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This paper measures the extent to which effects of foreclosures vary across neighborhoods. It offers a simple empirical framework for decomposing the spillover effects on neighboring property prices. Data from Orange County, Florida, reveal that the effects systematically vary across neighborhoods by morphology. The results indicate that older, homogeneous age structure, and non-gated neighborhoods with high vacancy rates are most in jeopardy when foreclosures are present, as these neighborhoods show the greatest neighborhood house price effects.

Foreclosures lead to lower house prices in the short run. However, whether or not foreclosures also have long-run or legacy price effects has not been addressed extensively. Do neighborhoods with a greater number of past foreclosures exhibit long lasting house price discounts? This paper examines both transitory and legacy foreclosure price effects. We use almost 20 years of data from one of the epicenters of the foreclosure crisis: Orange County, Florida. We measure the number of recent and past foreclosures within narrowly defined neighborhoods for each house sold during 2016–2019:Q2. We compare transaction prices with different numbers of recent and past foreclosures, while controlling for differences in observed property characteristics and taking measures to reduce the impact of unobserved heterogeneity. We find that greater numbers of recent and past foreclosures are associated with lower house prices. We find strong transitory effects consistent with the existing literature. We also find significant but modest legacy effects on surrounding prices. These long-run discounts are about 0.41 percent to 0.79 percent in Orange County, Florida.

This paper uses a search model with Nash bargaining to identify various channels through which agent gender affects selling price and selling time in the resale market for houses. The theory is used in conjunction with the empirical model to infer agent bargaining power when dealing with the same or opposite sex agents on the other side of the transaction. The results reveal that sellers set higher listing prices when working with male agents, a pattern consistent with sellers’ ex ante beliefs that male agents enjoy greater expected bargaining power. Ex post agent bargaining power varies by sex and their role in the transaction. Female agents assisting buyers have stronger bargaining power when facing male listing agents than when facing female agents in rising or falling markets. The ex post bargaining power of male selling agents assisting buyers appears to be generally weaker than that of female listing agents.

Previous research focuses on how sample characteristics and research methods affect school quality capitalization estimates. This paper instead examines how the institutional environments of each market affect capitalization, specifically, desegregation litigation and forced busing. The meta-analysis shows that previous desegregation litigation and forced busing are associated with significantly weaker school quality capitalization. The capitalization literature reports a wide range of estimates, so it is not surprising that the range of effects of prior litigation and forced busing on the market valuation of a one standard deviation in school quality fall between $80–$2000 and $130–$3250, respectively, for the studies examined.

We use a listing price hedonic model coupled with a standard selling price model to identify seller beliefs about how the housing market responds to refurbished formerly substandard properties serv...

Economists traditionally view public and private land use regulation as alternatives to each other. An alternative view argues that public and private regulation are not equally suited to accomplish the same outcomes. In particular, government regulation is easily changed while private regulation is not, making the latter better suited to control future externality risk. One implication of the alternative view is that more risk-averse households are drawn to gated neighbourhoods while their less risk-averse counterparts are not. This paper exploits exogenous differences in neighbourhood amenity uncertainty created by public school attendance zone changes to test this prediction of the alternative view. The results show that greater exogenous amenity uncertainty yields stronger house price capitalisation in gated subdivisions than in open neighbourhoods, a pattern consistent with the risk-aversion sorting hypothesis. The results are robust and are consistent with the key implication of the alternative view of private regulation.

A surprisingly large number of houses sell above listing prices in a wide range of markets and in all market conditions. The question is: why do some houses sell above listing price while neighboring similar houses do not? Is it that sellers misprice the property at the outset, work with real estate brokers who are particularly skilled at bringing in high value buyers, or are simply lucky to have high value buyers show up during the marketing period? This paper makes two contributions. It offers an empirical framework to isolate seller and agent influences on the likelihood of selling above listing price. It also offers empirical evidence about the seller, agent and market determinants of sales above list across all market phases. Sellers who do not follow their agent’s guidance and under-price their property increase the likelihood of selling above list. Agent experience also increases the likelihood. We also identify specific marketing strategies and agent incentives that do and do not appear influence the likelihood of selling above listing price once the other seller behavior, agent characteristics, and market conditions are taken into account.

Property markets do not fully price the public’s value for historic homes to correct the intergenerational externality associated with historical preservation. While preservation for future generations often provides the primary motivation for Pigovian subsidies, historical preservation or restoration policies may also have significant contemporary amenity effects. This study exploits unique data on the use of rehabilitative tax credits (RTCs) in Virginia to estimate the extent to which historic property investment generates market externalities for nearby nonhistoric properties. Using a difference-in-differences approach, the results indicate that homes in close proximity to RTCs sell at a premium, with only modest liquidity effects.

Empirical studies investigating urban sprawl and the determinants of city size with the Mills-Muth framework have struggled to find a reliable and ubiquitous proxy for the theoretical commuting costs variable. This study is the first to apply the Davidson-McKinnon non-nested specification test to address the long-standing issue in the literature of determining the best proxy measure for commuting costs. We employ this specification test to evaluate the three most widely available commuting costs measures from the literature: vehicle availability, public transit usage, and commuting speed. For a sample of all urbanized areas in 2000 and 2010, our results provide a degree of resolution. While we find for a pooled sample of all urbanized areas that commuting speed is the preferred proxy, subsample analysis reveals the prior result may be driven by larger urbanized areas spanning more than one county; commuting speed dominates the other proxies for these larger cities. Conversely, the sizes of single-county urbanized areas are explained by vehicle availability and transit usage, though neither of those proxy measures emerge as dominant, suggesting some unspecified measure may be better for these smaller cities.

Uninformed buyers may pay more when purchasing complex assets, such ashouses. This paper compares local house buyers who are later foreclosed with those not foreclosed for various buyer-types, namely, owner-occupier households, investor-companies, second-home buyers, and small-scale investors. Data from one of the foreclosure epicenters, Orange County,Florida, reveal that subsequent foreclosures are associated with higher prices for comparable housing at the time of purchase. The premium paid by buyers between 2000 and 2007 who experience foreclosure after 2007 is larger closer to the 2007 market peak, approaching 3 percent. We find considerable heterogeneity across buyer-types. In particular, foreclosed second-homebuyers and small-scale investors systematically pay more, while investor-companies and owneroccupiers do not. The pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that the premium paid by foreclosed households reflects poor information or limited financial acumen.

It is well established in the literature that the number of interest group organizations varies across countries and states, with economic freedom and other institutional factors playing important roles in economic growth and prosperity. At the same time, the literature offers little empirical evidence of the influence of institutions on interest group behavior. This study presents new evidence on the extent to which institutional structure, in particular state and local governmental fiscal decentralization, promotes or hinders interest group formation. Expenditure decentralization, more so than revenue decentralization, appears to constrain the number of industry-type groups while having little effect on social-type groups in US states. The results provide further evidence of the importance of institutional quality and structure across states and suggest important directions for future research.

Housing market microstructure focuses on how neighborhood market conditions affect prices and liquidity. In this paper, we test alternative empirical microstructure models in which substit...

Renters of multi-unit housing structures report weaker ties to their community than other renters and owner occupants. In response to the lack of a sense of community in multi-unit rental structures, owners and managers of these properties have implemented planned programs to establish stronger community ties for residents. We examine the effect of one such program, the CARES (Community Activities and REsident Services) program, on the rental price of apartments using both a standard hedonic approach as well as matching techniques designed to limit unobservable differences between treated and comparison units. Our results using propensity score matching to identify comparison units, suggest that monthly rents are between 5.7 and 9.3 percent higher for apartment units that offer the CARES program. We also find the effect of the CARES program to be stronger in larger apartment complexes, suggesting that renters are willing to pay a premium for a sense of community rather than just the increased services from the program.

Existing evidence indicates that larger listing inventories thin agent effort dedicated to each individual client. This study examines whether shopping externalities or other scale effects offset this inventory externality for agents with the largest market presence. Data from Central Virginia shows that agents holding the greatest percentage of listings in the housing market obtain higher prices and sell listing faster than other agents. This pattern is consistent with the notion that top tier listing agents are able to exploit their market presence to generate meaningful positive shopping externality effects for individual clients. Propensity scoring models provide evidence that the performance advantage of these agents is not driven by differences in the types of houses they represent, but reflects agent productivity. On the other hand, top tier agents in terms of sales do not consistently obtain higher prices or shorter selling times for their listing clients. The shopping externalities associated with top tier listing agents do not appear to extend to top tier selling agents.

This paper examines how household social interaction affects housing and location demand in urban settings. The extended Alonso-Muth urban household model shows that the effects on density and location hinge upon the demand relationship between social activities and housing consumption. Stronger tastes for social activities outside the home lead to lower housing demand and decrease demanded distance from the CBD. Stronger tastes for socializing at home have the opposite effects on housing and location demands. The empirical analysis of interaction survey data yields results consistent with the theoretical framework.

This paper provides new evidence of sales sequence-real estate price relations in a setting in which consumption risk and completion risk are both minimized and where agglomeration economies do not pertain. The results illustrate that the monotonic declining price “afternoon effect” or rising price from increasing relative demand documented in auction settings do not extend to real estate transactions in open (non-auction) markets. Instead, we find underlying non-monotonic U-shaped and inverted U-shaped sales sequence-price relations for high-rise and mid-rise developments, respectively, when correcting for unit selectivity effects. The results represent price anomalies in that they are evident after removing the effects of previously identified factors associated with sales sequence-price relations.

Observable measures of public school quality provide noisy signals of underlying quality to parents. Accordingly, this paper examines the house price effects of school quality and quality uncertainty. Residential bid rent theory under this type of uncertainty shows that greater school quality increases housing prices and steepens the gradient whereas quality risk decreases housing prices and flattens the gradient. The empirical models incorporate two sources of quality risk, the uncertainty over the quality of a given school and the uncertainty over which school a household will be assigned. Estimates reveal capitalization consistent with the theory. Including risk measures in the empirical model reduces quality level effects. All capitalization effects tend to be stronger in higher income neighborhoods. Further, attendance zone uncertainty exhibits more stable capitalization across subsamples than does uncertainty over the performance of a given school.

This study is the first to examine the principal-agent issues surrounding how agents’ efforts to sell their own properties affect their efforts to sell concurrently listed client properties. The principal-agent model shows that listed agent-owned properties induce agents to worker harder over all, but diminish effort dedicated to marketing concurrently listed client properties, leading to reduced liquidity and/or lower selling prices for those properties. The empirical results show that client properties competing with agent-owned properties remain on the market 30 to 46 % longer and sell for 1.8 % less than properties whose agents have no such conflict of interest.

Although controversial, local and state governments draw on broad interpretations of the Fifth Amendment takings clause to justify using eminent domain for economic development. Previous studies examine such uses from the perspective of property rights and the scope and size of government. This paper addresses the fundamental question: Do states that grant local governments liberal eminent domain powers actually enjoy greater economic growth? This paper estimates how liberal eminent domain laws affect private sector employment growth across states while controlling for national trend and industry mix effects. The results clearly show that allowing local governments to use eminent domain for economic development does not lead to more private sector jobs.

Comparing agent-owner with agent-represented home sales illustrates that commission contracts lead to external agent moral hazard. Real estate developers are sophisticated sellers who can either use external agents or hire internal agents. The theory shows that neither scheme eliminates agent moral hazard. The empirical study of how the seller-agent relationship affects both price and liquidity in a simultaneous system concludes that external agents enjoy superior selling ability that offset moral hazard effects.

Formal title to property allows owners to borrow for investing in improvements. Title legalization laws, however, appear to yield only modest increases in housing quality in developing countries. We offer a simple model in which squatters initially balance initial investment in low quality structures to reduce the risk of eviction against the future effect of increasing the marginal cost of improving quality. The effort to secure initial possession thereby creates a legacy effect, reducing subsequent investments in housing quality. Empirical tests using Bolivian data yield results consistent with the legacy theory: initial title risk suppresses long run housing quality.

The existing literature focuses on how perceived flood risk affects house value. Search theory, however, implies that flood risks will be capitalized into both house price and liquidity. This article draws on search theory to develop an empirical approach for estimating flood risk capitalization into both price and selling time. The results show the mix of price and liquidity capitalization varies by level of flood risk as well as across housing market phases. Regardless of the specific capitalization pattern, the results illustrate that focusing solely on price without allowing for concomitant liquidity capitalization can yield estimates that understate the full impact of flood risk on house transactions.

Representative democracies govern most locales in the US, making it difficult to compare performance relative to direct democracy. New England states, however, provide an opportunity to test both direct and representative democracy at the local level. This article uses revealed preference axioms to compare spending patterns in New England towns and cities against median voter hypothesis benchmarks. Contrary to previous evidence, we find no differences between direct and representative democracy. The results suggest that horizontal competition arising from local fragmentation minimize differences between direct and representative local government, providing support for wider applicability of median voter-based empirical models of local government behaviour in the US.

A deeper understanding of the credit-sorting process is essential when considering the extent to which home foreclosures are driven by price contagion or an underlying spatial pattern of mortgage quality. Adapting household location theory, we find that credit constrained households follow “drive-'til-you-qualify” behavior leading to rising credit quality with distance from the CBD while unconstrained households exhibit declining credit quality. Individual level mortgage loan-to-income data for the 100 largest MSAs show credit constrained behavior either throughout the urban area or concentrated in the suburbs. Meta analysis of the credit sorting estimates identify MSA characteristics associated with each pattern.

This paper examines the impact of land title systems on property values. The predominant system in the U.S. and a few other countries, the recording system, awards title to claimants over current possessors, whereas the predominant system throughout most of the world, the registration system, awards title to the current possessor. The theory illustrates that the title system effect on asset value depends on property-specific factors like the risk of a claim and title system characteristics like transactions costs. A natural experiment in Cook County, Illinois, where both systems existed side-by-side from 1897 through 1996, allows a test of the theory. The evidence for commercial and industrial properties reveals that parcels tend to self-select into the two systems as expected with registration enhancing value once the self-selection effects are removed.

A dual land market is one in which the government owns a significant portion of developable land while real estate development is done primarily by the private sector. This article examines Singapore's experience with its system of government land supply in a dual market, focusing on its response to market signals as well as the interaction with the significant private supply of land. The example is relevant to the general problem of government sales of valuable assets. The private supply of developable land behaves in line with expectations. The government response to price signals differs only modestly from that of private landowners.

This paper examines the efficiency of eminent domain used to acquire green spaces, situations in which private investment permanently destroys the ecological externality value of land. The real option approach takes into account this irreversibility and changes established conclusions for the reversible investment case. Under irreversibility, eminent domain efficiency is more sensitive to compensation rules than previously thought. Setting compensation equal to what market value would be in the absence of eminent domain—the approach taken in the US and many other countries—reduces efficiency relative to losing the ecological externality to private development. Compensating at the market value under eminent domain threat increases efficiency, but not as much as compensation at social value does.

This article introduces Nash bargaining into a search model to identify various channels through which vacancy affects selling price and liquidity in the resale market for houses. The model shows the various vacancy effects in the form of greater seller holding cost, lower seller bargaining power and unobserved negative attributes or stigma. We use a 20-year data series on house transactions to test for these effects in a simultaneous model of price and liquidity, using the long data series to allow for variation across market phases. The robust vacancy effects on price and liquidity across all market phases primarily reflect greater seller holding cost and diminished bargaining power. Repeatedly, vacant houses also exhibit significant stigma effects in the rising market but not in stable or declining market phases. At the same time, vacant houses enjoy stronger shopping externality effects from surrounding houses for sale than do their occupied counterparts.

The housing literature largely overlooks the price evolution of similar assets sold sequentially, even though such sales often occur with new residential developments. The law of one price implies no persistent price pattern for identical assets sold sequentially. Nonetheless, the auction literature argues that changes in relative demand over the sales sequence and the reduction in valuation risk as later buyers use previous sales to validate asset values can lead to sales sequence effects on prices. The non-auction literature emphasizes rising prices from declining consumption risk as new housing subdivisions are built out. This paper examines the price evolution in the condominium market where similar units are sold sequentially in a setting with minimal consumption risk. While we find statistically significant sequence-price effects that vary across sales phases and how quickly the development sells out, none are economically significant. We conclude that there appears to be no pervasive sequence-price relationship for sequential sales of similar property units.

Many private common carriers or regulated utilities have eminent domain powers in the U.S. The rationale resembles that for local governments; lower cost of assembling land for long distance electric transmission, gas and oil products pipelines, etc. Recent court cases raise questions about whether eminent domain allows firms to use inefficiently long indirect land corridors, inefficiently wide corridors, or higher value land when lower value land is available as an alternative? Despite the incentive to over-use capital under rate-of-return regulation, it turns out that the firm adopts an excessive land corridor width only to the extent that corridor width is tied to capital usage. For route selection, rate-of-return regulated firms follow the same Pareto rule that would be followed by an efficiency-oriented government when designating which land to take for a transmission route by eminent domain.

The antichresis lease in civil law countries requires a lump sum tenant payment which is returned when the lease ends. The custody of the lump sum is the property owner's compensation. We present a theory of leases that emphasizes tenant liquidity risk and owner input moral hazard. Monthly rent leases dominate when tenant consumption depends importantly on owner supplied inputs. However, the antichresis insulates owners from tenant liquidity risk while rent contracts do not, making antichresis leases more attractive for tenant populations with greater liquidity risk. The empirical evidence from Bolivian property leases is consistent with the main model predictions.

The traditional law of leases imposed no duty on landlords to mitigate damages in the event of tenant breach, whereas the modern law of leases does. An economic model of leases, in which absentee tenants may or may not intend to breach, shows that the traditional rule promotes tenant investment in the property by discouraging landlord entry. In contrast, the modern rule prevents the property from being left idle by encouraging landlords to enter and re-let abandoned property. The model reflects the historic use of the traditional rule for agricultural leases, where absentee use was valuable, and the emergence of the modern rule for residential leases, where the primary use entails continuous occupation.

[Author Affiliation]Velma Zahirovic-Herbert, Department of Housing and Consumer Economics, University of Georgia, 213 Dawson Hall, Athens, GA 30602-3622, USA; E-mail vherbert@uga.edu; corresponding author.Geoffrey K Turnbull, Department of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3992, Atlanta, GA 30302-3992, USA; E-mail gturnbull@gsu.edu.[Acknowledgment]We would like to thank Christopher Bollinger and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The authors are responsible for any errors.1. IntroductionEducation is one of the most important services provided by local governments. Low test scores, high dropout rates, high teacher turnover rates, and other problems indicate that large urban school districts in the United States serve their students inadequately. These deficiencies provide incentives for affluent families to leave cities for the suburbs or to move their children to private schools. When these families move, urban tax bases and economic activity are reduced. When good students move to private schools, the average academic quality of the remaining public school students declines, which can reduce the quality of the education received in the public schools through influence on peer group effects and declining parental involvement and political support. For these reasons, education reform remains a key concern in urban areas.This paper draws on local education reforms that occurred in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, in 1996 and 2001 to examine several questions left unresolved in the capitalization literature, especially the literature concerned with how housing markets respond to different types of government-supplied information about school quality. Two policy events in the school district provide a rare opportunity in this regard; changes ordered by the federal court supervising the school district present natural experiments for observing the extent to which school characteristics are reflected in the housing market. More importantly for our purposes, the setting and the two policy events themselves highlight the roles of home owners' expectations on measured capitalization.As a legacy of a 40-year desegregation lawsuit, the local school system was under direct federal court control for more than 15 years. In the years preceding our first policy event, students were randomly assigned to individual schools in an effort to equalize racial composition, a method that eliminated school quality as a location-specific house attribute (e.g., it was not unusual for different children in the same family to attend different schools).1 In a surprise move in the summer of 1996, the presiding judge ordered the elimination of random school assignment in favor of stable attendance zones, thereby creating a direct tie between house location and school quality. This change from random to zone school assignment represents a natural experiment and an opportunity to observe how the local housing market values the policy change. Further, in light of the history of the 40-year federal lawsuit and 15 years of direct court control of the local school system, the public had little confidence in the federal court's ability to improve education quality. The overwhelming defeat of a major school tax referendum following the court's creation of school attendance zones is evidence of this lack of confidence. This is precisely the type of environment in which we expect to find little or no systematic capitalization of measured school quality differences.There is evidence that public confidence in the school system improved during the next few years. Enrollments ceased their inexorable declines and stabilized within a few years and, more importantly, voters passed a major school tax referendum at that time as well. Both observations signal an important reversal in public opinion regarding the perceived viability of school reform. …

Cities and counties are overlapping jurisdictions in most US states. Virginia cities, however, are independent of counties, with separate tax bases and residents. This paper examines whether the Virginia system creates a horizontal relationship resembling that among cities in other states. It uses revealed preference axioms to compare spending patterns against competitive median voter benchmarks. The results show that cities and counties in metropolitan areas function like horizontal rivals in the Virginia system, in contrast with the vertical relationship imposed by the overlapping jurisdiction structure in other states.

This paper explains both squatting and preemptive eviction by landowners within the context of incomplete land markets. The model shows that squatting is not inevitable in incomplete property markets; instead, it arises from optimal landowner decisions not to fully exercise property rights. The analysis explains why squatters' housing investments and owners' preemptive eviction rates tend to be higher than efficient and why eviction rates for open property are inefficiently high. It also examines informal land markets comprising potential squatters and owners and shows why they need not fully resolve inefficient squatter investment and landowner eviction decisions.

This paper develops an empirical framework for taking into account the effects of endogenous liquidity on price capitalization estimates. Changes in school attendance zones in the East Baton Rouge Parish public school district provide a natural experiment for studying how changes in school characteristics affect house prices and liquidity. House price and selling time, or liquidity, are simultaneously determined in search markets. The empirical model exploits variation in the surrounding neighborhood market conditions pertinent to each house to identify the system of price and liquidity equations. The estimates are consistent with search-market theory in that liquidity absorbs part of the capitalization of school quality.

Changing demographics, growing real incomes, and friendly tax laws underlie the continuing growth in demand for recreational real estate in the US. The market for recreational property has undergone a major transformation over the past decades, with the refinement and deepening of markets for partial property ownership vehicles. This paper represents the first to analyze the factors underlying the demand for partial ownership interests. It develops a theory of partial ownership demand that focuses on the roles of familiarity and location-specific human capital in mediating the consumption uncertainty associated with particular recreation locations. Using private data from a survey of partial ownership participants, the empirical analysis yields results consistent with the theory: factors associated with greater site-specific recreation price, like distance between the primary residence and the recreation site and frequency of visits per week, reduce the share of ownership demanded, while factors associated with lower consumption risk tend to increase the share of ownership demanded.

This paper evaluates how consumers value differences in neighborhood composition and street layout, factors not previously included in empirical studies of house value. Highly connected street patterns are important to New Urbanism. We use measures of neighborhood street connectivity and their interaction with other neighborhood attributes to evaluate how street layout affects property values. We employ two different methods of indexing street layout. Both methods show layout has a significant impact on price, but conclusions are sensitive to the method used. In pedestrian oriented neighborhoods, a more gridiron-like street pattern increases house value using one measure, but greater connectivity decreases house value using the other. In auto-oriented developments, a more gridiron-like street pattern reduces house value using either measure.

We test the human capital interpretation of the experience-earnings profile. Does the upward sloping portion of the experience-earnings profile reflect on-the-job training which in turn causes the experience-productivity profile to slope upwards, or do purely contractual factors determine the nature of life-cycle earnings. Herein, we provide additional evidence on the relationship between productivity and earnings by examining earnings differentials in the UK academic labor market for economists. Using a test first suggested by Mincer, we find that the empirical results are consistent with human capital theory. We find that, although the positive relationship between earnings and experience persists when individual productivity measures are included in the salary equations for lecturers and senior lecturers, the positive relationship becomes statistically insignificant when the same productivity measures are included in the salary equations for professors. For lecturers and senior lecturers, the experience-salary profile properly reflects the structure of the national pay scale rather than variations in individual research productivity. At the professor level, where individual salaries are not determined by a pay scale, the data support the human capital explanation of the positive experience-earnings profile.

This study examines how individual agents affect house selling prices and time on the market while controlling for brokerage firm-specific effects as well as supply and demand conditions that vary by neighborhood. Firm size effects disappear once firm specialization and agent characteristics are taken into account but geographic concentration by firms leads to higher selling prices. For individual agents, neither sex nor selling own listings affects price or selling time, but there are gains from partnering transactions across firms. Agents who specialize in listing properties obtain higher prices for their sellers while those who specialize in selling obtain lower prices for their buyers. Houses nearer to other transactions of an agent sell for higher prices. Finally, greater scale of listing and selling activity by an agent tends to lower selling price or lengthen the time on the market.

While chronic constipation (CC) has a high prevalence in primary care, there are no existing treatment recommendations to guide health care professionals. To address this, a consensus group of 10 gastroenterologists was formed to develop treatment recommendations. Although constipation may occur as a result of organic disease, the present paper addresses only the management of primary CC or constipation associated with irritable bowel syndrome. The final consensus group was assembled and the recommendations were created following the exact process outlined by the Canadian Association of Gastroenterology for the following areas: epidemiology, quality of life and threshold for treatment; definitions and diagnostic criteria; lifestyle changes; bulking agents and stool softeners; osmotic agents; prokinetics; stimulant laxatives; suppositories; enemas; other drugs; biofeedback and behavioural approaches; surgery; and probiotics. A treatment algorithm was developed by the group for CC and constipation associated with irritable bowel syndrome. Where possible, an evidence-based approach and expert opinions were used to develop the statements in areas with insufficient evidence. The nature of the underlying pathophysiology for constipation is often unclear, and it can be tricky for physicians to decide on an appropriate treatment strategy for the individual patient. The myriad of treatment options available to Canadian physicians can be confusing; thus, the main aim of the recommendations and treatment algorithm is to optimize the approach in clinical care based on available evidence.