Can industrial policy be effective when dealing with a revolutionary new technology? Mark Casson's recent book, "The World's First Railway System," offers the intriguing claim that a slight dose of central planning by the British government in the 1840s would have produced a dramatically more...

The British Railway Mania of the 1840s was by many measures the greatest technology mania in history, and its collapse was one of the greatest financial crashes. It has attracted surprisingly little scholarly interest. In particular, it has not been noted that it provides a convincing...

Walter Bagehot is remembered today primarily as a proponent of the doctrine of lender of last resort, in which central banks pump money into the economy to ameliorate the damage from a financial crisis. But none of the growing number of publications about him appear to investigate in depth...

On 15th November 2012 in Copenhagen, SUERF and Nykredit in association with Danmarks Nationalbank organised a conference on “Property prices and real estate financing in a turbulent world.” The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the conference.

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...

We provide an analysis of the housing market and current housing policies in three developed countries: the United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland, and the United States (US). We focus on these three countries mainly due to the marked differences in their institutional settings. The UK is...

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey (1991-2008) and the UK Census (waves 1991, 2001 and 2011) to examine the association between gentrification and displacement in English cities. Gentrification is the phenomena of a large and relatively sudden in-migration of wealthy or middle...

In this paper I study how debt and housing affect the trend of a closed economy. I build and estimate a DSGE model with endogenous growth and with heterogeneous agents, savers and borrowers. I find that in response to an increase in the nominal collateral value, savers decrease their investments...

In this study, we exploit a policy shock that differentially increased capital gains taxes for housing units with holding period less than 5 years, and document tax avoidance and tax evasion in the residential resale market in China. We show suggestive evidence that after the capital gains tax...

The contribution of this paper is to offer a rationale for the observed seasonal pattern in house prices. We first document seasonality in house prices for the US and the UK using formal statistical tests and illustrate its quantitative importance. In the second part of the paper we employ a...