This thesis contains three empirical essays on housing markets and housing policies. In the first essay, we investigate the effects of rent control on rents using historical panel data in Lyon over a 78-year period. We use multiple regressions with fixed effects as the main form of analysis. Our results show that the causal effect of rent control on rents in Lyon is significantly negative. In the second essay, I study how age influences housing demand based on household level data from China. The two-stage hedonic house price model used in this essay allows me to estimate the pure age effect on housing demand, after housing quality and other household's characteristics are controlled for. The results demonstrate that the willingness-to-pay for a constant-quality house will decrease slightly or keep constant when a representative household head becomes old, if the household head's educational attainment is controlled for. In contrast, it will drop rapidly if the household head's educational attainment is not controlled for. Therefore, this essay concludes that the total housing demand will not decrease with population aging, because the current middle- aged generation get educated more than the current old generation. Finally, in the third essay, in the framework of Rosen-Roback model, I analyze how housing costs affect the ratio of high-skilled to low-skilled workers, explicitly the skill intensity ratio (SIR), across cities in China. To avoid endogeneity issues, I use both share of unavailable land and historical housing prices as instruments of current housing prices. The results show that average housing prices have significant positive effects on the SIR in 2010 when workers' mobility is relaxed, but insignificant effects on the SIR in 2000 when workers' mobility was tightly regulated.

This dissertation analyzes the mechanisms of the French housing market documenting its constraints and the impact of several housing policies. It aims to increase our understanding of the mechanisms at work on this very particular market where land has a key role. The first chapter tries to document the place of land through the past decades. Some economists have been documenting a steady decline of its importance during the XIX and XX centuries. However, such decline was progressively balanced by the sharp appreciation of housing wealth and more particularly its land component. The second chapter tries to understand the origin of this rise in residential land value documenting one of the key parameter of the housing market: the supply elasticity of the French urban areas. This chapter starts defining two different concepts related with the supply elasticity. The first one is the intensive margin supply elasticity and designates the reaction of developers following a short run increase in housing prices. The second one describes how real estate price vary when a city is growing. It shows that French urban areas are less elastic than their US counterparts. The third chapter uses a natural experiment, the Scellier Housing Tax Credit (STC) and shows that it had a limited quantitative impact on the housing production. The fourth chapter documents the crowding out effect of private construction by social housing.

This thesis consists of three independent chapters which all revolve around the investment decisions of households on the housing market. Although the chapters vary in method and subject, they all emphasize the distributional consequences of a policy or business cycle uctuation.

Based on the work of Karl "Chip" Case, who is renowned for his scientific contributions to the economics of housing and public policy, this is a must read during a time of restructuring our nation's system of housing finance.

In light of potential consequences for inequality and housing affordability, this thesis delivers a comprehensive contribution to several fields of studies related to regional housing markets. It comprises three scientific articles, which contribute to understanding the regional heterogeneity in housing markets, its origin as well as its implications. The first article deals with the evolutionary process of city size distributions, in particular the evolution of Zipf's law, and its implications for (sub-)urbanization processes. In he second article, the convergence process of regional housing markets and characteristics of house price convergence clubs are investigated. The third article assesses the role of regional housing markets in the transmission of monetary policy to economic activity and presents implications for regional inequality.

This book of specially commissioned essays by distinguished housing scholars addresses the big issues in contemporary debates about housing and housing policy in the UK. Setting out a distinctive and coherent analysis, it steers a course between those accounts that rely on economic theory and analysis and those that emphasize policy. It is informed by the idea that the 1970s was a pivotal decade in the second half of the twentieth century, and that since that time there has been a profound transformation in the housing system and housing policy in the UK. The contributors describe, analyze and explain aspects of that transformation, as a basis for understanding the present and thinking about the future. The analysis of housing is set within an understanding of the wider changes affecting the economy and the welfare state since the crises of the mid 1970s.