The “Great Recession” has painfully demonstrated the impact of real estate prices on real economic activity. Hence, close examination of real estate price changes is important for business cycle analysis and economic policy. However, most real estate price indices for Germany either exhibit...

Economists have been noting for decades that Consumer Price Index (CPI) in the developed countries is overstating inflation by 0,5−2,0% per year. A significant part of the bias is due to the presence of technology products and differentiated products in the CPI basket. An increase share of...

As the market for downtown office space recovers from yet another boom and bust, are there reasons to think that future cycles may be less volatile than in the past?

The 1980s and 1990s have been turbulent times in the U.S. market for single-family homes. For most of the previous two decades, housing prices across states and metropolitan areas moved together and increased slowly in real terms while regional differences generally remained small. The 1980s and...

Three years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released an examination of racial patterns in mortgage denial rates in the Boston area. The study was motivated by newly available data on mortgage applications, showing that black and Hispanic applicants were two to three times as likely to be...