How important are wealth effects on consumption in Canada?

We estimate the marginal propensity to consume from financial and housing wealth in Canada. The modelling framework of Carroll et al. (2011) that builds on the observed stickiness in consumption data is used. Estimations and inferences are conducted using identification‐robust methods. The results provide support for the overall modelling strategy, but there are also important differences in the identification status of the econometric equations considered. Based on the most informative specification, we find that both types of wealth—financial and housing—have significant effects in Canada and that the former has a greater effect than the latter. A simple extension of the model that also accounts for non‐price credit conditions shows that housing wealth may be relevant only during periods of easier access to credit. Finally, we find support for relatively high stickiness in consumption growth in Canada.     

Housing rent dynamics in Italy

In this paper we focus on tenant rents in Italy and compare results from several methods for the rent dynamic estimation. We first document the sources of data available and then introduce quality adjusted techniques, which enable us to separate the price variation due to qualitative changes in housing attributes from pure price changes. Finally, we compare these measures with unconditional and matched-type price indices derived from microdata. Over the period 1998–2006, we estimate a cumulative rent increase ranging between 40 and 80%. The upper bound refers to the average dynamic for a subset of flats entering the market in a given period. Our hedonic estimates point to an average rent increase of approximately 40%, almost 20 percentage points above the one recorded by the rent component of the Italian consumer price index. A simple calibration model suggests that only part of the difference between our estimates and the official ones is due to survey non-response.     

Housing prices and population dynamics in urban China

In this study, a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model is used to investigate the influence of population on housing price dynamics in urban China. The contribution of population growth to the housing price trend and the contribution of population shocks to housing price fluctuations are quantitatively measured. The empirical results indicate that the ongoing policy to control the population size in large cities in China can decrease the growth rate of housing prices by 0.49% every year, which accounts for 1/10 of the total housing price trend. Furthermore, this policy cannot stabilize housing prices because population shocks have negligible effects on the housing price cycle. Housing technology shocks and housing preference shocks are responsible for most of the housing price fluctuations.     

Housing decisions and the U.S. income tax: An econometric analysis

This paper examines the effects of the current income tax treatment of owner-occupied housing on the quantity of housing consumed and on the tenure choice by various groups. Cross-sectional data for 1970 are used to estimate jointly tenure choice and housing demand equations. The equations' parameters are used to assess the efficiency and equity implications of the relevant tax law provisions.     

Hazardous Waste Hits Hollywood: Superfund and Housing Prices in Los Angeles

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the effect of various actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund Program, on housing prices. This study uses a housing transaction panel dataset encompassing the five major counties of the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area to estimate the program’s influence on the local housing market. Using house and time-varying census tract fixed effects, I am able to avoid many of the endogeneity problems seen in previous research attempting to measure the Superfund treatment effect. An estimate of the effect on housing prices is given for each of the major events that occur under a typical Superfund remediation. After controlling for confounding correlated unobservables, I find a 7.3 % increase in sales price for houses within 3 km of a site that moves through the complete Superfund program. The analysis gives evidence of positive price appreciation for housing markets and serves as a lower bound for measuring remediation benefits.     

Preferences with and without prices - does the price attribute affect behavior in stated preference surveys?

The experimental as well as the non-market valuation literature include several examples of how an introduced price can affect behavior in otherwise not expected ways. It has become standard to include a price vector as an attribute in choice experiments, something that enables us to estimate a marginal willingness to pay for other attributes. We test the impact on preferences by an inclusion of a price in a choice experiment. Preferences are affected, as might be expected. However, also the relative ranking of individual attributes is affected.      

Housing Prices in Urban China as Determined by Demand and Supply

This paper studies the demand for and supply of residential housing in urban China since the late 1980s when the urban housing market became commercialized. Using aggregated annual data from 1987 to 2012 in a simultaneous equations framework we show that the rapid increase in the urban residential housing price can be well explained by the forces of demand and supply, with income determining demand and cost of construction affecting supply. We find the income elasticity of demand for urban housing to be approximately 1, the price elasticity of demand to be approximately ?1.1 and the price elasticity of supply of the total housing stock to be approximately 0.5. The resulting long‐run effect of income on urban housing prices in elasticity terms is approximately 0.7, because the increase in income has shifted the demand curve outward more rapidly than the supply curve.     

资产价格、通胀率与我国流动性过剩规模

现有衡量流动性过剩规模的方法存在许多不足。通过借鉴水力学理论可以推导出中国货币需求函数,以此估算我国的流动性过剩规模。在此基础上,通过Granger检验,发现流动性过剩规模与股价、房价和通胀率的走势较吻合。因此,我们可以利用流动性过剩的机会深化金融市场的改革与创新;引导流动性流向金融市场,避免房地产市场的资产价格泡沫;将货币政策与产业政策紧密配合;选择适当的货币政策工具调控流动性。     

An Application of the Hedonic Price Model to the Perth Residential Land Market*

This paper presents the results of an application of the Rosen-Freeman hedonic price model to the Perth (Western Australia) residential land market. A sample of over two thousand market transactions is used to estimate the value of residential land attributes. Major emphasis is given to those particular land attributes that are subject to public regulation and to the policy implications that follow.     

Hedonic prices and cost/benefit analysis

Hedonic prices have been used to evaluate the willingness to pay for attributes. We reformulate the notion of hedonic price from a composite price on housing to a unit price on traded quantities, in conformity with long run competitive equilibrium theory. This formulation was suggested (but not developed) by Rosen (J. Polit. Econ.82, No. 1 (1974), 34–35). By first characterizing an efficient allocation of consumers to space, we show that hedonic unit prices can be understood as a bid-rent function which supports the efficient allocation. This is despite the fact that the lots over which consumers bid are themselves endogenous. We show that unit hedonic prices reveal preferences in a manner different from composite hedonic expenditures.     

A DYNAMIC MODEL OF HOUSING DEMAND: ESTIMATION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS*

Using data from the PSID, we estimate a dynamic model of housing demand with nonconvex adjustment costs, credit constraints, and uncertainty about income and home prices. We simulate how consumer behavior responds to house price and income declines as well as tightening credit. In response to a negative home price shock, households early in the life cycle climb the housing ladder more quickly and invest more in housing assets due to the lower price. With a concurrent negative income shock, however, housing demand falls among young and middle aged households who stay in smaller homes rather than to trade up.     

Housing prices and crime perception

In this article, we combine data from the housing market with data from a victimization survey to estimate the effect of crime perception on housing prices in the City of Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Using dwelling data and a hedonic price model (using both OLS and quantile regressions), in the first stage, we estimate the shadow price of the location of dwellings. In the second stage, we analyse the impact of crime perception, after controlling for other district characteristics such as local public spending and immigration, on this locational valuation. After accounting for the possible endogeneity of crime and housing prices, our findings suggest that crime exerts relevant costs beyond its direct costs. Indeed, a one standard deviation increase in perceived security is associated with a 0.57 % increase in the valuation of districts. Moreover, in districts perceived as being less safe than the average for the City of Barcelona, houses are highly discounted. Less safe districts have on average a valuation that is 1.27 % lower.     

China’s house price: Affected by economic fundamentals or real estate policy?

Many theory and empirical literature conclude that house price can reflect economic fundamentals in the long-term. However, by using China’s panel data of 35 main cities stretching from 1998 to 2007, we find that there is no stable relationship between house price and economic fundamentals. House price has deviated upward from the economic fundamentals since government started macro-control of the real estate market. We consider that the mechanism between the house price and economic fundamentals is distorted by China’s real estate policy, especially its land policy. Meanwhile the policy itself is an important factor in explaining the changes of China’s house price. Then we estimate the dynamic panel data model on house price and the variables which are controlled by real estate policy. The result shows: land supply has negative effects on house price; financial mortgages for real estate have positive effects on house price; and the area of housing sold and the area of vacant housing, which reflects the supply and demand of the housing market, has negative effects on house price. We also find some differences in house price influence factor between eastern and mid-western cities. Finally, we propose policy suggestions according to the empirical results.     

Ripple effect in house prices and trading volume in the UK housing market: New viewpoint and evidence

This study adopts the data of house prices and trading volume in the overall UK housing market and in the housing markets in the 10 major regions in the UK to estimate the ripple effect in the trading activities in the housing markets. First, this study details why the ripple effect occurs in the housing market price and volume using static and cobweb dynamic models. The results of the panel-based unit root tests indicate that the relative price and volume ratios show constancy, signifying that long-run equilibrium relationships exist between the regional and national housing markets in the UK. The frequency of the transaction volume convergence behavior is higher than that of the overall house prices.     

Bayesian analysis of Hong Kong's housing price dynamics

This paper uses a Bayesian vector‐autoregressive model with sign restrictions to estimate the underlying drivers of Hong Kong's housing price dynamics in the short run. While existing studies are useful in analysing housing valuation, little attention has been paid to the short‐run dynamics. In contrast, the present paper identifies short‐run drivers of housing prices using structural identification with theoretical underpinnings. We find that among the shocks that we have identified, bank lending shock and housing supply shock were the main factors affecting Hong Kong's housing prices. Low mortgage rates were another key factor that led to the significant increase in housing prices after the global financial crisis.     

A LANDFILL CLOSURE AND HOUSING VALUES

The United States disposes roughly 60% of the municipal solid waste it generates each year in solid waste disposal facilities, commonly known as landfills. Hedonic pricing studies have estimated the external costs of landfills on neighboring housing markets, but the literature is silent on what happens to property values after the landfill closes. Original housing price data collected both before and after a landfill closure are used to estimate how a landfill closure affects neighboring property values. Results of both a hedonic pricing model and a repeat-sales estimator are used in the analysis. ( JEL H42, H72, Q51, Q53, R21)     

The choice of a foreign price measure in a Bayesian estimated new-Keynesian model for Israel

We estimate a small DSGE model by full information Bayesian techniques on the basis of Israeli data from 1995 to 2006. The model was first developed and estimated by means of classical GMM in Argov and Elkayam (2010), and since then it has been used at the Bank of Israel for monetary policy analysis. It is widely believed that in 2007 (out of sample year) as elsewhere worldwide, inflation rose in Israel due to high commodity prices in global markets. However, our baseline model attributes most of the high inflation in 2007 to supply shocks. One conjecture is that this model's result derives from the inappropriate original use of the unit value of imported consumer goods (which do not include unprocessed food and energy) as the main foreign price measure. We test this conjecture by re-estimating the model with various other foreign price measures that typically do reflect the global rise in commodity prices and compare the log-marginal likelihoods. We find that no other price measure outperforms the original choice in the sample period. Only the foreign trade-weighted CPI equals the performance of the original choice while improving the 2007 interpretation of inflation, and should therefore be considered the main foreign price measure. The proposed methodology for comparing the suitability of alternative measures for observable variables can be applied to any model with exogenous variables that are characterized by univariate equations.     

The estimation of a hedonic asking and offer rent equation model: An EM algorithm approach

In this paper we claim that modeling housing markets, specifically the rental housing market, should be based on some sort of disequilibrium framework. We posit a model of asking and offer rents in the spirit of a sample selectivity model. This approach allows us not only to test whether landlords and tenants agree upon the marginal evaluations of unit attributes, but also to estimate the impact on rental demand of tenant specific attributes such as family income and race. Since estimators obtained from this procedure are consistent, but not efficient in this two equation context, we employ an EM algorithm in our estimation in order to obtain MLE equivalent estimators. We have found that our data support the use of this disequilibrium approach in that the coefficient estimates for the asking rent equation, under the assumptions of a sample selectivity model, are not coincident with those obtained from an uncorrected equation.     

普通住宅房价与地价因果关系的检验及其政策含义

本文在综述房价与地价关系研究成果的基础上,结合土地市场与住宅市场二者属性,构建一个认识房价与地价关系的基础。理论研究表明,在不完全竞争的市场中,地价是房价上涨的一个重要但非决定性因素,土地需求作为引致需求受房价影响较大。同时,本文利用1998年至2009年季度数据对房价和地价进行G ranger因果关系检测,计量结果表明：短期内房价与地价互为影响,房价对地价影响更为显著;长期内,房价是地价的G ranger因,而不是相反。计量结果可以揭示房地产市场信号短期与长期传递的机制。在此基础上,本文提出房地产市场治理的应对之策。     

基于公平角度的房价合理性研究——以江苏某市为例

房价问题已经成为社会关注的焦点,建立科学的房价合理性评价指标体系成为当前亟待解决的重要问题。许多研究者认为房价收入比是比较合理的方法,本文认为用房价收入比衡量房价合理性不符合当前中国的实际,存在三个方面的缺陷。科学的评价体系必须能够反映收入结构、支出结构和住房供应结构的差异,以机会均等作为房价合理的判别准则。按照这一设想,本文提出了以“住房负担能力、住房机会指数和住房机会均等指数”为核心的房价合理性评价指标体系,并对2005年江苏某市房价合理性进行了实证分析,提出了改善其房价合理性的相关建议。