Linear and Nonlinear Dynamics of Housing Price in Turkey

Housing sector have an important size in economic activities of Turkey. This sector could absorb an important size of skilled and unskilled unemployed. Furthermore, decreasing rents would cause an increase in household savings because of lightening their basic expenditures. Therefore, having knowledge about the dynamics of housing prices is very crucial for economic policymakers. In this paper, the dynamics between house prices and macroeconomic variables including inflation, interest rate, unemployment and real domestic product are studied. Despite the well-known fact that macroeconomic variables possess asymmetric and nonlinear features, many studies about the dynamics of housing prices has been tested only within a linear framework. Therefore, in this paper non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) model is used to explore asymmetrical relations in the long-run. Despite to most researches in this field, the effect of interest rate found with a negative sign. Negative effect of both nominal interest rate and inflation on housing prices alongside of greater impact of inflation in comparison with nominal interest rate, would cause the long-run coefficient of real interest rate be positive. Forethought can explain of the positive relation of the unemployment rate and housing prices.