Estimating price trends for residential property: A comparison of repeat sales and assessed value methods

The repeat sales methodology for estimating residential price indices is based on actual appreciation of individual properties. On the other hand, the repeat sales method wastes data, typically discarding a large percentage of all sales. This article explores two issues related to the subsample of repeat sales. First, are paired sales representative of the entire population of properties that sold? Second, is there evidence that sample selectivity biases the price trend estimates? Evidence from five metropolitan areas supports a negative answer to the first question and the second question. It appears that a “lemon” or “starter home” effect causes repeat residential sales to be a biased subsample of all transactions. Cumulative price trends for the repeat subsamples can differ from the full samples over periods ranging from two to ten quarters. While short-term price trends can differ widely, there are no systematic differences among the samples over long periods of time (e.g., three years or more).     

The Role of Environmental Management in Consumers Preferences for Corporate Social Responsibility

Consumers in modern societies are increasingly sensitive to environmental performance by large and small corporations, making it a crucial issue in the overall policy of corporate social responsibility. The objective of this paper is to study the role of environmental performance in the profile of corporate social responsibility as perceived by consumers. We utilize a stated preference approach to the study of consumer’s preferences. This approach allows for the evaluation in monetary terms of the trade-offs that individuals can make between various aspects of corporate policy decisions, including the extent of environmental performance. The data is modelled by means of a mixture heuristics approach that allows us to study the utilization of various decision rules in the choice of products with various degrees of environmental performance. The results show that the linear compensatory heuristic is the most extended across individuals and these subjects value most the policies concerned with environmental management. Those subjects opting for the non-compensatory decision rule tend to focus on the attribute of good labour relations as the most salient factor defining corporate social responsibility. In addition, policy measures are relatively more valued for some products rather than for others, suggesting that consumers discriminate between products when valuing companies’ environmental profiles.     

A Schumpeterian growth model with random quality improvements

A common assumption in the Schumpeterian growth literature is that the innovation size is constant and identical across industries. This is in contrast with the empirical evidence which shows that: (1) innovation size is not identical across industries and (2) the size distribution of profit returns from innovation is highly skewed toward the low value side, with a long tail on the high value side. In the present paper, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model that is consistent with this evidence. In particular, we assume that when a firm innovates, the size of its quality improvement is the result of a random draw from a Pareto distribution. This enables us to extend the class of quality-ladder growth models to encompass firm heterogeneity. We study the policy implications of this new setup numerically and find that it is optimal to heavily subsidize R&D for plausible parameter values. Although it is optimal to tax R&D for some parameter values, this case only occurs when the steady-state rate of economic growth is very low.     

The value relevance of earnings disaggregation provided in the Spanish profit and loss account

This study analyses the value relevance of the different components of the earnings figure that appear in the Spanish profit and loss account in order to determine the preferred level of disaggregation by investors. It is considered that the disaggregation may help to evaluate the earnings quality; that is, its predictive ability about future earnings. We use a valuation model based on Ohlson (1995), which models firm value as a function of book value of equity and earnings, adding the earnings components to determine whether they provide incremental price-relevant information beyond aggregate earnings. In addition, we allow the parameters to vary under some firm-specific circumstances. Our results support the usefulness of the earnings decomposition for valuation purposes, resting primarily on the disclosure of the corporation tax, particularly for either small companies, or with a high-risk profile or with low persistence of earnings. It seems that neither financial profit nor extraordinary earnings have additional information content over the bottom-line figure, which is consistent with the IASC's position on ordinary versus extraordinary items.     

The Conditional Performance of REIT Stock Repurchases

This paper uses a conditional performance measure to test whether real estate investment trust (REIT) managers announcing stock repurchases have private information about their firms' prospects. We use stock price to condition for public information and measure the managers' implied private information by the covariance between repurchase size and subsequent stock payoffs (or operating performance). Results show that managers have private information but mostly with respect to long-term as opposed to near-term payoffs. We also find that repurchase size is positively related to a stock's idiosyncratic return volatility, perhaps because noisy stocks deviate farther from fundamental value, offering informed managers larger profit potential. JEL Classification G12 G14 G35     

Consulting University: A Reflection from Inside

This paper contributes to a growing literature on the role of management consultants in the public sector by examining a sensitive area of management consulting, as exercised by university faculty members and as applied to universities. It frames the development of management consulting as an idea that originated in universities, travelled first into the private sector and then into the public sector, from country to country, and was eventually applied to universities – with problematic effects.     

On the impossibility of representing infinite utility streams

We introduce a new Pareto-type criterion for social welfare functions over infinite utility streams that is not necessarily sensitive to increments in just a finite number of components. We show that there is no social welfare function that satisfies both this criterion and Diamond’s equity condition simultaneously. With our result, we extend the impossibility theorem of Basu and Mitra. Moreover, we show that, even under a weaker version of equity related to Zame’s intergenerational equity condition, the impossibility results are obtained as well.     

Housing Price Indices Based on All Transactions Compared to Repeat Subsamples

The set of real properties sold during a given period of time may be subdivided into several subsets comprising those properties that sold only once, only twice, and three or more times. The major reason for subdividing the sample is to allow estimation of residential price indices by the repeat-sales methodology. The purpose of this paper is to compare price indices estimated with the repeat subsample to indices based on the entire sample.
Our data for five metropolitan areas indicate that cumulative price trends for the repeat subsamples can differ from the full samples over periods ranging from two to ten quarters. While short-term price trends can differ widely, there are no systematic differences among the samples over periods of three years or more. The data indicate that arbitrage typically forces prices for the repeat sample to grow at the same rate as those for the full sample. Whether this would be the case in areas experiencing greater disequilibrium than our towns in the Hartford area is uncertain.