EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Homeowner Subsidy Repeal and Housing Recentralization

Alexander Daminger and Kristof Dascher

VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Subsidizing homeownership makes cities decentralize, so Muth (1967) suggested over half a century ago, and so Voith (1999) and Glaeser (2011) have argued more recently. This paper provides a first quasi-experimental test of "Muth's hypothesis". We analyze a homeownership subsidy's effects on urban form, by turning to Germany's 2005 subsidy repeal. Because housing in the city center was predominantly rental, prospective owner-occupiers needed to move to the city periphery. We are able to identify the subsidy's effect on decentralization because we capitalize on the subsidy's variation both in timing and design. We find that repealing the subsidy did contribute to recentralizing Germany's cities. This highlights the decentralizing role of the original homeownership subsidy. Inasmuch decentralization begets greater carbon dioxide emissions, encouraging homeownership is at cross-purposes with mitigating global warming.

Keywords: Homeownership Subsidy; Subsidy Repeal; Housing Recentralization; Global Warming; Suburban Land Use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 R12 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/242367/1/vfs-2021-pid-49312.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Homeowner Subsidy Repeal and Housing Recentralization (2023) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc21:242367

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:zbw:vfsc21:242367