Canadian City Housing Prices and Urban Market Segmentation

The authors provide a detailed empirical analysis of Canadian city housing prices. They examine the long-run relationship between city house prices in Canada from 1981 to 2005 as well as idiosyncratic relations between city prices and city-specific variables. The results suggest that city house prices are only weakly correlated in the long run, and that there is a disconnect between house prices and interest rates. City-specific variables such as union wage levels, new-housing prices, and the issuance of building permits tend to be positively related to city existing-house prices. Surprisingly, there is mixed evidence with respect to standard measures of economic activity, such as labour force and per capita GDP