Moritz Schularick

Overview

Moritz Schularick is a financial historian and macroeconomist whose empirical research on long-run house prices and mortgage credit has become central reference material for land-economics arguments on this wiki. He is identified in the corpus as affiliated with the University of Bonn and later with Sciences Po / the Kiel Institute [VERIFY: current affiliation and exact dates could not be confirmed from the supplied corpus pages alone].[1][2]

Schularick's relevance to the Georgist case is indirect but substantial: he is a mainstream academic economist with no Georgist framing, yet his two most-cited works on this wiki supply the long-run empirical evidence that (a) the postwar rise in housing wealth is overwhelmingly a land-price phenomenon, and (b) the credit fuelling modern business cycles is overwhelmingly mortgage credit secured against real estate. Neither paper discusses land value taxation, rent theory, or Henry George; their significance is inferential, drawn by this wiki and by other researchers building on the datasets.[1][2]

Key Works on This Wiki

No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012 (2017)

Co-authored with Katharina Knoll and Thomas Steger, published in the American Economic Review 107(2): 331–353. The paper assembles the first long-run, internationally comparable annual house-price dataset covering 14 advanced economies over roughly 140 years. Its central finding is that real house prices were essentially flat from the late nineteenth century to roughly 1950, then rose sharply — and that decomposing house prices into land and structure components shows rising land prices explain about 80 percent of the global house-price increase since World War II, while construction costs tracked the price of produced goods with comparatively little long-run increase. The authors offer a transport-cost explanation: large pre-WWII reductions in transport costs expanded the effective supply of usable land, suppressing land-price growth, while comparable land-augmenting reductions have not recurred since.[1]

This paper functions as the historical price-level backbone for the wiki's capital-share-rise-is-land outcome, complementing Rognlie (2015) (who decomposes capital's income share) and Bonnet et al. (2021) (who decompose wealth-to-income ratios). All three reach a compatible conclusion using different data and methods: modern advanced-economy asset appreciation is substantially a story about land, not produced capital.[1]

The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles (2014)

Co-authored with Òscar Jordà and Alan M. Taylor as NBER Working Paper No. 20501. The paper constructs a new long-run dataset of disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies covering 1870–2011, documenting that the share of mortgage loans on banks' balance sheets roughly doubled over the 20th century — from about 30% in 1900 to about 60% by 2007. The authors find that mortgage credit became a statistically significant predictor of financial crises in the post-WWII period (but not before), and that only mortgage credit booms — not non-mortgage credit booms — are associated with deeper recessions and slower recoveries in the post-WWII era. They describe the transformation starkly: "To a large extent the core business model of banks in advanced economies today resembles that of real estate funds."[2]

This paper is cited on the wiki as the mainstream credit-side complement to the land speculation cycle narrative. Where Georgist analysts argue that land speculation drives the cycle, Jordà–Schularick–Taylor provide the rigorous empirical documentation that the credit fuelling those cycles is overwhelmingly mortgage credit. The paper does not separate land value from structure value, so it cannot speak directly to the Georgist distinction between land and improvements.[2]

Significance for the Georgist Case

Schularick's work matters to this wiki for three reasons:

1. Mainstream authority without Georgist framing. Both papers are published through top-tier mainstream channels (the American Economic Review and the NBER working-paper series) by economists with no Georgist affiliation. Their findings carry the same "not a fringe claim" weight this wiki attaches to similarly-sourced results like the Mirrlees Review.[1][2]
2. The land-price decomposition. The Knoll–Schularick–Steger finding that ~80% of the postwar house-price boom is land prices provides 140 years of price-level evidence reinforcing the core Georgist claim that land appreciation — not produced-capital returns — is the dominant driver of modern asset-value growth.[1]
3. The credit-cycle mechanism. The Jordà–Schularick–Taylor finding that mortgage credit dominates modern bank balance sheets and predicts financial crises documents the credit channel through which land-price dynamics translate into systemic financial risk — the mechanism the land speculation causes cycles narrative depends on.[2]

Neither paper makes a policy argument about land value taxation. Any Georgist inference drawn from them is this wiki's interpretation, not the authors' stated purpose.[1][2]

See Also

• No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012
• The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles
• Most of the modern rise in the capital share is land, not capital
• Narrative: Land Speculation Causes Boom and Bust
• The 2008 Financial Crisis
• Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share (Rognlie 2015)

Sources

1. Katharina Knoll, Moritz Schularick & Thomas Steger (2017), "No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870–2012," American Economic Review 107(2): 331–353. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20150501 — used for authorship, affiliation (University of Bonn / Sciences Po / Kiel Institute), the 14-country 140-year dataset, the ~80% land-price decomposition finding, the transport-cost explanation, and the paper's relation to the capital-share-rise-is-land outcome. All claims drawn from the wiki's research page for this paper, which itself relied on converging secondary summaries; the AER full text was not directly fetched.
2. Òscar Jordà, Moritz Schularick & Alan M. Taylor (2014), "The Great Mortgaging: Housing Finance, Crises, and Business Cycles," NBER Working Paper No. 20501. NBER PDF — used for co-authorship, the 17-country disaggregated credit dataset, the mortgage-share doubling finding, the post-WWII crisis-prediction result, the recession-severity finding, and the quoted characterisation of banks as real estate funds. All claims drawn from the wiki's research page for this paper.

[VERIFY: Schularick's current institutional affiliation, birth year, doctoral training, and any additional land-specific contributions beyond these two papers could not be confirmed from the supplied corpus pages alone. A future editor with access to his academic profile should add biographical details and confirm the Sciences Po / Kiel Institute affiliation noted on the Knoll–Schularick–Steger research page.]