We estimate total returns to rental housing by studying over 170,000 hand-collected archival observations of prices and rents for individual houses in Paris (1809-1943) and Amsterdam (1900-1979). The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.0% for Paris and 4.8% for Amsterdam,...

During the recent housing recession and financial crisis, mortgage modification has been heavily promoted by government as a way to stabilize the housing and the national banking systems. Numerous programs, such as the Home Owners Preserving Equity (HOPE), Home Affordability Modification Program...

This paper investigates optimal tax policy when economic conditions are uncertain, creating risk in tax revenues. Optimal taxation with uncertainty balances costs from volatility and deadweight loss. Tax policy affects volatility through two channels; spreading risk between public and private...

This paper proposes a simple, partial equilibrium model for studying an individual's migration decisions. It shows that an individual may choose to delay migration when the condition appears to be favorable, giving rise to the “waiting” behavior observed in the data. Using a closed-form...

This study empirically tests volatility effects on land development options using data on the government's land sales by tender for the period from 1995 to 2018. We find that development land option premiums increase by 6% on average with one standard deviation increase in conditional...

In diesem Beitrag werden Überlegungen zur Subvention des Wohneigentums als Form der Altersvorsorge aus einer ökonomischen Perspektive hinterfragt. Drei Argumente legen nahe, dass der Staat die Unterstützung des Wohneigentums bei der privaten Altersvorsorge nicht in den Vordergrund rücken...

We study long-term returns on residential real estate in twenty-seven "superstar" cities in fifteen countries over 150 years. We find that total returns in superstar cities are close to 100 basis points lower per year than in the rest of the country. House prices tend to grow faster in the...

With prices surging in major cities since 2010, the debate about a potential speculative bubble in the German housing market has been gaining momentum. Overall, however, the German housing market is sound. Neither an excess of construction, nor an excess of mortgage lending have been observed,...

How damaging are uncertainty shocks during extreme events such as the great recession and the Covid-19 outbreak? Can monetary policy limit output losses in such situations? We use a nonlinear VAR framework to document the large response of real activity to a financial uncertainty shock during...