Foreign Real Estate Investment in Germany

近年来，房地产已成为国际资本的中心目的地。外国资本的流入引发了东道国经济的一些担忧。一些城市政策目标，例如确保房地产质量标准或为当地人口维持可持续的住房价格，可能与国际投资者的价值储存或投机动机相冲突。此外，定性证据，特别是来自2021年潘多拉文件的证据表明，房地产是非法资金流动的核心模式。尽管有大量定性的例子和决策者方面的一些关切，但对国际房地产投资的定量研究很少。通过离岸结构引入的保密性和公司注册的不发达状态使得定量分析变得困难。这里提出的项目(a)开始记录德国房地产公司投资的登记册；(b)建立并评估这些公司结构的国际所有权链；(c)使用避税天堂资本流动文献中使用的工具来评估外国投资对价格和不平等的影响。因此，该项目将有可能通过其国际公司所有权链追踪房地产所有权，直至其最终受益所有人，并确定这种投资的影响。这个数据库随后被用来回答三个关于德国的研究问题。首先，我将解决这样一个问题，即外国房地产投资是否以及在多大程度上推动了文献中记载的德国房地产市场异常高的价格上涨。其次，我想问的是，作为租客（与业主市场相反），德国房地产市场如何加剧了投资者的价值储存/投机动机与主办城市住房目标之间的冲突。第三，我将开始进行探索性分析，以确定国际和德国内部的房地产投资对德国不平等趋势的影响程度。该项目有两个目标：它启动了德国公司房地产持有的有用登记册的过期进程，并提供了几个角度，表明如何利用这种数据库进行与政策相关的经济研究。

In recent years, real estate has emerged as a central destination for international capital. This inflow of foreign capital triggered several concerns in host economies. A number of urban policy objectives, such as ensuring real estate quality standards or maintaining sustainable housing prices for the local population, can conflict with store of value or speculative motives of international investors. Additionally, qualitative evidence, notably from the Pandora Papers in 2021, shows that real estate is a central mode for illicit financial flows. Despite an abundance of qualitative examples and a number of concerns on the side of policy makers, quantitative research on international real estate investments is scarce. The secrecy introduced through offshore constructs and the underdeveloped state of corporate registers makes quantitative analyses difficult. The project proposed here (a) starts work on a register documenting corporate investment in German real estate (b) it establishes and evaluates international ownership chains of these corporate structures and (c) uses tools employed in the literature on tax haven capital flows to evaluate the impact of foreign investment on prices and inequality. The project will therefore make it possible to trace ownership of a real estate title through its international chain of corporate ownership to their ultimate beneficial owner and to ascertain the impact such investment has. This database is then used to answer three research questions about Germany in particular. First, I will address the question if and by how much foreign real estate investment fueled the unusually high price increases in German real estate markets documented in the literature. Second, I ask how Germany’s real estate market as a renter (opposed to an owner market) exacerbates conflicts between store of value/speculative motives of investors and housing objectives of host cities. Third, I will start an exploratory analysis to establish how much international but also intra-German real estate investment contributed to inequality trends in Germany. This project pursues two aims: It starts the overdue process of creating useful registers of corporate real estate holdings in Germany and it provides several angles that show how such a database can be exploited for policy relevant economic research.