Round numbers affect behavior in various domains, e.g., as prominent thresholds or focal points in bargaining. In line with earlier findings, residential real estate transactions in Germany cluster at round-number prices, but there are also interesting (presumably cultural) differences. We...

Home equity is the primary self-funding mechanism for long term services and supports (LTSS). Using data from the relevant waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1996-2010), we exploit the exogenous variation in the form of wealth shocks resulting from the value of housing assets, to examine...

This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for...

Recent analyses of intergenerational mobility show that investments in children pay big dividends. The priority of resources in early childhood also affects the working of the local economy. Geographic variation in child care services motivates location of families and thereby influences housing...

There is a large literature in the U.S. measuring the extent and stringency of land-use regulations in urban areas and how these regulations affect important outcomes such as housing prices and economic growth. This paper is the first to present an international measure of regulatory stringency...

We estimate the ratio of private wealth to national income, βpt, for Switzerland from 1900 to 2020. Our results indicate that over the 20th century, βpt did not follow a U-shaped pattern as in most European countries. Instead, its was exceptionally stable at around 500%. We argue that this...

We study market rents in the neighborhood of asylum seeker hosting centers. Our empirical setting exploits the quasi-random opening of centers and spatial allocation of asylum seekers in Switzerland. Rents within 0.7km of an active center are found on average to be 3.8% lower than rents in the...

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we consider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

This paper takes a financial market perspective in examining the relationship between oil prices, the US dollar and asset prices, and it exploits the heteroskedasticity for the identification of causality in a multifactor model. It finds a bidirectional causality between the US dollar and oil...

We consider optimal monetary policy in a model that integrates credit frictions in the standard New Keynesian model with sticky prices and wages as well as adjustment costs of capital. Different from traditional models with credit frictions such as Carlstrom and Fuerst (1998), the model is able...