The Unassuming Economist

On prices, rent, and mortgage:    

• Case-Shiller: National House Price Index Up 1.4% year-over-year in November
• FHFA House Prices up 1.9% YoY in November – Calculated Risk
• Inflation Adjusted House Prices 2.4% Below 2022 Peak. Price-to-rent index is 9.6% below 2022 peak – Calculated Risk
• Home Prices Rose to Record Highs in 2025 as Affordability Challenge Looms – ATTOM
• Back to the Suburbs: Bay Area Edition. Suburban home prices are rising faster than urban ones – Home Economics
• Is your backyard heating up in 2026? Check Zillow’s hottest markets list. – Zillow
• Zillow’s Best Markets for Home Buyers in 2026: Where Buyers Have Leverage and Upside – Zillow
• The Winter 2026 Wall Street Journal/Realtor.com Housing Market Ranking – Realtor.com
• Mortgage Applications Today: Record-Low Mortgage Rates Spark Home Lending and Refinancing Surge – Realtor.com 
• NMHC on Apartments: “Lower rent growth and higher vacancies” in Q4. Leading indicator for Rents and Apartment Vacancies Negative in Q4 – Calculated Risk
• Trump’s mortgage-backed bond purchases not moving needle on housing costs – Reuters
• Homebuying and Selling Activity Show Signs of Life Amid Lower Mortgage Rates – Redfin
• Buying a House Has Become Less Affordable. A 50-Year Mortgage Is Not the Answer. – AEI
• US single-family home prices jump in November, FHFA says – Reuters

On sales, permits, starts, and supply:    

• Will Banning Corporate Homebuyers Make Housing More Affordable? The Trump administration has moved to restrict institutional investors’ home purchases and proposed allowing buyers to draw on retirement savings for down payments. We asked Professor Cameron LaPoint, who studies housing finance, whether these policies are likely to make housing more affordable—or to push prices higher. – Yale Insights 
• These Developers Stand to Win in Trump’s Housing-Investor Crackdown. The build-to-rent business looks poised to take off after Trump exempted this industry from his regulations on large investors – Wall Street Journal
• December 2025 Monthly Housing Market Trends Report – Realtor.com
• Pool Permitting Falls Lower In 2025 – NAHB
• 4th Look at Local Housing Markets in December – Calculated Risk
• Remodeling Growth Set to Downshift in Late 2026 – Joint Center for Housing Studies 

On other developments:    

• How Remaking the Neighborhood Could Boost Poor Kids’ Futures. A 1990s initiative to replace housing projects with mixed-income developments gave children an economic lift as adults, new research finds – Wall Street Journal
• Population Growth Slows to a Crawl. Less international migration, less domestic migration, fewer births, and more deaths – Home Economics
• What Explains Low Millennial Home Ownership? Lifestyle and affordability – Home Economics
• The Price of Endless Summer. California is experiencing large migration outflows. The high cost of housing is the main driver. – Home Economics
• Is this a Weird Housing Market? It sure feels like one – Home Economics
• The Hidden Risk to the Housing Market – New York Times
• There’s a practical way to lower housing prices. Democrats should seize it. Affordability is a goal, not a policy. – Washington Post 
• Event: Creating high-opportunity neighborhoods: Lessons from HOPE VI on February 2 – Brookings
• December 2025 Luxury Housing Report: Where the Gap Between Median and Luxury is the Widest – Realtor.com
• Here’s How the Housing Market Has Changed Over the Past 10 Years – Realtor.com
• Addressing the US Affordability Crisis – Signal Versus Reality. The Trump administration has announced a range of measures aimed at addressing affordability in the run up to this year’s midterm elections including housing, healthcare and consumer finances. In our view, these initiatives are unlikely to materially alter the near-term inflation outlook – Nomura
• Who Should Shoulder the Tax Burden in a Resort Town? There’s no easy answer as Massachusetts communities contemplate changing taxes for part-time residents. – New York Times
• How Trump Could Actually Fix Housing Market. Washington needs to unlock capital through deregulation. – Wall Street Journal
• Portland’s housing crisis squeezes middle-income buyers – Axios
• Trump Wants to Fix the Broken US Housing Market. Can He Succeed? – Bloomberg
• Something Weird Is Happening in the Housing Market. After the pandemic, many younger Americans were encouraged to buy housing in “starter cities.” But now the homes are losing value, and property taxes are soaring, pitching the housing market into crisis. – Jacobin  

January 28 at 12 pm
Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/98397311321?pwd=K5i4ya1afU1JbJDJ87YRnpDgP7wjyG.1

 Last year, the U.S. economy ended up with about 2 % income growth and about 2½ % inflation. What are the expectations for this year? Should we expect (1) resilience (broadly similar performance to 2025), (2) stagflation (slower income growth, higher inflation – say, due the impact of tariffs) or (3) recession (a decline in income, say due to the bursting of an AI bubble)?

Hear the views of:

• Jason Furman, Harvard professor and former CEA chair;
• Torsten Slok, chief economist, Apollo Management;
• Peter Coy, former Businessweek and New York Times columnist;
• Betsey Stevenson, Michigan professor and former CEA member and chief economist, Department of Labor.

All are welcome to attend. Zoom link given above.

Johns Hopkins University offers an online Master of Science program in applied economics that typically takes students one to two years to complete.

The university scored well in our methodology primarily thanks to a high graduation rate (95%) and high median annual earnings among alumni 10 years after graduation ($87,555). Johns Hopkins also maintains the lowest student-to-faculty ratio (6-to-1) out of the 10 schools ranked here.

See the link here: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/education/science/best-online-masters-in-economics/

This is the second in a special series of posts in which I take stock of some of the main activities of my long 40-year career. In the first one, I shared some reflections on my profiles of famous economists. A convenient link to all my profiles and interviews can be found here.  In this post, I discuss the performance  to date of my 2019 book, “Confronting inequality: How Societies Can Achieve inclusive Growth” (Columbia University Press).

• The book was published in January 2019, just before the annual meeting of economists in Atlanta. the IMF did an impromptu book launch as part of the party that many institutions organize at the annual meetings. Later that month, thanks to Adam Posen, there was a major launch event at the Peterson Institute. The discussants were Heather Boushey (the link is to her excellent presentation) and Jason Furman. Jason’s thought-provoking  PowerPoint from the event is available too. Two other memorable presentations were at Florida State University and at the New School for Social Research, organized by Willi Semmler and featuring a discussion of the book by the great Dani Rodrik. For personal reasons, I then took a break from book launch events and only resumed them in 2020, when invited by James Foster of GW’s International Institute of Economic Policy. The book has nearly 150 citations on Google Scholar.
• In additional to the praise and recognition in these professional settings, it has been gratifying to get praise from lay readers on Goodreads and on Amazon. In 2024, I watched as the book climbed the ranks on Amazon , going all the way to #14 in the Income Inequality category.

• The book has been successful as a textbook (complemented by a more standard text like Jones and Vollrath) in courses on Economic Growth at a couple of institutions. And according to World Cat, more than 300 copies are sitting at institutional libraries around the world.

From a paper by Harold Glenn A. Valera, Cymon Kayle Lubangco, and Mark J. Holmes:

“We propose a new measure of revisions to consumer inflation expectations using repeated cross-sections rather than requiring panel data. We calculate the value of group average expectations in a prior period as a proxy for what an individual’s expectations might have been using micro data in the Philippines for Q1 2010 to Q2 2024. In contrast to existing mixed evidence, the resulting revisions show sensitivity to price changes in 14 food and energy goods. The equivalence testing finds that the group-based coefficients are valid, as they are: (a) different from an overall sample average-based revision results with Philippine data and (b) similar to rotating panel-based revision results using data from the Michigan Survey of US households. Using Philippine data, we also provide new evidence of significant effects of a firm’s frequency of price changes on expectation revisions.”