Three Essays in Hedonic Housing Price

Abstract

Chapter 2 attempts to quantify the impacts of green space, by using the hedonic price analysis of the relationship between property values and the green space amenities around the selected single family houses in Delaware County, Ohio. Also, by incorporating spatial-lag term, we can compare the results with and without spatial effect. Eventually, after extending the model by quantile regression, the influence of different green space characteristics on housing price may change across the conditional distribution of housing price. Substantial variation was found between the results with and without spatial effects across quantiles, which indicates that luxury house buyers may value green space differently from middle or low level house buyers. Chapter 3 employs spatial autoregressive hedonic models within a difference-in-difference and regression discontinuity framework, first investigate the effect of a new high school establishment while controlling for other locational amenities and disamenities in neighborhoods on housing prices in the whole county, and then also investigate those effects on housing price for houses adjacent to the boundary of the new school district in Lee County, North Carolina. Chapter 4 examines the effect of the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional, and was thus the first state in the country to legalize gay marriage in 2004. Based on this event, propensity score difference-in-difference and spatial difference-in-difference methods are used to measure the effect of the law on housing prices in Massachusetts relative to the bordering State of New York.