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Energy-Efficient Building Renovation: Price‑Adjusted Investments Declining; Trend Reversal Needed to Reach Climate Targets

In light of rising oil and gas prices, investments in energy-efficient building renovation in Germany have risen recently in nominal terms. In 2023, around 72 billion euros were spent on the energy-efficient renovation of residential, public, and commercial buildings, about 12 billion more than in 2021. Nevertheless, investments declined by over six percent in price-adjusted terms, as construction ...

Inform Me When It Matters: Cost Salience, Energy Consumption, and Efficiency Investments

Using a large-scale natural experiment in staggered billing dates for energy use in Germany and a unique billing dataset for multi-apartment buildings, this paper shows that the month of billing is a significant determinant of heat energy consumption. A large set of residential buildings demand significantly more heat energy annually, when the bill is issued during off-winter months. The paper finds ...

Airbnb and Rental Markets: Evidence from Berlin

Rent Control Effects through the Lens of Empirical Research: An Almost Complete Review of the Literature

Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since the 2010s, it is experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing chronic housing shortages are desperately looking for solutions, directing their attention to controling housing rents and other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it create more damage than utility? ...

DECIPHE – Demographic Change and the Intergenerational Persistence in Homeownership in Europe

DECIPHE is the first project to comprehensively study whether and how profound demographic changes in Europe impact the intergenerational persistence of homeownership, considering variations across countries, regions, and birth cohorts. It adopts a life course framework on housing tenure, in which individuals’ homeownership is shaped by their household members’ preferences and resources and...

Construction Boom Coming to an End; Change in Policy Strategy Needed

Following the construction boom of recent years in Germany, inflation and supply bottlenecks hit the industry hard in 2022. While nominal construction volume increased by nearly 14 percent, it decreased by two percent when adjusted for inflation. Residential construction, which is urgently needed, was particularly affected. In 2023 and 2024, it is expected that investors will show restraint and that ...

Investments in energy-efficient building renovation are on a downward slide

Putting MARS into Space: Non Linearities and Spatial Effects in Hedonic Models

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 ...

Limited Price Competition Among Real Estate Agents and the Role of Inattention

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...

Government-Made House Price Bubbles? Austerity, Homeownership, Rental, and Credit Liberalization Policies and the “Irrational Exuberance” on Housing Markets

Housing bubbles and crashes are catastrophic events for economies, implying enormous destruction of housing wealth, financial default risks, construction unemployment, and business cycle downturns. This paper investigates whether governmental housing policies can affect economies’ propensity to build up speculative house price bubbles. Specifically, we focus on the liberalization effects of rent and ...