The Unassuming Economist

On prices, rent, and mortgage:    

• Revealed: The ZIP Codes Where Home Prices Have Increased the Most Since 2024 – Realtor.com
• Stubbornly High Mortgage Rates Thwart the Crucial Home-Selling Season. Mortgage rates stayed flat while stock-market volatility and recession fears threaten the housing market – Wall Street Journal
• Mortgage Rates Remain Steady—but Home Shoppers Will Have To Navigate a Lot of Volatility – Realtor.com
• How Market Volatility Can Affect Homeowners and House Hunters – Wall Street Journal
• Homeowners Have Been Waiting Years To Sell—but Feel ‘Locked In’ by Mortgage Rates – Realtor.com
• Home prices are dropping in some cities. See what it’s like in your neighborhood. – Washington Post
• The 10 ZIP Codes Where Home Prices Have Fallen the Most Since 2024—Including a Pricey Florida Hot Spot – Realtor.com
• Survey: 81% of Potential Sellers Think They Will Get Their Asking Price or More This Year – Realtor.com
• The Florida housing market is so weak that this giant builder is cutting prices. KB Home CEO Jeffrey Mezger says the start of the housing market’s 2025 spring selling season is ‘more muted’ than usual. – Fast Company
• Home Price Expectations Survey (HPES) – Fannie Mae
• The Coachella Effect! Home Prices in Festival Hot Spot Cities Have Nearly Doubled in Under 10 Years – Realtor.com
• Washington lawmakers clash over rent cap proposal – Axios

On sales, permits, starts, and supply:    

• Why America Should Sprawl. The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it. – New York Times
• Part 2: Current State of the Housing Market; Overview for mid-April 2025 – Calculated Risk
• 2nd Look at Local Housing Markets in March – Calculated Risk
• 3rd Look at Local Housing Markets in March – Calculated Risk
• Building Material Prices Continue to Grow at Slower Pace – NAHB
• Housing market inventory is rising just about everywhere—just look at this map. National active housing inventory for sale is up 28.5% year-over-year. It’s even starting to rise in the Midwest and Northeast. – Fast Company
• Where Do Builders and Remodelers Buy Building Products? – NAHB
• Permits Pullback in February 2025 – NAHB
• Watch Inventory and Why Measures of Existing Home Inventory appear Different – Calculated Risk
• Despite Exemptions and Delays, Tariffs are Already Affecting Builders – NAHB
• Build Homes on Federal Land – New York Times
• Understanding the housing supply gap: What every real estate agent needs to know – Realtor.com
• Zillow’s bold move to confront off-market housing inventory. Zillow just banned home listings from appearing on its site if they’re first listed for sale in private networks more than 24 hours before appearing on the MLS. – Fast Company
• Housing Supply Frameworks Act Would Break Down Barriers to Housing Development – National Association of Realtors
• Builder Confidence Levels Indicate Slow Start for Spring Housing Season – NAHB
• Housing Starts Decreased to 1.324 million Annual Rate in March – Calculated Risk
• Housing Starts Decline Amid Economic Uncertainty – NAHB
• America’s housing shortage by the numbers – The Hill

On impact of tariffs on housing:

• From tariffs to tightness: What’s happening in the US housing market? – JP Morgan
• The Surprising Impact That Trump’s Tariffs Will Have on Luxury Real Estate – Realtor.com
• Trump’s Tariffs on China Now Total 145%—and Beijing’s Retaliation Could Hit U.S. Homebuyers – Realtor.com
• How to Tell What Your Home Will Be Worth in a Trade War. These four metrics can provide clues about how the housing market is reacting to higher tariffs – Wall Street Journal
• Wealthy Buyers Are Backing Out of Multimillion-Dollar Home Deals. President Trump’s trade war and stock market chaos have put the once unshakable high-end home market on ice – Wall Street Journal
• Apartment Developers Who Overbuilt Luck Out With Tariffs. The multifamily industry now can pause most construction ahead of potential tariffs on building materials – Wall Street Journal
• This Surprising State Is Most Reliant on Imports—What Tariffs Could Mean for Its Housing Market – Realtor.com

On other developments:    

• Uncertainty looms after a more stable D.C.-area housing market in 2024. “Last year was a whole different universe.” – Washington Post
• Housing market affordability is so stretched that home turnover hits a 40-year low  . When adjusting for U.S. population size, U.S. existing home sales are hovering around four decade lows. – Fast Company
• A Growing Share of New Yorkers Are Set to Receive — Not Buy — Their Homes. About a quarter of all Manhattan home sales in 2024 involved a trust, a preferred tool for passing on wealth. – Bloomberg
• Just One-Third of 30-Year-Olds Own a Home Today—as Adults Delay Major Life Milestones – Realtor.com
• Housing affordability issues show few signs of easing – The Hill
• Who’s to Blame for America’s Housing Crisis? Readers respond to our March 2025 cover story and more. – The Atlantic
• Immigrants, Housing Wealth, and Local Government Finances. In addition to the $1.7 trillion in directly paid property taxes as property owners, immigrants also generated $513 billion in taxes as renters and another $1.1 trillion through their positive effects on property values in their roles as consumers. – Cato Institute 
• Another reason housing in Texas is cheap
• What we’ve been reading: urbanism, science, tech, aesthetics and more … – The Works in Progress Newsletter
• Average Property Tax Amount on Single-Family Homes Up 2.7 Percent Across U.S. in 2024 – ATTOM
• Democrats alarmed over upheaval at housing regulator, fearing instability. Supporters say Fannie and Freddie provide an anchor for a market suffering under elevated interest rates and a shortage of affordable residences. – Politico

From a paper by Du Zhang and Rundong Chen:

“This article analyzes the impact of global economic uncertainty (GEU) and country-specific economic uncertainty (CSEU) on cross-border capital flows using quarterly data from 31 countries between 1997 and 2022, employing a DFM-SV model. The findings reveal that rising GEU leads to capital inflows, while increasing CSEU results in capital outflows. Macroeconomic variables such as CPI and interest rate spread can moderate the effects of GEU and CSEU on capital flows. Additionally, the equity index mitigates capital outflows driven by higher CSEU. In emerging markets, capital flows are particularly sensitive to macroeconomic factors. The influence of GEU on capital flows is moderated by government spending, stock indices, and the real effective exchange rate (REER). Government spending, import volumes, and stock market volatility exacerbate CSEU-induced capital outflows, while the REER dampens them. These insights deepen our understanding of economic uncertainty’s role in cross-border capital movements, offering valuable implications for market regulators, firms, and investors.”

From a paper by Luis I. Jácome, Nicolás E. Magud, Samuel Pienknagura, and Martin Uribe:

“As inflation targeting (IT) turns 35, it has become a key institutional monetary framework by central banks. Yet, this paper shows that stark differences exist among inflation targeting countries in the conduct of monetary policy. Behind such heterogeneity, the legacy of a high inflation history appears as a preponderant factor. We propose a model that diverges from existing IT workhorse models by adding path-dependence (to a forward-looking model) and potentially imperfect central bank credibility. We show that achieving low inflation (hitting the target) requires more aggressive monetary policy, and is costlier from an output point of view, when individuals’ past inflationary experiences shape their inflation expectation formation. In turn, we provide empirical evidence of the need for these two theoretical additions. Countries that experienced a high level of inflation before adopting the IT regime tend to respond more aggressively to deviations of inflation expectations from the central bank’s target. We also point to the existence of a credibility puzzle, whereby the strength of a central bank’s monetary policy response to deviations from the inflation target remains broadly unchanged even as central banks gain credibility over time. Put differently, a country’s inflationary past casts a long and persistent shadow on central banks.”

From a paper by Haryo Kuncoro:

“This paper aims at analyzing the exchange rate misalignment in the inflation-targeting regime. Different from the previous studies, the exchange rate misalignment is based on the purchasing power parity. We use the ASEAN-3, i.e. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand as the case of the inflation-targeting countries. By applying probit and logit models for the monthly data over the period of 2001(1) to 2022(12), we found that central bank intervention is effective to correct exchange rate misalignment in Indonesia and the Philippines, not for Thailand. More specifically, the selling intervention enables to reduce Indonesian Rupiah overvaluation. Similarly, the Philippines Peso undervaluation can be effectively adjusted by the purchasing intervention. The symmetric behavior of purchasing and selling holds for the two countries. These findings suggest that the central banks in the two countries should be careful in managing foreign reserves in relation to their interventions. Without sterilizing them, any purchase/sale of foreign currency could affect the domestic money supply and thereby undermine the credibility of inflation targeting monetary policy. Further research is advisable to differentiate foreign reserves into sterilized and unsterilized states to analyze the exchange rate misalignment so that the currency stabilization will be more effective.”

From a paper by Luca Bettarelli, Davide Furceri, Prakash Loungani, Jonathan D. Ostry and Loredana Pisano:

“In this paper, we first test the validity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, using a large sample of approximately 190 advanced and developing countries, over a period of 34 years (1989-2022). We find that (CO 2 ) emissions respond positively to increasing income per capita, up to a turning point of approximately US$25,000. In a departure from the previous literature, we allow the relationship between economic development and emissions to depend on the stringency of environmental regulation.”