The recent house price appreciation in the United States has renewed the interest in determining the existence of ”bubbles”. In this paper, we provide a model-free test of rational bubbles and we apply it to the U.S. housing market. Based on the current account identity, we argue that there...

I explore whether time-series methods exploiting the long-run equilibrium properties of the housing market might have detected the disequilibrium in U.S. house prices which pre-dated the Great Recession as it was building up. Based on real-time data, I show that a VAR in levels identified as in...