For most of the past decades, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region has experienced rapid expansion, driven largely by increasing energy revenues, and growth-focused government policies. As the region's population increases in size, and becomes wealthier and more urbanized, significant...

Germany like many other European countries subsidize commuting by granting the right to deduct commuting expenses from the income tax base. This regulation has often been changed and has regularly been under debate during the last decades. The pros (e.g. causing efficiency gains with respect to...

We make two contributions to the study of house price index and mortgage credit modeling accuracy. First, we assess the predictive power of house price indices calculated at different levels of geographic aggregation. Lower levels of aggregation offer superior fit when appreciation rates vary...

Employing a unique quasi-experiment -- spillovers caused by the imposition of local house purchase restrictions to nearby non-regulated cities, we study the effects of out-of-town housing demand and policy spillovers. This quasi-experiment induces sharp increases in house prices but not local...

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

The German apprenticeship system is widely known throughout the world. We analyze expenditures on vocational schools on county level using data from 213 West-German counties between 2001 and 2006. We use spatial econometrics to test for spatial correlation in counties' expenditure on vocational...

In this study, we develop and apply a new methodology for obtaining accurate and equitable property value assessments. This methodology adds a time dimension to the Geographically Weighted Regressions (GWR) framework, which we call Time-Geographically Weighted Regressions (TGWR). That is, when...

Money growth in the euro area has exceeded its target since 2001. Likewise, recent empirical studies did not find evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function. The equation appears to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are used. If the link between money balances and...

Monetary growth in the euro area has exceeded its target since several years. At the same time, the money demand function seems to be increasingly unstable if more recent data are used. If the link between money balances and the macroeconomy is fragile, the rationale of monetary aggregates in...

It is frequently suggested that export diversification contributes to an acceleration of growth in developing countries. Horizontal export diversification into completely new export sectors may generate positive externalities on the rest of the economy as export oriented sectors gain from...