Robin M. Cross

The Value of Terroir: Hedonic Estimation of Vineyard Sale Prices

We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect, elevation, and soil types, or designated appellations are more important determinants of price. We find that prices are strongly determined by sub-AVA appellation designations, but not by specific site attributes. These results indicate that the concept of terroir matters economically, although the reality of terroir – as proxied for by locational attributes – is not significant. (JEL Classification: C2, Q11)

Regularity and predictability of human mobility in personal space.

Fundamental laws governing human mobility have many important applications such as forecasting and controlling epidemics or optimizing transportation systems. These mobility patterns, studied in the context of out of home activity during travel or social interactions with observations recorded from cell phone use or diffusion of money, suggest that in extra-personal space humans follow a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity – most often in the form of time-independent universal scaling laws. Here we show that mobility patterns of older individuals in their home also show a high degree of predictability and regularity, although in a different way than has been reported for out-of-home mobility. Studying a data set of almost 15 million observations from 19 adults spanning up to 5 years of unobtrusive longitudinal home activity monitoring, we find that in-home mobility is not well represented by a universal scaling law, but that significant structure (predictability and regularity) is uncovered when explicitly accounting for contextual data in a model of in-home mobility. These results suggest that human mobility in personal space is highly stereotyped, and that monitoring discontinuities in routine room-level mobility patterns may provide an opportunity to predict individual human health and functional status or detect adverse events and trends.