The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Yannan Zhou, Ying Lu, Yu Yang, Yan Cheng, Ze He, Yuxin Wang, and Yuli Shan:

“In an increasingly globalized world, energy security is no longer solely determined by direct energy imports but also by complex, cross-border flows of embodied energy embedded within traded goods and services. This study investigates how these embodied energy transfers reshape national energy dependencies and risk exposures within global production networks. Using a multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model based on GTAP 11 and IEA data, this study develops indicators of embodied energy import dependency and diversification, and introduces an innovative energy-risk mask method to identify the spatial sourcing tiers of energy risks embedded in international trade. Our findings show that while global embodied energy dependency has declined slightly since 2000, highly globalized economies such as Singapore and Luxembourg remain extremely reliant on external energy inputs. In addition, countries including Norway and China exhibit structurally concentrated embodied energy import sources, increasing their exposure to potential supply chain disruptions. Moreover, over 50% of global medium- and high-risk embodied energy is transmitted through long-distance trade, with large emerging economies like China and India heavily reliant on energy embedded in imports from geopolitically unstable regions. These risks are often obscured by conventional energy security metrics, which fail to capture the hidden dependencies of complex global supply chains. This study calls for the integration of embodied energy flow considerations into national energy strategies, emphasizing the need for diversified sourcing, upstream risk monitoring, and trade-energy policy coordination to enhance resilience in a geopolitically interconnected world.”

From a paper by Thomas Bourany , and Jordan Rosenthal-Kay:

“To combat global warming, climate policies like carbon taxes, renewable subsidies, and carbon tariffs must be implemented to phase out fossil fuel consumption and lower emissions. Who are the winners and losers of such policies? Through a simple Integrated Assessment Model with heterogeneous countries and international trade in goods and energy, we study both the costs of implementing these policies unilaterally, and the local costs and global gains of international policy cooperation. To do so, we express and decompose welfare changes under different policy regimes to the first order as a function of sufficient statistics that depend on observables and identifiable elasticities like nations’ energy mix, energy rents, trade shares, energy supply and demand elasticities, and damage parameters. We show that climate change has non-trivial reallocation effects through international trade in goods and energy. Pursuing unilateral policies generates strong leakage effects, primarily through energy trade. Global climate policy cooperation mitigates leakage, but not all countries have an incentive to participate. Regional climate clubs operate differently: an EU-wide club reduces global emissions but creates internal winners and losers, while an ASEAN climate club achieves smaller global gains but delivers welfare increases for member nations.”

On cross-country:

• BIS residential property price statistics, Q3 2025. In the third quarter of 2025, global real house prices fell by 0.7% year on year (yoy), a rate similar to the previous quarter (–0.8%); this was despite a rise in nominal prices (2%). Real house prices in AEs were almost stable (0.3% yoy), extending the recent period of moderate growth. In EMEs, prices continued to decrease, at a slower rate (–1.5%) compared with the previous quarters. – BIS

Working papers and conferences:

• Is Housing the Business Cycle (in 2026)? – Econbrowser
• Creating high-opportunity neighbourhoods: Evidence from the HOPE VI programme – VoxEU
• Mortgage borrower actions dampen the impact of higher rates on monthly payments – VoxEU
• A Unified Urban Model With Non-Homothetic Housing Demand – NBER
• Good Neighborhoods, Good Neighbors, Good Jobs? – NBER
• Strong Spatial Spillovers Determine Neighborhood Shape and Neighborhood Change – Philadelphia Fed
• Housing Has a Data Problem. The lack of basic tools to track and understand housing has resulted in a patchwork of individual programs and little clarity on whether any of them meet basic access and affordability needs. The promise of AI, which requires structured, standardized inputs, makes addressing this data-infrastructure gap more urgent. – Project Syndicate
• Episode 65. Property Rights and the UCLA School of Economics with David Henderson – Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast Episode

On Australia and New Zealand:

• [Australia] How to tackle Sydney’s housing crisis – Grattan Institute

On other countries:  

• [Korea] Seoul Apartment Prices Gain Further Ahead of BOK Meeting – Bloomberg
• [Netherlands] Centralised planning to increase housing supply – European Commission
• [Spain] Spain’s Housing Chaos Pits Squatters Against Stranded Owners. Tens of thousands of occupied homes are for sale as Spain’s housing market reaches a boiling point. – Bloomberg

On prices, rent, and mortgage:    

• Housing Doesn’t Need Higher Prices—It Needs More Homes – AEI
• A 25-Basis-Point Decline in the Mortgage Rate Prices-In 1.42 Million Households – NAHB
• Case-Shiller: National House Price Index Up 1.3% year-over-year in December. FHFA House Prices up 1.8% YoY in December – Calculated Risk

On sales, permits, starts, and supply:    

• The ripple effects of banning institutional purchases of single-family rentals – Brookings
• Warren urges Trump to press GOP on reining in Wall Street’s housing purchases. “If Trump wanted to make real changes that would lower costs for the American people, we can make that happen,” said the Massachusetts Democrat. – Politico
• Pending Home Sales Slip in January – Realtor.com
• White House Offers New Details on Its Push to Ban Housing Investors. Trump wants to prohibit investors that own more than 100 homes from buying more, potentially banning hundreds of investment firms – Wall Street Journal
• New Home Sales Close 2025 with Modest Gains – NAHB
• New-Home Sales Heat Up To End 2025, but Annual Total Falls Short of 2024 – Realtor.com
• On the Q4 Advance Release: GDP vs. “Core GDP” and Residential Investment – Econbrowser
• 1.600 million Total Housing Completions in 2025 including Manufactured Homes. Altos: Active single-family inventory was up 1.4% week-over-week – Calculated Risk
• High-End Construction Really Does Help Everyone. A new rung at the top of the housing ladder permits people lower down to climb up. – The Atlantic
• AEI State Housing Supply Legislative Update – AEI
• US single-family home price growth slows in December, FHFA says – Reuters
• Housing’s Share of GDP Declined Further at the End of 2025 – NAHB

On other developments:    

• Trump Vows To Make Housing Affordable While Keeping Values Up as He Praises the ‘Golden Age of America’ in State of the Union Speech – Realtor.com
• Trump administration moves to end housing assistance for mixed immigration families – Reuters
• It’s a Buyer’s Market, but Homeownership Eludes Many Americans. A growing split between low-to-middle-income families and wealthy households is changing who has access to homeownership now. – New York Times
• Four Years Into the High-Rate Era: How the Housing Market Changed and Why Prices Didn’t Reset – Realtor.com
• Beyond the State of the Union: Continuing a path to housing affordability – Zillow
• The Housing Market Is Tilting Back Toward Buyers. After years of bidding wars, there are now more sellers than buyers, forcing price cuts — even as high rates continue to narrow the entryway. – New York Times
• Colorado’s Distinct Trends in Affordable Housing Development. Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) are among the most common financing tools for the development of affordable housing units. Over the past 15 years, the development of LIHTC-funded housing units decelerated nationwide but accelerated in Colorado. – Kansas City Fed  

From a paper by Sezer Ferhad:

“The International Monetary Fund is one of the most important international financial institutions, which aims to protect and ensure the development of the global financial system as well as the development of developing countries. The IMF has been the go-to source for help during many times of crisis, and the latest financial and economic crisis following the COVID-19 pandemic was no different. Many countries required aid and policy guidance in order to ensure a fast and strong recovery from the pandemic, and the IMF assumed the role to provide the much-needed support tied to its conditionalities. The aid provided by the IMF had a significant impact on many aspects of economies and led to a considerably quicker recovery, to the surprise of many. The impact of the IMF with regard to rebuilding market trust and financial stability led to a commendable recovery. However, there were several shortcomings as well. The opportunity provided by the need for an economic recovery to reshape economics into a more inclusive, green economic understanding and to reduce inequalities was underutilized, and the characteristic austerity policies of the Fund continued to create new struggles for developing countries with vulnerability. The aim of this paper is to understand the role and impact of the IMF during the post-pandemic economic recovery.”