Topic Real Estate and Housing

Housing Decisions, Family Types and Gender: A Look across LIS Countries

In this paper we shall examine homeownership trends over the past 3 to 4 decades and discuss differences related to the homeownership gap for women and men, with a focus on most recent trends. We shall compare differences in the US to those in countries with different institutional structures and shall pay particular attention to differences across family types. Our estimation techniques will allow ...

The Construction Industry Continues Its Upward Trend: Seven Questions to Claus Michelsen

Fifty Shades of State: Quantifying Housing Market Regulations in Germany

The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional legislation, for each class, an index is constructed, increasing in degree of regulation. The average of class-specific ...

German Construction Industry: Refurbishment Lacks Momentum, New Residential Construction Gets Second Wind

The construction industry has been a key pillar of the German economy in recent years. New residential construction played a major part in this with the volume of new construction growing nominally by over 60 percent between 2010 and 2014. The development of construction work on existing residential buildings was less dynamic, however, with just under ten-percent growth between 2010 and 2014. A key ...

Small Might Be Beautiful, but Bigger Performs Better: Scale Economies in "Green" Refurbishments of Apartment Housing

The energy efficiency of the residential housing stock plays a key role in strategies to mitigate climate change and global warming. In this context, it is frequently argued that private investment and the quality of thermal upgrades are too low in the light of the challenges faced and the potential energy cost savings. While many authors address the potential barriers for investors to increase energy ...

Evolution and Determinants of Rent Burdens in Germany

The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’ disposable needs-adjusted income. We find a substantial increase in the ratios over the 1990s. In the decade that ...

Urban House Prices: A Tale of 48 Cities

In this paper, the authors construct a unique data set of Internet offer prices for flats in 48 large European cities across 24 countries. The data collected between January and May 2012 from 33 websites, are drawn from Internet advertisements of dwellings. Using the resulting sample of more than 1,000,000 announcements, the authors compute the quality-adjusted city-specific house prices. Based on ...

Modernization and Innovation in the Materials Sector: Lessons from Steel and Cement

Since 2007, the European cement and steel sectors have been characterized by substantial surplus production capacity. Hence re-investment in primary production of many materials remains limited and endangers the longer-term economic viability of many plants. Opportunities for innovation and modernization could overcome these challenges. They are linked to new demands for more efficient and lower-carbon ...

Combining Dynamic Allocation and Inclusion of Consumption into the EU ETS Would Be Beneficial: Six Questions to Karsten Neuhoff

War, Housing Rents, and Free Market: A Case of Berlin's Rental Housing Market during the World War I

Before the World War I, the urban rental housing market in Germany could be described as a free and competitive market. The government hardly interfered in the relationships between the landlords and ten- ants. The rents were set freely. During the World War I, the market was hit by several violent shocks. The outbreak of the war led initially to a huge outflow of men from cities to the fronts. Towards ...