Regional Unemployment Compensation in Housing Markets of Iran

The regional labor migration is responsive to regional differences of unemployment rate which is interrelated with fundamentals of housing market. This paper analyzes the relationship between labor and housing markets in 30 provinces of Iran. It uses Vermeulen and Ommeren (2005) model in a panel data for regions and an Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) model in the country over the period 1998-2011. The estimation results indicate that most of provinces with high housing prices on average have also low volatility in unemployment rates. The workers in high-unemployment regions are compensated through housing markets, since the prices of land and housing and living expenses are lower in these regions than ones with low unemployment. In addition, the propensity of households to get housing loan decreases and the housing price falls despite high risk of unemployment. The risk of getting unemployed raises the income uncertainty and reduces the housing price. This indicates a negative relationship between housing price and unemployment rate. The test for causality shows that this relationship is bidirectional in provincial level, so that provinces having high unemployment rates are compensated by better conditions of housing market which means low housing prices.