Spatial Competition and Shopping Externalities: Evidence from the Housing Market

In search markets, greater spatial concentration of sellers increases price competition. At the same time, though, a greater concentration of sellers can create a shopping externality by attracting more buyers to the site. Using housing sales data, we test for spatial competition and shopping externality effects on prices and marketing time. We find that they reflect both competitive and shopping externality effects from surrounding houses, although the relative strength varies with how fresh the house is in the market, the freshness of surrounding houses, and the phase of the market cycle. New listings have the strongest shopping externality effect on neighboring houses that have been on the market for some time. Vacant houses have their strongest competition effects in the declining market and externality effects in the rising market. Fresh houses on the market reap little benefit from shopping externalities in all phases of the market cycle.     

Wer wird Professor für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Journalistik?

Der vorliegende Beitrag fragt nach der demographischen Struktur der zentralen akademischen Akteure der Kommunikationswissenschaft in Deutschland und nach m?glichen Ver?nderungen dieser Struktur in den letzten 50 Jahren. Die Analyse zeigt zum einen, dass von einem einheitlichen Zugang zum Hochschullehrerberuf nach wie vor keine Rede sein kann, und zum anderen, dass das Fach vor einer demographischen Herausforderung steht. Die Kommunikationswissenschaft hat sich durch Akademisierung und ?Versozialwissenschaftlichung? von ihren Wurzeln gel?st. War Berufserfahrung im Medienbereich bis in die 1960er Jahre Voraussetzung für eine Berufung, verfügt heute nur noch eine Minderheit über solche Erfahrungen. Da die Existenz des Faches im Rahmen der Universit?t auch von der Nachfrage der Studierenden abh?ngt, kann man über die Folgen des anstehenden Generationswechsels nur spekulieren. In jedem Fall fehlt es an formal für die Hochschullehrerlaufbahn qualifiziertem Nachwuchs. Deshalb sind erhebliche Anstrengungen erforderlich, wenn der Boom im letzten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts sich nicht als Seifenblase erweisen soll.     

The Effects of Attributes on the Repeat Sales Pattern of Residential Property in Hong Kong

There has been copious research work on the development of house price models and the construction of house price indices. However, results in some studies revealed that the accuracy of such indices could be subject to selection bias when using only information from a sample of sold properties to estimate value movements for the entire housing stock. In particular, estimated house price appreciation is usually systematically higher among properties that change hands more frequently. It therefore suggests that the determination of important factors affecting the transaction frequency or intensity of a housing unit should be a more fundamental research question. This paper examines the possible factors that determine the popularity of residential unit by means of a repeated sales pattern. The Poisson regression model and event history analysis techniques are employed to assess the effect of attributes on transaction frequency and intensity. The event history analyses technique can take account of transaction-specific as well as time-dependent covariates, and therefore is recommended for analyzing repeated sales data in a real estate market. All transaction records during the period 1993–2000 from the Land Registry of one of the most popular residential estates in Hong Kong were used to illustrate the method. Unlike a response to favorable transaction price, good quality units do not necessarily inherently display a high transaction frequency. Rather, units of average quality are more likely to be transactionally active.     

Testing for Vertical Fiscal Externalities

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen by different levels of government will generally be correlated, even if the resource allocation is optimal from society's point of view. By using panel data for the Swedish local and regional public sectors, the results imply that an increase in the regional income tax rate induces the municipalities in the region to decrease their income tax rates. In addition, we are able to reject the null hypothesis that the vertical external effects have become internalized.     

Modelling the behaviour of the new issue market

This paper analyses the time series behaviour of the initial public offering (IPO) market using an equilibrium model of demand and supply that incorporates the number of new issues, average underpricing, and general market conditions. Model predictions include the existence of serial correlation in both the number of new issues and the average level of underpricing, as well as interactions between these variables and the impact of general market conditions. The model is tested using 40 years of monthly IPO data. The empirical results are generally consistent with predictions.     

An Empirical Study of Firm Size and Competitiveness in German Life Insurance

Based on a purely rank-oriented approach, this empirical study analyzes to what extent superior firm size in German life industry generally translates into corporate advantages for the companies concerned. It turns out that while modest advantages with some criteria are measurable, any such benefits are usually outweighed by unquantifiable factors unrelated to firm size. Confining the study to a highly homogeneous subgroup of life insurers, however, reveals substantial corporate advantages in a number of areas, thereby confirming well-established theoretical reasoning.