Indicators of Housing Finance Intergenerational Wealth Transfers

This paper sheds light on intrafamilial gifts for housing. By using Austrian intergenerational survey data various questions are addressed. First, is familial aid more or less widespread in given social strata? Second, what are the determinants and motives for family gifts? And third, what are the possible impacts on the choice set of their recipients? Probit estimates show that gifts significantly depend on the parents lifetime financial position, consistent with life cycle permanent income (LCPI) approaches. Gifts to remove liquidity constraints are more difficult to reconcile with LCPI. “Dynastic” gifts that support household formation and ownership acquisition may be interpreted as intergenerational exchange. They occur more frequently than periodical cash transfers where altruistic behavior cannot be ruled out.     

Roger Lowenstein. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. New York: Penguin, 2004. ix + 270 pp. ISBN 1-59420-003-3, $24.95 (cloth); 0-14-303-467-7, $15.00 (paper).

What happened on Wall Street from 1997 to 2002 was a financialversion of the perfect storm. Almost everything that could gowrong did go wrong simultaneously. The Securities and ExchangeCommission reforms of the 1930s had closed many of the loopholesfor chicanery, but new paths to questionable practices and debasedprinciples eventually emerged. In his examination of the originsof the "dot.com bubble" and the circumstances of the balloon’sbursting, Roger Lowenstein narrates clearly     

Qualitative discrete multiple criteria choice models in regional planning

The paper provides a concise review of evaluation methods for decision problems in which qualitative data is involved. Special attention is paid to a new qualitative evaluation method: the regime method. An application of the regime method is given in the field of multiregional conflict analysis.     

Heroin addiction and public policy

This paper investigates alternative approaches to the control of heroin addiction. It establishes criteria for evaluation of their relative effectiveness and derives estimates of net benefits associated with major existing heroin addiction control programs.