The Impact of Fiscal Policy on Housing in the U.S.
Main Article Content
Abstract
Theory and empirical evidence have provided contradictory predictions and findings on the impact of government spending on housing investment and home values. Previous empirical studies have employed vector-autoregressions. Given the deficiencies of VARs, we utilize local linear projections. In addition, we directly compare the impact of government spending on both housing investment (residential investment, permits, sales, housing starts) and non-residential investment. We find fiscal expansion leads to unambiguously greater crowding out of housing activity than for non-housing investment. Moreover, housing is more sensitive to monetary policy than non-residential investment. Thus, housing appears more sensitive to policy shocks than non-housing capital spending. In contrast to housing investment, home prices, while reacting negatively to government spending shocks, don’t exhibit the magnitude of the reaction of housing, or even non-housing investment. This likely reflects the sticky nature of house prices, with falling purchases leading to greater “time on market” more than falling prices.