In an economy that proved to be highly sensitive to housing prices fluctuations it is at least intriguing why the U.S. has accurate housing price indices for the top 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) only. This is an important informational gap since in most the states, housing sales in Small Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) account for at least 30% of the total state sales. This p...

This article carries out an asset-pricing analysis of the U.S. metropolitan housing market. We use ZIP code–level housing data to study the cross-sectional role of volatility, price level, stock market risk and idiosyncratic volatility in explaining housing returns. While the related literature tends to focus on the dynamic role of volatility and housing returns within submarkets over time, our...

Many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies. In this paper, panel data on IZ in the San Francisco metropolitan area and suburban Boston are used to analyse how much affordable housing the programmes produce and how IZ affects the prices and production of market-rate housing. The amount of affordable hous...

Hotel demand in large urban markets does respond to changes in income, but that demand is relatively inelastic, according to an analysis of 22 top metropolitan areas in the United States. The analysis, made possible through Smith Travel Research, examined room-night demand for 480 individual hotels from 1989 through 2000 and compared that demand to a set of economic measures, including gross do...

Numerous empirical studies have examined the effect of growth controls on housing prices.’ These studies have used many different techniques ranging from hedonic price model estimation to paired comparisons but have all come to the same conclusion: growth controls raise the price of housing. In theory, there are both demand and supply side explanations (which need not be mutually exclusive) for...

It is suggested that instead of attempting to adjust the consumer price index (CPI) after tax reform it is better to measure changes in after-tax income.

On October 6, 1979, the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System embarked on an aggressive policy to lower the inflation rate, which then stood near 12 percent. That effort succeeded: By the mid-1980s, the rate of change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) was reduced to less than 4 percent on a three-year moving-average basis, as shown in figure 1. The commonly reported measur...

Consumer Price Index (CPI) of a particular region is primarily calculated through aggregation of individual household observations. This aggregation is done following two schemes, plutocratic and democratic. While both of them are useful for certain purposes, none of them actually give proper attention to poor households. In this study, we have shown that weighting scheme with certain mathemati...

Despite a centralized political system, nation-wide legal reforms, and similar high housing demand pressures, property rights have evolved differently in Vietnam’s two leading cities Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City during the transition period. Using ethnographic fieldwork and a hedonic price model, the study shows that the two land and housing markets price tenure ambiguity differently. The differe...