Policy and Planning Programs as Goals of Scientific Work: interdisciplinary Training for Social Planning as a Case Study in Applied Social Science

Abstract . Policy and planning have now become the field of a new profession—actually a series of professions—in and out of academic life as each of the specialized social and behavioral sciences is applied to the problems of society by some of its professional practitioners. Specialism, however, tends to make of problems in real life constructs that fit within the borders of one's specialty, constructs which have little relation to reality. To transcend specialism's limitations without prejudice to specialization, interdisciplinary training is proposed and worked out for a single area, social policy and social planning.     

Did Office Market Size Matter in the 1980s? A Time-Series Cross-Sectional Analysis of Metropolitan Area Office Markets

Recent contributions to the literature have resulted in a standard modelling of office markets. The models provide considerable insight into the working of office markets. • Nonetheless, a major difficulty is the use of data for a single city or aggregate data for the U.S. The latter implicitly assumes that model structure is invariant across cities. In this article we test for structural differences in office markets by size class. Rental data from REIS Reports for twenty-one metropolitan areas for the time period 1981 to 1990 are used to model office market behavior. Results suggest market outcomes vary by city size, larger markets are better modelled using standard procedures, and Manhattan behaves quite differently from the other markets.     

The determinants of short selling: evidence from the Hong Kong equity market

While most financial regulators agree that short sellers have an important role to play in ensuring an efficiently functioning market, it is interesting to note that many did not hesitate to ban short selling during the recent financial crisis. This apparent contradiction most likely stems from a lack of understanding about what motivates short trading. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of short selling during ‘normal’ trading in the Hong Kong stock market. We find that dividend payments, company fundamentals, risk, option trading, the interest rate spread and past returns and short selling are all significant determinants of short selling.