Rising inequality of housing: evidence from segmented house price indices

This article uses the Case‐Shiller technique for constructing house price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991–2002 comprising 10,376 pairs of repeated sales. Using weighted least squares to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a general house price index by regressing differences in log prices for the subset of repeated sales of identical homes onto a set of dummy time variables, one for each quarter in the period studied. The index thus constructed shows that, in general, nominal prices for identical homes have increased by a factor of 3.58 over the 11‐year period, while the consumer price index increased by 1.28, creating substantial capital returns for early purchasers. Considerable differences were also found in the appreciation in submarkets defined by dwelling size. This article argues that asset appreciation and differences in asset appreciation have important policy ramifications and represent challenges for policymakers and the general populace.

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