economies of scale in multi product firms an empirical analysis this paper presents new evidence on scale economies in multiproduct firms previous studies are limited in view of r ecent advances in the theory of the multiproduct firm the water util ity is chosen here as a multiproduct firm providing multiple services to various classes of customers with spatial variation a translog m ultiproduct cost function is estimated based on duality between tran sformation and cost functions the paper analyzes overall as well as product specific scale economies it also discusses ray average cos t curves and derives the m locus which provides useful information on scope economies and the cost minimizing number of firms copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

the environmental economic impact of woodland a two stage hedonic price model of the amenity value of forestry in britain woodland is an important part of the environment providing economic benefits through its use in commercial timber production and through its value as an amenity as well as providing recreation for visitors woodland is also important to local residents for whom it provides leisure opportunities and a source of aesthetic enjoyment it is well known that the price of a house may reflect a household s willingness to pay to live near an environmental amenity such as a forest and to gain access to it the nature of this relationship may be examined by applying the hedonic price technique an econometric method which investigates house prices and the variation in structural and environment characteristics over space this study uses a two stage hedonic price model to explore the impact of forest type on house price and to estimate the demand for broadleaved woodland for a sample of houses adjacent to forestry commission land

la dolce vita hedonic estimates of quality of life in italian cities colombo e michelangeli a and stanca l la dolce vita hedonic estimates of quality of life in italian cities regional studies this paper investigates quality of life in italian cities using the hedonic approach it analyses micro level data for housing and labour markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within four domains weather environment services and society large compensating differentials in housing markets are found whereas the effects on wages are relatively small quality of life varies substantially across space and is generally better in large and medium sized cities of the centre north services and social conditions are strongly related to overall quality of life it is also found that across cities quality of life is positively and significantly related to subjective well being

an alternative approach to housing market segmentation using hedonic price data abstract much empirical research has been devoted to housing market segmentation and the implications for the application of the hedonic price model market segmentation is demonstrated empirically in j urban econ 3 2 146 166 1976 j urban econ 7 1 102 108 1980 rev econ statist 66 3 404 406 1974 there appears to be theoretical evidence j pol econ 82 1 34 55 1974 that such empirical efforts may have been less than adequate unfortunately the empirical applications of rosen s model j environ econ manag 5 81 102 1978 j urban econ 5 3 357 369 1978 do not seem to effectively account for the complexity of the factors which cause multiple equilibria market segmentation this paper demonstrates empirically that market segments can be defined along more dimensions than hitherto have been included in any analysis

the mercantile form of value and its place in marx s theory of the commodity this paper reinterprets marx s theory of the form of value in the context of his theory of the commodity building on the unresolved tension between marx s concept of value and the specific character of the labour constituting itself as value in his theory of commodity production it is argued that marx s is actually a theory of the mercantile form of value thus it becomes evident that the process of realisation of material production in commodity production and the process giving rise to money are the same and that they are only the material manifestation of the process of realisation of private and independent work as social labour this characterises commodity production as the unity in difference of a material and a social moment showing that marx s mercantile form of value is the conceptualisation of adam smith s invisible hand the paper also argues that marx s is not the theory of a money commodity copyright 2012 oup

approximate surrogate production functions the cambridge debate showed that an aggregation of capital is not possible in general a recent investigation has found one example for reswitching and several for reverse capital deepening but the paradoxes appear to be infrequent the paper provides a theoretical justification of this result and shows how wage curves of input output matrices with small non dominant eigenvalues become quasi linear with some numeraires large random systems lead to the genesis of such states approximate surrogate production functions then seem possible a family of economic systems with constant capital composition allows construction of a surrogate production function copyright oxford university press

privately operated water utilities municipal price negotiation and estimation of residential water demand the case of france this paper addresses the issue of price negotiation between a municipality and a private water utility operator and its implications for residential water demand estimation we use appropriate econometric procedures to estimate a water demand equation on a panel of french municipalities we find evidence that negotiated water price depends on municipality s characteristics causing endogeneity of price in the demand equation the impact of average household income housing and system features such as metering is investigated both on municipal consumption and price estimated price and income elasticities are significant and close to previous household level studies

planning policy and retail property markets measuring the dimensions of planning intervention there is considerable case study based evidence that changes in the public policy environment have profoundly altered the structure and operation of retail property markets in england despite this however few studies of property market performance consider the influence of retail planning policies this paper seeks to fill the gap the empirical part of the paper uses data derived from a survey of local planning authorities to construct a range of measures of planning policy stance the indicators demonstrate that the role of policy is complex and multidimensional the paper then explores the relationship between planning policies and measures of property market performance the results show that while proactive policies do not guarantee a vibrant market they can play an important part in stimulating occupier and investor demand even where there are poor economic fundamentals

redevelopment and the urban land price gradient abstract this paper presents the first careful test of an equilibrium model of urban redevelopment in addition it demonstrates a new methodology for recovering vacant urban land prices in areas that have already been developed using data on single family detached homes sold in vancouver b c we estimate the price of vacant land based on properties that were sold and redeveloped the price of developed land is also estimated based on properties that were sold and not redeveloped various tests overwhelmingly support the hypothesis that housing is redeveloped when the price of vacant land exceeds the price of land in its current use this result provides support for various theoretical models of urban spatial growth and indicates that one can recover vacant urban land prices by examining redeveloped properties

explaining the spatial variation in housing prices an economic geography approach housing prices vary geographically even between neighbouring municipalities local differences can be attributed to differences in socio economic variables and real estate characteristics this article argues that one should additionally take into account the geographical location of municipalities in particular housing prices are affected by distance and travel time to important economic centres offering jobs and extensive services following the economic geography literature we develop a model showing the explicit impact of geographical barriers on housing prices as such we distinguish ourselves from the existing literature on the dynamics of housing prices since geographical elements are fairly constant over time we estimate our model on municipality level housing prices for all 589 belgian municipalities in 2001 we also differentiate between the two main regions of belgium flanders and wallonia our empirical results confirm expectations geographical barriers have significantly negative eff

the impact of supply constraints on house prices in england we test the theoretical prediction that house prices respond more strongly to changes in local earnings in places with tight supply constraints using a unique panel dataset of 353 local planning authorities in england between 1974 and 2008 exploiting exogenous variation from a policy reform vote shares and historical density to identify the endogenous constraints measures we find that regulatory constraints have a substantive positive impact on the house price earnings elasticity the effect of constraints due to scarcity of developable land is largely confined to highly urbanised areas and uneven topography has a quantitatively less meaningful impact

endogenous spatial regression and delineation of submarkets a new framework with application to housing markets summary housing submarkets have been defined by different criteria i similarity in house attributes ii similarity in hedonic prices and iii substitutability of houses we show that spatial clustering on i and ii also satisfies criterion iii and develop inferences based on functional linear regression of a hedonic house price model then we delineate submarkets by clustering jointly on the surfaces of the estimated functional partial effects and housing features the above model incorporates both spatial heterogeneity and endogenous spatial dependence application to an urban conglomeration in portugal implies submarkets that emphasize the historical and endogenous evolution of urban spatial structure copyright 2015 john wiley sons ltd

a constant quality price index for resale public housing flats in singapore largely because of the significant societal and economic aspects of public housing in singapore the current resale price index is published regularly by the housing and development board hdb based on average transaction prices this hdb index does not control for a shift in the mix of public housing resale flats transacted this paper looks into the usefulness of the current hdb resale price index that is reflective of pure price appreciation across time adopting the varying parameter technique a constant quality hdb resale price index is constructed instead for the period between january 1997 and june 2000 the usefulness of a constant quality resale price index is evaluated using three assessment criteria first through a series of comparative studies between a constant quality hdb resale price index and other resale price indices it is found that the constant quality resale price index provides a better indication of pure price appreciation secondly the parameters of price determinants are fo

an empirical investigation of paradoxes reswitching and reverse capital deepening in capital theory this paper examines the empirical relevance of the capital controversy the price model of sraffa and the dual models of the price and quantity systems of von neumann become the basis of the investigation in the course of the controversy it proved easy to construct theoretical examples which contradicted the fundamental neoclassical hypothesis of an inverse capital demand function this paper presents empirical examples for the first time thiry two input output tables from the oecd database serve as data as a result one envelope is found which involves reswitching reverse substitution of labour or reverse capital deepening are observed in about 3 65 of tested cases they involve at least two switchpoints copyright 2006 oxford university press

testing for the existence of office sub markets a comparison of evidence from two cities most conceptual and applied economic models of the structure of urban office markets have been developed from traditional location theory in their basic form these models tend to posit a trade of

the demand for residence site characteristics the analysis of residential site choice is the primary concern in urban economics research on this problem is deficient in that rigorous theoretical models concentrate almost exclusively on access to the central business district cbd in this decision process while empirical models have been specified in a manner that is inconsistent with standard demand theory although these models possess the power of simplicity they are unable to explain the non monotonic location patterns which characterize urban areas without resorting to ad hoc theorizing this article develops and tests a model which is consistent with demand theory and is also capable of explaining non monotonic location patterns the hedonic rent function is seen as an intermediate step in the analysis of location which allows one to construct the complete data matrix necessary for the estimation of a set of demand functions for location specific traits the analytical importance of the functional form of this hedonic function is briefly noted finally the empirical analysis notes the importance of children in determining residential preferences with special attention being directed to the endogeneity of children with respect to the process of residential choice the traditional location model is generally tested by regressing some transformation of the annual rental payments or alternatively property value r on access or lack of access to the city center acc a vector of other locational traits z income i and a race variable mc

on the application of mathematics to political economy the edgeworth walras bortkievicz controversy 1889 1891 in the period of the first spread and consolidation of mathematical economics there was impotant debate on walras s theory of exchange involving edgeworth walras and bortkievicz directly and marshall indirectly the dispute may be traced back to issues involving the role of abstract reasoning and the use of mathematics in economics the discussion reveals the clash of different methodological requirements on the one hand there is walras s requirement of rigour and simplicity allowed by the reduction of economics to mathematical treatment on the other hand there is edgeworth s requirement of greater realism in the model copyright 2007 oxford university press

measuring the importance of location in house price appreciation abstract this paper examines the variation in the rates of price appreciation within an individual metropolitan market a methodology is developed to examine the locational variation in house price changes in dade county miami florida from 1971 to 1992 house price appreciation appears to be somewhat spatially related that is it varies by municipality with distance from the cbd with local changes in population and housing units and by ethnic mix however these relationships have minimal explanatory power controlling for the census tract group location of each home explains only around 12 of the residual variation in the appreciation of individual homes that is not explained by metropolitan wide changes in house prices the effect of tract group location appears to be dominated by the idiosyncratic influences of individual homes and their immediate environments

estimating the effect of land leases on prices of inner city apartment buildings the effect of land leases as opposed to freehold tenure on selling price is investigated for income property in proximity to the city centre hedonic estimation with multiplicative and additive models in a cross section analysis is used to estimate the relationship between property characteristics on the one hand and selling price on the other if land leases are valued by the market as the present value of the lease payments independent of other property features an additive lease component should be appropriate if on the other hand the valuation of the land lease aspect is not independent of other property features a multiplicative lease component should be appropriate theoretical arguments can be advanced for either point of view making it interesting to study the issue empirically a sub issue of interest is the effect on value of distance to the city centre the sample consists of major apartment buildings centrally located in downtown stockholm sold during a selected three year period

space time approach to commercial property prices valuation there exists three ways of approaching real estate prices the cost approach the market data approach and the income capitalization approach in this article we propose an improvement of the market data approach that takes into account the spatial component in particular we propose a modified market data approach based on interpolation being the structure of the spatial correlation between the prices of properties the main factor to obtain the weights interpolation methods have been widely used for estimating real estate prices but they do not take into account the structure of their spatial dependence although this drawback is overcome by kriged estimation in the case of the prices of commercial properties they do not provide good estimates because the scarceness of the market information this is why auxiliary information is needed and cokriging methods are used to obtain estimates that are more accurate the aim of this article is the comparison of cokriged estimation of premises prices in tw

regulation of public utilities under asymmetric information we consider the relationship between a localcommunity and a private operator in charge ofthe water utility an important feature of themodel is the possibility of water networklosses that are costly to the operator wecompute the first best and asymmetricinformation solutions to the optimal contract with private information on the operator stechnology based on an econometric estimationof production cost and water demand for a panelof french local communities we simulate theoptimal contract solutions and show thatasymmetric information has importantconsequences for the regulation of water publicutilities

capitalising the value of free schools the impact of supply characteristics and uncertainty there has been a growing literature in both the us for example haurin and brasington 1996 and black 1999 and the uk for example gibbons machin 2003 that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices cheshire and sheppard 1995 and 1999 estimated hedonic models in which the quality of the secondary school to which a household was assigned was a significant variable which provided evidence that secondary school quality was being capitalised into the price of houses in contrast gibbons and machin concluded that primary schools were more significant each of these analyses is predicated on the assumption that the value of local schools should be reflected in the value of houses we argue here that this is rather too simple we should expect variation in the capitalised price of a given school quality at either primary or secondary level according to the elasticity of supply of school quality in the local market the certainty with which that quality can be expected to be maintained over time and the suitability of the dwelling to accommodate children these factors will vary systematically between and perhaps within cities this paper explores the sources and the impact of such variations as well as the impact of model specification the results provide new evidence on the complex and subtle ways in which housing markets capitalise the value of local public goods such as school quality and perhaps most importantly suggest that this is highly non linear houses in the catchment areas of only the best state schools command substantial premiums but such capitalised values can be very substantial indeed

commuting congestion and employment dispersal in cities with mixed land use abstract for centuries cities have been modeled as having centered employment scarce access to which generates land rent this paper first presents some new empirical evidence that in us cities actual employment turns out to be almost as dispersed as residences this range of urban forms is generated with analytic ease in a model that assumes land can have mixed rather than exclusive use at any location the model has firms trading off a central agglomeration force against the lower wages that accompany shorter commuting distances in peripheral locations at one extreme with very high agglomerative forces employment is approximately centered with long commute distances and high congestion levels at the other extreme lower agglomerative forces lead to employment that is completely dispersed commute distances of zero and the absence of congestion maximizing output minus congestion never leads to a pattern of land mixing where employment is fully dispersed a market model however often does if the mix at each location is based on the relative magnitude of the land rent offered from residential as opposed to commercial uses

sraffa labor theories of value and the economics of real wage rate determination the labor theory of value and the question of whether or not a real wage rate versus profit rate trade off exists have been topics debated since the times of ricardo and marx more recently these topics have been investigated using sraffa s standard commodity approach it is argued here that such approaches are basically flawed however it also is shown that there are situations consistent with perfect competition for which negatively sloped real wage rate versus profit or interest rate trade offs do exist thus despite perfect competition genuine bargaining situations may arise between workers and owners of the capitalistic means of production

land use planning and the housing market a comparative review of the uk and the usa this paper provides a review of some of the key articles and research examining the relationship between planning regulation and its impact on the housing market in the uk and the us in both count

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

the transformation problem solved the so called general transformation problem is introduced and it is shown that any actual economy of multiproduct firms with joint production and technical change is traceable to a corresponding labor theory of value economy of labor values and unrewarded labor as profits conversely the labor theory of value economies are transformable into the economies of prices and profits and profits by means of prices of labor can be distributed at will including the celebrated case of equalized profit rates even negative profits in some or all units all economies are therefore labor theory of value economies distorted by prices the author claims to have solved the transformation problem and that his work validates the labor theory of value in the spirit of david ricardo and karl marx but without marx s tools copyright 1989 by oxford university press

local public expenditures and housing prices this paper estimates a hedonic price model which makes it possible to determine how the price of a unit varies with the set of attributes it possesses in the spanish housing market concretely and by means of capitalisation hedonic price models can be used as an instrument to capture how local public expenditures influence housing prices and by extension how homeowners can indirectly receive benefit from local public investment using individual data for dwellings from the city of barcelona spain for the period 1998 2001 it is found that local policies aimed at enhancing the quality of life or the location specific characteristic of the city of barcelona have a positive impact on housing values

understanding the marxian notion of exploitation a summary of the so called transformation problem between marxian values and competitive prices the ending in the second part of the article the author examines the so called problem of transformation first he analyze certain contradiction faced by marx in the third volume of capital in studying the question of how to transform the cost into the price then he turns to the problem of inverse transformation and argues that marx procedure works only in a single case equal organic composition of capital the third part of the article bibliography provides an overview of the work on the analysis of marx s theory

neighbourhoods in urban economics incorporating cognitively perceived urban space in economic models this paper proposes that urban economic analysis would benefit from the use of cognitively perceived neighbourhoods which are discussed within urban studies georeferenced data should be aggregated by spatially bounded units that are identifiable by citizens in order to enrich one dimensional distance as the sole variable to bring urban complexity into economic models multivariate analysis is applied to data from belo horizonte brazil to formulate four indices ranked by neighbourhoods that together represent a spatially complex non linear influence on urban real estate markets the results of the indices by neighbourhood are then tested against a traditional specification in an econometrics exercise that does not include the concepts and indices put forward the definition of neighbourhood used and the empirical results provide a thorough description of urban fabric that can fully and more accurately represent urban influence in economics while avoiding abstract distance measurement

cross tenure differences in home maintenance and appreciation this paper investigates the relative maintenance levels of owner and renter occupied housing by examining their short and long run appreciation rates we modify the standard repeat sales estimation procedure to test whether owner occupied housing appreciates faster than renter occupied housing this procedure holds constant all structural factors except for aging hence appreciation is estimated net of physical depreciation i e routine aging deficient and deferred maintenance we find only weak evidence to support the notion that long term rates of appreciation and maintenance levels are substantially different between owner and renter occupied housing

the welfare economics of land use planning abstract this paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning the technique is applied in the context of the town and country planning system of the uk and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups the results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large

the convergence of neo ricardian and embodied energy theories of value and price abstract the concepts of embodied energy entropy and the like have made limited inroads into orthodox economic thought ecological economists however have been developing a coherent theoretical perspective to be considered with and or against orthodox economics this paper focuses on the classical economic implications of the embodied energy theory of value it is argued that the embodied energy theory of value is very similar to neo ricardian economics after examining the issues separating classical and neoclassical economics the paper makes a beginning theoretical integration between these two theories finally several suggestions for theoretical development of embodied energy theory and for the empirical testing of the theory are made

the impact of site characteristics on housing cost estimates abstract hedonic housing regressions using micro data for owners and renters from the 1972 1973 consumer expenditure survey are presented by including tract characteristics and public goods in these regressions evidence is presented which indicates sensitivity of the physical housing variable coefficients to the choice of included site related characteristics furthermore omission of public good variables can result in misleading and possibly perverse coefficients on access intermetropolitan housing cost estimates however are shown to be relatively insensitive to the choice of site related characteristics

the whiggish foundations of marxian and sraffian economics the first half of the paper discusses what is wrong with whig history and why it is wrong to distort the past the author s views are compared with those of noted historians of economics this discussion provides motivation for the second half of the paper which focuses on whiggish accounts of the scientifically progressive character of mainstream marxian and sraffian economics that rest heavily upon proofs of internal inconsistency in marx s own theories the paper argues that the inconsistencies are actually products of whiggish misinterpretation thus it is not the case that progress has taken place through correction of error mainstream marxian and sraffian theories are not corrections of the original theories but alternatives to them

a model of spatial patterns across local retail property markets in great britain property markets are commonly modelled either at relatively high levels of aggregation such as regional or national using time series data or panel data or at individual town level this paper d

flood insurance wealth redistribution and urban property values abstract this paper examines the economics of the wealth transfer created by the national flood insurance program nfip by its very nature nfip is unique in that it subsidizes existing homeowners but not new construction thus for comparable properties the gain captured by existing homeowners is the difference between selling prices of equivalent qualified and nonqualified properties using standard hedonic pricing models we empirically test the impact of subsidized and nonsubsidized flood insurance on property values

hedonic prices and public goods an argument for weighting locational attributes in hedonic regressions by lot size the hedonic price technique is frequently used for valuing attributes of housing in such an analysis a hedonic price function is specified p p x p is the price of a house and x is a vector of attributes of the house the attributes include structural features such as size age garage and fireplace and locational features such as neighborhood quality crime access to downtown and air quality the function is interpreted as an equilibrium price schedule for houses see rosen 5 its first derivative with respect to an element of x is an implicit price for that attribute the price function is estimated typically using cross sectional data from a housing market i argue that the measure of each locational attribute in a hedonic price function should be weighted by lot size and that the measure of each structural attribute should not be weighted the usual regression weights neither locational nor structural attributes by my argument if two houses are identical in every respect except that the measure of lot size of the first is twice that of the second then the measure for air quality access to parks and so on for the first should be twice that of the second i also argue that failure to weight locational attributes in a hedonic regression that should be weighted gives biased implicit price estimates for structural and locational attributes the direction and degree of bias depend on the correlations between the attributes and lot size in the housing market on the variance of lot size in the market and on the lot size of the observation for which implicit price is being estimated

marx s transformation problem and pasinetti s vertically integrated subsystems pasinetti 1988 constructs a complete generalization of marx s transformation problem in the context of a non uniform growth model by proving that production prices are not proportional to the physical quantities of labour supplied to vertically hyper integrated subsystems pasinetti therefore restricts the labour theory of value to a pre institutional stage of analysis in this paper i demonstrate that the transformation problem dissolves once we consider the vertically integrated subsystems induced by the specific institutional setup of a capitalist economy i prove that production prices both in steady state and non uniform growth models are proportional to the physical quantities of labour supplied to vertically super integrated subsystems in consequence the labour theory of value suitably generalized also applies at the institutional stage of analysis

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

defining spatial housing submarkets exploring the case for expert delineated boundaries although there are numerous reasons for real estate analysts to construct spatial housing submarkets there is little clarity about how this might best be done in practice the existing literature offers a variety of techniques including those based on principal components analysis cluster analysis and a range of other statistical procedures this paper asks whether given their market expertise and their role in disseminating information shaping search patterns and informing bid formation real estate agents might offer an effective but less data intensive method of submarket construction the empirical research is based on an experiment that compares the predictive of different sets of submarket boundaries constructed by using either standard statistical methods or through consultation with real estate agents and other market analysts the analysis draws on housing transactions data from istanbul turkey while the results do not demonstrate the outright superiority of any single method they do suggest that expert defined boundaries tend to perform at least as well as alternative construction techniques importantly the results suggest that agent based methods for delineating submarket boundaries might be used with a degree of confidence by real estate analysts and planners in market contexts where rich micro datasets are not readily available this has been one of the constraints internationally on wider adoption of submarket boundaries as an analytical tool

evaluating the welfare effects of reforming municipal water prices abstract despite the strong criticisms by economists of water utility pricing practices and the presence of well articulated theoretical models of efficient pricing alternatives few empirical studies have documented the magnitude of the efficiency gains from altering water prices the structures of water supply costs and water demands are estimated using data from vancouver canada a simulation program uses these estimated relationships to compute the impact upon a representative water utility s output and deficit and upon aggregate consumer surplus of a move from its current practice to efficient prices simulation results show that a move to seasonally differentiated pricing with an annual charge calculated to recoup the resulting deficit raises aggregate surplus by approximately 4 this result contrasts with recent water pricing studies that found welfare improvements of approximately 1

estimating the structure of industrial water demands the case of canadian manufacturing this study considers water use by canadian manufacturing firms the estimation of water demands is based on a detailed cross sectional survey of establishment level observations on water prices quantities and expenditures industrial water use is modeled as having four components intake treatment prior to use recirculation and discharge average values for the estimated own price elasticity for water intake range from 0 1534 to 0 5885 water recirculation is found to be a substitute for both water intake and water discharge this confirms that expanding the use of economic incentives e g effluent fees may be effective in encouraging firms to reduce their water use while increasing in plant recirculation

valuing school quality better transport and lower crime evidence from house prices housing prices within urban areas exhibit highly localized variation that cannot be explained solely by differences in the physical attributes of dwellings we consider the role of local amenities and disamenities in generating price variation within urban areas focusing on three highly policy relevant urban issues transport accessibility school quality and crime our survey of the recent empirical literature highlights what is known and what is not known on these issues and considers the relevance and reliability of this evidence for policy design and evaluation although there are serious empirical challenges we argue that research on housing values based on careful research designs can offer credible estimates of the social value of place specific attributes and amenities

between berlin and cambridge classical conceptions of the general economic equilibrium in the late 1920s this paper deals with some contributions to the debate on general economic equilibrium between the two world wars originating in cambridge and berlin they differed from the viennese contributions of the walrasian perspective traditionally considered by the literature they can be defined to represent the classical approach to general equilibrium the authors considered are the italian born economist piero sraffa the german mathematician robert remak and the russian born economist wassily leontief the paper focuses in particular on the intellectual origins of their contributions in the russian german theoretical debate of the period 1890 1910 involving classical economists marx and walras these connections emerge clearly in the contributions of the german russian mathematical school between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

value price and exploitation the logic of the transformation problem this paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labor values and prices from an axiomatic perspective the famous transformation problem is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and definitions a comprehensive review of recent literature is provided which shows that there are various theoretically relevant and logically consistent alternative interpretations based on different assumptions and definitions

hedonic prices demands for urban housing amenities and benefit estimates abstract this paper uses a rosen two step hedonic price trait demand approach to estimate demand functions for a vector of urban amenities to ascertain whether this theoretically preferred approach yields benefit estimates which differ from the oft used ridker henning one step hedonic approach we conduct a sensitivity analysis we find that the two step approach does yield different benefit estimates and that the differences are large for some amenities the estimates are sensitive to the functional form of the hedonic equation when the forms are significantly different according to modified box cox results but are not particularly sensitive to specification of the amenity demand equation

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

the determinants of nonresidential urban land values abstract this paper presents the results of an empirical study of nonresidential urban land values in the dallas metropolitan area the data base consists of 467 vacant land transactions from 1978 to 1982 by concentrating on sales prices of vacant land rather than improved property problems normally encountered from use of appraised values or improved properties are eliminated separate models are developed for industrial commercial and office land the study focuses on the tendency toward agglomeration for consumers of each land use as measured by the impact on land values in the central business district suburban nodes and other employment concentrations the results provide insight into a number of influences on urban land value and offer evidence that office land derives greater benefit from agglomeration than does commercial or industrial land

the surrogate wage function and capital theory with measurement technological change induces a structural change in both the values tableau and the prices tableau of an economy the measurable change in the values tableau reveals the labor saving effect and the measurable change in the prices tableau reveals the cost reducing effect a measure preserving transformation between the values tableau and the prices tableau provides the basis for an unambiguous definition of the aggregate capital labor ratio notion as a function of the rate of profit the paper shows that the direction of shifts in the capital functions of an economy depend on the relative strength of the labor saving effect versus the cost reducing effect of technological change if the cost reducing effect of technological change is greater less than the labor saving effect then the capital labor ratio decreases increases and the system generates a rising falling tendency for the rate of profit

the social and private micro level consequences of homeownership abstract this paper reviews the literature that describes the micro level economic and social consequences of homeownership we adopt an interdisciplinary approach and include studies from economics sociology geography political science psychology and other disciplines our focus is on the set of consequences of homeownership in developed countries our list of potential outcomes of homeownership includes the impact on household wealth and portfolio choice mobility labor force participation urban structure and segregation home maintenance political and social activities health demographics self esteem and child outcomes there is substantial evidence that homeownership has important effects on some household behaviors and outcomes however we find that much of the past 30 year s literature on consequences of homeowning is deficient from a theoretical or econometric perspective we suggest solutions and identify research gaps present in the literature

british planning policy and access to housing some empirical estimates there is evidence that the implementation of the planning system creates scarcity rents for land in different uses by acting as a constraint on land supply this paper provides for 1984 estimat

economics and underdetermination a case study of urban land and housing economics underdetermination associated with the duhem quine thesis is a familiar if under researched theme in economics in the light of this we examine the development of urban land and housing economics through its cartesian dualistic delineation of theory and data the contemporary mainstream approach appears unable to circumvent the problem of underdetermination in effect it employs the strong version of duhem quine in its retention of the assumption of a single unitary competitive market and associated access space trade off conversely we highlight the affinity of ely s and the later columbia school s approach to pragmatists dewey and peirce which provides a more fruitful basis for explanation

schumpeter s theory of self restoration a casualty of samuelson s whig historiography of science this article argues that samuelson s influential 1987 call for a whig history of economic science rests on a whig historiography of the natural sciences this contrasts with how science actually works samuelson neglects the critical role of controversy in the development of knowledge leading to the misleading idea that scientists pursue discovery at the expense of reflection on the foundation and history of their subject the consequence is institutional delegitimation the exclusion of legitimate contrary hypotheses when economists test their theories invalidating the test samuelson further confuses the history of ideas with the history of texts this expands the scope of institutional delegitimation to a systematic misrepresentation of the actual ideas at stake in the economic controversies erecting a permanent obstacle to the discovery of truth i illustrate this with samuelson s exclusion from consideration of two non ignorable contributions to macroeconomic theory schumpeter s business cycles which he failed to recognise as a theory of endogenous capitalist self restoration and the concept of endogenous decline excluded by his whig reinterpretation of marx s theory of value schumpeter and marx offered opposed but legitimate alternatives to the post war macroeconomic consensus of which samuelson was a major architect in particular both recognised that deep and prolonged crises were a natural product of capitalism not an inexplicable exception to respond to the 2008 downturn economics needs to reopen a wide discussion without excluding a priori any of these opposed theoretical explanations instead seeking to understand clearly what each of them actually says and testing them against the empirical evidence of history

forecasting housing prices under different market segmentation assumptions three types of market segmentation strategies are available to estimate hedonic housing price models i e no segmentation segmentation by using statistical clustering methods and segmentation by using a priori information this research tests the hypothesis of tiebout theory that individual residential decision making is determined by equilibrium provision of local public goods in accord with the tastes and preferences of residents thereby sorting their housing locations into optimal sub markets forecasting accuracies of eight sub market segmentation strategies and two forecast combining methods are examined by using housing sales data from knox county tennessee usa the results provide empirical support for tiebout theory of optimal housing sub market location in that boundaries drawn using a priori information from local government jurisdictions school districts and expert opinions are more closely aligned with the equilibrium provision of local public goods than boundaries drawn by statistical cl

the market and exploitation in marx s economic theory a reinterpretation adopting the view that marx s notion of commodity has a wider reach than is usually supposed and that it is this notion rather than a labour theory of value that is the cornerstone of his economic theory this paper shows that marx s account of capitalist exploitation is one that accords equal priority to the production and market domains central to this demonstration is an unorthodox explanation as to why marx posits two alternative rules of prices in capital copyright 2000 by oxford university press

regulating pollution under asymmetric information the case of industrial wastewater treatment abstract we present in this paper an empirical evaluation of a contract based environmental regulation under asymmetric information an imperfect pollution tax results in the necessity of regulating industrials by a contract based policy in order to promote a higher level of pollution removal the local regulatory agency has imperfect information on costs of abatement and must design a feasible mechanism providing incentives for industrials to extend their wastewater treatment plant capacity the optimal policy consists in regulating only the most efficient industrials in the abatement activity empirical evidence reveals that the pollution tax should be more than twice its present level to attain the fully internalizing pigouvian tax level

healthy mixing investigating the associations between neighbourhood housing tenure mix and health outcomes for urban residents this paper examines the association between housing tenure mix and health outcomes for urban residents the analysis used cox s proportional hazard regression modelling with a range of health measures from two waves of the scottish health survey plus linked hospital morbidity records for the survey respondents there was no consistent pattern in health outcomes according to housing tenure mix for specific health issues particular types of neighbourhood had significantly different worse outcomes areas with a sizeable social renting sector for self reported health areas with a sizeable social or private renting sector for accidents and areas dominated by social renting for alcohol related illnesses there are indications that adjustments to the tenure mix of social housing areas might lead to improvements in some health outcomes improved mental health and reduced smoking via a reduction in area deprivation and reduced alcohol related illnesses due to possible effects of tenure mix on material context and culture

profits equal surplus value on average and the significance of this result for the marxian theory of accumulation being a new contribution to engels prize essay competition based on random matrices and on manuscripts recently published in the mega for the first time marx s justification of his theory of surplus value in the face of unequal compositions of capital by interpreting total profits as a redistribution of surplus value is not correct in general however it is shown here that the equality holds if the input matrices are random and the labour theory of value holds in a sense to be specified on average manuscripts recently published for the first time confirm that to the end marx trusted his approach to the theory of value in that he continued to use the identity of the aggregates of capital and surplus in value and in price terms his insistence was rooted in his philosophy an attempt is made to clarify his use of a hegelian methodology by comparing hegel s and marx s approaches to the foundation of the infinitesimal calculus the article concludes with marx s late reconsiderations of his theory of the falling rate of profit which also continue to be based on the equality of profit and surplus value

on the price of land and the value of amenities a house represents not only a bundle of structural characteristics but also a set of location specific characteristics adding locational coordinates and site area to other house characteristics makes it possible to estimate a land rent surface as well as thle hedonic prices attached to local patterns of land use and other neighbourhood characteristics one can then estimate how the value of such location specific characteristics are capitalized into land prices this analysis illustrated with estimates based on data from two british towns has a number of wider implications it generates a more parsimonious method of estimating amenity values it also reveals likely systematic biases produced by conventional hedonic studies which exclude land and location finally it clarifies the conceptual definition of land and suggests that monocentric models can perform well despite recent criticism

tiered housing markets and their relationship to labour market areas this paper develops a tiered geography of local housing market areas hmas that provides a national framework for spatial planning it is derived from a theoretical understanding of the economic basis of hmas the analysis explores the relationships between the tiers of the hma geography and local labour market areas drawing on this understanding the empirical research generates sets of different potential geographies of hmas for england based on an algorithm that applies criteria linked to the degree of closure of migration and or commuting patterns a range of theoretically appropriate criteria then enable the different geographies to be assessed the choice of geography is guided by chow tests of statistical differences in standardised house prices in neighbouring hmas derived from hedonic regressions finally conclusions are drawn on the validity of the approach developed the empirical work is on england and datasets drawn from the census and land registry