International Centre for Housing and Urban Economics (ICHUE)

About ICHUE

The Centre aims to apply modern economic theory and quantitative techniques to the analysis of housing and related policy problems at international, national, regional and local levels. Particular attention is paid to contemporary urban economic problems and the role that housing plays in contributing to solutions.

Part of the strategy of the international centre for housing and urban economics (ICHUE) is to build up formal links between centres of excellence in the field internationally and to promote participation of other leading other researchers located in other institutions.

Members of ICHUE

Initial formal collaboration is taking place between the University of Reading, UK, RMIT University, Melbourne and Delft University in the Netherlands. At Reading, Professors Michael Ball and Geoff Meen are centrally involved and at RMIT the main collaborators are Professors Gavin Wood and Mike Berry (Meen and Wood are taking on administrative roles as joint Directors of ICHUE). Professor Peter Boelhouwer is the main participant at Delft. Professor Duncan Maclennan is a Visiting Professor at Reading and Dr Christian (Andi) Nygaard, Lecturer, is also included. Other leading housing researchers in the UK are also involved.

• The Centre aims to encourage international collaborative work in order to generate first-class research and to disseminate best-practice techniques and policy initiatives across the partner countries.
• Its work is primarily theory-informed quantitative analysis. Despite inevitable uncertainties surrounding quantitative studies, the Centre's view is that application of housing and urban economics in the policy domain has often lacked empirical rigour. Not all issues are amenable to rigorous econometric analysis but the Centre still commits itself to using best practice techniques in these fields.
• The housing literature typically looks at the international, national, regional and local levels independently. The Centre encourages the development of integrated frameworks for studying housing questions at different scales.
• Much policy involves institutional and organisational change and, at present, little research in housing and related areas is based on the economics of institutions and organisations. The work of the centre provides theoretical and empirical outputs to inform such areas of policy debate.