The relationship between housing starts and mortgage availability

Sims' innovation-accounting techniques are used to investigate the relationship between housing starts and mortgage availability using U.S. monthly data over 1967-1984. First, a four variable vector autoregression is employed to compute impulse response functions. The results suggest that housing starts are significantly in fluenced by both interest rates and mortgage availability. Second, the estimated vector autoregression is used to compute a historical decomposition of the starts series using 1979(12) as the base period. The decomposition suggests that deregulation and the evolution of more competitive financial markets has led to a significant weakening of availability effects.