In this paper, we review the German practice of imputing the costs of owner-occupied housing by increasing the relative weight of actual rents in the CPI. As the structure of owner-occupied housing differs substantially from that of rental housing, this variant of the imputation method may cause...

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...

Concerns about global warming and growing scarcity of fossile fuels require substantial changes in energy consumption patterns and energy systems, as targeted by many countries around the world. One key element to achieve such transformation is to increase energy efficiency of the housing stock....

There is a broad literature on determinants of house prices, which received increasing attention in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Additional to macroeconomic standard variables, there might be other hard to measure or even unobservable factors influencing real estate price dynamics....

In light of the strong increase of house prices in Switzerland, we analyze the effects of mortgage rate shocks, changes in the interplay between housing demand and supply and GDP growth on house prices for the time period 1981- 2014. We employ Bayesian time-varying coefficients vector...

The main objective of this paper is to give an overview of the most commonly used housing policies and to illustrate their economic impact. To facilitate the analysis, we first introduce a simple two-period housing demand model for owner-occupied houses and rental houses. We then add a standard...

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of environmental and urban improvements on the islands of the Venetian lagoon. The model simulates the changes in residential real estate values using a value function integrated in a geographical database which provides spatial distributions of...

This chapter considers the structure of mortgage finance in the U.S., and its role in shaping patterns of homeownership, the nature of the housing stock, and the organization of residential activity. We start by providing some background on the design features of mortgage contracts that...

The "Minha Casa Minha Vida" program (MCMV) started in 2009 and was afterwards elevated to the status of Brazilian housing policy. Since its creation the appearance of other alternatives for housing provision has been restricted. This paper performs a diagnosis of the recent housing policy in...

In this paper we analyze the social housing supply by "Minha Casa Minha Vida" (MCMV) program in Brazil, aimed at low-wage families (earning up to R$ 1,600 per month), as well as the housing shortage ("deficit habitacional") in a similar wage range. The location of MCMV's housing estates is...