The Hedonic Price Function in a Matching Model of Housing Market

This paper develops a theoretical model in which the matching framework à la Pissarides (2000) extended to the housing market is integrated with the hedonic price theory. Market tightness and selling price collectively determine the long-run equilibrium of the economic system in which a seller can become a buyer, and vice versa. As a result, the house price depends not only on the housing characteristics but also on the market tensions and bargaining power of the parties. This integration allows to overcome a major drawback of the hedonic price theory, namely the assumption of perfect competition.hedonic price theory, housing market, search and matching models

Price Dispersion in the Housing Market: The Role of Bargaining and Search Costs

This paper develops a matching model à la Pissarides (2000) in order to explain a basic fact of housing markets: price dispersion. The variance in house prices is basically due to both the ex-ante heterogeneity of the parties (i.e., bargaining power, tastes, asymmetric information) and the search costs of buyers and sellers. In fact, sellers and buyers spend time and money before concluding the deal. Furthermore, the house price is substantially determined by bargaining between the parties. These factors affect the selling price and lead to price dispersion. This simple theoretical model is able to take these distinctive features of the housing markets into account.

Inductive Logic Programming in Databases: from Datalog to DL+log

In this paper we address an issue that has been brought to the attention of the database community with the advent of the Semantic Web, i.e. the issue of how ontologies (and semantics conveyed by them) can help solving typical database problems, through a better understanding of KR aspects related to databases. In particular, we investigate this issue from the ILP perspective by considering two database problems, (i) the definition of views and (ii) the definition of constraints, for a database whose schema is represented also by means of an ontology. Both can be reformulated as ILP problems and can benefit from the expressive and deductive power of the KR framework DL+log. We illustrate the application scenarios by means of examples. Keywords: Inductive Logic Programming, Relational Databases, Ontologies, Description Logics, Hybrid Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Systems. Note: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: 30 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

The impact of EPL on labour productivity in a general equilibrium matching model

The standard analysis of the impact of EPL on labour market outcomes concentrates mainly on unemployment, disregarding the possible effect on productivity. In this paper we make (a component of) labour productivity endogenous and analyze how the presence of a stringent protection legislation affects labour market in an equilibrium matching model with endogenous job destruction. Indeed, considering labour productivity an endogenous could be important not only in the case of EPL, but also for all kind of personnel policy evaluation. In this framework high labour productivity on one hand is costly in terms of effort, on the other hand is beneficial in terms of lower job destruction. We find that high firing costs partially substitute high labour productivity in reducing job destruction and this, consequently, brings down the optimal level of productivity. Moreover, the impact of EPL on unemployment is ambiguous but numerical exercises show unambiguously how higher firing restrictions reduce different measures of aggregate welfare. To some extent, the clear emergence of these results is full of policy implication and, indeed, rationalizes the recent empirical evidence on the impact of EPL.Employment protection; Endogenous labour productivity; Job destruction

Optimal taxation and monitoring in an economy with matching frictions and underground activities

This short paper shows the interdependence of taxation and monitoring policy in a search and matching model of equilibrium unemployment with an underground sector. More precisely, from a social welfare standpoint, two options are available to the policy maker: she/he may either substitute a tighter monitoring with a higher penalty or enforce both a higher taxation and an increased monitoring.optimal taxation, tax evasion, underground economy, job search theory