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...

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...

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 which set of informations voters use when they cast their vote. On the one hand, electoral accountability models assume that voters rely on past policy decisions of the incumbent politician. Gathering this information is, however, often costly. On the other hand, voters may...

Recent empirical studies have found – seemingly − efficiency-enhancing effects of vertical grants on local public service provision. The main purpose of this paper is to prepare an elaborate theoretical and empirical analysis of these contradictory results. Therefore, it investigates if...

The second generation fiscal federalism (sGff) approach is used as a reference to analyze the political and fiscal institutional design of Bolivia’s decentralization model and its evolution. subnational public finance data up to 2008 is used to verify that decentralization of expenditure was...

The present paper has as objective to study the whole relative problem to the autonomous communities and regional heath care expenditure financing in Spain. This article has a dual purpose. First, the financing of the current health care attendance is approached in the Spanish regions passing...