Fast zwanzig Jahre nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung gibt es immer noch erhebliche regionale Einkommensunterschiede zwischen West- und Ostdeutschland. Der Artikel soll zeigen, wie die Transferzahlungen des Staates diese Einkommensdisparitäten ausgleichen. In einem ersten Schritt untersuchen...

This paper describes an equilibrium life-cycle model of housing where nonconvex adjustment costs lead households to adjust their housing choice infrequently and by large amounts when they do so. In the cross-sectional dimension, the model matches the wealth distribution; the age profiles of...

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...

Co-ethnic networks and socioeconomic factors play a fundamental role in explaining immigrants' residence choices. However, their role varies across ethnic groups or populations with different assimilation levels. This study assesses the heterogeneous effects of co-ethnic networks and...

During the last few decades, aggregate wage growth has been very unevenly distributed across space in Germany. While wages in Southern German local labor markets rose by up to 28 log points, they increased only modestly or even declined in the north. Similar results apply to employment changes....

Hedonic regressions with house value as the dependent variable are widely used to study the value of public services and amenities. This paper builds on the theory of household bidding and sorting to derive a bid function envelope, which provides a form for these regressions. This approach uses...

This paper presents an original economic model of the apartment rental market where service expenditures are invisible to prospective residents (but highly important to current residents), while recruiting expenditures are highly visible to prospective residents (but often inconsequential to...

The city is a collective project that seeks to improve the general welfare of the population. Residential structuring agents have an inclination to get richer without reason. If collective actions that control and regulate this inclination are missing, the city becomes a powerful instrument to...

Housing rents are a large share of household budgets and make a large contribution to overall inflation. Rent inflation rates for different types of housing units sometimes diverge, even in the same neighborhoods. We estimate during 2013 to 2016 apartment rents outpaced rents for detached...

This chapter focuses on neighborhood effects in housing markets. Households in effect choose neighborhood effects, or more generally social interactions, via their location decisions, which renders them endogenous. Across several classes of models that it examines, it emphasizes how we may...