Topic Real Estate and Housing

Using Tax Incentives to Support Thermal Retrofits in Germany

The German government has committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050 and to attaining a thermal retrofit rate of 2%. Achieving both goals will require deep thermal retrofits across the existing building stock. To meet this challenge, the government is exploring what role tax support options could play in encouraging thermal retrofits and ensuring that they deliver the ...

An Early Warning System to Predict the House Price Bubbles

In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one that provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, we suggest an early warning ...

How Far Do Children Move? Spatial Distances after Leaving the Parental Home

Little is known about how far young adults move when they leave their parental home initially. We addressed this question using data from ten waves (2000 - 2009) of the German Socioeconomic Panel Study on spatial distances calculated by the geo-coordinates of residential moves (N = 1,425). Linear regression models predicted young adults· moving distance by factors at the individual, family, household, ...

Is there a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

Is There a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with pos-sible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is investigated by panel cointegration techniques. Evidence is based on a dataset for 35 major cities. Cointegration ...

Methodologies for Assessment of Building's Energy Efficiency and Conservation: A Policy-Maker View

Recent global peer-review reports have concluded on importance of buildings in tacking the energy security and climate change challenges. To integrate the buildings energy efficiency into the policy agenda, significant research efforts have been recently done. More specifically, the public domain provides a bulk of literature on the application of buildings-related efficiency technologies and behavioural ...

What Drives Housing Prices Down? Evidence from an International Panel

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

Building Sector: Stimulus Packages Make an Impact

The sharp slump of the German economy has left its mark on the building sector. Commercial construction has been especially affected by the significant decline in companies' propensity to invest - triggered by the macroeconomic downturn. However, due to the stable development of real wages and the overall labour market as well as targeted supporting programmes, the recession has more or less bypassed ...

Liquidity and Asset Prices: How Strong Are the Linkages?

The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the rise in liquidity in recent years has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets. If strong linkages exist, the inclusion of asset prices in the monetary policy rule can eventually limit speculative runs and negative effects ...

Monetary Policy Transmission and House Prices: European Cross Country Evidence

This paper explores the importance of housing and mortgage market heterogeneity in 13 European countries for the transmission of monetary policy. We use a pooled VAR model which is estimated over the period 1995-2006 to generate impulse responses of key macroeconomic variables to a monetary policy shock. We split our sample of countries into two disjoint groups according to the impact of the monetary ...