The house price determination process: Rational expectations with a spatial context

Applying the rational expectations hypothesis, this essay models the current value of a house as the conditional expectation of the discounted stream of housing services accruing to the owner of the house. The value of housing services is determined by neighborhood effects as well as the physical attributes of the property itself. In the existing hedonic literature, future transactions have not been utilized to describe neighborhood effects. The rational expectations asset pricing model in this study accounts for expected future neighborhood effects as well as observed current neighborhood effects. The reduced form of the rational expectations model is a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model with two spatial lags. After employing the generalized method of moments (GMM) in estimating the spatial asset pricing model, I find that both expected future transactions and prior transactions in the neighborhood are significant. The inclusion of expected future transaction prices in the neighborhood takes into account the influence of expected changes in the community and factors these potential changes into the current house price. This is consistent with forward-looking households. The forward-looking model generates superior out-of-sample prediction performance relative to both the conventional hedonic model without considering neighborhood effects or the standard spatial hedonic model including only past transactions.     

城市居民住房承受能力测度研究——剩余收入视角

借鉴扩展线性支出系统模型确定家庭食品、衣着、家庭设备用品及服务等非住房基本消费支出的基础上,运用剩余收入法测度了2003—2008年武汉市七种不同类型家庭的住房承受能力。剩余收入法测度结果能反映出不同类型家庭住房承受能力的具体差距,显示出武汉市中等偏下收入及以下收入家庭面临住房承受能力问题,并且收入越低住房承受能力问题越突出,结果比传统比率法更具有说服力。而比率法测度显示中等偏上户及以下家庭面临住房承受能力问题,扩大了存在住房承受能力问题的家庭范围。运用剩余收入法可以定量地测度各类家庭住房承受能力的大小和绝对差距,有助于确定城市中低收入家庭住房补贴的对象及标准,制定我国公共住房销售、租赁政府指导价格,促进完善住房保障政策。     

货币政策背景下房价的变动关系研究

本文在货币政策传导理论的基础上,通过向量误差修正模型(VECM)实证分析了房价在货币政策传导过程中的作用。通过分析可知,房价在货币政策传导过程中起到了一定的作用,房价渠道的传导效率整体而言比较高,由此而知货币政策和房价之间存在着一定程度的关系。     

Forecasting house prices using dynamic model averaging approach: Evidence from China

Forecasting house price has been of great interests for macroeconomists, policy makers and investors in recent years. To improve the forecasting accuracy, this paper introduces a dynamic model averaging (DMA) method to forecast the growth rate of house prices in 30 major Chinese cities. The advantage of DMA is that this method allows both the sets of predictors (forecasting models) as well as their coefficients to change over time. Both recursive and rolling forecasting modes are applied to compare the performance of DMA with other traditional forecasting models. Furthermore, a model confidence set (MCS) test is used to statistically evaluate the forecasting efficiency of different models. The empirical results reveal that DMA generally outperforms other models, such as Bayesian model averaging (BMA), information-theoretic model averaging (ITMA) and equal-weighted averaging (EW), in both recursive and rolling forecasting modes. In addition, in recent years it is found that the Google search index, instead of fundamental macroeconomic or monetary indicators, has developed greater predictive power for house price in China.     

Supply constraints and housing market dynamics

Although the volatility of house prices is often ascribed to demand-side factors, constraints on housing supply have important and little-studied implications for housing dynamics. I illustrate the strong relationship between the volatility of house prices and the regulation of new housing supply. I then employ a dynamic structural model of housing investment to investigate the mechanisms underlying this relationship. I find that supply constraints increase volatility through two channels: First, regulation lowers the elasticity of new housing supply by increasing lags in the permit process and adding to the cost of supplying new houses on the margin. Second, geographic limitations on the area available for building houses, such as steep slopes and water bodies, lead to less investment on average relative to the size of the existing housing stock, leaving less scope for the supply response to attenuate the effects of a demand shock. My estimates and simulations confirm that regulation and geographic constraints play critical and complementary roles in decreasing the responsiveness of investment to demand shocks, which in turn amplifies house price volatility.     

HEDONIC PRICE INDEXES FOR RESIDENTIAL HOUSING: A SURVEY,EVALUATION AND TAXONOMY

Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for this purpose. I consider here some developments in the hedonic methodology, as it is applied in a housing context, that have occurred in the last three decades. A number of hedonic house price indexes are now available. However, it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other. For this reason I attempt to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic indexes, and then show how existing indexes fit into this taxonomy. Also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field. In particular, greater use needs to be made of spatial econometric and nonparametric methods to exploit the increased availability of geospatial data. The main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with those of the repeat‐sales and stratified median methods. The overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages.     

业主委员会的性质及其投票权研究

业主大会是社区的最高权力机构，业主委员会是代表全体业主对小区进行管理的一个群体自治组织。业主委员会应成为业主大会的常设机构，具有非营利性，对小区日常事务拥有决策权，对小区的物业管理具有监督权，但小区管理中出现的重大事项应提交业主大会决定。业主大会是由物业管理区域内所有业主组成的，但对建设单位业主、未入住业主以及大产权业主的选举权应当作出一定的限制。     

Real estate prices in Beijing, 1644 to 1840

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1840), a long period without major wars, political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. We use hedonic methods to construct a real estate price index for Beijing for the period. The regression analysis explains a major proportion of the variance of housing prices. We find that house prices grew steadily for the first half-century of the Qing Dynasty and declined afterwards in both nominal and real terms through the late eighteenth century. Nominal prices grew starting in the late eighteenth century and declined from the early nineteenth century through 1840. But these price changes occurred with contemporaneous price changes in basic measures of the cost of living: there was little change in real terms to the end of our period.     

Supplanting the Planters

Summary

After briefly examining the plantation-as-hotel model, this contribution focuses the remainder of its attention on the conversion of plantation slavery into entertainment on the Caribbean island of Barbados. First, and by way of contextualization, it is shown that an extensive and well-documented history of plantation life exists, one that is drawn from early accounts of travelers, missionaries and others, as well as later expert commentaries offered by indigenous and extra-regional scholars. Second, it is argued that the tourism industry has largely ignored or been highly selective in borrowing from this rich source of material in its attempt to supply the sort of a-historical diversion which it believes its clientele enjoys. Examples provided include the Open House Programme of the Barbados National Trust, the annual Crop Over Festival and Plantation Spectacular dinner shows. Finally, a few suggestions are advanced in order to try and understand the success of this type of tourism. They include references to postmodernity, nostalgia, dark tourism and varieties of promotion.