Spatio-temporal dynamics of the Japanese housing market

• Main Author: Ang, Alfred Teck Shin
• Other Authors: Cheong Siew Ann
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Science::Physics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77110
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Housing has always been a large portion of the wealth of an agent in the economy. Despite that, we ?nd from reviewing previous work that the behavior of housing markets are seemingly poorly studied. Current methods such as hedonic models and the Alonso-Muth-Mills model either fail to account for certain aspects of complex behavior, or have a lack of implementations to empirical data. We thus study the housing market of 23 Special Wards in Tokyo, Japan and ?nd that it's home price distribution exhibits a exponential equilibrium distribution with a power-law tail . We then look at the temporal behavior of the housing price distributions, and ?nd the translation and shifts in the power-law tail of the equilibrium distribution correspond to a "mini-bubble" resulting from the introduction of Quantitative Easing monetary policy in the 2000s. The spatial behavior of housing price distributions is also studied, and we ?nd that in general, power-law exponents of the upper tail increase with distance from the central administrative and business districts. Lastly, we present the spatial-temporal behavior of the housing prices in the form of a heat map, and verify the e?ect of rising prices in the central region on the neighboring municipalities.