The financial crisis has brought the interaction between housing prices and household borrowing into the limelight of economic policy debate. This paper examines the nexus of housing prices and credit in Norway within a structural vector equilibrium correcting model (SVECM) over the period...

The house price level is a function of buyers’ realized home equity, and buyers’ realized home equity is a function of the house price level. This interdependence follows from the fact that buyers are sellers in the same market. This article examines under what conditions this leads to a...

The European Union (EU) identified some positive and negative externalities related to energy production and consumption when adopting its Renewable Energy and Climate Change Package. Given these externalities, we derive the optimal combination of policy instruments. Thereafter, we explore the...

This article uses the Case-Shiller technique for constructing housing price indices on a Norwegian data set of transactions for the period 1991-2002 consisting of 10 376 pairs of repeated sales. Using a weighted least squares scheme in order to control for heteroskedasticity, we construct a...

The question of whether the housing market is efficient or not is posed by an increasing number of economists, policymakers, current homeowners and prospective homebuyers. This article tests the efficiency hypothesis on data from the Norwegian housing market in its capital, Oslo. We employ the...

Owner-occupied housing services and rented housing services are often considered close substitutes, and both house price and rental price indices rely on regressions based on dwelling and location characteristics. However, while such characteristics are exhaustive in the owner's market, they...

We estimate Engel elasticities of housing expenditures for each independent cross-section of the Consumer Expenditure Surveys in the period 1986-1998, and find that the elasticity remains close to unity for all years. Its mean over the period is 1.02. Engel and demographic effects for housing...

This paper considers statistical discrimination in rental markets, using a rich data set on rental contracts from Norway. We find that tenants born abroad pay a statistically significant and economically important premium for their dwelling units after controlling for a comprehensive set of...

This paper analyzes housing market reactions to the release of previously unpublished information on school quality. Using the sharp discontinuity in the information environment allows us to study price changes within school catchment areas, thus controlling for neighborhood unobservables. We...

Abstract: Motivated by the climate problem, this paper examines some effects of international cap & trade when national quotas result from strategic choice. In contrast to the fairly optimistic tone of closely related literature, the tenor of our results is pessimistic. We find that though an...