This paper studies determinants of some aspects of the structure of cities, including density and the price of land and housing. We use a version of the Alonso-Muth-Mills model, calibrated to broadly match some of the features of a representative large city. While the calibrated model omits many...

This paper examines whether it costs more to own a home or to rent. We argue this is a useful criterion for assessing housing overvaluation. We use a new Australian dataset, which includes prices and rents for matched properties, letting us value housing in levels. We find that if real house...

I analyze empirically the effects of both urban and industrial agglomeration on men`s and women`s search behavior and on the efficiency of matching. The analysis is based on the Italian Labor Force Survey micro-data, which covers 520 randomly drawn Local Labor Market Areas (66 per cent of the...

This paper projects Chinese urban residential construction out to 2040. The paper argues that the extraordinary growth of recent years will not continue, but that construction will stabilise at a high level. This augurs well for steel demand, especially as steel intensity is expected to...

Following the transposition of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive into Irish law, all properties offered for sale or to let in Ireland are obliged to have an energy efficiency rating.  This paper analyses the effect of energy efficiency ratings on the sale and rental prices of...

In many countries, house prices are subject to boom/bust cycles and in some these are linked to severe economic and financial instability.  Overheating can have both a price and a quantity dimension, but it is likely that they are linked by common drivers.  However, much depends on the...

This paper explores the positive relationship betwen home prices and household spending by following a panel of Australian households over the period 2003 to 2010. There are three hypotheses put forth in the literature to explain this relationship: (1) increases in home prices raise spending via...

Using dwelling prices in Australia's two largest cities, we consider whether the way in which a property is sold, either through an auction or a private-treaty negotiation, is informative for predicting dwelling prices. We find evidence to suggest that average prices of dwellings sold at auction...

We investigate the factors associated with the incidence of mortgage-related financial difficulties in Australia. We use two complementary micro-level datasets: loan-level data on residential mortgages from two Australian banks, which we use to analyse the factors associated with entering 90+...