Christopher Oertel studies the impact of public policy measures on the German real estate market and confirms the assumptions, which imply that a city can influence its economic position in relation to nearby cities in the short run by making use of this tax instrument. His analyses begin with an examination of the German residential real estate market from a consumption good perspective. The findings indicate that the home-ownership allowance had a distorting effect by capitalizing into residential real estate prices, although at lower than expected rates. Then the author studies the German...