House Price Efficiency: Expectations, Sales, Symmetry

House Price Dynamics: Fundamentals and Expectations

We investigate whether expectations that are not fully rational have the potential to explain the evolution of house prices and the price-to-rent ratio in the United States. First, a stylized asset-pricing model solved under rational expectations is used to derive a fundamental value for house prices and the price-rent ratio. Although the model can explain the sample average of the price-rent r...

Estimating house price growth with repeat sales data: What’s the aim of the game?

Since the seminal work of M. Bailey, R. Muth, and H. Nourse (1963, J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 58, 933–942), numerous articles have been written about repeat sales and other methods for constructing house price indices. Our justification for producing yet another paper on this subject is to reemphasize fundamentals. We focus on the basic building blocks—asking questions about what the underlying t...

Depreciation of housing capital, maintenance, and house price inflation: Estimates from a repeat sales model

The rate at which physical capital depreciates is fundamental to investment in the economy. Nevertheless, although housing capital accounts for one-third of the total capital stock, the rate at which housing capital depreciates has only rarely been directly estimated, in part because prior studies do not control for maintenance. For that same reason, widely publicized measures of house price ap...

Understanding House-Price Dynamics

*The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia or the Federal Reserve System. or most homeowners, housing is the single most important component of their nonpension wealth. Therefore, a change in house prices greatly affects the total wealth of many households. Furthermore, movements in house prices can af...

House Price Index Methodologies