In a world with complete markets and no transactions cost, the decision whether to rent or buy a home is separate from a household's professional income risk. If markets are incomplete and have frictions, however, profession- specific income risk, regional house price risk, and mobility needs...

The quality of newly constructed single-family houses is usually homogeneous in and heterogeneous between neighborhoods. Such quality-clustering will be caused by the variation of natural amenities throughout a suburban area. Clustering will be enforced if the quality of neighboring buildings...

Statistische Prognosen basieren auf der Annahme, dass ein funktionaler Zusammenhang zwischen der zu prognostizierenden Variable y und anderen j-dimensional beobachtbaren Variablen x = (x1,...xl) besteht. Kann der funktionale Zusammenhang geschätzt werden, so kann im Prinzip für jedes x der...

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...

Market value predictions for residential properties are important for investment decisions and the risk management of households, banks, and real estate developers. The increased access to market data has spurred the development and application of Automated Valuation Models (AVMs), which can...

We use Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS) of Polzehl and Spokoiny (2000, 2003, 2006) to estimate a map of land values for Berlin, Germany. Our data are prices of undeveloped land that was transacted between 1996-2009. Even though the observed land price is an indicator of the respective land...

We show that house prices from Aberdeen in the UK improve in- and out-of-sample oil price forecasts. The improvements are of a similar magnitude to those attained using macroeconomic indicators. We explain these forecast improvements with the dominant role of the oil industry in Aberdeen. House...