Housing a ffordability broadly refers to the cost of housing services and shelter - both for renters and owner occupiers - relative to a given individual's or household's disposable income. While there is no universal definition for this term, housing affordability is an easy concept to grasp in...

Increasing supply is frequently proposed as a solution to rising housing costs. However, there is little evidence on how new market-rate construction-which is typically expensive-affects the market for lower quality housing in the short run. I begin by using address history data to identify...

Housing prices have been growing strongly in Luxembourg, stoked by population growth, a high rate of household formation and limited use of land available for construction. Increases in price-to-income ratio mainly reflect high valuations of residential real estate, which rise faster than...

In this paper, we explore the drivers of house prices in Norway, using a cross-country panel framework. Empirical results confirm that house prices are determined by numerous demand and supply factors, including income, demographics, macroeconomic conditions, stock of housing and institutional...

Norway’s dual income tax system achieves high levels of revenue collection and income redistribution, without overly undermining economic performance and while paying attention to environmental externalities. It treats capital and labour income in different ways: capital income is taxed at a...

With the aid of econometric modeling, I investigate whether rapidly increasing house prices necessarily imply the existence of a bubble that will eventually burst. I consider four alternative econometric methods to construct indicators of housing market imbalances for the US, Finland and Norway....

Dwellings in housing cooperatives constitute 15 per cent of the Norwegian housing property market. The price paid for such dwellings consists of two elements: An equity price and a share of the mutual debt held by the cooperative. The interest rate paid on the housing cooperative's mutual debt...

In Norway house prices have risen to high levels, associated with very strong credit growth, in a context of low interest rates. Such a combination was in many countries a contributory factor to the 2008- 09 crisis. The Norwegian authorities have been well aware of the problem. Below-target...

This Article examines the varying and often-conflicting meanings and goals ascribed to the term “affordable housing.” It asserts that the term often serves as a metaphor; it obscures rather than clarifies, and contributes to the intractability of problems pertaining to housing from any...

While aggregate house price indices display time persistence, less is known about micro persistence. This article proposes that absence of micro persistence implies that an excessively high or low sell price in one transaction is not repeated in the next transaction. We exploit a unique...