Intrametropolitan Location and Office Market Dynamics

Theory and evidence point to interdependency between office location decisions and dynamic growth paths. For example, clerical and administrative support employees are suburbanizing relatively rapidly in most markets in response to changes in technology and transportation. This paper tests the hypothesis that both cross-sectional and dynamic variables are important determinants of dynamic patterns and office market forecasts.County Business Patterns data at the county and town levels indicate substantial spatial specialization (i.e., agglomeration) by type of office activity. But these agglomerations do shift over time, as indicated by the maintained hypothesis. Our econometric estimates suggest that the demand for office space in submarkets is responsive to agglomerations by type of industry as well as to growth in FIRE employment. The supply of office space is responsive to lagged expected demand. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Did Office Market Size Matter in the 1980s? A Time-Series Cross-Sectional Analysis of Metropolitan Area Office Markets

Recent contributions to the literature have resulted in a standard modelling of office markets. The models provide considerable insight into the working of office markets. • Nonetheless, a major difficulty is the use of data for a single city or aggregate data for the U.S. The latter implicitly assumes that model structure is invariant across cities. In this article we test for structural differences in office markets by size class. Rental data from REIS Reports for twenty-one metropolitan areas for the time period 1981 to 1990 are used to model office market behavior. Results suggest market outcomes vary by city size, larger markets are better modelled using standard procedures, and Manhattan behaves quite differently from the other markets. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

Amenity-Based Housing Affordability Indexes

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate-income households, especially in high-cost, supply-constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town-level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town-level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability. Copyright (c) 2009 American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.