on the dynamic behavior of housing prices and the number of houses sold in different regions at different time periods and that these economic aggregates alone cannot explain the fluctuations in real estate values and construction levels that occurred in some regions.     

Optimal Macroprudential Policies and House Prices in Korea

This article investigates the impacts of the macroprudential policy of limitation on credit growth in housing market on Korean economy to find empirical and theoretical implications. Empirical results based on VAR models show that macroprudential policies like LTV and DTI in Korea have significant and persistent effect on real household credit and real house price. This article further addresses implications of optimal macroprudential and monetary policy in Korea by employing a standard DSGE model. The results suggest that the time-varying macroprudential policy responding to the borrower’s debt to income ratio is most effective in stabilizing household debt among the macroprudential policy rules considered, but produces a moderate downturn of the economy.     

The Long-Run Elasticity of New Housing Supply in the United States: Empirical Evidence for 1950 to 1994

The long-run price elasticity for alternative specifications of new housing supply is estimated using U.S. annual data for 1950 through 1994. The basic model expresses residential construction as a linear function of new housing price and the prices of construction inputs. Long-run elasticities range from 1.6 to 3.7, suggesting that new housing supply is price elastic. Residential construction responds to both the real interest and expected inflation rates, but other construction cost variables perform poorly. However, the results are sensitive to the time-series processes underlying the variables. A modified model that expresses residential construction as a function of changes in input prices, rather than their levels, produces a long-run elasticity of about 0.8 and a significant inverse relationship between new housing supply and the construction wage rate.     

Capital Inflows and the U.S. Housing Boom

We estimate an open‐economy vector autoregressive (VAR) model to study the effect of capital‐inflow shocks on the U.S. housing market. We look at different external shocks that generate capital inflows to the U.S., in particular “saving‐glut” shocks and foreign monetary‐policy expansions. The shocks are identified with theoretically robust sign restrictions derived from an open‐economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model. Our findings suggest that capital inflows that result from “saving‐glut” shocks have a positive and persistent effect on real house prices and real residential investment.     

中国城市住房价格动态特征及其影响因素

本文从理论和实证两个层面分析了1997-2007年中国35个大中城市的房价动态特征,并考察了城市因素对房价动态参数的影响。所得主要结论有:中国城市房价具有强序列相关和弱均值回归特征;住房使用成本、地区市场化指数、土地交易价格指数及其变化对序列相关系数有显著影响;真实收入及其变化、建造成本、地区市场化指数对均值回归系数有显著影响;各城市的房价动态参数拟合值几乎全部落入震荡收敛区内,东部城市房价的波动振幅普遍高于中西部城市;1999年后35个大中城市的平均房价波动振幅有逐渐增大的趋势,尤其是2007年的房价波动振幅出现了非正常增长,但波动频率变化幅度不大。     

麦克林模型视角下中国货币政策探究

温家宝总理在2011年政府工作报告中提出,要把稳定物价总水平作为宏观调控的首要任务,而保持物价稳定需要以合理的货币供给为基础。本文在麦克林模型视角下。探索货币供给量对物价的动态影响方式、途径,提出货币可以作为变量来对物价水平进行预测．在此基础上运用自回归模型证明货币政策对整个社会的名义产出产生巨大冲击。     

关于我国资产价格与货币供应量关系的实证研究

随着金融市场深化与资本市场发展,资产价格波动对货币政策提出新的挑战。该文在回顾相关理论研究的基础上,从完善资产价格统计范围的角度,对我国资产价格与货币供应量的实证关系进行了研究。结果发现,资产价格变动确会对货币政策中介目标产生影响,且不同资产价格对不同层次货币供应量影响不一。建议密切关注资产价格,提升货币政策的前瞻性。     

2010年我国货币政策取向的若干建议

继续保持适度宽松的总体基调：是2010年货币政策的基本取向：在信贷总量方面．新增信贷规模只宜做小幅度调整,控制在8万亿元左右。在信贷投放方面,更加关注优化结构,由保“量”转向保“质”;在关注重点方面,提高货币政策对资产价格变动反应的前瞻性和预见性,防范资产价格泡沫;在退出策略方面,分步实施政策调整与转向。     

Subsidized and Unsubsidized Housing Stocks 1935 to 1987: Crowding out and Cointegration

Crowding out arises in many economic contexts, from the macro concern that deficit spending might crowd out investment to the micro concern that increased employment of women might result in fewer jobs for men. Here I ask whether subsidized housing crowds out unsubsidized housing in the United States, applying the econometric tools of cointegration analysis. Such crowding out proves to require stringent restrictions on the coefficients of the cointegrating relationships that link housing stocks with one another and with other economic variables. These restrictions also apply to testing for other crowding out phenomena.I find that public housing has steadily added to the total stock of housing since its inception in 1935. In contrast, I find that moderate-income, conventionally financed, subsidized housing, such as the Section 235 and 236 programs that accounted for more than 1.5 million new units between 1960 and 1987, most likely adds little or nothing to the total housing stock. These findings speak against recent proposals to provide subsidies to developers who build dwellings for moderate income Americans but offer qualified encouragement to those who advocate expansion of the conventional public housing program.     

The role of liquidity constraints in the response of monetary policy to house prices

We analyse the optimal response of monetary policy to house prices in a New Keynesian framework. A positive wealth effect from housing is derived from liquidity constrained consumers. Housing equity withdrawal allows them to convert an increase in housing value into consumption and we show that monetary policy should react to house prices due to their effect on consumption by constrained agents. Moreover, we allow the share of liquidity constrained consumers to vary with house prices. Consequently, the optimal weights on expected inflation, the output gap and house prices in the optimal interest rate rule vary over time too.     

Business cycle implications of mortgage spreads

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant magnitudes: a 100 basis point decline in the spread causes a peak increase in consumption, residential investment and GDP by 1.6 percent, 6.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. Presumably, these effects are magnified when the policy rate is held fixed, as was the case in the US during the recent implementation of unconventional monetary policy.     

The US Housing Market: Asset Pricing Forecasts Using Time Varying Coefficients

The US housing market has experienced significant cyclical volatility over the last twenty-five years due to major structural changes and economic fluctuations. In addition, the housing market is generally considered to be weak form inefficient. Houses are relatively illiquid, exceptionally heterogeneous, and are associated with large transactions costs. As such, past research has shown that it is possible to predict, at least partially, the time path of housing prices. The ability to predict housing prices is important such that investors can make better asset allocation decisions, including the pricing and underwriting of mortgages. Most of the prior studies examining the US housing market have employed constant coefficient approaches to forecast house price movements. However, this approach is not optimal as an examination of data reveals substantial sub-sample parameter instability. To account for the parameter instability, we employ alternative estimation methodologies where the estimated parameters are allowed to vary over time. The results provide strong empirical evidence in favor of utilizing the rolling Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic (GARCH) Model and the Kalman Filter with an Autoregressive Presentation (KAR) for the parameters time variation. Lastly, we provide out-of-sample forecasts and demonstrate the precision of our approach.     

Infrequent Housing Adjustment,Limited Participation,and Monetary Policy

This paper asks why monetary contractions have strong effects on the housing market. The paper presents a model with staggered housing adjustment in which monetary policy has real effects in the absence of any rigidity in producer pricing or wages. Limited participation in financial markets leads to a rise in the real mortgage rate following an increase in the nominal short rate. Since households must take on a mortgage to consume housing, the rise in the real interest rate reduces the share of residential investment in output.