IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mtu/wpaper/08_09.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Inflation and the Measurement of Saving and Housing Affordability

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Coleman

    (Motu Economic and Public Policy Research)

Abstract

This paper analyses the effect of inflation on the measurement of saving and housing affordability in New Zealand. When the inflation rate is positive, the income and saving of lenders is overstated and the saving of borrowers is understated because a portion of the interest earnings on capital are not true earnings but merely compensation for inflation. Because New Zealand has a large international debt position, this distortion means aggregate saving is understated, possibly by 2 percent of gross domestic product per year. In addition, a standard measure of the cost of financing the purchase of a house is overstated by approximately fifty percent, as a large part of mortgage payments are actually saving. Nevertheless, at the end of 2007 the cost of financing house purchase in New Zealand was at a cyclical high, approximately 40 percent higher than its average level since 1990.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Coleman, 2008. "Inflation and the Measurement of Saving and Housing Affordability," Working Papers 08_09, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:mtu:wpaper:08_09
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://motu-www.motu.org.nz/wpapers/08_09.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John Y. Campbell & João F. Cocco, 2003. "Household Risk Management and Optimal Mortgage Choice," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1449-1494.
    2. Andrew Coleman, 2007. "Credit constraints and housing markets in New Zealand," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Discussion Paper Series DP2007/11, Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Steven C. Bourassa & Donald R. Haurin, 2017. "A Dynamic Housing Affordability Index," International Real Estate Review, Global Social Science Institute, vol. 20(3), pages 251-286.

    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. Eloisa T Glindro & Tientip Subhanij & Jessica Szeto & Haibin Zhu, 2008. "Are Asia-Pacific Housing Prices Too High For Comfort?," Working Papers 2008-11, Monetary Policy Group, Bank of Thailand.
    2. Antonia Diaz & Maria Jose Luengo Prado, 2008. "On the User Cost and Homeownership," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(3), pages 584-613, July.
    3. 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.
    4. Matteo Benetton, 2021. "Leverage Regulation and Market Structure: A Structural Model of the U.K. Mortgage Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(6), pages 2997-3053, December.
    5. Dancsik, Bálint, 2017. "Számít-e a devizahiteles múlt?. A lakáshitelkamatok rögzítéséről szóló döntés vizsgálata mikroszintű adatokon [Analysing the decision of fixing housing loan interest rates on micro-level data: does," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(10), pages 1030-1055.
    6. Horneff, Wolfram J. & Maurer, Raimond H. & Stamos, Michael Z., 2008. "Life-cycle asset allocation with annuity markets," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(11), pages 3590-3612, November.
    7. Mavropoulos, Antonios & Xiong, Qizhou, 2019. "Housing consumption and macroprudential policies in Europe: An ex ante evaluation," IWH Discussion Papers 17/2018, Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), revised 2019.
    8. Yongsheng Jiang & Dong Zhao & Andrew Sanderford & Jing Du, 2018. "Effects of Bank Lending on Urban Housing Prices for Sustainable Development: A Panel Analysis of Chinese Cities," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(3), pages 1-16, February.
    9. Gary V. Engelhardt & Anil Kumar, 2007. "Employer Matching and 401(k) Saving: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study," NBER Chapters, in: Public Policy and Retirement, Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar (TAPES), pages 1920-1943, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Kydland, Finn & Rupert, Peter & Sustek, Roman, 2012. "Housing Dynamics over the Business Cycle," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt7bn5k73m, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    11. Chung, Sol & Agnew, Julie & Bateman, Hazel & Eckert, Christine & Liu, Junhao & Thorp, Susan, 2024. "The impact of mortgage broker use on borrower confusion and preferences," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 224(C), pages 229-247.
    12. Jack Favilukis & Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, 2021. "Out‐of‐Town Home Buyers and City Welfare," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(5), pages 2577-2638, October.
    13. John Y. Campbell, 2013. "Mortgage Market Design," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 17(1), pages 1-33.
    14. John Gathergood & Neale Mahoney & Neil Stewart & Jörg Weber, 2019. "How Do Individuals Repay Their Debt? The Balance-Matching Heuristic," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(3), pages 844-875, March.
    15. David Miles, 2012. "Population Density, House Prices and Mortgage Design," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 59(5), pages 444-466, November.
    16. Matthew Chambers & Carlos Garriga & Don E. Schlagenhauf, 2007. "Equilibrium mortgage choice and housing tenure decisions with refinancing," Working Papers 2007-049, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
    17. Simon Lysbjerg Hansen, 2005. "A Malliavin-based Monte-Carlo Approach for Numerical Solution of Stochastic Control Problems: Experiences from Merton's Problem," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 391, Society for Computational Economics.
    18. Agarwal, Sumit & Ambrose, Brent W. & Chomsisengphet, Souphala & Liu, Chunlin, 2006. "An empirical analysis of home equity loan and line performance," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 444-469, October.
    19. Amromin, Gene & Huang, Jennifer & Sialm, Clemens, 2007. "The tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax-deferred retirement savings," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(10), pages 2014-2040, November.
    20. Hermansson, Cecilia, 2016. "Relationships between bank customers’ risk attitudes and their balance sheets," Working Paper Series 15/12, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    inflation; real interest rates; housing affordability;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E01 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - General - - - Measurement and Data on National Income and Product Accounts and Wealth; Environmental Accounts
    • E40 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - General

    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:mtu:wpaper:08_09. 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: Maxine Watene (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/motuenz.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.