Changes in the biophysical characteristics of natural habitats – that can be measured with data on land cover – are the best proxy to monitor pressures on ecosystems and biodiversity. This paper presents a suite of indicators that track land cover change over time in a globally consistent...

House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Making housing more affordable ranks high on the policy agenda across the world. One way to achieve affordable housing is to ensure sufficiently elastic supply of the housing stock in response to demand shocks. This paper aims at disentangling policy from non-policy drivers in explaining...

Most developed countries now pursue policies that implicitly or explicitly aim at promoting compact urban form. This report analyses more than 300 academic papers that study the effects of compact urban form, and finds that 69% of the papers reviewed find positive effects associated with compact...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

Housing is key for well-being and for spatial and social mobility. In India, the housing market is characterised by excess demand for affordable dwellings, a small rental market and an oversupply of high-end housing, especially in urban areas.

The U.S. population is becoming increasingly urban and has gradually shifted to the south and west. Policy restrictions have played a role in preventing dynamic areas expanding, and when they do expand it can be through low-density housing sprawl. Land use restrictions and a sluggish housing...

By combining fresh estimates of housing supply and prices with recent long-term projections for their fundamental drivers such as population, income and interest rates, this paper produces scenarios for residential investment and real house prices up to 2050. For half of the covered countries,...

Research on interbank networks and systemic importance is starting to recognise that the web of exposures linking banks balance sheets is more complex than the single-layer-of-exposure approach. We use data on exposures between large European banks broken down by both maturity and instrument...

This paper presents a comprehensive model of financial contagion encompassing both direct and indirect transmission channels. We introduce direct contagion through a 2-layered multiplex network to account for the distinct dynamics resulting from collateralized and uncollateralized transactions....