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...

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...

This paper proposes two new measures of illiquidity for real estate markets utilising concepts from asset pricing. Segregating real estate through a regional lens, we provide an in-depth analysis of real estate returns and illiquidity for the US and UK using time-varying parameter VAR models....

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 a recent set of influential papers, researchers have argued that residential mortgage foreclosures reduce the sale prices of nearby properties. We revisit this issue using a more robust identification strategy combined with new data that contain information on the location of properties...

Extending the controversial findings from relevant literature on testing the efficient market hypothesis for the U.S. housing market, the results from the monthly and quarterly transaction-based Case-Shiller indices from 1987 to 2009 provide further empirical evidence on the rejection of the...