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Housing market transactions are a matter of public record and thus provide a rare opportunity to analyze the behavior, performance, and strategies of individual investors. Using data for all housing transactions in the Los Angeles area from 1988-2009, this paper provides empirical evidence on investor behavior that is consistent with several rationales for speculative investment in the finance literature, including the roles of middlemen and naïve speculators. Speculative activity by novice investors increased sharply in the recent housing boom. These investors earned little more than the market rate of appreciation and demonstrated no ability to foresee market price movements.

The COVID-19 pandemic created the largest experiment in working from home. We study how persistent telework may change energy and transport consumption and costs in Germany to assess the distributional and environmental implications when working from home will stick. Based on data from the German Microcensus and available classifications of working-from-home feasibility for different occupations, we calculate the change in energy consumption and travel to work when 15% of employees work full time from home. Our findings suggest that telework translates into an annual increase in heating energy expenditure of 110 euros per worker and a decrease in transport expenditure of 840 euros per worker. All income groups would gain from telework but high-income workers gain twice as much as low-income workers. The value of time saving is between 1.3 and 6 times greater than the savings from reduced travel costs and almost 9 times higher for high-income workers than low-income workers. The direct effects on CO₂ emissions due to reduced car commuting amount to 4.5 millions tons of CO₂, representing around 3 percent of carbon emissions in the transport sector.

We use a quantitative spatial equilibrium model to evaluate the distributional and welfare impacts of a recent temporary rent control policy in Berlin, Germany. We calibrate the model to key features of Berlin���s housing market, in particular the recent gentrification of inner city locations. As expected, gentrification benefits rich homeowners, while poor renter households lose. Our counterfactual analysis mimicks the rent control policy. We find that this policy reduces welfare for rich and poor households and in fact, the percentage change in welfare is largest for the poorest households. We also study alternative affordable housing policies such as subsidies and re-zoning policies, which are better suited to address the adverse consequences of gentrification., CEPA Discussion Papers; 39

In 2013 buy-to-rent investors — referred to as buy-to-let (BTL) in the United Kingdom — accounted for 13% of all UK mortgage-funded housing transactions and for an even greater fraction of non-mortgage sales. This paper studies the behaviour of BTL investors using 2009–14 micro data. Combining the universe of transactions from the England and Wales Land Registry with online listings from WhenFresh/Zoopla, I identify a BTL purchase as a transaction where a rental listing on the same property appears on the web in the six subsequent months. The micro data reproduce the increase in BTL transactions over 2009–14 and show that BTL investors are more likely to invest in regions with large rental markets. I find that, on average, BTL investors pay 0.9%–1.1% less than other buyers for equivalent properties. Discounts are larger (around 2%) in regions with less liquid housing markets. Results are robust to including detailed geographical fixed effect and advertised sale prices in the regressions. I also show that properties purchased by investors spend on average five days less on the market.

In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability. Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers. However, much depends on the land-use planning regime which profoundly affects the supply response. It is helpful to make the distinction between overshooting of house prices due to extrapolative expectations and 'frenzy', given fundamentals, and shifts in possibly fragile fundamentals. The contribution of careful econometric modelling to estimating the effects of the former is demonstrated: central banks or other policy makers should institute quarterly surveys of house price expectations of potential housing market participants to help assess the first type of overshooting. Assessing the fragility or otherwise of the economic fundamentals is more complex. Credit supply conditions in the mortgage market are the 'elephant in the room'. Without taking a credit conditions measure into account, one simply cannot understand the behaviour of house prices, housing debt and consumption in countries such as Australia, the UK, the US, South Africa or France or understand vulnerability of some economies to high levels of household debt. Other financial and economic indicators of vulnerability are discussed, including high bank leverage ratios, high ratios of loans to deposits, debt, deficit and current account of ratios. Models of early warning of financial and economic crises estimated on large country panels need to be quite complex, for example, including some important interaction effects since shock transmission is very institution dependent.

We present a modified open monocentric city model that assumes that land is available for conversion into new housing throughout the city. The model predicts that positive local income shocks (i) increase the city's share of multi-family housing in new construction and (ii) lead to the construction of smaller units. We exploit the metro area samples of the American Housing Survey from 1984 to 2004 and find support for both predictions. We confirm that the adjustment process is driven by migration and is hindered by strict local land use control. Our findings imply that tight regulation may hamper metro area level labor market adjustment to positive economic shocks not only through limits on the quantity of newly supplied units but also by constraining their type to single-family houses and larger units that may be less suitable for would-be-migrants.

This paper studies a household's optimal demand for a reverse mortgage. These contracts allow homeowners to tap their home equity to finance consumption needs. In stylized frameworks, we show that the decision to enter a reverse mortgage is mainly driven by the differential between the aggregate appreciation of the house price and principal limiting factor on the one hand and the funding costs of a household on the other hand. We also study a rich life-cycle model that can explain the low demand for reverse mortgages as observed in US data. In this model, we analyze the optimal response of a household that is confronted with a health shock or financial disaster. If an agent suffers from an unexpected health shock, she reduces the risky portfolio share and is more likely to enter a reverse mortgage. On the other hand, if there is a large drop in the stock market, she keeps the risky portfolio share almost constant by buying additional shares of stock. Besides, the probability to take out a reverse mortgage is hardly affected.

A model in which homebuyers make a modest approximation leads house prices to display three features present in the data but usually missing from perfectly rational models: momentum at one-year horizons, mean reversion at ve-year horizons, and excess longer-term volatility relative to fundamentals. Valuing a house involves forecasting the current and future demand to live in the surrounding area. Buyers forecast using past transaction prices. Approximating buyers assume that past prices reect only contemporaneous demand, just like professional economists who use trends in housing prices to infer trends in housing demand. Consistent with survey evidence, this approximation leads buyers to expect increases in the market value of their homes after recent house price increases, to fail to anticipate the price busts that follow booms, and to be overcondent about the accuracy of their assessments of

Following the example of the Kalamazoo Promise initiated in 2005, place-based "Promise'' scholarship programs have proliferated over the past 8 years. These programs guarantee money towards the costs of attendance at selected colleges and universities provided that a student has resided and attended school within a particular public school district continuously for at least the four years prior to graduation. While some early programs have been studied in isolation, the impact of such programs in general is not well understood. In addition, although there is substantial and controversial variation from the original program's design, there is no direct evidence on how outcomes vary along with these design choices. We use a difference-in-difference approach to compare the evolution of both school enrollments and residential real estate prices around the announcement of these programs within the affected Promise zone and in the surrounding area. Taken together, our estimates suggest that these scholarships have important distributional effects that bear further examination. In particular, while estimates indicate that public school enrollments increase in Promise zones relative to their surrounding areas following Promise announcements, schools associated with merit-based programs experience increases in white enrollment and decreases in non-white enrollment. Furthermore, housing price effects are larger in neighborhoods with high quality schools and in the upper half of the housing price distribution, suggesting higher valuation by high-income households. These patterns lead us to conclude that such scholarships are primarily affecting the behavior of households living above the median income for whom they present the greatest value and that merit-based versions disproportionately impact white households.

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for unobservable location characteristics such as environmental amenities or the access to public goods and thereby reduces the estimated response of housing prices by one half compared to conventional estimates: we identify an income tax elasticity of rents of about 0.26. We complement this approach with census data on local sociodemographic characteristics and show that about one third of this effect can be traced back to a sorting of high-income households into low-tax municipalities. These findings are robust to a matching approach (MBDD) which compares identical residences on opposite sides of the boundary and a number of further sensitivity checks., KOF Working Papers, 362

A housing lottery in an Indian city provided winning slum dwellers the opportunity to move into improved housing on the city’s periphery. Fourteen years later, relative to lottery losers, winners report improved housing farther from the city center, but no change in family income or human capital. Winners also report increased isolation from family and caste networks and lower access to informal insurance. We observe significant program exit: 34% of winners never moved into the subsidized housing and 32% eventually exited. Our results point to the importance of considering social networks when designing housing programs for the poor.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Summary This study examines the behavior of Swiss house prices in relation to immigration flows for 85 regions from 2001 to 2006. The results show that the nexus between immigration and house prices holds even in an environment of low house price inflation and modest immigration flows. An immigration inflow equal to 1 % of an area’s population is coincident with an increase in prices for single-family homes of about 2.7 %, a result consistent with previous studies. The overall immigration effect for single-family houses captures almost two-thirds of the total price increase.

The paper studies the problems associated with the construction of price indexes for commercial properties that could be used in the System of National Accounts. Property price indexes are required for the stocks of commercial properties in the Balance Sheets of the country and related price indexes for the land and structure components of a commercial property are required in the Balance Sheet accounts of the country for the calculation of the Multifactor Productivity of the Commercial Property Industry. The paper uses a variant of the builder’s model that has been used to construct Residential Property Price Indexes. Geometric depreciation rates are estimated for commercial offices in Tokyo using assessment data for REITs. The problems associated with the decomposition of asset value into land and structure components are addressed. The problems associated with depreciating capital expenditures on buildings and with measuring the loss of asset value due to early retirement of the structure are also addressed.

We present empirical evidence on the heterogeneity in monetary policy transmission across countries with different home ownership rates. We use household-level data together with shocks to the policy rate identified from high-frequency data. We find that housing tenure reacts more strongly to unexpected changes in the policy rate in Germany and Switzerland - the OECD countries with the lowest home ownership rates - compared with existing evidence for the U.S. An unexpected decrease in the policy rate by 25 basis points increases the home ownership rate by 0.8 percentage points in Germany and by 0.6 percentage points in Switzerland. The response of non-housing consumption in Switzerland is less heterogeneous across renters and mortgagors, and has a different pattern across age groups than in the U.S. We discuss economic explanations for these findings and implications for monetary policy.

This paper describes a novel concept of customer discrimination in the housing market, neighbor discrimination. We build up a matching model with ethnic externalities where landlords differ in the number of apartments they own within the same building. Larger landlords discriminate more often only if some tenants are prejudiced against the minority group. Testing the null hypothesis whereby minority tenants are equally likely to have a large landlord provides a natural test for the existence of neighbor discrimination. In an empirical application, we show that this null hypothesis is rejected for African immigrants in the French private rental market. We then show that the local proportion of large landlords is positively correlated with African tenants’ probability of living in public housing, whereas this is not the case of other demographic groups.

The responsiveness of house prices to monetary policy shocks depends on the nature of the shock – expansionary versus contractionary – and on local housing supply elasticities. These findings are established based on a panel of 263 US metropolitan areas. We test and find supporting evidence for the hypothesis that expansionary monetary policy shocks have a larger impact on house prices when supply elasticities are low. Our results also suggest that contractionary shocks are orthogonal to supply elasticities, as implied by downward rigidity of housing supply. A standard theoretical conjecture is that contractionary shocks have a greater impact on house prices than expansionary shocks, as long as supply is not perfectly inelastic. For areas with high housing supply elasticity, our results are in line with this conjecture. However, for areas with an inelastic housing supply, we find that expansionary shocks have a greater impact on house prices than contractionary shocks. We provide evidence that the direction of the asymmetry is related to a momentum effect that is more pronounced when house prices are increasing than when they are falling.

In Transylvania, buildings with a high quality architecture have been constructed along the centuries. The purpose of the present study is to document the built heritage of Transylvania, particularly the Jewish buildings and especially those that had been neglected over the last years. The article is the continuation of the article about the Jewish architecture in Transylvania, with a case study about the Jewish girls’ school in Satu Mare. The research domain is interdisciplinary because it links History, Architecture, Art history and the problem of Globalization as well. The niche in this domain remains the fact that the buildings are not identified, rehabilitated, or promoted. Previous studies have mostly focused on synagogues and prayer houses. Most of the other precious buildings have been left aside. This study offers a new approach to change the point of view of the people who live in Romania, and helps them appreciate the heritage they have received.

The theme of this paper centres on the convergence and divergence of housing policy between two regimes inhabiting the same geographical space on the island of Ireland, as reflected in the development of the private rented sector (PRS) in both jurisdictions. Using a historical comparative analysis of key indicators, this paper aims not just to present an accurate picture of the state of policy towards the sector in both jurisdictions today, but to place this analysis within a framework which looks at the backdrop of overall housing systems. The paper postulates that while Northern Ireland and the South of Ireland are reflective of the Anglo Saxon tradition in housing, major historical differences in their pathways have brought clearly identifiable policy outcomes indicative of their differing status in comparative welfare analysis. While both jurisdictions have diverged significantly during the course of the twentieth century in the profile of policy and housing tenure mix, showing examples of path dependency at work, there is clear evidence of more recent convergence. More recent changes in housing policy in both jurisdictions away from direct social housing provision and the changing role of the private rented sector are also examined and a convergence theory is proposed.

Budget deficit has been a common fiscal pressure facing Chinese cities since the 1994 fiscal reform. Meanwhile, land lease sales have become a significant off-budgetary revenue to local governments since 2003. This paper investigates whether financing budget deficit is an important driving force of the recent soaring housing prices when local governments function as the monopoly supplier of urban land. A conceptual framework is developed to illustrate a transmission mechanism from budget deficit to housing prices. This leads to an empirical model consisting of two simultaneous structural equations for housing prices and land prices. Using data for the 35 major Chinese cities from 2003 to 2011, an empirical exercise shows that although budget deficit has a positive effect on land prices, it is the factors from demand side, such as amenities, income and the user cost of housing capital, that have been pulling up the housing prices.

Financially constrained borrowers have the incentive to influence the appraisal process in order to increase borrowing or reduce the interest rate. We document that the average valuation bias for residential refinance transactions is above 5%. The bias is larger for highly leveraged transactions, around critical leverage thresholds, and for transactions mediated through a broker. Mortgages with inflated valuations default more often. Lenders account for 60%–90% of the bias through pricing. This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.

We propose a new method to estimate quality adjusted commercial property price indexes using real estate investment trust (REIT) data. Our method is based on the present value approach, but the way the denominator (i.e., the discount rate) and the numerator (i.e., cash flows from properties) are estimated differs from the traditional method. We run a hedonic regression to estimate the quality adjusted discount rate based on the share prices of REITs, which can be regarded as the stock market’s valuation of the set of properties owned by the REITs. As for the numerator, we use rental prices associated only with new rental contracts rather than those associated with all existing contracts. Using a dataset with prices and cash flows for about 400 commercial properties included in Japanese REITs for the period 2001 to 2013, we find that our price index signals turning points much earlier than an appraisal-based price index; specifically, our index peaks in the second quarter of 2007, while the appraisal-based price index exhibits a turnaround only in the third quarter of 2008. Our results suggest that the share prices of REITs provide useful information in constructing commercial property price indexes.

This paper studies an economy inhabited by overlapping generations of homeowners and investors, with the only difference between the two being that homeowners derive utility from housing services whereas investors do not. Tight collateral constraint limits the borrowing capacity of homeowners and drives the equilibrium interest rate level down to the housing price growth rate, which makes housing attractive as a store of value for investors. As long as the rental market friction is high enough, the investors will hold a positive number of vacant houses in equilibrium. A housing bubble arises in an equilibrium in which investors hold houses for resale purposes only and without the expectation of receiving a dividend either in terms of utility or rent. The model can be applied to China, where the housing bubble can be attributed to the rapid decline in the replacement rate of the pension system.

We study equilibrium outcomes in markets with asymmetric information about asset values among both buyers and sellers. In residential real estate markets hard-to-observe neighborhood characteristics are a key source of information heterogeneity: sellers are usually better informed about neighborhood values than buyers, but there are some sellers and some buyers that are better informed than their peers. We propose a new theoretical framework for analyzing such markets with many heterogeneous assets and differentially informed agents. Consistent with the predictions from this framework, we find that changes in the seller composition towards (i) more informed sellers and (ii) sellers with a larger supply elasticity predict subsequent house-price declines and demographic changes in that neighborhood. This effect is larger for houses whose value depends more on neighborhood characteristics, and smaller for houses bought by more informed buyers. Our findings suggest that home owners have superior information about important neighborhood characteristics, and exploit this information to time local market movements.

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the characteristics of house price dynamics for a sample of 16 emerging economies from Asia and Central and Eastern Europe over the period of 1995-2011. Design/methodology/approach – Linking housing valuations to a set of conventional fundamental determinants – relative to both the supply and the demand side of the market, institutional factors and other asset prices – and modelling short-term price dynamics – which reflect gradual adjustment to underlying fundamentals –conclusions about the existence and the basic nature of house price overvaluation (undervaluation) are drawn. Findings – Overall, it was found that actual house prices in the sample of emerging economies are not overly disconnected from fundamentals. Rather, they tend to reflect a somewhat slow adjustment to shocks to the latter. Moreover, the evidence that housing valuations may be driven by overly optimistic (or pessimistic) expectations is, in general, weak. Research limitations/implications – Residential property prices used in the empirical analysis have many limitations: while some series are derived using a hedonic pricing method, others are based on floor area prices collected by national authorities; while some countries publish house prices in national currency per-square metre (or per apartment or per dwelling), others calculate an index number scaled to some base year; while some countries publish statistics for the whole national territory, others produce data only for the capital city or for the largest cities in the country; data from national sources refer to different types of residential property; finally, available time series are relatively short, which may adversely affect the robustness of estimation results. Practical implications – The decomposition suggested in the paper has important implications: it would be paramount, in fact, for policymakers to implement market-specific diagnoses, and to find the right policy instruments that can ideally distinguish between the two underlying components driving house price short-run dynamics. Originality/value – There is a very small body of empirical literature on housing market developments in emerging economies, especially if focussed on the comparisons between the actual dynamics of housing valuations and the equilibrium ones.

We show that since 1994, branching deregulations in the U.S have signi…cantly af- fected the supply of mortgage credit, and ultimately house prices. With deregulation, the number and volume of originated mortgage loans increase, while denial rates fall. But the deregulation has no eect on a placebo sample, formed of mortgage compa- nies that should not be aected by the regulatory change. This sharpens the causal interpretation of our results. Deregulation acts to relax access to mortgage credit, and pushes the demand for house ownership outwards. Interestingly, the fraction of securi- tized mortgage loans remains unchanged through the process. We …nd evidence house prices rise with branching deregulation, and particularly in Metropolitan Areas where construction is inelastic for topographic reasons. We document these results in a large sample of counties across the U.S. We also focus on a reduced cross-section formed by counties on each side of a state border, where a regression discontinuity approach is possible. Our conclusions are strengthened. JEL Classi…cation Numbers: G21, G10, G12

This paper studies the joint transitional dynamics of the foreclosures and house prices in a standard life-cycle incomplete markets model with housing and a realistic long-term mortgage structure. We calibrate our model to match several long-term features of the U.S. housing market, and analyze the effects of several unexpected and permanent shocks on the house price and the foreclosure rate both across the steady states and along the transition between the steady states. We examine permanent, unexpected shocks to the risk-free interest rate, the minimum down-payment ratio, and unemployment. During the transition, these shocks create large movements in house prices. More importantly, the foreclosure dynamics are quite significant along the transition compared to the steady-state changes, and there are strong feedbacks between foreclosures and house prices. We assess the effects of a temporary reduction in the risk-free interest rate, which has moderate effects on house prices but little effect on foreclosure dynamics. We also study the effects of an ex ante macroprudential policy, which establishes a minimum down-payment requirement at a higher threshold. Such a macroprudential policy helps substantially stabilize both house prices and foreclosures.

How does the change in the creditworthiness of a financial institution or sovereign impact its creditors’ solvency? I address this question in the context of the recent European sovereign debt crisis. Considering the network of Eurozone member states, interlinked through investment cross-holdings, I model default as a multi-stage disease with each credit-rating corresponding to a new infection phase, then derive systemic importance and vulnerability indicators in the presence of financial contagion, triggered by the change in the creditworthiness of a network member. I further extend the model to analyse not only negative, but also positive credit risk spillovers.

Houses and apartments sold in New York and New Jersey at prices above $1 million are subject to the so-called 1% "mansion tax" imposed on the full value of the transaction. This policy generates a discontinuity (a "notch") in the overall tax liability. We rely on this and other discontinuities to analyze implications of transfer taxes in the real estate market. Using administrative records of property sales, we find robust evidence of substantial bunching and show that the incidence of this tax for transactions local to the discontinuity falls on sellers, may exceed the value of the tax, and is not explained by tax evasion (although supply-side quality adjustments may play a role). Above the notch, the volume of missing transactions exceeds those bunching below the notch. Interpreting our results in the context of an equilibrium bargaining model, we conclude that the market unravels in the neighborhood of the notch: its presence provides strong incentive for buyers and sellers in the proximity of the threshold not to transact. This effect, the identification and recognition of which is novel to this paper, is above and beyond the standard extensive margin response. When present, unraveling affects interpretation and estimation of bunching estimates. Finally, we show that the presence of the tax affects how the market operates away from the threshold---taxation increases price reductions during the search process and in the bargaining stage and weakens the relationship between listing and sale prices. We interpret these results as demonstrating that taxation affects the ultimate allocation in this search market.

In January–October 2014, entities of all the forms of ownership built 729,400 apartments with the total fl oorspace of 56.1m sq. m. which is equal to 123.7% on the respective period of 2013. Despite the macroeconomic situation, in 2014 in the country the ratio between the price of housing and households’ income points to higher aff ordability of housing both on the primary and the secondary market. In 2014, the weighted average rate on MHL in rubles extended within a month rose from the minimum value of 11.97% in March to 12.84% in October. As of October 1, 2014, the debt on MHL amounted to 6.19% of the respective GDP which value is 1.21 p.p. higher than that as of October 1, 2013.

In January–February 2015, 155,900 apartments were commissioned and their total fl oorspace of 12.3m sq. meters exceeded by 40.6% the result of January–February 2014. According to the data of the Rosreestr, in 2014 the volume of registered titles to land plots (6735253 registration certificates), including the individuals’ titles exceeded by 1.69% the result of 2013. For the first time since 2010, growth in mortgage housing landing gave way in 2015 to a decrease: 43025 loans for the total amount of Rb 70.52bn extended in January 2015 were 9.85% and 11.07% lower in quantitative and monetary terms, respectively, than in January 2014. As of 1 February 2015, the overdue debt on MHL in rubles as percentage of the outstanding debt fell 0.12 p.p. as compared to 1 February 2014 and amounted to 0.87%. In January 2015, the weighted average rate on MHL in rubles amounted to 14.16%, which is 2.19 p.p. higher than the lowest value of the rate in 2014.

The purpose of the article is a critical analysis of the structure dynamics, consumption level and savings of the rural population and building on this basis of the economic model required to predict these indicators. The study founded that the standard of living of the rural population of Ukraine in the international classification falls under the category of 'absolute poverty'. Despite this, the share of savings in the structure of total expenditure of the rural population in recent years is higher than that of the urban population. An economic-metric model of consumption and savings of the rural population is build which, along with the basic economic factors, includes the consumer price index and the interest rate. Based on the functions received the level of consumption and household savings of rural areas is predicted. The findings suggest that in the current circumstances the share of savings for the rural population will remain at the level of 11-12%. This level is extremely low for the active development of the domestic economy, in particular the growth of GDP.

We estimate the effect of the UK Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) - a transfer tax on the purchase price of property or land - on different types of household mobility using micro data. Exploiting a discontinuity in the tax schedule, we isolate the impact of the tax from other determinants of mobility. We compare homeowners with self-assessed house values on either sides of a cut-off value where the tax rate jumps from 1 to 3 percent. We find that a higher SDLT has a strong negative impact on housing-related and short distance moves but does not adversely affect job-induced or long distance mobility. Overall, our results suggest that transfer taxes may mainly distort housing rather than labor markets.

Social democracy and market liberalism provide different solutions to the same problem: how to provide for life‐cycle dependency. Social democracy makes lateral transfers from producers to dependents by means of progressive taxation. Market liberalism uses financial markets to transfer financial entitlement over time. Social democracy came up against the upper limits of public expenditure in the 1970s. The ‘market turn’ from social democracy to market liberalism was enabled by liberalized credit in the 1980s. Much of this was absorbed into homeownership, which attracted majorities of households (and voters) in the developed world. Early movers did well, but eventually easy credit drove house prices beyond the reach of younger cohorts. Debt service diminished effective demand, which instigated financial instability. Both social democracy and market liberalism are currently in crisis.

In this paper we question whether parental resources are important for first-time buyers? We find a nuanced set of results. First, when parents help out financially, it clearly increases the probability of entering the housing market. Furthermore, some of this help is taken out as lower loan-to-value (LTV) and higher house value, and thus gives a head start on the rungs of the housing ladder. On the other hand, own income is economically much more important for first-time buyers than the potential or implicit help through having wealthy parents. Second, along with a growing gap between income and house prices, parental resources have become more important. Homeownership rates for young households with wealthy parents, or parents helping out financially, are increasing relative to young households without wealthy parents. We find no effect on the age of first entry into the housing market, which has declined for all young buyers, or on housing wealth inequality. Finally, we do not find that recent prudent mortgage-lending practices has caused a decline in the probability of entering the housing market, even for those who do not receive financial help from parents. We conclude that in a country like Norway, where there are well functioning credit markets and high intergenerational mobility, homeownership is still achievable without parental help, even under unfavorable conditions.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of geographic diversification in reducing housing investment risk. To characterize diversification potential, we estimate spatial correlation and integration among 401 U.S. metropolitan housing markets. The 2000s boom brought a marked uptrend in housing market integration associated with eased residential lending standards and rapid growth in private mortgage securitization. As boom turned to bust, other macroeconomic factors, including employment and income fundamentals, importantly contributed to the trending up in housing return integration. Portfolio simulations reveal substantially lower diversification potential and higher risk in the wake of increased market integration.

L'immobilier joue un rôle majeur dans les cycles économiques par plusieurs canaux. Le premier canal est celui de l’investissement résidentiel (Leamer, 2007). Nous montrons ici que dans plusieurs pays, ce canal a été important (États-Unis, Espagne). Le deuxième canal est celui d’un accélérateur financier, dans lequel la hausse des prix de l’immobilier accroît l’endettement des ménages dont il est le collatéral. Lorsque l’activité se retourne, la dette accumulée des ménages aggrave la récession et se traduit par une montée des inégalités (Mian et Sufi, 2014). Le troisième canal est celui de l’effet de richesse. S’il est discuté sur le plan théorique, il apparaît qu’en cas de bulle, il peut avoir un effet puissant. À partir de données exploitant les comptes nationaux, les comptes de patrimoine et les données détaillées sur la consommation, nous explorons ces trois canaux.

Si le marche de l’ancien constitue desormais la majorite du marche du logement, son developpement est relativement recent : il a accompagne, avec decalage, la montee de l’accession a la propriete. Longtemps neglige par les pouvoirs publics et les economistes, il doit au notariat d’avoir mis en place les bases de donnees qui permettent de calculer les indices de prix Notaires-INSEE et d’informer sur la consistance des biens echanges et les parties prenantes a la transaction. La source notariale permet une description detaillee du cycle commence en 1998. A l’inverse du precedent, celui-ci se caracterise par une flambee des prix presente sinon uniforme sur tout le territoire, du moins jusqu’en 2008. Ce n’est qu’apres la crise qu’apparait une forte differenciation entre les metropoles, Paris en tete, et le reste du territoire. Le credit facile et bon marche explique une bonne part de la hausse des prix. La croissance de la part des detentions de courte duree sur la periode 2005-2007 laisse cependant soupconner l’existence de comportements speculatifs. Le role des acquereurs etrangers dans la hausse des prix doit par ailleurs etre ramene a sa juste proportion : parmi les acquereurs personnes physiques, moins d’une sur quarante en moyenne est un etranger non resident. Classification JEL : C81, R21, R30, R31, R32.

The paper uses hedonic regression techniques in order to decompose the price of a house into land and structure components using readily available real estate sales data for a Dutch city. In order to get sensible results, it was useful to use a nonlinear regression model using data that covered multiple time periods. It also proved to be necessary to impose some restrictions on the price of structures. The resulting builder’s hedonic regression model was compared with the results for traditional logarithmic hedonic regression models.

This paper extends existing research on regional quality of life in Germany by newly estimating the role of region-specific (dis-)amenities in the determination of regional housing rents and wages. Different from previous studies, the empirical analysis draws on functional labor market areas recently delineated by Kosfeld and Werner [Raumf Raumordn (2012) 70: 49-64] rather than administrative jurisdictions, circumventing problems of spatial autocorrelation. Consistent with cross-region spatial equilibrium, the results indicate that labor market area heterogeneity in housing rents and wages is closely related to differences in non-market attributes that affect household utility. The results enable the construction of a comprehensive ranking of regional quality of life which can be directly compared to the findings of previous studies.

The dynamics of house prices, sales, construction, and population growth in response to city-specific income shocks are characterized for 106 US cities. A dynamic model of search in the housing market in which construction, the entry of buyers, house prices, and sales are determined in equilibrium is then developed. The theory generates dynamics qualitatively consistent with the observations and a version calibrated to match key features of the US housing market offers a substantial quantitative improvement over models without search. In particular, variation in the time it takes to sell induces transaction prices to exhibit serially correlated growth. (JEL D83, R21, R23, R31) We explore the consequences of time-consuming search and matching for the dynamics of house prices, sales, and construction at the city level. First, we char acterize the impact of city-specific income shocks on the short-run dynamics of average house prices, home sales, construction, and population growth for a panel of US cities. We then develop a model in which the entry of new buyers and the construction of new houses in response to such shocks are endogenously determined. Our theory generates serial correlation in the growth rates of house prices and construction, even if income is strictly mean-reverting following shocks. 1 When calibrated to data on US cities our model accounts for over 80 percent of the variance of house price movements driven by city-specific income shocks and nearly half of the observed autocorrelation of house price growth. In our empirical analysis, we estimate a structural panel vector autoregressive (VAR ) model using city-level observations on the variables listed above. We focus

While filtering has long been considered the primary mechanism by which markets supply low-income housing, direct estimates of that process have been absent. This has contributed to doubts about the viability of markets and to misplaced policy. I fill this gap by estimating a “repeat income” model using 1985–2011 panel data. Real annual filtering rates are faster for rental housing (2.5 percent) than owner-occupied (0.5 percent), vary inversely with the income elasticity of demand and house price inflation, and are sensitive to tenure transitions as homes age. For most locations, filtering is robust which lends support for housing voucher programs. (JEL R21, R31, R38)

In January-February 2014, Rb 198.175bn worth of 17,797 mortgage housing loans (MHL) were extended which is 1.4 times and 1.5 times more as regards the number of loans and in money terms, respectively, as compared to the indices of January-February 2013. As of March 1, 2014, the outstanding debt on MHL amounted to Rb 2,746 trillion which is 33.73% more than the respective debt as of March 1, 2013. Throughout 2013, the overdue debt as percentage of the outstanding debt on MHL in rubles kept falling and as of March 1, 2014 amounted to 0.98%, while that on MHL in foreign currency rose and as of March 1, 2014 amounted to 12.94%. The debt on MHL with payments overdue for over 180 days decreases as well and amounted to 1.77% of the total debt as of March 1, 2014. The weighted average rate for a month on loans extended from the beginning of the year amounted to 12.3% as of March 1, 2014 against 12.4% for the entire 2013.

В январе – августе 2014 г. продолжился рост ипотечного жилищного кредитования. На 1 сентября 2014 г. предоставлено 619026 ипотечных жилищных кредитов на сумму 1,07 трлн руб., что превышает на 27,47% по количеству и на 36,33% в стоимостном выражении объем кредитования за соответствующий период 2013 г. На 1 сентября 2014 г. остаточная задолженность по ИЖК в 3,2 трлн руб. на 33,44% превысила задолженность на 1 сентября 2013 г. Сохраняется положительная тенденция снижения доли просроченной задолженности по ИЖК в рублях в остаточной задолженности (0,87% на 1 сентября 2014 г.) и рост объема и доли задолженности по ИЖК без просроченных платежей (95,59% на 1 сентября 2014 г.) в общей задолженности. Средневзвешенная за месяц ставка по ИЖК в рублях за август 2014 г. увеличилась на 0,05 п.п. и стала равной 12,27% против 12,2% на 1 июня 2014 г.

This paper presents an analysis of mortgage delinquency between 2004 and 2008 using a loan-level data set from a major national mortgage bank. Our analysis highlights two problems underlying the mortgage crisis: a reliance on mortgage brokers who tend to originate lower-quality loans and a prevalence of low-documentation loans—known in the industry as “liar's loans”—that result in borrower information falsification. While over three-quarters of the difference in delinquency rates between bank and broker channels can be attributed to observable loan and borrower characteristics, the delinquency difference between full- and low-documentation mortgages is due to unobservable heterogeneity, about half of it potentially due to income falsification. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

La volonté de posséder son « chez soi » et de se constituer un patrimoine est largement généralisée en Europe. La baisse des taux d’intérêt au cours des années 2000 et la concurrence accrue entre établissements bancaires ont favorisé la distribution du crédit, avant que la crise financière de 2007 ne remette en question ces évolutions. Malgré des mesures publiques de soutien au secteur immobilier, la chute du crédit (dans un contexte d’assainissement du bilan des banques et de ralentissement de la croissance du revenu des ménages) s’est accompagnée, après une décennie de boom immobilier, d’une baisse des prix immobiliers dans de nombreux pays européens. L’exception notable étant l’Allemagne où après dix ans de baisse, les prix se sont stabilisés au milieu des années 2000 et remontent même depuis 2010. Face à ces évolutions, nous observons ici dans quelle mesure d’une part la mobilité des ménages a évolué et d’autre part comment le contexte macroéconomique a modifié le profil des ménages qui achètent. Changes in Owner Households’ Characteristics during the Crisis in Europe The desire to own one’s home and to accumulate housing wealth is largely widespread in Europe. The fall in interest rates during the 2000s and the increased competition between banks have promoted the distribution of credit before the financial crisis. Despite public measures to support the housing sector, house prices and credit have collapsed in many European countries, after a decade of real estate boom. These evolutions result from the strengthening of bank balance sheets and from the slowdown in household income growth. Germany is an exception. After ten years of decline, prices have stabilized in the mid-2000s and even increased since 2010. In this context, we will first focus on the trend in household mobility and then analyse how the macroeconomic environment has impacted the profile of households who have recently purchased their home. Our logit regressions show that younger and/or lower income households have been the first victims of tighter credit conditions. Indeed, in all the countries studied (Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom), low-income households have seen their probability of purchase greatly reduced. This is the case even in Germany, where the probability of purchase for other households has tended to stagnate or to grow. The purchase likelihood of households under 30 years has strongly decreased in Spain. On the contrary, the probability of young households to buy their home in France has remained constant, due to quite favourable credit conditions, the “zero interest loan” reform and increased donations.

Les salaires ont progressé à un rythme plus rapide en France qu’en Allemagne dans les années récentes. Ces évolutions salariales divergentes s’expliquent notamment par des dynamiques différentes du coût du logement, à travers son impact sur le coût de la vie.

We analyze the prices of owner-occupied housing in 97 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2011. Our tests indicate that price changes exhibit positive serial correlation at the one year intervals, with subsequent reversals of price changes over longer intervals. Consistent with our simple model, regional differences in observed price patterns reflect differences in the serial correlation of the demand shocks as well as the elasticity of supply responses.

В I кв. 2013 г. построено 126,1 тыс. квартир общей площадью 10,4 млн кв. м, что составило 106,5% к соответствующему периоду прошлого года. Средняя фактическая стоимость строительства 1 кв. м общей площади жилых домов в I кв. 2013 г. выросла на 7,89% по сравнению с I кв. 2012 г. и составила 34,92 тыс. руб., а соотношение между ценой 1 кв. м жилья общей площади на первичном рынке жилья и стоимостью строительства 1 кв. м жилья увеличилось за тот же срок на 0,85 п.п. и составило 139,75%. Объем регистрации прав физических лиц на земельные участки (1,243 млн актов) в I кв. 2013 г. увеличился по сравнению с I кв. 2012 г. на 6,24%. В январе–апреле 2013 г. предоставлено 211480 ипотечных жилищных кредитов (ИЖК) на сумму 341,0 млрд руб., что на 27,52% превышает денежный объем ИЖК, выданных в январе–апреле 2012 г. В апреле 2013 г. рост средневзвешенной за месяц ставки по ИЖК в рублях впервые с ноября 2011 г. сменился снижением. Ставка снизилась на 0,3 п.п. и составила 12,6%.

В январе-феврале 2014 г. предоставлено 117797 ипотечных жилищных кредитов (ИЖК) на сумму 198,175 млрд руб., что превышает показатели за январь-февраль 2013 г. в 1,4 раза по количеству кредитов и в 1,5 раза в денежном выражении. Остаточная задолженность по ИЖК на 1 марта 2014 г. составила 2,746 трлн руб., что на 33,73% превышает соответствующую задолженность на 1 марта 2013 г. В течение 2013 г. просроченная задолженность в процентах от остаточной задолженности по ИЖК в рублях устойчиво снижалась и на 1 марта 2014 г. составила 0,98%, а по ИЖК в иностранной валюте росла и на 1 марта 2014 г. – 12,94%. Задолженность по ИЖК со сроком задержки платежей более 180 дней также снижалась и на 1 марта 2014 г. составила 1,77% от общей задолженности. Средневзвешенная за месяц ставка по выданным с начала года кредитам составила на 1 марта 2014 г. 12,3% против 12,4% за весь 2013 г.

In H1 2014, 375,800 apartments with the total fl oorspace of 29.4m sq. m. were built which value amounted to 130.2% on the respective period of the previous year. In Q2 2014, the average actual cost of building of 1sq m of housing increased by 13.55% as compared to Q2 2013 and amounted to Rb 40,456, while the ratio between the price of 1 sq. m of housing on the primary housing market decreased within the same period by 12.6% and amounted to 125.86%. In H1 2014, the volume of registration of individuals’ titles of ownership (2,796,474 certifi cates) to land plots increased by 1.69% as compared to H1 2013. In January–July 2014, 538,482 MHL for the total amount of Rb 927,038bn were extended which value exceeds the volume of MHL extended in January–July 2013 by 39.67% and 31.01% in monetary terms and as regards the number of loans, respectively. In July 2014, the weighted average rate on MHL extended in rubles within a month fell by 0.02 p.p. to 12.21% as compared to July.