The role of the housing market in the everyday life of society is difficult to overestimate. The housing rents and prices directly affect standard of living of virtually every person. Housing loans constitute the largest liability of households and account for a large proportion of bank lending....

Most countries show a residency discount in rents for sitting tenants. In the wake of strong rent increases and housing shortages, Germany implemented a reform in 2001 to curtail rent increases. Based on linked housing-tenant data for Germany, this paper estimates panel OLS and quantile...

In model-based small area estimation an explicit statistical model is used to enhance efficiency of estimation in case of small subsamples. This model assumes a fixed relationship between the statistic of interest and a set of covariates, which is valid for all areas under consideration and can,...

Real estate prices are central to a range of themes that are, e.g., relevant for monetary policy, community development, environmental valuation, and economic planning more generally. This paper developes a real estate index based on apartment offer prices on the post code level for Germany,...

We analyze the extent to which sales prices for residential housing react to rent-price regulation. To this end, we exploit changes in apartment prices across the regulation treatment threshold. We examine a quasi-natural design in the German federal state of Brandenburg using transaction price...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...