We simulate the effects of unseasonable increases in temperature and precipitation on housing starts and completions in each of the four Census regions. Using an over identified vector autoregression model the dynamics of housing starts and completions are estimated. The persistence of housing activity over time implies that weather shocks also have long-lasting effects, though the impact seems large on in the North Central region.

This volume of Contributions to Economic Analysis addresses a number of important questions in the field of business cycles including: How should business cycles be dated and measured? What is the response of output and employment to oil-price and monetary shocks? And, is the business cycle asymmetric, and does it matter?

For many younger and lower-income people, housing affordability continues to worsen. Based on the academic research of two distinguished housing economists – and stimulated by working with governments across the world - this wide-ranging book sets out clear theoretical and empirical frameworks to tackle one of today’s most important socio-economic issues. Housing unaffordability arises from complex forces and a prerequisite to effective policy is understanding the causes of rising house prices and rents and the interactions between housing, housing finance and the macroeconomy. The authors challenge many of the conventional wisdoms in housing policy and offer innovative recommendations to improve affordability.

Despite housing's importance to the economy and worries about recent financial and economic turmoil traceable to housing market difficulties, little has been written on how distress in the housing market, measured by foreclosures, affects home prices, or how these variables interact with other macroeconomic or housing variables such as employment, housing permits or sales. Employing a panel VAR model to examine quarterly state-level data, our paper is the first to systematically analyze these interactions. There is substantial regional variation across states, which facilitates our ability to identify linkages among variables. Importantly, price-foreclosure linkages work in both directions; foreclosures have a significant, negative effect on home prices, while an increase in prices alleviates distress by lowering foreclosures. Similarly, employment and foreclosures have mutually negative effects on each other. The impact of foreclosures on prices, while negative and significant, is quite small in magnitude. We demonstrate this by simulating house price changes in response to extreme foreclosure shocks. Even under extremely pessimistic scenarios for foreclosure shocks, average U.S. house prices, as measured by the comprehensive OFHEO house price index (which we argue is the most reliable and useful measure of house prices to use for our purposes), likely would decline only slightly or remain essentially flat in response to foreclosures like those predicted for the 2008-2009 period. This suggests that home prices are quite sticky, and that fears of a major fall in house prices, with all of its attendant negative macroeconomic consequences, typically are not warranted even in extreme foreclosure circumstances.