The Interaction of Housing Price and Credit: Some Evidence from Iran

Housing price swings have always been under the spotlight for policy-makers and academics. Financial accelerator mechanism (developed by Bernanke and Gertler, 1999) can provide some explanation to these fluctuations. With focusing on the concept of financial accelerator, this paper sheds light on the long- and short-run correlation of housing prices and credit in Iran. We applied a Structural Vector Error Correction Model (SVECM) to housing and credit market over period 1988q2-2015q1. Our findings confirm the existence of a cointegrated relationship between credit and housing prices. In a long-run perspective, the causation goes from credit to housing prices. However, in the short-run we find an existence of contemporaneous bi-directional dependence between housing prices and credit. In general, we find the evidence of housing collateral effect in housing and credit markets in Iran. However, this role is small and limited compared to the same role in countries with developed financial and mortgage markets.