House Price Expectations and Housing Choice

What is the role of heterogenous house-price expectations for boom-bust cycles in the housing market? We exploit a unique Dutch panel data set on households' house price expectations and their consumption, savings and housing choices for the period 2003-2016. This period was characterized by a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Ludwig, Alexander, Mankart, Jochen, Quintana, Jorge, Wiederholt, Mirko, Vellekoop, Nathanael
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 01.01.2019
Subjects
Housing
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Summary:What is the role of heterogenous house-price expectations for boom-bust cycles in the housing market? We exploit a unique Dutch panel data set on households' house price expectations and their consumption, savings and housing choices for the period 2003-2016. This period was characterized by a pronounced boom-bust cycle in the housing market. Conditioning the sample on household heads who report non-zero house price expectations, we find that expectations closely track realized house prices. We next develop a structural life-cycle model of the Dutch housing market where we distinguish household types according to their house price expectations. We employ a calibrated model variant to test if observed variations in expectations can account for the housing boom-bust cycle. First results show that our model closely matches the observed fluctuations of the rent-to-price ratio in the data but overshoots the size of the housing boom.