Downward nominal house price rigidity: Evidence from three centuries of data on housing transactions

By analyzing housing data from the period 1850 to 2019 in Norway, we find evidence of downward nominal house price rigidity. More specifically, we document that there is a marked fraction of repeat-sales housing transactions with a zero nominal price change and show that this fraction increases in housing market downturns. While the former result reveals a rigidity in nominal house prices, the latter suggests that the direction of it is predominantly downward. •We use data from 1850–2019 on repeated house sales in Norway to investigate nominal rigidity in housing markets.•We show that a disproportionate fraction of repeated sales are done with exactly zero nominal price changes.•We show that the share of sales with exact zero nominal price change is increasing in housing market downturns, indicating that households are downwardly nominal rigid.