No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012

Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick and Thomas Steger

American Economic Review, 2017, vol. 107, issue 2, 331-53

Abstract: How have house prices evolved over the long run? This paper presents annual house prices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. We show that real house prices stayed constant from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, but rose strongly and with substantial cross-country variation in the second half of the twentieth century. Land prices, not replacement costs, are the key to understanding the trajectory of house prices. Rising land prices explain about 80 percent of the global house price boom that has taken place since World War II. Our findings have implications for the evolution of wealth-to-income ratios, the growth effects of agglomeration, and the price elasticity of housing supply.

JEL-codes: C43 N10 N90 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20150501
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (239)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20150501 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... M8LSUu_jeSWwHxhM8BM- (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... Zw-7IMwE2ad7zRcCdsx9 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... SCRA4u51NBY5e7bS2ZX3 (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870 – 2012 (2016)
Working Paper: No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012 (2015)
Working Paper: No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012 (2014)
Working Paper: No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012 (2014)
Working Paper: No price like home: global house prices, 1870-2012 (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aecrev:v:107:y:2017:i:2:p:331-53

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review is currently edited by Esther Duflo

More articles in American Economic Review from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().