Housing markets and current account dynamics

I document a strong negative correlation, both across and within countries, between housing and current account dynamics. I use two methodologies to analyze three potential drivers of housing markets. First, in a quantitative two-country model, I input the dynamics of population, loan-to-value and housing price expectations that have been observed in the OECD economies since the mid 1990s. The model generates housing and current account dynamics very similar to the data. Second, I derive sign restrictions to identify the previous shocks in a vector autoregression. The results confirrm the importance of housing demand shocks in driving both housing and current account dynamics.