Planning is about other things as well, but it is fundamentally an economic activity. It allocates a scarce resource but independently of prices or any market information. In analysing the effects this allocative mechanism has on housing supply (or, indeed, the supply of buildings for any given...

In recent years, global imbalances have channeled the excess savings of surplus countries toward the real estate markets of deficit countries. By consequence, the deficit countries that attracted lots of foreign capital experienced large run-ups in house prices while the surplus countries that...

Homeownership is heavily subsidized in many countries mainly through the tax code. The adverse effects of lenient tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on economic efficiency and growth are large and well documented in the economics literature. The main argument in favor of subsidizing...

House price capitalization – the adjustment of house prices to changes in local public service and tax levels – has long been thought to be a means of testing for efficiency in the local public sector. In this article I argue that the extent of house price capitalization itself may have...

Existing research shows that house prices respond to local school quality as measured by average test scores. However, higher test scores could signal better quality teaching and academic value-added, or higher ability, sought-after intakes. In our research, we show decisively that value-added...

We study the link between homeownership and entrepreneurship by exploiting the longitudinal dimension of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and constructing a detailed monthly-spell dataset that tracks individuals‟ job history and tenure choice, coupled with other time-varying...

Mortgage loans are a striking example of a persistent nominal rigidity. As a result, under incomplete markets, monetary policy affects decisions through the cost of new mortgage borrowing and the value of payments on outstanding debt. Observed debt levels and payment to income ratios suggest the...

We test the impact of historic amenities on house prices and sorting of households within cities. Conservation area boundaries enable us to employ a semiparametric regression-discontinuity approach to measure the impact of historic amenities. The approach allows for household-specific...