Working paper library

The Economic Geography of Digital Retail Supply: Product Diversity, Regional Specialization, and the Hidden Structure of Quebec's Online Economy

Evidence from 390,108 product listings of 1,569 Quebec online stores across 17 administrative regions (Fabri-Ka snapshot, 1 November 2026)

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v1.0

Can product-level online catalogues reveal the spatial organisation, diversity and specialization of a regional retail economy beyond what business counts show? This paper studies one read-only snapshot (1 November 2026) of Fabri-Ka, an aggregator of the public catalogues of 1,569 Quebec-based online stores (390,108…

The Hidden Architecture of Grocery Prices: Promotions, Retail Competition, and the Cost of Living in Quebec

Evidence from 300,613 posted-price events across 54 Quebec grocery feeds, August–November 2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v1.0

Grocery prices are not a single inflation process. Using a read-only research copy of Food-Ka, a Quebec grocery price aggregator, the paper assembles an auditable panel of 124,579 listings from 54 active source feeds (26 retail companies, two channels: online storefronts and weekly circulars) observed every seven…

The Hidden Dynamics of Used-Car Markets: Price Discovery, Inventory Liquidity, and Strategic Dealer Behavior

Evidence from a Daily Panel of 273,265 Quebec Listings

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · November 2026 · v1.0

The paper studies price discovery and liquidity in the Quebec used-car market with a daily panel of 273,265 dealer listings observed by the aggregator Auto-Ka between 12 August and 1 November 2026, with every asking-price change and listing disappearance recorded about seven times a day. Hedonic models with flexible…

Can Autonomous AI Agents Discover the Fundamental Value of Real Estate? Evidence from Quebec Transactions and Multi-Agent Deliberation

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

Committees of role-specialised language-model agents that debate before answering are increasingly proposed as valuation tools. This paper asks whether the debate adds information. In a preregistered experiment on 631,866 arm's-length residential sales registered in Quebec between 2021 and 2026, evaluated under a…

Beyond Hedonic Models: Spatiotemporal, Hierarchical and Probabilistic Architectures for Residential Real Estate Price Forecasting

A pseudo-real-time evaluation on 632,000 Quebec transactions and 82 local market indices, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper asks whether new forecasting architectures improve residential price forecasts over strong conventional methods, and under which conditions. Using the audited Quebec land-registry sample of UQO Working Paper 22 (632,006 sales, 2021–2026) and its real-time quality-adjusted index vintages, it defines three…

SHARP-HPI: A Spatially Hierarchical, Adaptive and Robust Framework for Quality-Adjusted Housing Price Indices

Monthly municipal indices for Quebec from 770,000 registered sales, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.0

This paper develops and evaluates SHARP-HPI, a framework for monthly quality-adjusted housing price indices at the municipal level in thin markets. Stage one is a robust pooled hedonic regression with fine-scale location fixed effects, smoothly time-varying quality prices and provincial month effects; stage two models…

Does the Sales Comparison Approach Actually Work? A Large-Scale Point-in-Time Validation of Comparable Selection, Price Adjustments, and Value Reconciliation

Evidence from 391,000 Single-Family Transactions in Quebec, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

The sales comparison approach is the dominant method of residential valuation, yet its operating rules — how many comparables to use, how far and how far back to search, which adjustments to apply, how to weight and reconcile — rest largely on professional convention. This paper subjects these rules to a…

Hedonic House Pricing with Language-Model and Vision Features: Evidence from Quebec Real-Estate Listings

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v2.1

Hedonic house-price models are bounded by the characteristics an analyst can measure, yet much of a home's value is recorded only in the free-text description and photographs of its listing. This paper treats general-purpose AI models as a feature-engineering technology: a large language model converts each…

Half a Million Prices, Twenty Models

A Systematic Assessment of Hedonic Specifications and Estimation Methods for the Quebec Housing Market, 2021–2026

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

Fifty years after Rosen (1974), applied hedonic practice still rests on specification choices (functional form, temporal controls, spatial controls, estimation method) that are made by convention and rarely stress-tested jointly. Using 514,212 Quebec residential sales (2021–2026) whose structural descriptors come from…

The Assessment Gap in Quebec

Vertical and Horizontal Inequity in Municipal Property Valuation: Evidence from 522,769 Sales Matched to the Assessment Roll

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

Municipal property taxes are levied on assessed values, so any systematic relationship between assessment ratios and market value redistributes the tax burden within a municipality. This paper matches 522,769 residential sales recorded in Quebec between 2021 and 2026 to the triennial assessment rolls of 625…

Airbnb, Residential Rents, and Housing Market Pressure: A Hedonic and Spatial Econometric Analysis

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper examines the relationship between short-term rental (STR) activity and residential rents in Quebec, Canada, using a 2026 cross-section of 3,456 Airbnb listings and 8,303 residential rental listings with precise coordinates. For each rental listing the number of Airbnb listings within 250 m, 500 m, 1 km and…

Hedonic Pricing of Short-Term Rental Properties: A Multi-Method Analysis of Airbnb Listing Prices in Quebec

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

This paper estimates hedonic price functions for a province-wide cross-section of Airbnb listings in Quebec, Canada, from a scrape of 5,000 listing cards collected in early 2026 (3,456 with a displayed price). The displayed price field is bimodal: about 28% of priced listings, mostly small Montreal rental units, show…

Decoding Real Estate Descriptions: Semantic Embeddings and Hedonic Pricing of Residential Properties in Quebec

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.2

Broker-written listing descriptions contain information about housing quality that structured hedonic variables omit. This paper proposes an interpretable way to use that information: sentence-transformer embeddings of 17,087 single-family listings from Quebec are projected, by cosine similarity, onto 20…

Heterogeneous Amenity Capitalization in the Quebec Residential Market: A Spatial Quantile Regression Approach

Simon-Pierre Boucher · UQO Working Papers · October 2026 · v1.1

Hedonic regressions estimated at the conditional mean impose a single implicit price for each housing attribute across the price distribution. This paper asks whether the capitalisation of neighbourhood amenities into Quebec residential asking prices varies along the conditional price distribution, and whether it…