How informative are average effects? Hedonic regression and amenity capitalization in complex urban housing markets

Christian L. Redfearn

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 2009, vol. 39, issue 3, 297-306

Abstract: Variations in real estate prices within an urban area are commonly exploited to value local amenities. Be they public or private goods, local amenities should be capitalized into property prices. This paper, however, demonstrates that standard hedonic models used to recover implicit prices are highly sensitive to sample choice and to model specification. In the case of Los Angeles, complex local housing markets produce attribute prices that vary spatially and temporally, violating the common assumption they are fixed. This misspecification yields estimated average effects of the value of access to light rail stations that vary widely across seemingly innocuous choices regarding samples and model specification. The paper proposes an alternative, more flexible approach, which yields a finding of no capitalization of light rail access into surrounding home prices.

Keywords: Hedonic; analysis; Amenity; capitalization; Locally-weighted; regression; Urban; housing; markets; Housing; submarkets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166-0462(08)00112-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:regeco:v:39:y:2009:i:3:p:297-306

Access Statistics for this article

Regional Science and Urban Economics is currently edited by D.P McMillen and Y. Zenou

More articles in Regional Science and Urban Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).