Although the housing prices in the 127 largest German cities have surged strongly in recent years, there is still no sign of a Germanywide housing bubble. In comparison with 2009, the price of condominiums has risen by around 55 percent. Single-family houses cost between 38 and 45 percent more...

Housing prices in many countries have increased significantly over the past years, fueling a fear that speculative price bubbles will return. However, it can be difficult for policymakers to recognize when regulatory interventions in the market are necessary to counteract bubbles. This report...

Ten years after the worldwide financial and economic crisis was triggered by the American real estate market, real estate prices are rising around the globe. Concerns about a new housing bubble are growing. The present report based on OECD data for 20 countries demonstrates that this concern is...

In this paper, we construct a data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities from 24 countries. The data are collected in January - April 2012 from 33 websites, where the advertisements of flats for sale are placed. Using these data we investigate the determinants of the...

We examine real business cycle convergence for 41 euro area regions and 48 US states. Results obtained by a panel model with spatial correlation indicate that the relevance of common business cycle factors is rather stable over the past two decades in the euro area and the US. Ongoing business...

In this paper we forecast the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (States) simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature that addresses this question for all German Länder as most of the studies try to forecast the...

In this paper we examine the interactions between the remittances of the Turkish workers in Germany and the output both in Turkey and in Germany. In our analysis we use the new data set provided by the German monetary authorities, which was never before employed in the literature and which we...

This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model...