Dr. Seth Giertz, assistant professor of economics at the UNL College of Business Administration, will be presenting a seminar at the Lincoln Institute in Cambridge, Mass, on November 2. The topic will be "Boom and Bust: A Look at Housing Bubbles from 1980-2010."
Giertz is co-authoring a working paper titled "A Look at US House Price Bubbles from 1980-2010 and the Role of Local Market Conditions" with Dr. James R. Follian, a senior fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute for Government. Follian and Giertz will be presenting their findings at the seminar.
The paper takes a look at relationship between housing prices and several explanatory variables for a large panel of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). The authors projected housing and employment distributions for each MSA, allowing a test of the role of local market conditions in the formation of price bubbles.
The analysis underscores the complexity of the housing bubbles, and highlights the difficulties of doing so when looking at a national housing market and relatively simplistic equilibrium conditions.
Published: November 1, 2011