Speaker:  Marianna Kudlyak (San Francisco Fed)

Paper Title:  “House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from U.S. Listings Data”

Abstract: Evidence on the contemporaneous effects of interest rates on house prices has been elusive. We present direct evidence of the high-frequency causal relationship between interest rates and house prices in the United States. We exploit information contained in listings for residential properties for sale in the United States between 2001 and 2019 from the CoreLogic Multiple Listing Service Dataset. Using high-frequency instruments for monetary policy shocks, we estimate that a contractionary monetary policy surprise that raises average 30-year mortgage rates by 0.25 percentage points lowers housing list prices by 1 percent within two weeks. House prices respond to surprises to the expected path of future rates and are insensitive to the federal funds rate surprises. The initial response of list prices is almost entirely passed through to sale prices and persists for at least a year after the announcement.

Paper Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10aHkV_41Vf_2g3oynAqqMhAK6aNAeuIP/view