房屋及家居用品：购房支出渠道

Of House and Home-Related Goods: The HomePurchase Channel of ExpenditureGiovanni Favara, James Graham, and Geng Li∗June 6, 2025AbstractHome-related spending in categories such as furnishings, renovations, and re-pairs is tied to housing market activity, with significant implications for aggregateexpenditure dynamics. We refer to this relationship as the home purchase channelof expenditure. Using household-level panel data we estimate that home purchaseslead to sizable increases in home-related spending, but not to increases in goods andservices unrelated to home purchase. These findings are robust to the use of close-control groups and placebo tests. We then build a heterogeneous household modelwith housing, home renovations, and home-related durables that is calibrated tomatch our household-level evidence. Model simulations of housing market shocksgenerate large fluctuations in home-related and total expenditure.We show thatthe home purchase channel amplifies aggregate expenditure dynamics, with home-related spending accounting for around half of total spending fluctuations over thehousing cycle.Keywords: Housing, Home purchase, Household spending, Housing cy-cleJEL: D12, D15, E21, E32, R31Giovanni Favara:Federal Reserve Board of Governors,giovanni.favara@frb.gov.James Gra-Universityof Sydney and the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis at ANU,james.a.graham@sydney.edu.au.Geng Li:Federal Reserve Board of Governors, geng.li@frb.gov.Fortheir many helpful comments we thank William Gamber, Christopher Gibbs, Victoria Gregory, PatrickMoran, Jonathan Payne, Conor Walsh, Egon Zakrajsek, Donghai Zhang, Angela Zheng and conferenceand seminar participants at the Bank of Canada, Columbia University, Federal Reserve Board, McMasterUniversity, Midwest Macroeconomics Meeting, National University of Singapore, New York University,Sydney Macroeconomics Reading Group Workshop, Virtual Australian Macroeconomics Workshop, theWestern Economic Association International Conference, and the Zicklin School of Business at BaruchCollege.The views of the paper are the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the FederalReserve Board or its staff. The authors do not have any sources of external research support, financialrelationships, or other potential conflicts of interest to disclose. 1.IntroductionThe housing market is a key driver of aggregate fluctuations, as suggested by thelarge macroeconomic spillovers observed during recent housing booms and busts. Muchof the theoretical and empirical literature links housing market developments to the realeconomy through consumption spending responses to mortgage credit conditions, hous-ing wealth, and collateral channels.1 The literature implicitly assumes that these chan-nels have uniform effects across all categories of spending.However, as illustrated inFigure 1, cyclical measures of housing demand are highly correlated with home-relatedexpenditures—such as furniture and major appliances—and are only weakly correlatedwith other unrelated expenditures. Our goal in this paper is to investigate the microe-conomic drivers and macroeconomic implications of this spending co-movement with thehousing market, which we refer to as thehome purchase channel of expenditure.Figure 1: Home Sales and Household Expenditures19701980-80-60-40-2002040Deviation from trend (%)New House SalesHousing-Related Expenditure (RHS)Housing-Unrelated Expenditure (RHS)Notes:Annual data reported as log-deviations from trend, estimated using the Hamilton (2018) filter.NBER recession dates shaded in grey. The correlation between new home sales and home-related expen-diture is 0.69; the correlation with housing unrelated expenditure is 0.28.Source:Authors’ calculations using data from U.S.Census Bureau et al. (2024) and U.S.Bureau ofEconomic Analysis (2024b).Several categories of household expenditures are closely tied to home purchases. Forexample, new homeowners may carry out home improvements and purchase goods—furniture, fixtures, and fittings—more customized to their new dwelling.Additionally,households may conduct home maintenance and repairs prior to selling their currentproperty. Consistent with these intuitions, recent empirical studies find that home-relatedexpenditures rise substantially around the date of housing transactions (Best et al., 2018;Benmelech et al., 2023).1See, for example, Favilukis et al. (2017), Berger et al. (2017), Justiniano et al. (2019), Kaplan et al.(2020), Mian et al. (2013), Aladangady (2017), and Graham et al. (2023). 1990200020102020-20-15-10-5051015Deviation from trend (%)1 However, the broader spending implications of this home purchase channel of expen-diture are understudied.Home-related spending comprises a significant share of totalconsumer spending. For example, furnishings and durable household equipment, an im-portant component of home-related spending, accounts for 23 percent of durable goodsand 8 percent of total goods expenditure.2Therefore, under the home