Working Paper

Identification and estimation of hedonic models

Authors

Ivar Ekeland, James Heckman, Lars Nesheim

Published Date

1 January 2002

Type

Working Paper (CWP07/02)

This paper considers the identification and estimation of hedonic models. We establish that technology and preferences in a separable version of the hedonic model are genericallyidentified up to ane transformations from data on demand and supply in a single hedonicmarket. For a very general parametric structure, preferences and technology are fullyidentified from demand data. Much of the confusion in the empirical literature that claimsthat hedonic models estimated on data from a single market are fundamentally underidentifiedis based on linearizations that do not use all of the information in the model. Theexact economic model that justifies the linear approximations has strange properties sothe approximation is doubly poor. A semiparametric estimation method is proposed, andalternative estimators are considered. Instrumental variables estimators can be applied to identify technology and preference parameters from a single market even though there are no exclusion restrictions.


Latest version

Identification and estimation of hedonic models
Ivar Ekeland, James Heckman, Lars Nesheim
CWP