Search Results
Working Paper
Capitalization of the quality of local public schools: what do home buyers value?
The expansion of state-mandated tests in the 1990s and the testing requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act have supplied researchers with an abundance of data on test scores that can be used as measures of school quality. This paper uses the state-mandated test scores for 5th grade and 11th grade in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, to examine three issues about the capitalization of school quality into house prices: (1) At what level do prospective home buyers evaluate the quality of local public education?at the district level or the level of the neighborhood school? (2) After ...
Working Paper
Measuring housing services inflation
Recent papers have questioned the accuracy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? methodology for measuring implicit rents for owner-occupied housing. We propose cross-checking the BLS statistics by using data on owner-occupied and rental housing from the American Housing Survey.
Working Paper
Core measures of inflation as predictors of total inflation
Two rationales offered for policymakers' focus on core measures of inflation as a guide to underlying inflation are that core inflation omits food and energy prices, which are thought to be more volatile than other components, and that core inflation is thought to be a better predictor of total inflation over time horizons of import to policymakers. The authors' investigation finds little support for either rationale. They find that food and energy prices are not the most volatile components of inflation and that depending on which inflation measure is used, core inflation is not necessarily ...
Working Paper
Risk and return within the single-family housing market
The trade-off between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same trade-off in the single-family housing market. That market is dominated by homeowners, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households. For them the choice about how much housing and what house to buy is a joint consumption/investment decision. Furthermore, owner-occupied housing is by nature a lumpy investment whose risk cannot be completely diversified. Does this consumption/investment link negate the risk/return trade-off within the single-family housing market? ...
Working Paper
Risk and return in the single-family housing market
The tradeoff between risk and return in equity markets is well established. This paper examines the existence of the same tradeoff in the single-family housing market. For home buyers, who constitute about two-thirds of U.S. households, the choice about how much housing and which house to buy is a joint consumption/investment decision. Does this consumption/investment link negate the risk/return tradeoff within the single-family hosuing market? Theory suggests the link still holds. This paper supplies empirical evidence in support of that theoretical result.
Journal Article
Making money in the housing market: is there a sure-fire scheme?
Journal Article
The changing faces of the Third District: a snapshot of the region from the 2000 census.
In "The Changing Faces of the Third District: A Snapshot of the Region from the 2000 Census," Ted Crone describes some of these patterns and tells us what they mean for economic growth in this region.
Journal Article
What a new set of indexes tells us about state and national business cycles
Ted Crone presents information on a recently constructed set of coincident indexes for the 50 states. These indexes can be used to define business cycles at the state level and can tell us how business cycles and the overall patterns of growth have differed among the states.