Housing Studies and the Role of Economic Theory: An (Applied) Disciplinary Perspective.

This paper is a disciplinary contribution to the Housing, Theory and Society debate on the role of theory in housing studies. The discipline in question is economics, but considered widely across the range of perspectives it offers. A pragmatic case is made for investigating applied economics from across the subject's spectrum provided they meet the criteria of being useful, insightful, interesting or novel and potentially testable. It is argued that this is consistent with a multidisciplinary approach to housing research. The paper also argues that recent trends in economics have contributed positively, particularly through the increasingly mainstream behavioural economics and finance school, an area of practical relevance to housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]