Behavioural biases and nonlinear adjustment: evidence from the housing market

Using the threshold vector error correction model, this study finds substantial evidence for asymmetric mean-aversion in the Korean housing market, arising from behavioural biases. In order to effectively capture behavioural biases from the prospect theory, special attention is paid to the extreme tails of price deviations from long-run rationality. The major findings are highly consistent with the prospect theory predicting the risk-aversion effect after prior losses and the house money effect after prior gains. The overall speed of adjustment at losses is assessed about 7 times as high as at gains. The evidence that price changes are serially dependent, even after controlling the behavioural biases, suggests that house prices are also driven by investors’ extrapolative expectation.