If house prices are convergent at the national level, monetary policy is easier to implement and labor has an easier time achieving mobility across regions. There have accordingly been a number of studies on home price convergence. Some of these previous papers have methodological problems. In...

A lack of co-movement among the national housing markets in the euro monetary union makes the job of the ECB difficult. If markets are depressed in some countries, while booming in others, the ECB would be unable to create simultaneous loose and tight monetary conditions tailored to each...

Two recent empirical papers have presented results indicating that the U.S. Federal Reserve deserved much blame as a cause of the latest boom and bust in house prices and activity. Both papers are important contributions, but neither study allows for the impact of long-term interest rates, which...

Despite housing's importance to the economy and worries about recent financial and economic turmoil traceable to housing market difficulties, little has been written on how distress in the housing market, measured by foreclosures, affects home prices, or how these variables interact with other...

Rents have been proposed as a fundamental determinant of house prices, and indeed deviations from a purported stable relationship between rents and prices have been used as measures of housing market froth, or bubbles. However, previous research has demonstrated that rents and prices are...