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Presented By: Department of Economics

Births, Aging, and Migration: How Demographics and Demand Drive Growth in the US Housing Price

Neil Christy, University of Michigan

Neil Christy Neil Christy
Neil Christy
The real price of housing in the US increased 60.4% from 1980 to 2019. Over this same period, the population grew 45%, and its composition changed as birth rates fell, people lived longer, and migration patterns shifted. I quantify the effects of these demographic changes on the real price of housing in a dynamic, general equilibrium model. I adapt a standard, state-of-the-art incomplete markets model to include time-varying demographics, which I calibrate to exactly match a series of empirical population measures from 1980 to 2019. The model indicates that demographic changes can account for 49.6% of the measured increase in the real price of housing. The effects of demographic change in the model are born mostly by younger households: in 2019, older households achieve a similar standard of living as older households in 1980, while younger households own and consume less than their 1980 counterparts. Using counterfactual demographic evolutions, I separately quantify the effects of changes in three demographic channels—births, aging, and migration—since 1980. Holding births constant at their 1980 level, I find that the real price of housing rises an additional 10.2 percentage points; counterfactuals with constant aging and migration processes produce less price growth than the baseline.

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