Influences of current neighbourhood characteristics on Hanoian’s actual residential choices and subjective expectations

Abstract

Bearing in mind that people may have rational expectations conditional on current information, this paper provides additional insights about the influences of current neighborhood characteristics on household residential location choice behavior from such a perspective by comparing actual choices and subjective expectations. Using data in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2005 and multinomial logit models, it is found that current neighborhood characteristics surely influence subjective expectations for the future residential location, but the influences are different from those on actual choices in the sense that signs and/or magnitudes of parameters of some specific neighborhood characteristics change significantly. With the above results, it is concluded that subjective expectations in the research of residential location choice behavior should be paid more attention.