Karachi is one of the world's fastest growing large cities. This paper describes the complex processes by which land is (formally and informally) made available for housing (and for commercial development), as well as who benefits - and how the low-income majority of Karachi citizens lose out. It also describes what underpins this - especially the political complications in a city that has grow...

Abstract We investigate how the economy responds to anticipated (news) shocks future investment decisions. Using structural vector autoregressions (SVARs), we show that news about relative price of residential explains a high fraction variance output, aggregate and for Spain. In contrast, Germany it is on business structures equipment explain higher consumption non-residential investment. confr...

The paper studies the impact of the portfolio constraint imposed by the consumption demand for housing (the “housing constraint”) on the household’s optimal holdings of financial assets. Since the ratio of housing to net worth declines as the household accumulates wealth, the housing constraint induces a life-cycle pattern in the portfolio shares of stocks and bonds. For reasonable degrees of r...

When most people hear the words affordable housing, they picture old-style urban public housing with apartments stacked end-to-end, replete with graffiti and shadylooking characters, unkempt and marked by a general malaise. Nothing seems healthy about it. But today’s affordable housing is different. Successful projects are well-designed, built to a reasonable scale, and have landscaping and ame...

Homeownership, like baseball and hotdogs, is an integral part of the American culture. Over the past 70 years, the U.S. government has devoted significant public resources to encouraging and promoting homeownership. (See Housing Policies That Promote Homeownership for a summary of the various programs.) The percentage of households that live in housing units they own has risen from around 40 pe...

From the early ‘70s the Italian families improved their welfare, raising the national dwelling standard level. During the same period, for several reasons, the rental market share on the total housing stock decreased from 40% to less that 20%. The situation was mainly caused, on the one hand, by some structural changes introduced in the leasing contracts, and, on the other hand, by some incenti...

Using individual-level data from the 1985-2011 American Housing Survey panel, this paper confirms that housing capital gains encourage transitions into self-employment. Additional findings suggest that this occurs at least in part because homeownership provides an accessible source of potential financing that serves as a form of insurance for aspiring homeownerentrepreneurs. The link between ho...

The 2005 American Housing Survey reveals that 11% of residents on the west coast of the USA live in gated communities. The trend is not confined to America: just about all new housing built in China over the last 10 years is gated, with neighbourhood walls, guards, owner-governance structures, fees and neighbourhood management and investment plans based not on the municipal government model but...

Recent empirical work in public finance uses the housing price response to public investment to assess the efficiency of local durable public good provision. This paper explores the theoretical justification for this technique. It points out that the logic justifying the technique for evaluating non-durable public good provision does not translate to the durable case. A model in which investmen...