Skip to main content

Northern Irish House Prices

In my first academic post (economics lecturer at the University of Ulster), I taught an Econ101 module from 1997 to 1999.  As part of the assessment for this module, I had an essay question which went as follows - what explains the large increase in Northern Ireland house prices over the past decade?  Little was I to know that house prices would keep on rising until 2007.  By some measures, the Northern Irish property bubble is one of the largest property bubbles in history.  We therefore shouldn't be surprised by the news today that house prices are now at or below their 2005 levels and that sales are less than one third of their peak levels.  Anyone who has tried to sell a house will realise just how bad the market is at present, which may suggest that house prices will fall further.

Clive Walker, one of my soon-to-be former PhD students, has been doing some really nice work on the role of the media during the housing market bubble.  In his thesis, he finds that media coverage of the housing market expanded rapidly during the 2000s and that media coverage affected the housing market.


Popular posts from this blog

Bitcoin Bubble?

According to Robert Shiller , speaking at Davos, Bitcoin is a perfect example of a bubble - story here . Shiller sees Bitcoin as a backwards step in the evolution of money.   George Selgin , a free banker, takes an opposing view - click here .  Although he doesn't believe that Bitcoin is money, he sees its development as a fascinating turn in the evolution of money. In particular, he lauds the fact that Bitcoin production is constrained and cannot be infinite. There is a short video below where Bitcoin explain how it works.

How Valuable Are Connections?

Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles, co-authored with my colleague Will Quinn , is forthcoming in August. It is published by Cambridge University Press and is available for pre-order at Amazon , Barnes and Noble , Waterstones and Cambridge University Press .