IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/bis/biswps/1149.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Housing affordability: a new data set

Author

Listed:
  • Nina Biljanovska
  • Chenxu Fu
  • Deniz Igan

Abstract

The rapid increase in house prices in the past few years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, raises concerns about housing affordability. The price-to-income ratio is a widely-used indicator of affordability, but does not take into account important factors such as the cost of financing. The aim of this paper is to construct a measure of housing affordability that takes these factors into account for a large set of countries and long period of time. The resulting dataset covers an unbalanced panel of 40 countries over the period from 1970Q1 to 2021Q4. For each country, the index measures the extent to which a median-income household can qualify for a mortgage loan to purchase an average-priced home. To gauge the performance of the constructed indices, we compare them to other readily-available measures of affordability and examine the evolution of the indices over time to understand the relevant drivers, including in a regression analysis to assess the extent to which government housing programs could contribute to improving affordability.

Suggested Citation

  • Nina Biljanovska & Chenxu Fu & Deniz Igan, 2023. "Housing affordability: a new data set," BIS Working Papers 1149, Bank for International Settlements.
  • Handle: RePEc:bis:biswps:1149
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.bis.org/publ/work1149.pdf
    File Function: Full PDF document
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.bis.org/publ/work1149.htm
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Cerutti, Eugenio & Dagher, Jihad & Dell'Ariccia, Giovanni, 2017. "Housing finance and real-estate booms: A cross-country perspective," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(C), pages 1-13.
    2. Francesco Beraldi & Mr. Yunhui Zhao, 2023. "The Pricing-Out Phenomenon in the U.S. Housing Market," IMF Working Papers 2023/001, International Monetary Fund.
    3. Ms. Deniz O Igan & Mr. Prakash Loungani, 2012. "Global Housing Cycles," IMF Working Papers 2012/217, International Monetary Fund.
    4. Dennis R. Capozza & Patric H. Hendershott & Charlotte Mack & Christopher J. Mayer, 2002. "Determinants of Real House Price Dynamics," NBER Working Papers 9262, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yip Chee Yin & Woo Kok Hoong & Oon Kam Hoe & Nabihah Binti Aminaddin & Nurfadhilah Binti Abu Hasan, 2017. "Boom-Bust Housing Price Dynamic: The Case of Malaysia," International Journal of Economics and Financial Issues, Econjournals, vol. 7(4), pages 132-138.
    2. Kurmaş Akdoğan, 2019. "Size and sign asymmetries in house price adjustments," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 51(48), pages 5268-5281, October.
    3. Epstein, Brendan & Finkelstein Shapiro, Alan & Gonzalez Gomez, Andres, 2018. "Firm Dynamism and Housing Price Volatility," MPRA Paper 88694, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Jérôme Vandenbussche & Ursula Vogel & Enrica Detragiache, 2015. "Macroprudential Policies and Housing Prices: A New Database and Empirical Evidence for Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(S1), pages 343-377, March.
    5. Nataliya Barasinska & Philipp Haenle & Anne Koban & Alexander Schmidt, 2023. "No Reason to Worry About German Mortgages? An Analysis of Macroeconomic and Individual Drivers of Credit Risk," Journal of Financial Services Research, Springer;Western Finance Association, vol. 64(3), pages 369-399, December.
    6. Michael, Bryane & Zhao, Simon, 2016. "Bubble Economics How Big a Shock to China’s Real Estate Sector Will Throw the Country into Recession, and Why Does It Matter?," EconStor Preprints 141314, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    7. Punzi, Maria Teresa, 2016. "Financial cycles and co-movements between the real economy, finance and asset price dynamics in large-scale crises," FinMaP-Working Papers 61, Collaborative EU Project FinMaP - Financial Distortions and Macroeconomic Performance: Expectations, Constraints and Interaction of Agents.
    8. Mariarosaria Comunale, 2017. "Synchronicity of real and financial cycles and structural characteristics in EU countries," CEIS Research Paper 414, Tor Vergata University, CEIS, revised 25 Sep 2017.
    9. Núria Rodríguez‐Planas, 2018. "Mortgage finance and culture," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 58(4), pages 786-821, September.
    10. Hertrich Markus, 2019. "A Novel Housing Price Misalignment Indicator for Germany," German Economic Review, De Gruyter, vol. 20(4), pages 759-794, December.
    11. Crowe, Christopher & Dell’Ariccia, Giovanni & Igan, Deniz & Rabanal, Pau, 2013. "How to deal with real estate booms: Lessons from country experiences," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 9(3), pages 300-319.
    12. Mr. Shengzu Wang & Ms. Patrizia Tumbarello, 2010. "What Drives House Prices in Australia? A+L4584 Cross-Country Approach," IMF Working Papers 2010/291, International Monetary Fund.
    13. Brian Micallef, 2016. "Property price misalignment with fundamentals in Malta," CBM Working Papers WP/03/2016, Central Bank of Malta.
    14. Gabriele Galati & Federica Teppa & Rob Alessie, 2013. "Heterogeneity in house price dynamics," DNB Working Papers 371, Netherlands Central Bank, Research Department.
    15. Murray, Cameron, 2020. "A housing supply absorption rate equation," OSF Preprints 7n8rj, Center for Open Science.
    16. Masron, tajul & Mohd Nor, Abu Hassan Shaari, 2016. "Foreign Investment in Real Estate and Housing Affordability," Jurnal Ekonomi Malaysia, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, vol. 50(1), pages 15-28.
    17. Kajuth, Florian & Knetsch, Thomas A. & Pinkwart, Nicolas, 2013. "Assessing house prices in Germany: Evidence from an estimated stock-flow model using regional data," Discussion Papers 46/2013, Deutsche Bundesbank.
    18. Kennedy, Gerard & O'Brien, Eoin & Woods, Maria, 2016. "Assessing the sustainability of Irish residential property prices: 1980Q1-2016Q2," Economic Letters 11/EL/16, Central Bank of Ireland.
    19. Federica Ciocchetta & Elisa Guglielminetti & Alessandro Mistretta, 2023. "What drives house prices in Europe?," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 764, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    20. Poghosyan, Tigran, 2020. "How effective is macroprudential policy? Evidence from lending restriction measures in EU countries," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    housing affordability; real estate markets;

    JEL classification:

    • R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location
    • G51 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Household Savings, Borrowing, Debt, and Wealth
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bis:biswps:1149. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Beslmeisl (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/bisssch.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.