Jonathan Dombrow

Measuring depreciation in single-family rental and owner-occupied housing

A wide variety of research has been developed around the estimation of economic depreciation rates on single-family houses. One aspect that has not been fully investigated in the literature has been the effects of tenure status on depreciation in housing. Tenants face different incentives than owner-occupants with respect to care for property, and we know little about landlord response to this difference and landlord behavior in general. This paper examines the extent to which the type of occupancy—tenant versus owner-occupant—influences the net (of maintenance) depreciation of single-family houses. The paper finds that tenant-occupied single-family dwellings depreciate faster than owner-occupied units, holding all else constant.

A Varying Parameters Approach to Constructing House Price Indexes

Conventional housing price index models assume interperiodparameter stability and typically employ either repeat sales or hedonic methodologies. This paper introduces a method of index construction that combines multiple sales observations with single sale transactions while permitting characteristics prices from hedonic regressions to vary over time. A test for interperiod parameter stability is provided. Each periods data are arranged by location and repeat sales are matched by rows. This construction allows greater use of sample information and acknowledges the unique contribution of repeat sales to the estimation process. It also produces intertemporal error correlations that can be beneficially exploited by the seemingly unrelated regressions (SUH) technique. The paper also demonstrates a significance test for error correlation and discusses the treatment of unequal numbers of observations among index periods. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Big House, Little House: Relative Size and Value

How do markets value relative house size in a neighborhood? The literature offers differing rationales: atypical houses sell for less, capitalization of property taxes penalizes larger and benefits smaller houses in mixed neighborhoods and conspicuous consumption reinforces the value of relatively larger houses and reduces the value of relatively smaller houses to consumers. Using a simultaneous price-liquidity model that controls for neighborhood supply and demand conditions, this article finds a dominant tax capitalization effect on price and marketing time that appears to override any extant atypicality or conspicuous consumption effects.

A Flexible Fourier Approach to Repeat Sales Price Indexes

Time periods are typically highly aggregated for repeat sales estimators because of the small number of observations available in some periods. We use a flexible Fourier expansion to account for time, which we treat as a continuous variable. Our estimator saves degrees of freedom and enables us to estimate the price index efficiently even for times with few sales. We present estimated price indexes for the City of Chicago, Cook County, and several suburbs.

Aggregation Bias in Repeat-Sales Indices

The repeat-sales methodology has become a standard approach for estimating real estate price indices. This article examines the underlying assumptions inherent in the repeat sales model and provides an empirical test for both included and omitted variables as sources of aggregation bias. The results indicate that virtually all price indices may be biased, the degree of bias being dependent upon the number of variables examined and the instability of their parameters over time.

Residential Development, Risk, and Land Prices

This paper examines the relationship between the residential development sequence and land price. Inherent in the dynamics of residential development is that the first consumers face the greatest risk since they do not know with certainty what the neighborhood characteristics will be; subsequent consumers have more information. The model predicts that land prices will rise over time relative to the market; developers offer the first consumers discounted land prices to compensate them for the first-mover disadvantage. The empirical evidence indicates that this is indeed the case.

A Complete Nonparametric Event Study Approach

Event studies have been used to examine the direction, magnitude, and speed of security price reactions to various phenomenon. Concerns over the lack of normality in stock return distributions motivated the introduction of nonparametric test statistics in the event study literature. A parametric procedure (OLS), however, has been extensively employed in the estimation of parameters for the market model. This paper, in contrast, applies Theils nonparametric regression in the estimation of abnormal returns; an approach which is distribution free and provides a complete nonparametric approach for the detection of abnormal performance. Simulation results indicate Theils estimation procedure offers a slight improvement in power in the detection of abnormal performance over the traditionally employed methodology. The results suggest employing Theils nonparametric estimation procedure combined with the rank statistic. This complete nonparametric combination offers similar power with fewer underlying assumptions.

Individual and Institutional Contributors to the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics: 1988–1999

This article identifies the individuals and institutions contributing the research published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics during its first 12 years. Consistent with the trend in many fields, coauthorship has increased during the period. The top individual contributors vary across six-year periods as well as whether measured by appearances or pages. The concentration of publications by the top individuals has decreased over time. Unlike individuals, the top institutions are not sensitive to whether measured by appearances or pages or to whether measured using contemporaneous or current faculty affiliations. The breadth of the journal appears to be growing; contributions by universities outside the United States and by private firms and organizations have risen during the 12 years.