Drivers of the great housing boom‐bust: Credit conditions, beliefs, or both?

Josue Cox and Sydney C. Ludvigson

Real Estate Economics, 2021, vol. 49, issue 3, 843-875

Abstract: Two potential driving forces of house price fluctuations are commonly cited: credit conditions and beliefs. We posit some simple empirical calculations using direct measures of credit conditions and beliefs to consider their potentially distinct roles in house price fluctuations at the aggregate level. Changes in credit conditions are positively related to the fraction of riskier nonconforming debt in total mortgage lending, while measures of beliefs are unrelated to this ratio. Credit conditions explain quantitatively large magnitudes of the variation in quarterly house price growth and also predict future house price growth. Beliefs bear some relation to contemporaneous house price growth but have little predictive power. A structural vector autoregression analysis implies that exogenous changes in credit conditions have quantitatively important dynamic causal effects on house price changes.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.12303

Related works:
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:bla:reesec:v:49:y:2021:i:3:p:843-875

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1080-8620

Access Statistics for this article

Real Estate Economics is currently edited by Crocker Liu, N. Edward Coulson and Walter Torous

More articles in Real Estate Economics from American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().