In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As...

This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed...

Housing affordability is a hotly debated issue on global scale. A lack of affordable housing of decent quality is a chronic problem in urban areas. Governments try to alleviate it by stimulating homeownership among middle-income households and providing social housing for the low-income...

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring rents by setting a cap on rental prices: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The policy was revoked one year later by the German Constitutional Court. Although successful in reducing rents during its duration, the...

This study investigates the effects of short-lived rent control regulations introduced in Catalonia in September 2020 and revoked in March 2022. Using the microdata of the largest Spanish housing advertisement portal idealista between January 2017 and May 2022, we analyze the dynamics of prices...

Welfare is traditionally understood through social security decommodifying labor markets or social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes' fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this paper...

Housing bubbles and crashes are catastrophic events for economies, implying enormous destruction of housing wealth, financial default risks, construction unemployment, and business cycle downturns. This paper investigates whether governmental housing policies can affect economies' propensity to...

This paper introduces a new international longitudinal database of governmental housing policies. The regulations are measured using binary variables based on a thorough analysis of the real-time country-specific legislation. Three major restrictive policies are considered: rent control,...

In 2020, Berlin enacted a rigorous rent-control policy: the 'Mietendeckel' (rent freeze), aiming to stop rapidly growing rental prices. We evaluate this newly enacted but old-fashionably designed policy by analyzing its immediate supply-side effects. Using a rich pool of rent advertisements...

As the institutional literature convincingly shows, socioeconomic phenomena are to a large extent shaped by the formal institutions, that is, legal acts (laws and ordinances). However, the latter are formulated in a specific language that is difficult to understand, let alone to measure....