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Housing Affordability: A New Dataset
The rapid increase in house prices in the past few years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, raises concerns about housing affordability. The price-to-income ratio is a widely-used indicator of affordability, but does not take into account important factors such as the cost of financing. The aim of this paper is to construct a measure of housing affordability that takes these factors into account for a large set of countries and long period of time. The resulting dataset covers an unbalanced panel of 40 countries over the period from 1970Q1 to 2021Q4. For each country, the index measures the extent to which a median-income household can qualify for a mortgage loan to purchase an average-priced home. To gauge the performance of the constructed indices, we compare them to other readily-available mesures of affordability and examine the evolution of the indices over time to understand the relevant drivers, including in a regression analysis to assess the extent to which government housing programs could contribute to improving affordability.
Optimal Macroprudential Policy and Asset Price Bubbles
An asset bubble relaxes collateral constraints and increases borrowing by credit-constrained agents. At the same time, as the bubble deflates when constraints start binding, it amplifies downturns. We show analytically and quantitatively that the macroprudential policy should optimally respond to building asset price bubbles non-monotonically depending on the underlying level of indebtedness. If the level of debt is moderate, policy should accommodate the bubble to reduce the incidence of a binding collateral constraint. If debt is elevated, policy should lean against the bubble more aggressively to mitigate the pecuniary externalities from a deflating bubble when constraints bind.
Macroprudential Policy Effects
The global financial crisis (GFC) underscored the need for additional policy tools to safeguard financial stability and ultimately macroeconomic stability. Systemic financial vulnerabilities had developed under a seemingly tranquil macroeconomic surface of low inflation and small output gaps. This challenged the precrisis view that achieving these traditional policy targets was a sufficient condition for macroeconomic stability. Thus, new tools had to be deployed to target specific financial vulnerabilities and to build buffers to cushion adverse aggregate shocks, while allowing traditional policy levers, including monetary and microprudential policies to focus on their traditional roles. Ma...
Residential Property Price Developments and (Mis)alignments in Cyprus
Residential house prices in Cyprus show no signs of overvaluation in international comparison, and various indicators confirm that prices are aligned with economic fundamentals. However, still-high household debt poses a risk. Regional disparities raise some concerns about affordability, notably in Limassol, calling for supply-side measures to increase housing supply.
IMF Research Perspectives
Where do we go from here? The Fall-Winter 2020 issue of the IMF Research Perspectives considers this question and analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research showcased in this issue looks at the history of social unrest in the aftermaths of pandemics, discusses the inequalities of telework, places COVID and lending conditions under the microscope, and examines how economic activity has been shaped by people’s reaction to the virus and the resulting policy measures.
Bubble Detective: City-Level Analysis of House Price Cycles
This paper investigates house price dynamics at high frequency using city-level observations during the period 1994-2022 in Lithuania. We employ multiple time series-based econometric procedures to examine whether real house prices and house price-to-rent ratios exhibit explosive behavior. According to these recursive right-tailed test results, we reject the null hypothesis of no-bubble and find evidence for long and multiple periods of explosive behavior in the real estate market in all major cities during the sample period. While the size of bubbles varies across cities, especially when we use the house price-to-rent ratio, there is clearly a similar boom-bust pattern. Large house price corrections can in turn have adverse effects on economic performance and financial stability, as experienced during the global financial crisis and other episodes in history.
Fear Thy Neighbor: Spillovers from Economic Policy Uncertainty
High levels of economic policy uncertainty in various parts of the world revamped the de- bate about its impact on economic activity. With increasingly stronger economic, financial, and political ties among countries, economic agents have more reasons to be vigilant of for- eign economic policy. Employing heterogeneous panel structural vector autoregressions, this paper tests for spillovers from economic policy uncertainty on other countries' economic ac- tivity. Furthermore, using local projections, the paper zooms in on shocks originating in the United States, Europe, and China. Our results suggest that economic policy uncertainty re- duces growth in real output, private consumption, and private investment, and that spillovers from abroad account for about two-thirds of the negative effect. Moreover, uncertainty in the United States, Europe, and China reduces economic activity in the rest of the world, with the effects being mostly felt in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.
Structural Reform Priorities for Brazil
Over the last few decades, Brazil has experienced relatively weak economic growth due to stagnant productivity. To boost productivity, Brazil should embark on an ambitious structural reform process. In doing so, it is crucial that authorities select a few reform priorities to avoid dispersing political capital on an overly broad reform agenda. The paper aims to identify Brazil’s reform priorities in two steps. First, it estimates the impact that different reforms have on Brazil’s productivity. Second, it analyzes survey data to assess the extent of public support for reforms. The results show that banking sector reforms would generate the largest productivity gains and have the highest level of public support. Moreover, they would also be relatively easy to legislate and generate significant fiscal savings.
Testing Shock Transmission Channels to Low-Income Developing Countries
The paper examines the transmission of business cycle fluctuations and credit conditions from advanced and emerging market economies to Low-Income Developing Countries (LIDCs), using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and related countryspecific error correction models. We compile a dataset on bank credit, exports, output, and real effective exchange rate for 24 LIDCs and 16 Advanced and Emerging Markets, accounting for 74 percent of World GDP, from 1990Q1 to 2013Q4. Impulse response analyses show that business cycles in oil- and commodity-exporting, as well as frontier LIDCs are more synchronized with those in emerging market economies. Furthermore, credit conditions in the US seem to have a significant impact on exports and real economic activity in LIDCs, while these variables are basically unresponsive to credit availability in emerging markets or economies in other parts of the world.
Cyprus
Cyprus: Selected Issues
