TÜRKİYE’DE KONUT FİYATLARI VE FAİZ ORANLARI ARASINDAKİ İLİŞKİNİN ANALİZİ

Abstract

Today, the size of the mortgage-backed asset market shows us that the housing market can profoundly affect not only the real economy but also the financial sector. The crisis in 2008 is a proof of this circumstance. Compared to developed countries, there is no deepened financial market for mortgage-backed assets in Turkey. However, in Turkey, which implements a growth strategy based on the construction sector, interventions in the housing market have become a part of the economic policy to keep the sector alive. For this reason, policymakers are trying to keep housing loan rates low to differentiate them from other interest rates. However, the effect of these interventions on housing loan rates on housing demand and housing prices is ambiguous. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to investigate the effects of housing loan interest rates on house prices in Turkey in the period of 2010-2020. To analyze the causality between housing loan rates and house prices indexes, we applied Hacker and Hatemi-J (2010) bootstrap Toda-Yamamoto causality test and Hatemi-J (2012) time-varying symmetric Toda-Yamamoto test. The main finding of the study is that there is no causality from the housing loan interest rates to the housing price index in the related period.