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We had a much larger and more comprehensive sample available to us than was <br />employed in Hirsch (1988) or Hirsch et al (1988) or Hirsch et al (1999). For our <br />primary analysis, we focused on 137,983 observations collected from over twenty <br />years of mobile home transactions between 1983 and the early part of 2003. The <br />ultimate transaction data base included only repeat- or multiple -sales along with <br />descriptive information about the coach. Each sale was geo-coded permitting the <br />census tract variables including Median Household Income (constant $, 1996), <br />Proportion of Households with Public Assistance Income and Proportion of <br />Persons > 65 Years Old to be appended to each record. The first two are proxies <br />for local amenity values as well as demand, while the third is a proxy for one of the <br />components of demand for mobile home units as many older households choose <br />mobile homes as a cost effective housing choice in retirement. Again, the <br />definitions of the descriptors of the various transactions are shown in Table 1 and <br />the descriptive statistics of the covariates are shown in Tables 4 and 5. <br />Because we have repeat- or multiple -sales in our data base, it is straight forward to <br />compute the Average Annual Growth Rate (AAG) in nominal and real terms for <br />each coach or mobile home between the date of initial purchase and the date of the <br />subsequent sale. We then regressed the AAG in constant dollars on coach and <br />neighborhood characteristics along with an indicator variable for the rigidity of the <br />rent control regime. <br />Our working hypothesis was that because rigid rent control policies allow coach <br />owners to pass on future pad rent savings to subsequent owners of the coach, prices <br />of coaches in those communities will increase more rapidly or decrease less rapidly <br />than the prices of coaches in communities without rent control or flexible rent <br />control. Thus, if rent control or the rigidity of the rent control regime influences the <br />rate of change of coach prices, the relevant estimated coefficient will be positive <br />and significant. <br />The key results of cross -sectional hedonic regressions of the data for the 20 years <br />are shown in Table 6a, 6b and 6c. We report results after having explored <br />numerous alternative specifications and alternative approaches to segmenting the <br />data. As will become clear, the rigidity of the rent control regime, the legal status <br />of rent control policies (influenced by the cited U.S. Supreme Court decision in <br />1992), neighborhood household income and neighborhood age of household seem <br />to impact the price effect associated with rent control policies. <br />We report results of the analysis segmented by: <br />