Maintenance contracts for leased goods: their role in creating brand loyalty

Using a two‐period switching cost model, this paper compares rental profit with sales profit in a framework in which duopolists produce horizontally differentiated durable goods. Rental firms use maintenance contracts that stipulate that repeat customers pay a lower fine per unit of damage than do those customers who switch to a rival firm. In the sales regime, firms give loyal customers a discount on their second period prices. If switching costs are zero, sales profit equals rental profit. For positive and identical switching costs, either regime can dominate. As the exogenous rate of depreciation falls, rental profit exceeds sales profit. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DEVELOPMENT OF REGIONAL SOCIAL ACCOUNTING MATRICES WITH DETAILED AGRICULTURAL LAND RENT DATA AND IMPROVED VALUE-ADDED COMPONENTS FOR THE USA

We describe a method for creating social accounting matrices (SAMs) with detailed agricultural land rent data for any arbitrary subset of the 48 contiguous states in the USA. Data on land use and land rents from various public sources is merged with national accounts data. The method reorganizes the rental income of persons concept present in national accounts to payments to conventional primary factors of production. This method also reallocates portions of the indirect business tax account to the appropriate sales and import tax accounts. SAMs created using this method should be useful inputs into input–output or computable general equilibrium models explicitly representing a heterogeneous land market and analyzing the economic effects of agricultural, bioenergy, water and climate policies on land-use change, land rents, agricultural commodity markets, trade and households’ welfare. The method's implementation is freely available, enabling others to rapidly create SAMs with their own desired region and sector aggregations.     

Innovation, Product Durability, and Market Structure

Because many durable goods industries are also industries with significant innovative activity, we analyze the relationship between an oligopolistic firm's choice of product durability and cost-reducing innovation in rental and sales markets. We demonstrate the firm's durability may be greater than, equal to, or less than a social planner's, depending upon innovation's impact on the marginal cost of durability. We also show that the firm's innovation level can be maximized for moderate levels of concentration if the output is durable. This provides theoretical support for the empirical observation that innovation is often maximized in markets of moderate concentration.     

Building Permit Policy and Land Price Distortions: Empirical Evidence

This study examines the impacts of building permit policy on suburban land prices. The central premise of this study is that building permit policy may be a binding constraint and may lead to price distortions in land markets. We use a database of 354 suburban land sales to examine the impact of permit policy on land prices in 26 municipalities in a suburban county of Philadelphia. Our study offers evidence of price distortions. We find that land prices go up with planned increases in residential building permits. We also find that a progrowth building permit policy causes land prices to rise more in municipalities where developable land is scarce and vice versa.     

Corporate social responsibility,durable‐goods and firm profitability

Utilizing a two‐period durable‐goods framework, we show that in uncommitted sales markets a firm may earn higher profits as it increases its level of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We find that this occurs even though CSR has no direct impact other than increasing the durable‐goods firm's manufacturing costs. We show that in sales markets, CSR may allow the firm to credibly commit itself to lower production in the future. This, in turn, can enhance their profits even though the CSR activities are costly and provide no direct demand or marketing benefit in our model. This is important because it provides another, hereto unexplored, strategic rationale for the willingness of profit‐maximizing firms to undertake costly CSR activities. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Applying sales promotion competitions to nonprofit contexts

This paper discusses the applicability of sales promotions within not‐for‐profit (NFP) marketing, and argues that some of the widely held prejudices about sales promotions have acted to obscure their potential contribution to a range of NFP markets. Understanding this potential requires a clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of specific sales promotion techniques. The paper presents frameworks for classifying both sales promotions and marketing contexts, which can help an understanding of which sales promotions might work in particular NFP contexts. The paper then focuses on a specific type of sales promotion, which represents a potentially valuable and versatile tool for NFP marketers, the sales promotion competition. It details the benefits that sales promotion competitions can offer NFP marketers, and also contributes some guidelines to aid in running them effectively. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

城乡交错区农村住房租赁市场:资源与收入配置效应

本文对杭州市城乡交错区农村住房租赁市场的资源配置与收入配置效应进行了详细分析。研究发现,村庄外来劳动力比重对住房租赁市场的发育影响较大;家庭人均住房建筑面积与农户出租面积关系密切。住房租赁市场的发育提高了宅基地利用效率,并一定程度上促进了住房投资。住房出租的租金收入在农户家庭收入总额中已经占到了不小的份额,这意味着住房租赁市场的发育有利于农户家庭收入的提高。     

Contract equilibria in a regulated rental housing market

Various contractual equilibrium concepts for a regulated rental housing market are studied in this paper. Regulation refers to rental contracts with institutionally prescribed structures and rental prices, a situation common for housing markets with restrictive rental protection legislation. Contracts can then be considered as indivisible commodities with certain unusual characteristics. Existence of equilibria of the various types is shown under rather weak assumptions.     

Platform market competition with endogenous side decisions

This paper develops a framework to analyze platform competition in two‐sided markets in which agents endogenously decide on which side of a platform to join. We characterize the equilibrium pricing structure and perform a comparative statics analysis on how the distribution of agents’ preferences affects the platforms’ profits. We also show that the market equilibrium under profit‐maximizing platforms leads to the first best social surplus, which illustrates the importance of the price mechanism to induce more balanced participation across the two sides. This framework can be applied to analyze market competition for “rental” or “sharing” platforms. In addition, we extend our analysis to consider an initial investment stage, which makes participants the owner of some durable goods to rent out.     

Monthly rent with variable deposit: A new form of rental contract in Korea

In this paper, we describe the structure of the monthly-rent-with-variable-deposit (MRVD) contract, a distinct type of rental contract in Korea. We demonstrate that the Chonsei contract is one variant of the MRVD contract. To explain the MRVD contract, we propose a leverage-effect-seeking hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, we are able to elucidate a variety of rental market conditions in Korea. Our hypothesis is consistent with the simultaneous existence of several types of rental contracts and various combinations of monthly rent, as well as the up-front deposit in the MRVD contracts. We also focused on the deposit-to-monthly-rent conversion rate, a critical factor in the Korean rental housing market. Our hypothesis indicates that conversion rates vary across local markets depending on local market conditions, such as the expected house price appreciation rate. The results of our data analysis demonstrate that our hypothesis more adequately explains the observed trend in the conversion rate, as well as that in the MRVD contracts.     

Global Engagement and Returns Volatility

This paper finds that a greater reliance on foreign market sales increases the volatility of firms’ stock returns, using high‐frequency data for publicly listed Japanese manufacturing firms over the period 2000–10. The two margins of global engagement we consider, namely, exports and sales via foreign affiliates (horizontal foreign direct investment), have both a positive and economically significant effect on firm‐level volatility. We find, however, that increasing the intensity of sales through foreign affiliates has a stronger effect on volatility than a similar change in export intensity. We also uncover evidence consistent with the notion that firms’ need to use external finance to cover the substantial costs involved in reaching foreign consumers can be an important channel through which firms’ participation in international markets increases their exposure to economic uncertainty.     

收益共享契约在考虑销售努力的出租供应链中的协调研究

在传统的出租供应链上各方独立决策,难以实现利润的最大化,收益共享契约的提出使此类问题的利润最大化成为可能。本文将销售努力考虑到此类问题的模型中,建立了由最佳销售努力和最优订货量联合确定的新的模型,设计了新的契约运行机制,使得模型更加贴近现实,并通过数学方法证实了收益共享契约在此类模型中仍具有可行性。在此基础上举出一个实例,通过对算例结果的分析进一步对模型进行了阐述。     

Are There Tax Arbitrage Opportunities in Private Rental Housing Markets?

Tax arbitrage opportunities in rental housing markets arise when high bracket taxpayers exploit the tax shelter and conversion features of the tax treatment of rental housing and as a consequence offer low bracket taxpayers rental housing at a cost lower than if they purchased the same quantity of housing for owner occupation. A microdata set has been employed to estimate the size of these tax arbitrage opportunities with respect to 1907 properties owned by Australian landlords. The measure of tax arbitrage opportunities is the breakeven tax rate at which the maximum rental rate a potential occupant is prepared to pay before turning to purchased housing is equal to the landlord's reservation rental rate. Potential occupants with marginal tax rates below the breakeven tax rate find that renting has a relative cost advantage over home purchase. When agency costs (the costs incurred in managing landlord-tenant relationships) are included in the tax arbitrage model, our estimates of the breakeven tax rate indicate that home purchase has a relative cost advantage over renting for most potential occupants. Renting is only financially attractive to low tax bracket individuals. This finding is consistent with Australian tenure patterns. However, there are more puzzling results. A majority of landlords belong to tax brackets below the top bracket, landlords in the lowest tax brackets typically make below normal profits, and reservation rental rates at the bottom of the rental housing market are relatively high. Down payment requirements, lock-in effects, and rent clientele groups are put forward as possible explanations for these findings.     

The Variegated Financialization of Housing

There is a small but growing literature on the financialization of housing that demonstrates how housing is a central aspect of financialization. Despite the varied analyses of the financialization of housing and the importance of housing to financialization, the relations between housing and financialization remain under‐researched and under‐theorized. The financialization of housing is not really a specific form of financialization, transcending as it does a number of different forms of financialization. Housing systems, in particular, vary widely across the globe, which implies that housing financialization will be inherently variegated, path‐dependent and uneven. In this introduction to the symposium, I will discuss how the articles to follow contribute to the literature on the financialization of housing. Housing has entered a post‐Fordist, neoliberal and financialized regime. Increasingly, both mortgaged homeownership and subsidized rental housing are there to keep financial markets going, rather than being facilitated by those markets. There is little evidence that the global financial crisis has resulted in any de‐financialization of housing. There are common trajectories within uneven and variegated financialization, rather than radically different and completely unrelated forms of housing financialization.     

The housing question in Japan

This article first examines how bad housing conditions are in Japan based on international comparisons. The next question is whether the extremely high land prices in Japan can be explained by economic logic. We then turn to more specific housing policy questions that are peculiar to or important in Japan, such as the tax advantages of owning land that have caused under-utilization of land and the reasons why the average size of Japanese rental housing is so small.     

浙江省装卸设备租赁市场调研及发展思考

以浙江省装卸设备租赁市场为研究对象,分析了目前在制造企业、专业市场、超市、第三方物流企业等场合中存在的租赁需求与现状,提出了进一步发展浙江省装卸设备租赁市场的看法。     

Spillover effects of subprime mortgage originations: The effects of single-family mortgage credit expansion on the multifamily rental market

The dramatic expansion in subprime mortgage credit fueled a remarkable boom and bust in the US housing market and created a global financial crisis. Even though considerable research examines the housing and mortgage markets during the previous decade, how the expansion in mortgage credit affected the rental market remains unclear; and yet, over 30 percent of all U.S. households reside in the rental market. Our study fills this gap by showing how the multifamily rental market was adversely affected by the development of subprime lending in the single-family market before the advent of the 2007/2008 subprime induced financial crisis. We provide evidence for a fundamentals based linkage by which the effect of an innovation in one market (i.e, the growth in subprime mortgage originations) is propagated through to another market. Using a large database of residential rental lease payment records, our results confirm that the expansion in subprime lending corresponds with an overall decline in the quality of rental payments. Finally, we present evidence showing that the financial performance of multifamily rental properties reflected the increase in rental lease defaults.     

美国住房租赁市场运行机制探讨及借鉴

美国拥有发达的私人住房租赁市场和公共住房租赁市场,其关于住房租赁市场的法律制度、税收体系、房租补贴政策和完善的政府监管体制等方面均值得我国借鉴。研究表明,支撑美国住房租赁市场的因素主要有供给因素、需求因素和政府对租赁市场的有效管理和规范。尽管在住房消费文化和土地制度环境等方面我国住房市场与美国住房市场差异显著,但美国发展与规范住房租赁市场的经验对培育和发展我国住房租赁市场仍然具有重要的政策借鉴价值。     

美国住房租赁市场运行机制探讨及借鉴

美国拥有发达的私人住房租赁市场和公共住房租赁市场,其关于住房租赁市场的法律制度、税收体系、房租补贴政策和完善的政府监管体制等方面均值得我国借鉴。研究表明,支撑美国住房租赁市场的因素主要有供给因素、需求因素和政府对租赁市场的有效管理和规范。尽管在住房消费文化和土地制度环境等方面我国住房市场与美国住房市场差异显著,但美国发展与规范住房租赁市场的经验对培育和发展我国住房租赁市场仍然具有重要的政策借鉴价值。     

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

The turn towards the knowledge‐based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge‐based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit‐maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.