Rates of Return on Housing of Low-and Moderate-Income Owners

While long-term returns to capital invested in owner-occupied housing have been competitive with other investment alternatives, no evidence exists on the market performance of the owner-occupied housing in which low- and moderate-income households would be most likely to invest. This article thus attempts to answer the question of whether the "affordable housing units" that are relevant to policy discussions concerning low- and moderate-income homeownership have experienced different rates of price appreciation than have higher valued dwellings. The national file of the American Housing Survey is used to estimate appreciation rates by value class in representative U.S. housing markets. We find that for the period 1974 through 1983 appreciation rates for lower valued housing were generally about equal to those for higher valued housing.     

STRATEGY, BUDGETING, AND CRISIS IN LATIN AMERICA

This empirical study investigated the relationship between business strategy and budgetary usage, given perceived crisis in Latin America. Using the strategy typology of Miles and Snow (1978), it was hypothesized that the Defender and Reactor strategy usage would be positively associated with Crisis while the Prospector and Analyzer strategy usage would be negatively associated. Employing LISREL analytic techniques, study results supported these relationships (although an alternate analysis supports the possibility that Defenders and Prospectors enact their strategy to be consistent with their Crisis perceptions). Further, though relationships between all strategy types should be related to Budgetary Usage, results indicated that the only significant relationship was between Prospector and Budgetary Usage. Though these results are consistent with the literature and have implications for budgeting practice in Latin America, additional research is needed. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd     

VERs and Price Undertakings under the WTO*

Under the rules of the WTO, governments are prohibited from negotiating voluntary export restraints (VERs) but may negotiate price undertakings (i.e. import price minima). While these two policies can have identical effects in models of perfect competition, they can have very different economic consequences with imperfect competition. The model presented here shows that in a model of international Bertrand duopoly, a VER can result in lower domestic prices and profits than a price minimum regime. This suggests that price undertakings should also be prohibited under the WTO.     

Market Participation and Share Prices

Share prices are analyzed in an overlapping generations model in which the generational size is random. This models stochastic fluctuations of market participants and can explain noninformational volatility of share prices. There exists a (stochastic) stationary equilibrium, which may be nonunique. In equilibrium, (a) the share price increases and (b) expected utility decreases with the generational size. A decline of this size below a critical level induces a crash: the stock price falls substantially, shares are undervalued, and investors' demand is restricted by illiquidity. Further, the model predicts the empirically observed positive correlation between volume of trade and absolute price changes.     

Homothetic functions revisited

Summary. This paper examines the proposition that homotheticity is equivalent to the property that (e.g., in the context of a production function) the marginal rate of substitution is constant along any ray from the origin. This claim is made in many places, but hitherto the prerequisites have not been stated explicitly. In the present contribution it is demonstrated that an additional condition is required for the claim to hold. We present a theorem that achieves equivalence by also assuming ‘nowhere ray constancy’. It turns out that this condition is implied by assumptions often made, e.g., in production theory. Further, a complete characterization is given of the class of functions that satisfy ray constant marginal rates of substitution or, somewhat more generally, a condition of ray parallel gradients. In addition to homothetic functions this class contains functions homogeneous of degree 0 (i.e., ray constant) and functions which are homothetic in disjoint regions separated by regions of ray constancy. Received: November 5, 1999; revised version: October 31, 2000     

Three approaches to knowledge management in the course of transformation of a modern economy

The authors analyze the Western, resource-based, and Japanese approaches to knowledge management, based on the management of knowledge generation and utilization, and present an approach of their own, which they deem adequate to Russian conditions and which allows for the high degree of self-organization existing in research groups. The development of organizational knowledge management systems requires new forms of interaction between companies and business schools. This paper looks at various stages of this interaction, including individual training of owners, preparation of manager teams, corporate universities, consultancy, as well as their place in organizational knowledge management.