This chapter examines certain of the developments in the application of economic theory and in empirical and policy analysis with respect to housing markets in general and urban housing markets in particular. The majority of the material refers to US and UK experience with some English language...

In this paper, we study the house price effects of local school choice opportunities among public primary schools using a rare and large-scale reform that abolished binding catchment areas in North RhineWestphalia, the largest German state with 18 million inhabitants. To estimate the reform's...

To analyze the impact of changes in the value of marriage on household decisions, we present a limited commitment framework of household behavior in which decisions are made regarding labor supply, divorce and housing demand over the lifecycle. We identify and estimate our structural model using...

The transition into homeownership is becoming increasingly difficult for first-home buyers. In this paper we measure the deposit requirements and the transaction costs associated with purchasing a home for the first time, and whether a reduction in stamp duty obligations will help potential...

This paper replicates Costa and Kahn's analysis of locational choices of couples of highly educated persons for the Netherlands. We find increasing concentration of such power couples in the urbanized western part of the country. This trend occurs in spite of the absence of an urban wage premium...

I show that individuals whose unemployment risk tends to increase more when local home prices fall optimally invest less in owner-occupied housing. Using a unique, Swedish register-based database, I find that a one standard deviation increase in the covariance between individually estimated...

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we .nd that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically signi.cant...

The sensitivity of housing demand to mortgage rates and available leverage is key to understanding the effect of monetary and macroprudential policies on the housing market. However, since there is generally no exogenous variation in these variables that is independent of confounding factors...

This paper provides a model for the well-known empirical phenomenon that houses of different quality experience different price developments. The typical pattern is that luxury houses appreciate more in boom periods and depreciate more during busts. The standard model of housing demand treats...