164th mBank-CASE seminar: Is a bubble inflating on Poland’s housing market?
mBank and CASE – Center for Social and Economic Research
cordially invite you to:
the 164th mBank – CASE Seminar:
Is a bubble inflating on Poland’s housing market?
Panelists:
Dr. Adam Czerniak – Polityka Insight, Warsaw School of Economics
Prof. Jacek Łaszek - Warsaw School of Economics
Stefan Kawalec - Capital Strategy
The seminar will take place on January 23, 2020 from 3:00 to 5:00 pm
at mBank S.A. head office, Senatorska 18, room 5.3, 5th floor, Warsaw
Language of the seminar: Polish
About the seminar
Despite the ongoing economic slowdown, prices of residential real estate in most provincial capitals are growing by more than 10%, on both the primary and the secondary markets. This is supported by historically low interest rates, declines on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, fast income growth, record high household sentiment and migration to cities, including by economic migrants from the former Soviet Union. As a result, we also have ever more short-term investment capital on the market, and the price spiral is being driven by flip transactions where buyers renovate apartments for resale, reaping annualized profits of 10-15% after just a few weeks. The growing inflow of investment capital onto the real estate market is attested to by factors including a doubling in value of cash transactions (from 2 billion to 4 billion per quarter) from 2015 to 2018. Does that mean that a house-price bubble is inflating in Poland? And if so, when should we expect it to pop, and what consequences can that have for the economy? What can we do to limit further price growth and protect the economy against the effects of a crash? These questions will be raised during an mBank-CASE seminar by Adam Czerniak, Ph.D., research director at Polityka Insight and head of the Institutional and Political Economy Department at the Warsaw School of Economics, which has been working for years on questions of imbalances on the residential market. Stefan Kawalec, president of Capital Strategy, and Professor Jacek Łaszek of the Warsaw School of Economics will comment on his remarks.
PANELISTS:
Dr. Adam Czerniak is director of research and chief economist at Polityka Insight. He also directs the Institutional and Political Economy Department at the Warsaw School of Economics, and lectures at the National School of Public Administration. Until 2012 Dr. Czerniak worked as a market economist, first at Invest Bank and later in the monetary economics department of Kredyt Bank. He has also worked with the World Bank and the FOR Foundation, and received a fellowship from the Ronald Coase Institute. Dr. Czerniak is the author of academic publications on economic sociology and institutional economics. For 10 years he has performed academic work on the functioning of the residential market, including in particular analysis of the process by which price bubbles are created. In 2019 he published an original typology of models of residential capitalism in EU countries.
Jacek Łaszek, Ph.D., habilitated, is an associate professor of the Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) in the Department of Market and Competition Analysis, Collegium of Business Administration. He received his doctorate from the Central School of Planning and Statistics and his habilitation from SGH. In 1990-1991 he advised the Council of Ministers' Economic Committee on reform of the residential sector, joining the World Bank's Housing Construction Finance Project in 1992 and becoming project manager in 1994. Dr. Łaszek later worked as a consultant for USAID and the World Bank, and in 1998 became an advisor to ING (on residential savings accounts and mortgage lending. In 2001 he began advising the president of the National Bank of Poland, taking over leadership of the team in 2008. Dr. Łaszek completed post-graduate studies and internships in the U.S., Canada and several EU countries and has participated in international research programs on issues of real estate, mortgage banking, housing policy and the housing market, and has been a member of working groups of the ECB and the ESRB (on real-estate market risk). He has published in Poland and abroad.
Stefan Kawalec is president of the advisory firm Capital Strategy. In 1989-1994 he worked in the Finance Ministry as the chief economic adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, and later as a Deputy Minister. He co-authored the Balcerowicz Plan (1989-1990) and oversaw the restructuring and privatization of state-owned banks, in particular by preparing and implementing an innovative law on financial restructuring of companies and banks (1991-1994). Mr. Kawalec has served many times as a consultant on economic transformation and financial system reforms in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Warsaw. Together with Ernest Pytlarczyk, Mr. Kawalec co-authored the book Paradoks euro. Jak wyjść z pułapki wspólnej waluty? (published in English in 2019 as The Economic Consequences of the Euro, and the Safest Escape Plan) (2016). He co-wrote the report Jak mobilizować dodatkowe oszczędności emerytalne? (How to mobilize additional retirement savings) (2015); the solutions it proposed were later applied in the 2018 law on employee retirement savings. He is the co-author of Raport dotyczący optymalnej struktury polskiego systemu bankowego w średnim okresie (Report on the optimal structure of the Polish banking system over the medium term) (2012).
Photo: Pixabay
