Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2002.Includes bibliographical references.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.In this study we examine the impact of internet use on the duration of non-sequential search in the housing market. We develop a model of partial equilibrium in the housing market which suggests an ambiguous effect on the search duration when internet resources are employed in the search. In this model, the impact of using the internet can be viewed as increasing the search efficiency, or as altering the distribution of potential matches from which the home buyer can choose. We use data from the 2000 Home Buyer and Seller Survey collected by the National Association of Realtors. While theory suggests there might be an increase or a decrease in search times when using on-line resources in the search, in this data we find a tendency for internet use to increase the duration of home search relative to employing more conventional search methods. We use a simultaneous equations approach for the analysis of the impact of internet listing on the duration until sale in the residential housing market. In this model, the time on the market and the selling price are jointly determined, once asking price and the method used for the listing of the property is chosen by the home seller or agent. We use data from the 2000 Home Buyer and Seller Survey collected by the National Association of Realtors. We find that using the internet to list a house increases its time on the market. The results presented here are consistent our with previous findings pertaining to the use of the internet and the duration of search until a buyer locates a home to purchase. These results, together with the findings of the present study show evidence for a model of the housing market where all buyers are sellers.(cont.) We investigate the differential propensity of voters in the US to participate in national only versus national and local elections. We use data from the 1987 US General Social Survey to asses the importance of demographic and local community attachment characteristics of voters for this differential voting decision. We find that local community attachment and civic duty play an important role for this voting decision while personal monetary gains and redistributions do not appear to factor into the decision. In particular, education, age of respondent and length lived in community act to lower the costs of voting locally, and influence the voters' decision to participate in local elections as well as in national ones. However, economic incentives such as real estate capital values, local taxes and Social Security allocations do not appear to drive the differential voting decision for participating in local and national elections versus participating in national level elections only.by Victoria Tanusheva D'Urso.Ph.D
