The Causal Story of Housing and House Prices

Ed Lima is one of my favourite economists, but I've only heard your name recently and yet a few of my audience members already know of you. In order to describe a cause, you have to have an intervention. Any causal statement is making implicit intervention. The problem with the macroeconomics, there are no real experiments. There's no interventions except maybe some accidents now and then. So it's very hard, for example, to tell what the impact of monetary policy is because that's occurring not in an experiment. Nobody randomizes it. We just look at correlations in the data. What I like to say is correlations are in the data, but causality is in your mind.