House Prices and Housing Wealth in Italy
31 Pages Posted: 17 Jul 2008
Date Written: June 16, 2008
Abstract
In Italy there is no official source of information on house prices. Data on this issue are collected by several sources, each of them with its own advantages and disadvantages. Data for a representative but small sample of households are collected by the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW). In this paper we present a method for estimating the price per square metre of the average Italian house - resorting to different sources - and compare the results with the SHIW estimates. According to our findings, the SHIW estimates for 2002 turn out to be very close to market values. We then compare the SHIW estimates with Census data, showing that the survey overestimates the average surface area of houses while it strongly underestimates the number of secondary dwellings. Overall, in 2002 SHIW-based housing wealth was about 14 per cent lower than macroeconomic estimates.
Keywords: Households, Wealth, House prices
JEL Classification: D31, E21
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
What Drives Housing Price Dynamics: Cross-Country Evidence
By Kostas Tsatsaronis and Haibin Zhu