Rising housing costs have become a prevalent issue in many high-income countries, contributing to financial insecurity and social unrest. Whilst the UK presents one of the more extreme examples of this trend, Japan’s house prices have tended to remain low in comparison to other high-income nations. Nevertheless, this tendency no longer seems certain, especially in popular metropolitan areas such as Tokyo.

In this webinar, Professor Jiro Yoshida will provide an overview of the unique characteristics of Japan’s housing market, focusing on the country’s geographical constraints, its bubble economy of the 1980s and successive governments’ regulatory and fiscal policies, as well as challenges to housing stock management. Dr Filipa Sá will then address the rapid increase in UK house prices since the late 1990s and demonstrate how foreign investment, amongst other factors, has contributed to rising prices whilst decreasing the number of long-term vacant dwellings.

 

About The contributors

 

Professor Jiro Yoshida

Jiro Yoshida is the Arthur P. Pasquarella Professor of Business at The Pennsylvania State University and Project/Guest Professor of Economics at the University of Tokyo. He holds a B.Engi. from the University of Tokyo, an MS from MIT and an MS and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research areas include real estate finance, macroeconomics and asset pricing. His research has been published in top journals such as the Journal of Finance; Real Estate Economics; and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is also the recipient of the 2007 AREUEA Dissertation Award (1st place) and several prestigious fellowships, including the Fulbright Award, Real Estate Research Institute Grant and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grants. His work has also been featured in major media outlets, including the BBC, Forbes, and the New York Times, amongst others.

 

Dr Filipa Sá

Filipa Sá is Reader in Applied Economics at King’s Business School. Prior to joining King’s in 2013, she worked as a Teaching Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge. Filipa holds an MSc in Economics from the LSE and a PhD from MIT. After her PhD, she worked as an economist at the Bank of England for two-and-a-half years, during the global financial crisis. Her research has been published in the Economic Journal; the Journal of the European Economic Association; and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, amongst others. Her current research areas include capital flows and their effect on house prices; immigration and productivity; and the heterogenous effects of Covid-19 on different socio-economic groups. Filipa’s research on capital flows and house prices has had a significant policy impact and informed the decision by the UK government to impose a stamp duty surcharge on foreign buyers of UK property from April 2021.

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Booking Essential| Admission Free