Urban Green Space (UGS) such as parks and forests provide a wide range of environmental and recreational benefits. One objective in the conservation efforts of UGS is to analyse the benefits associated with UGS in order to make them more visible and to provide support for landscape planning....

Numerous papers have tried to understand housing’s role in the economy and have not reached an agreement. In this paper we turn to the asymmetric relationship between housing and the overall economic activity. We find that the relation between building permits and GDP is regime-dependent....

The price for a single-family house depends both on the characteristics of the building and on its location. We propose a novel semiparametric method to extract location values from house prices. After splitting house prices into building and land components, location values are estimated with...

We use Adaptive Weights Smoothing (AWS) of Polzehl and Spokoiny (2000, 2003, 2006) to estimate a map of land values for Berlin, Germany. Our data are prices of undeveloped land that was transacted between 1996-2009. Even though the observed land price is an indicator of the respective land...

"Bodenrichtwerte" reflect the average location value of land plots within a specific area. They constitute an important source of information that contributes to price transparency on land markets. In Germany, "Bodenrichtwerte" are provided by publicly appointed expert groups...

According to housing investment models, house prices and replacement cost should have an equilibrating relationship. Previous empirical work - mainly based on aggregate-level data - has found only little evidence of such a relationship. By using a unique data set, covering transactions of...

We show that house prices from Aberdeen in the UK improve in- and out-of-sample oil price forecasts. The improvements are of a similar magnitude to those attained using macroeconomic indicators. We explain these forecast improvements with the dominant role of the oil industry in Aberdeen. House...

This is an empirical study on the effect of house price on stock-market participation and its depths based on unique China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data in 2011 and 2013 including 36213 sample households. We mainly found that, with an increase of one thousand RMB per square meter in macro...

Certifiers contribute to the sound functioning of markets by reducing asymmetric information. They, however, have been heavily criticized during the 2008-09 financial crisis. This paper investigates on which side of the market a monopolistic profit-maximizing certifier offers his service. If the...

We examine the issue of whether two monopolists which produce substitutable goods should be regulated by one (centralization) or two (decentralization) regulatory authorities, when the regulator(s) can be partially captured by industry. Under full information, two decentralized agencies - each...