가계동향조사를 이용한 주택가격과 가계소비의 관계 분석

초록

The empirical fact that house prices tend to positively commove with household consumption has been attracting increasingly larger attention both from academia and policy commentators. A long-standing question came to existence, as a result, whether housing wealth affects consumption. The current state of literature is yet to reach a consensus. To resolve the question, it is essential to explore household-level microeconomic data, which is rare. Because of the data availability problem, there is only a small literature drawing on the UK Family Expenditure Survey. Even the small literature yields conflicting results. Campbell and Cocco (2007) present that older homeowners raise their consumption in response to a rise in house prices, while younger homeowners and renters decrease, in line with the wealth effect hypothesis. In contrast, Attanasio and Weber (1994), and Attanasio et al. (2009) report that the positive relationship of house price growth and consumption is larger for young households, but insignificant for old, which contradicts the redistributive wealth effect hypothesis. They put forward the endogeneity hypothesis, namely the apparent positive association between house prices and aggregate consumption in the UK data merely captures a common macroeconomic factor such as future income prospects of households that affects both house prices and consumption. At the backdrop of the debate on what underlies the positive relationship between house prices and consumption, this paper examines the Korean Family Expenditure Survey over the period of from 2003Q1 to 2016Q4. Applying the pseudo-panel methodology developed by Deaton (1985), which is now a standard empirical tool in the literature, I investigate plausibility of the two competing views for the Korean data. Following Attanasio et al. (2009) and Campbell and Cocco (2007), I construct two sets of cohort samples: the birth-year cohort sample and the homeownership cohort sample. The regression model is formulated by adopting the standard framework of the life cycle model of consumption. Main findings are as follows. In the first place, I confirm that the positive relationship indeed exists in the Korean data as well. When controlled by homeownership, I do not find any empirical evidences that effects of house prices on consumption is stronger for homeowners. Regression analyses show that responses of household consumption to house prices differ by age rather than homeownership. Specifically, young households tend to increase their consumption responding to a rise in house prices while old households do not. Overall empirical findings of this study suggest that the existing explanations developed in the context of the UK or the US economy lacks relevancy for the Korean data.

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