green price indices abstract this paper suggests two theoretically consistent and empirically tractable ways that a cost of living index can be expanded to include the environment and other public goods in addition it presents an empirical illustration of such an index for los angeles california incorporating air quality and other spatially varying public goods using a hedonic model the results indicate that the required information can be recovered and that including public goods can make a substantial difference in the index

methodological issues in the determination of the quality of life in urban areas this paper presents a model which illustrates the interaction between the labour and real estate markets in the determination of the value of local amenities the primary purpose of this study is to examine the importance of functional form in measuring the quality of life qol in urban areas using 1980 data on us urban counties this specification provides new options for qol estimates as an extension of previous work this study also discusses the problems associated with summarising qol in a one dimensional monotonic ranking one form of a multi dimensional rating system is presented for comparison

testing gibrat s law for small young and innovating firms this article analyses whether small young and innovating firms have experienced a greater employment growth than other spanish firms over the period 1990 2000 the study draws upon a sample of 1272 manufacturing firms in which only 967 of the firms survived for the entire ten year period the analyses test gibrat s law both by least squares and by utilizing the procedure proposed by heckman in which a probit survival equation is first estimated to correct for sample selection bias two estimators correcting for selection bias are utilized one that incorporates the inverse mill s ratio and the other that employs maximum likelihood methods all the results reject gibrat s law and support the proposition that small firms have grown larger additionally the results show that old firms grow less than young ones and innovating activity both process and product is a strong positive factor in the firm s survival and its employment growth

gibrat s law and persistence of growth in greek manufacturing this study makes use of a sample of greek manufacturing firms during 1995 2001 in order to analyze gibrat s law we find gibrat s law is rejected for the total sample of firms since persistence of growth plays a key role the classification of firms in size and age groups however yields more interesting results gibrat s law is rejected for micro small and young firms since an inverse relationship between firm growth and initial firm size is found along with a persistence of growth rates in subsequent periods in contrast gibrat s law is accepted for medium large and old firms implying that the growth patterns of these categories follow a random walk and do not tend to persist in subsequent periods

on the relationship between firm size and export intensity export marketing literature supports the view that firm size is positively related to export intensity although the empirical findings have been mixed a number of theoretical arguments are used to support this proposition i e international marketing economies of scale limited managerial and financial resources of small firms decisionmaker s risk perception based on a large survey of the italian manufacturing industry the article falsifies the proposition and challenges some widely held assumptions in export marketing literature

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

age size growth and survival uk companies in the 1980s this paper examines growth and survival amongst quoted and unquoted u k companies in the period 1975 85 and compares the results with earlier u k and u s studies an examination of death rates shows that smaller companies had higher death rates but the largest and smallest companies were least vulnerable to takeover careful attention is therefore paid to problems of sample selection bias it is shown that smaller companies grew faster than larger companies that gibrat s law does not hold amongst smaller firms that age is negatively related to growth and that these results are not an artifact of sample selection bias copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

deriving benefit measures with higher precision a study of economic values of air quality a calibration strategy using ridge regression to generate more precise estimates for a particular parameter in a model is proposed formulae to compute the proposed ridge estimates from standard ordinary least squares ols results are provided the strategy is applied to recomputing marginal effects of air pollution on property values for 30 housing studies results show that ridge estimates are superior to the ols estimates under the mean squared error criterion the same strategy can be used to reestimate key parameters of interest in other applications such as price elasticities for demand forecasts or the value of a statistical life from hedonic wage regressions

new estimates of quality of life in urban areas implicit markets capture compensation for intraurban and interregional differe nces in amenities and yield differences in housing prices and wages these pecuniary differences become preference based weights in a qual ity of life index hedonic equations are estimated using microdata fr om the 1980 census and assembled county based amenity data on climati c environmental and urban conditions ranking of 253 urban counties reveals substantial variation within as well as among the 185 urba n areas the quality of life differences across counties within one s msa is almost one half of the difference between the top and bottom ranked counties in the nation copyright 1988 by american economic association

estimating the demand for the characteristics of housing a hstract estimates of the demand for the characteristics contained in a differentiated product such as housing can be based on hedonic regressions however previous studies have not dealt with several potential problems in such estimation a more appropriate framework for the estimation is provided in this paper also data from a number of cities are used to eliminate the identification problem and the endogeneity of the marginal prices derived from non linear hedonic equations is considered in the estimation the results on own and cross price elasticities expenditure elasticities and the effects of socio economic vafiables accord well with expectations

growth acquisition activity and firm size evidence from the united kingdom this paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between size growth and acquisition activity of quoted companies in the united kingdom the evidence is based on some two thousand companies and covers the period i960 76 there has been no detailed systematic study for this period the results suggest some revisions to generally accepted views in the area and they have certain implications for industrial and competition policy pursued in the u k and the factors affecting aggregate concentration the paper is arranged as follows section i considers the broader economic context for the study whilst section ii notes some a priori expectations regarding the relationship between size and growth and size and acquisition activity sections iii v present empirical evidence and the last section provides a summary and policy implications of the results

valuing public goods a comparison of survey and hedonic approaches although the theory of public goods has progressed rapidly since paul samuelson s seminal article the empirical measurement of the value of demand for public goods only recently has received increased attention perhaps the best known and most widely accepted empirical approach has been the use of hedonic prices wherein for example it is assumed that either wages or housing values reflect spatial variation in public good characteristics of different communities this indirect approach based on theoretical work of charles tiebout kelvin lancaster sherwin rosen and others has proven quite successful among public goods or bads which have been valued using the hedonic approach are climate i hoch air pollution robert anderson and thomas crocker d harrison and d rubinfeld social infrastructure r cummings et al and other community characteristics such as noise level j nelson and ethnic composition ann schnare an alternative approach is to directly ask households or individuals to state their willingness to pay for public goods using survey techniques despite arguments that strategic bias will invalidate survey results there exists the need for an alternative to the hedonic approach as an example consider the case of a remote and unique scenic vista valuable to recreators which is threatened by air pollution from a proposed coal fired plant a typical situation in the western united states although it is possible in principle to impute the value of clean air and visibility from the relative decline in local visitation which might follow construction of a power plant information on the value of visibility at the site is needed prior to construction for socially optimal decision making on plant location and pollution control equipment the hedonic approach is unavailable both because the scarcity of local population as opposed to recreators makes use of wage or property value data impossible and because scenic vistas may themselves be unique for these reasons a randall et al first applied survey methods for valuing visibility and other environmental effects of large coal fired power plants in the four corners region of new mexico since this initial application the survey approach has been widely used to value environmental commodities where market data for hedonic analysis is difficult to acquire see for example brookshire ives and schulze rowe et al brookshire et al other early attempts to value public goods using the survey approach include r davis peter bohm and j hammack and g brown although results of using the survey approach for estimating the value of public goods appear to be internally consistent replicable and consistent with demand theory see schulze et al little work on external validation has been reported thus the purpose of this paper is to report on an experiment designed to validate the survey approach by direct comparison to a hedonic property value study the los angeles metropolitan area was chosen for the experiment because of the well defined air pollution problem and be assistant professor university of wyoming assistant professor university of missouri rolla associate professor university of wyoming and professor university of wyoming respectively the research reported here was funded under a grant methods development for assessing air pollution control benefits from the u s environmental protection agency we would like to give special thanks to alan carlin and shelby gerking for their helpful suggestions and contributions additional helpful comments were received from a myrick freeman iii john tschirhart and james murdoch all conclusions are of course our sole responsibility

hedonic housing price indices and secondary employment centers the monocentric model of the city concludes that the price of housing services varies inversely with travel time to the central business district cbd holding location specific amenities constant because households lower their bid prices for housing as commutation cost increases indeed residential locational equilibrium in the monocentric city requires a negative price gradient however empirical testing has revealed at best lukewarm support for the negative price gradient 2 for example estimates of hedonic housing price indices by berry 3 and daniels 4 yield statistically significant positive relationships between price and distance or travel time to the cbd while kain and quigley 6 lapham 7 and thaler 14 find no statistically significant relationship the lack of consistent empirical support for a monotonically negative price gradient need not be disturbing if the city violates the assumptions of the monocentric city model specifically secondary employment centers could cause the price gradient from the cbd eventually to become positive and achieve a local maximum in the neighborhood of the secondary center failure to control for distance or travel time to secondary centers may explain positive and statistically insignificant negative price gradients that

the law of proportionate effect and oecd bank sectors the paper investigates the growth dynamics of the bank sectors in the oecd area over the period 1985 1994 and examines whether the structural financial reforms of the late 1980s have affected their growth path based on a test of gibrat s law of proportionate effect it is found that the 1985 89 period was characterized by size convergence implying that smaller bank sectors were expanding more rapidly however in the 1990 1994 period the pattern reversed to proportionate growth the analysis of the determinants of bank market growth reveals that macroeconomic growth operational bank efficiency credit quality and capitalization are the main drivers of bank industry growth

estimating the effect of air quality spatial versus traditional hedonic price models author affiliation helen r neill department of environmental studies greenspun college of urban affairs university of nevada las vegas 4505 maryland parkway box 454030 las vegas nv 89154 4030 usa helen neill unlv edu corresponding authordavid m hassenzahl department of environmental studies greenspun college of urban affairs university of nevada las vegas 4505 maryland parkway box 454030 las vegas nv 89154 4030 usa david hassenzahl unlv edudjeto d assane department of economics college of business university of nevada las vegas 4505 maryland parkway box 456006 las vegas nv 89154 6006 usa djeto assane unlv edu acknowledgment the authors are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for valuable comments the authors wish to thank ms debra march director of the lied real estate institute at the university of nevada las vegas for supporting this research project with real estate data and mr russ merle senior planner from clark county for providing air quality data the views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the lied real estate institute and clark county government the authors are responsible for any possible errors 1 introductiontraditionally ordinary least squares ols methods have been used for hedonic modeling ols has the advantage that it can be applied to large data sets it is limited however by its inability to account for spatial autocorrelation for example geostatistical approaches using maximum likelihood estimation mle can account for spatial autocorrelation but in turn are limited by current computing techniques to relatively small data sets i e sets of 1000 or fewer depending on the complexity of the model and number of variables consequently for large data sets modelers must either use ols and be hampered by inadequately specified estimates of relatively low significance or apply mle techniques to a sample of the data set these shortcomings suggest two major research questions the first question which is central to this paper relates to the robustness of competing methods of estimation here we contribute a method for estimating and predicting hedonic price models while controlling for spatial dependence of proximal homes the other question of general interest deals with the usefulness or validity of hedonic modeling for environmental characteristics that is the importance of air quality in explaining sales price of homes in order to evaluate these two questions we propose and test an approach that uses a block bootstrap method to account for spatial dependence in the data our two step procedure consists of first creating blocks of temporal and spatial information within a larger data set of home sales prices and then implementing the bootstrap by resampling from each block next we apply ols and geostatistical mle estimation techniques to generate and store coefficient estimates for each resample the stored sets of resamples then represent monte carlo simulations of the full data set for each of the estimation techniques these can be compared to evaluate the robustness of the methods based on their respective predictive powers our findings may be summarized as follows we find that the geostatistical mle method which accounts for spatial effects outperforms the traditional ols method in several ways theoretically the geostatistical mle method better represents the expected spatial autocorrelation between error terms empirically this method provides better results with respect to expected signs statistical significance and predictive power the block bootstrapping technique allows hedonic modelers to effectively address spatial autocorrelation for large data sets overall we find that under these simulated conditions measured air quality matters for our data set regardless of the method used the remainder of this paper contains five sections

a bayesian approach to assessing the robustness of hedonic property value studies hedonic price models are widely employed to estimate implicit prices for bundled attributes residential property value studies dominate these applications using a representative cross sectional property value data set we employ bayesian methods to translate a range of priors in covariate selection typical of hedonic property value studies into a range of posterior estimates we also formulate priors regarding measurement error in individual covariates and compute the ranges of resulting posterior means finally we empirically demonstrate that a greater and more systematic use of prior information drawn from one s own data and from other studies can break the collinearity deadlock in this data

peer pressure experimental evidence from restroom behavior we provide experimental evidence on the effect of peer pressure on individual behavior specifically we study the effect of being exposed to an observer in a public restroom on handwashing and urinal flushing behavior our estimates show that being exposed to an observer increases the probability of handwashing by 13 percentage points and the probability of urinal flushing by 15 percentage points given that handwashing and urinal flushing have social benefits that exceed individual benefits our findings provide support for peer pressure as an additional way of addressing the social suboptimality arising from externalities jel c91 c93

an empirical investigation into the performance of ellickson s random bidding model with an application to air quality valuation abstract this paper compares ellickson s random bidding model to the standard hedonic model in estimating benefits due to marginal and non marginal changes in housing attributes using data on the chicago housing market the paper shows that the benefit estimates obtained using the two models are very close in addition various categorizations based on household characteristics are tested in the case of the random bidding model the study shows that the effect of categorization on the overall benefit estimates are negligible moreover the results from the random bidding model reveal that increased income leads to greater demand for environmental quality

the relationship between firm growth and labor demand several american studies have recently estimated models of employment growth from longitudinal data sets of business firms evans 1987 leonard 1986 hall 1987 by and large these studies find that the growth rate of employment is inversely correlated with initial size measured by employment and with age young firms tend to grow more rapidly than old ones these studies have cast considerable doubt on gibrat s law or the assumption of independence between firm size and the rate of growth however departures from gibrat s law are modest especially among firms above minimum size recently a group of researchers has proceeded along similar lines of investigation using data from a panel of italian manufacturing firms located in northern italy the purpose of this paper is to compare our results with those obtained for the u s and to explore in more detail the soundness of this approach our results are similar to the abovementioned american studies we find that departures from gibrat s law are not large