The Housing Wealth Effect: Quasi-Experimental Evidence

We exploit a quasi-experiment to provide new evidence on the magnitude of the housing wealth effect. We estimate an immediate shock of approximately -15% to house prices close to one of Stockholm's airports after its operations were unexpectedly continued. This source of price variation is ideal for identifying housing wealth effects since it is unrelated to macroeconomic conditions. We estimate a micro elasticity of 0.45 among purchasers of new cars. The implied aggregate MPC on cars is however only 0.13 cents per dollar. The response is entirely concentrated to homeowners with a loan-to-value ratio between 0.6 and 0.8.