This discussion paper updates the Center's 2006 housing affordability working paper, drawing on housing market data through 2008 to provide an in-depth analysis of housing affordability after the recent housing market bust. The paper looks at affordability in the New England states, their...

Hong Kong’s home mortgage market has remained among the world’s most stable. Supervisory authorities point to the 70 percent loan-to-value policy.

High housing prices have caused concerns among policy makers as well as the public in many U.S. regions. There is a general belief that unaffordable housing could drive businesses away and thus impede job growth. However, there has been little empirical evidence that supports this view. In this...

This paper estimates a Bayesian vector autoregression for the U.S. economy that includes a housing sector and addresses the following questions: Can developments in the housing sector be explained on the basis of developments in real and nominal gross domestic product and interest rates? What...

This paper develops a growth model with land, housing services, and other goods that is capable of explaining a substantial portion of the movements in housing prices over the past forty years. Under certainty, the model exhibits a balanced aggregate growth, but with underlying sectoral change....

The increase in housing prices in the past ten years can largely be explained by falling mortgage interest rates and changes in household income. This article offers some projections of what might happen to housing prices if mortgage rates increase.

Wenli Li and Rui Yao present their recent research, which tries to quantify the effects of house-price changes on both consumption and the well-being of American households. Their study looks at the economy as a whole, as well as different demographic groups.

The housing boom and bust of the last decade, often attributed to "bubbles" and credit market irregularities, may owe much to shifts in economic fundamentals. A resurgence in productivity that began in the mid-1990s contributed to a sense of optimism about future income that likely encouraged...

The authors explore the entire construction sector, as well as the different classes of workers employed by it, to see how much it may be contributing to the recent slowdown in productivity growth.