An empirical investigation on bubbles contagion in Scandinavian real estate markets

This paper investigates the presence of speculative bubbles in the Scandinavian countries namely Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden over the period from 1980Q1 to 2018Q4 and searches for evidence of bubble migration among those countries. First, we apply the GSADF test developed by Phillips et al. (2015) on quarterly housing price-to-rent ratios to test for exuberance and episodic bubbles. Subsequently, we examine bubble migration between these markets using the non-parametric model with time-varying coefficients (NPM-TVC) developed by Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips (2016). We find evidence of episodic bubbles in all the Scandinavian real estate markets for the period 1980 to 2018. Our results also indicate that housing bubbles are contagious between these markets during several periods, and the market connection is stronger for geographically neighboring countries.