The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with...

Geppert K., Gornig M. and Werwatz A. (2008) Economic growth of agglomerations and geographic concentration of industries: evidence for West Germany, Regional Studies. During the two decades between 1980 and 2000, there was no clear overall trend of economic convergence or divergence among West...

For most households, choosing whether to rent or buy a home is a difficult, multifaceted problem. It is well-established that relative cost and affordability aspects are important for the household's tenure decision, such as the tax treatment of owner-occupied homes, the cost of moving home, and...

In a world with complete markets, the decision whether to rent or buy a home is not influenced by risks related to human capital. If markets are incomplete and have frictions, however, this may change. Renting should become more likely the more mobile a household has to be and the more income...

Financial theory creates a puzzle. Some authors argue that high-risk entrepreneurs choose debt contracts instead of equity contracts since risky but high returns are of relatively more value for a loan-financed firm. Conversely, authors who focus explicitly on start-up finance predict that...

In this paper, we apply Ridge Regression, the Lasso and the Elastic Net to a rich and reliable data set of condominiums sold in Berlin, Germany, between 1996 and 2013. We their predictive performance in a rolling window design to a simple linear OLS procedure. Our results suggest that Ridge...