There are, by now, several long term, time series data sets on important housing and macro variables, such as land prices, house prices, and the housing wealth-to-income ratio. However, an appropriate theory that can be employed to think about such data and associated research questions has been...

This paper separates the roles of demand for housing services and belief about future house prices in a house price cycle, by utilizing a feature of user-cost-of-housing that it is sensitive to demand for housing services only. Optimality conditions of producing housing services determine...

This paper examines the determinants of residential property prices in Hong Kong SAR during 1980–98. It uses time-series analysis techniques to characterize price developments, establish empirical regularities, and provide measures of the deviations of actual price changes from “trend.”...

Hedonic regressions are used for property price index measurement to control for changes in the quality-mix of properties transacted. The paper consolidates the hedonic time dummy approach, characteristics approach, and imputation approaches. A practical hedonic methodology is proposed that (i)...

With the recent collapse of the asset price “bubble,” Japanese banks encountered significant pressure from both a sharp decline in the value of equity holdings and a marked increase in bad loans. In August 1992, the Government initiated measures that stabilized equity prices and assisted...

During the mid- to late 1980s, inflationary pressures were highly concentrated in asset markets in many industrial countries. This paper discusses why this may have occurred and then develops a forward-looking supply and demand model of the real estate market in which equilibrium prices depend...

The relationship between current account developments and changes in the macroeconomic environment remains a key issue in open economy macroeconomics. This paper extends the standard intertemporal optimizing model of the current account to incorporate the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on...

Statistical offices try to match item models when measuring inflation between two periods. However, for product areas with a high turnover of differentiated models, the use of hedonic indexes is more appropriate since they include unmatched new and old models. There are two main competing...