Option theory offers a useful way of modeling land value under uncertainty. While this approach underlies much theoretical analysis, the unanswered question is, to what extent does the market value of land reflect this option value? This paper exploits a unique natural experiment to obtain the...

Loan-to-value ratio and debt service coverage ratios have long been viewed as the two important quantitative measures of the default risk of commercial mortgages. Option-based models of default provide strong theoretic support for the importance of original loan-to-value ratio. The same...

This paper develops an empirical framework for taking into account the effects of endogenous liquidity on price capitalization estimates. Changes in school attendance zones in the East Baton Rouge Parish public school district provide a natural experiment for studying how changes in school...

This paper evaluates how consumers value differences in neighborhood composition and street layout, factors not previously included in empirical studies of house value. Highly connected street patterns are important to New Urbanism. We use measures of neighborhood street connectivity and their...

This study examines how individual agents affect house selling prices and time on the market while controlling for brokerage firm-specific effects as well as supply and demand conditions that vary by neighborhood. Firm size effects disappear once firm specialization and agent characteristics are...

In search markets, greater spatial concentration of sellers increases price competition. At the same time, though, a greater concentration of sellers can create a shopping externality by attracting more buyers to the site. Using housing sales data, we test for spatial competition and shopping...

This paper provides an overview and synthesis of the results from recent studies of how different types of land use regulations affect land development incentives. The presentation is nontechnical and focuses on uncovering general principles for the dynamic effects of such policies. It explains...

This paper examines publications and citations for topic and technique trends in JREFE and REE during the period 1988 through 2001. Publication and citation patterns reveal real estate as a largely empirical field. The mix of topics and techniques published by the two journals as well as sources...

This paper reexamines the popular assumption that real estate commissions are fixed over time. It shows how the competitively determined commission rate responds to changes in the housing market and broker cost conditions. One testable implication is that competition promotes counter-cyclical...

This article examines the usefulness of listing prices as leading indicators of house values and as predictors of the direction of housing markets. With Multiple Listing Service data from a large metropolitan area, we create two price indexes, using first listing price and then selling price as...