We exploit staggered real estate transaction tax (RETT) hikes across German states to identify the effect of house price changes on mortgage credit supply. Based on approximately 33 million real estate online listings, we construct a quarterly hedonic house price index (HPI) between 2008:q1 and...

Over the last twenty years, and particularly in the last ten, there has been a growing amount of economic and policy research conducted at a micro-geographic scale. This trend reflects both the continuing popularity of targeted spatial policies and the availability of new data and techniques to...

This article attempts to explore how key notions from Evolutionary Economics, such as selection, path-dependency, chance and increasing returns, may be applied to two key topics in Economic Geography. The first issue is the problem of how to specify the (potential) impact of the spatial...

This chapter on urbanization and growth focuses on modeling and empirical evidence that pertain to a number of inter-related questions. Why do cities form in an economy, with so much of economic activity in countries geographically concentrated in cities? Second, how do different types of cities...

Since ICT factors got growing importance in shaping social and economic differences, the determination of competitiveness in the information economy and society became needful in understanding modern regional disparities of Hungary. To evaluate recent inequalities caused by the factors of...

This paper analyzes the long-run convergence of regional house prices in a major developing country, Turkey. Using a non-linear time-varying factor model and quarterly hedonic house price data from 2010 to 2018, we find that house prices do not converge across 26 regions of Turkey. Results...

This volume was prepared by Constantin Mang while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in 2014 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes a short introduction and four self-contained chapters that focus on ICT...

We propose a useful way to predict building permits in the US, exploiting rich real-time data from web search queries. The time series on building permits is usually considered as a leading indicator of economic activity in the construction sector. Nevertheless, new data on building permits are...

What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...