1. American Housing Survey II

2. Data Model drives variable selection Selection Criteria
Certain MSAs
Owners only
Known metro status
Known year built
103 variables on observations

3. Data Download
Go to
Unzip the file using Winzip
Read it into Excel
Parse it into columns
Save as tab delimited text

4. Codebook

5. Stata
Read into Stata
insheet using “your file name”
Be sure you have 103 variables, observations

6. Examine the Data Sort control famtyp famrel Summarize data
note multiple observations per control
what are famtyp and famrel?
Summarize data
several variables are strings
note minimums and maximums

7. Housing Characteristics
Goal: estimate a hedonic equation for house characteristics
Consider Bedrms, Baths, halfb, kitch, dens, dining, famrm, laundry, living, rooms, unitsf, lot
What do you observe?
Look at maximums and minimums

8. Housing characteristics
Functional form?
Does each bedroom contribute equally to value?
Does each bathroom?
What about area?
Price or log price?
Construction cost or purchase price?

9. Regression
OLS - lprice as function of house characteristics, unitsf and lot
tabulate characteristics
tabu varname, gen(varname)
Sample weights [pw=pwt]