What role does uncertainty play in the housing markets of selected European Countries?

Sammanfattning: In this study, we investigate the relationship between national and global uncertainty with house prices. Uncertainty is measured with the economic policy uncertainty index developed by Baker et al. (2016). The relationship is evaluated with eight SVAR-models that are Cholesky decomposed to restrict the contemporaneous relationship between variables, this is used to model the housing market. We create two models for each country, one that includes the local uncertainty and one that includes global uncertainty. The studied countries are two larger and two smaller economies in the EU, namely Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and France. We investigate the impulse response functions to establish the short-run dynamics and then compare them amongst each other. The results show that uncertainty has a negative effect on house prices and that global uncertainty hasa larger impact than local uncertainty, except for Sweden´s case. Germany is most resilient to the effect of uncertainty among the studied countries. This can be because of the size of the rental housing market in Germany. Interestingly we also find that in all cases except for Denmark our models don’t find a consistent relationship between short-term interest and housing prices in the short run, which can be an indication of a bubble. Further studies are required to investigate how different housing policies affect the volatility of the housing market that is created by uncertainty.