From 2014 until present, housing prices in Germany have been rising faster than consumer prices in all quarters except one, raising concerns about an excessive over-heating of the housing market. To assess the vulnerability of the German housing market to a future realignment of prices or even a...

We estimate the transmission of the pandemic shock in 2020 to prices in the residential and commercial real estate market by causal machine learning, using new granular data at the municipal level for Germany. We exploit differences in the incidence of Covid infections or short-time work at the...

The house price level is a function of buyers’ realized home equity, and buyers’ realized home equity is a function of the house price level. This interdependence follows from the fact that buyers are sellers in the same market. This article examines under what conditions this leads to a...

We estimate alternative price to rent ratios in the Spanish housing market by considering different stochastic discount factors in present value models similar to those used in the financial literature but where the higher rigidity that characterises this market is taken into account. We...

We show that the hedging benefit of owning a home reduces the variability of housing consumption after a move. When a current home owner's house price covaries positively with housing costs in a future city, changes in the future cost of housing are offset by commensurate changes in wealth...

Conventional wisdom holds that one of the riskiest aspects of owning a house is the uncertainty surrounding its sale price, especially if one moves to another housing market. However, households who sell a house typically buy another house, whose purchase price is also uncertain. We show that...

We use the notion of a housing bubble as an equilibrium in which some investors hold houses for resale purposes only and not with the expectation of receiving a dividend, either in the form of rent or utility. We show that an economy with looser collateral constraints is less prone to bubbles,...

Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on...

The paper compares the dynamics of housing prices in fifteen OECD countries. The data reveal a remarkable degree of similarity across countries and suggest rich dynamics for the first-differenced real house prices, with a significant structure of autocorrelation.