IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/23570.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Making the House a Home: The Stimulative Effect of Home Purchases on Consumption and Investment

Author

Listed:
  • Efraim Benmelech
  • Adam Guren
  • Brian T. Melzer

Abstract

We introduce and quantify a new channel through which the housing market affects household spending: the home purchase channel. Using an event-study design with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we show that households spend on average $3,700 more in the months before and the first year following a home purchase. This spending is concentrated in the home-related durables and home improvements sectors, which are complementary to the purchase of the house. Expenditures on nondurables and durables unrelated to the home remain unchanged or decrease modestly. We estimate that the home purchase channel played a substantial role in the Great Recession, accounting for one-third of the decline in home-related durables spending and a fifth of the decline in home maintenance and investment spending from 2005 to 2010, together totaling $14.3 billion annually.

Suggested Citation

  • Efraim Benmelech & Adam Guren & Brian T. Melzer, 2017. "Making the House a Home: The Stimulative Effect of Home Purchases on Consumption and Investment," NBER Working Papers 23570, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:23570
    Note: AP CF EFG ME
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23570.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Elliot Anenberg & Daniel R. Ringo, 2019. "The Propagation of Demand Shocks Through Housing Markets," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2019-084, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    2. Feng Deng, 2019. "The sharing economy and urban property rights," Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, Springer, vol. 3(1), pages 121-136, February.
    3. Zekai He & Jingjing Ye & Xiuzhen Shi, 2020. "Housing wealth and household consumption in urban China," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(8), pages 1714-1732, June.
    4. Sjoerd Van Bekkum & Marc Gabarro & Rustom M. Irani & José-Luis Peydró, 2019. "Take It to the limit? The effects of household leverage caps," Economics Working Papers 1682, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Feb 2022.
    5. Tracey, Belinda & Van Horen, Neeltje, 2021. "The consumption response to borrowing constraints in the mortgage market," Bank of England working papers 919, Bank of England.
    6. Dongjae Jung, 2020. "Consumption Dynamics and a Home Purchase," Working Papers 2020-27, Economic Research Institute, Bank of Korea.
    7. Gyöngyösi, Győző & Rariga, Judit & Verner, Emil, 2021. "The anatomy of consumption in a household foreign currency debt crisis," SAFE Working Paper Series 332, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    8. Xiaoqing Zhou, 2022. "Mortgage borrowing and the boom-bust cycle in consumption and residential investment," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 44, pages 244-268, April.
    9. Arlene Wong, 2021. "Refinancing and The Transmission of Monetary Policy to Consumption," Working Papers 2021-57, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    10. Li, Cheng & Zhang, Ying, 2021. "How does housing wealth affect household consumption? Evidence from macro-data with special implications for China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    11. Alvaro Mezza & Daniel R. Ringo & Kamila Sommer, 2021. "Student Loans, Access to Credit and Consumer Financial Behavior," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2021-050, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    12. Wong, Francis & Kermani, Amir, 2022. "Racial Disparities in Housing Returns," VfS Annual Conference 2022 (Basel): Big Data in Economics 264099, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    13. Bhutta, Neil & Ringo, Daniel, 2021. "The effect of interest rates on home buying: Evidence from a shock to mortgage insurance premiums," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 195-211.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
    • E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
    • G01 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Financial Crises
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • R11 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Regional Economic Activity: Growth, Development, Environmental Issues, and Changes
    • R2 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis
    • R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Household Analysis - - - Housing Demand

    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:nbr:nberwo:23570. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.