Topic Real Estate and Housing

5th Workshop on Rent Control

The aim of the workshop is to bring together experts from different countries and different disciplines (economics, history, law, sociology, urbanism, etc.) who are interested in rent control and other housing policies. The annual workshop, taking place for the fifth time, aims to be a forum for discussing housing policies around the world and exchange ideas. Furthermore, it also aims to encourage...

The Keys to the House - How Wealth Transfers Stratify Homeownership Opportunities

This study investigates how actual and anticipated intergenerational wealth transfers – i.e., inter vivos gifts and inheritances – contribute to inequalities in the transition to homeownership by parental social class. Utilizing discrete-time survival analysis on data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study (N = 13,018), we find that individuals whose parents were manual workers or service workers ...

The Impact of Governmental Regulations on Housing Market: Findings of a Meta-Study of Empirical Literature

Housing markets are affected by a large variety of factors. Among them, governmental regulations play an important role. Besides desired effects, all these policies exert a number of side effects, some of which can even offset the desired effects. In addition, different policies can cancel out each other. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the effects of individual policies and the composite ...

Turnaround in Sight for the Construction Industry; Political Pressure for Action Is Nonetheless Increasing

Real construction volume is expected to decline for the fifth year in a row: A decline of nearly four percent is expected for 2024 and it should fall by almost one percent in 2025. However, the construction industry may manage to reverse the trend in 2026, when real construction volume is projected to grow by two percent. However, this should not obscure the fact that the declines over the past years ...

The Long-Term Implications of Destruction During the Second World War on Private Wealth in Germany

By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual ...

Property owners have been investing less in energy-efficient renovation in 2024

Despite further increases in heating energy prices, households reduced their energy consumption less

Agents, Landlords and Tenants: Price Regulation in a Thick Two-sided Market

This paper examines the impacts of new policies aimed at reducing the cost of renting by regulating the actions of intermediaries in the rental market. We highlight how information frictions between buyers and intermediaries can give rise to rents in the thick two-sided market. The distribution of these rents between intermediaries and sellers, as well as the impact of price regulation, depends on...

DECIPHE – Demographic Change and the Intergenerational Persistence in Homeownership in Europe

DECIPHE is the first project to comprehensively study whether and how profound demographic changes in Europe impact the intergenerational persistence of homeownership, considering variations across countries, regions, and birth cohorts. It adopts a life course framework on housing tenure, in which individuals’ homeownership is shaped by their household members’ preferences and resources and...

What are the distributional advantages of retrofitting?