This paper examines the impact of a specific local tax limit, Proposition 2* in Massachusetts, on the fiscal behavior of cities and towns in Massachusetts and the capitalization of that behavior into property values. Proposition 2* places a cap on the effective property tax rate at 2.5 percent...

In a local economy, the citizens can react on local policy by exit. Exit induces a shift in the housing demand. The local policy may thus capitalize into the housing prices. However, the citizens encounter specific coordination problems on the housing market. Therefore, it may be asked how...

Affluent towns often deliver high-quality public services to their residents. I estimate the willingness to pay to live in a high-income suburb, above and beyond the demand of wealthy neighbors, by measuring changes in housing prices across city-suburban borders as the income disparity between...

This paper develops a comprehensive framework for estimating household preferences for school and neighborhood attributes in the presence of sorting. It embeds a boundary discontinuity design in a heterogeneous model of residential choice to address the endogeneity of school and neighborhood...

This text deals with the topic of housing shortage vs. residential vacancy – housing market intervention as a task of politics? At the beginning there will be some basic assertions on the relation of market vs. state, especially bearing in mind, the overall importance and social responsibility...

There are four major challenges for housing policy in the near and midterm future: First, rents in many German conurbations have been rising significantly faster than incomes over the last five years. Though it can rightly be argued, that the suggested policies of the new German federal...

The regional differences in the housing markets are enormous and will continue to exacerbate in the future. The main task for the housing policy is to take appropriate long term measures depending on the market structure. A central aspect of future housing policy is the site development....

This paper examines the determinants of municipal cash holdings and the implications of holding high levels of cash. The first part of the analysis investigates municipal manager incentives to accumulate cash as part of normal operations. Results indicate that municipalities with a higher...

Collusion and soft budget constraint are two conspicuous phenomena in transition economies' banking system. Literature has separately investigated those two phenomena from theoretical point of views. However, the cross-point of both phenomena has been neglected in the research of banking...

This paper addresses the question of whether the size of the legislature matters for the size of government. Previous empirical studies have found a positive relationship between the number of legislators and the size of government but it is questionable whether they have identified a causal...