German urban renewal programs are favoring the cities in the Eastern part since the reunification in 1990. This was accompanied additionally by attractive tax incentives, designed as an accelerated declining balance method of depreciation for housing investments during the late 1990s. The...

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood...

Neighborhoods are the result of a complicated interplay between residential choice, housing supply and the influences of the larger metropolitan system on its constituent parts. We model this interplay as a system of reduced-form equations in order to examine the effects of a generous spatially...

Seit der Wiedervereinigung werden die Städte in Ostdeutschland bei den Programmen der Wohnungsbauund Städtebauförderung finanziell begünstigt. In der zweiten Hälfte der 1990er Jahre wurde dies durch degressive Abschreibungsmöglichkeiten für Immobilieninvestitionen ergänzt. Die...

We describe a rational expectations model in which speculative bubbles in house prices can emerge. Within this model both speculators and their lenders use interest-only mortgages (IOs) rather than traditional mortgages when there is a bubble. Absent a bubble, there is no tendency for IOs to be...

This paper examines whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the housing markets facts, most of all the empirical anomaly known as ‘price dispersion’. Our main finding is that the model can account for the three basic facts of housing market, without any restrictive...

This paper presents and investigates a new data set of individual residential property transactions in England. The main novelty of the data is the record of all listing price changes and all offers made on a property, as well as all the visits by potential buyers for a subset of the properties....

Local policy makers seek ways to deal with abandoned industrial heritage in their jurisdictions. Much is demolished, but in some cases considerable investments are made to preserve the cultural aspects of industrial sites. The renewal plans are usually designed to stimulate urban renewal in the...

In hedonic analysis, a common approach for eliciting information regarding the welfare significance of some landmark or (dis)amenity is to control for its distance from each observation. Unfortunately, the effects of distances to amenities on housing prices are generally not consistent...

This paper uses housing market data to estimate the welfare costs of shoreline loss along coastal beaches in Florida. I develop a forward-looking structural model of a housing market in which a time-variant housing characteristic (beach width) follows a Markov process. I use this model to...