2. Data

Research into the determinants of house prices informs the choice of variables for this study.

Identified determinants include income growth (Malpezzi 1990), inflation, GDP, and interest rates (Iacoviello 2002; Aye et al. 2013; Droes et al. 2016; Muellbauer and Murphy 1997), housing sales volume (Zhou 1997), population growth and construction costs (Capozza et al. 2004) and exchange rates (Ya-chen and Shuai 2013).

Table 1 reports summary statistics for the variables employed over the period from 1980Q1 to 2021Q1. Data is collected from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the CoreLogic (CL) Economist Pack dataset, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). All variables were obtained in seasonally adjusted form, except the cash rate, exchange rate index, and sales volume. We seasonally adjust sales volume via the method employed by the ABS.1

Table 1: Descriptive statistics of the variables employed

MeanStd. Dev.Min.MedianMax.Source
Real house price index61.8726.9630.2148.93113.90OECD
Rent price index62.2525.8718.8158.14102.52OECD
Price-income ratio index100.0023.1166.4191.84147.57OECD
Price-rent ratio index100.0034.9057.8782.99172.66OECD
Cash rate7.084.860.035.3318.35RBA
Exchange rate index63.8810.4948.7361.6794.13RBA
Sales volume31.4413.096.3335.4458.50CL
Real GDP287.62117.12134.61261.89516.90ABS
Disposable income234.7790.37119.45215.87422.12ABS
Real GDP PC14.083.588.9213.7420.08ABS
Disposable income PC11.562.677.7611.3116.41ABS
Population19.643.2114.6819.1325.74ABS
Unemployment rate6.811.764.106.2011.20ABS
Employment-population ratio59.232.3654.2059.2062.80ABS
Participation rate63.541.6060.3063.4066.30ABS
Consumer price index74.1326.3025.4072.90117.90ABS

Note: OECD indices are set to 100 in 2015. The cash rate is the interbank overnight cash rate in percentage. The exchange rate index is the trade weighted exchange rate index, set to 100 in 1970. Sales volume is the quarterly housing sales volume in thousands of units. Real GDP and disposable income are in billions of dollars. Real GDP per capita and disposable income per capita are in thousands of dollars. Disposable income and disposable income per capita are in real, net terms. Population is in millions of people. The unemployment rate, employment-population ratio, and participation rate are in percentages. The consumer price index is set to 100 in 2012. All variables have 165 observations from 1980Q1 to 2021Q1.

Footnotes

[1] This is the X-12 approach with X-11 filter.

Updated