Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

You shall not build! (until tomorrow) [:] Electoral cycles and housing policies in Germany

Martin, Thorsten (2017): You shall not build! (until tomorrow) [:] Electoral cycles and housing policies in Germany.

[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_78998.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_78998.pdf

Download (634kB) | Preview

Abstract

This paper investigates whether local politicians adjust their approval of housing licenses during election times in Germany. For my research, I use a balanced Panel of 4,983 West German municipalities from 2002 to 2010. Due to the timing of local elections in Germany, I can disentangle the election effect from common time effects. My results suggest a decrease in new construction approvals for residential housing areas during election years of around 11 % evaluated at the mean, and an increase of similar magnitude in the years following the election. Furthermore, I am able to show that the decrease during election times is associated with the share of homeowners in a municipality. Hence, my research adds to the literature on political business cycles as well as to the existing literature on homevoters and their potential effect on housing policies during election times.

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.