John R. Knight

• University of the Pacific

How to improve healthcare access for Chinese migrants? We show that the social network is a major key. It uses a 2006 dataset from a survey of rural migrant workers conducted in five cities amongst the most economically advanced. We use a fixed effect logit model and we control for the non-exogeneity of the health insurance. The empirical findings...

Many aspects of the housing market distinguish it from a perfectly competitive market. In a perfectly competitive market, a large number of buyers and sellers, together with ease of entry and exit, ensure that all participants are price takers. The marketplace is clearly defined and products in such markets are perfectly homogeneous. Moreover, info...

This study tests for the presence of rational speculative bubbles in the Equity REIT industry. We analyze REIT prices using a vector of macroeconomic fundamentals. Using the unit root test and cointegration procedures, we find no evidence of rational bubbles in the REIT market. Tests for duration dependence in the returns series show no evidence of...

Executive Summary. This paper tests the efficiency of the market for Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) from 1972 to the present. The data is segmented chron-ologically to take into account the effect of the Tax Re-form Act of 1986 and the effect of the explosive growth in market capitalization that began in the early 1990s. The findings indicat...

Changing reservation prices during the marketing of a heterogeneous asset is a basic result of search theory and the theory of pricing under demand uncertainty. Empirical evidence is sparse though, because data regarding price changes are not usually available. Using a unique housing data set that includes the number of list price changes that occu...

Hedonic models are used almost universally for modeling house prices. Recognizing the importance of location, the past decade has seen increasing effort to introduce spatial considerations into such modeling. When spatial process models are used to capture association between locations, isotropic specifications have been used almost exclusively des...

It is well established that house prices are dynamic. It is also axiomatic that location influences such selling prices, motivating our objective of incorporating spatial information in explaining the evolution of house prices over time. In this paper, we propose a rich class of spatio-temporal models under which each property is point referenced a...

Uganda, a less developed but rapidly growing East African nation, continues to correct the economic mismanagement of past governments. One important legacy of this mismanagement is the Land Decree of 1975, issued by then President Idi Amin Dada. This decree nationalized all land and made illegal all private real estate market transactions. This pap...

Conventional housing price index models assume interperiodparameter stability and typically employ either repeat sales or hedonic methodologies. This paper introduces a method of index construction that combines multiple sales observations with single sale transactions while permitting characteristics prices from hedonic regressions to vary over ti...

This paper introduces the use of non-sample, prior information to the problem of predicting prices of heterogeneous products. Using data from the 1983 American Housing Survey, the predictive performance of three Stein-like empirical Bayes estimation rules are compared to the least squares estimator and the traditional biased estimation technique, r...

Bargaining is common in markets for heterogeneous goods and differences in bargaining power between buyer and seller affect the negotiated transaction price. Previous research has found systematic evidence in the housing markets that weak buyers pay higher prices and weak sellers receive lower prices for their homes. Earlier work has modeled the ba...

The two basic models used for constructing price indexes for durable assets (such us real estate assets) have been the hedonic and repeated sales models. Case and Quigley (1991)-CQ proposed a generalized least squares (GLS) procedure to estimate a combined (single and repeated sales information) model (CSRS). Hill, Knight and Sirmans (1997)-HKS pro...

Information about price changes during a home's marketing period is typically missing from data used to investigate the listing price, selling price, and selling time relationship. This paper incorporates price revision information into the study of this relationship. Using a maximum-likelihood probit model, we examine the determinants of list pric...

This paper examines the impact of repair expenses on the selling price of a house. Using data from settlement statements, we investigate the frequency and extent to which performance of major repairs is part of the sales contract. We find that most homes are restored to a "normally maintained" state each time the home changes hands, and that the co...

Development of asset pricing indexes is an important economic activity. Here we focus on house price indexes, in particular, for single family homes. In creating such indexes, one encounters both single sales and repeat sales. We propose a rich class of spatio-temporal models under which each property is point referenced and its associated selling...

In this paper we provide a statistical test for the presence of a random walk component in house prices. This assumption is widely made when estimating repeat sales price index models. The surprising aspect of the test is that it is based on repeat sales data in which each house is observed to sell only twice. We do not have a time series of data o...

Real estate data are often characterized by data irregularities: missing data, censoring or truncation, measurement error, etc. Practitioners often discard missing- or censored-data cases and ignore measurement error. We argue here that an attractive remedy for these irregularity problems is simulation-based model fitting using the Gibbs sampler. T...

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 the dependent variable in the hedonic regressions. The...

This paper introduces an improved procedure for estimating capital asset price indexes. We jointly estimate conventional hedonic and repeat sales models via maximum - likelihood procedures, thereby taking advantage of the unique features of the individual models and using all the data that are available. Our model captures depreciation within the r...

The repeat-sales methodology has become a standard approach for estimating real estate price indices. This article examines the underlying assumptions inherent in the repeat sales model and provides an empirical test for both included and omitted variables as sources of aggregation bias. The results indicate that virtually all price indices may be...

Real estate data are often characterized by irregularities, e.g., missing data, censoring or truncation, measurement error, etc. Practitioners often discard missing or censored data cases and ignore measurement error concerns. We argue here that we can remedy these irregularity problems through simulation based model fitting using the Gibbs sampler...

The Czech Republic is facing a population ageing phenomenon. In addition, its demographic structure is expected to change dramatically over the next 50 years. We apply a stylised overlapping generation model in order to analyse the potential effects of the expected demographic changes on aggregate economic performance taking into account alternativ...

This study compares Canada and the United States in the context of regional and superregional shopping centers. Using triennial data from Dollars and Cents of Shopping Centers, a simple model is developed to analyze the functional relationship of rent per square foot with size and sales per square foot. The results indicate a consistent, systematic...

Equity in the personal residence is the largest single asset in the investment portfolio of most households. Lenders also have keen interest in residential property values. Estimating the market value of an individual house through appraisal is quite challenging. Regression analysis based upon hedonic pricing theory using individual house character...

Consumers often invest with a specific goal in mind and often know with some precision when the investment proceeds will be needed to achieve that goal. Because different investors have different attitudes toward risk and because different asset types exhibit different risk characteristics, there is often confusion as to the appropriate investment...

To determine whether list price contains useful information for anticipating trends in eventual transactions prices, we develop a model of buyer behavior from a search-theoretic perspective. Using data from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, housing market between 1985 and 1992, we estimate separate price indexes with list price and selling price as the r...

Dollar Cost Avemging is an investment system that is widely advocated by brokerage firms and mutual funds. In its best known form, an investor seeking to put a lump sum into risky assets is counseled to invest the money over a period of time in equal installments in or&r to avoid the devastating effect of a marketfall immediately afkr a single, lum...

Using Monte Carlo simulations, this paper evaluates the predictive performance of ordinary least-squares estimation, ridge regression, two empirical Bayes formulations of Stein-like rules that are based on different nonsample information, and a pre-test estimator. The context of the experiment is a standard hedonic model for housing values using Am...

Property tax assessors and their valuation experts frequently argue that rentals of anchor department stores in regional/superregional shopping centers are "too low" and not representative of market rentals. Canadian shopping center data for the years 1975-1990 were analyzed to test this contention. The data included median figures for Gross Leasab...

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 1990. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-111). Abstract.