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American Economic Review Vol. 100 No. 3 2010

A New Approach to Estimating the Production Function for Housing

Dennis Epple1; Brett Gordon2; Holger Sieg1

1 Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213. · 2 Columbia Business School, 3022 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Abstract

Dating to the classic works of Alonso, Mills, and Muth, the production function for housing has played a central role in urban economics and local public finance. This paper provides a new flexible approach for estimating the housing production function which treats housing quantities and prices as latent variables. The empirical analysis is based on a comprehensive database of recently built properties in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. We find that the new method proposed in this paper works well in the application and provides reasonable estimates for the underlying production function.

DOI
10.1257/aer.100.3.905
Volume
100
Issue
3
Pages
905-924
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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