Imperfect information and the Community Reinvestment Act

Community Reinvestment Act of 1977

(WP 2010-11) The Benefits of Environmental Improvement: Estimates From Space-time Analysis

This paper develops estimates of environmental improvement based on a two-stage hedonic price analysis of the single family housing market in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. The analysis — which focuses specifically on several EPA-designated environmental hazards and involves 226,918 transactions for 177,303 unique properties that took place between January 2001 and September 2009 — involves four steps: (i) ten hedonic price functions are estimated year-by-year, one for each year of the 2000s; (ii) the hedonic estimates are used to compute the marginal implicit price of distance from air release, superfund, and toxic release sites; (iii) the marginal implicit prices, which vary through time, are used to estimate a series of implicit demand functions describing the relationship between the price of distance and the quantity consumed; and, finally (iv) the demand estimates are compared to those obtained in other research and then used evaluate the potential scale of benefits associated with some basic environmental improvement scenarios. Overall, the analysis provides further evidence that it is possible to develop a structural model of implicit demand within a single housing market and suggests that the benefits of environmental improvement are substantial

Revisiting Guerry's data: Introducing spatial constraints in multivariate analysis

Standard multivariate analysis methods aim to identify and summarize the main structures in large data sets containing the description of a number of observations by several variables. In many cases, spatial information is also available for each observation, so that a map can be associated to the multivariate data set. Two main objectives are relevant in the analysis of spatial multivariate data: summarizing covariation structures and identifying spatial patterns. In practice, achieving both goals simultaneously is a statistical challenge, and a range of methods have been developed that offer trade-offs between these two objectives. In an applied context, this methodological question has been and remains a major issue in community ecology, where species assemblages (i.e., covariation between species abundances) are often driven by spatial processes (and thus exhibit spatial patterns). In this paper we review a variety of methods developed in community ecology to investigate multivariate spatial patterns. We present different ways of incorporating spatial constraints in multivariate analysis and illustrate these different approaches using the famous data set on moral statistics in France published by Andr\'{e}-Michel Guerry in 1833. We discuss and compare the properties of these different approaches both from a practical and theoretical viewpoint.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS356 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Benefits of Environmental Improvement: Estimates From Space-time Analysis

This paper develops estimates of environmental improvement based on a two-stage hedonic price analysis of the single family housing market in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. The analysis — which focuses specifically on several EPA-designated environmental hazards and involves 226,918 transactions for 177,303 unique properties that took place between January 2001 and September 2009 — involves four steps: (i) ten hedonic price functions are estimated year-by-year, one for each year of the 2000s; (ii) the hedonic estimates are used to compute the marginal implicit price of distance from air release, superfund, and toxic release sites; (iii) the marginal implicit prices, which vary through time, are used to estimate a series of implicit demand functions describing the relationship between the price of distance and the quantity consumed; and, finally (iv) the demand estimates are compared to those obtained in other research and then used evaluate the potential scale of benefits associated with some basic environmental improvement scenarios. Overall, the analysis provides further evidence that it is possible to develop a structural model of implicit demand within a single housing market and suggests that the benefits of environmental improvement are substantial.Hedonic housing model, benefits, environmental improvement

Teen-age participation in neighborhood centers

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Merger Negotiations and Ex-Post Regret

We consider a setting in which two potential merger partners each possess private information pertaining both to the profitability of the merged entity and to stand-alone profits, and investigate the extent to which this private information makes ex-post regret an unavoidable phenomenon in merger negotiations. To this end, we consider ex-post mechanisms, which use both players’ reports to determine whether or not a merger will take place and what each player will earn in each case. When the outside option of at least one player is known, the efficient merger decision can be implemented by such a mechanism under plausible budget-balance requirements. When neither outside option is known, we show that the potential for regret-free implementation is much more limited, unless the budget balance condition is relaxed to permit money-burning in the case of false reports.Mergers, Mechanism Design, Asymmetric Information, Interdependent Valuations, Efficient Mechanisms

The local effects of monetary policy

Previous studies have documented disparities in the regional responses to monetary policy shocks; this variation has been found to depend, in part, on differences in the industrial composition of the regional economies. However, because of computational issues, the literature has often neglected the richest level of disaggregation: the city. In this paper, we estimate the city-level responses to monetary policy shocks in a Bayesian VAR. The Bayesian VAR allows us to model the entire panel of metropolitan areas through the imposition of a shrinkage prior. We then seek the origin of the city-level asymmetric responses.Vector autoregression ; Econometric models

Program on stimulating operational private sector use of Earth observation satellite information

Ideas for new businesses specializing in using remote sensing and computerized spatial data systems were developd. Each such business serves as an 'information middleman', buying raw satellite or aircraft imagery, processing these data, combining them in a computer system with customer-specific information, and marketing the resulting information products. Examples of the businesses the project designed are: (1) an agricultural facility site evaluation firm; (2) a mass media grocery price and supply analyst and forecaster; (3) a management service for privately held woodlots; (4) a brokerage for insulation and roofing contractors, based on infrared imagery; (5) an expanded real estate information service. In addition, more than twenty-five other commercially attractive ideas in agribusiness, forestry, mining, real estate, urban planning and redevelopment, and consumer information were created. The commercial feasibility of the five business was assessed. This assessment included market surveys, revenue projections, cost analyses, and profitability studies. The results show that there are large and enthusiastic markets willing to pay for the services these businesses offer, and that the businesses could operate profitably

DOES CONSISTENT AGGREGATION REALLY MATTER?

Consistent aggregation assures that behavioral properties, which apply to disaggregate relationships also, apply to aggregate relationships. The agricultural economics literature is reviewed which has tested for consistent aggregation or measured statistical bias and/or inferential errors due to aggregation. Tests for aggregation bias and errors of inference are conducted using indices previously tested for consistent aggregation. Failure to reject consistent aggregation in a partition did not entirely mitigate erroneous inference due to aggregation. However, inferential errors due to aggregation were small relative to errors due to incorrect functional form or failure to account for time series properties of data.Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Depicting urban boundaries from a mobility network of spatial interactions: A case study of Great Britain with geo-located Twitter data

Existing urban boundaries are usually defined by government agencies for administrative, economic, and political purposes. Defining urban boundaries that consider socio-economic relationships and citizen commute patterns is important for many aspects of urban and regional planning. In this paper, we describe a method to delineate urban boundaries based upon human interactions with physical space inferred from social media. Specifically, we depicted the urban boundaries of Great Britain using a mobility network of Twitter user spatial interactions, which was inferred from over 69 million geo-located tweets. We define the non-administrative anthropographic boundaries in a hierarchical fashion based on different physical movement ranges of users derived from the collective mobility patterns of Twitter users in Great Britain. The results of strongly connected urban regions in the form of communities in the network space yield geographically cohesive, non-overlapping urban areas, which provide a clear delineation of the non-administrative anthropographic urban boundaries of Great Britain. The method was applied to both national (Great Britain) and municipal scales (the London metropolis). While our results corresponded well with the administrative boundaries, many unexpected and interesting boundaries were identified. Importantly, as the depicted urban boundaries exhibited a strong instance of spatial proximity, we employed a gravity model to understand the distance decay effects in shaping the delineated urban boundaries. The model explains how geographical distances found in the mobility patterns affect the interaction intensity among different non-administrative anthropographic urban areas, which provides new insights into human spatial interactions with urban space.Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, International Journal of Geographic Information Scienc