Multi-Horizon Financial and Housing Wealth Effects across the U.S. States

We investigate for the presence of multi-horizon wealth effects across U.S. states over the period of 1975:Q2 to 2012:Q2 by utilizing multi-horizon non-causality testing and multi-horizon causality measurement. At the state/aggregate level, we document that housing wealth has more statistically significant and persistent impact on private consumption than financial wealth. We also find that state-level housing/financial wealth effects are present at long time horizons and exhibit heterogeneity across the U.S. From a policy perspective, we suggest that state-level policies may specifically utilize the housing market to support consumption and growth.

International Real Estate Review

This paper investigates two types of housing wealth effects: conventional housing wealth and collateral. We incorporate home equity extraction (HEE) and the influence of mortgage liberalization into the model in Campbell and Mankiw (1989). Based on U.S. data during the 1977Q1–2019Q4, our empirical results suggest that consumption is remarkably influenced by the use of HEE, rather than home equity. Furthermore, the rapid expansion of mortgage securitization significantly amplifies the collateral effect. Conditional on the use of HEE and the share of non-bank mortgage holdings, housing wealth has an average marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 0.84 cents and a maximum MPC of 6.06 cents. In 2007, when market-based mortgage pools and issuers of asset-backed securities held more than 60% of home mortgages, the HEE shock explained for over 50% of the forecasting variance of consumption growth. The results provide evidence that with a focus on collateral value, lenders allow more equity withdrawal, which leads to higher consumption.

Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View

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.

Housing Wealth Effects in Japan: Evidence Based on Household Micro Data

Using micro data covering almost 500,000 Japanese households over the period 1983–2012, we examine to what extent household consumption responds to changes in housing wealth. To do so, we estimate the housing wealth of individual households by matching several official statistics. Employing cross-section and pseudo-panel-based regressions, we find that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of housing wealth is approximately 0.0008–0.0013 for nondurable consumption and 0.0059–0.0082 for total consumption. We further find that the consumption response of older households is larger than that of younger households, which is consistent with the pure wealth effects hypothesis.

Housing wealth effects for private and subsidized homeowners

Purpose This paper aims to examine the effect of housing wealth on household consumption when there are resale and refinancing constraints that prevent housing assets from being cashed out. Design/methodology/approach Based on Household Expenditure Survey data in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2010, regression analysis is applied to compare the housing wealth effects of private and subsidized homeowners. Propensity score matching is adopted to ensure that the two groups of homeowners share similar household income. Further regression analysis is conducted to examine private homeowners’ consumption when their recourse mortgages are in negative equity. Findings Subsidized homeowners, who are not allowed to resell their units before sharing their capital gain with the government, experienced an insignificant housing wealth effect. While private homeowners experienced a significant housing wealth effect, the effect was weakened in the presence of a resale constraint induced by negative equity. The results remain robust after the application of more rigorous sample selection through propensity score matching. Research limitations/implications The analyses are subject to two potential data limitations. One is a relatively small sample size. The other is that data on financial assets and mortgages are unavailable and have to be indirectly controlled through household characteristics. Nevertheless, our estimated marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is 0.03 of the annual household consumption for private homeowners, which is within the range of estimates reported in previous literature. Practical implications This study shows that the housing wealth effect enjoyed in the private sector does not necessarily apply to the subsidized sector where resale and refinancing constraints exist. This is not to suggest that the constraints be removed. Rather, policymakers should be aware of the tradeoff: while the constraints ensure that government subsidies are used to assist home ownership, not capital gain, they also bring about consumption inequality in a society, especially in a booming housing market. Originality/value Our findings extend the literature on the housing wealth effect, which has been exclusively focusing on private homeowners, to subsidized homeowners. This study also adds to the literature on housing welfare by highlighting that the resale constraints of subsidized housing can weaken the housing wealth effect.