King's College London

Professor Engelbert Stockhammer was awarded the William Kapp Prize the by European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for his work on the paper What goes up, must come down: speculation-encouraging institutions and house price cycles across countries.

In the paper, Prof Stockhammer and co-authors Ben Tippet (King’s College London) and Karsten Kohler (University of Leeds) find that low taxes on property profits and weak protection for tenants are linked to more extreme housing price cycles.

The paper argues that “speculation-encouraging” policies are more influential in determining the severity of house price swings than the ease of getting a mortgage. Their analysis of 23 OECD countries between 1990 and 2019 found that cyclical movements in house prices were far more significant than long-term trends.

The paper was published in the Socio-Economic Review.