The Unassuming Economist

On cross-country:

• Financial Stability Review, May 2019 – European Central Bank
• How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism – CityLab
• Impacts of urban renewal on neighborhood housing prices: predicting response to psychological effects – Journal of Housing and the Built Environment
• “The ‘housing question’ is no longer simply about housing” – Housing Europe

On the US:

• The Fair Housing Act at 50 – Cityspace
• After Amazon HQ2: New York and D.C. Offer a Tale of Two Housing Markets – Yahoo
• Have Changes in Financing Contributed to the Loss of Low-Cost Rental Units and Rent Increases? – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Regulations And Failed Governance Are The Root Causes Of California’s Housing Crisis – Hoover Institution
• Monkkonen Guides Discussion of L.A.’s Housing Needs – UCLA

On other countries:

• [Canada] RBC Sidesteps Canada’s Housing Slump With Mortgage Growth – Bloomberg
• [China] Understanding China’s ‘One-Way Bet’ Property Market – Washington Post
• [Hong Kong] Hong Kong Property Back in Bubble Territory, Reinhart Says – Bloomberg

On cross-country:

• Debate Over Lunch: How Architecture Brings Us Together – OECD
• Identifying booms and busts in house prices under heterogeneous expectations – Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control
• The housing cycle: What role for mortgage market development and housing finance? – Loughborough University

On rent control:

• Housing Supply Dynamics under Rent Control: What Can Evictions Tell Us? – American Economic Association
• Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls – American Economic Association
• The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values – American Economic Association
• Who Pays for Rent Control? Heterogeneous Landlord Response to San Francisco’s Rent Control Expansion – Stanford University

On the US:

• Press Briefing on the Evolution and Future of Homeownership – Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• An expert’s 7 principles for solving America’s housing crisis – Vox
• Monetary Policy, Housing Rents, and Inflation Dynamics – Federal Reserve Board
• The Great Recession, education, race, and homeownership – Economic Policy Institute
• Why Isn’t The Black Homeownership Rate Higher Today Than When The 1968 Fair Housing Act Became Law? – Forbes
• ‘Fairbnb’ Wants to Be the Unproblematic Alternative to Airbnb – Citylab
• Trump Administration Wants To Cut Funding For Public Housing Repairs – NPR
• California Today: Lawmakers Shelve a Potential Remedy to the Housing Crisis – New York Times
• 3 Top REITs With High Dividend Yields Above 5% And Secure Payouts – Seeking Alpha
• Labor Demand Shocks and Housing Prices Across the United States: Does One Size Fit All? – Economic Development Quarterly
• Undersupply in Housing Inventory – CoreLogic
• Spain’s Richest Person Bets Billions on Prime U.S. Real Estate – Bloomberg
• Despite Resistance, Cities Turn to Density to Tackle Housing Inequality – CityLab
• Special Incentive for Property Buyers: A Foreign Passport – New York Times
• Shortage of cheaper houses stifles U.S. homes sales – Reuters
• California’s big housing bill tanked. Newsom is partly to blame – Los Angeles Times
• How Do Mortgage Refinances Affect Debt, Default, and Spending? – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies

On other countries:

• [Canada] Real estate prices and banking performance: evidence from Canada – Journal of Economics and Finance
• [India] Affordable Housing as Human Right – Yale University
• [Portugal] The impact of Airbnb on residential property values and rents: evidence from Portugal – Ideas
• [United Kingdom] UK housing: Resilient in the face of turmoil – ING

On cross-country:

• House Prices Are Up: Should We Be Happy? – IMF
• How real-estate barons have ridden the tech boom – The Economist
• “Housing affordability is a key determinant of individual well-being and overall economic growth” The World Bank Look at Housing, Mobility and Welfare – Housing Europe
• This Land is whose Land? Picking the Housing Europe annual conference theme – Housing Europe
• European Summer School for young professionals 2019 – Housing Europe

On the US:

• California’s Rent Control Advocates Are About To Get What They Want, Good and Hard – Reason
• Special briefing on new construction, housing supply, and home prices – American Enterprise Institute
• Proposed Rule Could Evict 55,000 Children From Subsidized Housing – NPR
• Chipping away at the mortgage deduction – Brookings Institute
• The Capital Region needs more housing – Brookings Institute
• AEI Housing Center announces 10 best and worst metro areas to live in for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs – American Enterprise Institute
• A great choice by the Federal Housing Finance Agency – American Enterprise Institute
• Second Home Buyers and the Housing Boom and Bust – Federal Reserve Board
• When Airbnb Listings in a City Increase, So Do Rent Prices – Harvard Business Review
• Chinese nationals purchase more U.S. residential real estate than buyers from any other foreign country, but Trump’s trade war could soon end that – MarketWatch

On other countries:

• [Canada] Combatting Money Laundering in BC Real Estate – CityNews
• [Canada] Poloz Underestimates Housing Slump, Capital Economics Says – Bloomberg
• [China] The Demand for Reverse Mortgages in China – VoxChina
• [Netherlands] Amsterdam Parliament Seeks Three-Year Freeze for Housing Resales – Bloomberg
• [Singapore] Do Real Estate Agents Have Information Advantages in Housing Markets? – Journal of Financial Economics

From the IMF’s latest report on Korea:

“Evidence for Korea suggests that financial stability will not necessarily materialize as a natural by-product of a so-called appropriate monetary policy stance. Although the effects of monetary and macroprudential instruments may overlap, they are not perfect substitutes. Empirical evidence for Korea shows that macroprudential policy have made two active contributions to limit financial risks to the wider economy:

• Preempting aggregate weakness by limiting the buildup of risk, thereby reducing the occurrence of crises. Macroprudential policies can reduce the procyclical feedback between asset prices and credit.
• Reducing the systemic vulnerability by increasing the resilience of the financial system. By building buffers, macroprudential policy helps maintain the ability of the financial system to provide credit to the economy, even under adverse conditions.

Policymakers should be mindful that macroprudential policy is not free of costs and that there may be trade-offs between the stability and the efficiency of financial systems. For instance, when policymakers impose high capital and liquidity requirements on financial institutions, they may enhance the stability of the system, but they also drive up the price of credit. For macroprudential policy to contribute to financial stability and social welfare, its objectives need to be defined clearly and in a manner that can form the basis of a strong accountability framework.”

From the IMF’s latest report on Luxembourg:

“Real house prices are estimated to be slightly overvalued in 2018. The percent deviation between the actual house price index and the predicted house price index suggests that real house prices were slightly overvalued, by about 7.5 percent in 2018.

Going forward, given supply constraints, Brexit-related immigration flows could add demand pressures and increase overvaluation of residential real estate (RRE) prices.

However, elevated household indebtedness indicates medium-term vulnerabilities, especially among younger age cohorts. Household debt remained high at about 170 percent of net disposable income in 2017, placing Luxembourg above the average of OECD countries. According to the latest available data from CSSF, 32 percent of households have a debt-service-to-income (DSTI) ratio greater than 45 percent. Disaggregated data from Household Finance and Consumption Survey (2014) indicates very high debt-to-income and DSTI ratios for younger cohorts (below 45 years old). The median and 75th percentile DSTI ratios were approaching 25 and 40 percent of disposable income, respectively. Classified by income quintiles, debt service burden is larger for poorer households (quintiles 1 and 2). In 2018, the share of adjustable rate mortgages in new mortgages remained stable at about 50 percent, indicating that some household balance sheets remain vulnerable to interest rate risks. These vulnerabilities would be exacerbated should monetary policy normalize faster than anticipated.

Rising RRE prices and elevated household indebtedness require continued monitoring of financial stability risks including banks’ ability to absorb price declines. Non-performing loans (NPLs) in the real estate sector remain low, with the ratio of total NPLs in RRE to total assets of the domestic banking system at 0.18 percent. However, borrower-based indicators point towards the need for closer monitoring of financial stability risks. Loan-to-value (LTV) ratios above 80 percent, for instance, are high at 31 percent of the outstanding mortgage stock. This is expected to increase further as one half of all new mortgage loans continue to have LTV ratios above 80 percent.”