Inclusive Growth

Global Housing Watch

Forecasting Forum

Energy & Climate Change

Housing View – February 7, 2025

Working papers and conferences:

  • Housing Subsidies for Refugees: Experimental Evidence on Life Outcomes and Social Integration in Jordan – NBER
  • Housing and Inequality – CEPR
  • When land is not enough: Drawing in private investment to increase social rental housing in Spain – Cities
  • Measuring Fairness in the U.S. Mortgage Market – Philadelphia Fed
  • Constructing Applicants from Loan-Level Data: A Case Study of Mortgage Applications – Philadelphia Fed
  • Are First‑Time Home Buyers Facing Desperate Times? – SSRN


On the US—developments on house prices, rent, permits and mortgage:    

  • Subprime Mortgages Destroyed Them. Who Paid the Price? In “The Killing Fields of East New York,” Stacy Horn profiles one 1990s white-collar crime spree and the wreckage it left behind. – New York Times
  • What does Taiwan have to do with US mortgage rates? The weird financial dance between Taiwanese life insurers and US homebuyers – FT
  • Asking Rents Mostly Unchanged Year-over-year – Calculated Risk
  • Mortgage Applications Increase Marginally in January – NAHB
  • CoreLogic: Home Price Growth Ticks Up Slightly in December – CoreLogic
  • US Home Price Insights –  February 2025 – CoreLogic


On the US—other developments:    

  • Trump Tariffs Risk $29,000 Rise in US Home Building Costs. Canada is the US’s biggest foreign supplier of lumber. Tariffs likely to make it harder for Americans to afford homes – Bloomberg
  • Climate Change to Wipe Away $1.5 Trillion in U.S. Home Values, Study Says. Rising home-insurance costs and more homeowners spurning some risky neighborhoods will drive these declines, according to First Street – Wall Street Journal
  • That Giant Sucking Sound? It’s Climate Change Devouring Your Home’s Value. – New York Times
  • Unaffordability in the West Accelerates Mortgage Buydowns – CoreLogic
  • To Rebuild Los Angeles, Fix Zoning. A lot more housing is needed, and not primarily in the areas destroyed by the fires. – The Atlantic
  • Are First‑Time Home Buyers Facing Desperate Times? – New York Fed
  • Where the housing market shift is happening the fastest right now. Inventory is a key housing metric. Here’s what it’s telling us right now, according to ResiClub’s latest monthly report. – Fast Company
  • Fannie and Freddie: Single Family Serious Delinquency Rates Increased in December. Multi-Family Delinquency Rate Declined Slightly in December – Calculated Risk
  • Construction Labor Market Softens – NAHB  
  • Homeownership Rate for Younger Households Declines – NAHB
  • Minnesota’s Multifamily Housing Industry Faces Rising Property Insurance Costs – Minneapolis Fed
  • US Housing Market Is Doing Something ‘Very Unusual’ – Newsweek
  • Nearly 70% of Single People Struggle to Afford Housing Payments, Compared to 52% of Married People – Redfin
  • Will Congress Regulate AI’s Rapid Growth in Real Estate? – CoreLogic   


On Australia and New Zealand:

  • [Australia] Australian House Prices Fall Further Led by Sydney and Melbourne. Outlook expected to improve somewhat if rates are reduced. But affordability, slower immigration will keep a lid on gains – Bloomberg
  • [New Zealand] Average Wellington house prices plummet nearly 25 percent in latest official valuations – RNZ
  • [New Zealand] Economist warns Kiwis not to ‘bet the house’ on housing market – RNZ
  • [New Zealand] New Zealand house prices crash – MacroBusiness


On other countries:  

  • [Canada] Vancouver: Listings surge as sellers anticipate a housing market revival – National Bank of Canada
  • [Canada] Measuring unmet housing need and housing instability in households with roommates and extended family – Statistics Canada
  • [Canada] Building new homes in the path of floods and wildfires could cost billions, threaten affordability: report. First-of-its-kind analysis shows significant financial risks from climate change-fuelled disasters unless a small proportion of the new homes needed by 2030 are built out of harm’s way. – Canadian Climate Institute
  • [Russia] Moscow Property Rivals London as Rich Russians Bring Cash Home. High-end real estate in the city is seeing a surge in demand as Russians invest back home and turn away from overseas deals because of sanctions. – Bloomberg
  • [Spain] La vivienda ya es más cara que nunca: el precio medio superó en 2024 a los años de la burbuja. El importe promedio, con 2.086 euros por metro cuadrado, fue superior al de 2006 y 2007, según la estadística registral, que certifica un nuevo auge del mercado – El Pais
  • [Spain] España gasta cuatro veces menos que Europa en vivienda social. El país invirtió de media 34 euros por habitante en asistencia habitacional entre 2007 y 2021, lejos de los 160 euros de la media europea – El Pais
  • [Spain] Nuevas previsiones para el sector inmobiliario español: el ciclo alcista se afianza en 2025 – CaixaBank
  • [United Kingdom] Peace, permanence and affordable prices: six ways to solve Britain’s housing crisis – The Guardian

Working papers and conferences:

  • Housing Subsidies for Refugees: Experimental Evidence on Life Outcomes and Social Integration in Jordan – NBER
  • Housing and Inequality – CEPR
  • When land is not enough: Drawing in private investment to increase social rental housing in Spain – Cities
  • Measuring Fairness in the U.S. Mortgage Market – Philadelphia Fed
  • Constructing Applicants from Loan-Level Data: A Case Study of Mortgage Applications – Philadelphia Fed
  • Are First‑Time Home Buyers Facing Desperate Times?

Read the full article…

Posted by at 5:00 AM

Labels: Global Housing Watch

An Evaluation of World Economic Outlook Forecasts: Any Evidence of Asymmetry?

From a paper by Emrehan Aktuğ and Abolfazl Rezghi:

“Using a large cross-country dataset covering over 150 countries and more than 10 macroeconomic variables, this study examines the consistency of IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecasts with the full information rational expectations (FIRE) hypothesis. Similar to Consensus Economics forecasts, WEO forecasts exhibit an overreaction to news. Our analysis reveals that this overreaction is asymmetric, with more measured response to bad news, bringing forecasts closer to the FIRE benchmark. Moreover, forecasts align more closely with FIRE hypothesis during economic downturns or when a country is part of an IMF program. Overreaction becomes more pronounced for macroeconomic variables with low persistence and for forecasts over longer horizons, consistent with recent theoretical models. We also develop a model to explain how state-dependent nature of attentiveness may drive this asymmetric overreaction.”

From a paper by Emrehan Aktuğ and Abolfazl Rezghi:

“Using a large cross-country dataset covering over 150 countries and more than 10 macroeconomic variables, this study examines the consistency of IMF World Economic Outlook (WEO) forecasts with the full information rational expectations (FIRE) hypothesis. Similar to Consensus Economics forecasts, WEO forecasts exhibit an overreaction to news. Our analysis reveals that this overreaction is asymmetric, with more measured response to bad news,

Read the full article…

Posted by at 9:37 AM

Labels: Forecasting Forum

A Meta-analysis on Labour Market Deregulations and Employment Performance: No Consensus Around the IMF-OECD Consensus

From a paper by Emiliano Brancaccio, Fabiana De Cristofaro, and Raffaele Giammetti:

“The so-called ‘IMF-OECD consensus’ suggests that labour market deregulations increase employment and reduce unemployment. This paper presents a meta-analysis of research on this topic based on MAER-NET guidelines. We examine the relation between Employment Protection Legislation indexes on one hand, and employment and unemployment on the other. Among 53 academic papers published between 1990 and 2019, only 28 per cent support the consensus view, while the remaining 72 per cent report results that are ambiguous (21 per cent) or contrary to the consensus (51 per cent). The decline in support for the consensus view is particularly evident in the last decade. Our results are independent of the citations of papers examined, the impact factor of journals and the techniques used. A FAT-PET meta-regression model confirms these outcomes.”

From a paper by Emiliano Brancaccio, Fabiana De Cristofaro, and Raffaele Giammetti:

“The so-called ‘IMF-OECD consensus’ suggests that labour market deregulations increase employment and reduce unemployment. This paper presents a meta-analysis of research on this topic based on MAER-NET guidelines. We examine the relation between Employment Protection Legislation indexes on one hand, and employment and unemployment on the other. Among 53 academic papers published between 1990 and 2019,

Read the full article…

Posted by at 9:34 AM

Labels: Inclusive Growth

Shades of inflation targeting: insights from fractional integration

From a paper by Marek A. Dąbrowski, Jakub Janus, and Krystian Mucha:

“In this paper, we propose a novel approach to classifying inflation-targeting (IT) economies based on fractionally integrated processes. Motivated by the rising prevalence and diversity of IT strategies, we leverage variation in the persistence of inflation rate series to identify four de facto IT strategies, or ‘shades’ of IT. Moving from negative orders of fractional integration, indicating anti-persistent behaviour, to more persistent long-memory processes, often associated with less credible policy frameworks, we classify countries into average IT, strict IT, flexible IT, and uncommitted IT categories. This framework sheds light on the differences between declarative and actual monetary policy strategies across 36 advanced and emerging market economies. Notably, we demonstrate that while most economies fall into the flexible IT category, extreme cases, including the uncommitted IT category, occur with marked frequency. Furthermore, we link our IT classification to institutional features of national monetary frameworks using ordinal probit models. The results suggest that differences across IT categories are related to variations in the maturity and stability of IT frameworks, with less pronounced connections to central bank independence and transparency.”

From a paper by Marek A. Dąbrowski, Jakub Janus, and Krystian Mucha:

“In this paper, we propose a novel approach to classifying inflation-targeting (IT) economies based on fractionally integrated processes. Motivated by the rising prevalence and diversity of IT strategies, we leverage variation in the persistence of inflation rate series to identify four de facto IT strategies, or ‘shades’ of IT. Moving from negative orders of fractional integration, indicating anti-persistent behaviour,

Read the full article…

Posted by at 1:10 PM

Labels: Inclusive Growth

A Quarter Century of Okun’s Law in Scholarly Literature

From a paper by Martin Boďa and Mariana Považanová:

“In order to canvass the state of the art of research on Okun’s law, the paper surveys 84 articles published in Web of Science™ journals between 1995 and 2020 occupied with estimating the relationship between unemployment and output in the spirit of an approach proposed by Okun (1962). A bibliometric analysis is conducted to identify the most influential works and authors, to establish links between them, and to outline research fronts with main paths of knowledge diffusion. Under a content analysis, the articles included in the survey are further classified by their leitmotif and research agenda as well as by their geographical scope. The basal methodological choices of the articles are overviewed and their temporal patterns are studied. An emphasis is put on the stylized facts constituting the research agenda of 57 of the surveyed applications of Okun’s law (such as instability over time, asymmetries, or age and gender specificity). A majority of studies estimated Okun’s law on the basis of a regression equation that may suggest that it is unemployment that responds to fluctuations in output and adopted the difference version of Okun’s law. In estimating the gap version, the Hodrick-Prescott filter has continued to be a preferred choice despite its well-known flawed statistical properties. Lotka’s law indicates an above-average level of research productivity of authors in this field. The findings provide insights into the intellectual structure of the empirics of Okun’s law and act as guidance for future research on cyclical unemployment-output fluctuations.”

From a paper by Martin Boďa and Mariana Považanová:

“In order to canvass the state of the art of research on Okun’s law, the paper surveys 84 articles published in Web of Science™ journals between 1995 and 2020 occupied with estimating the relationship between unemployment and output in the spirit of an approach proposed by Okun (1962). A bibliometric analysis is conducted to identify the most influential works and authors, to establish links between them,

Read the full article…

Posted by at 1:13 PM

Labels: Inclusive Growth

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