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Working Paper
A Statistical Learning Approach to Land Valuation: Optimizing the Use of External Information
We develop a statistical learning model to estimate the value of vacant land for any parcel, regardless of improvements. Rooted in economic theory, the model optimizes how to combine common improved property sales with rare, but more informative, vacant land sales. It estimates how land values change with geography and other features and determines how much information either vacant or improved sales provide to nearby areas through spatial correlation. For most census tracts, incorporating improved sales often doubles the certainty of land value estimates.
Working Paper
Skills, Migration, and Urban Amenities Over the Life Cycle
We examine sorting behavior across metropolitan areas by skill over individuals’ life cycles. We show that high-skill workers disproportionately sort into high-amenity areas, but do so relatively early in life. Workers of all skill levels tend to move towards lower-amenity areas during their thirties and forties. Consequently, individuals’ time use and expenditures on activities related to local amenities are U-shaped over the life cycle. This contrasts with well-documented life-cycle consumption profiles, which have an opposite inverted-U shape. We present evidence that the move towards ...