Testing for rational bubbles in the UK housing market

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the UK has witnessed significant booms in the real estate market, and housing prices have experienced increases. Since 1997, the housing price has almost tripled, which is far beyond the long-term trend. To identify the existence of housing bubbles is a crucial issue for any country to prevent possible damage to economies and outbreaks of financial crises. The objective of this paper is to examine the existence of a housing price bubble in the UK through employing a co-explosive vector autoregression (VAR) model, originally applied to stock markets. The results demonstrate that both housing price and rental price show explosive behaviour during their growth, which provides little evidence to support the presence of real estate bubbles in the UK.