IE HAS seminar – Gábor BÉKÉS 21/02/2019
Békés Gábor, Bisztray Márta: Területi egyensúly – a munkaerőpiac és az ingatlanárak kapcsolata Magyarországon
Spatial equilibrium – links between the labor market and housing prices in Hungary
The aim of this study is to see if we can find the baseline predictions of the spatial equilibrium model in Hungarian data. To that end we construct a new modified subregion-level dataset for the period of 2001-2014, which contains information on the housing and labor markets, as well as additional geographic and demographic data. This dataset allows us to evaluate the strength of connection between the housing market and the labor market. We find that the links between the two are weak and unstable in terms of changes. The spatial equilibrium model performs poorly. One reason behind is the sizeable heterogeneity of the patterns among various sub-samples. Before the financial crisis changes in house prices are mainly driven by changes in the share of local employment compared to the local population. After the crisis the role of within-country migration and demographics seem to become more important. Additionally, there are considerable differences between the Eastern and Western parts of Hungary not only in the level of house prices but also in terms of the factors influencing price changes in the housing market.
