Essays on urban economics special focus on New Zealand housing markets

Huang, Yi

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/108118 Copy

Description

Title

Essays on urban economics special focus on New Zealand housing markets

Author(s)

Huang, Yi

Issue Date

2020-04-23

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Hewings, Geoffrey J.D.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Hewings, Geoffrey J.D.

Committee Member(s)

• McMillen, Daniel P.
• Dall'erba, Sandy
• Bera, Anil K.

Department of Study

Economics

Discipline

Economics

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Earthquake Hazard
• Salience
• Liquefaction
• Land Slope
• Slope Discount
• Decomposition
• Builder's Model
• School Proximity
• Quantile
• Housing Price

Abstract

"This dissertation consists of three chapters on the New Zealand housing market. The first chapter, titled ""Salience of Hazard Disclosure and House Prices: Evidence from Christchurch, New Zealand,"" addresses the impacts of providing precise salient earthquake hazard information on property values. Taking advantage of the land liquefaction zoning, known as the Technical Category (TC) zoning, following the 2010-2011 earthquake sequence (EQS) in Christchurch, I estimate the impacts of precise salient earthquake hazard information on property values. Using the property transaction data from 2000 to 2008 in the City of Christchurch, I first verify that the inherent liquefaction hazard was not capitalized before the 2010-2011 EQS. Next, exploring the property transaction data that spans 7 years before and after the TC zoning from 2005 to 2018, I find that the EQS prepared the market for a price change to liquefaction hazard. The area-wide TC zoning clarified the relative liquefaction hazard risks and reinforced the price change. Over the 7 years after zoning, average property values declined significantly by 20% in TC3 (high liquefaction risk areas), and 7% in TC2 (medium liquefaction risk areas). Pricing of housing is also found to incorporate the TC information quickly. Moreover, property values increased with distance to residential red zones (areas where liquefaction damage was beyond economical repair) the most in TC3 after the EQS. The second chapter, titled ""Is There a Slope Discount?"" is joint work with Geoffrey Hewings. This chapter attends to the construction of more reliable quality-adjusted land price indices and focuses on the physical attributes of land that intrinsically confine land use and possibly affect land values, land slope. In particular, we investigate if there is a slope discount to land price and address the role of land slope in forming more reliable constant quality land price indices and aggregate house price indices. We find while land slope discounts the unit land price, it has a small effect on quality-adjusted land price indices in selected neighborhoods in Auckland, New Zealand, where sloped terrain is common. The third chapter titled ""Does Proximity to School Still Matter Once Access to Your Preferred School Zone Has Already Been Secured?"" is joint work with Sandy Dall'erba. This chapter develops the existing literature on proximity to school further by assessing the role of proximity to school on housing prices once access to the preferred school has been secured. We relax the assumption of uniform marginal effects of proximity to school and exploit the power of the quantile regression approach to test whether proximity is valued the same at the higher and lower end of the housing market. Using property transaction data from four school enrollment zones in Auckland, New Zealand, we find that in the most sought-after school zones, house prices increase with proximity to school but decrease above 3.664 km. Moreover, we find that the nonlinear effects are most prominent at the lower quantile of the sales price distribution. In the other two school zones, proximity to school reduces house prices. These results demonstrate that distance to school still matters within each school enrollment zone."

Graduation Semester

2020-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108118

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2020 Yi Huang

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