Bhanupong Nidhiprabha: The authors have extended the understanding of housing price cycles in East Asia by introducing two measures of dynamic co-movement based on dynamic correlation (cohesion) and time-varying dynamic conditional correlation. The problem with correlation analysis is that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Even when the Granger causality test is used (Table 13), it does not mean causality in the usual cause–effect reasoning, because Granger causality is based on prediction criterion. There may be other factors that influence housing prices to move in tandem in East Asia, such as expectations, uncertainties, panic, or animal spirits. These factors are difficult to measure but it is not impossible to find some proxies for such expectations.
The authors need to provide a convincing explanation of the co-movement of international housing prices rather than interpreting the statistical result from ten marching tables on variance decomposition in various countries. In addition, readers should...