House prices, collateral constraint, and the asymmetric effect on consumption

This paper investigates the asymmetric effect of house prices on various categories of consumption under constrained and unconstrained regimes. We first present a simple theoretical model based on lacoviello (2004) and Luengo-Prado (2006), explicitly considering the dual role of housing and linking credit constraints to the behavior of consumption in a pair of aggregate Euler equations. We then estimate a threshold regression model and find that LC-PIH holds only under the unconstrained regime. More importantly, durable consumption exhibit a very strong asymmetric effect in response to changes in house prices, while other categories of consumption do not exhibit this asymmetry. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.