The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

Urban structures and urban growth rates are highly persistent. This has far-reaching implications for the optimal size and timing of new construction. We prove that rational developers postpone construction not because prospects are gloomy, but because they are bright. The slow mean reversion in...

In the past decades, gentrification has transformed American central city neighborhoods. In this paper, I estimate a spatial equilibrium model to show that the rising value of high-skilled workers' time contributes to the gentrification of American central cities. I show that the increasing...

In this work, we present a gridded dataset about land cover, population density, real estate, and transportation in 192 worldwide urban areas representing together 800 million people. While population density and land cover are secondary data extracted from the GHS-POP and the ESA CCI databases...

We estimate changes in the value and price of residential land for 379 German counties ("Landkreise") from 2014 to 2017 using a total of 42,685 observations. We use the two-step residual method that decomposes the value of a home into the value of the structure and land value. Despite the short...

Urban renewal programs have been implemented in many countries to fight housing decay, poverty concentration, and associated social ills in the last decades. In this paper, we propose an evaluation of a large-scale urban renewal program launched in France in 2004. Using a novel estimator aimed...