The Role Of Peoples Expectation In The Recent Us Housing

This paper investigates how an important driver of the recent housing boom and bust, people's expectation, influences housing asset returns. Specifically, it extends the volatility feedback model to study the relationship between housing volatility and asset returns during 1963-2007. The analysis considers two alternative breakpoints, 1984Q1 and 1999Q1, in order to distinguish the permanent structural break from temporary Markov-switching volatility. The novelty of this study lies in its insightful investigations into the recent U.S. housing boom and bust in the post-1999 period in four dimensions. First, the significantly negative volatility feedback effect in the housing market suggests a positive relationship between housing volatility and expected asset returns, and highly supports the important role of people's expectations in the recent housing boom and bust. Second, the high-volatility regimes of the housing market delivered by this study indicate a strong association between housing cycles and business cycles, as well as a remarkable uncertainty in the U.S. housing market after the recession 2001. Third, the violated fundamental which refers to the broken negative relationship between housing volatility and realized asset returns during 2001-2004 implies the possible presence of a housing bubble during this period. Finally, volatility feedback anticipates the recent bubble-like housing market dynamics because high volatility during 2002-2003 implies low realized returns i the early housing-boom stage (2002-2003), as well as high expected returns i the second stage of the housing boom (2004-2005).