A Cross-Country Quarterly Database of Real House Prices: A Methodological Note

Abstract

https://sites.google.com/view/emgeconomics/. This research was initiated while Adrienne Mack (Mutual of Omaha) was working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Since the update of May 2015, Valerie Grossman has been responsible for maintaining and developing the database and became the main contacting author for this paper too. We acknowledge Christophe André for providing helpful feedback on the OECD's own international house price dataset and the assistance of many national statistical offices and/or central banks in collecting the house price data (especially the relevant historical series). This draft is still work-in-progress as we continue to extend and enhance the database itself. The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.

No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012

“…110 Though the index is not directly available, it is included in the international house price database maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Mack and Martínez-García, 2012) and the OECD database. For the time 1970-1992 the index is computed from the median sales price of dwellings as reported by the Dutch Association of Real Estate Agents (Nederlandse Vereniging van Makelaars; NVM).…”

“…For the 14 countries in our sample, these data can be accessed through three repositories: the Bank for International Settlements, the OECD, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (Bank for International Settlements, 2013;Mack and Martínez-García, 2012;OECD, 2014). Extending these back to the 19th century involved a good many compromises between the ideal and the available data.…”

“…The agency publishes a nationwide house price index for single-family houses as well as for several types of multifamily structures for the time 1992-2012. As in the case of the index by the Danish Central Bank, the index by Statistics Denmark is computed using the SPAR method (Mack and Martínez-García, 2012).…”

“…The aggregate index is weighted by the market share of the respective property type in a certain period (Dechent, 2006(Dechent, , 1294 weights (Bank for International Settlements, 2013;Mack and Martínez-García, 2012). The indices do not control for quality differences between houses or quality changes over time but only cover properties that provide "comfortable living conditions" and are located in "average to good locations."…”

Border Effects in House Prices

“…The reason is that the cultural differences change only slowly over time. Figure 1, which depicts the all-country price indices in (Mack and Martinez-Garcia 2011), shows that real house prices in the Netherlands started to decline substantially in 2008, while prices in Germany slightly increased. Figure 3 makes evident that this also holds true for Dutch houses close to the German border.…”