Housing Supply Elasticity Research Articles

Boon or Burden? Evaluating the Competing Effects of House-Price Shocks on Regional Entrepreneurship

This paper examines the impact of changes in housing affordability on regional entrepreneurship. Two-way fixed-effects estimates suggest an increase in the level of house prices in a commuting zone results in a decline in establishment openings as a share of existing establishments—consistent with a crowding-out effect. In contrast, an increase in the growth rate of house prices results in a small (although not always statistically significant) increase in establishment openings—consistent with a positive wealth effect from capital gains. To address endogeneity concerns, the authors adopt two alternative instruments for commuting zone house-price growth: a measure of local real estate lending and a geography-based measure of the elasticity of local housing supply. They extend the analysis using restricted-use establishment-level microdata from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) for the state of Colorado. Results from the QCEW data are consistent with those from the commuting zone sample.

Why is the rent so darn high? The role of growing demand to live in housing-supply-inelastic cities

Real rents measured in the United States CPI increased 17.4 log-points from 2000 to 2018. We present a spatial equilibrium framework to decompose the increase into several channels, including demand to live in housing-supply-inelastic cities. We find location demand contributed significantly: using parameterizations from the literature and a new rent index, we find it is responsible for between 17 and 73 percent of the overall rent increase, and an even larger share in cities where CPI is measured. The wide range is primarily due to a lack of consensus over the population elasticity to rents, so we estimate it by comparing the effects of demand shocks across cities of differing housing supply elasticities. We find that demand changes have similar effects across cities, suggesting a high population elasticity. Therefore, our preferred estimate is that location demand accounts for more than half of the increase. We discuss implications for housing supply policy.

What Do We Learn from Cross-Regional Empirical Estimates in Macroeconomics?

Recent empirical work uses variation across cities or regions to identify the effects of economic shocks of interest to macroeconomists. The interpretation of such estimates is complicated by the fact that they reflect both partial equilibrium and local general equilibrium effects of the shocks. We propose an approach for recovering estimates of partial equilibrium effects from these cross-regional empirical estimates. The basic idea is to divide the cross-regional estimate by an estimate of the local fiscal multiplier, which measures the strength of local general equilibrium amplification. We apply this approach to recent estimates of housing wealth effects based on city-level variation, and derive conditions under which the adjustment is exact. We then evaluate its accuracy in a richer general equilibrium model of consumption and housing. The paper also reconciles the positive cross-sectional correlation between house price growth and construction with the notion that cities with larger price volatility have lower housing supply elasticities using a model in which housing supply elasticities are more dispersed in the long run than in the short run.

Government Land Regulations and Housing Supply Elasticity in Urban China

This paper studies the effect of government land supply, allocate and use regulations on housing supply elasticity in urban China. In particular, we first extend the theoretical framework of Saiz (2010), then investigate the marginal effect of each land regulation and calculate the reduction of housing supply elasticity using micro-data of land transactions and satellite-generated data. Our analysis finds that the government land regulations is an important reason for the overall inelasticity of housing supply in 272 Chinese cities, which reduces housing supply elasticity from 1.086 (elastic) to 0.750 (inelastic), a decrease of more than 30%. Among them, the marginal effect of land use regulation is higher than that of land allocate and supply regulations. In addition, physical geographic constraint is also a key factor, its marginal effect even higher than land use regulation.

Housing prices and speculation dynamics: a study of Auckland housing market

ABSTRACT Many housing markets across the globe have experienced upward trends in real estate prices during the past two decades. The dynamics between housing prices and speculation have been analysed by existing housing literature, but this study has a few features that may deepen the understanding of this topic. This research uses transaction-level data, focuses on only investor-purchase records, distinguishes leveraged transactions from unleveraged ones and adopts a new proxy for property speculation. Furthermore, the price elasticity of housing supply has been examined as the price responsiveness is important for understanding the topic in a supply-constrained market. We build a stock adjustment model to estimate the elasticity and a vector error-correction model to conduct Granger causality tests, impulse response analyses and a variance decomposition analysis. The findings uncover a feedback loop in a market with inelastic housing supply: investors’ speculative behaviour lifts Auckland housing prices which in turn spur further housing speculation.

The role of informal housing in lowering China’s urbanization costs

Over the past 30 years, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth spurred by large-scale rural-urban migration, industrialization, and strong global demand for its cheaply produced goods. This paper argues that an abundant supply of informal housing helped accommodate huge migrant inflows and contain labor costs. By constructing a unique proxy for city-level informal housing supply elasticity, we examine the linkages between urban housing markets and labor markets (migration flows and wages), with a focus on the low-skilled migrants who are most likely to live in informal housing. We find greater migration inflows in cities with more elastic housing supplies, in both informal and formal sectors. We show that the supply elasticity proxy for informal housing matters more for low-skilled migrants (those with a high school education or less), and that formal housing supply conditions matter more for high-skilled migrants (those who have a college degree or more education). In cities with higher housing supply elasticity, GDP rises more, and wages rise less, as labor demand increases. The findings provide a better understanding of the important role the informal housing sector has played in facilitating the low-cost urbanization and industrialization of China.

Distant Shocks, Migration, and Housing Supply in India

It is hard to estimate housing supply elasticities. India is a particularly useful country to study housing supply because it is large and has a variety of housing typologies. We estimate the supply elasticity of non-durable, durable, and vacant residential housing units in urban India. We use two migration-inducing exogenous events --- negative rainfall shocks and a highway upgrade program --- occurring in a distant state as demand shifters for local urban housing markets. We apply the Rosen-Roback spatial equilibrium framework to show that both the negative rainfall shocks and the highway upgrade program in a distant state increase inter-state migration. This increase leads to higher population and household growth, and therefore, higher demand for housing in local urban markets. Our findings are three-fold. First, we estimate the long-term supply elasticity of durable housing in urban India to be 1.64. This estimate is substantially lower than the long-run housing supply elasticity estimates of 6-13 for metropolitan areas in the United States seen in the literature. Second, we find that the supply elasticity of non-durable housing is -0.55. Negative supply elasticity of non-durable housing is consistent with the existence of urban gentrification through the demolition and upgrading of slums. And finally, we estimate the elasticity of vacant residential housing unit supply to be 2.63. We posit that a relatively higher vacant housing unit elasticity indicates speculative building by developers.

Revisiting metropolitan house price-income relationships

We explore long-term patterns of the house price-income relationship across the 70 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. In line with a standard spatial equilibrium model, our empirical findings indicate that house price-income ratios are typically not stable even over the long run. In contrast, panel regression models that relate house prices to aggregate personal income and allow for regional heterogeneity yield stationary long-term relationships in most areas. The relationship between house prices and income varies significantly across locations, underscoring the importance of using estimation techniques that allow for spatial heterogeneity. The substantial differences across metropolitan areas are closely related to the price elasticity of housing supply.

Housing Affordability and Transaction Tax Subsidies

House prices have increased faster than average income in many countries over the last decade, raising concerns on the affordability of housing. We study the impact of transaction taxes on the real estate market and the effectiveness of tax subsidies to make housing more affordable. We show how the demand and supply elasticities for housing determine the price impact of tax subsidies and the distribution of gains between buyers and sellers. We then use data on all real estate transactions in Luxembourg from 2007 to 2018 to estimate the elasticity of housing supply and demand. For identification, we exploit discontinuities in the transaction tax schedule as well as rules on tax subsidies for new constructions. Our estimates suggest that the elasticity of house prices to transaction taxes is 0.27, so buyers capture a large part of the surplus from the subsidies.

Housing supply elasticity and growth: evidence from Italian cities

Abstract This paper examines the impact of housing supply elasticity on urban development. Using data for a sample of roughly one hundred Italian main cities observed over 40 years, we first estimate housing supply elasticities at the city level, measured as the correlation between the changes in the housing stock and in the house prices. Second, we show that differences in the elasticity of housing supply may determine the extent to which a demand shock translates into more intense employment growth or more expensive houses. To address endogeneity of housing supply elasticity, we exploit a synthetic measure of physical constraints to residential development as instrumental variable. We find that an exogenous increase in labor demand determines a rise of employment and house prices; however, in cities with a less elastic housing supply, the impact on economic growth is significantly lessened while the effects on house prices are larger.

The Role of Informal Housing in Lowering China’s Urbanization Costs

Over the past 30 years, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth spurred by large-scale rural-urban migration, industrialization, and strong global demand for its cheaply produced goods. This paper argues that an abundant supply of informal housing helped accommodate huge migrant inflows, and contain labor costs. By constructing a unique proxy for city-level informal housing supply elasticity, we examine the linkages between urban housing markets and labor markets (migration flows and wages), with a focus on the low-skilled migrants who are most likely to live in informal housing. We find greater migration inflows in cities with more elastic housing supplies, in both informal and formal sectors. We show that informal housing supply elasticity matters more for low-skilled migrants (those with a high school education or less), and that formal housing supply conditions matter more for high-skilled migrants (those who have a college degree or more education). Cities with greater elastic housing supplies have lower wage levels and faster economic growth. The findings provide a better understanding of the important role the informal housing sector has played in facilitating the low-cost urbanization and industrialization of China.

Home price appreciation and residential lending standards

We explore the effect of home price appreciation on residential lending standards in the U.S. across different sample periods. Using housing supply elasticity measures as instrumental variables for home price changes, we find that rising home prices led to easing lending standards between 2001 and 2006. Mortgage acceptance rates increased more in MSAs that experienced higher home price appreciation, contributing to the credit boom. However, we find that home price appreciation is associated with tighter lending standards between 2012 and 2016, suggesting that banks took a more cautious view of home price appreciation after the financial crisis. To study the negative relationship between home price appreciation and lending standards during the post-crisis years, we examine loan acceptance rates of small and large banks separately. We find that it was the small banks who lowered loan acceptance rates in MSAs with higher home price appreciation, which caused the overall loan acceptance rates to decline.

Monetary policy and US housing expansions: The case of time-varying supply elasticities

We challenge the assumption in the literature of constant housing supply elasticities across housing expansions. Using a time-varying parameter (TVP)-VAR model on monthly US data since the early 1990s, we find that the response of housing supply to an expansionary monetary policy shock relative to the response of house prices has declined substantially since the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Our findings are consistent with research suggesting that land-use regulation has tightened. Absent major reversions in regulation, our results point to a post-COVID-19 housing recovery characterised by a sluggish response of housebuilding to demand, but a relatively stronger response of house prices.

Geographic Heterogeneity in Housing Market Risk and Portfolio Choice

The U.S. housing market is heterogeneous in that house price dynamics vary greatly across regions. Depending on the location of the main residence, households are exposed to completely different housing market risk. This paper examines how geographic heterogeneity in housing market risk affects household portfolio allocations. Housing supply elasticity largely explains variation in housing market risk across regions. Where housing supply elasticity is low, households face higher housing market risk since house price growth rates are more volatile and more positively correlated with stock returns and labor income growth rates. Using the restricted version of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data with detailed geographic information, I find that households in areas with low housing supply elasticity tend to hold less stock in their portfolios. This tendency, however, weakens after retirement when labor income risk disappears.

Are Housing Wealth Effects Asymmetric in Booms and Busts?

This paper investigates the effects of household indebtedness and housing wealth on consumption. To identify exogenous movements of housing wealth and leverage, we estimate housing supply elasticities for New Zealand urban centers. We construct synthetic panel series by using household survey data to estimate the marginal propensity to consume out of exogenous changes in housing wealth, while controlling for the household leverage ratio. Our empirical results show that, on average, the marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is about 3 cents out of one dollar. But it is larger, about 4 cents, in response to falling house wealth than to increasing housing wealth, about 2 cents. We further investigate the role of household indebtedness in accounting for the asymmetric effect. Our findings suggest that household leverage reinforces the housing wealth effect in a housing bust, but dampens the housing wealth effect in a boom.

Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View

AbstractWe provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We use three identification strategies: ordinary least squares with a rich set of controls, the Saiz housing supply elasticity instrument, and a new instrument that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles. All three identification strategies indicate that housing wealth elasticities were if anything slightly smaller in the 2000s than in earlier time periods. This implies that the important role housing played in the boom and bust of the 2000s was due to larger price movements rather than an increase in the sensitivity of consumption to house prices. Full-sample estimates based on our new instrument are smaller than recent estimates, though they remain economically important. We find no significant evidence of a boom–bust asymmetry in the housing wealth elasticity. We show that these empirical results are consistent with the behaviour of the housing wealth elasticity in a standard life-cycle model with borrowing constraints, uninsurable income risk, illiquid housing, and long-term mortgages. In our model, the housing wealth elasticity is relatively insensitive to changes in the distribution of loan-to-value (LTV) for two reasons: first, low-leverage homeowners account for a substantial and stable part of the aggregate housing wealth elasticity; second, a rightward shift in the LTV distribution increases not only the number of highly sensitive constrained agents but also the number of underwater agents whose consumption is insensitive to house prices.

Housing supply elasticity, gasoline prices, and residential property values

We revise the standard monocentric city model to incorporate differential assumptions about the elasticity of housing supply in response to changes in transportation costs. We test the implications of the model with data from the Las Vegas metropolitan area and find that housing markets respond roughly the same in the face of increases and decreases in gas prices. Supply elasticity is evidently relatively elastic in response to both expansions and contractions, despite expectations that supply is much more inelastic when markets contract when gas prices increase. Simulating the effect of a 10% increase in gas prices from a carbon tax, we find that homes near the center of town rise on average $532 while homes beyond 5 miles fall on average $1,064. These findings are consistent with negative rent gradient results reported in Coulson and Engle (1987) and Larson and Zhao (2017).

Changing Supply Elasticities and Regional Housing Booms

Recent developments in US house prices mirror those of the 1996–2006 boom, but the recovery in construction activity has been weak. Using data for 254 US metropolitan areas, we show that housing supply elasticities have fallen markedly in recent years. Consistent with this, we find that monetary policy shocks have a stronger effect on house prices during the recent recovery than the previous boom. At the same time, building permits respond less. Finally, we find that housing supply elasticities have declined more in areas where land-use regulation has tightened the most, and in areas that experienced the sharpest housing busts.

Housing Supply Elasticity and Growth: Evidence from Italian Cities

The paper examines the impact of housing supply elasticity on urban development. Using data for a sample of around one hundred Italian main cities observed over 40 years, we first estimate housing supply elasticities at the city level. Second, we show that differences in the elasticity of housing supply may determine the extent to which a demand shock translates into more intense employment growth or more expensive houses. To address endogeneity of housing supply elasticity, we exploit a synthetic measure of physical constraints to residential development as instrumental variable. We find that an exogenous increase in labour demand determines a rise in employment and housing prices; however, in cities with a less elastic housing supply the impact on economic growth is significantly lessened while the effects on house prices are greater.

The Propagation of Local Credit Shocks: Evidence from Hurricane Katrina

A local credit shock, induced by hurricane Katrina, propagated through banks’ internal networks to produce real and credit markets’ effects in distant regions. Driven by abnormal mortgage and housing demand in Katrina-hit areas, financially constrained multi-market banks reallocated resources towards the damaged areas leading to a credit tightening in the undamaged local markets. Depending on their housing supply elasticity, local housing markets in the undamaged regions responded to this credit disruption with a mix of housing prices and housing supply declines. These spillovers depended on undamaged markets’ financial linkages to disaster areas. In the undamaged regions, community banks, being local and unexposed to disaster areas, partially insulated their markets from these spillovers.