Does home owning smooth the variability of future housing consumption?

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner’s house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth before the move. Using Census micro-data, we find that the cross-sectional variation in house values subsequent to a move is lower for home owners who moved between more highly covarying cities. Our preferred estimates imply that an increase in covariance of one standard deviation reduces the variance of subsequent housing consumption by about 11%. Households at the top end of the covariance distribution who are likely to have owned large homes before moving get the largest reductions, of up to 40% relative to households at the median.     

Supply constraints and housing market dynamics

Although the volatility of house prices is often ascribed to demand-side factors, constraints on housing supply have important and little-studied implications for housing dynamics. I illustrate the strong relationship between the volatility of house prices and the regulation of new housing supply. I then employ a dynamic structural model of housing investment to investigate the mechanisms underlying this relationship. I find that supply constraints increase volatility through two channels: First, regulation lowers the elasticity of new housing supply by increasing lags in the permit process and adding to the cost of supplying new houses on the margin. Second, geographic limitations on the area available for building houses, such as steep slopes and water bodies, lead to less investment on average relative to the size of the existing housing stock, leaving less scope for the supply response to attenuate the effects of a demand shock. My estimates and simulations confirm that regulation and geographic constraints play critical and complementary roles in decreasing the responsiveness of investment to demand shocks, which in turn amplifies house price volatility.     

Real estate portfolio allocation: The European consumers’ perspective

Owner occupied housing facilitates household wealth accumulation and the stability of consumption in developed countries. It also contributes to other social goals. But owner-occupied housing is also a risky investment. This paper synthesizes existing knowledge about the riskiness of housing investment in European economies during the past quarter century. It also presents estimates of the potential gains to European consumers from investments in derivatives which may reduce risk at the individual level. We find that futures markets in house price indexes may increase portfolio returns for European investors by several percentage points at the same level of risk. We also consider practical steps to develop markets for these investments.     

Retirement and housing adjustment in later life: evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

Using data from the first five waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we examine the extent and determinants of residential mobility for persons aged 55 or older, plus the subsequent housing adjustments made by those who move. The dimensions of adjustment examined are house value and rental costs, the number of `excess' rooms, and housing tenure. Relatively few individuals move house in later life in Britain. Choices do respond to one's own retirement, but other household changes such as loss of spouse and spouse leaving employment are also important. When a residential move is made, there is a tendency for housing consumption to change in a direction consistent with the correction of a disequilibrium position.     

Housing Wealth and UK Consumption

There is widespread disagreement about the role of housing wealth in explaining consumption. However, much of the empirical literature is marred by poor controls for the common drivers both of house prices and consumption, such as income, income growth expectations, interest rates, credit supply conditions, other assets and indicators of income uncertainty (e.g. changes in the unemployment rate). For instance, while the easing of credit supply conditions is usually followed by a house price boom, failure to control for the direct effect of credit liberalisation on consumption can over‐estimate the effect of housing wealth or collateral on consumption. This paper (Janine Aron, John Muellbauer and Anthony Murphyi, October 2006) estimates an empirical model for UK consumption from 1972 to 2005, grounded in theory, and with more complete empirical controls than hitherto used.     

House price risk and the hedging benefits of home ownership

Using a repeat-sales methodology, this paper finds that estimates of house price risk based on aggregate house price indices substantially underestimate the true size of house price risk. This is the result of the fact that aggregate house price indices average away the idiosyncratic volatility in house prices. Additional results show that the idiosyncratic risk exceeds the hedging benefits of home ownership. These results imply that for many home owners, owning a house may well add more price risk than it hedges away. These findings are based on a detailed dataset of individual housing transactions in the Netherlands.     

House prices, wealth effects, and the Singapore macroeconomy

This paper examines the effect housing wealth has upon aggregate consumption in Singapore. While past research has focused only on changes in private housing wealth, the residential market in Singapore is dominated by the public housing sector. The massive public housing segment can generate potentially different wealth effects from standard private housing markets given the former’s unique institutional features. In particular, public housing owners who sell their units at market rates can repurchase a public flat at subsidized prices whereas private homeowners typically cannot. We estimate the link between consumption expenditure and both private and public housing wealth using a VARX approach for the Q1:1990–Q4:2002 period. We find that changes in private house prices have no significant effect on aggregate consumption. In contrast, public housing wealth effects are larger and more persistent.     

House prices,collateral constraint,and the asymmetric effect on consumption

This paper investigates the asymmetric effect of house prices on various categories of consumption under constrained and unconstrained regimes. We first present a simple theoretical model based on Iacoviello (2004) and Luengo-Prado (2006), explicitly considering the dual role of housing and linking credit constraints to the behavior of consumption in a pair of aggregate Euler equations. We then estimate a threshold regression model and find that LC-PIH holds only under the unconstrained regime. More importantly, durable consumption exhibit a very strong asymmetric effect in response to changes in house prices, while other categories of consumption do not exhibit this asymmetry.     

Business,housing, and credit cycles

We use multivariate unobserved components models to estimate trend and cyclical components in gross domestic product (GDP), credit volumes, and house prices for the USA and the five largest European economies. With the exception of Germany, we find large and long cycles in credit and house prices, which are highly correlated with a medium‐term component in GDP cycles. Differences across countries in the length and size of cycles appear to be related to the properties of national housing markets. The precision of pseudo real‐time estimates of credit and house price cycles is roughly comparable to that of GDP cycles.     

Transaction costs, capital-gains taxes, and housing demand

The paper considers the effect of transaction costs—particularly in the form of capital-gains taxes—on the aggregate demand for owner-occupied housing. The framework is an overlapping-generations model, where consumers can avoid the transaction costs (taxes) by keeping the same house for both periods of life. The first part of the paper analyzes the consumer's choice problem. It distinguishes between costs that are fixed irrespective of the size of the house bought or sold, and costs such as capital-gains taxes that are related to the house value. It is shown that higher transaction costs have lock-in effects, inducing consumers to keep the same house for both periods. Also it is found that under a wide variety of circumstances the amount of housing demanded will increase as the household is being locked in. Finally, the paper looks at the effects on aggregate demand from an increase in capital-gains taxes. It is shown that an increased rate of taxation decreases demand for low tax rates. But for high tax rates, when lock-in effects become important, one generally gets the opposite effect; high tax rates tend to increase housing demand.     

Housing and the Korean economy

This paper explores the nexus between housing and the Korean economy. It starts with an overview of the size, growth, and volatility of residential investment in conjunction with long-term resource allocation and short-term macroeconomic fluctuations. Then, the evolution of housing finance and its implications for recent house price run-up are discussed. The relationships among housing price, consumer spending, and inflation are also investigated. Particular attention is paid to the debate over house price bubbles, housing wealth effects on consumption, and the causality between house price and inflation. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of government intervention to stabilize house prices.     

The demand for rental housing: Evidence from the Housing Allowance Demand Experiment

This paper provides new evidence on the price and income elasticities of demand for rental housing by low income households. Housing expenditures of households participating in the Housing Allowance Demand Experiment and receiving housing allowances in the form of a proportional rent rebate are analyzed. These rent rebates experimentally vary the effective relative price of housing and thus enable estimation of the price elasticities. Natural income variation enables estimation of income elasticities. Analysis is carried out using two functional forms and a variety of models of housing dynamics. The estimated income and price elasticities of demand are 0.36 and −0.22, respectively. When the sample is restricted to include only households headed by couples, the elasticity estimates are 0.47 for income and −0.36 for price. These estimates are lower (in absolute value) than have been previously estimated and it is suggested that this may be due to the low-income nature of the sample.     

Do house prices impact business starts?

At the national level, business starts and housing prices both fell dramatically over the 2007–2009 period. Using a proprietary database of business starts this paper quantitatively models the interaction between house price and business starts from 2005 to 2009. We identify the impact by exploiting the cross-sectional variation in house price changes during the period. Controlling for observable and unobservable city characteristics, we find the significance of a robust relationship between house prices and business starts depends on the size of the business starts; a robust link exists between house prices and very small business, whereas, no significant robust link is seen for large business starts.     

Determinants of house prices in Istanbul: a quantile regression approach

This paper uses quantile regression methods where a hedonic equation is estimated for each quantile of the conditional distribution of housing prices. The survey data are used to investigate the relationship between house prices and housing characteristics in Istanbul. This data set includes some housing characteristics of the dwellings like numbers of room, bathroom, heating system, location of house etc. In the results of this paper show some similarities and differences from earlier studies on housing prices. We find that age, cable tv, security, heating system, garage, kitchen area, increasing numbers of room and bathroom increase the house prices. Our findings also show that side variable which is a special factor for Istanbul real estate market has negative effect on the prices. It is clear that the factors of housing prices can change because of the properties of country, region or city. The results of this study may give some important interpretations for developing real estate market.     

Medicaid and the housing and asset decisions of the elderly: Evidence from estate recovery programs

I examine the impact of Medicaid on elderly housing and portfolio decisions by using recent state-by-calendar-year level variation in the Medicaid treatment of owner-occupied housing assets from the adoption of Medicaid estate recovery programs. Prior to the adoption of these programs, the house, which represents the most important non-pension asset to the elderly, was exempt from determining Medicaid eligibility and served as both a place of residence and a store of wealth. Adoption of estate recovery programs changed the owner-occupied housing safety net by making the house eligible for recovery by the government, which increased the implicit tax of holding owner-occupied housing. Using data from 1993 to 2004 in the Health and Retirement Study on elderly individuals, I find that state adoption of estate recovery programs makes the elderly decrease homeownership by 4.6%, decrease home equity by 15%, and also decrease the housing share of the elderly wealth portfolio. State adoption of these programs results in elderly baseline homeowners being 33% less likely to own their homes at death and more likely to use a trust as a substitute to housing in order to preserve assets and carry out bequest motives at death.     

Dissecting the myth of the house price in Chinese metropolises: allowing for behavioral heterogeneity among investors

This paper aims to demystify the housing boom in Chinese metropolises by allowing for behavioral heterogeneity among investors. We construct an agent-based model where investors are categorized into two groups: fundamentalists and chartists. In addition, the investment strategy switching is allowed between these two groups contingent on the historical performance. Using the data of five Chinese metropolises over the period 2008–2014, the results suggest that chartists dominate the housing market and make the house price maintain an upward trend, while fundamentalists play a stabilizing role. Specifically, fundamentalists can serve as a “price anchor” in the market, because the proportion of the fundamentalists is negatively associated with both the growth rate of the house price and the deviation relative to the fundamental value. Overall, the impact of the chartists on the house price is much greater than that of the fundamentalists, which contributes to the ever-increasing house price in Chinese metropolises.

     

Monetary policy,housing rents,and inflation dynamics

In this paper we study the effect of monetary policy shocks on housing rents. Our main finding is that, in contrast to house prices, housing rents increase in response to contractionary monetary policy shocks. We also find that, after a contractionary monetary policy shock, rental vacancies and the homeownership rate decline. This combination of results suggests that monetary policy may affect housing tenure decisions (own versus rent). In addition, we show that, with the exception of the shelter component, all other main components of the consumer price index (CPI) either decline in response to a contractionary monetary policy shock or are not responsive. These findings motivated us to study the statistical properties of alternative measures of inflation that exclude the shelter component. We find that measures of inflation that exclude shelter have most of the statistical properties of the widely used measures of inflation, such as the CPI and the price index for personal consumption expenditures, but have higher standard deviations and react more to monetary policy shocks. Finally, we show that the response of housing rents accounts for a large proportion of the “price puzzle” found in the literature.     

On the welfare cost of rare housing disasters

This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an OLG general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred from historical housing market experiences in the OECD. The model shows that despite the rarity of housing disasters, Canadian households would willingly give up 6 percent of their non-housing consumption each year to eliminate the housing disaster risk. The welfare evaluation of this risk, however, varies considerably across age groups. The risk translates into a welfare loss of as much as 16 percent of annual non-housing consumption for the old, but a welfare gain of 2 percent for the young. This asymmetry stems from the fact that, compared to the old, younger households suffer less from house price declines in disaster periods, due to smaller holdings of housing assets, and benefit from lower house prices in normal periods, due to the negative price effect of disaster risk.     

Price dynamics in public and private housing markets in Singapore

In down-payment constrained housing consumption models, increases in house prices could trigger household mobility decisions in housing markets. This study empirically tests house price dynamics associated with the mobility of households in the public resale and private housing markets in Singapore. The results show that stochastic permanent breaks were found in the public housing resale prices and private housing prices. The relative prices drift apart occasionally, but mean-revert to a long-run fundamental equilibrium. Error correction mechanisms and lagged public housing prices were also found to have significant explanatory effects for price changes in the private housing markets. The results support the hypothesis that household mobility creates co-movements of prices in public and private housing submarkets in the long run.     

货币和税收政策对我国住房价格的影响——基于VAR模型的实证研究

基于我国1999-2010年房地产市场季度数据,本文建立向量自回归模型(VAR)和向量误差修正模型(VEC),将住房供给和需求同时纳入模型,分析我国利率政策、信贷政策和税收政策对住房价格的影响。结果显示,贷款利率在短期内对住房供给有负效应,但长期效应不明显;贷款规模对住房价格的短期冲击明显,二者之间存在正相关关系;针对保有环节征税可以通过影响住房供给,从而有效抑制住房价格上升。根据我国住房供求特点,应优先选择税收工具,通过促进住房供给实现控制房价的政策目标。