Housing Transactions and the Changing Decisions of Young Households in Britain: The Microeconomic Evidence

In this second of two related papers in this issue, the causes of declining levels of housing transactions in Britain during the 1990s are explored. The lower transaction levels resulted partly from the changing behavior of young individuals. Both household formation and owner–occupation rates of these groups also fell sharply. Using panel data, we investigate the causes of reduced new household formation and owner–occupation, finding that changes in the income distribution away from young cohorts have been an important factor.     

The Impact of the Implementation of Technology Education on In-Service Teacher Education in South Africa (Impact of Technology Education in the RSA)

In this article the impact of technology education, as a new learning area (subject) in the curriculum, on in-service teacher education in South Africa is described in order to ascertain the extent of the impact. The research on which this article is based draws on a variety of experiences and observations in the field at grassroots level (in particular an outreach project in rural communities). The envisaged impact of technology education on South African schools, communities, teacher educators and teachers, the range of in-service teacher education that is required, and the impacts in urban and rural areas are discussed. Finally a number of concluding remarks are made about the extent of the impact of the inclusion of technology education in the new National Curriculum Statement and whether the situation has changed since the implementation of a pilot technology education project in 1998. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Without `Reinventing the Wheel': Business Accounting Applied to the Public Sector

This article considers why a business accounting model was applied in an early adoption of public-sector accrual accounting. The history of that change shows that large private-sector consulting firms were active in the promotion and implementation of a commercial model of public-sector accrual accounting. It is argued here that the consulting firms' actions are best understood using concepts of mimetic isomorphism and the interplay between self-interest and perceived public interest. They formed an epistemic community in which self-interest was present but with a zealous belief that private-sector accounting was an inherently righteous objective for the public sector.     

International trade in a differentiated good: Trade elasticities in the world rice market

In many previous rice trade models, the commodity has been regarded as a homogeneous product. However, homogeneity is not an appropriate assumption, given the various types of rice that are traded and consumed. Parameters estimated from these models, therefore, do not reflect the real world market for rice and, hence, may mislead decision makers who use the results for policy evaluation purposes. This study uses an Armington approach to model the world rice trade as a differential good market and to derive trade elasticity parameters.     

The approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents,translog, and generalized Leontief forms

This paper compares the approximation capabilities of the minflex-Laurents translog and minflex generalized Leontief cost functions with their translog and generalized Leontief counterparts in Monte Carlo experiments. The minflex Laurent specifications generally provided closer approximations to underlying technical and economic parameters. Imposition of nonlinear restrictions on some of the parameters of the minflex Laurent models yielded measurable improvement in estimated elasticities of substitutions, returns to scale, and rates of technical change.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through E. Appelbaum.     

A Permanent Change in the Route to Owner Occupation?

This paper attempts to explain why home ownership rates among young adults fell in the early 1990s when various indicators suggested it had become more affordable. As a potential explanation, we focus on the relatively slower growth in their incomes and argue that this could signal a fundamental change in behaviour, a change in route adopted into owner occupation, induced by structural economic change. In examining the implications for housing tenure, we use a conditional fixed effects multinomial logit model to exploit the information on the tenure choice and the timing of transitions in the British Household Panel Survey. Our results reveal that relatively slower income growth contributed significantly to this decline and that ignoring the intertemporal correlation in micro‐panels generates inconsistent results.     

The Benefits of Visibility Improvement: New Evidence from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

This article examines the impact of a specific aspect of air quality—visibility, or the ability to clearly see distant objects—on housing values. Our analysis is based on a data set constructed by matching residential housing sales data from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area for the period 1980 through 1995 with visibility and other air pollution data and other characteristics. We find that visibility differences are capitalized into housing values, producing a measurable hedonic price gradient. The time-series design facilitates an estimate of the demand for visibility that we use to calculate the benefits of changes in visual range.