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Housing IS the Business Cycle

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Edward E. Leamer

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Abstract

Of the components of GDP, residential investment offers by far the best early warning sign of an oncoming recession. Since World War II we have had eight recessions preceded by substantial problems in housing and consumer durables. Housing did not give an early warning of the Department of Defense Downturn after the Korean Armistice in 1953 or the Internet Comeuppance in 2001, nor should it have. By virtue of its prominence in our recessions, it makes sense for housing to play a prominent role in the conduct of monetary policy. A modified Taylor Rule would depend on a long-term measure of inflation having little to do with the phase in the cycle, and, in place of Taylor's output gap, housing starts and the change in housing starts, which together form the best forward-looking indicator of the cycle of which I am aware. This would create pre-emptive anti-inflation policy in the middle of the expansions when housing is not so sensitive to interest rates, making it less likely that anti-inflation policies would be needed near the ends of expansions when housing is very interest rate sensitive, thus making our recessions less frequent and/or less severe.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13428.

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Date of creation: Sep 2007
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13428

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E17 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General Aggregative Models - - - Forecasting and Simulation
E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy

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    Other versions:
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. Tommaso Proietti & Alessandra Luati, 2008. "Real Time Estimation in Local Polynomial Regression, with Application to Trend-Cycle Analysis," CEIS Research Paper 112, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 14 Jul 2008. [Downloadable!]
  2. M. Ayhan Kose & Stijn Claessens & Marco Terrones, 2008. "What Happens During Recessions, Crunches, and Busts?," IMF Working Papers 08/274, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  3. Andra C. Ghent & Michael T. Owyang, 2009. "Is housing the business cycle? evidence from U.S. cities," Working Papers 2009-007, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. [Downloadable!]
  4. L. Randall Wray, 2008. "The Commodities Market Bubble Money Manager Capitalism and the Financialization of Commodities," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive ppb_96, Levy Economics Institute, The. [Downloadable!]
  5. Patrick Honohan, 2008. "Risk Management and the Costs of the Banking Crisis," The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp262, IIIS. [Downloadable!]
  6. Patrick Honohan, 2008. "Bank Failures: The Limitations of Risk Modelling," The Institute for International Integration Studies Discussion Paper Series iiisdp263, IIIS. [Downloadable!]
  7. Mohamadou Fadiga & Yongsheng Wang, 2009. "A multivariate unobserved component analysis of US housing market," Journal of Economics and Finance, Springer, vol. 33(1), pages 13-26, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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