The effects of partial-coverage rent control on the price and quantity of rental housing

Rent control is widely used, but its effects are little understood. A two-sector model is provided that predicts the effects of rent control on both the price and quantity of rental housing and allows estimates of the size of these effects with limited amounts of data from jurisdictions which have controlled and uncontrolled sectors. Among other things, the model indicates the relationship between the price of rental housing in the absence of rent control and controlled and uncontrolled rent levels under a partial-coverage regime.     

Rent control and complete contract equilibria

This paper develops a theoretical model for analysing the effects of rent control. The model incorporates the roles of optimal long-term contractual arrangements and the responses of individual agents to rent control in determining the economic characteristics of the controlled market equilibrium, and can help to explain the wide variation in empirical results observed across jurisdictions. Necessary and sufficient conditions for a complete contract equilibrium, where the characteristics of the competitive and controlled solutions are identical, are established. It is shown that housing quality, new construction, and the distribution of wealth may not be affected by rent control.     

Rent control and homelessness

The purposes of this paper are to produce more precise estimates of the effect of rent control on homelessness using microdata on housed and homeless households and to provide evidence concerning the mechanisms through which rent control might affect homelessness. Our results suggest that rent control does increase homelessness by decreasing the rental vacancy rate and increasing the rental price of housing in the uncontrolled sector but that these effects of rent control are offset by other effects that decrease homelessness. We cannot reject the hypothesis that rent control has no net effect on homelessness.     

Ownership,firm size and rent sharing in Bulgaria

Using a unique three-digit firm-level data set of all medium and large manufacturing enterprises in Bulgaria covering the years 1997–1998, we investigate how wages are affected by ownership status, firm size and rent sharing. Our pooled OLS, panel and first-difference TSLS estimates clearly point to ownership structure as an important determinant of both the wage level (for given productivity) and the degree of rent sharing. Rent sharing is very pronounced in state-owned firms but far less pronounced in private domestic and foreign firms. The results strongly confirm the existence of a multinational wage premium. In addition, we find weak evidence of a positive firm size-wage effect and a positive effect of firm size on the degree of rent sharing. If these effects exist, they are often more pronounced in private domestic firms.     

TAXATION OF ECONOMIC RENTS

Economic rents have long been identified as an efficient tax base. In addition, the recent literature documents that rent income is highly concentrated and that rents are quickly increasing. Rent taxation thus seems attractive for reasons of both efficiency and equity. Nevertheless, rent taxation remains a marginal topic in research and policy making. In a systematic review of the neoclassical literature on different rent types, we find that some types of rents reflect inefficiencies and should thus be minimized, while others reward investments and should be supported in line with social welfare. What remains for taxation are land rents, one of the few true scarcity rents. Land rents have significant potential to improve the efficiency of the tax system. We then begin to develop a comprehensive theory of land rent taxation by identifying relevant efficiency and equity effects. The interaction of many of these effects remains unexplored, which might explain policymakers' hesitation in using land taxes to date.     

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.     

Site Value Taxation and the Timing of Land Development

A bstract . Recent writers have challenged the traditional view that a tax on site value is neutral, but there is still disagreement as to the effects of the tax. The site value tax affects the timing of land development in that it provides an incentive for landowners to develop land sooner than under a property tax levied on improvements also. Confusion has resulted from a failure to distinguish market value from development value. The incidence of the site value tax must take into account the dynamics of untaxing capital and of the capitalization of the tax increase on land values , as well as of the resulting increase of land supply and its effect in further reducing land values. The increased profitability of capital improvements could then increase land rent from the demand side. Obviously, amidst such dynamic changes, the overall effect on land values and rents is unsettled pending further research.     

Land rent and housing policy: a case study of the San Francisco Bay area rental housing market

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where residential rent is among the highest in the United States, an analysis of data from several sources demonstrates that high rent cannot be accounted for by higher quality, higher operating costs, or higher construction costs. At least one-third of the total rent paid is land rent. Despite increases in real incomes, very-low-income tenants in the Bay Area today have less income remaining after payment of rent than tenants did in 1960. High land rent is a long-term feature of the Bay Area rental market that results mostly from its geography, the density of its urban centers, and a strong economy, rather than from regulatory barriers to new multifamily construction. Deregulation is not a sufficient response to the effects of land rent on low-income tenants. Government should subsidize non-profit housing organizations, particularly land trusts that remove residential land from the market. Taxes on land rent would be a particularly appropriate funding source.     

Optimal city size,land tenure and the economic theory of clubs

In this paper, a connection is made between urban population size in the presence of increasing returns to scale, and the economic theory of clubs. It is shown that under certain conditions, the optimal size of the population is finite and that collective action are transferable concepts from the theory of clubs. The model is also solved in a closed format, i.e., including rent payments as part of total income, under two redistribution schemes. It is shown that the optimal size of the population is independent of the mode of ownership of the urban residential land, when the transportation cost function is linear.     

The epsilon core of a large replica game

Sufficient conditions are given for large replica games without side payments to have non-empty approximate cores for all sufficiently large replications. No ‘balancedness’ assumptions are required. The conditions are superadditivity, a boundedness condition, and convexity of the payoff sets.     

A probabilistic approach to the structure of rental housing markets

A probabilistic view of the structure of urban housing markets is developed. The demand side is based on aggregate probabilistic demand functions derived from microbehavioral random utility theory. The supply side examines the short-run pricing of the housing stock by developing “asking rent theory,” which explains how a housing supplier must find the optimal rent that maximizes expected revenue. Next, concepts of aggregate market clearing and market equilibrium are defined. Finally, a two-submarket model with specific assumptions regarding the representation of demand and the nature of market signaling is examined in detail and is given a graphical illustration. In closing, directions for extending the probabilistic approach both within and beyond urban analysis are pointed out. All analysis in this paper is for a stationary urban economy, with the housing stock assumed fixed.     

Some results on the weak core of a non-side-payment game with infinitely many players

The present note considers a balanced game without side payments with a continuum of players. A concept of weak core for such games is introduced. Then a non-emptiness theorem for the weak core is proved for a class of games.     

Profit-sharing and financial performance in the Chinese state enterprises: Evidence from panel data

This paper examines the effects of incentives in employee remuneration on financial performance in a sample of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The estimates show that bonus payments as a form of profit-sharing between employees and the state have positive effects on both the total factor productivity and profitability of the sample SOEs. Moreover, the actual level of bonus payments is found to be lower than the optimal level which a competitive firm would set to maximise profits. These results suggest that profit-sharing introduced in Chinese state-owned enterprises as one of the centrepieces of economic reforms over the last decade has been effective.We wish to thank participants at the Seventh Annual Conference of the Chinese Economic Association (UK) in December 1995 and an anonymous referee for comments. The paper has also benefited from the comments by participants at the STICERD Lunchtime Seminar, the London school of Economics. The financial support from ESRC (grant no. L324253025) is gratefully acknowledged.     

Contributing Factors to the Spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases

A bstract .   Economists have long studied the determinants and effects of income transfers. This article examines an indirect effect of welfare payments on participating individuals: an increase in the incidence of sexually transmitted disease ( STD ) rates.
Several studies have found a significant and positive link between the size of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock fertility rates. Higher welfare payments reduce the cost of bearing and raising a child, and thus reduce the full cost of engaging in unprotected sex. An unintended consequence of unprotected sex is exposure to contagious diseases. This implies that states with higher welfare payments per child will experience higher rates of STDs.
We test this hypothesis using statewide data on the incidence of three types of bacterial STDs, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, for the years 1994 through 1998. The empirical specification is based on the standard microeconomic model of utility-maximizing behavior. The included explanatory variables are demographic proxies reflecting differences in state population characteristics. These characteristics capture unobservable or intrinsically unmeasureable differences in the perceived costs and benefits of engaging in unprotected sex.
The explanatory variable of primary interest is the size of the real welfare payment per recipient. Our empirical results indicate that states with higher real welfare payments are associated with greater rates of STDs.     

The possibility of positive rent gradients reconsidered

Despite empirical evidence to the contrary most residential location models are consistent only with a negative rent gradient. Richardson has suggested including average neighborhood plot size as an argument of the utility function; a positive rent gradient is not then a priori inconsistent with equilibrium. However, Richardson does not define the concept of equilibrium, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest a reasonable definition and to show that the rent gradient is negative if the utility function is strictly quasi-concave and if individual and average neighborhood plot size are substitutes.     

Formula Apportionment: Factor Allocation and Tax Avoidance

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, the profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the allocation of real production factors and/or manipulate the FA factor through tax avoidance strategies. Analyzing FA tax effects of the German local business tax with payroll expense as the exclusive FA factor, we find empirical evidence consistent with both hypotheses. Regarding the allocation of production factors, we observe significant tax effects on labor input at the intensive margin but not on labor input at the extensive margin. In addition, we find evidence of an indirect FA spillover effect on capital investment. Our findings on tax avoidance proxies are consistent with tax-induced manipulations of payroll expense as an FA factor to save tax payments.     

Economic Effects of Taxes on Land:

A bstract . Land taxes may not be neutral in their economic impacts due to liquidity effects. Liquidity effects of land taxes may be in the form of holding cost effects or capitalization effects. Holding cost effects may occur when land is being withheld from development for non-financial reasons, such as the direct benefits of landownership. Capitalization effects may occur when there are imperfections in capital markets which prevent the acquisition of land for otherwise viable projects. Contrary to the analysis by Bentick , no liquidity effects should be expected due to variations in streams of land rent generated by different hypothetical development projects for a given site. Bentick's analysis relies on a misunderstanding of the nature of land rent .     

The role of insurance growth in economic growth: Fresh evidence from a panel of OECD countries

Insurance is one of the key activities in a globalised financial and economic environment. Through its benefits, it offers income, life and property protection to the insured and their keens, as well as income accumulation that can be used at retirement to help preserve the desired lifestyle or living standards. Motivated by this end of insurance, the goal of this paper is to study the contribution of insurance growth to economic growth, by employing the benefit side of the insurance activity, next to the acquisition side that has already been considered. More precisely, the findings provide evidence that gross claims payments and gross operating expenses are significantly and positively related to economic growth. At the same time, the results confirm the findings of the existing literature that gross premia and insurance penetration are also significantly and positively related to economic growth. The outcomes hold true for total, life and non-life insurance, both during the pre- and post- 2008-crisis periods, even though less strong after the crisis. Furthermore, the positive and statistically significant impact of gross capital formation, government expenditure, secondary schooling, FDI inflows, trade openness and financial development is validated, in line with certain theoretical expectations.     

Testing neoclassical convergence in regional incomes and earnings

The time-series properties of per capita income and per capita earnings in the regions of the United States are tested for consistency with the neoclassical growth model's prediction of convergence. We find evidence for per capita income convergence for U.S. regions during the 1929–1990 period after allowing for a trend break in 1946. These findings support the neoclassical model's prediction of convergence. The evidence for per capita earnings convergence is, however, less conclusive. Shocks to per capita earnings are found to be more persistent than shocks to per capita income. This implies that the regional distribution of transfer payments tends to smooth the effects of deviation on relative regional per capita earnings and reinforce trends in per capita income convergence.     

Why Do Landlords Include Utilities in Rent? Evidence from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study (HDS) and the 2002 American Housing Survey (AHS)

This study assesses the decision to include utilities in the rent and the effect of this decision on rents. We utilize individual house-level data from the 2000 Housing Discrimination Study (HDS) and 2002 American Housing Survey (AHS), and determine that the cost of meter installation is not the only reason that utility costs are included in rent. We find evidence that landlords include utilities in the rent to attract more customers. Additionally, our findings demonstrate that utility inclusion behavior differs significantly between old and new building owners. For the hedonic rent estimation, we find that the decision to include the cost of utilities in the rent raises rent.