What Drove the 2003-2006 House Price Boom and Subsequent Collapse? Disentangling Competing Explanations
64 Pages Posted: 8 Dec 2018 Last revised: 11 Aug 2021
Date Written: October 28, 2019
Abstract
Ten years after the financial crisis, the central question of what explains the rise and fall in house prices remains unresolved. We provide a unified framework to examine four excess credit supply variables and three speculation variables that have been proposed in the literature. Credit supply variables, particularly subprime share and worse originator share, strongly relate to future zip code level house price changes in the boom and bust, whereas none of the speculation variables consistently relate to house prices within MSAs. Pre-trends, supply elasticity, and depressed areas suggest these relations are not driven by lenders anticipating house price growth.
Keywords: financial crisis, house price growth, credit supply, mortgage misreporting, housing demand, speculation
JEL Classification: G01, G21, R31
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation