This paper studies determinants of some aspects of the structure of cities, including density and the price of land and housing. We use a version of the Alonso-Muth-Mills model, calibrated to broadly match some of the features of a representative large city. While the calibrated model omits many...

This paper projects Chinese urban residential construction out to 2040. The paper argues that the extraordinary growth of recent years will not continue, but that construction will stabilise at a high level. This augurs well for steel demand, especially as steel intensity is expected to...

This paper explores the positive relationship betwen home prices and household spending by following a panel of Australian households over the period 2003 to 2010. There are three hypotheses put forth in the literature to explain this relationship: (1) increases in home prices raise spending via...

House prices are intrinsically difficult to measure due to changes in the composition of properties sold through time and changes in the quality of housing. I provide an overview of the theoretical nature of these issues and consider how regression-based measures of house prices – hedonic and...

Developments in housing prices are of interest to households, policy-makers and those involved in the housing industry. This has been the case both in Australia and in other countries where house price developments are having significant macroeconomic impacts. However, the construction of...

Housing investment is one of the most cyclical components of GDP. Much of that cyclicality stems from the sector’s sensitivity to interest rates, but it is also possible that construction lags generate intrinsic cyclicality in this sector. Although the housing sector is generally considered to...

This paper addresses the question of how changes in stock market wealth and housing wealth affect consumption expenditure in Australia. We approach the problem using a panel of Australian states, for which we construct data on housing and stock market wealth. We estimate the link between...

Australia’s household sector appears to hold a greater proportion of its wealth in dwellings than do households in other countries. Average dwelling prices in Australia also appear to be high relative to household income, but dwellings in Australia are not noticeably higher in quality than...

We investigate the factors associated with the incidence of mortgage-related financial difficulties in Australia. We use two complementary micro-level datasets: loan-level data on residential mortgages from two Australian banks, which we use to analyse the factors associated with entering 90+...

Using dwelling prices in Australia's two largest cities, we consider whether the way in which a property is sold, either through an auction or a private-treaty negotiation, is informative for predicting dwelling prices. We find evidence to suggest that average prices of dwellings sold at auction...