Maneuvering the property hot air balloon in Singapore

This paper examines the effects of the Singapore government ongoing efforts to manage private property prices, measured by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) Property Price Index of Singapore’s private property market. Since 2009, the Singapore government has unveiled numerous property market cooling measures in a bid to curb skyrocketing property prices. Using quarterly data from 1991 to 2013, this paper attempts to identify key drivers of Singapore’s private property prices using two econometric models, simple OLS and autoregressive distributed lag model. This paper finds that the May 1996 government measure that included capital gains taxation had a clear impact on private property prices. On the contrary, many of the newly implemented cooling measures such as additional stamp duties and controlling buyers’ loan-to-value ratios appear not to have a significant effect on private property prices.Master of Scienc