House-Price Crash and Macroeconomic Crisis: A Hong Kong Case Study

Abstract

House prices crash has become an important feature of macroeconomic crisis. We argue that house prices crash driven by contractionary monetary policy is not only a reaction to crisis, but also accelerates and amplifies the fluctuations of major macroeconomic variable. In this paper, we conduct a case study of Hong Kong in the 1997-1998 financial crisis and quantitatively analyze the mechanism by developing a general equilibrium model incorporating financial accelerator mechanism into both household and entrepreneur sectors. After estimating and simulating the model, impulse response results imply that our model can explain the co-movement of house prices, consumption, and investment better than the alternative models.house prices, fianncial accelerator, consumption, investment, Hong Kong