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This paper applies a general spatial equilibrium model to investigate the effect that distance within the urban hierarchy can have on interurban house prices. Our spatial model predicts a negative price gradient towards higher-tier cities, which can be decomposed into a ‘productivity component’ and an ‘amenity component’, representing respectively the effect of wage differences and households’ valuation of access to higher-order services. The theoretical findings are tested on data for the hierarchical urban system of the Pan-Yangtze River Delta in China. Both central and subcentral cities are shown to impose statistically significant distance penalties on interurban house prices, even after we control for amenities and characteristics that are generally considered to be the determinants of house prices. According to the empirical decomposition, the negative house price gradients are largely accounted for by the productivity component.

Cross-city spillovers among housing markets are usually modelled by the classical spatial autoregressive models, which usually suffer from identification problems in practice. This paper investigates the cross-city house price spillovers arising from city network externalities wherein a city's connections with other cities in the urban network create the external house price premium through productivity and amenity gains. Using a cross-sectional data set for an urban system in eastern China, we present significant evidence for positive network spillovers by the application of spatial lag of X model and spatial Durbin error model. Besides, common shocks are also proved to be responsible for cross-city dependence of house prices.

Location is capitalized into the price of the land the structure of a property is built on, and land prices can be expected to vary significantly across space. We account for spatial variation of land prices in hedonic house price models using geospatial data and a semi-parametric method known as mixed geographically weighted regression. To measure the impact on aggregate price change, quality-adjusted (hedonic imputation) house price indices are constructed for a small city in the Netherlands and compared to price indices based on more restrictive models, using postcode dummy variables, or no location information at all. We find that, while taking spatial variation of land prices into account improves the model performance, the Fisher house price indices based on the different hedonic models are almost identical. The land and structures price indices, on the other hand, are sensitive to the treatment of location.