In Chapter 1, the relationship between condominium price and the collective action problem associated with condominium reconstructions in Japan is discussed.Condominium reconstruction involves a difficult collective decision-making process among owners, which prevents older condominiums from being redeveloped efficiently.In Japan, more than one million condominium units remain unable to satisfy earthquake-resistance regulations, while only 211 condominiums had been rebuilt by April 2015.This paper provides empirical evidence (by examining the price differential, as controlling for rent, between condominiums and single-owner rental apartments) that a significant cost is associated with collective action problems surrounding condominium reconstructions in Japan. In particular, the condominium price declines by 3.7% as the number of owners in a complex doubles, while the number of owners does not affect the price of rental apartments.Also, the depreciation rate of condominium price is greater than the rate of the price of rental apartments.These findings are consistent with the prediction from the development model, that collective action problems surrounding the condominium reconstruction deteriorate the condominium price.A comparative examination of condominiums in Japan and the United States suggests that revising the current Japanese condominium law could induce more efficient development of old condominiums.In Chapter 2, the externality of stigmatized properties and the interpretation of hedonic estimates are examined by using housing data in Tokyo, Japan.A stigmatized property is a real estate property that suffers from an undesirable past event, such as a suicide or homicide.The first part of this paper provides the empirical evidence of the existence of the negative externality of stigmatized property, based on data on rental housing and stigmatizing events recorded in Tokyo, Japan.The result shows that an incidence of homicide has a significant negative effect on the rent of a unit in the same apartment building: the rent decreases by about 20% in the following year of the incidence and recovers after 10 years.The second part of the paper discusses implications of hedonic estimates when prospective renters do not have complete information about stigmatized properties available in the data.Since hedonic coefficients do not represent implicit impacts of stigmatizing events in the presence of incomplete information, the implicit impacts are investigated by imposing several assumptions; the results reveal that homicide are still likely to have a significant impact.In Chapter 3, an empirical approach to estimate the special effect of multiple sites is proposed.Geographical relationships between a housing unit and the surrounding major sites, such as public transportation and crime scenes, are fundamental factors that determine the value of housing.In this paper, an empirical model is developed to estimate the spatial effect of such multiple sites that addresses the following three assumptions: (1) the closer a site, the greater the impact may be; (2) the impact differs by the characteristics of a site; and (3) the higher the ranking of proximity to a site, the greater the impact may be.In this model, a simple and interpretable proximity measure is constructed, representing the aggregate effect of surrounding sites.An empirical application is provided by using rental housing data in Tokyo, Japan, to examine how the clustering of train and subway stations influences the surrounding housing rental prices.The results suggest that at least the three nearest stations (and at most the five nearest stations) from each housing unit need to be considered in the hedonic model.The results also suggest that the nearest station has more influence on the rental price than do the second and third nearest stations, as mentioned in assumption (3). The proposed methodology can be applied to various spatial topics as transportations, foreclosures and polycentric cities.
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