We use novel and unique data to study the effect of price changes in the market for luxury and middle class homes. We find that luxury home sales respond less to price changes than the middle-class home sales; in the market for luxury homes, past prices affect current prices; luxury home prices...

Housing, particularly for low income urban households, is a long-standing challenge in India. In 2012, 96 per cent of the all India urban housing shortage of 18.78 million was confined to low-income economic groups. This study empirically examines three facets of urban India's housing demand...

We analyze households' joint investment decisions for financial wealth and homes. We use a bivariate censored regression model with endogenous switching. Fixed costs or transaction costs are captured by an unobserved nonzero censoring threshold. The model allows for spill-over effects of a...

As it has rightfully been recognized by China's central government, successful urbanization will be decisive for the nation's future development. Key challenges will be to realize urbanization economies, improve production and innovation capabilities, direct urban and suburban growth and improve...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. Such processes are subject to persistent random shocks stemming from agents’ maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term —logit...

This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium model of cities and uses it to analyze the role of local housing markets and moving costs in determining the character and extent of labor reallocation in the US economy. Labor reallocation in the model is driven by idiosyncratic city-specific...

The member states of the European Union received 1.2 million first time asylum applications in 2015 (a doubling compared to 2014). Even if asylum will be granted for many of the refugees that made the journey to Europe, several obstacles for successful integration remain. This paper focuses on...

It is often argued that capital should flow from aging industrialized economies to countries with fast-growing populations. However, institutional failures and the risk of expropriation substantially reduce developing economies' attractiveness for foreign investors. We analyze the influence of a...

Ageing gives rise to concern about the sustainability of pay-as-you-go pension systems. One reform option suggested is to make the system actuarial by a tight connection between contributions and benefits. The incentives for the individual will then coincide with the interest of the pension...

This paper empirically examines the effect of population growth on real interest rates. Although this effect is well founded in macroeconomic theory, the corresponding empirical results have been rather tenuous. Demographic interest rate theories are typically based on long-term relationships...