Housing prices vary widely from market to market in the United States. The purpose of this study is to (1) construct new place-to-place indexes of the price of housing, using the 1990 Census, and (2) analyze the determinants of housing prices, with a particular focus on the supply side determinants-regulatory and natural constraint-as well as the usual demand determinants. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

This study explores the role of pension‐plan real estate investment in an asset–liability framework. By assuming that the pension‐plan manager wishes to have assets of at least equal value to the liabilities at all points in time, an asset selection process is derived which depends on both the asset's covariance with other assets and its covariance with the liability stream. We generally find real estate not to be highly correlated with pension‐plan liabilities. This finding is of general interest, since it helps to explain why pension‐plan real estate investment is extremely limited and much smaller than one would expect if pension‐plan investors cared only about the mean and variance of the real return to their invested wealth.

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This article examines the variation in rents per square foot among regional shopping centers in the United States in response to variation in retail sales per square foot. The analysis breaks new ground by treating base and percentage rents as endogenous functions of retail sales. The analysis further distinguishes between de facto, if not de jure, fixed and percentage leases, and between new versus existing leases. Simulation results suggest that shopping center rents can easily increase in the short-run as retail sales decrease, or they can easily decrease as retail sales increase. In addition, the results suggest that shopping center rents per square foot generally react more aggressively to an increase in retail sales per square foot over time than to a decrease in retail sales per square foot, all else equal. This article is concerned with the effects of variations in retail sales on the time path of shopping center rents. On the basis of a variety of evidence, including a recent article by Wheaton and Torto (1995), the case for examining the relationship between retail sales and shopping center rents is compelling. 1 Between 1968 and 1993, for example, retail sales in regional shopping centers in the United States (in constant dollars per square foot) fell by 20% to 40%, while rents per square foot (constant dollars) almost doubled. Since then shopping center rent and retail sales changes, for many retailers, have been such that rents and retail sales are now, as it were, just in balance. For other retailers, changes in shopping center rents have continued to outpace changes in retail sales. Still for other retailers, the changes in shopping center rent and retail sales would appear to be on the "yellow brick road" leading back to an eqUilibrium level (see Exhibits 1-10). As an explanation for some of these trends-particularly, the tendency for changes in shopping center rents to deviate noticeably from changes in retail sales in the short-run-this article develops a theoretical model of shopping center rents, with

In this paper we examine the institutional real estate ownership patterns of life insurance companies for 10 countries over the period 1986-96. The countries included are ustralia, Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We find that most institutional investors worldwide have shifted out of real estate assets and into stocks and bonds over the last decade. We then investigate whether this behavior is the result of changing investor perceptions or a shift in stock market apitalization. To test this hypothesis, the paper derives measures of ex ante real estate returns following previous empirical work in finance. The results indicate that only a small proportion of what is driving institutional investors' real estate portfolio decisions is actually explained by changing investor perceptions and lagged unexpected excess returns.