Christopher Bitter

Ph.D. Student, Geography & Regional Development

BA, 1990, Anthropology, University of Michigan
MA, 1996, Geography, University of Arizona

Phone: (520) 626-8136
E-mail: cbitter@email.arizona.edu

Harvill Building, Box #2
Tucson, AZ 85721-0076
USA

Research

My dissertation research focuses on the relationship between geography and housing prices. The first phase of this work examines how implicit prices associated with individual housing characteristics vary with geographic context at the intraurban scale. Hedonic theory suggests that implicit prices for individual housing attributes, such as the presence of a pool or proximity to a superfund site, can be uncovered by examining variation in the price of homes with differing quantities of each characteristic. Research within this tradition typically assumes that implicit prices are stationary within metropolitan areas. My research finds that implicit prices vary widely within the Tucson housing market. This result has important implications for hedonic applications such as environmental valuation, as spatial heterogeneity in implicit prices may result in biased value estimates. The next phase of my research empirically demonstrates how a failure to adequately control for the geographic structure of the housing market has serious repercussions for the implicit price estimate of proximity to a riparian corridor within Tucson.

The final phase of my research examines the role that house prices play in regional development. Specifically, we seek to clarify how house prices influence inter-regional migration patterns. The preliminary findings indicate that house prices had a significant influence on migration flows within the U.S. during the late 1990s. Further, we find that the influence of housing prices varies based on household demographic characteristics such as age and educational attainment level. Thus, housing prices may drive demographic turnover as the characteristics of in-migrants differ from those of out-migrants within high cost housing markets. These results have important implications for regional labor supply and economic growth.