View of Wellington harbour from Mount Victoria Lookout - a place with very high house prices and disappointingly low productivity.

Productivity and House Prices

This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and will run from 1 January 2026 until 31 December 2027.  The project team are Christoph Thoenissen as PI and Emily Whitehouse,  Alberto Montagnoli  and Juan Paez-Farrell as co-investigators along with two research associates Rachel Cho and Thomas Siddall .

Since the global financial crisis of 2008 the UK economy has stagnated, with productivity growth falling to virtually zero whilst real house prices have risen by 20%. Why is this and what are the implications for households and the wider economy? This innovative project brings together disparate branches of economics to help us understand the important, yet largely unexplored, relationship between house prices and productivity. We will examine this relationship from a macroeconomic and household finance perspective, yielding new insights into how house price changes influence individuals' investment and savings behaviour, and how this ultimately affects productivity and economic growth.