Essays on Housing, Unemployment and Monetary Policy

Essays on Housing, Unemployment and Monetary Policy PDF Author: Ejindu Ume
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I study the interconnections between the housing market and labor market, and the link between monetary policy and housing market activity. In the first chapter, I focus on the interplay between the housing and labor market. To do so, I construct a model of search and bargaining across two different markets: the labor market and the housing market. The model highlights that housing prices and frictions in the housing market have a profound impact on labor market activity through the desire of workers to eventually purchase a home, the "American Dream." The model also reveals that labor market frictions can impact housing market activity. I also perform a calibration exercise to evaluate economic activity in general equilibrium. I find that frictions in the housing market generate strong negative external effects on the labor market. More specifically, a tighter housing market is associated with higher unemployment rates and less job creation. Consequently, my findings suggest that policymakers should be very careful in implementing policies targeted towards housing -- housing markets are likely to generate significant external effects to other sectors of the economy, especially the labor market. To study the effects of monetary policy on housing market activity I develop an overlapping generations model in which housing is traded across generations of individuals. Incomplete information leads to a transactions role for money so that monetary policy can be effectively studied. Moreover, individuals face liquidity risk which interferes with their ability to accumulate housing wealth. Contrary to the existing literature, I demonstrate that it is important to disaggregate fixed investment between the residential and non-residential sectors. In particular, I find the effects of monetary policy are asymmetric across the components of the overall capital stock. I conclude this chapter with a policy experiment studying how optimal monetary policy depends on housing market fundamentals. In response to adverse supply conditions in the housing sector, monetary policy should be more aggressive in order to promote residential investment and the housing stock. However, monetary policy should be conservative in order to limit exposure to risk if fundamentals favor housing demand. The third chapter is an empirical look at the relationship between monetary policy and housing market activity. I analyze and quantify the effects of monetary policy on residential investment, housing starts, new private housing permits and new single family houses sold. To conduct the analysis I estimate a vector autoregression model (VAR) where the monetary policy shock is identified using sign restrictions. No restrictions are imposed on the variables of interest, however, in response to a monetary policy shock I impose sign restrictions on the impulse responses of price, output, reserves and the federal funds rate. I find that a contractionary monetary policy shock reduces housing market activity for up to a year after the shock. Interestingly, 2 to 3 years after the economy contracts, activity in the housing sector reverses course. The findings suggest that once the economy contracts the Federal Reserve Bank reverses course by lowering the federal funds rate, and this policy reversal stimulates housing market activity.

Essays on Housing, Unemployment and Monetary Policy

Essays on Housing, Unemployment and Monetary Policy PDF Author: Ejindu Ume
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
In this dissertation, I study the interconnections between the housing market and labor market, and the link between monetary policy and housing market activity. In the first chapter, I focus on the interplay between the housing and labor market. To do so, I construct a model of search and bargaining across two different markets: the labor market and the housing market. The model highlights that housing prices and frictions in the housing market have a profound impact on labor market activity through the desire of workers to eventually purchase a home, the "American Dream." The model also reveals that labor market frictions can impact housing market activity. I also perform a calibration exercise to evaluate economic activity in general equilibrium. I find that frictions in the housing market generate strong negative external effects on the labor market. More specifically, a tighter housing market is associated with higher unemployment rates and less job creation. Consequently, my findings suggest that policymakers should be very careful in implementing policies targeted towards housing -- housing markets are likely to generate significant external effects to other sectors of the economy, especially the labor market. To study the effects of monetary policy on housing market activity I develop an overlapping generations model in which housing is traded across generations of individuals. Incomplete information leads to a transactions role for money so that monetary policy can be effectively studied. Moreover, individuals face liquidity risk which interferes with their ability to accumulate housing wealth. Contrary to the existing literature, I demonstrate that it is important to disaggregate fixed investment between the residential and non-residential sectors. In particular, I find the effects of monetary policy are asymmetric across the components of the overall capital stock. I conclude this chapter with a policy experiment studying how optimal monetary policy depends on housing market fundamentals. In response to adverse supply conditions in the housing sector, monetary policy should be more aggressive in order to promote residential investment and the housing stock. However, monetary policy should be conservative in order to limit exposure to risk if fundamentals favor housing demand. The third chapter is an empirical look at the relationship between monetary policy and housing market activity. I analyze and quantify the effects of monetary policy on residential investment, housing starts, new private housing permits and new single family houses sold. To conduct the analysis I estimate a vector autoregression model (VAR) where the monetary policy shock is identified using sign restrictions. No restrictions are imposed on the variables of interest, however, in response to a monetary policy shock I impose sign restrictions on the impulse responses of price, output, reserves and the federal funds rate. I find that a contractionary monetary policy shock reduces housing market activity for up to a year after the shock. Interestingly, 2 to 3 years after the economy contracts, activity in the housing sector reverses course. The findings suggest that once the economy contracts the Federal Reserve Bank reverses course by lowering the federal funds rate, and this policy reversal stimulates housing market activity.

Essays on Monetary Policy, Household Expectations, and Housing Prices

Essays on Monetary Policy, Household Expectations, and Housing Prices PDF Author: Shihan Xie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Monetary policy in the U.S. has changed substantially in the past few decades. This thesis seeks to understand the effects of monetary policy through household expectations and housing prices. The first chapter proposes and estimates a dynamic model of household inflation expectations. The information flow constraint of the household leads to costly information monitoring. Households use a Bayesian learning model to form and update inflation expectations. The model identifies and corrects for sizable reporting and sampling errors prevalent in household surveys. The estimates show that better-educated households track inflation more closely and report their expectations more accurately. Household inflation expectations are less responsive to changes in the inflation target after the Great Recession. Model-implied household inflation expectations improve the fit of the expectation-augmented Phillips curve. Inattention from households makes it costlier for the Fed to lower inflation than would be the case if everyone is perfectly informed. The second chapter examines the differential effect of monetary policy shocks on U.S. local housing markets. By exploiting the heterogeneity in housing supply elasticity, I provide estimates of local housing price responses to monetary policy shocks in a large sample of metropolitan statistical areas. Given an expansionary shock that decreases the Federal Funds rate by 100 basis points, housing prices increase by 7.2% in cities with a highly inelastic housing supply (e.g., San Francisco), but by only 1.0% in cities with a very elastic housing supply (e.g., Iowa City) at the two-year horizon. To understand the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the housing market, I develop and estimate a structural model of the housing price with information friction. The third chapter surveys a number of important methods on the identification of monetary policy shocks and compares their estimated impacts on output, inflation and unemployment rate for pre- and post-1984 periods. In particular, identification using monetary SVAR or Romer-Romer method suggests substantial changes in the effects of monetary policy shocks. In contrast, the FAVAR method provides relatively consistent estimation for both periods. Tests for structural breaks point to parameter instability during 1979-1984. Such instability persists after accounting for GARCH effects.

Essays on Monetary Policy in Developing Countries

Essays on Monetary Policy in Developing Countries PDF Author: Zhandos Ybrayev
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation explores the effects of monetary policy on economic inequality, asset prices and unemployment in developing countries. Emerging market economies are structurally different from advanced economies as they are generally associated with greater financial frictions, underdeveloped financial markets, as well as both a high average level and unequal access to dollarized assets, among others. Thus, the study on the impact of monetary policy in emerging economies requires additional specifications. The first essay investigates the distributional consequences of monetary policy in the context of a small open economy framework. I show that wealthy households (represented by the top ten percent of the income distribution), who are more able to save in foreign currencies, gain in purchasing power of their incomes by hedging against domestic inflation. At the same time, since the poor (represented by the bottom fifty percent of the income distribution) retain larger share of liquid assets denominated in domestic currency, consequently leading them to bear a greater burden of local currency inflation. I also show that contractionary monetary policy is associated with periods of higher income inequality in emerging markets. The second essay presents a comprehensive practical analysis of Kazakhstani city-level housing prices. The key focus is to test whether there is a single, integrated Kazakhstani housing market, and hence to examine potential long-run relationships among the seven city housing prices series for which we have monthly data during the period 2014-2017. We also explore how monetary policy shifts and subsequent exchange rate shocks could affect the system of relative prices. The results obtained suggest that city-level house prices are weakly related across cities in the long run, and the interest rate channel of monetary policy currently is surprisingly weak in Kazakhstan. The third essay discusses a relatively new take on Inflation Targeting as a single-mandate monetary policy, which effectively exposes its many disadvantages. Our discussion first introduces the issues of coordination and conflict between fiscal and monetary policies. Our empirical exercise directly addresses the unemployment outcome of inflation targeting policy compared to other monetary policy settings. Our results show that while IT actually reduced the average inflation rate prior 2008 financial crisis, it has a negative effect on the unemployment rate in the longer term. The paper argues that the aggregate unemployment rate is an optimal social welfare-maximizing goal for central banks and should be used as a natural second target in a typical emerging market economy case.

Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble

Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble PDF Author: Jane Dokko
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Monetary policy
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Three Essays on Housing and Labor Economics

Three Essays on Housing and Labor Economics PDF Author: XUE HU
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
These essays contribute towards our understanding of housing and labor economics. This dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, I explore the impact of negative housing equity on households' geo- graphical mobility using data from Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The empirical analysis implies that addressing the endogeneity nature of homeowners' underwater mortgage status is crucial. Even with comprehensive controls for households' demographic characteristics and macro-level factors, omitted variable bias such as homeowners' attitudes towards their financial responsibility may still generate estimation bias that is quite large. After proper instrumenting for homeowners' underwater mortgage status using local shocks from housing and labor markets, the estimation results show that having underwater mortgages is associated with an average decline in mobility rate of about 17 percentage points. The second chapter investigates the role of housing choice and mortgage on employment transitions when there are uncertainties regarding income and house prices. Motivated by the empirical evidence on large employment-transition disparities between homeowners and renters, I develop and estimate a structural model in which mortgage obligations motivate homeowners to exert greater job-search efforts during unemployment spells. The model is used to understand individuals' response to housing and labor market shocks. I find that while the decline in house prices creates negative labor market externalities for renters, tightening mortgage constraints result in greater job search incentives for homeowners. With concurrent negative labor market shocks, the probability of transitioning out of unemployment for both renters and homeowners declines. Two policy experiments are conducted. The first shows that lower refinance cost discourages housing equity accumulation and is associated with a decline in the average employment rate. The second demonstrates that a lower down payment requirement encourages the transition into home ownership, which has positive labor market implications, especially for younger individuals. The first two chapters explore the relation between underwater mortgage and geographical mobility and impacts of mortgage debt obligation on employment incentives. Both analyses are based on individual-level data. The last chapter investigates the mysteries of regional housing market disparities from a macro perspective. This chapter shows that local economic conditions are correlated with deviations between house prices and rents in a price-rent model framework, suggesting that the demand for credit and housing is greater when a variety of local economic conditions are more supportive. Several different measures of local economic conditions are considered in this chapter: local unemployment rates, local unemployment rates relative to the natural rate of unemployment, local inflation rates, and measures of local perceptions of the cost of credit. This chapter attempts to offer explanations not as how or why house prices increased, but rather, given the myriad of national factors making home purchase easier and cheaper, where house prices increased. This approach also resolves a bit of a puzzle as to why the housing bubble was so pronounced in some areas and not others.

Essays on Interest Rates and the Housing Market

Essays on Interest Rates and the Housing Market PDF Author: Roberto Maria Croce
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 99

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Book Description
Abstract: In the first essay of this dissertation, "Monetary Policy and the Housing Cycle," I investigate the role of monetary policy in a housing boom that precipitated the U.S. financial crisis of 2007. I find expansionary policy between 2002 and 2005 accounts for about 50% of the peak deviation of real residential investment from its long-run trend, which occurred in the second quarter of 2005. To determine if monetary policy was a contributor to the housing boom I estimate a large dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) to fit the economy in several different time periods. I mathematically isolate a series of changes in the Fed Funds rate that are statistically unrelated to changes in the macroeconomy and classify these deviations as a measure of monetary policy. The magnitude of the monetary policy series is relatively small during the housing boom but explains half of the of the 2005 peak in residential investment because of inertia in the Fed Funds rate.

Essays on Housing and Monetary Policy

Essays on Housing and Monetary Policy PDF Author: Min-ho Nam
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Housing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Housing and Monetary Policy

Housing and Monetary Policy PDF Author: Clara Wolf
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This thesis investigates heterogeneous topics since it is related to both housing economics and monetary economics, and uses various tools including theoretical modeling, microeconomic policy evaluation and macroeconomic empirical approach. It is constituted of three chapters. The first one, co-authored with Eric Monnet, is interested in the relationship between demographic changes within countries and housing investment. The second one, co-authored with Guillaume Chapelle and Benjamin Vignolles, assesses the impact of a housing tax credit on several dimensions of the housing market. Finally, the third one studies how monetary policy should react to capital inflows when there are frictions on the financial market.

Essays in Contemporary Economic Problems

Essays in Contemporary Economic Problems PDF Author: William Fellner
Publisher: Washington, D.C. : American Enterprise Institute
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Essays on disinflationary monetary policy of the USA - focuses on resource allocation financial markets, the public debt, capital flow, exchange rates, monetary relations, liquidity, housing and labour markets, and labour relations effects. Graphs, references and statistical tables.

Essays on Housing Policy

Essays on Housing Policy PDF Author: J. B. Cullingworth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000296660
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Originally published in 1979, these essays provide a guide to the labyrinth of issues which together made up ‘housing policy’ in the late 20th Century. The focus is on the practical and political difficulties of devising measures which meet policy objectives – difficulties which are just as prevalent in the 21st Century. The search for ‘comprehensive strategies’ is shown to be a vain one: given the number of relevant issues and their complexity, only an incremental approach is practicable. Major issues are discussed in the context of an analysis of the institutional, historical and financial framework within which housing policy is formulated and operated.