MACROECONOMIC UNCERTAINTY AND THE COMOVEMENT IN BUYING VERSUS RENTING IN THE USA

Goodness C. Aye and Rangan Gupta
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Goodness C. Aye: Department of Economics, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Advances in Decision Sciences, 2019, vol. 23, issue 3, 93-121

Abstract: This paper characterizes the sources of the comovement in the U.S metropolitan buy-rent growth rate. The analysis is based on quarterly buy-rent indices from 1982:Q1 to 2016:Q4. To this end, we used the dynamic factor model to decompose the index into national and local factors. The national component contributed more to the variation in the buy-rent indices relative to the local component with variance decomposition values of 72% and 27% respectively albeit this varied across the cities. We further examined the sensitivity of the national buy-rent factor to macroeconomic uncertainty. Our full sample results show that uncertainty has a significant negative effect on the buy-rent behavior thus favouring buying a home as a wealth accumulation channel and hence a hedge relative to renting a similar home and investing in other financial assets. The results from the recursive estimation further confirmed a dominant negative relationship with fewer periods of positive relationship. The implications of these findings are drawn.

Keywords: Buy-rent choice; consumer behavior; dynamic latent factor model; development; economic uncertainty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C38 E21 E30 R31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aag:wpaper:v:23:y:2019:i:3:p:93-121

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