Housing conditions in Belgium are among the best in OECD countries according to the Better Life Index, as dwellings are of high quality and large, and housing costs are average. However, the steep increase in house prices since 2003 has put market access for first-time buyers under pressure....

What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, we find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. We propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the...

We analyze the reliability of homeowners¿ estimates of the value of their houses, in a household survey (of poor suburbs) of a developing country. We show that non-response to the home value question by the owner is uncorrelated with the appraised value of the house and other demographic...

One of the key assumptions in spatial econometric modelling is that the spatial process is isotropic, which means that direction is irrelevant in the specification of the spatial structure. On one hand, this assumption largely reduces the complexity of the spatial models and facilitates...

Systemic risk must include the housing market, though economists have not generally focused on it. We begin construction of an agent-based model of the housing market with individual data from Washington, DC. Twenty years of success with agent-based models of mortgage prepayments give us hope...

Econometric evidence suggests the existence of two dynamics in the postwar U.S. housing market: (i) housing rental and purchase prices co-move positively in response to productivity shocks, and (ii) the purchase price exhibits much larger volatile movements than the rental price in response to...

We show how simple statistical techniques for capturing critical transitions used in natural sciences, fail to capture economic regime shifts. This implies that we need to use model-based approaches to identify critical transitions. We apply a heterogenous agents model in a standard housing...

A well-functioning housing market is essential for economic prosperity and well-being. A combination of favourable economic and financial conditions and tight housing supply led to sharp increases in real house prices between the mid-1990s and end 2007, which spurred household consumption. While...

Is there a theoretical basis for the view that the end of a period of over-investment necessarily leads to a period of below-normal employment as the excess capital stock is run down? We study the repercussions of a false boom in housing driven by prior expectations of future housing prices not...

Housing markets typically exhibit a strong positive correlation between the rate of price increase and the number of houses sold. We document this correlation on high-quality Dutch data for the period 1985–2007, and estimate a VEC-model that allows us to study the mechanism giving rise to the...