A Nation of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation and American History

摘要

Between January 2000 and March 2006, the Case-Shiller 20 city real estate price index rose by 76 percent in real terms, and then declined by 36 percent between March 2006 and May 2009, leaving real prices today only 7 percent higher than they were at the turn of the millennium. Figure 1 shows the time series of price for 281 metropolitan areas based on the Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) repeat sales price index. The figure displays different paths for the warmest fourth of metropolitan areas and the rest.~1 Figure 2 shows the relationship between the change in the logarithm of FHFA prices between 2000 and 2006, and the change in the logarithm of FHFA prices between 2006 and 2012. The figure illustrates both the remarkable amount of mean reversion (the regression coefficient is —0.85) across areas and the tremendous heterogeneity across the United States.