JOURNAL OF HOUSING ECONOMICS 5, 290–301 (1996)ARTICLE NO. 0015

BOOK REVIEW

DENISE DIPASQUALE AND WILLIAM C. WHEATON, Urban Economics andReal Estate Markets. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Prentice Hall, 1996.378 pp.

This is a super book. It is certainly the most important book in real estateeconomics over the last quarter-century. It is also arguably the best bookin urban economics since the first edition of Edwin Mills’ textbook UrbanEconomics which to a large extent defined urban economics as a field.

Despite its title, the book does not attempt a comprehensive overviewof urban economics, nor does it provide more than an introduction to realestate finance. Rather, it applies urban economics to study the real side ofreal estate. In so doing, it redefines (real) real estate economics as a partof urban economics, thereby enriching both fields.

This book review will be unconventional. One can fault the book for notcovering this topic or that topic, but it is impossible nowadays to write acomprehensive book in any field, and choice of topics is largely a matterof taste and professional experience. Apart from this, I have no seriouscriticisms of the book. In fact, I wish I had the range of talents to docomparable work. So I dithered in deciding how to review a book that Ijudge to be in all respects excellent. I considered writing a two word review.‘‘Read it.’’ But that would have been a cop-out. I finally decided to organizemy review into three sections, the first discussing what makes the book sogood, the second considering the book as a textbook, and the third proceed-ing linearly through the book, focusing on selected issues.

1. WHAT MAKES THE BOOK SO GOOD?

Back perhaps a decade ago, I checked out real estate economics. I can’tremember exactly why, but I think I was starting work on the role ofvacancies in housing market adjustment and wanted to see what had beendone by real estate economists. Perhaps I picked out the wrong books, butI was almost embarrassed. While the books were informative and no doubtuseful to the real estate practitioner, they were pedestrian in the extremeand what little economics they contained was not even at the level of asuperior principles textbook. By the standards of the field at that time, apresent value calculation was high theory. The field was indeed an intellec-tual backwater.

2901051-1377/96 $18.00Copyright 1996 by Academic Press, Inc.All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Over the past decade, there has been a revolution in real estate econom-ics—much as there was in urban economics two decades earlier. From acasual perusal of Real Estate Economics (previously the AREUEA Journal)and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, now the two topjournals in real estate economics, it is evident that real estate is now verymuch in the mainstream. The revolution started in real estate finance. Withthe development of the secondary mortgage market came the need to pricemortgage-backed securities, and option-pricing theory was there ready tobe applied. That theory has subsequently been applied to real options—thepricing of real estate under uncertainty. There have been other majordevelopments on the real side of real estate economics. Principal–agent/mechanism-design/contract theory has been extensively applied to incen-tive problems in real estate, most notably to real estate brokerage but alsoto incentive contracting in real estate development. Game theory has beenapplied to the land assembly problem and to tax competition betweenlocal governments. Several strands of modern macroeconomic theory havebeen adapted to real estate macroeconomics: monopolistic competition/matching/search models, imperfect capital markets and the credit transmis-sion mechanism of monetary policy, and the new economic dynamics. Atthe same time, the level of sophistication of empirical work has increasedimpressively. The application of time series econometrics to real estatedynamics is particularly noteworthy.

One thing that makes this book so good is that it is thorougly modern.It touches on all the recent developments and brings the reader right tothe research frontier on all the topics treated. At the same time, it avoidsfaddishness, using the new tools and perspectives where appropriate, butnot overemphasizing them at the expense of traditional theory.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is that, by applying thebest tools—old and new—consistently and coherently to a broad range oftopics in real estate economics, it redefines real estate economics and bringsit squarely into the mainstream. Just as Mills’ textbook defined the newurban economics, Atkinson and Stiglitz’ textbook Lectures on Public Eco-nomics the new public economics, and Tirole’s textbook The Theory ofIndustrial Organization the new industrial organization, so this book defines(the real side of) the new real estate economics. Through its organizationof topics, it provides a conceptual integration and bird’s-eye view of thefield, and through its asides on what we don’t know and its emphases, itprovides a broad and coherent research agenda. Without question, thebook will shape the direction of the field for many years to come.

Another great strength of the book is its method. Economics, or at leastmodern applied economics, has been so successful largely because of itsmethod. The method has two main components. The first is model-basedreasoning. The collection of mainstream models in economics provides a

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kit-bag of tools, and much of the art of applied economics, which distin-guishes the technician from the gifted economist, is the ability to choosethe right set of tools for the job at hand. The second is the interplay betweenmodels on the one hand and data and real phenomena on the other. Thisbook does a really marvelous job of presenting data and then building amodel broadly consistent with the data, or of presenting a model and thenshowing how it fits the facts. Many students are very resistant to abstractmodel-based reasoning. They do not appreciate how models organize one’sthoughts about a complex real-world problem. Neither, due to lack ofexperience, do they perceive how useful models are in practical application,nor do they understand the didactic value of models in training one tothink analytically. American students especially, with their strong trainingin critical thinking, their desire for instant intellectual gratification, andtheir insistence on relevance, are not impressed when told to take it onfaith that model-based reasoning is the best way to learn economics. Thisbook should persuade even the most skeptical student of the power ofmodels, not by preaching but by repeated application and osmosis.

Although it is now out of print, I continue to teach my graduate publicfinance course using Atkinson and Stiglitz’ textbook. Contrary to whatsome of my students think at the time (though not in retrospect, I hope),the reason I do so is not laziness but a desire to expose the students toreally first-class economic reasoning (as well as to the core models andtopics). Much the same goes for this book, though its style of reasoning issignificantly different. Atkinson and Stiglitz’ style is more theoretical anda priorist. This book’s approach is more positivist: Here are the empiricalcharacteristics of the issues at hand. How can we use models to understandwhat’s going on? The level of economic reasoning is consistently excellent—not simply without error, but combining good plain common sense (thehallmark of the good applied economist but not of the theorist!) with greatintelligence and a high level of intellectual sophistication. I would muchprefer to teach out of this book which shows real intellectual distinctionthan out of a book whose coverage is more comprehensive but whosetreatment is prosaic.

This book displays not only intellectual distinction but also distinctionin presentation. The book is remarkably well-written. American technicalstyle is designed for clarity but is often terribly dull. This book’s style iscertainly clear but is also about as lively and conversational as the rules ofAmerican technical style permit. The book also does a superb job of ex-plaining the economic concepts in words, even though many of the conceptsare abstract, techincal, and/or advanced.

While perhaps not contributing to the book’s excellence, there were twoother features of the book I liked. The first was it modesty. The treatmentof topics was consistently state-of-the-art and for some topics new material

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was presented. As well, for many of the topics the authors have madesignificant research contributions and for several were the research pio-neers, but one would not know this from reading the book. But there areno drumrolls or fanfares, or inflated claims of seminal contributions. Thefocus is sharply on the subject matter. The book’s choice of topics doesreflect the authors’ research contributions, but it is only natural to concen-trate on what one has thought deeply about and believes to be important.The second feature is the quality of the printing job—high-quality paper,clear printing, excellent copy-editing and mathematical typesetting, andbeautifully done figures. No doubt this is because the book was writtenand published as a textbook. Nevertheless, the editors at Prentice Hall cantake bibliophilic pride in a job well-done.1

All in all, this book is beautifully crafted, so much so that part of mypleasure in reading it was aesthetic.

2. APPROPRIATENESS AS A TEXTBOOK

In the preface the authors state that ‘‘the book [was designed] for usein advanced undergraduate courses in real estate and urban economics andin graduate level courses in business schools and schools of public policyand planning . . . [and assumes only] one course in economics principles. . . [and] a solid knowledge of high school mathematics’’ (p. ix). In econom-ics articles and textbooks, there is a high correlation between the level ofmathematics employed and the level of conceptual sophistication. Thisbook, with its combination of conceptual sophistication and elementarymathematics, is an outlier. Does this combination work?

It does for the professional economist. The book is so well-written thatthe use of words rather than mathematics is not bothersome. I am not sure,however, that the book will be popular in the classroom. For 20 years I havebeen teaching a model-based course in undergraduate urban economics thatemploys the same combination of conceptual sophistication and elementarymathematics. I encounter resistance from all but the best students, stemmingI think from their frustration at finding it so difficult to follow an extendedanalytical argument, whether it be in words or mathematics. I persist inmy approach since I view it as part of an undergraduate economics teacher’smission to get students to think like economists. I do, however, get discour-aged on occasion. This book is not as extreme as my course. It does abetter job of relating theory to observation, illustrating how useful themodels are in practical applications, and generally motivating the material.It also spells out the arguments in more detail and provides more down-

1 I do, however, have two cavils: I object to the plasticized cover and to the lurid cover design.

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to-earth intuition. Nevertheless, I think that adoption of this book as thecentral text for a course at all but the very best universities would resultin considerable wailing and gnashing of teeth. I am not going to adviseagainst adoption, however, since too many undergraduate courses andcourses in professional schools take the low road, with the result that moststudents never really learn to reason. Perhaps a happy compromise wouldbe to use an easier book as the principal required book and this book asthe secondary required book. That way students would be exposed to first-class economic reasoning without being frustrated at failing to master themore difficult material for examinations, and the best students would receivesome intellectual nourishment.

Both the authors have taught at only the very top schools and may failto appreciate how steep the intelligence gradient is as one moves down therankings. I would like to be wrong but I doubt the book will be a bestseller.

I do not think, however, that it was a mistake to write the book as atextbook. It should be adopted at the top schools. Through those studentsgetting jobs at a broad range of schools, the new (real) real estate economicsthat this book defines will filter through the field.

A final comment. This book is not appropriate as the central book in anurban economics course. Its coverage is too narrow. Virtually no space isdevoted to urban transportation and little to urban public finance—two ofthe main subfields of urban economics. Its perspective is not a standardone in urban economics. There is very little discussion of public policy ingeneral or housing policy in particular, or of many important topics inurban economics, including pollution, crime, and race. It would, however, bean excellent supplementary text for the spatial economic, housing economic,and urban macroeconomic sections of a graduate course in urban eco-nomics.

3. SUBJECT MATTER

The core of the book is divided into two quite distinct parts. The first,‘‘Microeconomic Analysis of Property Markets,’’ does a superb job ofapplying modern urban economics to the study of property markets. Thereis not much here that will be new to the average urban economist. Partlythis is because most major theoretical advances in urban economics camein the 1970s, but also there is little discussion of more recent developments.Nevertheless, its synthesis of mainstream spatial and housing economics ismost impressive. It succeeds admirably in expositing the basic material andin conveying a bird’s-eye view of how competitive property markets work.The second part, ‘‘Macroeconomic Analysis of Property Markets,’’ is lesspolished but more intellectually stimulating, at least for the specialist. The

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new urban economics is applied microeconomics. Its development resultedin the accumulation of an impressive body of theory, but inadvertentlydeflected interest away from urban macroeconomics. Only very re-cently—in the past five years or so—have urban economists started thinkingagain about urban macroeconomics. The authors have been leaders in thisresurgence and the material presented in this section actually goes beyondthe state of the art. I found this part very exciting and believe it will spark anexplosion of interest and research in urban and real estate macroeconomics.

Having presented a broad overview of the book, I shall now work myway through it section by section. Rather than provide a comprehensivereview I shall restrict my comments to aspects that I found particularly inter-esting.

● Section One: Introduction to Real Estate Markets● Chapter 1: The Property and Capital Markets● Chapter 2: The Operation of Property Markets: A Micro and

Macro ApproachBecause of its almost exclusive reliance on static (but sometimes interpre-

ted as stationary state) models, the new urban economics blurred the distinc-tion between property values and rents, and between the asset and usemarkets for housing. This book consistently draws the distinction betweenthe two markets sharply and integrates the analysis of the two marketsvery nicely.2

● Section Two: Microeconomic Analysis of Property Markets● Chapter 3: The Urban Land Market: Rents and Prices● Chapter 4: The Urban Housing Market: Structural Attributes

and Density● Chapter 5: Firm Site Selection, Employment Decentralization, and

Multicentered Cities● Chapter 6: Retail Location and Market Competition

One of the main points at issue in modeling housing markets is whetherthe housing market should be treated as perfectly competitive or imperfectlycompetitive. The appropriate choice is to some extent an empirical issuebut also depends on the modeling context. My view is that in most positive,microeconomic analysis the benefit in simplification achieved by the com-petitive assumption outweighs the cost of some loss in descriptive realism.But the competitive assumption is far from innocuous in policy analysissince it begs the question concerning the efficiency of market equilibriumand hence of the potential desirability of government intervention. As

2 Two quibbles: First, since rent is a price, I prefer to refer to the asset price of housing ashousing value rather than as housing price. Second, von Thunen rather than Ricardo deservesthe distinction as the father of urban spatial economics. von Thunen’s theory of agriculturalland rent and land use was based on differences in accessibility, which is the defining featureof the monocentric city model, while Ricardo’s was based on differences in fertility.

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well, given the apparent importance of vacancies in the housing marketadjustment process, the competitive assumption is probably inappropriatein models of the microfoundations of housing macroeconomics. The au-thors’ treatment is consistent with my views.

Every reader will be disappointed by omission of some of her favoritetopics. I, for instance, was disappointed that the authors did not discussfiltering models a la Sweeney or the effects of uncertainty on the assetprice of housing, or devote more attention to dynamic, spatial models ofdurable housing with and without redevelopment. Nevertheless, I approveof the authors’ selective approach. The basics are well-covered and instruc-tors can add material as they wish. Also, because the authors wrote ontopics in which they have a special interest, the book has sparkle, in contrastto the soporific quality of most principles textbooks.

The authors’ omission of filtering models from Chap. 4 raises a broaderissue. How does residential real estate economics, which this book treats,differ from housing economics? There is considerable overlap, but thereare also significant differences which stem, I think, from differences inintended application. Residential real estate economics looks at the housingmarket from the landlord/developer’s perspective, while housing economicstends to take a policymaker’s more prescriptive and typically more interven-tionist point of view. It is noteworthy that this book makes no referenceto race or poverty.

The comment has frequently been made that urban economics has devel-oped an impressive body of theory to describe a type of city that no longerexists—the monocentric city. This comment neglects that the theory hasbroad application if ‘‘distance to the CBD’’ is interpreted as a metaphorfor accessibility. However, with respect to the theory’s ability to describethe actual spatial structure of cities, the comment is on the mark. Chapter5 provides a nice introduction to the emerging literature on employmentdecentralization and subcentering, with a particularly nice discussion of thesimultaneous determination of rents and wages over location.3

A difficult decision in writing a book on urban economics is how totreat spatial competition theory/strategic firm location theory/classicalretail competition theory—the vast literature that has evolved from the‘‘Hotelling ice-cream sellers’ problem,’’ in which two ice-cream sellersdecide where to locate on a beach and what price to charge.4 The theoryhas evolved largely independently of urban economics and employs the

3 One feature of Chaps. 5 and 6 puzzled me. The authors provide much of their data onthe distribution of employment in the Boston area (Figs. 5.3, 5.4, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 5.10, 6.1, and6.2) in terms of employment shares for its 146 cities and towns (e.g., Boston had 16.5% ofthe area’s retail jobs in 1990). I fail to see how this is more informative than providing thedata in per capita terms.

4 In fact, Hotelling’s paper makes no mention of ice-cream sellers.

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tools of game theory rather than of competitive equilibrium analysis.The models are fun to work through, but most of the results are somodel-specific that one is left wondering what general insights theliterature provides. Chapter 6 provides a fair and sensible treatment. Itsbasic theme is that classical retail competition theory does provide somebroad insights into the strategic aspects of retail location, but becauseit assumes unrealistically that a consumer makes a separate shoppingtrip for each good purchased (modeling trip chains/multi-purpose tripshas proved formidably difficult) is deficient as a basis for empirical work.The authors present a promising alternative model based on discretechoice theory in which consumers visit alternative shopping centers withprobabilities that depend on the centers’ characteristics, and then onceat a center visit a particular store with a probability that dependson the characteristics of that store and all the other stores in theshopping center.

● Section Three: Macroeconomic Analysis of Property Markets● Chapter 7: Economic Growth and Metropolitan Real Estate

Markets● Chapter 8: The Market for Housing Units: Households, Prices,

and Financing● Chapter 9: The Market for Housing Services: Moving, Sales,

and Vacancy● Chapter 10: The Cyclical Behavior of Metropolitan Housing

Markets● Chapter 11: The Operation of Nonresidential Property Markets● Chapter 12: Econometric Analysis of Metropolitan Office and

Industrial MarketsRegional economics has remained a backwater, employing much the

same base multipliers, shift-share analysis, input–output models, and unso-phisticated macro models as it did 25 years ago. To a considerable extent,the lack of interest the profession has shown in the field is understandable.Much like physics and biology, the glamorous fields in economics focus onthe very small (microeconomic theory) or the very large (macroeconomictheory). The messy, practical middle ground tends to be microeconomicswrit large or macroeconomics writ small. The unattractiveness of the fieldis compounded by its being an applied field hampered by serious datadeficiencies and sponsored by state governments which tend to be neithergenerous in funding research nor discriminating in its evaluation. Chapter7 demonstrates, however, that it is possible to do very interesting work byadapting and supplementing the traditional tools of the field. The center-piece of the chapter is a three-sector model of metropolitan economicgrowth that accounts for the interaction between the output market, thelabor market, and the real estate market. It is the inclusion of the real

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estate market that makes the model especially interesting. Perhaps it istime to develop a ‘‘new’’ regional economics.

Chapter 8 provides an insightful overview of a potpourri of topics relatingto the housing market: demographics, tenure choice, mortgages and themortgage market, and the effect of federal tax policy on the user cost ofcapital in housing. A curious omission from this chapter and indeed fromthe entire book is a discussion of the industrial organization of real estatedevelopment. The authors seem just to assume that builder-developers actcompetitively. This is standard but not self-evident. The friction of spaceconfers market power; imperfect capital markets may give large establisheddevelopers a significant advantage; housing is a highly differentiated prod-uct; and developers go to great lengths to hide their intentions in acquiringlarge, contiguous blocks of land even though ‘‘economies of contiguity’’are probably small. In any event, the supply side of the real estate marketmerits more attention.

Chapters 9 through 12 are the most original in the book, containingmaterial that is either new or very recent. From the specialist’s point of view,they are the most exciting, but from a student’s, probably the least coherent.

What approach should be adopted in developing a macroeconomics ofreal estate markets and in analyzing real estate cycles? The current wisdomseems to be that nonbehavioral time series models, which focus on the errorstructure, perform better in short-term forecasting but are outperformed bybehavioral models over the medium and long term. Since most agents inreal estate markets are concerned with the medium term, behavioral modelswhich pay considerable attention to the error structure are probably themost promising. There seems to be a consensus that vacancies perform acrucial role in real estate market adjustment and at least a dominant viewthat a real estate market has a steady-state structural vacancy rate akin tothe natural rate of unemployment, with movement around the structuralrate. What is needed, therefore, are behaviorally based models that generatea structural vacancy rate and has sensible transient dynamics.

Many housing economists have commented on the broad analogies be-tween labor markets and housing markets. There are many types of labor-economic-theoretic models which generate a natural rate of unemployment,and it should be possible to adapt almost all of them to generate sensiblemodels of housing vacancies. However, the small literature on the subject,including Chapter 9, puts search and matching at center stage. Even control-ling for quality, housing units are highly differentiated, as are households’tastes over housing characteristics. This suggests that a typical householdis willing to search extensively for a unit that suits its tastes. On the otherside of the market, a typical seller (a landlord in the rental market) realizesthat, because of heterogeneity in taste, different households have differentreservation prices. This gives the seller market power and she will choose

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price trading off a higher price against a longer expected time-to-sale. Sinceentry into the housing market and exit from it are essentially free, theequilibrium is monopolistically competitive, with excess capacity manifest-ing itself as vacancies. Such models hold considerable promise for providingsound microfoundations for housing market macroeconomics. Indeed, Iforecast that research along these lines will be one of the major thrustsof not only real estate economics but also urban economics in the nextfew years.

The model of equilibrium vacancies presented in Chap. 9 has somerestrictive features; it assumes that all mobility is internal to the marketand that a household buys a new (nouveau) home before putting its oldone on the market. But the general insights it provides are broad.

One of my pet peeves is the unthinking application of standard macroinvestment (stock-flow) models to housing markets. For one thing, in con-trast to those models, the presence of land results in an upward-slopinglong-run average cost curve (with land price endogenous). For another,models in the Sweeney tradition suggest that the housing market is seg-mented. At higher qualities where new construction occurs, values andrents are supply-determined—determined by construction costs and thecost of capital, respectively. But at lower qualities, where most of thehousing is hand-me-down, values and rents are largely demand-determined.Chapter 10 presents an investment-type macroeconomic model of a metro-politan housing market (somewhat surprisingly making no mention of va-cancies). While it ignores the Sweeney insight (which may be empiricallyunimportant) it does take land into account. Of particular interest is thesharp contrast in the transient behavior of the model under alternativeexpectational hypotheses—adjustment is much smoother under perfectforesight than under myopic or adaptive expectations. This is not surprisingbut somewhat discouraging since it suggests that the properties of realestate cycles depend heavily on expectations, which are notoriously difficultto model and to forecast. I anticipate that the next few years will see thedevelopment of a new generation of housing macroeconomic forecastingmodels that build on the microfoundations provided by models which high-light vacancy adjustment, such as the one presented in Chap. 9.

Investment-type forecasting models of the housing market have beenaround for almost 30 years. Remarkably, however, until recent work byWheaton, in co-authorship with Raymond Torto, there has to my knowledgebeen no comparable work on nonresidential—industrial, office, and retail—property markets. Thus, Chaps. 11 and 12 open up an almost entirely newand very important line of research. Research on these markets, despitetheir obvious importance, has been so slow to develop because of thepaucity of data. Wheaton and Torto have done the profession a real serviceby compiling and guesstimating many of the needed time series. The chap-

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ters are not easy reading because of their necessary preoccupation withdata issues. But the struggle is worth the effort. Chapter 11 documents thecyclical pattern of commercial and industrial construction. Office construc-tion is highly volatile and seems to have a cycle of its own, while officevacancy rates are both high on average and volatile. Industrial constructionis considerably less volatile and more closely tied to the business cycle, andthe average vacancy rate is lower. The chapter also discusses the ‘‘tenure’’characteristics of the two property markets, with multi-tenant rental undercomplex, long-term leasing contracts being the norm in the office marketand ownership or single-tenant leasing the norm in the industrial market.Chapter 12 develops two econometric forecasting models, one for officespace in San Francisco and the other for industrial space in Philadelphia,both of which treat vacancy adjustment explicitly.

Long lags in development, the length and nature of leases (which oftenentail the building owner sharing risk with the tenant), and the volatilityof expectations and underlying demand all probably play a role in explainingwhy office markets are so volatile. But why is the average vacancy ratehigher in the office market than in the industrial market? Adapting theheterogeneity argument advanced earlier to explain structural vacancy inthe housing market, one would expect that the commercial structural va-cancy rate is high because prospective tenants are willing to search a longtime to find just the right space. Intuitively, however, one would expectindustrial space to be at least as heterogeneous, reflecting the technologicalparticularities of different production processes. The proximate reason thisdoes not translate into a high structural vacancy rate for industrial spaceis that many producers have their space built specially for them. Why doesthis not occur in the office market as well—perhaps because commercialfirms are concerned more with location than layout?

● Section Four: The Impact of Local Government on Real EstateMarkets

● Chapter 13: Local Governments, Property Taxes, and Real Es-tate Markets

● Chapter 14: Public Goods, Externalities, and Development Regu-lation

These two chapters provide a useful, though somewhat cursory overviewof the role of local governments, the policies they employ, and the impactsof these policies on real estate markets.

4. CONCLUSIONS

Without question, this is a very important book. The microeconomicssection does a masterful job of applying urban economics to the microeco-nomics of property markets. The macroeconomics section provides a stimu-

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lating overview of the emerging fields of urban and real estate macroeco-nomics, implicitly laying out a challenging research agenda. Together thetwo sections define the real side of the new real estate economics, muchas Edwin Mills’ textbook defined the new urban economics. The book isa pleasure to read: the style is clear and sprightly; the organization isvery good; the interplay between models and data is excellently done; thematerial covered is consistently interesting; and the macroeconomics sectionin particular conveys the excitement of entering uncharted waters. Mostof all, the book is beautifully reasoned, displaying superb economic intelli-gence and intuition. Not only is this a defining book in real estate economics,it is also arguably the best book that has been written in applied urbaneconomics. Despite its accessible style and its minimal use of mathematics,it is probably conceptually too difficult for use as a textbook at all but thevery top universities. Nevertheless, it is bound to have a huge impact.Read it.

RICHARD ARNOTT

Boston CollegeChestnut Hill, Massachusetts