Profs Ulf von Lilienfeld-Toal, head of the Department of Finance, and François Koulischer, Assistant Professor within the Department of Finance were recently honoured with a 2021 Real Estate Market Analysis Manuscript Prize from the American Real Estate Society (ARES), an organisation of real estate thought leaders drawn from both practice and academia dedicated to encouraging research and promote education in real estate.
The two University of Luxembourg researchers wrote the winning paper entitled, Housing Affordability and Transaction Tax Subsidies with co-author Anatasia Girshina, Assistant Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Studying the impact of transaction taxes on the real estate market and the effectiveness of tax subsidies to make housing more affordable, the researchers show how the demand and supply elasticities for housing determine both the price impact of tax subsidies and the distribution of gains between buyers and sellers. The researchers use empirical data, drawn from the Luxembourg real estate market between 2007 and 2018, to estimate the elasticity of housing supply and demand.
This research project received financial support from the FNR, in the framework of the FNR CORE Regulation of Real Estate Finance (REFER) project. Running from 2018 to 2020, REFER sought to further the understanding of government intervention in the housing market under the lead of Principal Investigator Prof. von Lilienfeld-Toal. A full version of the paper can be downloaded from SSRN.