The impacts of global liquidity on international housing prices

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine how global liquidity affects international housing prices. The data sample covers 35 economies from 2000Q1 to 2017Q4. Design/methodology/approach - The existing papers seldom investigated whether the impacts of global liquidity on housing prices display differences between advanced and developing economies. Cesa-Bianchiet al.(2015) is an exceptional study in that they focused on the impulse response of house price volatility to global liquidity shocks but did not examine the long-run equilibrium relationship. To fill the gap in the existing research, this paper used panel cointegration of Pedroni (2000, 2004) to estimate the long-run linkage between global liquidity and housing prices in both advanced and developing economies, and generalized impulse response function (GIRF) and generalized variance decomposition (GVDC) were also applied to capture the relative strengths and contribution of global liquidity shock on house price volatility. Findings - First, the global liquidity elasticity of housing prices is 0.0679 in developing economies, and 0.0454 in advanced economies, implying that the positive effect of global liquidity on housing prices is higher in developing economies. Next, the results of generalized impulse response indicate that the innovation of global liquidity can significantly and positively impact housing prices only in developing economies and the duration is two quarters. Third, in light of the long-run portions of the global liquidity shock on house price volatility in individual economies, the two highest portions are 28.51% in the USA and 20.04% in the UK, while there are low portions, less than 10%, in most of the European economies. Moreover, comparing the long-run contributions of global liquidity and other variables shock on house price volatility, the contribution of the global liquidity shock ranks the highest or second highest in 21 out of 35 economies, confirming that it played a more important role than other economic variables in explaining house price volatility for most economies. Originality/value - Compared with the related literature, the contributions of this paper are as follows. First, except for Cesa-Bianchiet al.(2015), the existing papers seldom investigated whether the impacts of global liquidity on housing prices display differences between advanced and developing economies. Hence, the study adopted a wider data sample, including 7 developing economies and 28 advanced economies, to examine the differences in the impact of global liquidity on housing prices between advanced and developing economies. Second, most of the relative literature calculated global liquidity by applying a monetary aggregate, such as M2 or M3, while Cesa-Bianchiet al.(2015) argued that global liquidity being measured by the international supply of credit is intuitively connected to housing prices. This paper follows the argument of Cesa-Bianchiet al.(2015) to use the international supply of credit as the measure of global liquidity, and both the long-run effects and the short-run relative strengths of global liquidity on housing prices are analyzed. Hence, this paper uses not only the GIRF to discuss the short-run relative strengths, as with Cesa-Bianchiet al.(2015) but also the panel cointegration of Pedroni (2000, 2004) to identify the long-run linkage between global liquidity and housing prices. Moreover, GVDC was used to estimate the contribution of a global liquidity shock on house price volatility in individual economies, which can confirm that global liquidity innovations are a very important factor in explaining house price volatility in most countries.