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Who Creates Housing Bubbles? An Agent-Based Study

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8235))

Abstract

This paper develops an agent-based spatial model of the housing market. A house is many families’ biggest asset. It is also widely held by financial institutions, in the form of mortgage-backed securities. As a result, avoiding extreme housing price volatility is crucial for maintaining financial stability of the nation. The housing market is very unique: it is less liquid, highly regulated, highly leveraged, involves speculative behaviors, and exhibits spatial correlations. To this day, there are few housing market models that take into account all of these complications. In this paper, we propose an agent-based spatial model of the U.S. housing market. Preliminary results show that sensible aggregate outcomes that are generated from individual interaction, and a lenient lending criteria might be responsible for causing a housing bubble.

Jiaqi Ge like to thank Dr. Leigh Tesfatsion, Dr. Steve Kautz, Dr. Catherine Kling, Dr. Joseph Herriges, and Dr. John Schroeter at Iowa State University for their advice, comments, and help. He also like to thank Tom Randall Real Estate Team, Hunziker & Associates, and an anonymous realtor for their helpful inputs.

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Correspondence to Jiaqi Ge .

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Ge, J. (2014). Who Creates Housing Bubbles? An Agent-Based Study. In: Alam, S., Parunak, H. (eds) Multi-Agent-Based Simulation XIV. MABS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8235. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54783-6_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54783-6_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-54782-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-54783-6

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