Urban land values in Santiago: a time series assessment of the so-called “Chilean Miracle”
International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis
ISSN: 1753-8270
Article publication date: 3 February 2025
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to build a set of long-term, geographically controlled land value indices for Santiago de Chile, with which to test land rent theory predictions regarding macroeconomic impacts.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses a geographic cluster approach to the Laspeyres estimator, weighted by the stock of available land plots and their market offers per zone, to create two quarterly land value indices for Gran Santiago during the period 1983Q4–2016Q2. Subsequently, this paper implements dynamic time series methods (Vector Error Correction) as a baseline to determine the effect of economic performance and interest rate on urban land values.
Findings
The two land value indices are correctly predicted by economic and interest rate shocks, as theoretically expected. In addition, this paper found that land values grew faster-than-predicted during the period of the so-called “Chilean Miracle” (1992–1998), a situation associated in the literature with worsened housing affordability and socio-spatial inequality.
Originality/value
The land value indices offer unprecedented time-series precision in tracking the long-term performance of real estate markets in a Latin American city, allowing us to produce short- and long-term (accumulative) time-series causality analyses.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank funding from The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy – Latin American and Caribbean Division, for the project: “Estimación de la tasa de variación general del precio del suelo de Santiago de Chile”, from which we extracted the land value indices used in this article.
Citation
Garza, N., Gasic, I. and Larrain, C. (2025), "Urban land values in Santiago: a time series assessment of the so-called “Chilean Miracle”", International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-11-2024-0183
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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