Rent control is a highly debated social policy that has been omnipresent since World War I. Since 2010s, it has been experiencing a true renaissance, for many cities and countries facing housing shortage are desperately looking for solutions of the chronic housing shortage and direct their attention to controlling housing rents and to other restrictive policies. Is rent control useful or does it...
The housing issue is one of the hottest social problems. It is widely debated by the society. These debates contain a large subjective component. In addition, they are expected to correlate with the phases of the housing cycle. One of the most visible and durable manifestationsof these debates are the media items. In this study, we aim at assessing the sentiment of these media publications in...
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a deep worldwide economic crisis. In many countries, the construction industry has been impacted. In Germany, however, construction activity is one of the economic sectors that has remained largely stable: In 2020, the total construction volume in Germany is expected to have increased by around four percent to 444 billion euros after increasing by around eight percent ...
This paper provides evidence for the propagation of idiosyncratic mortgage supply shocks to the macroeconomy. Based on micro-level data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for the 1990-2016 period, our results suggest that lender-specific mortgage supply shocks affect aggregate mortgage, house price, and employment dynamics at the regional level. The larger the idiosyncratic shocks to newly issued ...
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 ...
Housing affordability is a hotly debated issue on global scale. A lack of affordable housing of decent quality is a chronic problem in urban areas. Governments try to alleviate it by stimulating homeownership among middle-income households and providing social housing for the low-income households. Such policies are very costly. Thus, this study aims to assess at least tentatively the effectiveness ...
Sales in the construction industry will continue to increase strongly in 2022 and 2023. Overall, DIW Berlin estimates a nominal increase in construction volume of almost 13 percent in 2022 and six percent in 2023 to 585 billion euros. In 2021, construction volume increased by ten percent to 488 billion euros, which is around 15 percent of GDP. This shows that construction demand remains at a high level ...
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 ...
Since the start of the century, particularly in urban centres, housing markets worldwide have experienced stark price and rent increases. As a consequence urban agglomerations have experienced strong changes in their neighbourhood composition with originally poorer, central areas gentrifying quickly. Governments have reacted by raising the topic of affordable housing on the...