Real estate bubbles and contagion: new empirical evidence from Canada

Abstract

This paper investigates the presence of bubbles in the new housing market and resale housing market of four Canadian census metropolitan areas (CMAs): Vancouver, Toronto, Victoria and Hamilton, and whether the bubbles are contagious. The GSADF test developed by Phillips, Shi, and Yu (2015) is applied on a monthly price-to-rent ratio from January 1988 to December 2018 to date-stamp episodes of bubbles in these markets. Our results suggest that among the four CMAs, only the resale housing market of Victoria was exuberant, while for the new housing market, both Victoria and Vancouver experienced exuberance. Subsequently, using a non-parametric model with time-varying coefficients performed by Greenaway-McGrevy and Phillips (2016), we find the evidence of bubbles migration from the new housing and resale housing markets within and between these CMAs.