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 increase in liquidity has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets in the years preceding the financial crisis. If linkages are strong, the inclusion of asset prices in the monetary policy rule may limit speculative runs ...
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 ...
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 ...
Homeownership rates are very different across European countries. They range from below 50% in Germany to over 80% in Greece, Spain or Ireland. However the differences lie not only in the overall homeownership rates but also in its structure, and this is the focus of this paper. Its aim is to study the impact of microeconomic factors on household's tenure choice, using a cross-country comparative approach. ...
This paper uses the newly constructed Luxembourg Wealth Study data to document cross-country variation in homeownership rates and the homeownership-income inequality among young households in Finland, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US, and relate it to cross-country differences in mortgage market maturity. We find that aside from Italy, homeownership rates and inequality in the four countries correspond ...
Hedonic regression has become the standard approach for modeling the behavior of house prices. Usually, the common price component is modeled via dummy variables. Based on an approximation for the present value, we deliver an economic interpretation of the common price component. This allows to include explanatory factors like inflation rates, mortgage rates and building permissions. The notional rents ...
Housing is a critical component of household well being and the extent to which minority households have achieved parity with Germans is a measure of the extent to which this population is integrated into the larger German society. Specifically we examine whether the housing conditions for immigrants2 has improved between 1985 and 1998 despite the greater barriers to upward mobility for low skill workers ...
This article deals with income advantages derived from owner-occupied housing and their impact on the personal income distribution. Using micro-data from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) we find distinct cross-national differences in terms of the prevalence and extent of imputed rent. Results from inequality ...