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 ...

Digitisation and Renaissance of the Manufacturing Industry in Major Cities: The Case of Berlin

The rise of digitisation will cause a major upheaval in the manufacturing industries, bringing changes to traditional industrial location patterns as well. In order to understand the direction these structural changes are taking, this paper analyses the start-up activity in the industrial sector. The frontrunners are metropolitan regions and in particular major cities such as Berlin or Munich. Furthermore, ...

Agglomeration or Market Access? The Defining Factors of Firms' Location Choice

As research indicates a gap between complex scientific measures of accessibility and simpler proxies used by firms, this paper analyses the impact of several market access indicators on the location decision of firms. It compares the role of inter- and intra-industry agglomeration as proxies of access with a newly developed gravity-based indicator incorporating transport distances and industry relations. ...

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

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side ...

Health Implications of Building Retrofits: Evidence from a Population-Wide Weatherization Program

What is the impact of housing upgrades on occupant health? Although economists and policymakers are certain about the health implications of housing upgrades, empirical evidence is largely missing or else only based on small-scale experiments in developing countries. This study provides the first population-representative quasi-experimental estimates based on a large-scale refurbishment program that ...

Structural Change, Landuse and Urban Expansion

Lessons from an Aborted Second-Generation Rent Control in Catalonia

This study investigates the effects of short-lived rent control regulations introduced in Catalonia in September 2020 and revoked in March 2022. Using the microdata of the largest Spanish housing advertisement portal idealista between January 2017 and May 2022, we analyze the dynamics of prices and supply for dwellings offered for rent and for sale. We also examine separately the rental and sales markets. ...

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

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring rents by setting a cap on rental prices: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The policy was revoked one year later by the German Constitutional Court. Although successful in reducing rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and adjacent municipalities are not clear. In this paper we evaluate the ...

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 ...