‘Generation Rent’ and The Fallacy of Choice

The now widely used term ‘Generation Rent’ reflects the growing phenomenon in the UK of young people living in the private rental sector for longer periods of their lives. Given the importance of leaving home in youth transitions to adulthood, this is a significant change. It is further critical given the rapid expansion of the private rented sector in the UK over recent decades and the more limited rights that private tenants have. This article draws on qualitative evidence to highlight the impact this has on young people's lives, and broader patterns of social‐spatial inequality. Our research highlights that, whilst young people retain long‐term preferences for homeownership, they nonetheless deconstruct this normalized ideal as a ‘fallacy of choice', given its unachievability in reality. Influenced by the work of Foucault, Bourdieu and Bauman, we emphasize how these dominant norms of housing consumption are in tension with objective reality, since young people's ability to become ‘responsible homeowners' is tempered by their material resources and the local housing opportunities available to them. Nonetheless, this does not exempt them from the ‘moral distinctions' being made, wherein renting is problematized and constructed as ‘flawed consumption'. These conceptual arguments advance international scholarly debates about the governance of consumption, offering a novel theoretical lens through which to examine the difficulties facing ‘Generation Rent’.     

Length of residence discounts,turnover, and demand elasticity. Should long-term tenants pay less than new tenants?

Previous academic work on rental contracts has predicted that landlords will attempt to minimize turnover costs by giving discounts to long-term tenants. If long-term tenants have less elastic demand than short-term tenants, however, landlords might prefer to give discounts to short-term tenants. A model is developed in this paper in which landlords take account of both turnover costs and demand elasticity. Evidence from a survey of apartment managers is consistent with the model and shows that length-of-residence discounts are less common than discounts on the first month’s rent for new tenants.     

Brokers’ contractual arrangements in the Manhattan residential rental market

We bring new evidence to bear on the role of intermediaries in frictional matching markets and on how parties design contracts with them. Specifically, we examine two features of contracts between landlords and agents in the Manhattan residential rental market. In our data, 72 percent of listings involve exclusive relationships between landlords and agents (the remaining 28 percent are non-exclusive); and in 21 percent of listings, the landlord commits to pay the agent’s fee (in the other 79 percent, the tenant pays the agent’s the fee). Our analysis highlights that these contractual features reflect landlords’ concerns about providing agents with incentives to exert effort specific to their rental units and to screen among heterogeneous tenants.     

Unwilling Subjects of Financialization

This article seeks to advance debates about the financialization of housing by focusing on the emergence of rental housing as a frontier for financialization, a dynamic that is increasingly relevant since the global financial crisis. Situated in New York City, the research focuses on an aggressive wave of investment in affordable rent‐stabilized properties by private equity firms, their efforts to release value from these properties, and the implications of the 2008 financial crisis for their investment strategies and thus for tenants’ experience of home. Through detailed empirical analysis tracing the connections between how rental housing has been constituted as a new site for private equity investment globally, the local conditions facilitating this process in New York and how it reshaped everyday life for tenants, the article theorizes tenants as unwilling subjects of financialization. Yet unwillingness does not necessarily translate into being overtaken; it also connotes reluctance and indeed struggle. This novel conceptualization highlights the ways in which financialization meets with dissent, and its necessarily contingent and incomplete nature. The article therefore develops the wider intellectual project of understanding financialization not as a monolithic and inevitable process, but as one characterized by resistance from without and contradiction from within.     

The Japanese Tenant Protection Law and Asymmetric Information on Tenure Length

The Japanese Tenant Protection Law (JTPL) protects tenure security to such an extent that landlords cannot terminate a contract at the end of a tenancy period without just cause. Hence, information on intended tenure length is important for landlords in managing rental housing. A model is developed in which landlords cannot foresee the intended tenure length of prospective tenants. If landlords are sufficiently risk-averse under asymmetric information on tenure length, the JTPL reduces the equilibrium quantity of rental housing, resulting in inefficiency of the Japanese rental-housing market.     

基于Logistic回归的房客信用评价模型研究

国内的房屋租赁市场存在严重的房客信用缺失现象,给房东带来了信用风险,亟待建立科学的房客信用评价机制来控制信用风险。文章结合房屋租赁的具体情况,提出了一套房客信用评价指标体系,并使用问卷调查收集的房客数据建立了基于Logistic回归的评价模型,最后对模型进行了检验和评估。实证结果表明,利用此指标体系和评价模型能够有效地预测房客风险,为实际租房提供决策支持。     

The emergence of career boundaries in unbounded industries: career odysseys in the Italian New Economy

The main objective of this research1 was to study boundaries to the ‘boundaryless career’ in a novel context. Our empirical study focused on career paths leading top managers to enter emergent firms. We collected data on professional histories of a sample of top managers who operated in firms listed at the ‘Nuovo Mercato’ (New Market), the Italian equivalent of the NASDAQ. We demonstrate the existence of two major kinds of boundaries: competence-based (in the form of industry boundaries) and relation-based (in the form of professional network boundaries). A second objective of our research was to identify dominant individual career logics and to connect different career logics to the boundaryless career concept. Our data reveal the dominance of the evolutionary career logic.     

Discrimination in rental markets: Evidence from Norway

This paper examines discrimination in the rental housing market. We analyze a rich data set on rental contracts from Norway. We find that tenants born abroad pay a statistically significant and economically important premium for their dwelling units after controlling for a comprehensive set of apartment, individual and contract specific covariates. Moreover, we find that the premium is largest for tenants of African origin. Finally, Norwegians whose parents were born abroad also face a statistically significant and economically important rental premium that is directly comparable to the premium paid by tenants born abroad.     

Rent control and tenancy duration

This paper investigates how rent control affects mobility in the Danish housing market. We apply a proportional hazard duration model, that encompasses both the presence of left truncated tenancy durations, right censored observations and allows for a very flexible specification of the time dependency of the hazard rate. Tenancy mobility is severely reduced by rent control. For a typical household in the private rental sector tenancy duration is found to be more than six years longer if the apartment belongs to the 10% most regulated units than if it belongs to the 10% least regulated units.     

‘We have never been Post-modern’: On the Search of Management Accounting Theory

This paper considers the value that aldermen in Dutch municipalities, who are elected politicians, attach to quantitative output information. The paper especially focuses on the way in which aldermen evaluate the performances of their professional top managers. In the paper the Hopwood evaluation styles, which originally refer to the private sector, are further developed for the public sector. Exploratory field research was conducted in the municipalities of Groningen, Leeuwarden and The Hague. The research shows that the aldermen paid much attention to a manager's activities and the organization's operations and relatively little to outputs. Aldermen did not use an ‘output-constrained’ or an ‘outcome-conscious’ evaluation style. Rather, most of the politicians evaluated the performances of their top managers in a style that is here called an ‘operations-conscious style’. This evaluation style focuses on the activities of managers and the processes of their organization. Quantitative output information plays some part in this evaluation style, but the main question is whether a manager acts as a good ‘facilitator’, i.e. ensures that his organization is functioning well. Besides, important criteria are the way in which a manager deals with short-term problems and with the politicians' opinions and personal wishes.     

Private conversation matters: Evidence from sell-side analyst reports after private meetings

Using a manually collected database of Shenzhen Stock Exchange listed firms from 2013 to 2015, we examine the key characteristics of firms’ private meetings and their effects on analysts’ reports. We show that the presence of managers, a smaller number of meeting participants, and discussing questions in more categories are associated with more accurate and less optimistic short-term forecasts during the hosting periods following the meeting. Our results suggest that private and small group conversations between managers and analysts can be significant information channels in these meetings. In particular, we show that the short-term earnings forecast is more accurate and less optimistic during hosting periods after these meetings in general, but recommendations are still biased upwardly. These results are robust regardless of whether the analyst attend meetings or whether the meeting is hold onsite, providing further evidence that private conversations with managers may be a more effective information channel than observing firms’ operations during site visits.     

Financial repression and housing investment: An analysis of the Korean chonsei

South Korea has a unique kind of rental contract, called chonsei. The tenant pays an upfront deposit, typically from 40% to 70% of the property value, to the landlord, and the landlord repays the deposit to the tenant upon contract termination. The tenant is not required to make any periodic monthly rental payments. The main goal of this paper is to show why such a unique rental contract exists and has been popular in Korea. The model shows that chonsei is an ingenious market response in the era of “financial repression” in Korea (Renaud, 1989), allowing landlords to accumulate sufficient funds for housing investment without major reliance on a mortgage. The model also shows that the tenant, who suffers from insufficient mortgage borrowings, can access cheaper rental housing via chonsei than when only monthly rental housing is available. The model predicts that the chonsei system should fade out when arbitrage gains from housing investment disappear. An implication of the model is that the chonsei renter may save while the landlord and the owner-occupier put all their assets into housing and thus have no financial savings. This hypothesis is empirically tested and confirmed.     

PUBLIC SERVICES MANAGEMENT: ACTIVITIES, INITIATIVES AND LIMITS TO LEARNING

Private sector-style management initiatives to ensure UK public services managers’ learning from private sector management practice are examined, and their rationale questioned. The lack of a coherent, systematic and agreed view of what constitutes ‘management’ and ‘managerial work’ in the private sector is discussed. It is argued that there are reasons for believing that the particular character and organizational contexts of public services will require different managerial behaviours. The manner in which experimental managerial initiatives in some public services have shifted into mandatory innovations is examined. Such innovations can be incompatible with the values of those managing in the public service, who frequently fail to recognize the advantages of late innovation, incrementalism and circumspection. In public services particularly, many managerial activities are the province of ‘non managerial’ staff. Though frequently not considered, the values of these de facto managers may be central to the progress of such innovations. It is further argued that risk-taking as applied in a business context is inappropriate to the degree that public services managers must be concerned with the common weal, equity and accountability. The article concludes with a detailed research agenda to support the need to recognize public services management as a rich and varied area of managerial behaviour in its own right. Its character and variation warrants further investigation as a basis for formulating more appropriate management concepts against which to measure public services managers’ behaviour and performance.     

职业经理人引入对公司非效率投资的影响——基于上市家族企业的数据

以沪深两市2010—2015年上市家族企业作为研究对象,实证检验我国上市家族企业引入职业经理人对公司非效率投资的影响,并进一步研究在成长性水平不同的企业中职业经理人引入对企业投资效率影响的差异。实证研究结果表明：非效率投资普遍存在于我国上市家族企业中;上市家族企业引入职业经理人对公司非效率投资具有抑制作用;与低成长性企业相比,高成长性企业引入职业经理人对公司非效率投资的抑制作用较弱,即企业成长性水平的逐步提高会削弱职业经理人引入对企业非效率投资的影响。     

广东家族企业上市公司职业经理人的现状分析

本文以在深市上市的广东50家家族控制的上市公司为对象,根据他们当前的聘用经理人的现状,发现广东上市家族企业有超过一半的企业未聘用职业经理人,基于对广东上市家族企业中职业经理人的年龄、学历、资历、性别、年薪等现状分析,指出职业经理人制度在广东家族上市公司还不能得到很好的普及,这样不利于我们经济的发展,实际上对应了我国较弱的投资者保护水平,这方面工作需要我们以后加以改善。     

DIS/POSSESSORY DATA POLITICS: From Tenant Screening to Anti-Eviction Organizing

In this article I place tenant screening data grabbing practices in tension with the ongoing work of housing justice-based tool making. While the tenant screening industry has spent decades amassing eviction data to facilitate the blocklisting of tenants with prior eviction records and thereby reifying racial capitalist geographies, housing organizers today rely on some of this same data to illuminate evictor networks and organize anti-eviction campaigns. This has been particularly important in the wake of corporate landlordism in which evictions are executed through opaque shell companies. Tenant-made tools attempt to undo this uneven landscape in which landlords own troves of data about tenants, but in which tenants don't even know their own landlords’ names. While opening up all eviction data to the public might appear to be an antidote, doing so can also provide screening companies with even more data to use in blocklisting. In my examination of this conjuncture, I forge the analytic of dis/possessory data politics to map out the violence of tenant screening data predation while also problematizing the technoliberal impulse to open up all eviction data. Yet dis/possessory data politics also attest to care and coalition work marked by practices of possession beyond logics of theft, banishment and techno solutionism.     

Neighborhood revitalization's effects on tenants and the benefit-cost analysis of government neighborhood programs

This paper analyzes the potential effects of neighborhood improvements on low-income tenants. The theoretical model shows that tenants with strong psychological ties to their current neighborhood may suffer significant losses due to rent increases caused by neighborhood improvement, even if no displacement occurs. These tenant effects bias property value measures of the benefits of government neighborhood programs. The model is tested using data from the Experimental Housing Allowance Program, and modest but important tenant effects are found.     

Manager's occupational stress in state-owned and private enterprises in the People's Republic of China

Privatization that has taken place in the People's Republic of China has brought about improved profitability and effectiveness of enterprises. However, it is not known whether employees' occupational stressors and strains in private enterprises would differ from those in state-owned enterprises. This study aims to examine the major sources of manager's occupational stress in private and state-owned enterprises, and comparing the intensity of these stressors and strains. The relationships between stressors and strains were also investigated in both economic sectors. The questionnaires were completed by 234 managers in state-owned enterprises and 179 managers in private enterprises from eight cities of the PRC. The questionnaires were used to measure sources of stress, job satisfaction, and physical and psychological strain. The results showed that managers in private enterprises experienced higher levels of occupational stressors (mainly ‘Organizational structure and climate’ and ‘Relationship with others’) and psychological strains than those in state-owned enterprises. Moreover, ‘Organizational structure and climate’ was also found to be a major stressor when predicting both psychological and physical strain in both economic sectors.     

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND EUROPEAN INNOVATION SYSTEMS

Abstract This paper surveys the literature on university patenting. From the point of view of the economic theory of patents, it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical: patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights, but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme, i.e. they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge. In the debate surrounding the so‐called Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA, it has, however, been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms. The first part of the paper addresses two major questions. First, what is the economic logic of Bayh‐Dole, and, second, what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop? In the second part, the paper addresses the issue of whether ‘Bayh‐Dole‐like’ legislation would be beneficial for European countries. In a number of European countries, a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector. Using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six European countries, an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in Europe. Because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant, statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in Europe. The paper ends with a discussion of how this ‘European practice’ of university patenting affects public–private knowledge transfer in Europe, and how this compares to the effects of the Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA.     

Templates for financial control? Management and employees under the private equity business model

The term ‘private equity business model’ (PEBM) refers to private equity investors that delist publicly quoted firms, managing them as private equity‐controlled portfolio firms. But how and in what form do these investors diffuse a preferred template for the PEBM in portfolio firms? Is diffusion codified, institutionalised or merely tacit? What is the difference between these forms of diffusion? As a method of financial control, how is diffusion evident for managers and workers? Theoretically, while ‘financialisation’ is a contemporary pressure on the British economy, there is a ‘disconnection’ between competitive pressures for financialisation and the diffusion of practices to manage these pressures in portfolio firms. Forty‐two interviews in eight portfolio firms and five associated private equity firms concludes that potentially transformative and decisive restructuring for managers and workers is more evident than a defined template.