Topic Real Estate and Housing

Mortgage Market Maturity and Homeownership Inequality among Young Households: A Five-Country Perspective

This paper uses the newly constructed Luxembourg Wealth Study data to document cross-country variation in homeownership rates and the homeownership-income inequality among young households in Finland, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US, and relate it to cross-country differences in mortgage market maturity. We find that aside from Italy, homeownership rates and inequality in the four countries correspond ...

Distributional Effects of Imputed Rents in Seven European Countries: AIM-AP National Report for Germany ; Part of the Research Project "Accurate Income Measurement for the Assessment of Public Policies" (AIM-AP) Funded by European Commission

The German Construction Industry: Production and Employment 2007/2008

In 2006, after years of stagnating and even significantly declining production, the construction industry finally experienced a year of strong growth (Table 1). In nominal terms, the industry expanded by 7% in 2006. After allowing for price increases, there was real growth of almost 5%, much higher than expected. Admittedly, one cause of this expansion was the effect of a VAT increase announced for ...

Cost Liability and Residential Space Heating Expenditures of Welfare Recipients in Germany

Within the German welfare system, heating expenditures of recipients are in general fully covered by the government. This paper empirically tests for the hypothesis that households receiving welfare payments turn to over consumption of residential space heating. We use microdata from two different data sources to explore whether conditional heating expenditures of these households significantly differ ...

Ethnic Identity and Immigrant Homeownership

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socio-economic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic identity as a potential influence on the homeownership decision, using a two-dimensional model of ethnic identity ...

Ethnic Identity and Immigrant Homeownership

Ethnic Identity and Immigrant Homeownership

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socio-economic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic identity as a potential influence on the homeownership decision, using a two-dimensional model of ethnic identity ...

What Drives Housing Prices Down? Evidence from an International Panel

In this study, we suggest an explanation for the alarmingly low growth rates of real housing prices in Canada and Germany in comparison to other OECD countries over 1975-2005. We show that the long-run development of housing markets is determined by real disposable per capita income, real long-term interest rate, population growth, and urbanization. The differential development of real housing prices ...

Germany 2007: Undiminished High Construction Production and Increased Construction Prices

After the high growth of 2006, the first quarter of 2007 also shows undiminished high construction production. Evidence of this is provided by the number of hours worked, which see growth rates in double figures in all fields of civil and structural engineering; yet it is surprising that growth in industrial construction lagged somewhat. It remains to be seen to what extent the extremely strong increase ...

Germany's Construction Industry: Stabilization on the Horizon

The construction volume this year will reach a value of just under euro 230 billion _ a drop as compared to 2004 of close to 3%. At approximately 1.5%, the price increase should turn out somewhat higher than the previous year, which means the real construction volume will thus shrink by a good 4%. While the development during the first six months of this year was clearly on the decline, improved demand ...