"Chapter 1. Education and Neighborhood Premium in Housing Price and its Dynamics: From a newly-assembled panel dataset, this study estimates the implicit prices of better education and neighborhood environments through models in which unobservable housing attributes are allowed to vary over time. The results of this study show that, first, past records of school performances have a long-lasting reputation effect, which has not been considered in the previous literature. Without taking the reputation effect into account, estimation results can be biased. Second, education and neighborhood premiums account for more than 43% of the housing price gaps. This paper also analyzes the dynamics of the housing market by using the panel VAR, a new approach in urban economics. The dynamic model shows more remarkable effects of education and neighborhood environments on housing price than a static model through bilateral -- direct and indirect -- relations among school performance, neighborhood composition, amenities, and housing price over time. This result supports the idea that education and neighborhood environments have more substantial impacts on housing prices and city segregation in a dynamic framework. Chapter 2. Impact of Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) Regulation on the Book Market of Korea: The reinforced resale price maintenance (RPM) regulation applied to books took effect from November 2014 in Korea under the policy purpose of preserving cultural variety and knowledge by supporting small publishing companies and bookstores. However, empirical evidence implies that the new regulation should be revised to achieve its policy purpose. After the new regulation, the number of newly-published books, which can be used as the index for cultural variety, was decreased by 7% annually after de-trending. The profit ratio of the six largest online firms was enhanced by more than 5% and the amount of their profit also increased significantly. However, the top 70 publishing companies' sales decreased by more than 10% and the sales of small book stores also decreased. Based on the empirical analyses, this paper suggests that other methods such as direct subsidy should be reviewed instead of price regulation to achieve the policy's purpose. Chapter 3. Impact of Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) Regulation on the Used Book Market: A new bill came into effect in November 2014 that further strengthens the existing resale price maintenance (RPM) regulation on the book market in Korea under the policy purpose to foster diversity of culture and knowledge by protecting small publishing companies and offline bookstores. However, after the new regulation took effect, some studies find evidence that is contrary to the intention of the regulation from various data. Most importantly, the gap in the market share between large online firms and small-scale offline bookstores has expanded even more, and the number of new publications has decreased significantly. Another noticeable change since the introduction of the new RPM regulation is the rapid growth of the used book market that has also benefited large online bookstores because the large online firms have dominated the used book market. Theoretically, this study constructs a comprehensive model including the used book market, which has properties of a two-sided market and is linked with the new book market. From the model, this paper explains various effects of new RPM regulations on the used book market."--Pages ii-iii.
Read
