Consumption, Housing Wealth and Financial Crises

2008 ◽  
Vol 205 ◽  
pp. 57-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell ◽  
Simon Kirby
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crises ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Banking Crises ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Consumption Growth ◽  
Future Evolution ◽  
Induced Changes

This note reviews recent Institute work on the factors that might affect the future evolution of consumption. Drawing on Barrell and Davis (2007), it discusses the evidence for the effects of housing wealth on consumption, and shows that there has been strong and well supported evidence for a link for some time. This evidence suggests that a fall in house prices will cause consumption growth to slow. The discussion also covers evidence from Barrell, Davis and Pomerantz (2006) on the effects of financial crises on consumption behaviour. They suggest that there are large and significant negative effects on consumption during banking crises that are over and above the effects on consumption of the crisis-induced changes in income and wealth. Much of this work is embedded in our structural model, NiGEM, and it is possible to estimate the effects of house price declines and financial crises on consumption and income using the model. The note also gives a set of ready reckoners for the impacts of house price declines on output and of a given associated fall in the level of housing wealth on the level of consumption.

scholarly journals Saving Behavior and Housing Wealth Evidence from German Micro Data

2018 ◽  
Vol 238 (6) ◽  
pp. 501-539
Author(s):  
Sören Gröbel ◽  
Dorothee Ihle
Keyword(s):  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Wealth Effect ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Price Shocks ◽  
Household Level ◽  
Underlying Causes ◽  
Saving Behavior ◽  
Housing Wealth Effect ◽  
Important Position

Abstract Housing property is the most important position in a household’s wealth portfolio. Even though there is strong evidence that house price cycles and saving patterns behave synchronously, the underlying causes remain controversial. The present paper examines if there is a wealth effect of house prices on savings using household-level panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1996-2012. We find that young homeowners decrease their savings in response to unanticipated house price shocks, whereas old households hardly respond to house price changes. Although effects are relatively low in magnitude, we interpret this as evidence of a housing wealth effect.

scholarly journals Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam M Guren ◽  
Alisdair McKay ◽  
Emi Nakamura ◽  
Jón Steinsson
Keyword(s):  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Ordinary Least Squares ◽  
Wealth Effects ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Income Risk ◽  
New Instrument ◽  
Housing Wealth Effect ◽  
Housing Wealth Effects ◽  
Standard Life

Abstract We provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We use three identification strategies: ordinary least squares with a rich set of controls, the Saiz housing supply elasticity instrument, and a new instrument that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles. All three identification strategies indicate that housing wealth elasticities were if anything slightly smaller in the 2000s than in earlier time periods. This implies that the important role housing played in the boom and bust of the 2000s was due to larger price movements rather than an increase in the sensitivity of consumption to house prices. Full-sample estimates based on our new instrument are smaller than recent estimates, though they remain economically important. We find no significant evidence of a boom–bust asymmetry in the housing wealth elasticity. We show that these empirical results are consistent with the behaviour of the housing wealth elasticity in a standard life-cycle model with borrowing constraints, uninsurable income risk, illiquid housing, and long-term mortgages. In our model, the housing wealth elasticity is relatively insensitive to changes in the distribution of loan-to-value (LTV) for two reasons: first, low-leverage homeowners account for a substantial and stable part of the aggregate housing wealth elasticity; second, a rightward shift in the LTV distribution increases not only the number of highly sensitive constrained agents but also the number of underwater agents whose consumption is insensitive to house prices.

scholarly journals Forty Years of Leverage: What Have We Learned About Sovereign Debt?

2014 ◽  
Vol 104 (5) ◽  
pp. 266-271
Author(s):  
Peter Boone ◽  
Simon Johnson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Banking Crises ◽  
Sovereign Debt Crisis ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Regulatory Constraints

Financial crises frequently increase public sector borrowing and threaten some form of sovereign debt crisis. Until recently, high income countries were thought to have become less vulnerable to severe banking crises that have lasting negative effects on growth. Since 2007, crises and attempted reforms in the United States and Europe indicate that advanced countries remain acutely vulnerable. Best practice from developing country experience suggests that regulatory constraints on the financial sector should be strengthened, but this is hard to do in countries where finance has a great deal of political power and cultural prestige, and where leverage is already high.

scholarly journals More Mortgages, More Homes? The Effect of Housing Financialization on Homeownership in Historical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Kohl
Keyword(s):  
Financial Markets ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Macroeconomic Performance ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Government Programs ◽  
Mortgage Debt ◽  
Price Bubbles ◽  
Long Run

Recent research has emphasized the negative effects of finance on macroeconomic performance and even cautioned of a “finance curse.” As one of the main drivers of financial sector growth, mortgages have traditionally been hailed as increasing the number of homeowners in a country. This article uses long-run panel data for seventeen countries between 1920 (1950) and 2013 to show that the effect of the “great mortgaging” on homeownership rates is not universally positive. Increasing mortgage debt appears to be neither necessary nor sufficient for higher homeownership levels. There were periods of rising homeownership levels without much increase in mortgages before 1980, thanks to government programs, purchasing power increases, and less inflated house prices. There have also been mortgage increases without homeownership growth, but with house price bubbles thereafter. The liberalization of financial markets might after all be a poor substitute for more traditional housing policies.

House Price Shocks, Credit Constraints and Household Indebtedness

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 780-803 ◽  
Author(s):  
By Kadir Atalay ◽  
Garry F Barrett ◽  
Rebecca Edwards ◽  
Chaoran Yu
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Credit Card ◽  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Wealth Effect ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Mortgage Debt ◽  
Collateral Constraints ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
Price Growth

Abstract We analyse the effect of housing wealth on household indebtedness in a life-cycle framework. Exploiting longitudinal household data and temporal and geographic variation in house prices, our empirical results indicate that households respond to increases in housing wealth by significantly increasing their debt. The effect is strongest for households that are moderately leveraged, highlighting the importance of collateral constraints. Furthermore, we uncover a weaker wealth effect from house price growth for households that have faced negative shocks to income or employment. Importantly, our findings are consistent with the theoretical predictions of the life-cycle model: households increase their mortgage debt, but not their unsecured credit card debt. A novel finding is that we uncover a moderate positive wealth effect on investment loans.

scholarly journals The role and significance of planning in the determination of house prices in Australia: Recent policy debates

2021 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2198894
Author(s):  
Peter Phibbs ◽  
Nicole Gurran
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Housing Market ◽  
Land Use Planning ◽  
House Prices ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Evidence Base ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Price Inflation ◽  
Depth Analysis

On the world stage, Australian cities have been punching above their weight in global indexes of housing prices, sparking heated debates about the causes of and remedies for, sustained house price inflation. This paper examines the evidence base underpinning such debates, and the policy claims made by key commentators and stakeholders. With reference to the wider context of Australia’s housing market over a 20 year period, as well as an in depth analysis of a research paper by Australia’s central Reserve Bank, we show how economic theories commonly position land use planning as a primary driver of new supply constraints but overlook other explanations for housing market behavior. In doing so, we offer an alternative understanding of urban housing markets and land use planning interventions as a basis for more effective policy intervention in Australian and other world cities.

scholarly journals Assessing the impacts of Airbnb listings on London house prices

2021 ◽  
pp. 239980832110018
Author(s):  
James Todd ◽  
Anwar Musah ◽  
James Cheshire
Keyword(s):  
Random Effects ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
House Prices ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Positive Association ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Fixed And Random Effects ◽  
The World

Over the course of the last decade, sharing economy platforms have experienced significant growth within cities around the world. Airbnb, which is one of the largest and best-known platforms, provides the focus for this paper and offers a service that allows users to rent properties or spare rooms to guests. Its rapid growth has led to a growing discourse around the consequences of Airbnb rentals within the local context. The research within this paper focuses on determining impact on local housing prices within the inner London boroughs by constructing a longitudinal panel dataset, on which a fixed and random effects regression was conducted. The results indicate that there is a significant and modest positive association between the frequency of Airbnb and the house price per square metre in these boroughs.

scholarly journals Housing wealth, mortgages and Australians’ labour force participation in later life

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110265
Author(s):  
Rachel Ong ◽  
Gavin A Wood ◽  
Melek Cigdem
Keyword(s):  
Household Income ◽  
House Prices ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Urban Housing ◽  
Housing Wealth ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Imputed Rent

In the life cycle model of consumption and saving, homeownership is an important vehicle for horizontal redistribution. Households accumulate wealth in owner-occupied housing during working lives before benefiting from imputed rent streams in retirement. But in some countries housing wealth’s welfare role has broadened as owners increasingly use flexible mortgages to smooth consumption during working lives. One consequence is higher outstanding mortgages later in life, a burden exacerbated by high real house prices that compel home buyers to demand mortgages that are a growing multiple of their incomes. We investigate whether these developments are prompting longer working lives, an idea that is especially relevant in countries offering relatively low government pensions. Australia is one such country. We use the 2001–2017 panels of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey to estimate hazard models of exits from the Australian labour force as workers approach pensionable age. We find that those with high outstanding mortgage debts are more likely to postpone retirement, as are those with relatively low amounts of private pension wealth. These results are stronger in urban housing markets, and especially among males.

scholarly journals Money and credit during normal times and house price booms: evidence from time-frequency analysis

Empirica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-861
Author(s):  
Maciej Ryczkowski
Keyword(s):  
Great Recession ◽  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Price Boom ◽  
The Us ◽  
Short Run

Abstract I analyse the link between money and credit for twelve industrialized countries in the time period from 1970 to 2016. The euro area and Commonwealth Countries have rather strong co-movements between money and credit at longer frequencies. Denmark and Switzerland show weak and episodic effects. Scandinavian countries and the US are somewhere in between. I find strong and significant longer run co-movements especially around booming house prices for all of the sample countries. The analysis suggests the expansionary policy that cleans up after the burst of a bubble may exacerbate the risk of a new house price boom. The interrelation is hidden in the short run, because the co-movements are then rarely statistically significant. According to the wavelet evidence, developments of money and credit since the Great Recession or their decoupling in Japan suggest that it is more appropriate to examine the two variables separately in some circumstances.

scholarly journals A Multilevel Eigenvector Spatial Filtering Model of House Prices: A Case Study of House Sales in Fairfax County, Virginia

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (11) ◽  
pp. 508
Author(s):  
Lan Hu ◽  
Yongwan Chun ◽  
Daniel A. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Multilevel Model ◽  
House Prices ◽  
House Price ◽  
Spatial Filtering ◽  
Neighborhood Environment ◽  
Model Specification ◽  
Spatial Effects ◽  
Residential Areas ◽  
Fairfax County ◽  
Eigenvector Spatial Filtering

House prices tend to be spatially correlated due to similar physical features shared by neighboring houses and commonalities attributable to their neighborhood environment. A multilevel model is one of the methodologies that has been frequently adopted to address spatial effects in modeling house prices. Empirical studies show its capability in accounting for neighborhood specific spatial autocorrelation (SA) and analyzing potential factors related to house prices at both individual and neighborhood levels. However, a standard multilevel model specification only considers within-neighborhood SA, which refers to similar house prices within a given neighborhood, but neglects between-neighborhood SA, which refers to similar house prices for adjacent neighborhoods that can commonly exist in residential areas. This oversight may lead to unreliable inference results for covariates, and subsequently less accurate house price predictions. This study proposes to extend a multilevel model using Moran eigenvector spatial filtering (MESF) methodology. This proposed model can take into account simultaneously between-neighborhood SA with a set of Moran eigenvectors as well as potential within-neighborhood SA with a random effects term. An empirical analysis of 2016 and 2017 house prices in Fairfax County, Virginia, illustrates the capability of a multilevel MESF model specification in accounting for between-neighborhood SA present in data. A comparison of its model performance and house price prediction outcomes with conventional methodologies also indicates that the multilevel MESF model outperforms standard multilevel and hedonic models. With its simple and flexible feature, a multilevel MESF model can furnish an appealing and useful approach for understanding the underlying spatial distribution of house prices.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document