Land tenure in an urban area∗

The paper considers land tenure in black townships in Grahamstown. The legal and practical difficulties which the township dwellers have in acquiring secure land rights is a reflection of their subordinate political status. All decisions about where blacks live and the laws and regulations under which they have operated since the establishment of Grahamstown have been made and administered by whites. At some periods individual whites, welfare and religious organizations have shown some sympathy and concern for the problems of blacks in the area. But such sympathy and concern has never gone so far as to permit blacks effective participation in the life of the city nor even real control over their affairs in the areas allocated to them. In view of the legal restrictions which limit the chances of blacks to gain access to land, the paper is largely a demonstration of the causes and extent of urban landlessness and what implications this situation has on policy making regarding land tenure.     

Effects of wages on job tenure

In this article, the effect of wages on the job tenure is studied using microeconomic data on industrial companies. The data cover a period of 11 years starting from the first quarter of 1980 and contain several pieces of information on workers, jobs, and companies. The models were estimated in a competing risk framework. According to the results the wage groups of the workers and relative wage within a company are positively related to the job tenure. These effects are larger among the persons who leave the industry than among the persons who find new industrial jobs.     

The effect on forestation of the collective forest tenure reform in China

The Chinese government has allowed collective village forest land to pass into individualized ownership. The purpose was to alleviate rural poverty and stimulate investment in forests. Using data collected from 288 villages, in eight provinces, over three years, this paper measures the effect of the individualization on one aspect of forest investment, forestation. Because villages voted on the reform, we identify the causal effect of the reform by an instrumental variable estimator based on the countywide decision to offer the reform package. We find an increase in forestation of 7.68% of forest land in the year of the reform.     

Active labour market policies and job tenure

In this paper, we study the effect of subsidised on-the-jobtraining, training for the unemployed and pure wage subsidieson job tenure. Correcting for selection biases, we find thateach of the labour market policies increases the length of jobtenure. Despite the sensitivity of the estimates to the parametricassumptions with respect to the unobservables, the effect ofsubsidised on-the-job training schemes is always found to besignificantly positive. Training programs for the unemployedand pure wage subsidies always have a positive, but statisticallynon-significant effect Our results provide some support forhuman capital theories as opposed to matching theories.     

Freehold land tenure: Problems and prospects

The purpose of this paper is first to define tenure and freehold tenure and then to consider traditional land tenure and how it would be affected by the introduction of freehold tenure.     

Training,Job Upgrading,Job Creation and Job Destruction

We extend the Mortensen and Pissarides (1999a, b) model to feature an endogenous upgrading or training rate, to gain a novel, general equilibrium, approach to training and labour market policy to gain a distinct model from the traditional partial equilibrium approach (e.g. Acemoglu and Pischke 1998). Among other results, we show training subsidies decrease equilibrium unemployment incidence, duration and level and less generous unemployment benefits increase the occurance of training. We also show the high elasticity of job destruction to aggregate conditions causes the frequency of training to be procyclical. A calibrated version of our model rationalizes cross-country differences in labour and training equilibrium outcomes.      

Measuring Transparency in the Dutch Mortgage Market

Summary This paper is an empirical study of pricing in the Dutch mortgage market. For a narrowly defined set of endowment mortgages (with a fixed lending rate of 10 years), we find that the price dispersion within lenders is larger than the dispersion across lenders. Prices remain dispersed across lenders, even after controlling for characteristics of the borrower, the municipality and the government bond rate. Apparently, the mortgage market is not fully transparent, which impedes competition in the mortgage market. We also find that the price dispersion for mortgages sold by banks is smaller than that for mortgages sold by other lenders. A likely explanation is that lenders using middlemen have higher agency costs. We wish to express our gratitude to the National Mortgage Guarantee (Nationale Hypotheek Garantie) in Zoetermeer, in particular Karel Schiffer and Hans Mersmann, for providing us access to their data as well as for their hospitality. We are grateful to Wim van Assenbergh, Harry Garretsen, Ralph de Haas, Jan Lemmen, Clemens Kool, Job Swank and two anonymous referees of this journal for their comments on previous versions of this article.     

Systemic Risk in the Dutch Financial Sector

This paper investigates systemic risk in the Dutch financial sector by focusing on extreme return co-movements of the major financial institutions. In particular, we use a Monte Carlo simulation experiment conditioned on both a fat and a thin tailed underlying return distribution to test the potential for systemic risk. We find evidence of a strong potential for systemic risk, which has emerged after the major mergers in the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.This work was completed while the author was affiliated to De Nederlandsche Bank. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of De Nederlandsche Bank. I am grateful to Robert-Paul Berben for many useful discussions on methodology, Jan Kakes for support, Martin Admiraal and Carry Mout for data assistance, Aerdt Houben, Job Swank, Casper de Vries, Garry Schinasi, the participants of the 24th meeting of the Research Group on Financial Stability at De Nederlandsche Bank, and two anonymous referees for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Contrarian Investment in the Dutch Stock Market

The efficient markets hypothesis states that at any times security prices fully reflect all available information. Contrarian investment strategies do not recognize the efficiency of capital markets. They call for buying undervalued stocks, i.e. stocks with a low price relative to their fundamentals. The idea behind such a strategy is to take advantage of the extrapolation behaviour of naive investors. Using a fresh and extensive data set from the Dutch stock market, we found that these strategies yield an outperformance without a higher risk. Our results make it hard to maintain the efficient market hypothesis.     

Land tenure and commercial farming in the national states: Problems and proposals

Arguments for or against the introduction of freehold tenure over agricultural land in the national states are based on an incomplete view of the role of tenure in the process of resource allocation. It is shown here that tenure systems in the national states do not meet the necessary requirements for optimal resource allocation. As these tenure systems are defined in terms of legislation, a process of land reform which encompasses the removal of these legislative provisions is proposed. Examples of reform measures which could encourage commercial farming serve to illustrate this proposal.     

Macroeconomic determinants of tenure in the U.S. house of representatives

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Dutch treat

Summary This paper presents data on personal income distribution in the Netherlands for the period 1914–1972, in terms of decile income shares and measures of dispersion. Estimates are given of the trend and of cyclical sensitivity of income inequality, both trend and cycle being far more important before 1940 than after. Attempts to explain changes in inequality by regression analysis, with a necessarily limited set of variables, lead to many rejections.     

在深化改革中促进就业与劳动力市场一体化

全球金融危机使得中国劳动力市场的体制问题更加凸显出来。在应对这次危机过程中，我们需要坚持就业优先的原则，把短期政策与深化改革有效地衔接起来，通过多管齐下来稳定和扩大就业，推动劳动力市场一体化发展，提高中国经济抵御外部风险和冲击的综合能力，实现保障就业、改善民生和社会稳定等多重目标，     

Trade,Job Destruction and Job Creation in European Manufacturing

This paper examines the effects of international trade with the newly industrialized Asian economies on the labor markets of Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The analysis confirms that, despite the growing importance of this trade, the problems of the European labor market can hardly be explained by the increase in imports of manufactures from the Nies. While job destruction appears completely independent from the trade flows with the emerging Asian economies, the evidence on job creation is less clear cut. In two cases imports appear to have depressed employment dynamics, but in another exports turn out to have stimulated it. The most striking evidence is on sector-specific features and individual characteristics, such as sector of (last) employment, sex and education: these variables appear to be much more important than trade in explaining individuals' positions in the labor market.     

新经济:基于传统产业的思考

信息费用的降低和全新的技术、产品创新机制是推动新经济到来和支撑新经济发展的本质因素。在此基础上 ,各产业部门的生产率普遍地提高 ,社会生产力的发展得到源源不断的推进力 ,市场空间由于信息费用的降低和新产品的面世而被不断地拓展 ,社会经济因此在整体上获得了持续、强