An exploratory empirical inquiry into the impact of federal budget deficits on the ex post real interest rate yield on ten year Treasury notes over the last half century

Using over a half century of data, this exploratory empirical study adopts a simple loanable funds to investigate the impact of the federal budget deficits on the ex post real interest rate yield on 10 year Treasury notes. For the period 1960–2012, an autoregressive 2SLS estimate finds that the ex post real interest rate yield on 10 year U.S. Treasury notes is an increasing function of the ex post real interest rate yield on Moody’s Baa-rated corporate bonds, the ex post real interest rate yield on 3 year Treasury notes, and the ex post real interest rate yield on high grade municipal bonds. This exploratory analysis also finds that federal budget deficit (relative to the GDP level) exercised a positive and statistically significant impact on the ex post real interest rate yield on 10 year Treasury notes, a finding consistent with a number of earlier studies of shorter time periods     

The impact of historic district designation on the prices of single-family homes in the oldest city in the United States,St. Augustine,Florida

This empirical investigation applies a hedonic pricing model to estimate how much historic district designation has influenced the sales price of single-family houses in the oldest city in the United States, namely, St. Augustine, Florida. There were sufficient data in this context to study a total of 4017 single-family houses for a 6-year period from 2008 to 2013. The semi-log and piecewise regression estimations reveal that the natural log of the sales price of a single-family house in the city of St. Augustine was positively affected by designation as national historic district in six of the seven districts, with robust results obtained for five of the districts. Moreover, the estimated premiums for historic designation were larger than those found in other similar studies, most of which were conducted prior to the Great Recession. This study also derives several other conclusions about the effects of recession variables, as well as other exterior characteristics, interior characteristics and spatial control variables, a number of which are not commonly explored in similar studies.