Commercial buildings play a major role in determining U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, yet surprisingly little is known about the environmental performance of different buildings at a point in time or how the same buildings perform over time. By exploiting a unique panel of commercial buildings...

Inferences about the determinants of land prices in urban areas are typically based on housing transactions, which combine payments for land and long-lived improvements. In contrast, we investigate directly the determinants of urban land prices within a metropolitan area – the San Francisco...

This paper considers residential segregation by race and by type of household in 1970 and 1980. The paper presents entropy indices of segregation fro the San Francisco Bay Area and its five metropolitan areas. The methodology permits an investigation of the effects of group definition upon...

Energy consumption in the residential sector offers an important opportunity for conserving resources. However, much of the current debate regarding energy efficiency in the housing market focuses on the physical and technical determinants of energy consumption, neglecting the role of the...

Since January of 2005, 250 building projects in the City of Singapore have been awarded the Green Mark for energy efficiency and sustainability. This paper analyzes the private returns to these investments, evaluating the premium in asset values they command in the market. We analyze almost...

We re-examine the links between changes in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer spending. We extend a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the seventeen-year period, 1982 through 1999, to the thirty-seven year period, 1975 through 2012Q2. Using techniques reported previously,...

This paper examines the importance of job access in explaining labor market outcomes for youth. The work sets forth a broader definition of 'access' which emphasizes the information links provided by social networks. Empirical analysis, based upon micro data from the public use sample and upon...

Theories about the importance of space in urban labor markets have emphasized the role of employment access, on the one hand, and neighborhood composition, on the other hand, in affecting employment outcomes. This paper presents an empirical analysis which considers both of these factors,...

Some networks may be more useful than others in affecting labor market outcomes. In particular, social contacts who are employed may be more useful in job referral than those who are not employed. Also, social networks containing non minority workers or male workers may have better and more...