In many countries, house prices are overvalued according to price-to-income ratios. We propose that the borrower s ability to pay through a mortgage is a long-run house price fundamental and find convincing evidence by means of cointegration tests, granger causality, and an elasticity of house...

After a decade under federal control, the Belgian regions became responsible for the mortgage interest and capital deduction (MICD) in 2015. One region drastically reduced the average subsidy while another left it unaffected. Exploiting this variation in a difference in differences design, we...

We study the effect of an increase in capital requirements for residential mortgages on mortgage rates and house prices. We exploit a unique quasi-experiment in which affected banks faced an increase in risk weights of five percentage points. Using a difference-in-difference estimator we find...

Hedonic house price indices adjust the average sales prices for the change in the quality of the property sold over time. This paper proposes a framework to disentangle the contribution of each individual dwelling characteristic to this quality change. We apply our framework to a unique dataset...