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Constant-Quality House Price Indexes for Switzerland

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics volume 144, pages 561–575 (2008)Cite this article

Summary

The measurement of house price movements is a vital topic from both academic and practical perspectives and hence has been the focus of much research. There is almost unanimous consensus in the literature that house price indexes should control for the quality of properties; the most widely used methods to attain this aim are the hedonic and repeat sales approaches. The objective of this paper is to compare the Swiss house prices indexes published by the Swiss National Bank (SNB), which are constructed using medians of list prices as published in newspapers and on the internet, to hedonic indexes based on sale prices for the period 1985 to 2006. We find that the list price indexes exhibit quite a different price path than the hedonic indexes during the period. In particular, they appear to overstate price changes in housing markets. We attribute this, at least in part, to changes over time in the composition of the sample of properties on the market.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Urban and Public Affairs, University of Louisville, Louisville, USA

    Steven C. Bourassa

  2. CEREBEM, BEM Management School, Talence, France

    Steven C. Bourassa & Martin Hoesli

  3. HEC and SFI, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Martin Hoesli

  4. Business School, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

    Martin Hoesli

  5. IAZI/CIFI, Zurich, Switzerland

    Donato Scognamiglio & Philippe Sormani

Authors
  1. Steven C. Bourassa
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  2. Martin Hoesli
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  3. Donato Scognamiglio
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  4. Philippe Sormani
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The authors thank the editors for helpful comments.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Bourassa, S.C., Hoesli, M., Scognamiglio, D. et al. Constant-Quality House Price Indexes for Switzerland. Swiss J Economics Statistics 144, 561–575 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399266

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03399266

JEL-Classification

  • E31
  • R31

Keywords

  • house price indexes
  • hedonic method
  • Switzerland