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Low Interest Rates and Housing Bubbles: Still No Smoking Gun

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Abstract

This paper revisits the relationship between interest rates and house prices. Surveying a number of recent studies and bringing to bear some new evidence on the question, this paper argues that in the data, the impact of interest rates on house prices appears to be quite modest. Specifically, the estimated effects are uniformly smaller than those implied by the conventional user cost theory of house prices, and they are too small to explain the previous decade's real estate boom in the U.S. and elsewhere. However in some countries, there does appear to have been a link between the rapid expansion of the monetary base and growth in house prices and housing credit.

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  • Kenneth Kuttner, 2012. "Low Interest Rates and Housing Bubbles: Still No Smoking Gun," Department of Economics Working Papers 2012-01, Department of Economics, Williams College.
    • Handle: RePEc:wil:wileco:2012-01
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    1. Charles Himmelberg & Christopher Mayer & Todd Sinai, 2005. "Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals and Misperceptions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 19(4), pages 67-92, Fall.
    2. Sa, Filipa & Towbin, Pascal & wieladek, tomasz, 2011. "Low interest rates and housing booms: the role of capital inflows, monetary policy and financial innovation," Bank of England working papers 411, Bank of England.
    3. Kuttner, Kenneth N., 2001. "Monetary policy surprises and interest rates: Evidence from the Fed funds futures market," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 523-544, June.
    4. Campbell, John Y, 1991. "A Variance Decomposition for Stock Returns," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 101(405), pages 157-179, March.
    5. Joshua Gallin, 2008. "The Long‐Run Relationship Between House Prices and Rents," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 36(4), pages 635-658, December.
    6. James M. Poterba, 1984. "Tax Subsidies to Owner-Occupied Housing: An Asset-Market Approach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(4), pages 729-752.
    7. Campbell, Sean D. & Davis, Morris A. & Gallin, Joshua & Martin, Robert F., 2009. "What moves housing markets: A variance decomposition of the rent-price ratio," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2), pages 90-102, September.
    8. Charles Goodhart & Boris Hofmann, 2008. "House prices, money, credit, and the macroeconomy," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 24(1), pages 180-205, spring.
    9. Leonardo Gambacorta, 2009. "Monetary policy and the risk-taking channel," BIS Quarterly Review, Bank for International Settlements, December.
    10. Del Negro, Marco & Otrok, Christopher, 2007. "99 Luftballons: Monetary policy and the house price boom across U.S. states," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(7), pages 1962-1985, October.
    11. Alan Greenspan, 2005. "Federal Reserve Board's semiannual monetary policy report to the Congress: testimony before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate, July 21, 2005," Speech 115, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
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    Cited by:

    1. Denis Gorea & Oleksiy Kryvtsov & Marianna Kudlyak, 2022. "House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from the U.S. Listings Data," Working Paper Series 2022-16, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • E52 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit - - - Monetary Policy
    • E44 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Money and Interest Rates - - - Financial Markets and the Macroeconomy
    • E65 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Studies of Particular Policy Episodes

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