Home ownership is widely stimulated by policy yet its effects are poorly understood. Exploiting privatization decisions of municipally-owned apartment buildings, we obtain random variation in home ownership for otherwise similar buildings with similar tenants. Granular data on demographics,...

Can social influence effects help explain regional heterogeneity in refinancing activity? Neighborhood social influence effects have been shown to affect publicly observable decisions, but their role in private decisions, like refinancing, remains unclear. Using precisely geolocated data and a...

The demographic problems in developed countries are getting more and more important. Very low fertility rates especially among skilled individuals will soon become relevant for a country's economy. Also of importance is education of children. Since there is an increasing demand for skilled...

Internal migration flows in Kazakhstan are of high social and political relevance but political and public attention has primarily been devoted to external movements. This paper presents the main descriptive results of a new household survey on migration and remittances in Kazakhstan which was...

Labor markets are increasingly global. Overseas work can enrich households but also split them geographically, with ambiguous net effects on decisions about work, investment, and education. These net effects, and their mechanisms, are poorly understood. We study a policy discontinuity in the...

The aim of this study is focus on the role of positive and negative monetary incentives in stimulating infra and inter-regional mobility in UK (through commuting behavior). We consider a simple theoretical model and develop an empirical application using data from the Quarterly Labour Force...

Relying on the present literature, official statistics, and household survey data in the People's Republic of China, this paper summarizes research findings on the relationship between urbanization, urban-rural inequality, and poverty, and provides further empirical evidence on the role of...

Residential satisfaction depends on housing and neighborhood conditions in addition to housing cost affordability. To determine the relative importance of these factors, their average effect is usually estimated using sample data, eventually split in sub-samples in order to represent social...