Transmission of housing bubbles among industrial sectors

We find that housing bubbles are accompanied by sluggish demand in non-housing-related sectors both currently in China and previously in Japan. To explain this, we construct a theory to model the differential impact of housing bubbles on housing-related and non-housing-related industrial sectors by combining the neoclassical framework of general equilibrium with the input–output table. We also find that the housing bubble increases investments and output prices in housing-related sectors (crowding-in effect) while simultaneously reducing investments and output prices in non-housing-related sectors (crowding-out effect). Our theoretical findings could explain the negatively significant correlation between housing or land prices and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) during China and Japan's bubble economy eras. Hence, this paper provides new insights into why and how the housing bubble distorts the economy differentially, for different industrial sectors.