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Working Paper
Do bank loans and local amenities explain Chinese urban house prices?
Based on Chinese city-level data from 1999 to 2012 and controlling for geological, environmental, and social diversity, this study suggests that credit plays a significant role in driving up house prices after the Great Recession, whereas property prices only influence bank lending before 2008. Local amenities such as higher education, green infrastructure, healthcare, and climate also positively affect house prices. Moreover, the impacts of bank loans on housing prices tend to be related to the level of amenities, suggesting an integrated approach (i.e. combining macroeconomic and urban ...
Working Paper
Commodity house prices
This paper studies how commodity price movements have affected local house prices in commodity-dependent economies, Australia and New Zealand. We build a geographically hierarchical empirical model and find that commodity prices influence local house prices directly and also indirectly through macroeconomic variables. While commodity price changes function more like ?income shocks? rather than ?cost shocks? in both Australia and New Zealand, regional heterogeneity is also observed in terms of differential dynamic responses of local house prices to energy versus non-energy commodity price ...
Working Paper
In the shadow of the United States: the international transmission effect of asset returns
We examine how the fluctuations in financial and housing markets in U.S. affect the asset returns and GDP in Hong Kong. In contrast to the results from linear specifications, which concludes that the U.S. and Hong Kong are virtually delinked in terms of the asset markets, our regime-switching models indicate that the unexpected shock of US stock returns, followed by the TED spread, has the most significant effect on HK asset returns and GDP, typically in the regime with high return and low volatility. For the in-sample one-step-ahead forecasting, US Term spread stands out to be the best ...
Working Paper
Error correction dynamics of house prices: an equilibrium benchmark
Central to recent debates on the "mis-pricing" in the housing market and the proactive policy of central bank is the determination of the "fundamental house price." This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that produces reduced-form dynamics that are consistent with the error-correction models proposed by Malpezzi (1999) and Capozza et al (2004). The dynamics of equilibrium house prices are tied to the dynamics of the house-price-to-income ratio. This paper also shows that house prices and incomes should be co-integrated, and hence provides a justification ...
Working Paper
The deep historical roots of macroeconomic volatility
We present cross-country evidence that a country?s macroeconomic volatility, measured either by the standard deviation of output growth or the occurrence of trend-growth breaks, is significantly affected by the country?s historical variables. In particular, countries with longer histories of state-level political institutions experience less macroeconomic volatility in post-war periods. Robustness checks reveal that the effect of this historical variable on volatility remains significant and substantial after controlling for a host of structural variables investigated in previous studies. We ...
Working Paper
Flipping the Housing Market
We add arbitraging middlemen -- investors who attempt to profit from buying low and selling high -- to a canonical housing market search model. Flipping tends to take place in sluggish and tight, but not in moderate, markets. There is the possibility of multiple equilibria. In one equilibrium, most, if not all, transactions are intermediated, resulting in rapid turnover, a high vacancy rate, and high housing prices. In another equilibrium, few houses are bought and sold by middlemen. Turnover is slow, few houses are vacant, and prices are moderate. Moreover, flippers can enter and exit en ...
Working Paper
Macro Aspects of Housing
This paper aims to achieve two objectives. First, we demonstrate that with respect to business cycle frequency (Burns and Mitchell, 1946), there was a general decrease in the association between macroeconomic variables (MV) and housing market variables (HMV) following the global financial crisis (GFC). However, there are macro-finance variables that exhibited a strong association with the HMV following the GFC. For the medium-term business cycle frequency (Comin and Gertler, 2006), we find that while some correlations exhibit the same change as the business cycle counterparts, others do not. ...
Working Paper
Why is the Hong Kong Housing Market Unaffordable? Some Stylized Facts and Estimations
The house price in Hong Kong is well-known to be "unaffordable." This paper argues that the commonly used house price-to-income ratio may be misleading in an economy with almost half of the population living in either public rental housing or subsidized ownership. Moreover, we re-focus on the relationships between economic fundamentals and the housing market of Hong Kong. While the aggregate GDP, population and longevity continue to grow, the real wage and household income fall behind. The trend component of the real GDP growth suffers a permanent downward shift after the first quarter of ...