Sébastien BOURDIN, EM Normandie, France
Jérôme PICAULT, Université Paris-dauphine, France
Arnaud SIMON, Université Paris-dauphine, France
This study deals with the spatial divergence between the French mortgage stock and the housing prices. We observe that a certain number of departments, such as Val-de-Marne and Drôme, have an outstanding mortgage amount that grows much faster than their housing prices. At the opposite, the amount of outstanding mortgage may increase slower than expected in regard to the real estate prices, Paris for instance. The aim of this paper is to document these spatial divergences and to analyse their drivers.
Our preliminary findings suggest that the financial divergence is significantly spatially autocorrelated. However, when we split our dataset in two sub-period (2010-2015 and 2015-2020), we observe a significant reduction of the spatial autocorrelation in the second sub-period. The financial local policies seem to become more independent across departments. This 2015 break coincides with two major events that have a significant impact on the spatial organization of the French territory and the associated financing policies: the increasing of money supply with the Quantitative easing policy launched by the ECB, and the French regional reform of 2015 that reorganized the French administration from 22 regions to 13 regions.
To understand what are the main drivers of the financial divergence and of its evolutions, we implement a spatial econometrics model where we regress the financial divergence over real estate, demographic, and economic variables. Our results suggest that traditional variables explaining credit and real estate dynamics have a little power to explain the dynamics of the financial divergences, especially after 2015. We hypothesize that quantitative easing policies and regional reform transformed the underfinancing and overfinancing local policies, through the channel of the lending decision of the regional banks.
Mots clés : Financial geography|mortgage stock|housing prices|French regional reform
A104653JP