Statistical Testing of the effect of Recession on the Housing Prices in University Towns

Hypothesis: University towns have their mean housing prices less effected by recessions.

Performs a Student's t-test to validate the statistical significance of this hypothesis using real world data.

Files in the repository

• City_Zhvi_AllHomes.csv - Median home sale prices at a fine grained level for all homes at a city level from the Zillow research data site for housing data in the United States.
• university_towns.txt - A list of university towns in the United States which has been copy pasted from the Wikipedia page on college towns
• gdplev.xls - The GDP over time of the United States in current dollars (using the chained value in 2009 dollars), in quarterly intervals from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Department of Commerce.
• ttest.py - Contains code for appropriate cleaning and pre-processing the data before performing the t-test to compare the ratio of the mean price of houses in university towns the quarter before the recession starts compared to the recession bottom.

Definitions of the terms used in the repository

• A quarter is a specific three month period, Q1 is January through March, Q2 is April through June, Q3 is July through September, Q4 is October through December.
• A recession is defined as starting with two consecutive quarters of GDP decline, and ending with two consecutive quarters of GDP growth.
• A recession bottom is the quarter within a recession which had the lowest GDP.
• A university town is a city which has a high percentage of university students compared to the total population of the city.