Housing Wealth Isn't Wealth

Willem Buiter

No 14204, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A fall in house prices due to a change in fundamental value redistributes wealth from those long housing (for whom the fundamental value of the house they own exceeds the present discounted value of their planned future consumption of housing services) to those short housing. In a representative agent model and in the Yaari-Blanchard OLG model used in the paper, there is no pure wealth effect on consumption from a change in house prices if this represents a change in fundamental value. There is a pure wealth effect on consumption from a change in house prices if this reflects a change in the speculative bubble component of house prices. Two other channels through which house prices can affect aggregate consumption are (1) redistribution effects if the marginal propensity to spend out of wealth differs between those long housing and those short housing and (2) collateral or credit effects due to the collateralisability of housing wealth and the non-collateralisability of human wealth. A decline in house prices reduces the scope for mortgage equity withdrawal. For given sequences of future after-tax labour income and interest rates, this may depress consumption in the short run while boosting it in the long run.

JEL-codes: E2 E21 E22 E3 E32 E37 G1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-mac and nep-ure
Note: IFM ME
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (45)

Published as Buiter, Willem H., 2010. "Housing wealth isn't wealth," Economics - The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, vol. 4(22), pages 1-29.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14204.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Housing Wealth isn't Wealth (2008)
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:nbr:nberwo:14204

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14204

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().