How Well Do Section 8 FMRs (Fair Market Rent) Match the Cost of Rental Housing? Data from Thirty-Nine Large Cities

The FMR (Fair Market Rent) idea was built into the Section 8 lower income rental assistance program to provide a means to reflect variations in the rental cost of comparable housing in different market areas and also rental cost differences within a market area due to size variations in housing units. Does the FMR schedule for the Section 8 Existing Housing Program parallel the actual differences in the rents of comparable housing among metropolitan areas? We find the 1975 schedule fulfills some of the criteria for an efficient and equitable Section 8 Existing Housing Program but not all.     

Target pricing: Demand-side versus supply-side approaches

The practice of target pricing has been a key factor in the success of Japanese manufacturers. In the more commonly known demand-side approach, the target price for the supplier equals the manufacturer's market price less a percent margin for the manufacturer but no cost-improvement expenses are shared. In the supply-side approach, cost-improvement expenses are shared and the target price equals the supplier's cost plus a percent margin for the supplier. Using a general oligopoly and Cournot duopoly models, we characterize the equilibrium and optimal policy for each approach under various conditions. We find that sharing cost-reduction expenses allows the manufacturer using the supply-side approach to attain competitive advantage in the form of increased market share and higher profit, particularly in industrial conditions where margins are thin and price sensitivities are high.     

Fertilizer trade under market liberalization: preliminary evidence from Kenya

This paper reports results of a study aimed at identifying broad demand-side and supply-side influences on trade in inorganic fertilizers in Kenya, where, following decades of government control, the fertilizer market has been fully liberalized. Multiple regression analysis using data from a country-wide survey of fertilizer traders indicates that significant demand-side factors include agroecological conditions and maize market prices in the regions in which fertilizer traders operate. On the supply side, the number of years in fertilizer trading and access to credit are important. Implications for policy and research are drawn.     

Housing Policy in a Nongrowth Era: Problems of the Northeast United States

The ambivalent results of the federal government's large-scale subsidization of low- and moderate-rent housing production in the early 1970s have produced new preoccupations about the directions federal housing programs should take in the light of sharply divergent growth trends among Regions that have become apparent in 1977. As economic and demographic growth in the South and West Regions poses classic problems of adaption to growth, the Northeast and North Central Regions are faced with either nongrowth or decreases in population and employment. This paper discusses adaptions designed to conserve and improve existing housing resources in areas that require only minimal new residential construction. These adaptions include new levels of state-federal housing coordination to make more intense use of private financing in conjunction with the federal Section 8, Coinsurance, and Section 233(f) programs.     

差别产品的动态完全竞争

现有经济学理论认为完全竞争是社会福利达到最大的市场结构，但完全竞争又只在每个厂商都生产同质产品时出现。对异质的差别产品来说，这个论断存在着内在矛盾：产品差别化更符合消费者的需求偏好，但不利于实现社会福利最大。随着市场格局从卖方市场向买方市场、社会生产从大规模制造向规模定制的剧烈转变，上述矛盾变得愈加突出。本文通过引入需求方市场结构及其特征的概念，构建了供求互动的市场结构演化模型，结果发现在收入增长、资本积累和技术进步的共同持续充分作用下，供求双方内部都会趋向基于差别产品的动态完全竞争。     

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.     

Location decisions of inward FDI in sub-national regions of a host country: Service versus manufacturing industries

Built on the differences between services and manufacturing sectors, this study examines the general proposition that service and manufacturing multinational enterprises (MNEs) have different responsiveness to location-specific characteristics when conducting foreign direct investment (FDI), and that these differences influence their final locations in the sub-national regions of a host country. Using a full population of 1,212 and 6,199 inward FDI projects conducted by MNEs in manufacturing and services sectors, respectively, across 234 sub-national regions in Korea between 2000 and 2004, it finds that the location decisions made by service MNEs are more likely to be driven by demand-side considerations, whereas those made by manufacturing MNEs are more likely to be influenced by supply-side characteristics of sub-national regions. In addition, it shows that sub-national location decisions made by both high-tech and low-tech manufacturing MNEs consider the availability of local strategic assets within a focal region more importantly than that from its neighboring regions, suggesting the importance of intra-regional effects. Sub-national location decisions made by location-bound service MNEs exhibit the same intra-regional effects for local market potential; however, those by non-location-bound service MNEs consider the local market potential from neighboring regions more importantly than that within a focal region, suggesting the existence of inter-regional effects.     

Community Reinvestment and Credit Risk: Evidence from an Affordable-Home-Loan Program

This study examines the performance of home purchase loans originated by a major depository institution in Philadelphia under a flexible lending program between 1988 and 1994. We examine long-term delinquency in relation to neighborhood housing market conditions, borrower credit-history scores and other factors. We find that likelihood of delinquency declines with increasing neighborhood housing market activity. Also, likelihood of delinquency is greater for borrowers with low credit-history scores and those with high ratios of housing expense to income, and when the property is unusually expensive for the neighborhood where it is located.     

Housing Density and the Effect of Proximity to Public Open Space in Aberdeen, Scotland

We consider whether public recreational open space is a substitute for private open space by testing whether price effects from proximity to an urban park are increasing in housing density. Aberdeen, Scotland features three owner-occupied residential property types: detached housing, nondetached housing and flats. We examine property sales within 800 m of five city parks. We find flat prices increase with additional proximity to parks, but there are generally no price effects from park proximity for lower density housing types. The results suggest that open space policy must consider the scale and density of surrounding urban development.     

大力推进新形势下的需求侧管理工作

在当前电力供需日趋紧张的形势下,电力企业为了保证电网的安全稳定运行,实现其向社会可靠供电的承诺,必须在政府的政策支持和引导下加快电源和电网建设的同时充分挖掘需求侧潜力,大力推进需求侧管理在中国的实践.笔者根据多年工作经验总结出在开展需求侧管理工作的过程中应注意的几个问题.     

Rent Controls in Ontario: Roofs or Ceilings?

This paper describes the rent control program in Ontario and discusses the consequences of these controls. It indicates that rent controls caused both a small nominal decline and a large real decline in the per unit value of rental apartments, substantially reduced new rental housing starts, generated a rental housing shortage, created a dual market with significant rent differences between the controlled and uncontrolled (new construction) sectors, and imposed large costs on government in the form of foregone tax revenues and increased rental housing subsidies. The paper also indicates some of the political responses to the developing economic effects, such as the imposition of additional land use controls and increased government spending programs to stimulate new rental construction.     

Strategic management in a new framework

The present article is concerned with strategic management as a specific field of general management. The authors analyse the nature of strategy formation in complex organizations and present some tools for improving this critical activity. Section 2 sets out with a simple terminology and framework for the analysis of strategic management. Next, an open-systems view is presented for analysing the strategic activity and a brief literature survey is added to support the concepts presented (Section 3). After discussing their own model of strategic management in complex organizations, the authors proceed to investigate the task of top managers in this specific field (Section 4). Finally, the concepts presented are confronted with specific management modes, drawn from literature reporting on German and Japanese business practice (Section 5).     

Alternative Mortgage Instruments, Qualification Constraints and the Demand for Housing: An Empirical Analysis

Government-guaranteed mortgage loans (GFRMs) and adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) were introduced to make payment to income (PTI) and loan-to-value (LTV) qualification conventions less restrictive. This paper analyzes the effect of GFRMs and ARMs on the demand for housing. Using a large national data set for the 1988 to 1989 period, we employ a two-stage procedure to estimate housing demand. In the first stage, a multinomial logit model estimates the probability of choosing an FRM, ARM or GFRM. Predicted values from the logit are used to construct user costs and estimate housing demand. Using the model estimates, we simulate demand under four different mortgage availability regimes: FRM, FRM and GFRM, FRM and ARM and all three. These simulations indicate that GFRMs, by relaxing LTV constraints, increase housing demand by approximately 6.2% relative to the FRM regime; the addition of ARMs, by relaxing both PTI and LTV constraints, raises demand by an additional 6%, for a total of 12.2% with inclusion of all alternatives.     

A Future for Public Housing

Two primary reforms are needed for the future success of the current public housing program: revision of the funding system for operating subsidy and development of a strategy for capital improvements and future use of the inventory. The current funding system has been criticized because of the dramatic growth in operating costs in the last decade and because of apparent over-funding of some public housing authorities (PHAs) and a distributional bias against housing authorities operating in distressed environments. Either a cost-based operating subsidy system or a market-rent based system would have strengths as well as weaknesses. Either type of system can provide adequate, fair, constrained, and predictable subsidies. The current level of deterioration of the public housing stock, the concentration of social and physical problems in 7-to-15% of the inventory, and the perverse incentives of the present modernization program, suggest a need for reform of the capital improvement funding system. Each PHA should be provided fixed levels of funds, based on its needs, both for rehabilitating and maintaining projects. Further, a project-by-project assessment should be made to identify those which cannot be cost-effectively managed or rehabilitated.
The President's Commission on Housing contributed importantly to public discussion of these policy areas, by recommending a dramatic reassessment of each project and its future use in the context of a change to a market-based subsidy system.     

Hedging House Price Risk in China

The increasing risk associated with China's housing prices is globally recognized. However, hedging this risk is challenging because of a lack of financial derivatives on China's housing assets. We suggest that the short sale of futures contracts for construction raw materials, i.e., iron ore or/and steel, can act as useful tools to hedge the systematic risk of China's new home price. We first present evidence that there is a strong and stable correlation between changes in China's housing prices and global steel/iron ore prices. Using a hedging strategy model, we then show that, during the sample period between 2009 and 2015, 20.6% of the total unpredicted variance in Chinese housing prices can be hedged by shorting rebar and iron ore futures. We further examine this strategy with an event study based on the announcement of the “home‐purchase restriction” policy in April, 2010. The cumulative abnormal returns show that both steel and iron ore prices reacted significantly to this negative shock, and therefore the proposed strategy could substantially help investors offset losses in the housing market. We finally provide some evidences that this strategy can also help investors in specific regional housing markets, or the resale housing markets.     

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.     

Demand-side reactive strategies for supply disruptions in a multiple-product system

This research examines demand-side reactive strategies for supply disruption in a multiple assemble-to-order system. We consider an assemble-to-order system with two substitute products where the demand is price-sensitive and disruption-sensitive. Two different supply disruption situations are examined: disruption of the low-value component and disruption of the high-value component. We propose and compare the performance of four reactive strategies for managing supply disruptions, namely, the backordering strategy, the upgrading/downgrading strategy, the compensation strategy, and the mixed strategy. We find that the compensation strategy and the mixed strategy can keep more customers than the backordering strategy and the upgrading strategy during the supply disruption of the low-value product. For the disruption of the high-value product, the total number of customers keeps constant. But it does lead to the reallocation of customers among the products. We find that the mixed strategy is the best reactive strategy and the backordering strategy is the worst one among the four reactive strategies.     

新冠肺炎疫情冲击下中国经济波动与减排效益研究——基于可计算一般均衡模型

2020年初,为防止新冠肺炎疫情蔓延,中国采取了严苛的防控措施。短期内的社会停摆对国内经济造成了巨大冲击;同时也抑制了碳排放量的增长。本文构建了一个包含碳排放模块的开放经济CGE模型,根据冲击来源设定不同情境,量化分析新冠肺炎疫情冲击造成的宏观经济、产业扩散以及CO₂减排效应。研究结果表明,新冠肺炎疫情对中国GDP的影响约为-2.74%,从冲击路径看,供给侧冲击是新冠肺炎疫情的主导冲击路径,从冲击来源看,防控措施的影响远大于疾病本身的影响。在碳排放方面,虽然疫情冲击在一定程度上减少了碳排放量,但经济代价极大,具有短期性和不可持续性。最后,基于后疫情时代,为经济恢复与碳减排发展提出相关建议。     

The impact of food safety standards on processed food exports from developing countries

This paper examines the impact of food safety standards on processed food exports in developing countries. A panel data econometric analysis of processed food exports in developing countries was undertaken. The Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standard (SPS) is incorporated into the model to capture the impact of food safety standards. The empirical model shows that food safety standards imposed by developed countries could impede processed food exports from developing countries. This could emerge because practically, SPS is less transparent than tariffs or quotas. There is an ample room for developed countries to tweak the standards stronger than necessary to achieve optimal levels of social protection, and to twist the related testing and certification procedures to make their competing imports more competitive. In addition, limited supply-side capacity of developing countries, especially in terms of resources, manpower as well as institution, constrains the countries to overcome food safety standards. Because of the potential benefits that could emerge from imposing food safety standards such as a reduction in transaction costs and trade friction, developing countries should view SPS not just as a trade barrier but also as an opportunity to upgrade quality standard and market sophistication. Supply-side capacity in developing countries needed to be improved, especially upgrading agriculture sector. Multilateral efforts are also needed to mobilize additional financial and technical assistance to help redress constraints in developing countries in meeting the required food safety standards imposed by developed countries.