House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

This paper analyzes the housing markets and housing policies in Hong Kong, China and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Both markets face housing affordability problems due to limited land supply, for which the solutions vary considerably. Hong Kong, China has adopted a railway and property...

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing, but do estimate differences in effects based on an individual...

New Zealand’s housing supply has not kept pace with rising demand, including from net immigration. Affordability has worsened, particularly for low-income renters. Government action is underway to allow new housing through initiatives such as the Urban Growth Agenda, KiwiBuild and the Housing...

The Finnish housing market is volatile. After declining significantly as the global financial crisis unfolded, housing prices and investment recovered to reach new peaks. This paper uses a small econometric model to assess the role of fundamentals in housing price and investment developments....

Housing policies in Japan after World War II were focused on the quantitative supply of houses with a wide range of targeted groups and public rental houses. The Japan Housing Corporation (now the Urban Renaissance Agency) and the Government Housing Loan Corporation (now the Japan Housing...

This paper examines housing affordability in Ireland by looking at the distribution of housing costs across households. Using microdata from the SILC survey over the period 2005-2015, the contribution of this paper is threefold. First, the paper considers the trends in the cost of housing in...

On 15th November 2012 in Copenhagen, SUERF and Nykredit in association with Danmarks Nationalbank organised a conference on "Property prices and real estate financing in a turbulent world". The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the conference.

We introduce a new measure of housing affordability that adjusts for normative variation in housing consumption. The new measure is computed using extensive micro-data from Israel for the 1998–2015 period. Findings suggest sharp declines in Israel quality- and consumption-adjusted...