Measuring and Analyzing Returns on Aggregate Residential Housing

This paper computes an aggregate real after-tax rate of return on residential real estate in the United States. We account for net rental income, capital gain, and subsidies due to tax provisions for homeowners in constructing a total return measure. We also compute separate returns to owners and rentiers (that is, households who rent to others). Both quarterly and annual data over 1952-2000 period are used in the analysis. We compare our measure of return with that in the literature and analyze how housing compares to other assets in the household portfolio. Our approach provides a more comprehensive measure of return than that found in the literature. We confirm that residential housing provides a high average return and low volatility, has low correlation with other assets such as stocks and bonds, and exhibits high positive correlation with inflation. The efficient frontier analysis shows that the residential housing providing diversification should be an important part of the household portfolio. Our results also indicate that housing may be as good an investment as stocks (S&P 500).housing return, measurement, efficient frontier, household portfolio

The Rate of Interest or the Rate of Return: Estimating Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution

This paper investigates whether the rate of interest such as the Treasury bill rate or the rate of return such as the return on a household portfolio is more relevant to the household’s intertemporal decision making. In a current era, households are diversifiers (to use Tobin’s 1958 term) and hold portfolios of assets rather than a simple loan. A portfolio of assets earns a composite return accounting for capital gains, taxes, and inflation, and rational agents make spending decisions based on expected total returns on a portfolio rather than on the return on a single asset. The total composite measure we use includes financial assets such as stocks and bonds and a real asset, residential housing. In particular, we estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution, namely, how a change in the asset or portfolio return affects household’s consumption growth. The estimates obtained using real after-tax composite return are about 0.15-0.3 and are more robust to linear and nonlinear estimations, different consumption measures, and various time periods than those obtained by using individual asset returns such as the Treasury bill rate.intertemporal elasticity of substitution, intertemporal choice, consumption, housing, portfolio return

A Market Garden and Truck Survey of the Ohio and Kanawha River Valleys

Mode of access: Internet

Potato Culture in West Virginia

Mode of access: Internet

Fertilizer Experiments with Tomatoes

Mode of access: Internet

A Second Report on the University Farm Garden

Mode of access: Internet

The Apple Orchard from Planting to Bearing Age

Bibliography: p. 205.Mode of access: Internet

Teachers’s attachments to their place of work and their working locality. A case study of geography teachers in the Silesian Voivodeship (Poland)

The authors of the article sought to answer the questions: do geography teachers feel a tie with their place of work, what is the strength of this relationship and what factors influence these declared ties with the place. A step towards knowing the answers is the declared subjective assessment of emotional relationships with such a place. To this end, surveys were conducted among geography teachers. Due to their profession, they are a social group having a wide range of influence on young people and their attitudes towards their local geographical environment. Organizational reasons (the ability to reach teachers of all schools through the information exchange platform between Board of Education and school heads – so-called the headmasters panel) decided to examine a selected group of respondents – geography teachers of the Silesian Voivodeship. Google questionnaire was used as an electronic form of data collection. The research was quantitative and only partly qualitative. The analysis of the obtained results gave an interesting view of the perception of teachers' relations with the place where their school is located – their place of work. Almost all respondents declared the existence of a territorial bond with their place of work. The workplace itself is an important factor in the formation and strength of these ties. The length of residence in a given place was also important, and its type (town or a village) and size were less important. For half of the surveyed teachers, it was difficult for them to indicate the distinguishing feature (symbol) of their place of work, regardless of whether they were inhabitants or commuters from elsewhere