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Housing, Inequality and Public Policies

Project description

Highlighting the impact of public policies in the housing crisis

The current housing landscape is intensively affected by the increasing housing cost, gentrification and regional inequalities. The EU-funded HIPPO project will explore the effectiveness of various public policies to counteract these challenges within and across cities in many countries. More specifically, HIPPO will focus on the ways that public housing policies define local housing markets and result in regional disparity. Utilising data from diverse European countries and the United States, the project aspires to present a comprehensive outline of available policy options and to suggest potential approaches to address the critical housing issues.

Objective

In light of rapidly increasing prices of housing, gentrification and increasing regional inequalities within and across cities in many countries, I study the effectiveness of various public policies to counter these challenges. In particular, I will study the efficiency and distributional effects of seven different, commonly used policy instruments directly or indirectly targeted at the housing market: residential property taxes, commercial property taxes, real-estate transaction taxes, capital gains transaction taxes, local public spending, social housing programs and rent control. The overarching research question of the project is how do different public housing policies shape local housing markets and affect regional inequality. Analyzing the effects of these different instruments provides a comprehensive overview of available policy options.

I analyze the policy effects combining state-of-the-art theoretical models with clean empirical evidence. The theoretical predictions about the different policy effects are based on widely used local labor market models, which I tailor and extend to the specific institutional context and specific research questions at hand. Guided by the resulting theoretical predictions, I exploit rich, micro-level data on housing markets, local labor markets, and local policy instruments in various European countries (Finland, Spain and Germany) and the United States. I selected the specific countries based on the availability of suitable data and, importantly, institutional features that allow exploiting quasi-experimental variation to identify the causal effects of the different policy instruments.

I combine the empirical evidence with the theoretical insights to eventually derive the efficiency costs and redistributive effects of the respective policies. These results provide guidance for policymakers when addressing the challenges induced by the current housing crisis.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Host institution

UNIVERSITAT ZU KOLN
Net EU contribution
€ 1 327 574,25
Address
ALBERTUS MAGNUS PLATZ
50931 Koln
Germany

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Region
Nordrhein-Westfalen Köln Köln, Kreisfreie Stadt
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
€ 1 327 574,25

Beneficiaries (1)

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