The Housing Boom and Bust: Model Meets Evidence

Greg Kaplan, Kurt Mitman and Giovanni Violante

No 23694, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We build a model of the U.S. economy with multiple aggregate shocks (income, housing finance conditions, and beliefs about future housing demand) that generate fluctuations in equilibrium house prices. Through a series of counterfactual experiments, we study the housing boom and bust around the Great Recession and obtain three main results. First, we find that the main driver of movements in house prices and rents was a shift in beliefs. Shifts in credit conditions do not move house prices but are important for the dynamics of home ownership, leverage, and foreclosures. The role of housing rental markets and long-term mortgages in alleviating credit constraints is central to these findings. Second, our model suggests that the boom-bust in house prices explains half of the corresponding swings in non-durable expenditures and that the transmission mechanism is a wealth effect through household balance sheets. Third, we find that a large-scale debt forgiveness program would have done little to temper the collapse of house prices and expenditures, but would have dramatically reduced foreclosures and induced a small, but persistent, increase in consumption during the recovery.

JEL-codes: D10 D31 E21 E30 E40 E51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-mac and nep-ure
Note: AP EFG IFM LS ME PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (89)

Published as Greg Kaplan & Kurt Mitman & Giovanni L. Violante, 2020. "The Housing Boom and Bust: Model Meets Evidence," Journal of Political Economy, vol 128(9), pages 3285-3345.

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Journal Article: The Housing Boom and Bust: Model Meets Evidence (2020)
Working Paper: The Housing Boom and Bust: Model Meets Evidence (2017)
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