Topic Regional Economy

Social Policy or Crowding-out? Tenant Protection in Comparative Long-run Perspective

Private rental markets have become increasingly important since the Global Financial Crisis 2008–2009 and rent controls are back on the political agenda. Yet, they have received less attention from housing scholars than homeownership and public housing. This paper presents new data on the development of private tenancy legislation based on a content-coding of rent control, protection of tenants from ...

The Rise and Fall of Social Housing? Housing Decommodification in Long-run Comparison

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares ...

Structural Change, Landuse and Urban Expansion

Where is the Consumer Center? A Case of St. Petersburg

In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As manufacturing gradually leaves the cities, the importance of consumer amenities as attractors of population to the urban ...

Green Bonds’ Reputation Effect and Its Impact on the Financing Costs of the Real Estate Sector

This paper explores the effect of a firm’s reputation of being a green bond issuer on its financing costs. Using a sample of 73 listed Swedish real estate companies issuing in total about 1500 bonds over the period from 2011 till 2021, difference-in-difference analyses and instrumental variable estimations are applied to identify the causal impact of frequent green vis-à-vis frequent non-green bond ...

Location, Location, Location: The Role of Objective Neighborhood Characteristics for Perceptions of Control

Introduction: Control beliefs can protect against age-related declines in functioning. It is unclear whether neighborhood characteristics shape how much control people perceive over their life. This article studies associations of neighborhood characteristics with control beliefs of residents of a diverse metropolitan area (Berlin, Germany). Methods: We combine self-report data about perceptions of ...

The Long-Run Effects of Immigration: Evidence Across a Barrier to Refugee Settlement

After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their effect on today’s productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on a spatial discontinuity in refugee settlement at the border between the French and US occupation zones in ...

Cost and Productivity Effects of Demographic Changes on Local Water Service

We investigate the impact of demographic changes on local public services taking the case of water service. We apply a structural production function approach to a large panel of German water utilities between 2003 and 2014. Exploring variation of population density and the population age structure across service areas and over time, we provide evidence that demographics and their changes significantly ...

Geodata in Labor Market Research: Trends, Potentials and Perspectives

This article shows the potentials of georeferenced data for labor market research. We review developments in the literature and highlight areas that can benefit from exploiting georeferenced data. Moreover, we share our experiences in geocoding administrative employment data including wage and socioeconomic information of almost the entire German workforce between 2000 and 2017. To make the data easily ...

House Price Expectations

This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a tailored household survey, past sale and rental offerings, satellites, and from an information RCT. As novel findings, we show that price expectations exhibit mean reversion in the ...