Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i.

During the ENHR 09 Prague conference a special conference paper competition was held. Each conference participant was able to choose whether to submit his/her paper for inclusion in the paper competition during registration. The papers had to be submitted by an earlier deadline, had to be an original work by the author/s, and must not have been published before the time of the conference. The papers also had to be relevant to the main conference topic – Changing Housing Markets: Integration and Segmentation – specified in more detail on the conference web site. The organizers encouraged all conference participants to submit their papers to the competition, especially papers providing an original contribution to current knowledge. The originality of the contribution was the main criterion taken into account in the evaluation of the papers.

The award was sponsored by the main partner of the conference, Hypoteční banka (Mortgage Bank), the leading mortgage lender in the Czech Republic. The prize for the winner was an award of 400 EUR and a symbolic gift (an original work of art). The winning paper will be reviewed for publication in the European Journal of Housing Policy.

Altogether 13 papers were submitted to the competition and thoroughly evaluated by the Award Committee made up of representatives of both international and Czech housing research networks. The committee members were: Christine Whitehead (London School of Economics), Peter Boelhouwer (Delft Technical University), Mark Stephens (University of Glasgow), Martin Lux (Institute of Sociology, Prague) and Luděk Sýkora (Charles University, Prague). The committee was chaired by Christine Whitehead.

The committee followed a two-stage evaluation process. First, each committee member selected the three best papers based on agreed criteria (particularly, relevance to the topic of the conference, originality, quality of the debate, methodology, and structure of the paper). At this stage each criterion was not marked separately but an overview was taken. The extent of agreement was such that only two papers were taken through to the second stage, at which point each member was asked to vote between the two selected papers, ranking them on three criteria - relevance to theme, quality, and the extent to which it is a new and original contribution. The committee members were then asked to provide an overall ranking. The voting results led to the declaration of the winner.

The title of the winning paper is “Housing Market Segmentation: The Theory and Measurement of Submarkets”, and it was written and submitted by Gwilym Pryce from the Department of Urban Studies, University of Glasgow. The winning paper attempted to establish a set of criteria that submarket methodologies needs meet in order to investigate nature and meaning of submarkets in a more robust, purposeful, and creative way. Existing approaches to housing market segmentation were critically evaluated and a more suitable methodology has been proposed. Gwilym Pryce received the award at the conference’s gala dinner from the hands of the chair of the Award Committee and the bank’s representative.

The Award Committee also highly commended a paper titled “Who Is Affected by Neighborhood Income Mix” by George Galster (Wayne State University), Roger Andersson (Uppsala University), and Sako Musterd (University of Amsterdam). This paper provided empirical evidence on the degree to which neighborhood income mix affects the subsequent earnings of individuals and tested the degree to which these impacts vary across gender, age, the presence of children, employment status, or income.