International Dimensions of Housing Markets

We make the case that an international perspective on housing markets can help us understand why house prices and transactions volumes sometimes vary in ways that cannot easily be attributed to local economic factors. We first document cross-country and cross-time variation in house price-to-income ratios, and selectively discuss a growing literature which quantifies how international capital flows affect domestic housing markets. While this literature helps rationalize some of the rhetoric on globalization's effects on housing markets, it seems difficult at first glance to attribute price variation at the aggregate housing market level to the relatively small absolute magnitudes of cross-border housing capital flows. We argue using a search and matching framework that housing market frictions can magnify the effect of seemingly modest shocks and lead to more widespread reverberation through the housing market, linking local outcomes to the global distributions of wealth, risk, and productivity.