Where Should the Elderly Live and Who Should Pay for Their Care?*

We consider a model with a population consisting of earners and retired persons; elderly care is publicly provided. There is one big city, where congestion effects and agglomeration forces are at work, and a number of small villages. We show how the externalities related to population mobility lead to an inefficient spatial distribution of earners and retirees, and we characterize the second‐best solution. Decentralization of this solution in a fiscal federalism structure requires the use of taxes and subsidies proportional to the number of earners and retired persons living in the city and the villages.     

Housing Allowance and the Rent of Low‐income Households

This paper analyses the effect of a housing allowance programme on the rent paid by assisted low‐income households. The data consist of 12,000 rental households in the free‐market and municipal sectors. The effect is estimated using the programme reform of 2002 as an instrument. The reform increased the allowance of the assisted households depending on housing characteristics, but it had little effect on the eligibility. Results suggest that in the private sector, one additional euro of allowance increases the rent of claimants by 60–70 cents. The effect is zero in the municipal sector, as rents are tied to the housing costs.     

Agglomeration economies with consistent productivity estimates

This paper investigates the relative impact of microeconomic agglomeration mechanisms on plant's total factor productivity (TFP) using German establishment and employment-level data. Contrasting different strategies for estimating TFP from plant-level production functions reveals that unobserved output prices bias true productivity and lead to underestimated agglomeration economies. With the corrected TFP measure, the largest impact is found for labor market pooling, which is captured by the correlation of the occupational composition between one county-industry and the rest of the county. This main result is robust, even when the spatial units are resized from counties to larger labor market regions. Input linkages appear to be relevant only at this larger regional scale. Overall, agglomeration economies differ substantially across industries. Only for a subset of industries, some positive evidence is detected for knowledge spillovers.     

Anatomy of Russia’s market segmentation1

Based on a relationship between price difference and demand difference among locations, the role of various market frictions in causing segmentation of the Russian goods market is analysed. The spatial sample covers most of Russian regions (70 of the 89); the data are annual, spanning 1992 to 2000. Spatial disconnectedness of regions is found to be responsible for about 70 percent of the average price differential, while the rest is caused by ‘artificial’ impediments to market integration such as regional protectionism, organized crime and intra‐region shipping conditions.     

THE 200 KM CITY: BRISBANE,THE GOLD COAST,AND SUNSHINE COAST

Since the 1970s, several Southeast Queensland coastal towns in areas marketed as the ‘Gold Coast’ and the ‘Sunshine Coast’ have merged with each other and joined with Brisbane to become one of the world's longest urban coastal strips. The population of this 200 km long city is fast approaching three million. This urban pattern reflects the preferences of many Australians about where and in what type of housing they would like to live. The unplanned nature of this growth raises several policy challenges relating to resource use and traffic congestion.     

DEVELOPMENT PRESSURES AND HERITAGE IN THE PERTH CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT, 1950–90

This article examines the remaking of Perth's Central Business District (CBD) during the 1950–90 period. It traces the establishment of a modernist development ethos in Perth's planning, outlines the inadequacy of the City's planning regulations, and analyses the impact on St George's Terrace, the city's main commercial thoroughfare. The City Council was largely incapable of restraining excessive development and the extension of its system of plot ratios encouraged manipulation to increase the height of developments. Several important historic buildings were demolished because there were no legal means of safeguarding the city's heritage until 1990.     

跨国公司在华R＆D与中国企业技术创新

文章在一个由跨国公司和发展中东道国企业所构成的寡头垄断的产量竞争模型中，考察了跨国公司在发展中国家的R＆D活动对东道国自身企业的技术创新的影响，并最终发现技术溢出效应的强弱、技术转化水平的高低等因素都会决定这一影响的大小。在此基础上，文章提出了一些政策建议。     

韩国应对劳工短缺的政策选择及其对中国的借鉴

劳工短缺现象已成为东亚许多国家的普遍问题。这个问题并不是经济自发调节便可消除的暂时现象,如长期持续下去,将对各国的产品出口以及经济发展构成严重的制约。韩国自20世纪80年代末起便开始了对劳工短缺问题的调查研究,积累了大量的文献与实践经验。在描述韩国劳工短缺现状的基础上,探讨其成因并介绍韩国政府对此问题所采取的措施及实施效果。提出了对解决我国劳工短缺问题的可借鉴之处。     

人力资本存量、R&D投资与中国工业增长转型

工业是中国当前三大产业中的支柱产业,工业增长模式的体制转轨很大程度上反映了中国经济增长模式的转轨方向和现状。文章借助1990年-2007年的统计数据进行计算和实证检验发现：中国工业企业从上世纪90年代初以依靠人力资本存量和物质资本存量积累的增长模式转变为新世纪以来以R＆D投资带来的技术进步和工业劳动力投入为主要产出支撑的新模式,虽然这种增长转轨并未彻底完成,但已经证明集约化增长模式将逐步成为中国经济可持续发展的主要途径。     

回归诊断在统计数据异常值探测中的应用

近年来有关异常值的理论探讨一直是个热点问题，从回归模型诊断的角度对统计数据中的异常值进行探测与分析，并在基于R语言的基础上，结合具体实例，给出回归诊断在统计数据异常值探测中的应用。