TY  - JOUR
AU  - Piazzesi, Monika
AU  - Schneider, Martin
TI  - Momentum traders in the housing market: survey evidence and a search model
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14669
PY  - 2009
Y2  - January 2009
DO  - 10.3386/w14669
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14669
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14669.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Monika Piazzesi
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: (650) 723-9289
E-Mail: piazzesi@stanford.edu

Martin Schneider
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6072
Tel: (650) 721 6320
E-Mail: schneidr@stanford.edu
AB  - This paper studies household beliefs during the recent US housing boom. The first part presents evidence from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. To characterize the heterogeneity in households' views about housing and the economy, we perform a cluster analysis on survey responses at different stages of the boom. The estimation always finds a small cluster of households who believe it is a good time to buy a house because house prices will rise further. The size of this "momentum" cluster doubled towards the end of the boom. The second part of the paper provides a simple search model of the housing market to show how a small number of optimistic investors can have a large effect on prices without buying a large share of the housing stock.
ER  -