In this paper, we consider the tenure choice problem under different schemes of legal tenancy protection. We analyze the interaction between the rental and resale housing markets under conditions of bilateral asymmetric information regarding housing quality and the type of residents. Home...

In this paper, I analyze the distribution of rental prices in Berlin using quantile estimates and decomposition methods. These methods have been rarely applied in the field of housing economics but have proven to offer relevant insights into the evolution of price distributions. The shift of...

In housing markets with asymmetric information list prices may signal unobserved properties of the house or the seller. Asymmetric information is the starting point for many models for the housing market. In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of list-price reductions on the time houses...

While estimates of models with spatial interaction are very sensitive to the choice of spatial weights, considerable uncertainty surrounds the definition of spatial weights in most studies with cross-section dependence. We show that, in the spatial error model, the spatial weights matrix is only...

This paper presents quantile estimates of house prices across two years, 2004 and 2007, in several Spanish cities. We decompose the change in the house price distribution into portions due to changes in the distributions of the explanatory variables and to changes in coefficients over time. We...

High and rising prices in Chinese housing markets have attracted global attention. Price-to-rent ratios in Beijing and seven other large markets across the country have increased by 30% to 70% since the beginning of 2007. Current price-to-rent ratios imply very low user costs of no more than...

We use a matching procedure to construct samples of private residential sales in Singapore for January 1995 to May 2010. Though the matching approach is similar to a repeat sales estimator in pairing each sale with the sale of a comparable property, sample sizes are much larger because the...

Under tenancy rent control, rents are regulated within a tenancy but not between tenancies. This paper investigates the effects of tenancy rent control on housing quality and maintenance. Since the discounted revenue received over a fixed-duration tenancy depends only on the starting rent,...

This paper analyses rental contracts in the housing market assu-ming asymmetric information about tenant related `service cost' andimperfect mobility. On the positive side it explains why long standingtenants tend to enjoy lower rents |the so called `tenure discount'. Onthe normative side, it...

In recent decades, large infl ux of immigrants to the U.S. and other developed countries has made cities in these countries more ethnically diverse. In this paper, I aim to understand whether and how ethnic diversity affects communities in these cities. A general equilibrium model is built in...