Inside a bubble and crash: Evidence from the valuation of amenities Ronan C. Lyons∗ December 2013 Abstract Housing markets and their cycles are central to understanding macroeco- nomic fluctuations. As housing is an inherently spatial market, an understanding of the economics of location-specific amenities is needed. This paper examines this topic, using a rich dataset of 25 primary location-specific characteristics and over 1.2 million sales and rental listings in Ireland, from the peak of a real estate bubble in 2006 to 2012 when prices had fallen by more than half. It finds clear evidence that the price effects of amenities are greater than rent effects, something that may be explained by either tenant search thresholds or buyers' desire to \lock in" access to fixed-supply amenities. Buyer lock-in concerns would be most prevalent at the height of a bubble and thus would be associated with pro-cyclical amenity pricing. Instead there is significant evidence that the relative price of amenities is counter-cyclical. This suggests the Irish housing market bubble was characterized by \property ladder" effects, rather than \lock-in" concerns. Keywords: Housing markets; amenity valuation; search costs; market cycles. JEL Classification Numbers: R31, E32, H4, D62, H23. ∗Department of Economics, Trinity College Dublin (
[email protected]), Balliol College, Oxford and Spatial Economics Research Centre (LSE). This is a draft working paper and thus is subject to revisions, so please contact the author if you intend to cite this. The author is grateful to John Muellbauer for his encouragement and insight as supervisor, to Paul Conroy, Richard Dolan, Grainne Faller, Justin Gleeson, Sean Lyons and Bruce McCormack for their assistance with data, and to Paul Cheshire, James Poterba, Steve Redding, Frances Ruane, Richard Tol and participants at conferences by SERC (London 2011), ERES (Edinburgh 2012) and ERSA-UEA (Bratislava 2012) for helpful comments.