Taming Airbnb: Toward guiding principles for local regulation of urban vacation rentals based on empirical results from five US cities

Urban vacation rentals, a phenomenon that has grown explosively very recently, bring benefits to cities but also impose quality of life and housing market impacts on neighborhoods. As a consequence, cities are beginning to grapple with creating regulatory regimes for managing this new land use and its encroachments on residential areas. This article uses webscraped data from Airbnb, the industry leader, to analyze the geographical patterns and concentrations of these impacts in five US cities: Austin, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. It uses the findings to put forth four general principles for cities seeking to manage impacts imposed by Airbnb and its competitors. These are that webscraping is an imperfect but relatively cheap and effective means of gathering locally specific data; that “spiky” usage patterns dictate a microgeographic approach to regulation; that meaningful regulation necessitates dedicated enforcement, likely paid for with permit fees; and that it is desirable to distinguish between “mom-and-pop” hosts and those operating at a commercial scale.     

Agglomeration,migration cost and intergovernmental transfers

The purpose of this article is to investigate the central government redistribution policies across local governments that affect regional agglomeration. Though full agglomeration is efficient, in many cases factor mobility is imperfect and the full agglomeration is not realized. This article analysed whether or not the central government should adjust the distribution of populations through local governments. The result is as follows: If individuals are relatively mobile, the central government can improve the aggregate income. In this case, when the private production and public sector are small, the central government should transfer from the productive regions local government to low-productive regions.     

以政府职能转变推动收入分配改革

收入和财富分配的不平等一直是中国改革发展中的重要问题。针对中国经济的特点,可以从政府改革的角度来研究如何更好地进行收入分配改革。地方政府主导推动地方经济的做法对收入不平等的扩大起了重要作用,加快政府职能转换,是使收入分配改革真正落到实处的破局之处,也是实现收入分配合理化可行的第一步。要改变地方政府的经济职能,降低它直接参与基础设施的程度,改革地方土地财政,建立垂直管理机构,以分散它的一部分经济管理职能,为收入分配改革打开空间。     

Local interests or centralized targets? How China’s local government implements the farmland policy of Requisition–Compensation Balance

The Requisition–Compensation Balance of Farmland (RCBF) is a strict policy in China aimed at controlling farmland conversion and replenishing farmland loss caused by urban expansion through a set of top-down quotas. These conflict with local interests, since land conversion from agriculture to construction is a key tool by which local governments attract investment and raise fiscal revenue. How should local authorities respond to this centralized policy? This paper presents a framework “quantity–quality–productivity–environment” to investigate local governments’ coping strategy and the holistic performance of the RCBF. The empirical study indicated that local jurisdictions placed economic and financial growth first and continued expropriating farmland on a large-scale, including land of high quality, for development. However, impelled by compulsory quotas and supervision from governments at higher levels, local authorities would partly replenish the quantity loss through farmland exploitation, regardless of the quality of the new cropland and the possible environmental impact. Consequently, fast requisition and unqualified compensation undermined the capacity of regional agricultural output. We suggest that the RCBF is not capable of guaranteeing food security, whilst farmland supplementation threatens the local environment.     

预算公开与廉洁政府关系的实证研究——基于OBI与CPI的相关性检测

预算公开与廉洁政府建设是学术界关注的热门话题,两者之间的关系更是其中的重点。2006、2008、2010与2012四个年度共同涉及的44个国家的预算公开指数与清廉指数的相关性检测表明,预算公开指数与清廉指数之间呈正相关关系,且基本属于高度相关,部分国家数据的不对称只是虚假背离。高度契合与虚假背离的背后起决定性作用的是成熟的民主政治,因此,预算公开推动廉洁政府建设需要以成熟的民主政治为前提和基石。     

The Tunisia Wheat Market in the Context of World Price Volatility: A Stochastic Partial Equilibrium Approach

Food security is a key objective of agricultural and food policy in Tunisia. The 2007–2008 food crisis highlighted the negative impacts of price volatility on international markets both in terms of food insecurity and budget exposure. Tunisian food subsidy expenditures ranged from $180 million to $710 million in 2006–2010, so volatile world prices meant volatile subsidy costs. Moreover, cereal production in Tunisia still has much instability due to climate conditions, which also influences imports and, consequently, subsidy expenditures. This study applies a structural model to conduct stochastic analyses of trade and policy impacts on food security and budget expenditures in the Tunisian wheat market. The methodology disaggregates durum wheat and soft wheat markets and generates projections of import prices of durum wheat and soft wheat, using projections of world prices provided by the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at University of Missouri (FAPRI-MU). The key innovation is the generated stochastic analyses of subsidy costs based on stochastic world price projections and stochastic domestic wheat yields based on historic yield variances. The analysis highlights the sensitivity of subsidy costs to world prices, volumes imported and domestic production, so that alternative policy tools can be considered.     

Dimensions of strategic intervention for risk reduction and mitigation: a case study of the MV Sewol incident

Organizations in disaster management system should learn from previous experience and strategically use their lesson for the refinement of a system’s competencies for risk management. However, the MV Sewol incident revealed the absence of the organizational learning in the Korean disaster management system. With mixed methods of content analysis, in-depth interview, and social network analysis, this study identified key failure factors in response to the incident and categorized them by managerial, structural, and institutional domains. While the Korean government took bold steps to rebuild its risk management system, those efforts were biased to structural reforms and lacked fundamental changes in human and informational resources management. Based on the findings, this study suggests the balanced efforts for system refinement for effective risk management.     

The effectiveness of the ECB’s unconventional monetary policy: Comparative evidence from crisis and non-crisis Euro-area countries

During the European financial crisis, the European Central Bank implemented a series of unconventional monetary policy measures. We argue that these programs lowered the bond yield spreads of Euro-area countries. This hypothesis is tested using pooled OLS estimations and two different datasets: monetary policy event dummies and the purchase volumes of the Securities Markets Programme (SMP). Overall, we find significantly negative effects on bond yield spreads for both datasets, leading us to accept the hypothesis. While the OMT reduces the spreads of both crisis and non-crisis countries, LTROs and the lowering of the deposit rate to 0 percent are mainly effective in non-crisis countries. The SMP lowers the spreads of crisis countries, but it has the opposite effect on non-crisis countries. This converse effect is explained by the risk that increasingly accumulates on the ECB’s balance sheet through the SMP and that way constitutes a fiscal risk for non-crisis countries. The results are confirmed by pooled OLS estimations that measure the effect of unconventional monetary policy on central government debt.     

反腐倡廉环境下创新国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容探讨

反腐倡廉环境下创新国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容是一项新的课题。本文对探索创新国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容的必要性和我国法律规定的国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容进行了综述，并根据审计实践，提出了“探索开展国有企业绩效审计”等5项审计内容，对创新国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容进行了探讨，并针对目前创新国有企业领导人员经济责任审计内容面临的困难提出了健全绩效审计法律法规和评价指标、完善企业增资扩股行为的法律法规、加强对基层审计人员的培训学习等3条对策。     

我国乡村生态旅游发展中的政府行为研究

乡村生态旅游作为一种新的旅游业态,在乡村旅游中注重生态环境与产业的可持续发展,对农民增收与农村环境保护有重要的促进作用。但目前国内大部分地区对于乡村生态旅游,从概念上到操作上仍然是十分模糊的,这在很大程度上限制了政府对旅游项目有效管理。文章研究认为,乡村生态旅游具有一定公共物品属性,完全依靠市场调节是远远不够的,在不同地区和不同阶段都需要政府介入,但政府行为应当结合具体阶段特征采取适宜策略。政府应通过乡村旅游试点项目的实施,对其有效性、效率、影响和可持续性进行科学的监测和评价;将能力建设同具体的项目操作有机地结合起来,促进乡村生态旅游项目实施效果和效率的提高;应尽量减少行政干预,通过经济宏观调控,强化规划引领、市场监管和公共服务提供。总之,在乡村生态旅游发展中,政府应该有所为有所不为,扮演好主导、扶持与服务的角色。