The Affordability of Adequate Housing

A "quality-based" measure of housing affordability problems employing the cost of housing just meeting adequacy standards is proposed as an improvement over the conventional "high" rent-to-income criterion. Based on Annual Housing Survey data, affordability difficulties grew between 1975 and 1983 by either measure. The conventional measure, however, overestimated the extent of quality-based affordability difficulty for renters by 20% in 1975 and 24% in 1983 based upon Section 8 housing quality standards. In addition, 35% of rental households with an affordability problem by the conventional measure did not have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure, while 19 to 23% of rental households found to have an affordability problem by the quality-based measure were not so classified using the conventional measure.     

Indicators of Local Housing Affordability: Comparative and Spatial Approaches

This paper focuses on the measurement of local housing affordability problems. A number of different housing market indicators are offered that help identify the magnitude and nature of housing affordability problems and their geographic distribution. This interest is prompted by the predominance of housing affordability problems and the severity of the problems for many of the lowest income renter households. In addition, there is significant policy interest in "the national goal that every American family be able to afford a decent home in a suitable environment" (National Affordable Housing Act of 1990). This paper develops measures of the spatial distribution of affordability problems and implements measures of the mismatch between the demand and supply of housing affordable to the lowest income households.     

Amenity‐Based Housing Affordability Indexes

The recent slump notwithstanding, substantial increases in house prices in many parts of the United States have served to highlight housing affordability for moderate‐income households, especially in high‐cost, supply‐constrained coastal cities such as Boston. In this article, we develop a new measure of area affordability that characterizes the supply of housing that is affordable to different households in different locations of a metropolitan region. Key to our approach is the explicit recognition that the price/rent of a dwelling is affected by its location. Hence, we develop an affordability methodology that accounts for job accessibility, school quality and safety. This allows us to produce a menu of town‐level indexes of adjusted housing affordability. The adjustments are based on obtaining implicit prices of these amenities from a hedonic price equation. We thus use data from a wide variety of sources to rank 141 towns in the greater Boston metropolitan area based on their adjusted affordability. Taking households earning 80% of area median income as an example, we find that consideration of town‐level amenities leads to major changes relative to a typical assessment of affordability.     

Regulatory factors influencing Internet access in Australia and China: a comparative analysis

Internet access is determined by a combination of a widely available telecommunication infrastructure and affordability of Internet services, which are closely related to government policies (IT Group. (1999). Like other countries, both Australia and China have considered the Internet a powerful tool for national development economically and socially. As Internet growth becomes more and more significant, it becomes important to address the extent to which the underlying communication policies influence current growth rates.This paper provides a comparative review of policy approaches to regulating the Internet in both China and Australia. This study aims to identify the regulatory factors affecting Internet access in terms of availability and affordability, especially those factors which encourage the creation of a policy and regulatory environment favourable to the development of Internet infrastructure and access.This paper examines the linkages between regulatory regimes, market environments and Internet access in both China and Australia. The preliminary result suggests that government policies governing the telecommunications service market and promoting information infrastructure have a significant impact on the affordability and availability of Internet access. The most significant factor is the level of competition permitted in the telecommunication sector. It has become clear that further regulatory initiatives such as deregulatory mechanisms and interconnection regimes are needed to establish a more competitive environment for Internet access in both countries, and more particularly in China.     

Housing Costs and the Elderly

Estimates are made of changes in average housing costs and average family incomes for non-moving elderly homeowners and renters over the period 1972–80. Findings suggest that: rental costs are higher in each time period than are homeownership costs; evidence of serious deterioration in affordability of housing is weak, when looking at aggregate price/income ratios; and it is clear that elderly renters are more seriously disadvantaged in housing affordability than are elderly homeowners at every time period.     

The Affordability of New Homes

There has been much recent public discussion about the rising price of new homes, and concern that an increasing number of families are priced out of the new home market. This paper argues that new homes are no more expensive, relative to income, than they have historically been, although the large volume of subsidized new home production during the early 1970s has tended to distort the recent trends. The main problem for new home buyers is the increase in mortgage interest rates generated by inflation in the past decade. However, current homeowners have also benefited from inflation and may be better able to afford a new house as a result. This paper also presents data on recent new home buyers, showing that a large number of families are buying new homes supposedly beyond their means, and that the typical buyer has a much lower income than has been thought feasible by many housing market analysts.     

Time-varying connectedness of metropolitan housing markets

We construct a time-varying measure of connectedness for 382 U.S. metropolitan housing markets using monthly house price data from 1975 to the present. Housing connectedness in the long run is found to be much stronger than the instantaneous connectedness, both of which exhibit notable variation over time and across metropolitan areas. Unlike stock market connectedness, housing market connectedness leads the business cycle; it helps predict the likelihood of future recessions.     

Impact of New Housing Construction on Racial Patterns

This paper inquires into the racial distribution impact of a projected significant increase in housing starts, under conditions of a federal fair housing law only now beginning to be effective and of an increase in the number of black families in the upper range of minority incomes. It examines the evidence within the broad context of changing urban forms and functions. The impact of new housing construction is analyzed under the headings of minority access to (1) new units and (2) filtered units in mover chains initiated by housing starts. Data are cited to support the conclusion that blacks' access to new units, while sharply increased over previous performance, will not have important effects on racial distribution, especially not increasing blacks as a proportion of suburban populations. Blacks' access to filtered housing, it is concluded, continues to be largely blocked by the dual racial market in real estate, except where such housing functions to extend the ghetto.     

Advertising, Its Determinants, and Market Structure

This study derives a formal model of firm advertising behavior and applies it to the industry level to figure out the relationship between advertising and market structure. The firm advertising model shows that both consumer preference andfirm-specific advertising competence jointly determineprofit-maximizing advertising intensity. At the industry level, advertising intensity is represented multiplicatively by consumer preference and a measure of market structure, which reflects the joint distribution of the levels of advertising competence and market shares among firms. The new market structure measure suggests that those single-dimensional measures of market structure such as seller concentration and the Herfindahl index are inadequate in explaining interindustry differences in advertising intensity, and that the long-debated advertising-concentration relationship differs depending primarily on the appropriability of advertising. An empirical analysis of 426 five-digit Korean manufacturing industries shows that an inverted U-shaped relationship between the Herfindahl index and industry advertising intensity is observed for consumer goods industries but a lazy J-shaped relationship for producer goods industries.     

Telemedicine competition,pricing, and technology adoption: Evidence from talk therapists

This paper examines how new telemedicine competitors affected incumbent health care providers during the first waves of COVID-19. Using data from the largest mental health provider search platform in Canada, I show that increased telemedicine competition in a market caused incumbent providers in that market to stop offering income-based discounts to patients. I isolate the causal effect of competition in a difference-in-differences framework, comparing providers before and after a supply shock on the platform that exogenously assigned some markets new telemedicine search results. I find that higher-quality providers are more likely to stop income-based discounts when facing new telemedicine entrants, while lower-quality providers are more likely to exit the platform, which is consistent with telemedicine providers competing for more price-sensitive patients. The results suggest that expanding telemedicine options had a heterogeneous effect on the affordability of care.     

Who benefits the most? Risk pooling in mortgage loan insurance: Evidence from the Canadian mortgage market

This article evaluates the effect of mortgage loan insurance (MLI), an essential macroprudential tool available to policy makers, on housing affordability, household leverage, and the overall welfare of the economy. A dynamic model of the housing market with heterogeneous households and competitive housing and mortgage markets is constructed and is calibrated to Canadian data. We find that relaxing the mandatory nature of MLI required for mortgages with a loan-to-value ratio of 80% or more, in favor of a counterfactual system where MLI reflects credit risks, dampens demand for housing to purchase and puts downward pressure on house prices. Some of the households with low income and low asset holdings can no longer afford a house; therefore, the aggregate homeownership rate drops. In contrast, demand for rental units increases and rents go up.     

A Vacancy Transfer Model of the Structure of the Local Housing Market

Household mobility data derived from vacancy chain or turnover studies may be used to develop a Markov model of the local housing market. Such a model based on empirical data from the Detroit metropolitan area indicates a strong tendency for households to substantially increase their housing expenditures when they move. This finding is consistent with the filtering model of local housing market dynamics. However, these data do not support the hypothesis that more expensive new housing will produce the greatest number of indirect housing opportunities. New units at every cost level generated about the same total of turnover vacancies. The model also indicates that all types of new construction ultimately have their greatest impact on lower cost housing in established communities.     

住房保障改革目标：居者所有其屋

由于住房是居民的最主要财产，住房性收入是居民的最主要财产性收入，所以住房调节应是财产调节的重要途径，住房收入调节应是收入调节的重要措袍；让更多居民拥有自己的房产，是实现共同富裕的重要保障，是社会主义所有制的话要内容。使居民尽量拥有自有住房，需要抑制对住房的投资需求从而控制房价水平，把廉租房、公共租赁房和经济适用房制度改为政府为低收入家庭建房制度,发展住房合作组织和集资合作建房，解决好非户籍常住人口的住房问题。     

Canceling the admission priority of private schools enlarges housing price gap in public school districts: Evidence from Shanghai's new admission policy

In 2018, Shanghai implemented an admission policy that canceled the admission priority of private schools to promote education equity. Since this policy is a unique measure for adjusting private and public school competition and discouraging private school choice priority, little is known about the policy effects. In this research, to examine the impact of the new admission policy on the capitalization of public education quality, we apply boundary fixed effect and Difference in Differences (DID) analysis to housing transaction records before and after the policy. The admission policy on average led to an additional 2% housing price premium for every standard deviation increase in public school quality. However, this average increase in premium was mainly driven by elite (top 5%) school districts, where an additional 8.6% housing price premium was generated by the policy. Housing prices in nonelite school districts, on the other hand, demonstrated no significant changes. These results indicate that the policy enlarges the housing price gap among school districts with different education quality. Thus, rather than promoting education equity, this policy may overall worsen the housing affordability in good public-school districts and make access to quality education more exclusive.     

Technological diversity,related diversification,and firm performance

Previous findings that related diversification creates value have been called into question over concerns about methodology and measures. Reviewing existing theory to consider how a firm's knowledge base interacts with its product market activity, I address several of these concerns by creating a measure of technological diversity based on citation‐weighted patents. The measure indicates a firm's opportunity for corporate diversification based on economies of scope in valuable knowledge assets, is defined for both single‐ and multibusiness firms, and is not correlated with more fundamental aspects of diversification, such as the number of businesses in the corporate portfolio. Evidence from a large sample of firms shows the positive relationship between diversification based on technological diversity and market‐based measures of performance, controlling for R&D intensity and capital intensity as further indicators of the type of assets underlying diversification. Results hold when controlling for the endogeneity of diversification and performance in a cross‐sectional sample or when controlling for unobserved factors using panel data. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Market Power in Chinese Taipei: Laws, Policies and Treatments

The experience of Chinese Taipei shows that opening up a previously protected market to new entrants can be a more effective and reliable way to enhance competition than regulating the behavior of dominant or monopolistic firms. Moreover, when opening up the market, the liberalizing measures adopted by government should be market-structure-neutral. That is, it should not try to dictate the direction and results of market competition. A more pressure-resistant mechanism should be designed to deal with market power, taking the form of a regime that is cross-sector, independent and collective in its decision-making, such as has been the case with Chinese Taipei's Fair Trade Commission.     

Can Tightness in the Housing Market Help Predict Subsequent Home Price Appreciation? Evidence from the United States and the Netherlands

This article assesses the predictive power of variables that measure market tightness, such as seller's bargaining power and sale probabilities, on future home prices. Theoretical insights from a stylized search‐and‐matching model illustrate that such indicators can be associated with subsequent home price appreciation. The empirical analysis employs listings data on residential units offered for sale through a real estate broker in the Netherlands and for certain U.S. regions. Individual records are used to construct quarterly home price indices, an index that measures seller's bargaining power and (quality‐adjusted) home sale probabilities. Using conventional time‐series models we show that current sale probabilities and bargaining power can significantly reduce home price appreciation forecast errors and help to predict turning points in local area housing markets. The measures and approaches in this article help to demonstrate ways in which researchers and practitioners can leverage listings data to gain knowledge about the current and future state of the housing market.     

Modeling and Computing Transactions Costs for Purchasers of Housing Services

This paper models, as equilibrium behavior, buyers' behaviors under transactions costs and market failure constraints. It derives equilibrium conditions and it shows how they differ from unconstrained models. Standard utility and cost parameters are then used to estimate the economic costs of the constraints, which may be interpreted, at the margin, as the transactions costs of moving. If transactions costs are greater than the economic costs of the constraints, the household remains in a residence, even in response to changed price and income expectations. Changes in expected prices and incomes lead to changed housing demand even when the household cannot adjust housing consumption between periods. These findings have implications for empirical work with both cross-section and panel data sets.     

提高住房公积金使用效率的对策研究

住房公积金制度是我国城镇住房制度改革的重要举措,对保证职工住房消费的资金积累,提高职工购房支付能力都起到了重要作用。公积金发展中暴露出了沉淀资金多、保值增值难、不能向中低收入者倾斜等使用效率低的问题,文章分析了问题产生的原因,提出了提高住房公积金使用效率的途径,以及建立解决普通职工尤其是中低收入者住房问题的长效机制与对策。     

Environmental Impact Evaluation,Land Use Planning,and the Housing Consumer*

A number of states are following the federal government's lead and requiring environmental impact reviews of new development proposals. This paper examines ambitious EIR programs in Florida and California with the aim of assessing the costs and benefits of their programs, and, by extension, of state-mandated EIR programs in general. The focus is on new housing production. The findings are that EIR shows some promise of enabling communities to better protect themselves from adverse side effects of new development. At the same time, EIR adds what appears to be a modest increment to the overall costs of new housing. However, because EIR has expanded local government planning options, one of the side effects of EIR is likely to be the enhanced ability of localities to exclude moderate income families from new housing.