Location, Location, Location: The Role of Objective Neighborhood Characteristics for Perceptions of Control.

INTRODUCTION: Control beliefs can protect against age-related declines in functioning. It is unclear whether neighborhood characteristics shape how much control people perceive over their life. This article studies associations of neighborhood characteristics with control beliefs of residents of a diverse metropolitan area (Berlin, Germany). METHODS: We combine self-report data about perceptions of control obtained from participants in the Berlin Aging Study II (N = 507, 60-87 years, 51% women) with multisource geo-referenced indicators of neighborhood characteristics using linear regression models. RESULTS: Findings indicate that objective neighborhood characteristics (i.e., unemployment rate) are indeed tied to perceptions of control, in particular, how much control participants feel others have over their lives. Including neighborhood characteristics in part doubled the amount of explained variance compared with a reference model covarying for demographic characteristics only (from R2 = 0.017 to R2 = 0.030 for internal control beliefs; R2 = 0.056 to R2 = 0.102 for external control beliefs in chance; R2 = 0.006 to R2 = 0.030 for external control beliefs in powerful others). DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION: Findings highlight the importance of access to neighborhood resources for control beliefs across old age and can inform interventions to build up neighborhood characteristics which might be especially helpful in residential areas with high unemployment.

Real estate listings and their usefulness for hedonic regressions.

Real estate platforms provide a new source of data which has already been used as a substitute for transaction data in hedonic regression applications. This paper asks whether it is valid to do so in the established research areas of (1) willingness to pay estimation, (2) automated valuations, and (3) price index construction. It therefore compares listings and transaction data and regression results derived from them. We find that ask prices stochastically dominate sale prices, mainly because the composition of characteristics differs between the two data sets. But estimates of implicit prices also differ. As a result, willingness to pay estimates from listings data can be widely off when compared with estimates from transaction data. Listings data are not very useful to predict market values of individual houses either, as these predictions suffer from upward bias and large error variance. We find, however, that an ask price index complements a sale price index, as it is useful for nowcasting. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00181-020-01992-3.

In search of features that constitute an "enriched environment" in humans: Associations between geographical properties and brain structure.

Enriched environments elicit brain plasticity in animals. In humans it is unclear which environment is enriching. Living in a city has been associated with increased amygdala activity in a stress paradigm, and being brought up in a city with increased pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) activity. We set out to identify geographical characteristics that constitute an enriched environment affecting the human brain. We used structural equation modelling on 341 older adults to establish three latent brain factors (amygdala, pACC and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)) to test the effects of forest, urban green, water and wasteland around the home address. Our results reveal a significant positive association between the coverage of forest and amygdala integrity. We conclude that forests may have salutogenic effects on the integrity of the amygdala. Since cross-sectional data does not allow causal inference it could also be that individuals with high structural integrity choose to live closer to forest.