住房价格,消费和货币政策-金融加速器原理(英文版)(pdf 22页)

Introduction
House prices in the United Kingdom, and more recently in the United States, have received a great deal of attention from policy-makers and economic commentators. It is oftenassumed that if house prices are growing rapidly, consumption growth will be strong too. Recentminutes of theMonetary Policy Committeemeetings in the United Kingdom stated: ‘. . . the continuing strength in house priceswould tend to underpin consumption . . . ’ (April 2001). Similarly, the Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan stated ‘And thus far this year, consumer spending has indeed risen further, presumably assisted in part by a continued rapid growth in the market value of homes’ (Greenspan, 2001).
      The question that we address in this paper is: what impact do house prices have on consumption via their role as collateral for household borrowing? In 2001, the value of the housing represented more than 40% of total UK household wealth. While in principle any asset could be used as collateral, housing is by far the easiest asset to borrow against. Indeed, 80% of all household borrowing in the UK is secured on housing. To further justify our focus on housing as distinct from other assets, it is useful to consider why houses are different. Most consumers live in the houses they own and value directly the services provided by their home. So the benefit of an increase in house prices is directly offset by an increase in the opportunity cost of housing services. An increase in house prices does not generally shift the aggregate budget constraint outwards. Even if one considers finitelylived
households, the capital gain to a last-time seller of a house represents a redistribution away from a first-time buyer, so house price changes can redistribute wealth, but not increase it in aggregate. This contrasts with financial assets: an increase in, say, the value of future dividends on equities due to an increase in productivity shifts the aggregate budget constraint out and can therefore lead to an increase in aggregate consumption. So it is not obvious that there is a traditional ‘wealth effect’ from housing in the way that we think of a wealth effect arising from a change in the value of households’ financial assets。
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