An alternative model for fair share allocation of lower income housing

A linear programming model was developed and presented for fair-share allocation of lower income housing as an alternative to existing heuristic models. The model is applied for the Middlesex County region in pursuit of a regional fair-share of lower income housing needs for the year 1975 for each township in the county. The results are presented and compared with those of the Court's allocation, held by the Superior Court of New Jersey in May 1976 for the Middlesex County region.     

The utilization of capital and the growth of output in a developing economy: The case of South Korean manufacturing

This paper presents the utilization rate of capital equipment in the S. Korean manufacturing industry during 1962–1971. The aggregate utilization rate is shown to have increased at an annual rate of about 8%. The level of utilization in S. Korea is found to be generally lower even in 1971 than in the U.S. in 1962, both at the aggregate and sectoral levels. The rise in the utilization rate is shown to have contributed nearly as much as investment has in the growth of manufacturing output. The influence of the residual component declines from 36% to 8% of the recorded growth of output when the increase in the utilization rate is properly allowed for.     

Corporate Real Estate and Stock Market Performance

An interesting question in corporate real estate literature is whether real estate can improve the stock market performance of property-intensive non-real estate firms. Using a data set comprising 75 non-real estate corporations that own at least 20 percent properties, this paper empirically assesses and compares the pair-wise return, total risk, systematic risk and Jensen abnormal return performance of composite (with real estate) and hypothetical business (without real estate) firms. We employed Morgan Stanley Capital International world equity index instead of a local market index to provide some insights into the performance of the local market relative to the global market during the 1997–2001 volatile periods experienced by many Asian countries. Our results suggest the inclusion of real estate in a corporate portfolio appears to be associated with lower return, higher total risk, higher systematic risk and poorer abnormal return performance. It is therefore likely that non-real estate firms own properties for other reasons in addition to seeking improvement in their stock market performance. Further research is needed to explore the main factors contributing to corporate real estate ownership by non-real estate firms.     

Currency Crisis in Korea – When and Why It Happened

Two possible causes of the Korean financial crisis are examined: (1)deterioration of the macroeconomic indicators andinconsistent policies and (2) sudden shifts in the market expectation andconfidence. Although the truthseems to lie between these causes, we conclude that the Korean currency crisisresulted from aserious mismanagement of foreign exchange rates and foreign currency reservesas well as theaccumulation of short-term foreign debts. Although it is generally believedthat the exchange rate ofthe won started depreciating drastically on 8 November 1997, depreciationstarted three monthsearlier when the international market conditions put the pressure on the won.     

Residential Investment, Non-residential Investment and GDP

We examine the causality and influence of residential and non-residential investment with respect to GDP and its components in a multivariate, vector autoregressive context, with some care devoted to the appropriate orthogonalization of the shocks which drive the various components of GDP. We find that residential investment shocks are more important in the determination of GDP than non-residential investment shocks.     

A Review and Empirical Comparison of Bayesian and Classical Approaches to Inference on Efficiency Levels in Stochastic Frontier Models with Panel Data

This paper appliesa large number of models to three previously-analyzed data sets,and compares the point estimates and confidence intervals fortechnical efficiency levels. Classical procedures include multiplecomparisons with the best, based on the fixed effects estimates;a univariate version, marginal comparisons with the best; bootstrappingof the fixed effects estimates; and maximum likelihood givena distributional assumption. Bayesian procedures include a Bayesianversion of the fixed effects model, and various Bayesian modelswith informative priors for efficiencies. We find that fixedeffects models generally perform poorly; there is a large payoffto distributional assumptions for efficiencies. We do not findmuch difference between Bayesian and classical procedures, inthe sense that the classical MLE based on a distributional assumptionfor efficiencies gives results that are rather similar to a Bayesiananalysis with the corresponding prior.