This paper examines the role of local housing supply conditions for social capital investment. Using an instrumental variables approach and data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, it is documented that the positive link between homeownership and individual social capital investment is largely confined to more built-up neighborhoods (with more inelastic supply of new housing). T...

Over the past year, there has been a very sharp rise in loan approvals for investors in housing, with the result that investors now account for over 40 per cent of all housing loans approved. This represents the continuation of a decade-long trend which has seen the share of investor loans in total housing loans more than double since the early 1990s (Graph 1). This strong growth in borrowing b...

There is increasing evidence that aggregate housing price are predictable. Despite this, a random walk in time and independence in space are two maintained hypotheses in the empirical models for housing price measurement used by government agencies and by commercial companies as well. This paper examines the price discovery process in individual dwellings over time and space by relaxing both as...

Conventional decision making in all aspects of the asset management sector has largely been based around the key concepts of risk reduction and maximisation of returns. Yet the RICS (2009) has called for surveying professionals to significantly modify their current practice to ensure it aligns with the government policy which has sought to encourage sustainable development through sustainable c...

We develop a life-cycle model to study the effects of house price changes on household consumption and welfare. The model explicitly incorporates the dual feature of housing as both a consumption good and an investment asset and allows for costly adjustments in housing and mortgage positions. Our analysis indicates that although house price changes have small aggregate effects, their consumptio...

This paper estimates a Structural Dynamic Factor Model on a panel of 102 US quarterly series. We model economic comovements by means of 5 underlying structural shocks (oil price, productivity, aggregate demand, monetary policy, and housing demand). The results of the benchmark model (impulse responses and variance decompositions) are in line with those predicted by economic theory and usually e...

This paper presents the key findings from a 2004 NESC study on the Irish housing system, Housing in Ireland: Performance and Policy. The paper begins by identifying the anxieties and concerns people have about housing. These cluster into three broad concerns: the stability of the housing market, the degree of inequality in housing opportunities experienced during the housing boom and the sustai...