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Assessing high house prices: bubbles, fundamentals, and misperceptions

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Author Info
Charles Himmelberg
Christopher Mayer
Todd Sinai

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Abstract

We construct measures of the annual cost of single-family housing for 46 metropolitan areas in the United States over the last 25 years and compare them with local rents and incomes as a way of judging the level of housing prices. Conventional metrics like the growth rate of house prices, the price-to-rent ratio, and the price-to-income ratio can be misleading because they fail to account both for the time series pattern of real long-term interest rates and predictable differences in the long-run growth rates of house prices across local markets. These factors are especially important in recent years because house prices are theoretically more sensitive to interest rates when rates are already low, and more sensitive still in those cities where the long-run rate of house price growth is high. During the 1980s, our measures show that houses looked most overvalued in many of the same cities that subsequently experienced the largest house price declines. We find that from the trough of 1995 to 2004, the cost of owning rose somewhat relative to the cost of renting, but not, in most cities, to levels that made houses look overvalued.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of New York in its series Staff Reports with number 218.

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Date of creation: 2005
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Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:218

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Keywords: Housing - Prices Interest rates Metropolitan areas - Statistics Rental housing Regional economics

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This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports: References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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    Other versions:
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Full references

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi, 2008. "The Consequences of Mortgage Credit Expansion: Evidence from the 2007 Mortgage Default Crisis," NBER Working Papers 13936, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Gavin Cameron & John Muellbauer & Anthony Murphy, 2006. "Was There A British House Price Bubble? Evidence from a Regional Panel," Economics Series Working Papers 276, University of Oxford, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Edward E. Leamer, 2007. "Housing IS the Business Cycle," NBER Working Papers 13428, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Edward L. Glaeser & Joseph Gyourko, 2006. "Housing Dynamics," NBER Working Papers 12787, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. J. Benson Durham, 2006. "What do financial asset prices say about the housing market?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-32, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  6. Juan Ayuso & Fernando Restoy, 2006. "House prices and rents in Spain: does the discount factor matter?," Banco de España Working Papers 0609, Banco de España. [Downloadable!]
  7. Rose Cunningham & Ilan Kolet, 2007. "Housing Market Cycles and Duration Dependence in the United States and Canada," Working Papers 07-2, Bank of Canada. [Downloadable!]
  8. David C. Wheelock, 2006. "What happens to banks when house prices fall? U.S. regional housing busts of the 1980s and 1990s," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, issue Sep, pages 413-430. [Downloadable!]
  9. Kristopher Gerardi & Harvey S. Rosen & Paul Willen, 2007. "Do Households Benefit from Financial Deregulation and Innovation? The Case of the Mortgage Market," NBER Working Papers 12967, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  10. Dong Fu, 2007. "National, regional and metro-specific factors of the U.S. housing market," Working Papers 0707, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. [Downloadable!]
  11. Gavin Cameron & John Muellbauer & Anthony Murphy, 2005. "Booms, Busts and Ripples in British Regional Housing Markets," Macroeconomics 0512003, EconWPA. [Downloadable!]
  12. Raj Chetty & Adam Szeidl, 2006. "Consumption Commitments and Risk Preferences," NBER Working Papers 12467, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  13. Isabel Vansteenkiste, 2007. "Regional housing market spillovers in the US - lessons from regional divergences in a common monetary policy setting," Working Paper Series 708, European Central Bank. [Downloadable!]
  14. Sean D. Campbell & Morris A. Davis & Joshua Gallin & Robert F. Martin, 2006. "A trend and variance decomposition of the rent-price ratio in housing markets," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-29, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  15. Luc Laeven & Deniz Igan & Giovanni Dell'Ariccia, 2008. "Credit Booms and Lending Standards: Evidence from the Subprime Mortgage Market," IMF Working Papers 08/106, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  16. Jonathan McCarthy & Charles Steindel, 2006. "Housing activity, home values, and consumer spending," Proceedings, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, pages 78-89. [Downloadable!]
  17. Kristopher Gerardi & Harvey S. Rosen & Paul Willen, 2006. "Do households benefit from financial deregulation and innovation?: the case of the mortgage market," Public Policy Discussion Paper 06-6, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. [Downloadable!]
  18. Arce, Oscar & López-Salido, J David, 2006. "House Prices, Rents and Interest Rates Under Collateral Constraints," CEPR Discussion Papers 5689, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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