Explaining asset price booms poses a difficult question for researchers in macroeconomics: how can large and persistent price growth be explained in the absence large and persistent variation in fundamentals? This paper argues that boom-bust behavior in asset prices can be explained by a model...

We estimate total returns to rental housing by studying over 170,000 hand-collected archival observations of prices and rents for individual houses in Paris (1809-1943) and Amsterdam (1900-1979). The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.0% for Paris and 4.8% for Amsterdam,...

This paper presents a model of real estate asset price dynamics based on empirical evidence, economic theory, and common sense. We note important differences between real estate versus stock market price dynamics. We then use this model to simulate the investment performance of archetypical...

This paper separates the roles of demand for housing services and belief about future house prices in a house price cycle, by utilizing a feature of user-cost-of-housing that it is sensitive to demand for housing services only. Optimality conditions of producing housing services determine...

Using recently developed econometric procedures (Phillips, Wu and Yu, 2011; Phillips, Shi and Yu, 2015), we find evidence of temporary episodes of explosive behaviour in price-to-rent ratios for established houses, in five of Australia's largest cities. One interpretation of our results is that...

While homeownership provides consumption benefits, housing is risky. Using zip code housing returns, we document that homeowners are compensated for bearing housing risk. Our sample covers more than 9,000 zip codes across 135 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), representing almost 70% of the...

Asset prices in general, and real house prices in particular, are often characterized by a nonlinear data-generating process which displays mildly explosive behavior in some periods. Here, we investigate the emergence of explosiveness in the dynamics of real house prices and the role played by...