Abstract:
This paper explores the impact of monetary policy and macroeconomic surprises on the U.S housing market returns and volatility at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) and aggregate level using a Glosten–Jagannathan-Runkle generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GJR-GARCH) model. Using daily data and sampling periods which cover both the conventional and unconventional monetary policy periods, empirical results show that monetary policy surprises have a greater impact on the volatility of housing market returns across time with particularly pronounced effect during the conventional monetary policy period. We also show that macroeconomic surprises do not have a significant impact on housing returns for most MSAs for the full sample, conventional and unconventional monetary policy periods.
