This paper relates incomplete price competition among real estate agents to inattentive home sellers. I exploit a recent legal reform in Germany which specifically aimed to increase price competition among real estate agents by raising the cost salience of sellers. I find that the reform backfired and real estate agents exploited the transition to increase their total commission rate by 0.3...
The energy and climate crisis enhance the need for energy savings. In the building sector, these savings can be achieved primarily through thermal retrofitting. So far, progress in this area has been slow. To date, less than one percent of the residential building stock in Germany is retrofitted each year. The existing support programs alone offer too little reliability for the necessary...
Various stakeholders are increasingly encouraging companies from the real economy to adopt measures facilitating their transition towards carbon neutrality. In this context, companies are expected to implement forward-looking strategies and climate-related reporting practices using scenario analysis aligned with scientific evidence and credible pathways to net zero carbon emissions. This paper examines ...
According to the latest review report of the Council of Experts on Climate Change, the German building sector failed to meet its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in 2022. This is in part because investments in energy-efficient building refurbishment—supported by all kinds of policy measures— has neither been low nor shown a consistently positive trend over the past ten years. Furthermore, ...
In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side ...
Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) is a simple and powerful non-parametric machine learning algorithm that automatizes the selection of non-linear terms in regression models. In this study, we propose using MARS in a spatial regression framework to account for potential non-linearities and spatial effects in spatial regression models. Using a relatively large data set of 17,000 dwellings ...
What is the impact of housing upgrades on occupant health? Although economists and policymakers are certain about the health implications of housing upgrades, empirical evidence is largely missing or else only based on small-scale experiments in developing countries. This study provides the first population-representative quasi-experimental estimates based on a large-scale refurbishment program that ...