This paper analyzes the housing markets and housing policies in Hong Kong, China and the People's Republic of China (PRC). Both markets face housing affordability problems due to limited land supply, for which the solutions vary considerably. Hong Kong, China has adopted a railway and property...

In October 2003, a new flight regime was introduced at Zurich airport that significantly changed the levels of noise pollution in surrounding communities. We investigate the impact of the new flight policy on apartment prices using a hedonic price model and a non-linear difference-in-differences...

This paper presents a dynamic theory of housing market fluctuations. It develops a life-cycle model where households are heterogeneous with respect to income and preferences, and mortgage lending is restricted by a down-payment requirement. The market interaction of young credit-constrained...

Housing conditions in Belgium are among the best in OECD countries according to the Better Life Index, as dwellings are of high quality and large, and housing costs are average. However, the steep increase in house prices since 2003 has put market access for first-time buyers under pressure....

We combine a standard stock-flow housing market model, incorporating explicit relationships between house prices, the housing stock, and the rent level, with a parsimonious expectation formation scheme of housing market investors, reflecting an evolving mix of extrapolative and regressive...

According to economic theory, there are no strong reasons to tax (or to subsidise) residential moves, although low levels of taxation may be potentially justified to deal with the presence of externalities and economic stability. This is in contrast to practise in most countries where...

This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred...

In light of the strong increase of house prices in Switzerland, we analyze the effects of mortgage rate shocks, changes in the interplay between housing demand and supply and GDP growth on house prices for the time period 1981- 2014. We employ Bayesian time-varying coefficients vector...

The Finnish housing market is volatile. After declining significantly as the global financial crisis unfolded, housing prices and investment recovered to reach new peaks. This paper uses a small econometric model to assess the role of fundamentals in housing price and investment developments....

Using aggregate quarterly data for the period 1975q1-2010q4, I find that the US housing market changed from a stable regime with prices determined by fundamentals, to a highly unstable regime at the beginning of the previous decade. My results indicate that these imbalances could have been...