Hedonic Models of Location Decisions with Applications to Geospatial Microdata

企业到地点、工人到企业、家庭到社区的分类是经济生活的重要因素。地方公共产品和住房市场理论的核心是将人们划分为代理群体，以利用他们的比较优势。代理人专门从事对他们最有利的活动。人们对在哪里工作和生活的选择，以及企业对在哪里选址和经营的选择，都是由各种因素驱动的动态过程，其中许多因素本质上是地理空间因素。这些地理空间因素包括固有的物理属性（如河流）、人为创造的物理属性（如公共基础设施）以及动态的社会和经济相互关系（如学区、税收机构或地方分区委员会等地缘政治实体）。有两个问题限制了对这类过程及其在人类和社会动态中的作用的科学理解。首先，数据的限制常常使社会科学家无法在足够精细的尺度上准确地测量地理空间和社会经济因素的组合，从而理清它们在经济和社会决策过程中所扮演的角色。其次，考虑到企业和消费者的多样性和异质性以及均衡分类过程的丰富性的复杂经济模型现在才充分发挥其经验潜力。这个跨学科的研究项目将解决这两个问题。研究人员将开发空间社会科学工具，以跟踪企业和家庭使用的人类社会分类过程的地理空间特征，并将这些工具与享乐分析的新发展一起使用。该项目将提供一种方法，通过估算特定位置属性的价值来建模社会动态，包括固有的地球物理属性以及随着时间的推移由人类互动产生的属性。该模型将生成由企业、工人和家庭的分类过程产生的均衡特征，并将提供一个可以用生成的地理空间数据估计的结构。这将使研究人员能够描述空间数据，并使他们能够识别和估计数据的结构特征，然后可以用来了解经济和社会系统如何响应经济环境的变化，如技术和人口变化。在这个项目中，将结合几个数据源来创建地理空间属性的度量，并将它们与享乐主义方法论一起用于研究位置决策和位置均衡的具体经验模型。该项目将发展并结合人类和社会动态的享乐模型的理论和实证进展与空间社会科学的进展。它将提供对排序动态的更好理解。它将提供建模工具来研究地理位置决策背景下的社会和经济动态机制。它将提供测量地理空间属性的经验工具。这些新工具将适用于许多具有重要社会影响的政策相关问题，包括环境正义、种族隔离、学校质量、社区基础设施、公共设施和有毒设施。包括经济学、地理学、地理信息科学和区域科学在内的许多领域的研究人员将能够利用这些新工具。该项目得到了2004财年美国国家科学基金会人类与社会动力学（HSD）竞赛的支持。HSD竞赛和HSD奖项组合的协调管理涉及所有NSF董事和办公室。

The sorting of firms to locations, workers to firms, and families to neighborhoods are important elements of economic life. Central to the theory of local public goods and housing markets is the sorting of people into group of agents, in order to exploit their comparative advantages. Agents specialize in the activities that are most beneficial to them. The choices of peoples about where to work and live and the choices of firms about where to locate and operate are dynamic processes driven by a variety of factors, many of which are geospatial in nature. These geospatial factors include inherent physical attributes (such as rivers), human-created physical attributes (such as public infrastructures), and dynamic social and economic interrelationships (such as geopolitical entities like school districts, taxing bodies, or local zoning boards). Two issues have limited the scientific understanding of these types of processes and their role in human and social dynamics. First, data limitations have often prevented social scientists from accurately measuring a combination of geospatial and socioeconomic factors at a scale sufficiently fine to disentangle the role each plays in economic and social decision processes. Second, sophisticated economic models accounting for the diversity and heterogeneity of firms and consumers and the richness of the equilibrium sorting process are only now reaching their full empirical potential. This interdisciplinary research project will address both issues. The researchers will develop spatial social science tools to track the geospatial characteristics of human social sorting processes used by both firms and households, and they will use these tools together with new developments in hedonic analysis. The project will provide a method for modeling social dynamics by estimating the value of location-specific attributes, both for inherent geophysical attributes as well as those that are created over time by human interaction. The model will generate a characterization of the equilibrium resulting from the sorting process of firms, workers, and households and will provide a structure that can be estimated with the generated geospatial data. This will enable researchers to describe spatial data and will allow them to identify and estimate structural features of the data, which can then be used to understand how the economic and social system will respond to changes in the economic environment such as technological and demographic changes. Several data sources will be combined in this project to create measures of geospatial attributes and will use them with the hedonic methodology to study specific empirical models of location decisions and location equilibrium.This project will develop and combine theoretical and empirical advances in hedonic models of human and social dynamics with advances in spatial social science. It will provide a better understanding of the dynamics of sorting. It will provide modeling tools to study the mechanisms of social and economic dynamics in the context of location decisions. It will provide empirical tools to measure geospatial attributes. These new tools will be applicable to many policy relevant issues that have important social implications, including environmental justice, racial segregation, school quality, community infrastructure, public amenities, and noxious facilities. Researchers in many fields, including economics, geography, geographic information science, and regional science, will be able to take advantage of the new tools. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2004 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD). Coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards involves all NSF directorates and offices.