The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the monthly growth rates of the prices and rents for flats in 26 largest German cities. Given the small time dimension, the forecasts are done in a panel-data format. In addition, we use panel models that account for spatial dependence between the...

In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GRP for each of the 31 Chinese provinces simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, we use panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence between the GRP growth rates. In addition, the...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the...

The effects of inter-government fiscal arrangements on variation in regional economic growth are analyzed for Russia, a country with large cross-regional differences and considerable fiscal redistribution. Moreover, fiscal reforms implemented in the first half of 2000s, which followed to some...

This paper investigates the income convergence among Russian regions in the period 1998-2006. It makes two major contributions to rather extensive literature on the regional convergence in Russia. First, it identifies spatial regimes using the exploratory spatial data analysis. Second, it...

Following World War I, rent control became a standard policy response to the housing shortage and the resulting rent increases. Typically, economists blame it for creating inefficiencies in the housing market and beyond. We investigate whether rental market regulations (including rent control,...

This paper studies the effect of sharing a common native language on international trade. Switzerland hosts three major native language groups which adjoin countries sharing the same native majority languages. In regions close to the internal language border the alternate major language is...

We suggest to use Internet car sale price advertisements for measuring economic inequality between and within German regions. Our estimates of regional income levels and Gini indices based on advertisements are highly, positively correlated with the official figures. This implies that the...

In this paper, we examine the effects of an airport expansion on the prices of houses and flats located under the planned flight corridors. We focus on the role of expectations about the exposure to noise and find that proximity to the planned corridors significantly reduces real estate prices...