The tremendous rise in house prices over the last decade has been both a national and a global phenomenon. The growth of secondary mortgage holdings and the increased impact of house prices on consumption and other components of economic activity imply ever-greater importance for accurate...

Many of the countries which experienced sharply rising home prices (often later described as bubbles) over the 2000s decade also ran substantial trade deficits. Some early research on the topic suggested that countries such as the US, Ireland, Spain and others with bubbles in their housing...

If there is a high level of synchronization among euro zone country housing markets, the European Central Bank can incorporate the housing sector into its monetary policy decisions. If such co-movement is low, however, the ECB would have a harder time setting policy. Given the importance of...

For the European Central Bank to incorporate euro-wide housing into its policy decisions, it is helpful if home values across the currency union are convergent in the long run. We apply a probabilistic pair-wise approach to the question of whether home values converge across eight euro-zone...

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...

Home prices and their fundamental determinants, such as income, should, according to theory and intuition have a stable long run relationship. While bubbles exist, these are deviations from this long run relationship. However, numerous empirical studies have failed to find such long run...

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...

Recent political events such as Brexit, as well as changing demographics have made the unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic likelier than recently thought possible. Unification would require addressing many political and economic issues. One change would be the adoption of the...

Convergence in per-capita income across member countries is a stated goal of the European Union. This goal applies, of course, to all euro zone nations. The impact of a common currency on income convergence is both theoretically and empirically ambiguous, however. Previous studies on European...

Previous studies on regional convergence in the US have employed varied methodologies and yielded different conclusions. Some authors report evidence that convergence has grown stronger in recent decades, while others find recent years have seen an end to convergence. We test for convergence...