Housing and the Great Depression

Abstract

This article considers the structural stability of the relationship between the real housing price and real GDP per capita for an annual sample that includes the Great Depression. We test for structural change in parameter values using a sample of annual US data from 1890 to 1952. The article examines the long-run and short-run dynamic relationships between the real housing price and real GDP per capita to determine whether these relationships experienced structural change over the sample period. We find that temporal Granger causality exists between these two variables only for subsamples that include the Great Depression. For the other subsample periods as well as for the entire sample period, no relationship exists between these variables.