Residential property prices play an important role in many areas of economics and finance. They are used, for example, to determine the value of a major component of real wealth, as an indicator of financial stability risks stemming from residential property price gyrations, or to monitor...

The large movements in residential property prices in emerging markets observed over the past decade have raised interest in housing market developments. Within a cointegration framework applied to an unbalanced panel, we assess the relationship between residential property price developments,...

In frictional matching markets with heterogeneous buyers and sellers, sellers incur discrete showing costs to show goods to buyers who incur discrete inspection costs to assess the suitability of the goods on offer. This paper studies how brokers can help reduce these costs by managing the level...

This paper presents a discussion about the unequal nature of the transformations in urban living conditions resulting from the prevailing neoliberal economic model in Brazil. In a historical perspective, it suggests that the social organisation in urban areas has been increasingly subordinated...

Sharp increase in house prices combined with the extraordinary Chinese lending growth during 2009 has led to concerns of an emerging real estate bubble. We find that, for China as a whole, the current levels of house prices do not seem significantly higher than would be justified by underlying...

Sharp increase in house prices in Hong Kong SAR in 2009-2010 has led to concerns of an emerging real estate bubble. According to our measure of price deviation from fundamentals, which should be taken as an early warning indicator of market exuberance, the current level of house prices in Hong...

The financial crisis showed, once again, that neglecting real estate booms can have disastrous consequences. In this paper, we spell out the circumstances under which a more active policy agenda on this front would be justified. Then, we offer tentative insights on the pros and cons as well as...

Since the core of a housing market with externalities may be empty, we propose as a solution concept the set of allocations that satisfy two basic properties: Pareto efficiency and the No-regret condition. Our main result shows that for any instance of the housing market problem, there always...

This paper provides an assessment of quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. We analyze micro-level data for housing and labor markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within five domains: climate, environment, services, society and economy. The...

Can monetary policy trigger pronounced boom-bust cycles in house prices and create persistent business cycles? We address this question by building heuristics into an otherwise standard DSGE model. As a result, monetary policy sets off waves of optimism and pessimism (“animal spirits”) that...