Household mobility in New York City’s regulated rental housing market

This study analyzes the effect New York City’s rent regulation regime has on household mobility. Using a panel dataset from the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, we estimate the costs and benefits to a particular household of remaining in a regulated unit each period; then in a second stage, we include the benefits of regulations (lowered rent) and the corresponding costs (from disequilibrium in consumption) as explanatory variables in two mobility models. Both logit and survival models confirm that larger benefits in one period are associated with a lower probability of moving in a second period. Similarly, larger costs (distortions in housing consumption) in one period are associated with a higher probability of moving later. While these effects are modest, they are statistically significant. The benefit and cost effects are, however, not symmetric; the pro-mobility effects of costs are roughly twice as large as the anti-mobility effects of benefits. This provides limited support for the relative loss aversion hypothesis of behavioral economics. This support is limited due to the lack of robustness of the result.     

New product development projects: The effects of organizational culture

Despite the increasing use of project management within organizations, an attendant poor rate of success among these projects has been observed (Clancy & Stone, 2005; Ives, 2005). Seventy‐five percent of all business transformation projects fail (Collyer, 2000) and only 16% of U.S. IT projects are completed on time and on budget (Peled, 2000). In an attempt to overcome such a high project failure rate, this paper investigates the effects of organizational culture on the performance of particular types of projects: new product development (NPD) projects. Using data from 95 U.S. organizations, the study provides evidence of the significant effects of organizational culture on NPD projects.     

纽约城市土地利用结构及其分区特征分析

本文研究了纽约市整体土地利用结构、各用地类型的空间布局以及各行政分区用地结构与人均占有量四个方面的内容。发现纽约市与中国的高等级城市土地利用结构和布局之间共性与差异性并存。其中在空间布局方面,居住用地、工业用地差异性更加明显,而商业用地等其他用地类型共性比较明显;不同分区之间与区域功能、人口密度、交通通达能力等要素有直接关系的住宅用地、开敞空间/娱乐用地和商住混合用地等用地类型差异较大。通过分析发现,容积率和建筑密度等指标将发挥重大的作用,需要结合多指标深入分析城市土地利用结构。     

For Better or worse: Organizational turnaround in New York City schools

The performance of public organizations has become a more salient issue as the popularity of accountability policies has grown. Though organizations are often defined as underperforming, little is known about the effectiveness of various strategies commonly recommended for agency turnaround. This study provides a large-N test of three common categories of turnaround mechanisms – retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization – in nearly 300 failing New York City schools between 2008 and 2011. Models show that none of the three turnaround strategies appear to be significantly associated with improvements in core organizational performance from an administrative perspective, although repositioning appears to improve client satisfaction.     

Neighborhood effects of concentrated mortgage foreclosures

As the national mortgage crisis has worsened, an increasing number of communities are facing declining housing prices and high rates of foreclosure. Central to the call for government intervention in this crisis is the claim that foreclosures not only hurt those who are losing their homes to foreclosure, but also harm neighbors by reducing the value of nearby properties and in turn, reducing local governments’ tax bases. The extent to which foreclosures do in fact drive down neighboring property values has become a crucial question for policy-makers. In this paper, we use a unique dataset on property sales and foreclosure filings in New York City from 2000 to 2005 to identify the effects of foreclosure starts on housing prices in the surrounding neighborhood. Regression results suggest that above some threshold, proximity to properties in foreclosure is associated with lower sales prices. The magnitude of the price discount increases with the number of properties in foreclosure, but not in a linear relationship.     

A computer model for the financial analysis of urban housing projects

A financial analysis model has been implemented within the framework of the APL time-sharing system. The model allows different levels of input and output commands which can be used by persons with different degrees of familiarity with computing, in general, and the APL System in particular. It is the result of a joint study between IBM and the Urban Coalition aiming at providing a computer model of the urban housing process which would allow both government planners and private developers to analyze the financial prospects of individual housing projects under a variety of subsidy provisions and other constraints such as FHA regulations concerning profits. The model includes provisions for different types of sponsors of urban housing projects allowing for different tax treatment of profits and losses, and different formulas for estimating the rent charged. The basic output is either in the form of a summary of financial figures or complete financial tables such as income statements, balance sheets and cash flows.     

The income redistribution effects of Medicaid: Application in New York State

The efficacy of Medicaid as an income redistribution mechanism among New York State counties was examined to determine tthe degree of income shifting from higher to lower income counties. A sample of 21 counties, grouped into four discrete income classes according to 1970 per capita income was taken.Costs and expenditures (attributed to Medicaid) were allocated over all counties, adjusting for federal and state aid transfers. The data were tabulated for each of the 21 counties and six key ratios (including: Medicaid expenditures per authorized recipient, etc.) were developed as measures of income distribution.The impact of Medicaid was tested using two independent statistical techniques, goodness of fit and pooled comparisons between each pair of means for each ratio. Results indicated that no appreciable shift in income from high to low counties existed. Medicaid failed 45 of 72 mean difference tests, and the true distribution of costs and expenditures across income classes did not differ significantly from a uniform distribution in 77.7% of the cases.The results indicate that the mandated funding structure of Medicaid impinges more severely on poorer counties. Lack of an adequate health care infra-structure may seriously limit the ability of lower income counties to provide care even with Medicaid covering a large share of medical costs.     

Spatio-temporal modeling of yellow taxi demands in New York City using generalized STAR models

The spatio-temporal variation in the demand for transportation, particularly taxis, in the highly dynamic urban space of a metropolis such as New York City is impacted by various factors such as commuting, weather, road work and closures, disruptions in transit services, etc. This study endeavors to explain the user demand for taxis through space and time by proposing a generalized spatio-temporal autoregressive (STAR) model. It deals with the high dimensionality of the model by proposing the use of LASSO-type penalized methods for tackling parameter estimation. The forecasting performance of the proposed models is measured using the out-of-sample mean squared prediction error (MSPE), and the proposed models are found to outperform other alternative models such as vector autoregressive (VAR) models. The proposed modeling framework has an easily interpretable parameter structure and is suitable for practical application by taxi operators. The efficiency of the proposed model also helps with model estimation in real-time applications.     

Market demand and the duration of business projects: the housing industry

In this study, we propose that companies strategically choose to pursue projects of certain duration according to the fluctuations in market demand conditions. During a market upturn, when more business opportunities are available, companies choose short projects, committing thus their resources for a short period of time and so to better exploit the upcoming business opportunities. On the other hand, in a market downturn projects of longer duration are preferable, since they protect the company from the consequences of adverse market conditions. Finally, these insights appear relevant at least in the US housing industry, where builders pursue longer building projects during the market downturn and shorter ones during the market upturn. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The estimation of HIV prevalence for women of child bearing age in New York City

As the AIDS epidemic developed in the United States, emphasis turned from estimates of HIV incidence in male populations to estimates of HIV prevalence in the larger population, and to estimates of prevalence in sentinel populations. The concern was that heterosexual contact with male intravenous drug users was responsible for increased HIV prevalence among young women. Increases in HIV infection in women of child bearing age would result in increases in the number of HIV infected children. Thus, women of child bearing age would become an especially important sentinel population.The Newborn Seroprevalence Project was part of a national population-based survey to assess HIV prevalence among women of child bearing age. Blood from every newborn was obtained and tested for the HIV antibody. The observed proportion of seropositive births obtained during a given year in a given age/race/region stratum was used to estimate HIV prevalence of all women in that stratum.The purpose of this paper is to estimate the stratum and population-specific HIV prevalence and prevalence proportions for New York City women of child bearing age in 1991, as well as to estimate the bias that results from using the sample proportion in these efforts.