The rent gap theory of gentrification has inspired a substantial amount of critical attention as well as several empirical studies. None of these studies addresses a fundamental problem with the rent gap hypothesis—namely, its dependence on a distinction between actual and potential land...

The analysis reported in this article incorporates direct measures of borrowing constraints into an otherwise standard model of the home-ownership decision in Australia. Borrowing constraints take into account mortgage underwriting criteria, household incomes and wealth, and the household's...

Typical measures of the affordability of home-ownership are based on aggregate data that ignore the distribution of incomes and wealth and the range of house prices. An analysis of household survey data provides a means for overcoming those problems; however, numerous conceptual and...

The US President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform has recommended changes to income tax concessions for homeowners. Consistent with the opinions of many economists, the tax reform panel concluded that the existing tax concessions are not particularly effective. The housing and mortgage...

This paper presents the Sale Price Appraisal Ratio (SPAR) method for constructing house price indexes. The method, which uses ratios of transaction prices and previous appraised values to build up an index, has been applied since the early 1960s to produce semi-annual price indexes for regions...

This article compares the homeownership rates of young households in Australia and the United States and evaluates the impacts of the two countries' different approaches to subsidizing homeownership. Since about 1950, Australia's rate of homeownership has consistently been higher than that of...

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 relatively low...