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This paper describes the sampling methods and estimation techniques employed by the Economics Research Centre (CypERC) for the construction of property price indices for Cyprus. More specifically, the research described here aims at enhancing the existing knowledge on property price behaviour in Cyprus by: (a) building a new database, using newspaper advertisements of monthly prices and related information about various types of property (houses, flats, plots, etc.) in different districts of Cyprus over the post2000 period; (b) developing models for the estimation of property price indices that can provide a measure of the quarterly change in property prices, together with an assessment of the reliability of this measure. This paper revises the estimation methodology in Karagiannakis et al. (2015) to take into account the effects of different data sources on property prices.

The effects of free of charge state education on income distribution are often studied by allocating government education outlays to households, assuming that these outlays equal the benefit which households attach to state schooling. This paper proposes a demand analysis approach to estimating the 'true' value of state education as perceived by consumers, and uses the results to assess the inefficiency of public provision. Empirical analysis based on data from Cyprus suggests that state schooling costs twice the amount households are willing to pay for. The implications of this finding for the equality and anti-poverty effects of state education are illustrated. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. 125 303 305 303-305

In spite of major advances in the theoretical, positive and normative, literature analysing the welfare implications of public provision of private goods, empirical investigation is often limited to contingent valuation studies, for example, of health care programmes. In this article we argue that when a market for a (subsidised or free of charge) publicly provided good exists, a consumer demand approach can be used to construct a money metric of welfare corresponding to the consumption of public provision. We illustrate this approach in investigating age and income effects on household demand for health care in Cyprus, where free public provision is not universal and those entitled to it often resort to private supplementation. Our findings suggest that the money metric of welfare, which consumers attach to free access to publicly provided health care, varies with age and to a lesser extent with household income.

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The gender wage gap in paid employment was studied using data from the 1991 Survey of Household Expenditure and Income for Cyprus, a country which aspires to join the European Union. Selection from a sample which includes more than paid employees was taken into account. It was found that average weekly wages for women are about 60 percent of those for men. Approximately 60 percent of the observed gender gap can be explained by differences in average characteristics but much of this explanation includes the results of industry and occupation choices, and opportunities in these populations. 14 311 329 311-329

This paper investigates the willingness of households to pay for academic and equality-inducing (deprivation-compensating) components of the Contextual Value Added (CVA) indicator of school quality used in England. Semi-parametric and parametric analysis shows that consumers are willing to pay for houses in the catchment area of primary and secondary schools with high academic achievement, as measured by the mean score; whereas, the component of the CVA indicating equality-inducing aspects of school performance is found to have a positive effect only on the price of houses in the catchment area of primary schools in London; its impact on the price of houses elsewhere is mostly negative. The role played by the CVA as a guide to choosing a school and the implications which our results can have for school funding are considered.

"The European Union's energy and climate policy package is expected to cause an increase in end-user prices of electricity and fuels. This paper assesses the distributional effects of these price increases in Cyprus by specifying and estimating a consumer demand system with price heterogeneity between households. This novel method allows obtaining robust parameter estimates even when household expenditure surveys are limited, as is the case in many European countries. The empirical analysis is conducted both conditional on energy-related household characteristics and unconditionally. We then use the estimated demand system to conduct welfare analysis. We find that the rise in energy prices results in welfare losses of EUR 101 per household (in 2009 prices) in year 2020, or a nationwide welfare loss of more than EUR'2009 33 million. Price increases will be regressive and will affect small and urban households more strongly than the rest of the population. Furthermore, we find that the largest proportion of welfare loss is due to loss of household's income purchasing power caused by higher energy prices, while the changes in relative prices induce deadweight loss which is a small part of welfare loss because of the limited substitutability of energy with other goods."–Editor.