The supply chain of the real estate sector accounts for one fifth of Italian GDP; its importance for the banking system is even greater: lending to this sector accounts for more than one third of total loans to the private sector. The crisis in the construction and real estate sector started...

The real estate sector is of particular interest from a central bank's perspective; due to its size, it directly and indirectly affects economic developments, financial stability and the monetary policy stance. The volume collects the papers by economists of the Bank of Italy and the discussions...

In this paper I estimate the impact of changes in real and financial wealth � proxied by house and stock market prices � on private consumption for a panel of sixteen emerging economies in Asia and Central and Eastern Europe. Using recent econometric techniques for heterogeneous...

The ability of a two-sector model to quantify the contribution of the housing market to business fluctuations is investigated using U.S. data and Bayesian methods. The estimated model, which contains nominal and real rigidities and collateral constraints, displays the following features: first,...

This paper discusses the limitations of the price-income ratio, the price-rent ratio, and of affordability measures as indicators of housing market conditions. For the purpose of assessing whether house prices are misaligned, the most sensible approach is to calculate the user cost of ownership...

In this paper, I investigate the characteristics of house price dynamics for a sample of 16 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, over the period 1995-2011. Linking housing valuations to a set of conventional fundamental determinants � relative to both the supply and...

We present a new indicator of house prices in Italy, with more extensive geographical and time coverage. The new indicator now makes it possible to analyze medium- and long-term trends with satisfactory representation of the Italian housing market. It also allows for timely updating, for prompt...

This paper analyses aggregate household wealth in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the UK and the US. Building on a new data set for the time span 1980-2011, we discuss the trends in household financial assets in the last thirty years, the reasons for differences across countries,...

During the last two decades, house prices in Italy have increased dramatically in real terms, particularly in large towns and cities; the rise in rents has been even more marked. This paper analyses home affordability for households, considering both the rent and the property markets. In...

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality-adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in...