The Unassuming Economist

On cross-country:

• Global House Price Index – Q1 2019 – Knight Frank
• Literature Review Article: Recent Developments in the Economics of Housing – Elgar Research Reviews in Economics
• The evolution of prime property pricing across global cities – Knight Frank
• Recent changes in housing policies and their distributional impact across Europe – EURMOD

On the US:

• Fix Mortgage Finance, or We’ll Do It for You, Regulator Tells Congress – Wall Street Journal
• Landmark Deal Reached on Rent Protections for Tenants in N.Y. – New York Times
• We need more housing. Local governments are standing in the way – Washington Post
• The Largest Co-Living Building in the World Is Coming to San Jose – Citylab
• The surprisingly effective pilot program stopping real estate money laundering in the US – Quartz
• Affordable Housing Is Not an Easy Fix, Lens Says – UCLA
• Recalibrating Local Politics to Increase the Supply of Housing – Cato Institute
• Housing Lab helps startups that aim to make housing less expensive – UC Berkely
• Housing Crunch Sends Bigger Populations to Smaller Towns – The Pew Charitable Trusts

On other countries:

• [Canada] Canada’s house price boom takes off – Global Property Guide
• [China] Chinese city tells property developers to cease offering drastic price cuts – Reuters
• [China] China’s debt disease might wreck its uncrashable housing market – Quartz
• [Finland] Finland’s housing market remains weak – Global Property Guide
• [Greece] Greek housing sector rebound gains pace as economy recovers – Reuters
• [Hong Kong] The Trade War Could Pop Hong Kong’s Property Bubble – Bloomberg
• [Indonesia] The housing market in Indonesia rarely makes big moves – Global Property Guide
• [Latvia] Latvia’s house prices are now falling – Global Property Guide
• [New Zealand] New Zealand’s house prices rising strongly again – Global Property Guide
• [Thailand] Thailand’s modest house price rises – Global Property Guide
• [Spain] Recent housing market developments in Spain – Banco de España
• [Spain] The Spanish housing market: is it fundamentally broken? – IDEAS

From the IMF’s latest report on Norway:

• “House prices remain overvalued, albeit less so than last year, and household debt continues to rise from an already elevated level (…). The house price moderation discussed earlier has improved housing affordability and correspondingly lowered the risks of a price crash. Nevertheless, house prices remain above fundamentals per staff estimates (0–10 percent at the national level and 5–20 percent in Oslo). Moreover, household indebtedness continues to increase from already high levels, leaving households vulnerable to sharp interest rate rises. Besides mortgages, the rapid growth of consumer credit also warrants close watch, even if it starts from a small base.

• Risks from commercial real estate are rising (…). Commercial real estate prices have increased by about 60 percent since 2000 in real terms, and more than twice that in prime Oslo. Although yields in Norway are not especially low, Oslo’s prime market has the lowest yield compression among major European cities. Banks have substantial exposure to CRE loans25 which account for 15 percent of banks’ loan portfolio (23 percent of GDP), higher than peer countries.”

• The current prudential toolkit to mitigate financial stability risks is quite comprehensive and should not be loosened at this stage.
  Residential housing: The current mortgage regulations, renewed last year, consist of both capital and borrower-based measures such as maximum LTV and DTI ratios, and are welltargeted to areas with higher risks such as Oslo. Together, they have contributed to containing the incidence of risky mortgages, not least in the capital. Given that prices are still overvalued, and that household debt continues to rise, the regulations should be extended as is when reviewed at year-end, barring large unexpected developments in the coming months. The tighter limits for Oslo should be preserved. As recommended in previous years, the mortgage regulations could also be made permanent; the parameters could then be adjusted as needed over the financial cycle.”

Marty Feldstein passed away at the age of 79. He was the first person I wrote a profile of when I joined the IMF’s public relations department in the 2000s. He was very pleasant and very patient during the interview, but got irritated when the photographer asked him to remove his glasses for the photograph. “The glasses stay on,” he said firmly. See the photograph and read my profile of Marty.

The International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) has awarded Ian Parry (IMF) the 2019 annual prize for outstanding contributions to the field of energy economics and its literature.

Ian Parry is Principal Environmental Fiscal Policy Expert in the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department, specializing in fiscal analysis of climate change, environment, and energy issues. Before joining the Fund in 2010, Ian held the Allen V. Kneese Chair in Environmental Economics at Resources for the Future. Below are some of latest posts by Ian Parry.

• Countries Are Signing Up for Sizeable Carbon Prices
• Climate Change: How To Price Paris
• Carbon Pricing: Good for You, Good for the Planet
• Too Much At Stake: Moving Ahead with Energy Price Reforms
• Sins of Emission and Omission in Durban

From a Vox piece on NZ’s well-being budget:

“To Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the purpose of government spending is to ensure citizens’ health and life satisfaction, and that — not wealth or economic growth — is the metric by which a country’s progress should be measured. GDP alone, she said, “does not guarantee improvement to our living standards” and nor does it “take into account who benefits and who is left out.”The budget requires all new spending to go toward five specific well-being goals: bolstering mental health, reducing child poverty, supporting indigenous peoples, moving to a low-carbon-emission economy, and flourishing in a digital age. To measure progress toward these goals, New Zealand will use 61 indicators tracking everything from loneliness to trust in government institutions, alongside more traditional issues like water quality.”

Other material on similar subjects include an earlier IMF paper on Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index (GNH) by Sriram Balasubramanian and Paul Cashin and a Vox piece on new growth models.