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A More Timely House Price Index

Elliot Anenberg; STEVEN LAUFER

Federal Reserve Board

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2017 open access

Using listings data, we construct a new repeat-sales house price index that describes house values at the contract date when the price is determined rather than the closing date when the property is transferred. We showthat this difference in timing helps explain several puzzles about house prices, including their strong short-term serial correlation and their weak correlation with stock prices and macroeconomic news shocks. In addition, we showthat a variant of our index that relies exclusively on listings data for recent transactions accurately reveals trends in house prices several months before existing price indexes like Case-Shiller become available.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00634
Volume
99 (4)
Pages
722-734
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
Sources
crossref openalex