The landlord's dilemma: Asking rent strategies in a heterogeneous housing market

This paper investigates the asking rent behavior of a landlord with a vacancy who faces a known, downward sloping rental probability function. The shape of this function is shown to be strongly dependent on the form of the underlying acceptance rent distribution and on the rate at which prospective tenants visit the unit. A particular family of asking rent strategies is examined. It is shown that all of these strategies exhibit a declining sequence of asking rents, and that the landlord in choosing among them must balance his desire for rental income against his aversion to waiting.     

北京夹心层住房突围进行时

8月25日上午10点,北京市石景山区首批限价房公开摇号的现场--石景山炮厂西山宴会厅内座无虚席.开始,随着一声令下,大屏幕开始滚动起来,申请家庭代表马昌云的心也跟着屏幕一起快速地跳动,他在期待着自己手里攥着的号码能够在大屏幕上出现.……     

Utility functions for Debreu's ‘excess demands’

Given an arbitrary function x: $\text{R}$^l→$\text{R}$^l satisfying Walras law and homogeneity, Debreu decomposed x into the sum of l ‘individually rational’ functions x(p)=Σ^l_k=1[uvbar|x]^k(p). Here we find explicit utility functions u^k, constructed on the basis of a simple geometric intuition, which give rise to Debreu's excess demands [uvbar|x]^k(p).     

Just the facts: An initial analysis of subprime’s role in the housing crisis

Using two large proprietary datasets from New England, this paper establishes some basic facts about the subprime crisis. First, while unaffordable interest-rate resets are often blamed for setting off this crisis, most subprime borrowers who defaulted did so well in advance of their reset dates. Defaults on subprime adjustable-rate mortgages are more sensitive to declining housing prices than are defaults on fixed-rate loans, however, and the data support a number of alternative explanations for this finding. Second, many borrowers with good credit scores took out subprime loans as the housing boom gathered steam. It is hard to construct a prima facie case that these borrowers were inappropriately steered into the subprime market, however, because the loans that these borrowers took out were too risky for prime treatment. Finally, 70% of Massachusetts homes recently lost to foreclosure were originally purchased with prime mortgages. But subprime refinancing is especially prevalent among owners who were likely to have extracted substantial amounts of equity before they defaulted.     

The slowdown in the timing of housing purchases in Japan in the 1990s

Housing prices are high in Japan, resulting in high mortgage payments. Since monthly mortgage payments cannot exceed 25% of current income, households tend to accumulate downpayments in the range of 30–45% of house value. This not only defers their entry into homeownership, but also has significant influence on the type of house eventually purchased. The objective of this study is to understand the changing access to ownership during the 1990s, with emphasis on wealth positions based on savings out of income, private transfers and bequests, and support from parents or other relatives. The source of data is the Ministry of Infrastructure, Land and Transportation survey on household home finance conducted from 1992 to 2000. The methodology employed is duration analysis, with special emphasis on the treatment of liquid asset covariates.     

A note on the unbiasedness of Swamy's estimator for the random coefficient regression model

In this note the estimator proposed by Swamy (1970) for the random coefficient regression model is proved to be unbiased under fairly general conditions. In addition, the conditions under which the mean of the estimator exists are derived.     

Residential density functions: An alternative to Muth's negative exponential model

A “base-price” model of a consumer is described and shown to be consistent with a variety of empirical results for United States cities. Each consumer, in a heterogeneous population, is assumed to trade a range of nonhousing goods and employment at locations not necessarily near the city center. A negative exponential function of distance from the city center is shown to be a reasonable approximation to a city's net residential density function. Differences in the relative shares, rather than absolute levels, of expenditure on housing and nonhousing goods are identified as a possible cause of spatial segmentation of a population.     

Maintenance management: Keeping up with production's changing trends and technologies

Current trends in manufacturing have led to reduced levels of work-in-process inventory and increased levels of automation and machine complexity. These changes have two important implications for maintenance management. First, machine breakdowns not only cause a loss of output from the down machine, but also result in lost production on downstream machines. This occurs because of the elimination of buffer stock between workstations. Second, the gap between the technological expertise of the operators and the technological sophistication of their machines has widened. This gap decreases the ability of operators to make adjustments and minor repairs to their own machines.These two factors cause an increase in maintenance costs associated with machine downtime and maintenance labor. Historically, the proportion of preventive and corrective maintenance has attempted to balance these costs. As buffer stock is reduced and more machines are coupled, the costs of downtime will increase, increasing the need for preventive maintenance and decreasing its cost compared to the cost of lost production.Increases in the use of computer-based planning systems have resulted in the development of computerized preventive maintenance systems that have proven to be successful in planning for maintenance labor and materials. Integrating planning methods with corrective maintenance tasks will help reduce breakdowns, make more efficient use of maintenance craft labor, and provide information for inventory control of maintenance, repair, and operating (MRO) materials.This article examines methods of reducing machine downtime costs, maintenance labor costs, and MRO inventory costs in today's changing production environment. Techniques for reducing these costs are explored in the areas of maintenance planning, maintenance methods improvement, and MRO inventory control.     

The systemic variables and elasticities in Alonso's general,theory of movement

This paper explores the theoretical underpinnings of interregional movement models generalized by William Alonso focusing on the systemic effects of origin supply conditions and destination demand conditions. It is found that although Alonso's theory is logically consistent in terms of regional aggregation and interregional migration accounts, in practice the elasticity estimation of the systemic variables is problematic. Unless the affinity term is broadly defined, the trends in the ratio of interregional to intraregional affinities, cast suspicion on the family of spatial interaction models because of the inseparability of distance from origin and destination characteristics, and spatial autocorrelation problem.     

Comment on ‘the dynamics of job separation: The case of federal employees’

This paper recasts the model presented in ‘The Dynamics of Job Separation: The Case of Federal Employees’, as an optimal stopping problem. It shows that the individuals represented by the model are assumed to behave suboptimally and illustrates several policy analysis problems introduced by assuming such behaviour.     

北京：人口剧增背景下的房价综合治理

北京市人口呈现爆炸式增长,有观点认为应放任房价上涨以此解决人口问题。本文从分析北京市近年来人口变动情况及北京市房价现状入手,分析“高房价抑制人口增长论”,提出解决人口剧增的根本性办法是加快城乡统筹,从宏观层面予以解决。在北京市人口剧增的背景下,北京房价的调控措施应该包括坚持限购政策、开征房产税、加大保障性住房建设、打击市场上垄断投机、骗购骗租等不良行为。     

A note on the Bayesian estimation of Solow's distributed lag model

This note develops the Bayesian estimation of the parameters of Solow's distributed lag model with implicit autocorrelation of disturbances in its autoregressive form. The estimation technique extends Chetty's method for independent disturbances. The results of some Monte Carlo experiments are given comparing point estimates from the posterior distributions with the maximum likelihood estimates. The characteristics of the Bayesian and maximum likelihood estimates are very similar.     

A note on Balestra's (1980) approximate estimator for the first-order moving average process

An approximate procedure, based on Balestra's stated assumptions, is developed. The new method is shown to have superior performance to the approximate procedure developed by Balestra for small sample sizes when the value of the moving average parameter, C, is between zero and 0.50. For C in this region, the new method is also shown to be nearly as good as the exact procedure.     

The demand for housing in developing countries: The case of Korea

This paper presents the results of an analysis of urban housing demand for Korea taking into account the most recent findings of housing demand analysis concerning specification and aggregation biases. In order to obtain correctly specified demand functions, a procedure based on a model of the housing market originally proposed by Muth is used. Drawing on the detailed land information available in Korea, this procedure permits the calculation of an individual price per unit of housing services for each household. The results show conclusively that both the income and price elasticity of the demand for housing services in Korea are comparable to those found in the United States: the income elasticity is smaller than one and the price elasticity is negative and smaller than one in absolute value. Given the number of countries found within the per capita income range between Korea ($700) and the United States ($7800), the finding that these two countries have comparable demand elasticities is of major significance: in the absence of good national estimates, the order of magnitudes found here would be used for other country analyses.