George Akerlof's asymmetric information theory explains why lemons are rarely, if at all, transacted. We extend his theory to explain liquidity in the second-hand real estate market. The idea is to decompose real estate asset into two components: Land and the building structure. While sellers...

A growing number of mainland Chinese real estate firms went public over the past decade. Some floated their shares in Hong Kong, while others were listed on mainland stock exchanges. This paper empirically examines the determinants of their initial public offering (IPO) location choice. Based on...

Spatial dependence is often seen as a problem in econometrics rather than in economics. This study seeks to find an economic explanation for spatially correlated real estate prices. We posit spatial dependence as a process to discover price information from neighboring property transactions....

Developers often conduct forward sales (or presales) before building completion to relieve financial risk and burden. However, there are worries that housing units sold in this way will turn out to be substandard because developers, who have been paid for the unfinished units, may have...

We examine the effect of forward sale (pre-sale) activities on the volatility of spot prices in the real estate market. The abundance of pre-sales data and major changes in regulatory control on the pre-sale market during the 90's in Hong Kong allow us to undertake empirical tests using Hong...

We examine the effect of forward sale (pre-sale) activities on the volatility of spot prices in the real estate market. The abundance of pre-sales data and major changes in regulatory control on the pre-sale market during the 90's in Hong Kong allow us to undertake empirical tests using Hong...

Conventional wisdom suggests that non-local buyers usually pay a premium for home purchases. While the standard contract theory predicts that non-local buyers may pay such a price premium because of the higher cost of gathering information, behavioral economists argue that the premium is due to...

The age-period-cohort problem has been studied for decades but without resolution. There have been many suggested solutions to make the three effects estimable, but these solutions mostly exploit non-linear specifications. Yet, these approaches may suffer from misspecification or omitted...

While the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease has caused asset markets to experience an unprecedented spike of risk and uncertainty worldwide, the real estate market in many global cities appears to be immune to the adverse effects. How does COVID-19 affect urban housing markets? This study is a...