It has become common wisdom amongst monetary policy professionals that central banks in Latin America should adopt inflation targeting. Pure inflation targeting implicitly assumes a social loss welfare function dependent on only inflation. In this paper using subjective well-being survey data...

Increasing happiness of population as the ultimate goal has engaged economist’s interest in identifying, measuring and theorizing based on the amount of influence of effective components on happiness. What makes this paper remarkable in contrast to similar studies is its Islamic ideological...

Understanding the reasons why individuals take risks, particularly unnecessary risks, remains an important question in economics. We provide the first evidence of a powerful connection between happiness and risk-avoidance. Using data on 300,000 Americans, we demonstrate that happier individuals...

The malleability of the urban housing markets is an indication that price equalisation in the housing market would not hold, to the extent that, reliable housing price measurement would be a difficult task. This paper which is exploratory in nature attempts to examine house prices at a micro...

This paper proposes a methodology for estimation of spatial weights matrices which are consistent with a given or estimated pattern of spatial autocovariance. This approach is potentially useful for applications in urban, environmental, development, growth and other areas of economics where...

We examine the role of demographics on the housing market in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (HMA) using the Mankiw and Weil (1989) approach. First, we estimate housing demand for each age group in HMA using cross section data and find that it increases from childhood to the age 70-74 years. This...

While estimates of models with spatial interaction are very sensitive to the choice of spatial weights, considerable uncertainty surrounds the definition of spatial weights in most studies with cross-section dependence. We show that, in the spatial error model, the spatial weights matrix is only...

While estimates of models with spatial interaction are very sensitive to the choice of spatial weights, considerable uncertainty surrounds definition of spatial weights in most studies with cross-section dependence. We show that, in the spatial error model the spatial weights matrix is only...

In 1980, housing prices in the main US cities rose with distance to the city center. By 2010, that relationship had reversed. We propose that this development can be traced to greater labor supply of high-income households through reduced tolerance for commuting. In a tract-level data set...

In the last three decades, the supply of housing in Argentina has not kept pace with demand. This study analyzes the main drivers of Argentina's housing market and relates them to the macroeconomic environment in order to advance a policy agenda for housing policy reform. The demand for housing...