Homeownership rates have increased significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. Using micro-econometric decomposition techniques, this paper shows that part of this increase can be explained by changes in the characteristics of households, including age, household structure, incomes...

This article examines the housing policy implemented by the Basque Government, in accordance with the exclusive authority devolved to it in this matter under the regional Statute of Autonomy. In this sense, the article first describes the various organisational instruments developed over time to...

Alternative hedonic model formulations are used to compare predicted and observed prices of property transactions in alternative locations. The estimation of model parameters is based on data from Western Norway, and alternative model formulations primarily differ with respect to how spatial...

The starting point of this paper is a hedonic regression model where house prices are explained as a result of urban attraction and the accessibility to job opportunities in the region. We introduce the hypothesis that households in addition value accessibility to job opportunities in the...

We use detailed microeconomic data to investigate why aggregate residential electricity consumption in California has been flat since 1980. Using unique micro data, we document the role that household demographics and ideology play in determining electricity demand. We show that building codes...

Fiscal packages usually capitalize into house prices. But if enough land for construction is available, housing developers can supply new houses and capitalization may disappear. We provide a theoretical model in which income taxes and public services capitalize at lower rates when housing...

Federal mortgage modification initiatives, targeting millions of borrowers, are intended to prevent foreclosures of underwater home mortgages. Those initiatives discourage principal reductions in favor of interest reductions, despite the possibility that the former would be a more durable...

Empirical research on cities starts with a spatial equilibrium condition: workers and firms are assumed to be indifferent across space. This condition implies that research on cities is different from research on countries, and that work on places within countries needs to consider population,...

This study presents a first summary of the housing finance results of the OeNB’s Household Survey on Housing Wealth in Austria. 22% of Austrian households have taken out debt to finance housing. The probability of holding such debt is significantly higher for younger and higher- income...

Conventional wisdom holds that one of the riskiest aspects of owning a house is the uncertainty surrounding its sale price, especially if one moves to another housing market. However, households who sell a house typically buy another house, whose purchase price is also uncertain. We show that...