Elderly home-owners get institutionalized less often than renters do. We hypothesize that housing tenure itself explains this behavior. Using longitudinal data from a Dutch community sample (N= 2,372) collected between 1992 and 2005, we find a negative effect of housing tenure on the probability...

Conventional hedonic analysis measures willingness to pay for attributes on the basis of marginal fixed costs. We argue that in many cases variable costs are also affected by these attributes and that this should be taken into account. We develop a simple model to show that the marginal...

This paper reviews the empirical research that has been generated by Oswald’s thesis, which claims that there is a causal relationship from homeownership to unemployment. The literature confirms a decreasing effect of homeownership on geographical mobility of workers, but does not in general...

Reimbursement of commuting costs by employers has attracted little attention from economists. We develop a theoretical model of a monopsonistic employer who determines an optimal recruitment policy in a spatial labour market with search frictions and show that partial reimbursement of commuting...

Even though economic models have been relatively successful in explaining the long run patterns of house prices, they have more difficulties in explaining short run developments of the housing markets. However, the fact that during such ‘bubbles’ the spatial pattern of house prices, which...

In spite of a growing recognition of the importance of supply conditions for the level and volatility of house prices, empirical work on housing supply outside the US is scarce. This paper considers various measures of housing supply in the Netherlands, where real house prices have roughly...

Although many researchers have investigated the value of open space in cities, few of them have compared them to the costs of providing this amenity. In this paper, we use the monocentric model of a city to derive a simple cost-benefit rule for the optimal provision of open space. The rule is...

How should urban containment and the diversion of households to nearby residential areas be evaluated from a welfare economic perspective? Assuming the existence of a negative externality of city size, we develop a concise general equilibrium model for a mother city and a satellite. This...

This paper presents a method to assess the distribution of values of time, and values of statistical life, over participants to a stated choice experiment, that does not require the researcher to make an a priori assumption on the type of distribution, as is required for example for mixed logit...

Conventional economic models of traffic congestion assume that therelation between road use and speed is a technical one. In this paper wederive the speed-flow relationship from more fundamental considerationsconcerning driving behaviour. We develop a structural model in which driverschoose...