the optimal threshold for a value added tax abstract one of the key features of a value added tax and often one of the most contentious is the threshold level of turnover at which firms are obliged to register for the tax despite its importance however the question of the appropriate level at which to set this threshold has received little analytical attention this paper first develops a simple rule characterizing the optimal threshold when firms sizes are fixed in terms of a trade off between tax revenues and collection costs it then considers in principle and by simulation the implications for the optimal threshold of the production inefficiencies implied by the differential treatment of those above and below the threshold

the compliance cost of itemizing deductions evidence from individual tax returns the resource cost of operating the income tax system is large totaling as much as seven to eight percent of revenue raised one source of this cost is the system of itemized deductions which can require extensive record keeping and calculation this paper estimates the resource cost of itemizing deductions in contrast to previous studies of compliance cost which rely an survey evidence we infer this evidence from data reported on tax returns which suggest that there exists taxpayers who would save money by itemizing but who choose not to we find that in 1982 the private cost of itemizing totaled 1 44 billon or 43 per itemizing taxpayer the compliance cost dissuaded from itemizing aver 650 000 taxpayers who would have thereby saved taxes causing an extra tax liability of nearly 200 million increasing the standard deduction by 1 000 would save 100 million in resources that would otherwise have been devoted to itemizing this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

an estimate of the accuracy of hedonic real estate valuations using the orange county bankruptcy it has become standard practice to estimate the value of amenities such as environmental cleanliness local school quality and crime using hedonic valuations typically changes in real estate prices the accuracy of hedonic valuations depends critically on whether real estate prices adjust appropriately which is difficult to verify the 1994 orange county ca bankruptcy offers a test of the accuracy of hedonic real estate valuations orange county s failed investment strategy resulted in unexpected county losses of 1 7 billion in response the aggregate value of orange county real estate dropped by between 1 65 and 3 70 billion

identification and stochastic specification in rosen s hedonic price model abstract the use of an explicitly specified utility function to derive the inverse demand functions in s rosen s hedonic price model provides considerable insight into the correct stochastic specification of the model it turns out that except in special cases the inverse demand equations are nonlinear in parameters and cannot be formulated conveniently as regression models moreover the inverse demand functions and the hedonic price function must be estimated simultaneously to obtain consistent estimates of the parameters of these functions a tractable estimation technique is described it is desirable to derive the inverse demand functions from a utility specification that is not a strongly separable function of houses attributes since strong separability implies the existence of deterministic relations among incomes prices and observed housing attributes that may fail to hold in applications finally it is shown that the use of an explicitly specified utility function does not guarantee identification of the parameters of rosen s model

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

the significance of quality differences for the united states and canada wheat trade some insights are provided as to why the united states the fifth largest wheat producer in the world imports a significant amount of wheat from canada after reviewing intra industry trade theory and the relevant empirical constructs an implicit price function of the import demand for wheat focusing on the physical and intrinsic characteristics of wheat is estimated the results are revealing there is a premium for the protein content and the percentage of heat damaged kernels in wheat clearly the fact that wheat is a differentiated commodity possessing a mix of physical and intrinsic characteristics together with price considerations helps to explain why the import of canadian wheat by the united states exists and why this became a significant issue in 1993

the long run relationship between stock return dispersion and output based on the rational that some industry groups are more closely linked to the business cycle than others we re examined a previous analysis on the long term relationship between stock return dispersion by industry and gross domestic product gdp which evaluated data until 1987 by extending it to 2008 using mean square forecast errors msfe statistics we find that incorporating the return dispersion in vector autoregressive var models enhances their forecasting power for output gdp in the long run this article also determines that the relationship between stock return dispersion by industry and gdp is tenuous in the recent decade from 1999

efficient estimation of structural hedonic systems when a product or job is not homogeneous but instead embodies several different characteristics it is difficult to use price information about the product to learn anything about the structure of the supply and demand for the embodied characteristics s rosen 1974 highlighted this problem and suggested that the estimated slope of the price characteristic relation the marginal price could be used instead of standard prices in otherwise standard estimation of the supply and demand system however recently brown and h rosen 1982 brown 1983 and mendelsohn 1985 have pointed out that this method is applicable only when the marginal price depends on variables not found in the supply and demand equations in this paper we show that since the hedonic system matches consumers with high demand for the characteristic to firms with low costs of producing it exogenous variables from the supply equation are not valid instruments in the demand equation and vice versa therefore even when the brown rosen mendelsohn brm condition holds estimation of the identified system by standard simultaneous equations techniques will produce inconsistent estimates we then show that the system can be identified despite the absence of the standard instruments and develop an efficient estimator for the identified system since cross equation constraints make estimation of hedonic systems particularly vulnerable to specification error we also consider some specification tests in this section we consider a simple model with only one characteristic the extension to several characteristics is straightforward the basic model developed by rosen can be described as follows firms with different technologies produce products which provide consumers with varying levels of some characteristic z each consumer buys one unit of the good the product is such that an amount of z from two units of the good provides less utility than the same amount of z embodied in a single unit e g acceleration in a car safety in a job consumers

neighborhood externality risk and the homeownership status of properties in contrast to corporate and institutional investors single owner occupiers cannot adequately diversify housing investment risk consequently homeownership should be relatively less likely in places with higher housing investment risk using the american housing survey it is documented that neighborhood externality risk a major component of housing investment risk substantially reduces the probability that a housing unit is owner occupied even when controlling for housing type and numerous location and household specific characteristics the effects are quantitatively meaningful and change in change estimates suggest that the effects are causal

the option value of tax delinquency theory abstract how taxes are enforced matters current enforcement of real property taxes does not consider the option value of delinquency the ultimate penalty is confiscation of property sometime in the future but the value of the property to be confiscated is not known with certainty if redemption fees are sufficiently small it can be optimal to wait and see what the size of the penalty will be before paying taxes we show how this can lead to excessive abandonment and examine proposals for reform

willingness to pay for car safety evidence from sweden this study estimates a marginal willingness to pay wtp function for a road mortality risk reduction observed marginal wtp from the swedish car market is used and found to be positively correlated with the baseline risk of the cars no statistically significant relationships between examined owner attributes e g wealth and background risk and marginal wtp are found when comparing the estimated monetary value of a non marginal risk reduction derived from the integral of the marginal wtp function with an estimate based on marginal wtp we find in line with expectations that the difference between the estimates is negligible for smaller risk reductions and small 4 10 also for relatively large risk reductions

stock returns inflation and real activity in canada this paper finds evidence that as for the united states there exists an inverse relation between real stock returns and inflation i n canada such a relation if nonspurious could signify a nonneutralit y of money the authors causality tests suggest however that inflation does not cause real stock returns instead their empirical results support e f fama s proxy effect hypothesis according to which the observed inverse relation is proxying for fundamental relations between real stock returns and anticipated real activity and between inflation and real activity the authors therefore cannot reject the fisherian hypothesis that variations in anticipated inflation have no effect on real stock returns

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

market power in a gis based hedonic price model of local farmland markets buyers of farmland are usually interested in parcels for sale that are close to their own farms with a limited number of parcels for sale this may lead to market power in local farmland markets the objective of this paper is to investigate whether market power affects farmland prices hedonic price models are adapted to allow for local market power of either sellers or buyers a distinction is made between rural and urban farmland markets the results provide evidence of market power effects in rural farmland markets however for farmland in urban areas market prices are dominated by speculation effects

does the stock market predict real activity time series evidence from the g 7 countries this paper extends one aspect of the us stock market study of fama 1990 and schwert 1990 we examine the relationship between industrial production ip growth rates and lagged real stock returns for the g 7 countries using both in sample cointegration and error correction models and the out of sample forecast evaluation procedure of ashley et al 1980 the cointegration tests show a long run equilibrium relationship between the log levels of ip and real stock prices while the error correction models indicate a correlation between ip growth and lagged real stock returns for all countries except italy the out of sample tests show that in several sub periods the us uk japanese and canadian stock markets enhance predictions of future ip 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

an expenditure based estimate of britain s black economy abstract we estimate the size of britain s black economy defined narrowly as unreported taxable income by using income and expenditure data drawn from the 1982 family expenditure survey our working assumptions are that all income groups report expenditure on food correctly employees in employment report income correctly and that the self employed under report their income we estimate food exependiture equations for all groups and then invert them to arrive at the conclusion that on average true self employment income is 1 55 times as much as reported self employment income this implies that the size of the black economy is about 5 5 percent of gdp

estimating tax noncompliance with evidence from unaudited tax returns this article estimates the degree of tax noncompliance using evidence from unaudited tax returns measurements of noncompliance are derived from the relationship between reported charitable contributions and reported income from wages and salary as compared to alternative reported income sources such as self employment farm and other small business income assuming that the source of one s income is unrelated to one s charitable inclinations and that the ratio of true income to taxable income does not vary by income source any difference in the relationship between charitable contributions and the source of income can be attributed to relative underreporting by the individual we find that the implied amount of noncompliance is significant and that it varies by source of income as well as between positive and negative values of each type of income tax evasion creates horizontal inequity and if opportunities for evasion are correlated with income complicates the attempt to achieve vertical equity evasion also imposes economic costs because taxpayers expend resources to facilitate evasion and the tax agency expends resources to contain it the equity and efficiency implications of tax evasion and optimal policy to address it depend on its magnitude and nature which for obvious reasons is difficult to ascertain this article contributes to that effort by developing a new method for estimating the extent and nature of tax noncompliance based on evidence from unaudited tax returns this evidence is derived from the relationship between reported charitable contributions and reported taxable income from various sources such as wages and salaries selfemployment nonfarm small business and farm income and is based on the assumptions that the source of one s income is unrelated to one s charitable inclinations and that the ratio of true income to taxable income does not vary by income source we find that the implied amount of noncompliance on non wageand salary income is substantial and that it varies among these sources of income as well as between positive and negative values of each type of income on average reported positive self employment nonfarm small business and farm income must be multiplied by a factor of 1 54 4 54 and 3 87 respectively in order to obtain true income even those individuals who report zero income for a specific income source but file the schedule for that source are estimated to have true positive income finally those households that report negative schedule income may actually have greater true income than those households that report positive income

a frontier approach to measuring the effect of market discrimination a housing illustration one area of particular interest to analysts and policymakers concerned with poverty and discrimination has been the housing market since world war ii housing has been a focus for antipoverty policies and therefore an area in which discrimination could not be tolerated however even though the civil rights act of 1968 expressly prohibits the offering of housing to nonwhites at terms that are different than those afforded whites it has been clearly demonstrated that discrimination continues to be a real problem in both the rental and owner occupied segments of the housing market 17 as james heilbrun points out in his summary of the 1977 survey of housing market practices conducted by the department of housing and urban development

reducing evasion through self reporting evidence from charitable contributions abstract in absence of third party reporting taxpayers are required to self report information with various degrees of detail ranging from uncorroborated claims to comprehensive records with receipts using a quasi experimental design applied to noncash charitable contribution deductions i show that even basic self reporting requirements are effective at reducing evasion but impose large compliance costs on taxpayers i find that simplified reporting requirements reduce reporting costs by 55 per person and substantially increase claimed donations however half of the new donations are due to evasion thus information reporting should only be imposed on total reported donations above a pre specified threshold

measuring the social value of local public goods an empirical analysis within paris metropolitan area a non linear hedonic model is used to estimate the implicit marginal prices of 17 local public goods in a paris suburban area on an original data set of some 8200 housing units the results reveal a robust effect of local public school quality measured both by the fraction of junior high school students that are at least two years behind grade level and the student teacher ratio on house prices it is observed that housing owners marginal willingness to pay for reducing commuting time is roughly similar for public transportation than for car transportation another noticeable result is the complete capitalization of local taxes at a discount rate of 3 5 an illustration of the potential usefulness of the results for cost benefit analysis is also provided

the effect of the stock market on investment a comparative study this paper is concerned with examining whether exogenous events whose only direct effect is to change stock prices can indirectly affect corporate investment through the stock price mechanism it is argued that the actual effect of share price changes depends on institutional considerations which affect the degree of managerial autonomy e g the extent of the use of the takeover mechanism gearing ratios and the role of employees in corporate decision making therefore it would be reasonable to expect the stock market to be less influential in japan or germany when compared with the u s or u k this paper provides some econometric evidence which supports this view in that once one has allowed for other influences on investment share prices provide no additional explanatory power for investment behaviour in japan or germany but they do affect investment in the u k and u s if one believes that the stock market is sometimes swayed by irrational considerations the absence of an influence of share prices on investment in japan or germany may then be regarded as an advantage

a note on the cost of crime to victims hedonic pricing models have been used to infer the cost of crime by estimating property value differences in high versus low crime areas however previous studies have been unable to disentangle t

property taxes and urban housing abandonment this paper formulates and estimates an economic mode1 of landlord housing abandonment using new york city data a major focus of the study is to investigate the importance of property taxes in the abandonment decision as opposed to such factors as the types of buildings or the characteristics of households occupying the neighborhood there are two major results first cities can reduce the rate of abandonment by initiating foreclosure as soon as buildings go into arrears on property tax payments rather than allowing a grace period and second property taxes are an important and significant determinant of abandonment rates the benefits and costs of a policy whereby cities would systematically reduce property taxes in blighted neighborhoods by lowering assessment levels are also explored

macroeconomics news and the stock market evidence from europe abstract the effects of unexpected variations in many macroeconomic variables on aggregate stock price indices are evaluated for great britain west germany and switzerland quarterly data over the recent flexible exchange rate period are used the results indicate that the effects of macroeconomic news are either very small or obscured by a low signal to noise ratio

demand for housing attributes in developing countries a study of pakistan the paper has applied a conventional framework of analysis of implicit markets to determine the characteristics of demand for housing attributes of quantity and quality in the urban areas of a larg

stock returns inflationary expectations and real activity this paper tests the fisher hypothesis that real stock returns are independent of inflationary expectations on data for the finnish economy a significant negative relationship is found when stock returns are regressed on the rate of inflation a possible explanation is that higher inflation may proxy a drop in the money demand induced by a lower growth in real activity which simultaneously implies a drop in expected future profits and thus a drop in stock prices to test this hypothesis actual growth in real activity is included in the regression equation for aggregate stock returns significant negative coefficients are however still obtained for expected as well as unexpected inflation it is further shown that these relations are quite insensitive to the specification of the expectations formation mechanism

house price structure and market equilibrium abstract after the accumulation of empirical research on house price structure that has taken place over the last decade a theoretical framework to explain observed differences in house price structure across markets is not yet well developed to explain house price structure a model of market equilibrium has to be formulated that allows the derivation of comparative statics results this paper presents such an analysis in the context of momentary equilibrium with continuous spectrums of household types and housing types

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

the impact of violence surges on neighbourhood business activity theoretical and empirical arguments suggest that fear of violence will cause consumers employees and entrepreneurs to alter their routine activities in areas that experience a surge in violent activity this paper argues that understanding how businesses respond to violence has important implications for understanding community crime cycles and offers further evidence of how crime impacts the choices individuals make with regard to where they live shop and work using newly available longitudinal business data and homicide data disaggregated to the zip code level an examination is made of the impact of violence surges on the creation destruction and growth of business establishments in five large us cities between 1987 and 1994 controlling for pre existing levels of violence it is found that increased violence has the greatest consequences for service related establishments in low crime neighbourhoods this finding is consistent with the notion that the fear of victimisation imposes additional indir

measuring the impact of crime on house prices this paper uses data on over 2800 house sales in jacksonville fl to estimate the impact of crime on house prices a gis programme is used to develop neighbourhood characteristics that are unique t

the market valuation of the fgis grain quality characteristics the issue addressed in this paper is whether the grain quality factors used by the federal grain inspection service in determining the quality grades of wheat exported by the united states including test weight dockage moisture content percentage of foreign material percentage of shrunken and broken kernels and protein content are characteristics that influence the price of wheat for export using shiplot data on the transactions price for hard red winter wheat hard red spring wheat and soft white wheat and the associated quality characteristics covering the period january 1990 to october 1991 and exported to 63 countires the results suggest that only the test weight and the protein content are characteristics consistently valued by the market

hedonic regressions mis specification and neural networks there is an emerging literature in the field of hedonic regressions which successfully applies flexible functional forms in contrast numerous authors report hedonic regressions with relatively simple functions often with little or no attempt to consider interaction terms and higher level powers such simple functions perform relatively well in spite of good a priori grounds for quite complex interaction effects indeed the studies are characterised by a general indifference to testing these more flexible models even when degrees of freedom permit using detailed scanner data hedonic functions for the uk tv market are estimated and tested for interaction effects for a case study of the market higher level interaction effects are tested for and compare the results with those from a neural network with its property of universal approximation the use of neural networks is particularly novel in this context and some general findings on their suitability emerge

systematic assessment error and intrajurisdiction property tax capitalization over the past twelve years considerable evidence has accumulated on the extent to which intercommunity differences in property tax burdens are capitalized into property values 17 21 8 7 25 recently linneman 14 has analyzed the validity of this evidence after taking into consideration alternative models of local government finance in the model that he believes best represents the spirit of the tax capitalization literature local government expenditures are financed wholly by property tax receipts he demonstrates that in this case a perfect correlation between taxes and public goods makes it econometrically impossible to estimate property value equations unless measurement errors and omitted variables are present he therefore asserts that existing results on the tax capitalization issue are of nebulous value

a structural model of the demand for owner occupied housing abstract the goal of the analysis in this paper is to estimate a structural model of the demand for owner occupied housing in our framework the buyer selects the value of the house the size of the mortgage and the length of stay in the house we estimate a housing demand equation which includes both the length of stay and the loan to value ratio as endogenous variables one empirical result of interest is that the income elasticity of demand for housing found in the structural housing demand equation is much larger than the value estimated in the reduced form we also point out some occasions when it is important to distinguish between a reduced form and a structural model of housing choices

a search model of housing market transactions arrive in a temporal sequence if an offer is received a seller must decide whether to accept the current offer or to reject that offer and continue to search it is this strategic choice and the possibility of not receiving an offer that results in extended selling periods and stocks of unsold houses rejection of offers and extended selling periods are to be expected in an uncertain environment where search may be used productively to obtain a higher selling price this paper considers the implications of a search environment for measurement of hedonic prices because an offer is observed only when it is acceptable to the seller sold houses constitute a self selected subsample in a search environment accurate measurement of hedonic prices in this situation may be obtained with the two stage procedure of heckman 3 and lee 5 or the maximum likelihood procedure summarized in amemiya 1 the empirical model presented in section ii is a generalization of the usual hedonic model in the sense that the pricing equation is supplemented with an exchange equation which determines probability of sale the coefficients in each equation provide useful information regarding housing search the coefficients in the pricing equation are marginal attribute prices while the attribute coefficients in the exchange equation are the standardized differences between the marginal attribute prices of buyers and sellers an interesting implication of this model is that attribute variation will not be systematically related to probability of sale if the marginal attribute prices of buyers and sellers equalize thus this model may be used to address two related questions regarding hedonic analysis in a search environment first does competition among buyers and sellers equalize marginal attribute prices in a search environment and second is accurate measurement of hedonic prices affected by the probabilistic nature of sale

predicting u s recessions financial variables as leading indicators this paper examines the out of sample performance of various financial variables as predictors of u s recessions series such as interest rates and spreads stock prices and monetary aggregates are evaluated individually and in comparison with other financial and nonfinancial indicators the analysis focuses on out of sample performance from one to eight quarters ahead results show that stock prices are useful with one to three quarter horizons as are some well known macroeconomic indicators beyond one quarter however the slope of the yield curve emerges as the clear individual choice and typically performs better by itself out of sample than in conjunction with other variables

is there a compensating wage differential for high crime levels first evidence from europe abstract this paper investigates whether high regional crime levels lead to a compensating wage differential paid by firms in the respective region using data from german social security records official police statistics and official statistics for 2003 2006 i consider both violent and non violent crimes and use three way error components estimators to control for individual and regional heterogeneity the findings suggest that wages are practically unrelated to changes in crime rates this result is robust over a wide range of subgroups there is however some evidence that crime rates influence land prices

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

the effect of tax enforcement on tax elasticities evidence from charitable contributions in france optimal tax formulas expressed in sufficient statistics are usually calibrated under the assumption that the relevant tax elasticities are unaffected by other available policy instruments in practice though tax authorities have many more instruments than the mere tax rates and tax elasticities are functions of all these policy instruments in this paper we provide evidence that tax elasticities are extremely sensitive to a particular policy instrument the level of tax enforcement we exploit a natural experiment that took place in france in 1983 when the tax administration tightened the requirements to claim charitable deductions the reform led to a substantial drop in the amount of contributions reported to the administration which can be credibly attributed to overreporting of charitable contributions before the reform rather than to a real change in giving behaviours we show that the reform was also associated with a substantial decline in the absolute value of the elasticity of reported contributions this finding allows us to partially identify the elasticity of overreporting contributions which is shown to be large and inferior to 2 in the lax enforcement regime we further show using bunching of taxpayers at kink points of the tax schedule that the elasticity of taxable income also experienced a significant decline after the reform our results suggest that optimizing the tax rate for a given tax elasticity when other policy instruments are not optimized can lead to misleading conclusions when tax authorities have another instrument that could set the tax elasticity itself at its optimal level as in kopczuk and slemrod 2002

tax delinquency and abandonment an expanded model with application to industrial and commercial properties this study expands on the literature of residential abandonment by considering five types of industrial and commercial properties and three levels of explanatory variables parcel neighbourhood and city using data for cleveland ohio it shows that tax policies have a limited impact on abandonment instead two categories of variables not previously modelled are significant and policy relevant first the more specialised a property and the greater the cost of conversion to alternative uses the greater the likelihood of tax delinquency and abandonment suggesting policies to ease transition to new uses second abandonment spillovers are highly significant even after accounting for neighbourhood common factors this suggests that spatial solutions such as land use planning may be more effective than tax abatement policies in dealing with abandonment and approaches to abandonment must be differentiated by type of property residential abandonment should be re examined in light of these findings

are estimated tax elasticities really just tax evasion elasticities the case of charitable contributions this paper uses data from tax returns that have been subject to intensive audits to confront the quantitative importance of misreporting for the estimated tax responsiveness of charitable contributions it concludes that the tax responsiveness of charitable giving that has been detected using tax return data cannot be ascribed to the tax responsiveness of overstating actual giving in fact overstatement is apparently less price responsive than actual giving implying that the responsiveness of actual giving is higher than is suggested by studying reported contributions copyright 1989 by mit press

economic efficiency v energy efficiency do model conservation standards make good sense abstract the incremental market value of higher thermal efficiency standards in new houses and the resulting energy savings are estimated using linear regression techniques based on the empirical findings a homebuyer discount rate is calculated and cost effectiveness tests are performed the findings indicate that the real estate market operates efficiently in capitalizing the value of energy savings into sale prices it appears that under current pricing mechanisms the thermal performance improvements provide net benefits to the homebuyer and to the sponsoring utility

stock returns and output growth in emerging and advanced economies abstract this paper studies the correlation between output growth and lagged stock returns in a panel of emerging market economies and advanced economies it finds that the proportion of countries in which this correlation is significant is the same for emerging market economies as it is for advanced economies using yearly data and somewhat lower using quarterly data asset prices therefore seem to contain valuable information to forecast output also in emerging market economies moreover the paper finds that the strength of the correlation between output growth and lagged stock returns is significantly related to a number of stock market characteristics such as a high market capitalization to gdp ratio and less robustly english legal origin and the number of listed domestic companies and initial public offerings

what to show on the wine labels a hedonic analysis of price drivers of sicilian wines unlike previous literature we construct a hedonic model of wine price that incorporates all the main categories of variables simultaneously to enable a better evaluation of their importance on wine price formation a comprehensive model has the advantage of providing more reliable estimates of the attributes implicit prices thereby facilitating firms pricing and improving effectiveness of wine production and marketing decisions we utilize two different datasets of sicilian wines collecting data from influential wine guides our results suggest that wine price strongly depends on objective features such as vintage alcoholic content geographical origin grape variety producer size and cellaring potential in addition use of containers like tonneaux and barrique positively affects prices whereas use of concrete containers has a negative influence no univocal indications emerge with regard to the effect of the type of company type of viticulture and firm age as for sensorial characteristics our a

sample selection and biases in local house value indices abstract analysis of cross sectional or intertemporal variations in house values among localities requires reliable house value indices however prior studies applying the hedonic method to transaction data have reported price series that may be biased our paper investigates a possible cause of bias and uses a censored regression technique extended to an intertemporal model to derive an unbiased index we apply our method to 1971 1991 data from the miami florida msa and find evidence in time varying amounts of bias our results suggest that prior studies using the hedonic method and samples consisting only of sold houses have understated the intertemporal variability of house prices

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

on the choice of functional form for hedonic price functions the empirical results presented in this paper demonstrate the usefulness of quadriatic models in the estimation of hedonic price functions we propose a quadriatic semi log model a restricted case of the quadriatic box cox model whose standardized marginal attribute prices are linear functions of the attribute vector this specification outperforms the linear box cox specification in terms of explanatory power and captures much of the increase in explanatory power provided by the quadriatic box cox model without the corresponding loss in the ability to interpret the coefficient estimates for policy applications the quadriatic semi log model provides a useful alternative to linear specification

unwilling or unable to cheat evidence from a tax audit experiment in denmark this paper analyzes a tax enforcement field experiment in denmark in the base year a stratified and representative sample of over 40 000 individual income tax filers was selected for the experiment half of the tax filers were randomly selected to be thoroughly audited while the rest were deliberately not audited the following year threat of audit letters were randomly assigned and sent to tax filers in both groups we present three main empirical findings first using baseline audit data we find that the tax evasion rate is close to zero for income subject to third party reporting but substantial for self reported income since most income is subject to third party reporting the overall evasion rate is modest second using quasi experimental variation created by large kinks in the income tax schedule we find that marginal tax rates have a positive impact on tax evasion for self reported income but that this effect is small in comparison to legal avoidance and behavioral responses third using the randomization of enforcement we find that prior audits and threat of audit letters have significant effects on self reported income but no effect on third party reported income all these empirical results can be explained by extending the standard model of rational tax evasion to allow for the key distinction between self reported and third party reported income

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

the cost of quality in existing housing estimates from an implicit markets model abstract rosen s implicit markets approach is used to model and estimate the cost of improving the state of repair of rental housing in existing structures particular attention is devoted to potential errors in the measurement of state of repair and to the inconsistent estimates of supply and demand parameters implied by rosen s original econometric technique cost estimates imply that improvements in low income housing could be provided much less expensively in existing housing than by either public new construction or the section 8 existing housing program

an empirical analysis of the demand for housing attributes in a third world city this paper presents estimates of the demand for a set of housing attributes using data drawn from the renter and owner occupier housing submarkets for ibadan nigeria the empirical analysis based on an adaptation of rosen s two step model reveals that the most important determinants of the demand for housing attributes are income price of the attribute in question household size and the occupational status of the head of household the paper further indicates that the demand for housing attributes is inelastic since all estimated coefficients are below unity

is murder bad for business evidence from colombia abstract this paper studies the effects of violent crime on market prices and size using plant level panel data in colombia to estimate causal effects i exploit reductions in violence driven by i

more giving or more givers the effects of tax incentives on charitable donations in the uk abstract this paper estimates the effects of tax incentives on charitable contributions in the uk using the universe of self assessment income tax returns between 2005 and 2013 we exploit variation from a large reform in 2010 to estimate intensive and extensive margin tax price elasticities of giving using a predicted tax rate instrument for the price of giving relative to consumption we find an intensive margin elasticity of about 0 2 and an extensive margin elasticity of 0 1 yielding a total elasticity of about 0 3 to further explore the extensive margin response we propose a model with a fixed cost of declaring donations and obtain a structural estimate of that cost of around 47 we also study the welfare effects of tax incentives extending the theoretical literature to allow for extensive margin giving and for a fixed cost of declaring donations taking into account these factors there is a case for increasing the subsidy on charitable giving in the uk

the welfare cost of violence across countries the cost of violence goes beyond its material dimension including also the welfare loss due to higher mortality a given mortality and its distribution across age groups determines a reduction in life expectancy that can be valued using the marginal willingness to pay approach we estimate the health dimension of the welfare cost of violence for 73 countries on average 1 year of life expectancy lost to violence is associated with a yearly social cost of 3 8 of gdp the health dimension increases the estimated social costs of violence by 40 in the united states and by 57 in latin america

taste or reputation what drives market prices in the wine industry estimation of a hedonic model for italian premium wines the aim of this article is to provide new evidence on the factors affecting wine prices on both methodological and factual grounds on the methodological ground this study is the first to apply a general box cox transformation within the context of hedonic models which exploit all the variables objective and sensorial characteristics reputation pointed out by previous literature as relevant in driving market prices on the factual ground the article fills the lack of empirical evidence on the issue for italy one of the leading wine producers by using a large data set on two premium quality wines barolo and barbaresco covering the 1995 1998 vintages our results support the evidence obtained using data from other countries showing that sensorial traits the reputation of wines and producers as well as objective variables are all important factors influencing the consumers willingness to pay more importantly by resorting to a nonnested statistical test vuong 1989 we compare two alternative

cheating ourselves the economics of tax evasion no government can announce a tax system and then rely on taxpayers sense of duty to remit what is owed some dutiful people will undoubtedly pay what they owe but many others will not over time the ranks of the dutiful will shrink as they see how they are being taken advantage of by the others thus paying taxes must be made a legal responsibility of citizens with penalties attendant on noncompliance but even in the face of those penalties substantial tax evasion exists and always has the history of taxation is replete with episodes of evasion often notable for their inventiveness during the third century many wealthy romans buried their jewelry or stocks of gold coin to evade the luxury tax and homeowners in eighteenth century england temporarily bricked up their fireplaces to escape notice of the hearth tax collector webber and wildavsky 1986 p 141 this essay reviews what is known about the magnitude nature and determinants of tax evasion with an emphasis on the u s income tax alm 1999 andreoni erard and feinstein 1998 and slemrod and yitzhaki 2002 offer more comprehensive recent reviews of the literature it then places this information into a conceptual and policy context

an evaluation of the federal legal services program evidence from crime rates and property values abstract this paper uses the city level roll out of legal service grants to evaluate their effects on crime using uniform crime reports from 1960 to 1985 the results show that there is a short run increase of 7 in crimes reported and a 16 increase in crimes cleared by arrest results show an increase in the staffing of police officers in cities that received legal services these cities are also associated with having higher median property values 10 years later this supports the narrative that legal services changed police behavior through litigation or threats of litigation

simultaneity in the market for housing characteristics abstract the nature of simultaneity in the markets for housing characteristics is examined simultaneity is found to arise in the implicit markets for individual characteristics because of the presence of nonlinearity in the market hedonic price function for housing however this simultaneity is not the kind discussed by s rosen j political econ 82 34 55 1974 between firm supplies and household demands as a result the rosen suggestion of identifying demand with firm supply shifters is inappropriate among the alternative approaches to identification the most desirable involve use of data over two or more markets in which residence for a given household is exogenous to the choice of housing

putting firms into optimal tax theory firms are for the most part absent from the modern theory of optimal taxation their disappearance dates from the foundational models developed by peter a diamond and james a mirrlees 1971 in which firms are simply mechanical vehicles for combining productive inputs into output in cost minimizing proportions in contrast firms play a central role in all modern tax systems mostly for a reason stated by richard m bird 1996 the key to effective taxation is information and the key to information in the modern economy is the corporation in most countries firms remit the majority of tax revenues to the government either with regard to taxes legally owed by businesses or through withholding of taxes legally owed by employees or other businesses even when businesses are not required to remit taxes they are often required to file information reports that can facilitate monitoring of tax liabilities the lack of a theoretical framework that features firms impedes rigorous welfare analysis of a number of important policy issues one such example is the comparative evaluation of a uniform retail sales tax rst versus a value added tax vat in the standard model these two taxes both remitted entirely by businesses are equivalent consumption taxes but most experts consider the vat to be clearly superior on administrative grounds a view echoed in the recent report of the president s advisory panel on federal tax reform 2005 we propose a simple framework in which these and other issues can be analyzed the new framework recognizes that a tax code must be backed up by an administrative and enforcement structure

measuring income tax evasion using bank credit evidence from greece we document that in semiformal economies banks lend to tax evading individuals based on the bank s assessment of the individual s true income this observation leads to a novel approach to estimate tax evasion we use microdata on household credit from a greek bank and replicate the bank underwriting model to infer the banks estimate of individuals true income we estimate that 43 45 of self employed income goes unreported and thus untaxed for 2009 this implies 28 2 billion of unreported income implying forgone tax revenues of over 11 billion or 30 of the deficit our method innovation allows for estimating the industry distribution of tax evasion in settings where uncovering the incidence of hidden cash transactions is difficult using other methods primary tax evading industries are professional services medicine law engineering education and media we conclude with evidence that contemplates the importance of institutions paper trail and political willpower for the persistence of tax evasion jel codes g21 h22 h24 h26 p37

how does home equity affect mobility abstract the impact of the housing crash on household mobility is theoretically ambiguous households that have little or negative equity are less likely to move because the proceeds from the sale of the home may not be large enough to pay off the original mortgage and provide a sufficient down payment on a new home on the other hand at sufficiently negative levels of home equity household mobility may actually increase through the foreclosure channel in this paper we develop and empirically test a model that incorporates both of these mechanisms our empirical results based on data for florida homeowners provide evidence of a non monotonic relationship between home equity and mobility although default induced mobility did increase following the financial crisis this increase did little to offset the substantial decline in voluntary moves due to home equity lock in we find that on net household mobility declined by roughly 25 in our sample because of reductions in equity

estimates of the impact of crime risk on property values from megan s laws abstract we estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move in dates of sex offenders we find significant effects of sex offenders locations that are geographically localized house prices within 0 1 miles of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average we then use this finding to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses and find costs of over 1 million per victim far greater than previous estimates however we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate risks posed by offenders or that living near an offender poses significant costs exclusive of crime risk jel k42 r23 r31

racial differences in homeownership and housing wealth 1970 1986 racial differences in homeownership and housing wealth 1970 1986 black couples are found to own a disproportionately low share of aggregate housing wealth in the united states because they are less likely than whites to be homeowners and because black owned houses have lower market values than white owned houses probability of ownership and house value equations corrected for selectivity bias are estimated with national data for 1970 1980 and 1986 trends in racial differences in homeownership and house value are identified and reasons for their existence are investigated i introduction the wage gap between blacks and whites has been the subject of many labor market studies during the last two decades these studies spawned similar analyses of racial differences in other markets such as housing concern over the black white differential in economic well being continues today with recent attention focusing on the wealth gap between blacks and whites andrew brimmer 1988 points out that blacks owned only 3 0 percent of accumulated wealth in the united states in 1984 even though blacks received 7 6 percent of total money income that year and they comprised 11 percent of all households 1 the equity accumulated in homes constituted the most important form of wealth held by blacks but even so the black share of home equity was only 4 4 percent of the total the value of black owned housing will be disproportionately low if a blacks are not as likely as whites to own homes and b blacks houses are relatively less valuable than whites houses in this paper we investigate both of these possibilities with national data on black and white households covering the period 1970 86 2 existing research has concentrated primarily on racial differences in the probability of homeownership with an eye toward determining the extent of discrimination 3 at least two prominent congressmen joseph kennedy of massachusetts and henry gonzalez of texas have charged that government regulators routinely allow discrimination in home mortgage lending because most studies have relied on data from the 1960s and early 1970s often covering only certain metropolitan areas no reliable estimates of the national trend in black homeownership and housing market discrimination during more recent years exist the question of how much housing blacks consume relative to whites given the decision to own has received only scant attention in the literature yet both decisions influence wealth distribution our study compares the racial differentials in these two dimensions of the housing choice ownership and value a basic hypothesis of the paper is that house value differentials by race will be larger than homeownership differentials by race since the factors that determine house prices are more numerous and probably more susceptible to discriminatory influence than the conditions that influence the decision to own rather than rent ii a model of the homeownership choice this section describes a model of the homeownership decision that can be applied to available data the model is similar to those of previous studies in that it relates the probability of owning a home to several explanatory variables reflecting economic demographic and locational characteristics of the household it differs in an important respect however in that it is estimated on a sample that contains only husband and wife households 4 most earlier studies that have used samples drawn from the entire population have controlled for different household types e g single female headed widowed by means of dummy variables this procedure generally constrains the impact of race on the housing choice to be equal for all household types in addition mcdonald 1974 has pointed out that the current values of variables such as income and labor market activity are more apt to misrepresent their permanent levels for single person or female headed households

quantifying the decision to become a first time home buyer becoming a first time homebuyer is quantified in two stages using household data a renter demand curve is estimated to calculate the consumer surplus gain from moving into housing consumption equilibrium probit is used to estimate the probability of becoming a first time homebuyer the model suggests that overcoming the transactions cost of buying and the gain from housing consumption equilibrium are important to the decision renting is explained by current housing demand through income and family size buying for the first time is explained by factors which reduce transactions costs such as assets marital status and education disequilibrium in rental housing consumption is also important the results further suggest that permanent income is not important to the decision

the link between crime risk and property prices in england and wales evidence from street level data this paper uses street level data on property sales and crime rates for england and wales to investigate compensating differentials for crime risk my identification strategy relies on the use of non parametric regional time trends on various levels of spatial aggregation as well as various fixed effects for streets and wider areas to control for unobserved amenities and regional economic conditions the data comes from transaction data collected by the land registry and recently published crime maps for the whole of the uk my estimates which are robust to a range of sensible specification changes suggest that each case of anti social behaviour per ten population in the same street leads to an approximately 0 6 0 8 drop in property prices while a corresponding increase in violent crime decreases prices by roughly 0 6 1 6 and a corresponding increase in non violent crime by about 0 2 0 4 the majority of estimates are at the upper end of these intervals estimates for robbery burglary and vehicle c

does credit card information reporting improve small business tax compliance we investigate the response of small businesses operating as sole proprietorships to form 1099 k an information report introduced in 2011 which provides the internal revenue service with information about electronic sales e g credit card sales the overall impact of the policy appears to be relatively small however theory and distributional analysis isolates a subset of taxpayers expected to be especially sensitive to reporting who report receipts equal to or slightly exceeding the receipts reported on 1099 k among this set of taxpayers information reporting induced more complete tax reporting 30 of sensitive taxpayers filed a return declaring business income for the first time and among those that were already filing we estimate an increase in reported receipts by up to 24 these taxpayers largely offset increased reported receipts with increased reported expenses which do not face information reporting diminishing the impact on reported net taxable income

nonlinear budget constraints and consumer demand an application to public programs for residential housing abstract this study presents a methodology for exploiting the nonlinear hedonic nature of housing prices to estimate the compensated demands of households for particular housing attributes the methodology is employed to provide hicksian benefit measures of a particular housing subsidy program typical of those undertaken recently in developing countries

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

the choice of functional forms for hedonic price equations comment abstract rosen 13 freeman 4 halvorsen and pollakowski 6 and others have stressed that economic theory does not suggest an appropriate functional form for hedonic price functions 1 it consequently is reasonable to try several functional forms and utilize the multiple regression equation with the best performance in this spirit halvorsen and pollakowski 6 recommend using the box cox flexible functional form for hedonic analysis and measuring best performance with a goodness of fit test the box cox methodology has also been adapted in hedonic studies by goodman 5 linneman 10 blomquist and worley 1 and eberts and gronberg 3 2 the box cox is particularly suited for testing functional forms because many familiar forms such as semilog log linear and translog are subsets of the flexible box cox permitting nested hypothesis testing in this note we illustrate that the formal hypothesis testing advantage of the box cox functional form is purchased at the expense of other important goals the goal of most hedonic studies is to estimate the prices of the characteristics to measure the response to changes in the prices and or to predict future expenditures using a best fit criterion to choose functional forms does not necessarily lead to more accurate estimates of characteristic prices in fact the large number of coefficients estimated with the box cox functional form reduces the accuracy of any single coefficient which could lead to poorer estimates of specific prices second because any negative number raised to a noninteger real power is imaginary the traditional box cox functional form is not suited to any data set containing negative numbers third the box cox functional form may be inappropriate for prediction since the mean predicted value of the untransformed dependent variable need not equal the mean of the sample upon which it is estimated the predicted untransformed variable housing value will be biased the predicted untransformed dependent variable may also be imaginary fourth the nonlinear transformation results in complex estimates of slopes and elasticities which are often too cumbersome to use properly we discuss each of these drawbacks and quantify them when possible in the remainder of this note

search hedonic prices and housing demand the conventional model of the housing market does not take into account the search process for a suitable housing unit based on a dynamic search theory this paper develops and estimates a truncated regression model of the rental housing market with stochastic and unobserved truncation points the author s model provides a joint estimation of the hedonic rice and the reservation rent equations the results turn out to be superior to the ordinary least squares estimates of either the traditional housing demand function or the hedonic price equation copyright 1992 by mit press

expected and unexpected changes in nominal and real variables evidence from the capital markets abstract the sources of variation in asset returns and exchange rates are empirically examined with the help of data from five industrialized countries a fourfold classification in real vs nominal and expected vs unexpected changes is used the empirical work is based on the observed time series characteristics of stock returns interest rates exchange rates and rates of inflation unexpected changes in real stock returns and real exchange rates have by far the largest variance movements in risk premia on shares and forward foreign exchange are also substantial fisher and mundell effects are however relatively small

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

nominal loss aversion housing equity constraints and household mobility evidence from the united states abstract this paper exploits the recent variation in us house prices to examine the effect of equity constraints and nominal loss aversion on household mobility detailed data from the 1985 1996 national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 were matched with house price data from 149 metropolitan areas to estimate instrumental variables linear probability and semi parametric proportional hazard models of intra metropolitan mobility household mobility is significantly influenced by nominal loss aversion there is little evidence that low equity because of fallen house prices constrains mobility

hedonics and demand analysis the implicit demand for player attributes i introduction hedonic analysis is the standard technique of applied econometrics for modeling differentiated products a hedonic price function relates the observed price of a differentiated good to the bundle of characteristics of which the good is composed the derivatives of the function with respect to the characteristics are the implied hedonic prices which empirical work typically seeks to estimate as has been recognized since at least the work of rosen 1974 underlying the hedonic price function is an implicit market for these characteristics a number of studies have attempted to estimate the associated supply demand system in particular applied contexts based on data on the quantities of the characteristics used in the estimation of the hedonic price function and the resulting estimated hedonic prices examples include nelson 1978 witte sumka and erekson 1979 and thomas 1993 rather than a complete supply demand system other authors focus only on the implicit demand for characteristics for example polinsky and rubinfeld 1977 harrison and rubinfeld 1978 agarwal and ratchford 1980 bender gronberg and hwang 1980 blomquist and worley 1981 quigley 1982 mendelsohn 1984 and palmquist 1984 a curious aspect of these studies which appears to have gone unrecognized is the failure to draw on modern econometric demand analysis in the estimation of the implied demand system for the characteristics instead the analysis of the implicit market proceeds on the basis of ad hoc typically linear or loglinear functional forms which involve no explicit derivation from consumer theory and which impose arbitrary and non testable restrictions on preferences as a consequence there is little means beyond descriptive econometric measures goodness of fit examination of signs and t ratios and so on for judging the adequacy or legitimacy of the results no use is made of contemporary flexible functional form methodology which provides a second order approximation to arbitrary preferences and which permits in addition to the calculation of elasticities the testing of fundamental hypotheses of consumer theory such as demand homogeneity and symmetry of the slutsky matrix and numerical checks on the concavity of the associated implied expenditure function the present work attempts to fill this gap however instead of a differentiated good in a product market to which consumer demand theory would apply we choose to study a good in a factor market so that the relevant demand equations are a system of factor demands for the underlying characteristics the good in question is the service of baseball players to major league baseball teams which is a differentiated good in that different players represent different bundles of alternative attributes such as pitching or hitting skills our focus is solely on the implicit demand system for these attributes no attempt is made to estimate the associated supply system reflecting player behavior there are several reasons for this seemingly peculiar choice of commodity first the factor market for baseball players is of some intrinsic interest as evidenced by the extent to which it has been studied by economists for a taste of this see the entry by quirk 1987 in the new palgrave and the recent survey by fort and quirk 1995 in particular the market has been the focus of work by labor economists examples are blass 1992 khan 1993a 1993b and sommers 1992 much of this literature derives from the seminal work of scully 1974 who estimated equations for baseball player salaries as functions of player skills although not previously recognized in these terms underlying scully s salary equations are implicit markets for player skills the previous work involving baseball salary equations by scully 1974 1989 and others for example blass 1992 hill and spellman 1984 fort 1992 pascal and rapping 1972 raimondo 1983 and sommers 1990 is useful because it provides guidance as to the appropriate specification of the hedonic price equation