Testing the Predictability of U.S. Housing Price Index Returns Based on an IVX-AR Model

We use ten common macroeconomic variables to test for the predictability of the quarterly growth rate of house price index (HPI) in the United States during 1975:Q1–2018:Q2. We extend the instrumental variable based Wald statistic (IVX-KMS) proposed by Kostakis, Magdalinos, and Stamatogiannis to a new instrumental variable based Wald statistic (IVX-AR) which accounts for serial correlation and heteroscedasticity in the error terms of the linear predictive regression model. Simulation results show that the proposed IVX-AR exhibits excellent size control regardless of the degree of serial correlation in the error terms and the persistency in the predictive variables, while IVX-KMS displays severe size distortions. The empirical results indicate that the percentage of residential fixed investment in GDP is fairly a robust predictor of the growth rate of HPI. However, other macroeconomic variables’ strong predictive ability detected by IVX-KMS is likely to be driven by the highly correlated error terms in the predictive regressions and thus becomes insignificant when the proposed IVX-AR method is implemented. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement.