permanent income hedonic prices and demand for housing new evidence abstract housing demand is examined by looking quite specifically at the income and price variables based on individual household data permanent and transitory incomes are computed through instrumental variables related to human and nonhuman wealth a price is constructed by spatially varying hedonic techniques separation of measured income into permanent and transitory components substantially improves the predictive power of the housing demand estimation and leads to demand elasticities of 1 and 1 with respect to permanent income and price the permanent income elasticity is roughly twice the measured income elasticity

the determinants of homeownership affordability among the sandwich class empirical findings from guangzhou china the sandwich class is an east asian term referring to the lower middle class using a large and unique micro dataset collected in guangzhou this paper examines empirically the potential determin

the impact of highway proximity on distribution centres rents access to a highway is an important issue for distribution centres in the netherlands distribution centres are located at only two kilometres from a highway on average this paper estimates the impact of highway proximity on distribution centres rents by using hedonic pricing techniques we show that a one kilometre increase to the nearest highway decreases rents of an average sized distribution centre by about 11 000 euro per year the distance to the geographic centre of the whole country is also shown to affect rents for other types of industrial real estate similar results are found based on our results policymakers responsible for spatial planning or economic development may be able to make better decisions when developing new distribution centres

valuing english primary schools this paper provides the first empirical evidence for the uk on the effect of primary school performance on property prices we find that on average a one percentage point increase in the neighbourhood proportion of children reaching the government specified target grade pushes up neighbourhood property prices by 0 67 at 2000 property prices we calculate the social valuation of a sustained 1 improvement in primary school performance to be up to 90 per child per year our instrumental variable and semi parametric approach avoids the problems of school quality endogeneity and omitted neighbourhood variables that occur in typical property value models

targeted saving by renters for housing purchase in japan abstract this paper examines the extent to which wealth accumulation for housing purchase increases household savings and suppresses consumption the study employs an estimation method based on simultaneous equations with limited dependent variables developed by nelson and olson to examine the relationship between wealth accumulation and housing purchase plans using data relating to young japanese renters the estimation results provide evidence that young japanese households severely reduce their consumption by around 30 40 percent

a hedonic analysis of rent and rental revenue in the subsidised and unsubsidised housing sectors in geneva in this paper an analysis is made of what would be the rent difference for the tenants of subsidised units if these units were rented as unsubsidised units furthermore the existence of any pecuniary disadvantage for the owner of a subsidised unit is investigated by considering his rental revenue i e the amount paid by the tenant and the subsidy it is found that there exists a premium between an unsubsidised and a subsidised unit when using the amount paid by the tenant i e the rent as the dependent variable also the subsidy system in geneva has an influence on the pricing of each characteristic of a unit furthermore it is found that when using rental revenue as the dependent variable both sub samples can be used in a single hedonic equation thus owners of subsidised units are not at a disadvantage due to the granting of a subsidy as a result geneva s subsidy system matches the goals of agents on both the demand and supply sides

identifying the impacts of rail transit stations on residential property values abstract prior studies that have empirically investigated the impact of rail station proximity on property values have not fully investigated the factors that may account for this relationship stations may raise the value of nearby properties by reducing commuting costs or by attracting retail activity to the neighborhood possibly countering these positive effects are negative externalities emitted by stations and the access to neighborhoods that stations provide to criminals this paper sorts out these effects by presenting the results from estimating a hedonic price model and auxiliary models for neighborhood crime and retail activity results show that all four effects play a role in defining the relationship between property values and rail stations but the relative importance of these effects varies with distance from downtown and the median income of the neighborhood

optimal sales force diversification and group incentive payments in this research we show that the interaction between territory allocation and sales force compensation two key drivers of sales productivity strongly affects the firm s profitability we analyze an agency theoretic model that jointly considers the degree of negative or positive correlation across territory outcomes differences in territories sales potentials the agency problem with risk averse salespeople and the availability of both own territory compensation elements such as commission and elements dependent on the performance of others such as group commissions or tournaments we find that allocating salespeople to negatively correlated sales territories beneficially diversifies each salesperson s portfolio of sales outcomes when this allocation includes a group commission pay component and can improve profitability even with a decrease in average territory sales performance in a larger sales force a balanced allocation of salespeople coupled with a group commission dominates an imbalanced allocation comparing piece rate compensation with or without a group commission component to tournaments alongside the allocation problem we find that tournaments are favored over piece rate plans when territories are highly positively correlated territory sales potentials are similar and salespeople have a low disutility for effort and are not very risk averse a piece rate plan conversely dominates a tournament when these conditions are reversed

the costs of urban property crime this paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the london area crimes in the criminal damage category have a significant negative impact on prices a one tenth standard deviation decrease in the local density of criminal damage adds 1 to the price of an average inner london property burglaries have no measurable impact on prices even after allowing for the potential dependence of burglary rates on unobserved property characteristics one explanation we offer here is that vandalism graffiti and other forms of criminal damage motivate fear of crime in the community and may be taken as signals or symptoms of community instability and neighbourhood deterioration in general

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

household risk management and optimal mortgage choice the portfolio of the typical american household is quite unlike the diversie ed portfolio of liquid assets discussed in e nance textbooks the major asset in the portfolio is a house a relatively illiquid asset with an uncertain capital value the value of the house generally exceeds the net worth of the household which e nances its homeownership through a mortgage contract to create a leveraged position in residential real estate other e nancial assets and liabilities are typically far less important than the house and its associated mortgage contract the importance of housing in household wealth is illustrated in figure i this e gure plots the fraction of household assets in housing and in equities against the wealth percentile of the household poor households appear at the left of the e gure and wealthy households at the right data come from the 1989 and 1998 survey of consumer finances the e gure shows that middle class american families from roughly the fortieth to the eightieth percentile of the wealth distribution have more than half their assets in the form of housing even after the expansion of equity ownership during the 1990s equities are of negligible importance for these households 1

exploring spatial dynamics with land price indexes the purpose of this study is to explore the within region spatial dynamics of appreciation and depreciation rates using three different representations of geographical space mean value indexing methods are used to construct global land price indexes sub market land price indexes and local land price indexes using transaction price data for vacant residential land within the city of hamilton ontario between 1995 and 2003 the results are validated against statistics canada s series of new housing price indexes followed by a comparison of the relative performance of the three geographical representations of land price indexes the results indicate that the mean value indexing methods are robust although subject to outliers and sample selection bias and clearly illustrate the spatial dynamics of annual appreciation and depreciation rates across the study area the results also underscore the need for regular surveillance of the spatial dynamics of urban land markets

contracting theory and accounting abstract this paper reviews agency theory and its application to accounting issues i discuss the formulation of models of incentive problems caused by moral hazard and adverse selection problems i review theoretical research on the role of performance measures in compensation contracts and i compare how information is aggregated for compensation purposes versus valuation purposes i also review the literature on communication including models where the revelation principle does not apply so that nontruthful reporting and earnings management can take place the paper also discusses capital allocation within firms including transfer pricing and cost allocation problems

functional form and rental housing market analysis this paper tests functional form for hedonic rent regressions and for rental housing demand regressions for 19 united states metropolitan areas in the hedonic rent regressions both linear and loglinear forms are rejected through box cox maximum likelihood procedures similar tests for demand regressions also reject both linear and loglinear forms these results have useful applications to the analysis of rental housing demand by low income households the more popular logarithmic and linear forms lead to very low estimated income elasticities for households in the low income range whereas the preferred form provides elasticities that are significantly higher this implies greater responsiveness to income subsidies than might otherwise be estimated

housing finance and monetary policy we document three facts concerning how the structure of housing finance affects the monetary transmission mechanism first the characteristics of residential mortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries second the impact of monetary policy shocks to residential investment and house prices is significantly stronger in those countries with larger flexibility development of mortgage markets third the transmission to consumption is stronger only in those countries where mortgage equity release is common and mortgage contracts are predominantly of the variable rate type we then build a two sector dsge model with financial constraints to rationalize those facts

efficiency and equity tradeoffs incentive compatible contracts revisited abstract while the efficiency of certain contractual choices has been well established less attention has been given to the distributional outcomes of contracting in natural resource based industries data from a case study of seed gatherers in honduras demonstrates that workers paid under a relative payment system receive an earnings premium of about 25 of which 40 cannot be explained by observed differences in worker productivity a theoretical agency model is outlined in the appendix to explain why workers under tournaments necessarily enjoy a higher return than those under piece rates implying a more skewed income distribution as suggested in the efficiency wage literature

the impact of transaction costs and the expected length of stay on homeownership abstract economic theory suggests that an increase in the expected length of stay in a dwelling increases the probability of a household choosing to own a house rather than rent this hypothesis is derived from recognition that there are substantial transaction costs associated with homeownership and increased expected time in the home reduces the annualized transaction cost using a military data set we confirm that expected length of stay in a dwelling and the transaction costs of selling are very important to the ownership decision our best estimate of the transaction costs of selling a home are the sum of 3 of house value and 4 of household earnings

booms and busts in the uk housing market the often volatile behaviour of uk house prices between 1957 and 1994 is analysed in an annual econometric model theory suggests that financial liberalisation of mortgage markets in the 1980s should have led to notable shifts in house price behaviour the evidence supports the predictions of theory suggesting shifts took place in wealth effects as in the consumption function and that real interest rates and income expectations became more important the presence of transactions costs suggests important nonlinearities in house price dynamics the paper also contains an explicit econometric treatment of expectations demography supply spillovers from the rented sector and of composition biases in the official house price index

re evaluating the income elasticity of the property tax base an important research issue relating to the property tax is its income elasticity income elasticities provide a potentially cost effective means to forecast local government revenues and in policy analysis they are used to judge the tax s behavior over business cycles its stability and capacity to generate necessary growth in revenues its adequacy while previous income elasticity estimates have been derived from simple log linear models this paper focuses on the residential component of the property tax base and develops and estimates a nonlinear structural model of residential property valuation in further contrast to previous studies which have relied on national or state

gender differences in housing demand this study examines the effect of gender differences in household formation tenure choice housing expenditure and location in vancouver and toronto it shows that the continuing increase in women s income prospects and career orientation will reduce family formation fertility and divorce rates and change housing demand in ways that will affect the growth and character of large canadian cities without in migration the demand for rental housing will decline while the demand for inner city condominiums will grow substantially as women s income prospects approach those of men s the proportion of non family households will continue to increase but the demand for single family suburban houses will continue to grow as the increase in income raises the propensity of both men and women family and non family to buy suburban houses the main reduction will be in the demand for higher density suburban housing the elimination of differences in employment opportunity and career outlook between men and women

replicative evidence on the demand for owner occupied and rental housing some important results in urban economic theory and policy analysis rest upon housing demand and its associated price and income elasticities the extent to which the affluent choose to live away from the city s center thus increasing their commuting time depends on the relative income elasticities of housing demand and valuation of leisure in a more policy oriented framework the relative efficacies of income as opposed to housing price subsidies for low income households depend on the relative values of income and price elasticities

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

comovement in euro area housing prices a fractional cointegration approach this paper analyses comovement in housing prices across the euro area we use techniques based on the concepts of fractional integration and cointegration our results indicate that all the individual log real price indices display orders of integration which are above one implying long memory in their corresponding growth rates further looking at the cointegration relationships we observe that the series for the euro area is cointegrated with those of belgium germany and france focusing on the individual countries we find cointegration relationships between belgium and spain belgium and the netherlands germany and spain germany and ireland france and spain and ireland and the netherlands other bilateral cointegration relationships can either clearly be rejected or the results are ambiguous finally prices in germany seem to move in the opposite direction from other countries which may be related to capital flows associated with current account imbalances

an empirical investigation of the relative performance evaluation hypothesis the principal agent framework has become a widely used paradigm in accounting and economics for analyzing issues in performance evaluation management control and the design of incentive systems while recent work in experimental economics has begun to examine empirically some of the underlying assumptions and implications of agency theory see baiman and lewis 1989 and kirby forthcoming few precise hypotheses have been tested using real world or naturally occurring data one exception has been the empirical investigation of the relative performance evaluation rpe hypothesis agency theory suggests that there are benefits associated with evaluating agents on the basis of their relative performances when the agents performances are affected by a common shock term e g see diamond and verrecchia 1982 and holmstrom 1979 1982 specifically a relative performance based contract can remove the common shock term from an agent s performance which enables a better evaluation of the agent s actions

testing the theory of tournaments an empirical analysis of broiler production broiler chickens are raised by contract growers whose rewards depend explicitly upon relative performance we use data on the performance of broiler producers facing both tournament and linear performance evaluation compensation structures to test three predictions from the theory of tournaments that changes in the level of prizes that leave prize differentials unchanged will not affect performance that in mixed tournaments more able players will choose less risky strategies and that tournament organizers will attempt to handicap players of unequal ability or reduce mixing to avoid the disincentive effects of mixed tournaments our evidence is consistent with each prediction

specification of hedonic regressions non nested tests on measures of neighborhood quality abstract the j test a non nested test is used to determine which set of neighborhood variables best explains the variation in housing prices the results indicate that characteristics of neighbors race and socio economic descriptors are more important than the quality of public services

length of residence discounts and rental housing demand theory and evidence the improved availability of crosssectional household level data over the past decade has led to substantive improvements in estimates of housing demand better techniques have been developed to measure permanent income and housing price to determine proper functional forms for demand equations and to consider the endogenous nature of the mobility move non move and or the tenure own rent decision this paper examines two rental housing market features which have been alluded to elsewhere but which have not received systematic attention first many analysts have estimated substantial length of residence discounts for example merrill 1977 lowery 1980 follain and malpezzi 1980 downs 1980 and marshall and guasch 1983 35778 these discounts are consistent with several explanations including turnover minimization by landlords screening of good tenants or sample truncation due to random error in the setting of rental prices irrespective of the source they imply that any crosssection sample of tenants will indicate rental prices that decrease all else equal with length of residence their pervasive nature suggests that they will be expected by consumers who will act accordingly in housing demand decisions this consumer optimization is the second feature of the analysis in what might be termed the equilibrium disequilibrium question the substantial search and moving costs that often accompany a housing purchase suggest that the random cross sectional

relative pay and its effects on firm efficiency in a transitional economy abstract in this study we examine the impact of relative pay manager pay divided by average worker pay on a firm s productivity using data from a major transitional economy china we find that relative pay is negatively associated with high productivity our results provide support for the view that workers are alienated when their incomes are far lower than that of top management and this leads to lower productivity this effect is most pronounced in labor intensive firms

distributive consequences of a property tax revolt voters who support tax limitations measures such as california s proposition 13 seem to feel that their expected gains more than compensate for whatever costs may follow from a successful tax revolt costs can arise from a decline in government services or from an increase in some replacement tax if service levels are maintained this paper estimates the perceived and actual incidence of a property tax revolt under alternative assumptions about voter perceptions and eventual outcomes our results suggest that the most visible benefits of a tax cut favor low income homeowners in the event of government budget cutbacks it is possible that the distribution of services is sufficiently skewed toward low income groups to reverse the incidence of a property tax revolt

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

the demand for housing in britain and population ageing microeconometric evidence the paper estimates a household s demand function for housing using household data esti mates of the price and current income elasticities are robust at about 0 4 and 0 5 respec tively independent of price and income effects there is a strong age pattern to household demand in conjunction with the age profile of household formation this pattern implies that changes in the age distribution of the population have important effects on aggregate housing demand although economic growth dominates in determining its rate of growth during the 1980s there was a dramatic boom in british house prices followed by large declines in the early 1990s while financial deregulation and rapid growth in real incomes for people in non manual occupations contributed to the rise in housing demand and prices changes in the population s age distribu tion also played a role ermisch 1990 in particular the number of people in the prime ages for first house purchase increased as a consequence of the baby boom of the 1960s the fall in birth rates during the 1970s and continued low fertility during the 1980s entail smaller numbers in these prime ages and an ageing of the population more generally what effect will these changes in the age distribution of the population in britain have on housing demand and house prices it may be possible to use aggregate data to answer this question e g in fair and dominguez 1991 but as recently stressed by stoker 1993 the most informative assessments of such distributional effects on demand come from studying individual level cross section or panel data a recent study in this vein by mankiw and weil 1989 of the us housing market experience has attracted a great deal of attention because it suggests that house prices are going to fall dramatically in the coming years because of the ageing of the population while their study estimates an age pattern of housing demand from micro data they admit it is a biased estimate and their conclusions concerning the impact of age distribution on house prices are based on a simple aggregate time series equation which omits income and other housing demand and sup ply shifters this paper takes a microeconometric approach it estimates a demand func tion for housing in britain and then examines the implications of prospective changes in the age distribution for housing demand an important by product in estimating the demand function is an estimate of the price elasticity of housing demand despite the importance of this parameter in assessing the impact of policy changes estimates of it for britain are few and existing ones are questionable because of the absence of appropriate data for its estimation

an econometric model of housing price permanent income tenure choice and housing demand abstract this paper addresses the determination of housing price permanent income tenure choice and housing demand full housing demand elasticities incorporate the interactive effects among the four stages of the model price and income have major effects in the tenure choice equation sociodemographic variables such as age have complex effects that may be lost in simpler forms of estimation

losing to win tournament incentives in the national basketball association the focus of tournament models has been rank order compensation schemes whereby participants receive higher payments for higher relative performance either incrementally or winner takes all our research focuses on a unique tournament that offers rewards for both winning and losing specifically the national basketball association s regularly scheduled season of games we examine three nba seasons to determine whether team performance responded to changes in the underlying tournament incentives provided by the nba s introduction and restructuring of the lottery system to determine draft order our results yield strong evidence that nba teams are more likely to lose when incentives to lose are present

the benefits of in kind government programs abstract in this paper i present a methodology to calculate the benefits of in kind programs such as public housing which restrict consumption of some goods to the levels offered by the government most previous studies begin with an a priori specification of the direct utility function i begin with the ordinary demand function and then integrate demand to recover the indirect utility function and the expenditure function i argue that this approach gives additional flexibility in choosing a functional form which best describes the data i then use this methodology to estimate the benefits of the u s government s section 8 housing program

estimating neighbourhood effects in house prices towards a new hedonic model approach a hedonic equation considers ols models with independently and identically distributed errors however quality of property and location tend to exhibit highly auto regressive correlation due to spatial dependence and heterogeneity a modification is made to multiple regression analysis based on the land rent concept so that the modified hedonic house price function can be determined this paper develops a stochastic approach which is able to correct autocorrelation bias in the hedonic function others tend to model the spatial autocorrelation through the error terms while this study models it through the constant term the sample was orientated by location to reflect the neighbourhood effects thus the neighbourhood effects can be separated from the random disturbance our model using data from hong kong incorporates adjustments reflecting net floor area ratio age floor level views transport accessibility and amenities such as availability of recreational facilities the stochastic model is a more

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

housing the market versus the welfare state model revisited most housing policy analyses conclude that housing is a commodity that cannot be efficiently and equitably allocated via the market process major contentions in this respect are that market allocation will result in suboptimal housing investment and that the market process leads to the creation of slums furthermore the proponents of the welfare housing model argue that welfare state interventions have raised the average level of housing consumption above the level that would have been achieved under a more market oriented allocative model however both theory and evidence fail to support these beliefs

financial innovation and european housing and mortgage markets in this paper we assess the recent history of house prices and of mortgage lending across europe we develop a simple economic framework to estimate the likely contributions of fundamental factors such as changes in real incomes and population growth to house price appreciation we also try to quantify how much of price rises might have been driven by rising expectations of future capital gains we estimate that this might have played a significant role in several countries including spain sweden belgium and the uk we then consider what different types of mortgage arrangement might become attractive in a world of higher house prices analysing types of indexed mortgage that have advantages where prices are higher relative to incomes and where house prices may be volatile and cannot be assumed to carry on rising

housing sales in urban beijing in the housing market new properties sometimes experience delays before they are sold such delays reflect the preferences of buyers in respect of the homes characteristics therefore it is important for managerial purposes to identify the causes of housing sales delays after analysing the delays in sales of housing in beijing city china the principal finding of this study is that delays are largely explained by the dwellings characteristics and location policy implications of the research findings particularly those related to means of reducing the delays are discussed

inequality aversion and externalities abstract we conduct a general analysis of the effects of inequality aversion on decisions by homogeneous players in static and dynamic games we distinguish between direct and indirect effects of inequality aversion direct effects are present when a player changes his action to affect disutility caused by inequality indirect effects occur when the own action is changed to affect other players actions we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of either effect moreover we examine the direction of the effects whereas indirect effects induce players to internalize externalities they impose on others direct effects act in the opposite direction

effects of income variability on the demand for owner occupied housing abstract this study investigates whether the uncertainty associated with an income stream affects the demand for owner occupied housing theoretical models yield an ambiguous sign for the direction of change in consumption but our empirical findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the consumption of housing falls when the uncertainty of receipt of income increases specifically in a sample of military employees the income earned by wives had little or no effect on the demand for housing we also find evidence that suggests the demand for housing is affected by pension rights the closer to retirement the stronger the effect

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

lifetime income and housing affordability in singapore most commonly used measures of housing affordability are essentially short run indicators that compare current income with house prices or housing costs despite the emphasis in the literature on t

pressure and performance in accounting decision settings paradoxical effects of incentives feedback and justification this paper shows that the positive effects on decision making of financial incentives performance feedback and the requirement to justify one s decisions to others can be undermined or even reversed by the availability of a decision aid more specifically in the absence of a decision aid subjects achieved greater classification accuracy in a repetitive decision task when a monetary incentive was offered or when feedback about past performance was provided or when they were required to justify their choices relative to the absence of these three variables in contrast when a statistically valid decision aid was available the same incentive feedback and justification requirements resulted in lower classification accuracy again relative to the absence of these three variables these results are interpreted within a framework having two basic tenets first financial incentives performance feedback and a justifi

alternative value estimates of owner occupied housing evidence on sample selection bias and systematic errors abstract numerous econometric models have used various estimates of housing value as dependent variables the three most common measures in order of descending popularity have been homeowner estimates sales price and assessed value each of these measures has limitations the use of sales price can cause sample selection bias while owner and tax assessor estimates are subject to measurement error this study investigates the magnitude of the selection bias associated with sales price samples and whether the errors in owner and assessor estimates are systematically related to independent variables typically included in estimated equations our most important conclusion is that the use of owner estimates may cause bias in the estimated coefficients on many independent variables

supply driven mortgage choice variable mortgage contracts dominate the uk mortgage market the dominance of the variable rate mortgage contracts has important consequences for the transmission mechanism of monetary policy decisions and systemic risks this raises an obvious concern that a mortgage market such as that in the uk where the major proportion of mortgage debt is either at a variable or fixed for less than two years rate is vulnerable to alterations in the interest rate regime theoretically mortgage choice is determined by demand and supply factors so far most of the existing literature has focused on the demand side perspective and what is limited is consideration of supply side factors in empirical investigation on mortgage choice decisions this paper uniquely explores whether supply side factors may partially explain observed ex post mortgage type decisions empirical results detect that lenders profit motives and mortgage funding pricing issues may have assisted in preferences toward variable rate contracts sec

cohesiveness productivity and wage dispersion abstract when work groups support the goals of the firm firms will want to increase group cohesiveness if narrowing wage dispersion increases cohesiveness then companies will pay an efficiency wage to the low end of the wage distribution this variant of efficiency wages predicts firm wage effects and predicts that unemployment will be concentrated among low wage workers furthermore workers at cohesive firms will have higher marginal products than will similar workers at other firms thus policies to encourage the growth of cohesive firms will increase national output

does school district and municipality border congruence matter research on zoning typically assumes that city planners aim to maximise housing prices with their land use decisions either explicitly for public choice reasons or implicitly through the approval of land uses that create local net benefits noncongruence of school district and municipality borders severs the link between costs and benefits in the eyes of the median voter however which could result in excessive residential development and fiscal externalities that lower property values this paper uses a hedonic approach to indirectly observe the presence of these externalities border congruency between school districts and municipalities in ohio is measured using gis data and matched with a data set of 56 717 home sales the hedonic results indicate that noncongruence is associated with lower housing prices while the degree of noncongruence is positively related for most school districts the negative effect of noncongruency dominates my results are robust and consistent across different model spec

collusion under yardstick competition an experimental study abstract the effectiveness of relative performance evaluation schemes such as yardstick competition can be undermined by collusion the degree to which the regulated agents manage to collude will be affected by the particulars of the scheme we hypothesize that in a repeated game setting schemes will be more prone to collusion the smaller are the rents to the agents in case they behave noncooperatively we illustrate the relevance of this hypothesis by means of an economic experiment in which we compare the efficiency of two performance evaluation schemes

a joint model of tenure choice and demand for housing in the city of karachi the paper estimates a joint model of tenure choice and demand for housing for the city of karachi pakistan using a two stage estimation procedure permanent income and demographic variables are included in the analysis the study uses data collected at the household level in the city in 1987 88 results show that ownership rates are high in karachi ownership is more likely with increases in permanent income age household size and residence in the unauthorised areas permanent income transitory income age and education of the head significantly affect the consumption of housing both for renter and owner households results of the analysis and the estimated income elasticities of demand are comparable and consistent with those reported for other developing countries

relative performance evaluation and project selection relative performance evaluation rpe occurs when one person s compensation depends on the relation of his output to that of others agency theory e g lazear and rosen 1981 and holmstrom 1979 1982 predicts that managerial compensation will use relative performance when other firms outputs reveal information about the manager s actions which is not knowable from the manager s output alone tests of the theory measure other firms outputs using the performance of other firms in the same industry or some macroeconomic measures of performance these two approaches are designed to separate industry and economy effects from the effects of the manager s actions empirical tests by antle and smith 1986 and janakiraman lambert and larcker 1992 found limited evidence that managerial compensation is adjusted for industry effects gibbons and murphy 1990 found some adjustment in ceo compensation for industry performance and much more adjustment for changes in market wide rates of return this paper provides an explanation for these empirical results by illustrating how the benefits of rpe based schemes depend on the absence of project choice decisions in the canonical agency model 1

the demand for housing in spain an endogenous switching regression analysis housing demand in spain has been studied by using data disaggregated into primary and secondary housing demands it is found that demand for both types of housing area indeed related and that they are both considered necessities thus suggesting that their consumption ought to be modelled as a joint decision moreover it is found that traditional determinants of housing demand affect primary and secondary home demands differently these differences are attributable to the following economic rationales need for asset holdings diversifications relative high cost of home ownership versus rental in choice locations and differences in land demand intensity across regions in sum the findings suggest that policy makers in spain contrary to popular beliefs must consider secondary homes an integral part of households accommodation need

estimating equilibrium housing demand for stayers abstract this study models demand by owner occupied housing stayers most consumers do not move routinely in response to small changes in income or housing price so the own rent and move stay decisions are modeled as multiperiod optimization in the presence of transaction costs the empirical section uses the american housing survey to provide a panel of household stayers for a metropolitan area results indicate that income and value rent measures in different years have separable and significant impacts on housing demand estimated conditional income elasticities are between 0 40 and 0 45

housing price functions and ownership capitalization rates abstract in this paper we examine the problem of consistently estimating capitalization rates and hedonic housing prices we specify a hedonic pricing model for housing that combines owner occupied and rental unit samples in a manner yielding hedonic prices not subject to selection bias and capitalization rates which vary with the age and family income of the residents we use the 1982 annual housing survey ahs for metropolitan philadelphia to obtain parameter estimates for this model our findings indicate that selectivity bias is present in price functions utilizing only owner occupied or rental unit samples our results further indicate that the mean annual capitalization rate for owner occupied units is approximately 10 however the capitalization rate is non monotonically related to both age of the head and family income