Rising rents in German cities have led to an intense debate about the need for tighter rent controls in housing markets. In April 2015, the so-called rental brake was introduced, which imposes upper bounds for rents in new contracts, in order to immediately slow down the increase of rents in...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (states) simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, such as pooled and fixed-effects models, we apply panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence...

The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional...

Despite rather skeptical attitude of the economists toward the state intervention in the housing markets, the policy makers and general public typically are supporting it. As a result, in many European countries, since World War I the rent and eviction controls as well as social housing policies...

In this paper, we examine the predictive ability of automatic and expert-rated media sentiment indicators for German inflation. We find that sentiment indicators are competitive in providing inflation forecasts against a large set of common macroeconomic and financial predictors. Sophisticated...

The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the monthly growth rates of the prices and rents for flats in 26 largest German cities. Given the small time dimension, the forecasts are done in a panel-data format. In addition, we use panel models that account for spatial dependence between the...

In this paper, we propose an indicator of the homeownership rate based on Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. We constructed the HOR estimate using the number of ads in four different markets (flats for rent, flats for sale, houses for rent, and houses for sale). Our HOR...

In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the...