Topic Real Estate and Housing

Owner-Occupied Housing Costs and Monetary Policy: Goals and Challenges for the Euro Area: In-Depth Analysis

Owner-occupied housing costs represent an important expenditure for households and should be included in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices. Conceptual and practical challenges must be resolved before this can be implemented. Estimates suggest that these costs would have a small impact on monetary policy. At the same time, different degrees of home ownership in the euro area mean that their inclusion ...

Real Estate Taxation Reform: Tax Land Values, Abolish Privileges

Real estate is taxed at comparatively low rates in Germany, with primarily the affluent benefiting from numerous existing tax privileges. This Weekly Report describes the current state of real estate taxation in Germany and outlines reform proposals that could increase tax revenue, improve the efficiency of the tax system, and reduce wealth and income inequality. In the case of property tax, value-based ...

Housing Rent Dynamics and Rent Regulation in St. Petersburg (1880–1917)

This article studies housing rents in St. Petersburg from 1880 to 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. Digitizing over 5000 rental advertisements, we construct a state-of-the-art index – the first pre-war and pre-Soviet market data index for any Russian city. In 1915, a rent control and tenant protection policy was introduced in response to soaring prices following the outbreak ...

Rent Price Control – Yet Another Great Equalizer of Economic Inequalities? Evidence from a Century of Historical Data

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r>g), taxation policies, or “great levelers,” like catastrophes. This paper argues that housing policy, in particular rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding overall inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower incomes ...

Forward to the Past: Short-Term Effects of the Rent Freeze in Berlin

In 2020, Berlin enacted a rigorous rent-control policy: the “Mietendeckel” (rent freeze), aiming to stop rapidly growing rental prices. We evaluate this newly enacted but old-fashionably designed policy by analyzing its immediate supply-side effects. Using a rich pool of rent advertisements reporting asking rents and comprehensive dwelling characteristics, we perform hedonic-style Difference-in-Difference ...

Structural Data on Production and Employment in the Construction Industry - Calculations for the Years 2020 - 2023

Airbnb and Rents: Evidence from Berlin

This is an online seminar using Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   Cities worldwide have regulated the peer-to-peer short-term rental market claiming that those markets remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an increase in rents. However, at the time many of these policies were passed, empirical evidence for or...

Childless Cities

Unfortunately the event is canceled. As soon as a new date is fixed, it will be announced here on the website. BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

Measuring Housing Costs and Housing Affordability Using SOEP: An Example Applied to Older Households

This paper explores the methodological issues to take into account when using SOEP as a database for calculating a measure of housing costs and housing affordability. For this purpose, we focus on the evolution of housing costs for households headed by elderly people between 1998 and 2018. Our review yields two clear conclusions: (1) that SOEP represents a valuable source of data for calculating household ...

Living Conditions and the Mental Health and Well-being of Refugees: Evidence from a Large-Scale German Survey

Refugees are at an increased risk of mental health problems and low subjective well-being. Living circumstances in the host country are thought to play a vital role in shaping these health outcomes, which, in turn, are prerequisites for successful integration. Using data from a representative survey of 4325 adult refugees who arrived in Germany between 2013 and 2016, we investigated how different living ...