英国住房保障政策的体系、进展与反思

英国是世界上最早实施政府干预住房市场的国家,早在1919年颁布的《住房和城镇规划法》中就明确规定居民住房问题为公共事务,政府对此负有义务。经过不断的摸索和改进,英国的住房保障政策从起初的政府直接供给公共住房,逐渐向政府以财政、金融等手段鼓励扶持社会化公共住房的建造与运营转变。本文对英国20世纪90年代以来的住房保障体系演变与发展现状做了介绍,并重点对扶持政策、资助项目、主管机构、融资方式等方面进行了详细阐述,以期对今后我国住房保障相关政策的研究制定有所启示。     

Strategic inter‐organizational environmentalism in the US: A multi‐sectoral perspective of alternating eco‐policy roles

During the last several decades, numerous policies and programs intended to advance environmental goals have been formulated in the US by governmental bodies and implemented by businesses and nongovernmental organizations. This article forwards a multi‐sectoral perspective that business and nonprofit organizations have also been significantly involved in environmental policy and program formulation, as well as implementation, and that governments have also fulfilled the latter strategic role in US environmental policy. In this article, nine US environmental initiatives are described and categorized according to which of the three sectors' organizations were significant formulators of the programs and which were significant implementors. Implications for future research include investigation of other environmental dyadic program combinations in addition to those presented, extension of the present analysis beyond dyads into environmental policy networks, inclusion of the strategic environmental program evaluation stage to complement formulation and implementation and exploration of effectiveness variables in cross‐sectoral, inter‐organizational collaborations. Implications for educators and practitioners are also presented. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ACTIVE LABOR MARKET POLICIES: A META‐ANALYSIS

This paper provides a meta‐analysis of microeconometric evaluation studies on the effectiveness of active labor market policies. The analysis is built upon a systematically assembled data set of causal impact estimates from 57 experimental and quasi‐experimental studies, providing 654 estimates published between January 1990 and December 2017. We distinguish between the short and longer term impacts in our analysis; at 6, 12, 24, and 36 months after program start. After correcting for publication bias and country‐specific macroeconomic characteristics, subsidized labor and public employment programs have negative short‐term impacts, which gradually turn positive in the longer run. Schemes with enhanced services including job‐search assistance and training programs do not have these negative short‐term effects, and stay positive from 6 until 36 months after program start.     

The effectiveness of European active labor market programs

Active Labor Market Programs are widely used in European countries, but despite many econometric evaluation studies analyzing particular programs no conclusive cross-country evidence exists regarding “what program works for what target group under what (economic and institutional) circumstances?”. This paper aims at answering this question using a meta-analysis based on a data set that comprises 137 program evaluations from 19 countries. The empirical results of the meta-analysis are surprisingly clear-cut: Rather than contextual factors such as labor market institutions or the business cycle, it is almost exclusively the program type that seems to matter for program effectiveness. While direct employment programs in the public sector frequently appear detrimental, wage subsidies and “Services and Sanctions” can be effective in increasing participants' employment probability. Training programs – the most commonly used type of active policy – show modestly positive effects.     

Public policy and innovation: The case of pharmaceuticals

The pharmaceutical industry has been subject in recent years to an expanding set of regulatory constraints and related policy actions adversely affecting its level of innovation. The experiences of this industry provides some important insights for recent national policy discussions on declining innovation in the U.S. and the need for economic “revitalization”. The first section of the paper considers the societal benefits resulting from new drug therapies and other kinds of industrial innovation. An analysis of the basic characteristics of the R and D investment decision is then undertaken along with recent trends in various determinant factors. The last half of the paper evaluates the effects of government regulatory, patent, and reimbursement policies on R and D incentives and the level of pharmaceutical innovation. The paper concludes with several recommendations for policy changes to improve the incentives for industrial innovation in this and related high technology industries.     

Government Subsidies

This paper addresses the problems of defining and measuring government subsidies, examines why and how government subsidies are used as a fiscal policy tool, discusses their general economic effects in terms of real welfare costs and distributional implications, appraises international empirical evidence on government subsidies, and offers options for their reform. Recent international trends in government subsidy expenditure are analyzed for the 16‐year period from 1975 to 1990, using general government subsidy data for 60 countries from the United Nations' System of National Accounts (SNA). The paper reviews major policy options for subsidy reform, focusing on ways to improve the cost‐effectiveness of subsidy programs.     

Counter-intuitive effects of domestic law enforcement policies in the United States

In spite of the increase in domestic law enforcement policies in the U.S. drug related crime has followed a non-monotonic trend and cocaine and heroin prices, instead of increasing, have been dropping or remained stable over time. All this in a context of an increase in these drugs’ consumption during the 1980s and a small decrease during the 1990s. This paper provides an explanation to these counter-intuitive effects of domestic law enforcement policies. We model how drug lords respond to this type of policy within a conflict framework over the control of distribution activities for illegal drugs, which is novel. The model predicts drug distribution activities, drug prices and drug consumption. These predictions appear to be consistent with the empirical evidence in the United States.     

美国不同时期的住房补贴政策:实施效果的评价及启发

本文研究了美国住房政策70年的演变历程,着重分析了公共住房计划、购房补贴计划(235条款)、租房补贴计划(236条款)以及第8条款中的住房津贴计划、代金券计划等重要的住房补贴计划,对这些补贴计划的实施效果进行了评价,为我国研究住房政策提供有价值的参考.     

Local authority employment planning: An ex post case study of some policy instruments

This paper outlines some of the results of a three year study into a local employment Act. The principal powers under this Act are similar to those later provided in the Inner Urban Areas Act 1978. The employment effects of the policies are evaluated in terms of before and after comparisons, and with-without perspective. An input-output model assesses the multiplier effect of spending under the program, including secondary employment effects elsewhere in the local economy from the expansion of aided firms. The cost-effectiveness of the various policies are presented in terms of a number of criteria. Finally, the social benefits and costs of the program are also evaluated.     

Pharmaceutical High Profits: The Value of R&D,or Oligopolistic Rents?

Pharmaceutical firms attribute high prices and high profits to costs associated with researching and developing the next generation of life-saving drugs. Using data from annual reports, this article tests the validity of this claim. We find that while pharmaceutical firms do invest in R&D, they also enjoy strong rents; between 1988 and 2009, pharmaceuticals enjoyed profits of 3 to 37 times the all-industry average, depending on the years, while investing proportionately less in R&D than other high-R&D firms. Costs of pharmaceutical drugs have successfully flown below the radar in much of the current health care debate, with producers managing to obstruct alternative sourcing as well as payment cuts. While health care is examined for savings in other areas, sustained high pharmaceutical profits suggest that as a new health care policy develops in the U.S., the pharmaceutical industry should not be excluded from examination for significant savings in health care costs.     

On the dynamic response of a firm to an employment subsidy with a fmd threshold

During the last two decades, policy-makers have included employment subsidies among the tools of stabilization policy. Employment subsidy programs have been introduced in Japan, Great Britain, Europe and the United States. There has been some concern, however, about the effectiveness of such programs. In this paper, we analyze how a profit-maximizing firm will respond to a marginal subsidy program with a fixed threshold, focusing on the role of inventories. We show that, in some cases, the firm may have an incentive to manipulate inventories in a way that increases its profits but lowers the cost effectiveness of the program.     

IMF and economic reform in developing countries

In this paper we assess the IMF approach to economic reform in developing countries. The impact of IMF program participation on economic growth has been evaluated empirically in a cross-country literature, with little evidence of IMF programs having been successful. This suggests that a fresh approach is in order. However, the cross-country approach is unlikely to provide a sound basis for drawing clear conclusions, so we review IMF programs from a different perspective, involving a broader literature on development strategy. In particular, it is widely accepted that a common characteristic of IMF programs is a high degree of policy rigidity. This is in contrast with studies which hold that unleashing an economy's growth potential hinges on a set of well-targeted policy interventions aimed at removing country-specific binding constraints. The process of locating constraints that bind involves growth diagnostics and policy trialing. This approach maintains that not all distortions are equally important and, by extension, not all policy reforms. From this point of view, IMF programs based on a list of standard conditionalities will not accomplish much. But policy trialing is more relevant to actors and entities with a broader, and more microeconomic, focus such as national policymakers and the World Bank. It is in choices among competing projects and programs that trial and error is most likely to be necessary. Nevertheless, reforms of the IMF such as the “streamlining initiative” should start from a good understanding of the reasons for adherence to policy orthodoxy. We discuss underlying institutional and organizational reasons for policy rigidity and consider some suggested reforms.     

Public insurance and private savings: who is affected and by how much?

This paper employs a recently developed instrumental quantile regression method to investigate the effect of Medicaid on household savings across different wealth groups. It finds that the disincentive effect of Medicaid on household savings is heavily concentrated in the middle net‐worth households. In contrast, the effects on the bottom and top net‐worth households are quite small and insignificant. These heterogeneous incentive effects are partly explained by Medicaid asset tests. Our findings hold regardless of whether affluence is measured in terms of wealth or income. They suggest that despite generating substantial crowd‐out for the mean household, Medicaid expansions are unlikely to discourage the savings of the poorest households. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Monetary policy in deflation: the liquidity trap in history and practice

The experience of the U.S. economy during the mid-1930s, when short-term nominal interest rates were continuously close to zero, is sometimes taken as evidence that monetary policy was ineffective and the economy was in a “liquidity trap.” Close examination of the historical policy record for the period indicates that the evidence does not support such assertions. The incomplete and erratic recovery from the Great Depression can be traced to a failure to pursue consistently expansionary policy resulting from an incorrect understanding of monetary policy in an environment of very low short-term nominal interest rates. Commonalities with the Japanese experience during the late 1990s, and the inadequacy of short-term interest rates as indicators of the stance of monetary policy are discussed and a robust operating procedure for implementing monetary policy in a low-interest-rate environment by adjusting the maturity of targeted interest-rate instruments is described.     

Medicaid and the housing and asset decisions of the elderly: Evidence from estate recovery programs

I examine the impact of Medicaid on elderly housing and portfolio decisions by using recent state-by-calendar-year level variation in the Medicaid treatment of owner-occupied housing assets from the adoption of Medicaid estate recovery programs. Prior to the adoption of these programs, the house, which represents the most important non-pension asset to the elderly, was exempt from determining Medicaid eligibility and served as both a place of residence and a store of wealth. Adoption of estate recovery programs changed the owner-occupied housing safety net by making the house eligible for recovery by the government, which increased the implicit tax of holding owner-occupied housing. Using data from 1993 to 2004 in the Health and Retirement Study on elderly individuals, I find that state adoption of estate recovery programs makes the elderly decrease homeownership by 4.6%, decrease home equity by 15%, and also decrease the housing share of the elderly wealth portfolio. State adoption of these programs results in elderly baseline homeowners being 33% less likely to own their homes at death and more likely to use a trust as a substitute to housing in order to preserve assets and carry out bequest motives at death.     

Maternal labour supply and child nutrition in West Africa

It is widely recognized that women in developing countries have dual roles as generators of household income and as primary caregivers to their children. Many policies directed at reducing poverty or malnutrition involve one or the other of these roles. Programs to reduce child malnutrition, for example, typically target mothers as caregivers. However, because of the time constraints women face, there are potential conflicts between women's different activities about which policy makers are rarely informed. Nutrition interventions have not usually considered the barriers to participation in such programs facing mothers who, either by choice or necessity, have entered the labour force (Leslie, 1988; Engle, 1994). Similarly, policies directed at improving female employment opportunities typically ignore women's important role in household activities related to children's healthy development.
  In this paper we address a potentially important implication of women's multiple roles and the time constraints they face: that female labour force participation, by reducing the time available for household activities related to child development, may place young children at nutritional risk.     

AGRICULTURAL POLICY AS A SOCIAL ENGINEERING TOOL: A NEW JERSEY CASE STUDY

This study uses logistic regression to examine the preferences for social engineering policies in the agricultural sector in a New Jersey case study. It finds that farm operators are unlikely to support a policy allowing countries to restrict trade to pursue domestic economic and social policy goals if the policies affect international trade. In particular, it suggests that farm operators with annual gross sales including government payments between $500 000 and $999 999 are 80 percent less likely to indicate such a preference. Farm operators with advanced degrees, some college education, and a high school diploma are also unlikely to indicate such a preference. In contrast, farm operators who receive no income from farming or ranching and those who receive a percentage of family income from farming or ranching indicate that countries should be allowed to restrict trade to pursue domestic economic and social policy goals even if the policies affect international trade.     

The impact of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) on the value of S&L stocks

This study examines the effects of the Financial Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 on the stock returns to shareholders of publicly traded savings and loans (S&Ls). Abnormal returns to stockholders are measured in response to each new piece of information concerning the passage of the Act. Using weekly data to have the largest possible sample, we found two significant time periods: a) the initial announcement of the Act and b) the time of passage and signing of the Act into law. We also provide evidence that stock return behavior differed between large and small S&Ls.