A probabilistic approach to the structure of rental housing markets

A probabilistic view of the structure of urban housing markets is developed. The demand side is based on aggregate probabilistic demand functions derived from microbehavioral random utility theory. The supply side examines the short-run pricing of the housing stock by developing “asking rent theory,” which explains how a housing supplier must find the optimal rent that maximizes expected revenue. Next, concepts of aggregate market clearing and market equilibrium are defined. Finally, a two-submarket model with specific assumptions regarding the representation of demand and the nature of market signaling is examined in detail and is given a graphical illustration. In closing, directions for extending the probabilistic approach both within and beyond urban analysis are pointed out. All analysis in this paper is for a stationary urban economy, with the housing stock assumed fixed.     

On the possibility of positive rent gradients

The negative rent gradient is a virtually unanimous prediction of urban residential land rent models and a condition of locational equilibrium. This is the result of treating urban rents solely as location rents, where location is defined in terms of accessibility to the CBD. Urban rent may include another component, “externality rent,” which could, for instance, reflect neighborhood externalities in the form of area amenities and pleasant living environments. Introducing externality rent as an element in urban rent makes a positive rent gradient possible, provided that the externality is internalized in the land market. Conditions for a positive rent gradient are determined for both the identical and unequal incomes cases.     

Advertising a second-price auction

This study examines a symmetric private-value second-price auction model in which the seller solicits bidders at a cost, sets a reserve price, and receives a payoff which is a convex combination of revenue and welfare. The bidder’s valuations are drawn from a distribution with a decreasing hazard rate and non-decreasing virtual valuations. We find that at equilibrium the seller adopts an advertising policy which minimizes the uncertainty over the number of participants, and sets a reserve price which only depends on the distribution of valuations and the weight on revenue in the objective function. A welfare-maximizing seller is shown to advertise more than a revenue-maximizing seller, and a ceteris paribus increase in the advertising level is proved to increase the expected winner’s rent.     

The Sufficiency of Single Tax Revenue:

A bstract . Statements claiming that the single tax would raise insufficient revenue to support modern governments have been damaging to Henry George's proposal to tax the rent of land. It is argued that these claims are a misleading way of assessing George's proposal. Firstly, it is shown that estimates of rent usually understate the revenue that would have been raised under the single tax. Secondly, the idea of a counterfactual proposition is used to show that government expenditure would have been lower subsequently had George's proposal been adopted. The conclusion is that there are generally errors of omission in estimating the sufficiency of single tax revenue.     

A sight for sore eyes: Assessing the value of view and land use in the housing market

We apply a hedonic model to the Geneva–Switzerland rental market to assess the value of view from dwellings and of land uses around buildings. Using a geographic information system, we calculate three-dimensional view variables, accessibility and land use variables. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to develop precise view measures at the dwelling level, considering surrounding land uses, in an urban context and with a large sample of 13,000 observations. The results show that view of various environmental amenities and its size has a significant impact on rents. The estimated rent premium for a dwelling located in a neighbourhood with an extended surface of water can be as high as 3%, and a view of water-covered area can raise rent up to 57%.     

土地政策改革时期的城市空间发展:北京的实证分析

论文探讨北京城市空间发展的特征、并探究空间发展的特征与正在发展壮大的土地市场和土地制度改革之间的关系.利用1993年到2000年上半年北京城市建设区土地使用权出让数据,实证分析显示土地价格及土地开发密度都随着距城市中心区的距离增加呈下降趋势.实证分析还表明地租的曲线的空间变化与土地使用类型相关.这些实证证据支持如下结论:正在形成的土地市场确实影响城市土地开发和空间形态.实证分析还显示地租曲线的斜率和土地-资本替代弹性系数都随着时间的推移而变化.正如城市经济理论所预测,地租曲线斜率的下降是由于北京大量的交通投资降低了交通成本,从而又反过来使城市土地地租空间变化曲线发生旋转.土地-资本替代弹性指数的增加意味着价格影响土地开发密度.这两者的变化都反映出北京的土地市场正走向成熟.应该指出,在土地市场之外(在行政划拨的土地上)进行的大量开发对北京正在形成和发育的土地市场会产生扭曲.     

Land rent and housing policy: a case study of the San Francisco Bay area rental housing market

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where residential rent is among the highest in the United States, an analysis of data from several sources demonstrates that high rent cannot be accounted for by higher quality, higher operating costs, or higher construction costs. At least one-third of the total rent paid is land rent. Despite increases in real incomes, very-low-income tenants in the Bay Area today have less income remaining after payment of rent than tenants did in 1960. High land rent is a long-term feature of the Bay Area rental market that results mostly from its geography, the density of its urban centers, and a strong economy, rather than from regulatory barriers to new multifamily construction. Deregulation is not a sufficient response to the effects of land rent on low-income tenants. Government should subsidize non-profit housing organizations, particularly land trusts that remove residential land from the market. Taxes on land rent would be a particularly appropriate funding source.     

土地年租制:住宅用地制度改革的方向

在厘清土地年租制、租赁制、出让制三者之间关系的基础上,阐述了土地年租制的本质是以长期契约为核心的租赁制,分析了城市住房土地年租制及其特征,剖析了我国现有城市住房土地使用制度存在的弊端,指出土地年租制是对我国城市住房土地使用制度的创新,提出了实施城市住房土地年租制应注意的问题及解决思路.     

Urban residential land rent function: An alternative Muth-Mills model

The urban residential land rent function has been studied extensively in the field of urban economics, and the land rent function of Muth and Mills is considered to be one of the typical functional forms which is used in empirical studies. However, the model of Muth and Mills simply assumed the demand function for housing services to be a power function of income, which gives rise to a question. The main purpose of this paper is to derive an alternative form of the urban residential land rent function which is consistent with the utility maximization behavior of consumers and to discuss the estimation procedure of the derived land rent function.     

城市扩展的两个均衡条件及其政策含义

论文认为中国的快速城市化侵占了大量的耕地,是迫使粮食在质量差的土地上生产的重要因素之一,造成了巨大的外部成本,应将其整合到城市扩展的代价中,以提高农业对土地的竞争性,求得城乡之间良好平衡.在这个基础上,还应在市区改造和新区建设之间取得平衡,即边缘地块上地租的净增加值应相等.收取的外部费用要用于土地的农业生产外部不经济性治理.土地管理应城乡整合,包括都市更新与新区建设通盘考虑.论文的研究等价于说,如果做到了如上所迷,那么城市扩展导致的土地价值上升部分就能够覆盖它的社会代价:基础设施建设的投入、拆迁投入、土地生产力建设投入和消除土地的农业生产外部不经济性投入.城市发展用地和农业用地会处在一个比较公平的竞争环境中,取得良好的平衡.     

Amenities and Fringe Benefits: Omitted Variable Bias

ABSTRACT If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through the impact of movers on wages and rents (and possibly "endogenous" disamenities, such as congestion or pollution). That is, as people move to desirable areas, they will increase the demand for land (raising rents) and increase the supply of labor (lowering wages); in equilibrium, the wage and rent "compensation" for the niceness of an area reveals, in dollar terms, just how nice the area is. Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn 1988 demonstrated the empirical importance of such amenity compensation in estimates of the "quality-of-life" in urban areas. However, those authors were unable to include fringe benefits, which are about 40 percent of explicit wage payments, in their wage compensation. This matters greatly as amenities are seen here to be even more important than previously thought and the regional implications are pronounced, with the West and Southeast looking "better" when fringe benefits are included and the East North Central and Northeast looking substantially "worse."     

ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS ON LVT

This article rebuts the arguments against land value taxation expressed by Oliver Marc Hartwich in the December 2006 'Economic Viewpoints'. This rebuttal argues that taxing land as a surplus is both feasible and consistent with modern economic concepts such as marginal productivity. Entrepreneurship is enhanced rather than hampered by eliminating taxes on wages and enterprise and shifting public revenue to the economic rent of land.     

土地财政与最优城市规模

土地是有限的,完全依靠土地收入的发展模式是不可持续的。本文主要考察土地财政作为地方政府的一种融资渠道,城市建设用地规模的使用是否与城市人口规模的增加相协调,是否存在过度扩张城市面积促进地区经济发展的现象。为了分析土地出让收入(地租)、公共品供给以及城市规模之间的关系,本文以乔治亨利定理为基础,并引入林达尔均衡条件建立起最优城市人口密度理论模型。采用1999～2009年31个省面板数据对中国城市成本收益模型进行计量分析,结果表明全国26个省低于估算的最优城市人口密度,验证了中国存在城市面积的扩张与人口的增加不协调发展的情况。     

Wage gradients,rent gradients,and the price elasticity of demand for housing: An empirical investigation

As developed in Muth's “Cities and Housing,” attainment of locational equilibrium within an urban area implies a necessary functional correspondence between wage and price gradients and the compensated price elasticity of demand for housing. In this paper estimates of the rent and wage gradients are utilized to generate price-elasticity estimates via this equilibrium correspondence. The Box-Cox transformation technique is used with data from the metropolitan Chicago area to test for the functional forms of the wage and rent gradients. The optimal maximum-likelihood functional forms for both gradients yield a price-elasticity estimate of ?0.40.     

Spatial equilibrium with locational interdependencies: The case of environmental spillovers

This paper extends the standard model of urban land rent to include locational interdependencies. It is shown that there exists a unique rent function that clears the urban land market in the presence of direct physical interaction among different sites, i.e., environmental spillovers.     

The ideal source of local public revenue

Free or underpriced curb parking creates a classic commons problem. Studies have found that between 8% and 74% of cars in congested traffic were cruising in search of curb parking, and that the average time to find a curb space ranged between 3 and 14 min. Cities can eliminate the economic incentive to cruise by charging market-clearing prices for curb parking spaces. Market-priced curb parking can yield between 5% and 8% of the total land rent in a city, and in some neighborhoods can yield more revenue than the property tax.     

论城市规划和管理中的规制和利导原则及其应用

论文认为由于城市中存在大量的负经济外部性,应建立与市场有机结合的一套规则或制度引导城市健康地成长和发展.像市场规制在其他领域一样,城市管理和规划中的市场规制原则为:使私人成本等于社会成本,私人收益等于社会收益.在社会主义市场经济条件下,城市规划者可以通过对自己掌控的、影响城市发展和空间配置的要素的规划来引导城市达到其合理结构.因势利导的原则除了系统性外,还有近远期相结合的原则.论文对规制和利导原则在交通结构和交通定价、土地合理定价与土地利用、城市空间战略、土地利用和交通系统、城市发展与土地供给等方面的应用进行了论述.     

Racism and urban structure

This paper begins the task of integrating models of racist behavior into general theories of urban land use. The paper derives equilibrium prices for a racist city and demonstrates that the city is less dense at the core, more dense in the suburbs, and covers a larger area than an unprejudiced city. A more complex theory of housing supply is then developed, and it is shown that racism's impact on the ghetto depends upon the ease with which maintenance can be reduced, the cost of replacing abandoned housing, and the nature of legal controls on housing quality.     

Reimbursement as a tool to reduce sabotaging in rent‐seeking contests

We study standard rent‐seeking contests with reimbursement and sabotaging. This study is conducted for a symmetric model with complete information. We show that changing the contest mechanism by applying a form of reimbursement could be an effective tool against sabotaging, in addition to the fact that it increases contest designer revenue. Simple changes such as sufficient reimbursement to winners/losers might completely stop sabotaging efforts in the contest.     

Municipal costs and urban area

There are plausible reasons for believing that municipal service system costs will increase with urban “sprawl.” The costs of several municipal systems were thus analyzed, namely: water; sewage; roads and highways (capital outlays only); police, fire, and park systems; electricity distribution; gas distribution; and telephone service. The statistical relation between urban area and urban costs was weaker than a priori beliefs might suggest. Capital outlays for public municipal systems increase only about 1.6% for every 10% increment in land area. Public municipal operating costs, and the capital and operating costs of private utility systems are practically unaffected by urban area.