We examine the properties of house price fluctuations across 18 advanced economies over the past 40 years. We ask two specific questions: First, how synchronized are housing cycles across these countries? Second, what are the main shocks driving movements in global house prices? To address these...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We characterize their behavior using some 3,200 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Before the financial crisis, spreads are 10 times more volatile in emerging economies than in...

Interest-rate spreads fluctuate widely across time and countries. We illustrate this on the basis of about 3,100 quarterly observations for 21 advanced and 17 emerging economies since the early 1990s. Prior to the financial crisis, spread fluctuations in advanced economies are an order of...

Housing crises usually go hand in hand with a long lasting recession and a considerable loss in output. We first re-examine the effects of a housing crises on the business cycle based on historical crises. Then we estimate the international spill-over-effects if several huge industrial countries...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship among house prices, income and interest rate in 15 OECD countries. We find that any disequilibrium in the long-run cointegrating relationship among these variables is corrected by the subsequent movement in house prices in most of these countries. This...

This paper studies the dynamic relationship among house prices, income and interest rates in 15 OECD countries. We find that any disequilibrium in the long-run cointegrating relationship among these variables is corrected by the subsequent movement in house prices in most of these countries....