The Unassuming Economist

On cross-country:

• Bedrooms for sale highlight the depths of Europe’s housing crisis – Reuters
• Housing crisis: why prices are rising and what the EU is doing about it. Rising house prices and rents are a big concern for many Europeans. Read on for key facts and what the EU is doing about the issue. – European Parliament

Working papers and conferences:

• How Costly Is Permitting in Housing Development? – MIT
• When Monetary and Macroprudential Policies Tighten Together: Evidence from the Czech Mortgage Market – Czech National Bank
• Call for Papers: 6th Workshop on Rent Control on June 22-23 – DIW Berlin
• Nighttime light metrics for analysing urban-rural economic disparities: A case study in 36 Chinese metropolitan areas – Cities

On China:

• The rotten tail of China’s property bust. Officials want to spread the pain as widely as possible – The Economist
• March Kicks Off the Start of Homebuying Season: Are You Ready? – Realtor.com

On Australia and New Zealand:

• [Australia] Australia’s home prices keep rising in February, defying rate hike – Reuters
• [Australia] Sydney Home Prices Flatline While Rest of Australia Stays Strong – Bloomberg
• [Australia] Desperate first home buyers are fuelling price ‘up-crash’ at lower end of market, experts say. Biggest house price increases in February come in smaller capital cities as buyers undeterred by interest rate hikes – The Guardian
• [New Zealand] New Zealand Rolls Out the Welcome Mat for Wealthy American Home Buyers. The country’s budding startup scene and changes to its Active Investor Plus visa program have led to an influx of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and advisers – Wall Street Journal
• [New Zealand] New Zealand House Prices Edge Higher, While Buyers Stay Cautious – Bloomberg

On other countries:  

• [Austria] Austria’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Canada] Toronto Home Prices Decline for a Ninth Month as Fears Persist – Bloomberg
• [Canada] Mortgage Renewal Mission Possible: The Final Reckoning – TD
• [Chile] Chile’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Finland] Finland’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Hungary] Hungary’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Indonesia] Indonesia’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Korea] Home Prices in Seoul’s Posh Districts Fall After Yearlong Rally – Bloomberg
• [Peru] Peru’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Romania] Romania’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [Sweden] Sweden’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• Thailand’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2026 – Global Property Guide
• [United Kingdom] UK house prices ‘bunching’ to avoid mansion tax. Buyers and sellers are already pricing homes under new thresholds – FT
• [United Kingdom] UK house prices rise in February as chancellor avoids ‘negative speculation’. Rachel Reeves’s upcoming spring forecast has not led to slowdown, as property tax rumours did in November – The Guardian
• [United Kingdom] UK mortgage approvals fall to lowest level in 2 years. Drop reflects uncertainty among homebuyers around chancellor Rachel Reeves’ November Budget – FT
• [United Kingdom] How the UK mortgage market became so unstable. The market has not been this jittery in decades — and that was before the Middle East conflict – FT
• [United Kingdom] London landlord begins evictions ahead of new renters’ rights law. Asif Aziz’s Criterion Capital owns several apartment blocks in capital as well as Trocadero centre in Piccadilly – FT  

On prices, rent, and mortgage:    

• Relief for US homeowners as mortgage rates hit lowest since 2022. Decline in benchmark rate helps bolster Donald Trump’s claim housing affordability is improving under his administration – FT
• The Disappearing American Mortgage. Young and working-class people aren’t getting on the property ladder anymore. – The Atlantic
• Price Growth for Building Materials Slows to Start the Year – NAHB
• A dangerous playbook is being revived for the giant US housing agencies. Increased buying of mortgage securities by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae marks a return to a risky business model – FT
• Did Mortgages with Locked-in Low Rates Lead to Rising House Prices? – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Asking Rents Continue to Decline Year-over-year – Calculated Risk
• House Price Appreciation by State and Metro Area: Fourth Quarter 2025 – NAHB

On sales, permits, starts, and supply:    

• Private Residential Construction Spending Edges Higher in December – NAHB
• Final Look at Local Housing Markets in January. Altos: Active single-family inventory was down 1.4% week-over-week – Calculated Risk
• Multifamily Absorption Rate Remains Below 50% – NAHB
• US housing supply gap widens further in 2025, Realtor.com says – Reuters
• Who we count shapes how we measure housing supply and affordability – Brookings

On other developments:    

• Is the Housing Market Going to Crash? – Redfin
• Homeowners Stay Put 12 Years, Stifling the US Housing Market – Bloomberg
• Senate bill to help Americans afford housing nears the finish line. The long-awaited bipartisan legislation has White House backing and includes a measure to ban large investors from buying hundreds of homes. – Washington Post
• Mamdani Meets Again With Trump, Emerging With Two Unexpected Victories. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he and President Trump discussed building housing in New York City, and he appeared to secure the release of a Columbia student detained by ICE on Thursday. – New York Times
• A new car, home feel out of reach for middle-class Americans, poll finds. Most renters — including those earning six figures — doubt they could afford a home in the foreseeable future. – Washington Post
• Q4 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO – Calculated Risk
• Housing has a data problem – Brookings
• The ROAD to Letting Treasury Pick Winners and Losers in Investing – Cato
• The 5 Strongest States Leading the ‘Two-Speed’ Housing Market – Realtor.com 
• Affordability Posts Mild Gains in Second Half of 2025 but Crisis Continues – NAHB

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