This paper analyzes how the dynamics of house prices are affected by the option to rebuild or enlarge existing dwellings. The curvature of option value and zoning limits provide identification of changes in option value over the cycle. For West Berlin homes with high development potential, our...

This paper aims to investigate how demographics determine the amount and the quality of housing services demanded. It contributes to the current debate in three ways: First, based on a very detailed 2001 cross-section of English households, it finds that human capital is a key driver for...

This paper examines the long run relation between prices and rents for houses in Amsterdam from 1650 through 2005. We first demonstrate that these series are cointegrated, a necessary condition for studying movements of the rent-price ratio. We then estimate the deviation of house prices from...

This paper analyzes how the dynamics of house prices are affected by the option to rebuild or enlarge existing dwellings. The curvature of option value and zoning limits provide identification of changes in option value over the cycle. For West Berlin homes with high development potential, our...

We estimate total returns to rental housing by studying over 170,000 hand-collected archival observations of prices and rents for individual houses in Paris (1809-1943) and Amsterdam (1900-1979). The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.0% for Paris and 4.8% for Amsterdam,...