House prices, housing tenure, and happiness: Three essays in applied econometrics

This dissertation consists of three papers in applied econometrics. Each chapter explores multiple estimation methods to answer the proposed questions.;Chapter One, entitled "Court-ordered Busing and House Prices" measures the effect of a court-ordered change in educational policy on local house prices. Opponents of the policy argued that this change would reduce local school quality, which would then spill over into house prices. The data set observes house sale data for a treatment group and control group over a ten year period. Using a difference-in-difference model and a derived hybrid repeat-sales model, the results show that, after the court order, there was no significant increase in the house price differential between the two groups.;Chapter Two, entitled "Housing Tenure Choice and the Dual Income Household", considers the question of how a second labor income of a married household affects the tenure choice of a household. It also considers the possibility that, holding the primary income constant, a second income could be endogenous to the tenure choice. The chapter proposes a likelihood function that incorporates all aspects of the data, which is used for estimation and is compared to other instrumental variable methods. The results show that the second income has the same, positive effect on the probability of homeownership as the primary income, and that it is not endogenous to the tenure choice.;Chapter Three (a joint working paper with Michael McBride), "Experienced Utility versus Decision Utility", explores the idea of Prospect Theory and how it relates to post-decision utility, as opposed to decision utility. Using a data set from an experimental setting, results show that some of the hypotheses of Prospect Theory hold for post-decision utility.