Three essays in Japanese housing market

In Chapter 1, the relationship between condominium price and the collective action problem associated with condominium reconstructions in Japan is discussed. Condominium reconstruction involves a difficult collective decision-making process among owners, which prevents older condominiums from being redeveloped efficiently. In Japan, more than one million condominium units remain unable to satisfy earthquake-resistance regulations, while only 211 condominiums had been rebuilt by April 2015. This paper provides empirical evidence (by examining the price differential, as controlling for rent, between condominiums and single-owner rental apartments) that a significant cost is associated with collective action problems surrounding condominium reconstructions in Japan. In particular, the condominium price declines by 3.7% as the number of owners in a complex doubles, while the number of owners does not affect the price of rental apartments. Also, the depreciation rate of condominium price is greater than the rate of the price of rental apartments. These findings are consistent with the prediction from the development model, that collective action problems surrounding the condominium reconstruction deteriorate the condominium price. A comparative examination of condominiums in Japan and the United States suggests that revising the current Japanese condominium law could induce more efficient development of old condominiums. In Chapter 2, the externality of stigmatized properties and the interpretation of hedonic estimates are examined by using housing data in Tokyo, Japan. A stigmatized property is a real estate property that suffers from an undesirable past event, such as a suicide or homicide. The first part of this paper provides the empirical evidence of the existence of the negative externality of stigmatized property, based on data on rental housing and stigmatizing events recorded in Tokyo, Japan. The result shows that an incidence of homicide has a significant negative effect on the rent of a unit in the same apartment building: the rent decreases by about 20% in the following year of the incidence and recovers after 10 years. The second part of the paper discusses implications of hedonic estimates when prospective renters do not have complete information about stigmatized properties available in the data. Since hedonic coefficients do not represent implicit impacts of stigmatizing events in the presence of incomplete information, the implicit impacts are investigated by imposing several assumptions; the results reveal that homicide are still likely to have a significant impact. In Chapter 3, an empirical approach to estimate the special effect of multiple sites is proposed. Geographical relationships between a housing unit and the surrounding major sites, such as public transportation and crime scenes, are fundamental factors that determine the value of housing. In this paper, an empirical model is developed to estimate the spatial effect of such multiple sites that addresses the following three assumptions: (1) the closer a site, the greater the impact may be; (2) the impact differs by the characteristics of a site; and (3) the higher the ranking of proximity to a site, the greater the impact may be. In this model, a simple and interpretable proximity measure is constructed, representing the aggregate effect of surrounding sites. An empirical application is provided by using rental housing data in Tokyo, Japan, to examine how the clustering of train and subway stations influences the surrounding housing rental prices. The results suggest that at least the three nearest stations (and at most the five nearest stations) from each housing unit need to be considered in the hedonic model. The results also suggest that the nearest station has more influence on the rental price than do the second and third nearest stations, as mentioned in assumption (3). The proposed methodology can be applied to various spatial topics as transportations, foreclosures and polycentric cities

Reinventing the Good Life: An empirical contribution to the philosophy of care

Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on ‘the invisible hand’ became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists have paid less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviours of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues. Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalisation and rationalisation. This shift has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern for everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them. By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analysing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life explores new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more imaginative ways to the many pressing concerns that we are forced to live with today

Reinventing the Good Life:An empirical contribution to the philosophy of care

Ever since Adam Smith’s musings on ‘the invisible hand’ became more famous than his work on moral sentiments, social theorists have paid less attention to everyday ethics and aesthetics. Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand posits that social outcomes emerge by dint of the behaviours of individuals rather than their intentions or virtues.Modernist and scientific approaches to determining the common good or good forms of governance have increasingly relied on techniques of generalisation and rationalisation. This shift has meant that we no longer comprehend why and how people display a deep concern for everyday life values in their social practices. People continue to enact these values and live by them while academics lack the vocabulary and methods to grasp them.By reconstructing the history of ideas about everyday-life values, and by analysing the role of such values in contemporary care practices for patients with chronic disease in the Netherlands, Reinventing the Good Life explores new ways to study the values of everyday life, particularly in situations where the achievement of a clear cut or uniform good is unlikely. The book presents a practice-based epistemology and methodology for studying everyday care practices and supporting their goodness. This analytical approach ultimately aims to generate ideas that will allow us to relate in more imaginative ways to the many pressing concerns that we are forced to live with today

Teaching child development principles to parents: A cognitive-developmental approach

Dissertation (Ed.D.)--Boston University, 1983The purpose of this study was to determine if a 12-week course would result in increased parental awareness and improved perceptions of parental behavior. The format included child development information and group problem solving of parent-child conflict dilemmas. A pre/post control group design was used with equivalent voluntary groups. The statistical techniques employed to analyze the data were the analysis of covariance and the t-test for correlated samples. The treatment group consisted of 11 parents and their 16 children while the control group comprised 11 parents and their 14 children. The Newberger (1977) Parental Awareness Scale (PAS) was administered to both sets of parents subsequent to the program and to the treatment group parents four months later. A modified version of the Schaefer (1965) Children's Reports of Parental Behavior Inventory (CRPBI) was administered to the parents and children of both groups. Analysis of the results of the PAS indicated that parents in the treatment group significantly increased their levels of parental awareness upon termination of the program (p<.03) and made further significant gains following a four month hiatus (p<.05). The results of the modified CRPBI indicated that parents perceived themselves as improving in their behavior to a significant level (p<.05) upon completion of the program but did not make likewise gains when retested four months later. The children of the parents of both groups failed to perceive improved behavior on the part of their parents. These results tentatively indicate that cognitive-structural growth can occur over time when the original stimulus conditions which facilitated it have been removed. It also appears that cognitive-developmentally oriented parent intervention is conducive to such growth. [TRUNCATED