The Unassuming Economist

Working papers and conferences:

• Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the U.S. Baby Boom? – NBER
• Ownership Profile of Single-Family Residence Properties in Philadelphia: A Focus on Large Corporate Investors – Philadelphia Fed
• Non-Homothetic Housing Demand and Geographic Worker Sorting – SSRN
• Testing for Persistence in Real House Prices in 47 Countries from the OECD Database – SSRN
• Housing Wealth Across Countries: The Role of Expectations, Institutions and Preferences – SSRN
• Fifty-Year-Olds and the Housing Demand Channel of Monetary Policy – SSRN    

On the US—developments on house prices, rent, permits and mortgage:    

• The outlook for the US housing market in 2025. With several variables impacting the U.S. housing market — from soaring home prices to rock-bottom demand — where’s the sector headed in 2025? – J.P. Morgan
• Trump Housing Market Warning Issued by JPMorgan Chase – Newsweek
• Four Housing Market Predictions For Industry Professionals To Watch In 2025 – Forbes
• Housing Prices Are Stuck, and So Is the Fed – Barron’s
• MBA: Mortgage Delinquencies Increased Slightly in Q4 2024 – Calculated Risk
• Mortgage Applications Increase in Latest MBA Weekly Survey – Mortgage Bankers Association
• Fannie Mae Underpins the Mortgage Market. Should the Government Sell It? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out by the government during the housing crisis nearly 17 years ago. The Trump administration is considering letting them go private again. – New York Times
• 1st Look at Local Housing Markets in January – Calculated Risk
• 2nd Look at Local Housing Markets in January – Calculated Risk
• Is it a buyer’s or seller’s housing market? Zillow’s analysis for over 200 metro areas. This interactive housing market map shows where sellers—and buyers—have the most power right now. – Fast Company
• The Top 10 Metros With the Largest Home Price Increases – Realtor.com
• Part 1: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-February 2025 – Calculated Risk
• Monthly U.S. Foreclosure Activity Increases in January 2025 – ATTOM
• Home Values in Opportunity Zones Continue to Ride Coattails of National Gains During Fourth Quarter – ATTOM

On the US—other developments:    

• Will Trump Tariffs Harm Home Affordability? Navigating construction material prices amid the new administration’s recent tariffs – CoreLogic
• Canada and Mexico tariffs risk inflating US housing crisis, Trump is warned – The Guardian
• From Missing Middle Housing to Gentle Density: Identifying Affordable Housing Trends Through Policy Tracking – Fiscal Note
• Builders’ Top Challenges for 2025 – NAHB
• Owning a Home More Affordable Than Renting Across U.S. but Both Still Pose Significant Burdens – ATTOM
• Overall Housing Sentiment Ticks Higher Despite Consumers’ Growing Affordability Concerns. Sharply Higher Share of Survey Respondents Expects Rent Prices to Rise – Fannie Mae
• Affordable housing is in short supply across the US. Atlanta may have found a way forward. Mayor Andre Dickens is turning to Atlanta’s own land and resources to create new development opportunities – The Guardian
• A Sore Spot in L.A.’s Housing Crisis: Foreign-Owned Homes Sitting Empty. International buyers, particularly from China, have contributed to the hundreds of thousands of vacant properties in Los Angeles County – Wall Street Journal 
• Non-Cash Rentals House More than Two Million Renters Affordably – Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies
• Aging Boomers Are About to Rekindle the Senior-Housing Market. The oldest baby boomers turn 80 in less than a year, and the senior housing market is moving from glut to shortage – Wall Street Journal
• Investing in housing: Unlocking economic mobility for Black families and all Americans – McKinsey
• How to house all Americans. Henry Cisneros and Cullum Clark discuss how to finally end the U.S. housing crisis – George Bush Institute
• Where Were the Top 15 Cities for Home Sales Growth in 2024. Although U.S. home sales decreased in 2024 compared with 2023, some metro areas still posted substantial sales growth – CoreLogic
• Zillow Revenue Grows but Outlook Collides With Subdued Housing Market. Home-listing site projects gains will continue despite challenges including high mortgage rates that have dampened the housing market – Wall Street Journal 
• Housing Unaffordability Is A Policy Choice Not A Technology Problem – Forbes
• The prophet of parking. A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup – The Works in Progress Newsletter
• D.C. mayor proposes permanent rollback of pandemic-era housing protections. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser said the legislation is an attempt to support affordable housing providers who are in crisis mode over unpaid rent. Tenant advocates are worried. – Washington Post
• Multifamily Developer Confidence Reflected Mixed Results in the Fourth Quarter – NAHB

On China:

• Why China Can’t Sort Out Its Property Market Mess – Bloomberg
• China’s Property Crisis Enters a Dangerous New Phase. Risks grow as authorities are forced into a first mainland rescue and iconic Hong Kong developer New World’s bonds sink into distress. – Bloomberg
• Regional Differences and Dynamic Evolution of House Price Bubble Risks in Provincial Areas of China – SSRN

On Australia and New Zealand:

• [Australia] The U.S. Housing Market vs. The Australian Housing Market – A Wealth of Common Sense
• [New Zealand] New Zealand hints at letting more foreign investors buy homes – The Straits Times

On other countries:  

• [Andorra] Andorra’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide
• [Belgium] Belgium’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide
• [Canada] Canada’s housing market outlook: Sustaining recovery in uncertain times – RBC
• [Hungary] Hungary’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide
• [Ireland] Tackling housing challenges and reducing public finance vulnerabilities would boost Ireland’s economic resilience and living standards – OECD
• [Portugal] Portugal court spares big banks from paying millions in fines for mortgage collusion – Reuters
• [Romania] Romania’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide
• [Saudi Arabia] Saudi Arabia’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide
• [Spain] New forecasts for the Spanish real estate sector: the expansionary cycle takes hold in 2025. In 2024, Spain’s real estate market enjoyed a remarkable recovery, with a significant increase in both house prices and sales. Factors such as the growth of gross disposable income, foreign demand and falling rates drove this trend. In this article, we unveil our forecasts for 2025 and explain why we expect this boom to continue. – CaixaBank
• [United Kingdom] The problem with taxing overseas homebuyers. The UK has tinkered with taxes on foreign buyers for a decade — but has it actually helped locals? – FT
• [United Kingdom] UK house prices jump as tax deadline looms, lender Halifax says – Reuters
• [United Kingdom] UK house prices jump to new high as stamp duty rise looms, says Halifax. Average property price increases by 0.7% in January to record £299,138 as market starts year ‘on positive note’ – The Guardian 
• [United Kingdom] UK Housing Market’s Spring Could Come Early. Declining rates and limited supply point to stronger property prices. – Bloomberg
• [United Kingdom] UK housing market cools in January but surveyors stay upbeat – Reuters
• [Vietnam] Vietnam’s Residential Property Market Analysis 2025 – Global Property Guide

From a paper by Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Loredana Pisano, Pietro Pizzuto:

“This paper investigates the impact of climate change policies on inflation, for a large sample of 177 developed and developing economies, 78 subnational territorial areas and 17 sectors, over the period 1989-2022. We show that carbon taxes lead to inflationary pressures. The effect is not negligible: a one standard deviation carbon tax shock—corresponding to a 5$/tCO2 increase in emissions-weighted carbon taxes—leads to an increase of the price level of about 0.7 percent one year after the implementation of the policy, and between 1.6 and 4 percent in the medium term. These results hold at the national, sub-national and sectoral level. The effect is larger when inflation is initially high, and in regions (sectors) characterized by high emissions and low innovation capacity. In contrast, we find that emissions trading systems as well as non-market-based climate change policies (such as R&D subsidies) do not have statistically significant effects on prices.”

From a paper by Xiaoshan Hu, Guanghua Wan, and Congmin Zuo:

“Education has long been perceived as a “great equalizer”, but even with universal rises in schooling years, income distribution worsened world-wide. We propose a method for decomposing the contribution of a variable to the change in inequality into three components: the mean, the dispersion, and the price components. The proposed method is then used to investigate the roles of the education variable in driving down China’s wage inequality between 2010 and 2018. We find that (1) education accounted for over 30% of total wage inequality in 2010 and 2018; (2) 70% of the overall decline in wage inequality from 2010 to 2018 can be attributed to education development, and (3) the 70% inequality-reducing effect was made up of 95% benign dispersion and price components and 25% malign mean component. The benign components are attributable to an improvement in educational equity and a decrease in the college premium.”

From a paper by Amaama Abdul Malik and Asad Ul Islam Khan:

“The Covid 19 pandemic was a strong shock that plummeted into the entire interconnected economic activities of the world. As a result of the lockdown associated with the pandemic, the economies of the world were affected through restrictions like lockdown leading to the reduction of economic indicators like Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and increase in Unemployment. This paper set out to look at the relationship between the GDP and unemployment in Ghana in the periods prior and during the covid pandemic. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used on data from 1991 to 2021. The result shows the nonexistence of the Okun’s law in Ghana in each of these periods. We conclude by advising policy makers to implement policies that directly generate more jobs like improvement in the agriculture sector through training and financial support to enable increased employment to match the increase in economic growth.”

From a paper by Antoine Gaudin, Brendan Harnoys Vannier, and Martin Kessler:

“In this article, we construct a new database on 606 Debt Sustainability Assessments (DSAs) published for 68 Low Income Countries over 2013–2023, a period covering the last two methodology updates. We study associated forecast errors to account for IMF and WB biases given their central role in the perception of countries‘ performances. The recent methodological change does not display improvement in projection accuracy. DSAs display a tendency for optimism when projecting public and publicly guaranteed debt ratios (realized ratios are higher than projected). DSAs perform relatively better for Small Islands Developing States. Circumstantial determinants (IMF programmes or recession) deepen optimism biases.”