Does space matter? The case of the housing expenditure cap

Abstract

In our evaluation of the housing expenditure share cap, a macroprudential policy, we discover the importance of modeling space. In a spatial model, the equilibrium features income-based spatial sorting where a household competes with households of their own income type for residential space. As a result, the cap policy causes a larger drop in housing demand, and consequently a larger reduction in equilibrium housing prices, for constrained low-income families than for unconstrained high-income families. Depending on the assumption on households’ preference, this mechanism leads to a smaller increase or even a modest decrease in welfare inequality in a spatial model than in a spaceless model.