| Title |
Evaluation of Mankiw-Weil Model for Long-term Housing Demand Forecasting |
| Keywords |
Housing Demands ; Housing Demand Forecasting Method ; Mankiw-Weil's Forecasting Methods |
| Abstract |
It is quite obvious that residential construction should depend on the population's age structure. For that reason, it has become common for Korean housing market researchers to use modified versions of Mankiw-Weil model(1989) to forecast long-term housing demand in Korea. As Mankiw and Weil suggest, age effects on residential investment may be robust in industrialized world where housing stocks are abundant. Yet, income effects rather than age effects would be the main cause of increased housing demand in developing countries where housing stocks remain scarce. This article demonstrates Mankiw-Weil's model estimating future housing demands is not appropriate for Korean housing market and suggest a new model. The model based on the assumption that housing demand per person is increasing as personal income goes up is more appropriate to explain the rate of housing price change than Mankiw-Wail's one. To do this, we estimate a simple housing demand function based on GDP per capita with Korean census data and do a housing supply gap analysis. The housing supply gap is the shortage (or excess) of increased housing supply relative to increased housing demand. The gap is measured as the change in total building permit of residential housing sector between the 1985 and 2005. To validate the estimated gap, we applied it to identify housing price movement in metropolitan Seoul area. The analysis shows that the gap is better than the gap based on Mankiw-Wail's assumption to explain housing price pattern in Seoul metropolitan area in Korea. |