Housing Supply Elasticity by Physical Characteristics: Another View

This paper develops an analysis of housing supply elasticity by physical characteristics. Housing supply is demonstrated to be a driver of economic growth through different channels (Case, Quigley and Shiller, 2001) and reacts to market incentives with different intensities in the responses to changes on prices. The strong of such responses depends on a bundle of variables related to local house market features. Most of the studies estimate the elasticity values by region or by time but none of them have calculated such difference regarding the physical characteristics. The literature regarding the supply analysis by physical features is weak due to strong requirements of data: micro-data, detailed at local level and including a large number of characteristics and observations. This paper analyses the housing supply model segmenting the market by physical characteristics. It uses a database of micro-data with almost 40 different usable characteristic by observation, with around 1.5 x106 of houses collected from 1995 to 2012 (first semester). The dataset refers to main Spanish regions and it is representative of the eight more active regions in house-building during that period.