In this paper we examine the degree to which Michigan's property value assessment growth cap has eroded the tax base and created substantial differences in effective tax rates among residential properties within the City of Detroit. While the analysis focuses on a specific city with significant...

We propose a method to estimate the capitalized value of the architectural design quality of a neighbourhood. Our economic design premium is identified by spatially differentiating property prices and design quality within neighbourhoods and comparing the differences across neighbourhoods. We...

What are the macroeconomic consequences of changing aggregate lending standards in residential mortgage markets, as measured by loan-to-value (LTV) ratios? In a structural VAR, GDP and business investment increase following an expansionary LTV shock. Residential investment, by contrast, falls, a...

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 12 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a panel VAR model which is estimated over the period 19952006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary policy...

This paper studies the determinants of house prices in eight transition economies of central and eastern Europe (CEE) and 19 OECD countries. The main question addressed is whether the conventional fundamental determinants of house prices, such as GDP per capita, real interest rates, housing...

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of regional house price cycles. Based on a newly available data set consisting of the 40 largest U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), we introduce a wavelet transform based metric to study the housing cycle synchronization across MSAs. We...

What risks do asset price bubbles pose for the economy? This paper studies bubbles in housing and equity markets in 17 countries over the past 140 years. History shows that not all bubbles are alike. Some have enormous costs for the economy, while others blow over. We demonstrate that what makes...

The renewed momentum in the German housing market has led to concerns that Germany is vulnerable to asset price shocks. In this paper, we apply recently developed recursive unit root tests to detect the beginning and the end of potential speculative bubbles in Germany over the sample period...

The aim of the study is to explain if the foreclosure effect on prices is explained by a lower quality of foreclosed houses, which is a crucial aspect in the intelligibility of foreclosures. Based on a novel and comprehensive dataset, we estimate the impact of foreclosure on home prices in...