In contrast to many other countries, Switzerland generally has not seen soaring house prices in the 2000s and house prices have only recently started to diminish slightly. Also, Swiss authorities do not engage in trying to increase the homeownership rate much above its current level. In this...

A house is a bundle of land and improvements, with the weights of the two components varying both over time and across locations. We capture the land intensity or 'leverage' of a property by measuring the ratio of land to total value. This is accomplished using transactions data for single...

At 34%, Switzerland has the lowest home ownership rate in Western Europe. This is a puzzle given the economic strength of the country. We use 1998 household survey data for five Swiss cantons to explore some possible reasons for this. We estimate a tenure choice equation that allows us to...

We analyze the impacts of alternative submarket definitions when predicting house prices in a mass appraisal context, using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and geostatistical techniques. For this purpose, we use over 13,000 housing transactions for Louisville, Kentucky. We use districts...

The measurement of house price movements is a vital topic from both academic and practical perspectives and hence has been the focus of much research. There is almost unanimous consensus in the literature that house price indexes should control for the quality of properties; the most widely used...

Using single-family sales data for Louisville, Kentucky, we show the benefits of applying robust methods to down-weight problematic transactions in a repeat sales context. Robust estimators reduce the influence of outliers in repeat sales price changes that are due to data entry errors, quality...

The aim of this paper is to review the international evidence on the impacts of mortgage interest deductions on homeownership rates. The probability of becoming a homeowner is a function of the relative cost of owning and renting, borrowing constraints, permanent household income, and a set of...

Using data for six metropolitan housing markets in three countries, this paper provides a comparison of methods used to measure house price bubbles. We use an asset pricing approach to identify bubble periods retrospectively and then compare those results with results produced by six other...

We show how a method that has been applied to commercial real estate markets can be used to produce high frequency house price indexes for a city and for submarkets within a city. Our application of this method involves estimating a set of annual robust repeat sales regressions staggered by...

We study the impact of housing conditions on the educational outcomes of young persons in Switzerland. We focus on children ages 15 to 19, who are potentially enrolled in or graduates of high school or vocational training programs, and young adults ages 20 to 24, who are potentially students in...