Has the Effect of Housing Wealth on Household Consumption Been Overestimated? New Evidences on Magnitude and Allocation

Abstract

The effect of housing wealth on household consumption is puzzling as existing empirical results do not match with theoretical predictions. Existing theories – life cycle theory, permanent income hypothesis and user cost model – suggest that housing wealth impact should be small. However, most prior studies find that Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) out of housing wealth ranges between 0.04 to 0.09, indicating material impact of housing wealth on household consumption. Motivated by this discordance, this study uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide a step by step analysis to show how the housing wealth effect decreases as biases from unobserved variables are properly addressed. Once households’ unobserved preferences towards consumption and their future expected income are controlled for, our estimated MPC drops significantly. We also directly control for home equity extraction to disentangle the pure wealth effect channel and the collateral channel. Our findings show that a one percent increase in perceived housing wealth is associated with 0.01-0.02 percent increase in real, non-housing consumption after directly controlling for the collateral channel. Our estimated magnitude of housing wealth effect is much smaller than previous findings. Additionally, we find heterogeneity in MPCs across consumption categories – consumptions that are necessary in daily lives such as food and transportation do not respond to changes in perceived housing wealth while households increase their spending on clothes and recreation as housing wealth increases. We also employ an IV approach to disentangle permanent and transitory housing wealth shocks. Our results indicate that it is the deviation between perceived house price appreciation rate and the real house price appreciation rate in fundamental values that drives this small magnitude of MPC out of housing wealth in the short run (in cloth and recreation) and this housing wealth effect will move towards to zero in the long run as the perception converges with the fundamental values.