Public Housing in New Orleans Post Katrina: The Struggle for Housing as a Human Right

This article reflects on the post-Katrina demolition of public housing communities in New Orleans and associated loss of affordable apartments with a focus on the Columbia Parc redevelopment. Some key issues regarding displacement, race, gender, and public housing policies are referenced throughout. A concluding discussion of advocacy efforts to frame housing as a human right highlights a central, unmet movement demand: one for one replacement of all demolished public housing.     

Trade creation and the status of FTAs: empirical evidence from East Asia

East Asia has been considered a latecomer with respect to Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Since the turn of the last century, however, FTAs with East Asian participation have seen an intra- and extra-regional expansion. Many trade initiatives have been proposed, negotiated or even implemented. This introduces interesting perspectives for the analysis of trade agreements regarding their anticipatory trade effects. This paper focuses on the trade impact of FTAs at different stages that East Asian economies participate in. The central part of this study is an econometric analysis that applies panel data to the gravity model of international trade flows. We augment the traditional model with variables to estimate trade effects of bilateral and multilateral agreements and year-to-year changes in the stages of their implementation. Our results reveal that there exist anticipatory effects preceding the actual implementation of bilateral FTAs with East Asian participation. Further, anticipation effects are larger for bilateral than for multilateral agreements, possibly because the realisation of bilateral agreements is considered more realistic.     

Do Immigrant Groups Differ in Welfare Usage? Evidence from the U.S.

The study of welfare participation in the United States prior to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act and afterward has primarily focused on comparing native and immigrant households. Analyses that have gone beyond this broad classification have focused on comparisons across race, with particular focus on Hispanic immigrants. This paper moves away from the existing literature by investigating whether there is a difference in welfare usage among immigrant based on their birthplace. Using a probit model, we investigate this potential difference by testing two related hypotheses. Our results suggest that the probability of welfare usage for immigrants with similar characteristic, differ for some immigrant groups. We also find that for some immigrant groups, citizen and noncitizens differ with respect to welfare usage.     

The Effect of Payment Methods on Risk Aversion

Risk aversion experiments such as those by Holt and Laury (2002, 2005) measure risk aversion by examining subjects’ responses to a series of probability-ordered choices. Subjects are paid real money rewards, using the random round payment method in which the amount is determined by one randomly selected decision. The findings reported here were obtained from 119 subjects who confronted the same choice set and payment amounts, but 60 of these subjects were paid using the random-round method while the remaining 59 were paid based on an average of all their choices, the accumulated value method. The accumulated value payment method simulates portfolio returns, as opposed to returns from stand alone investments. Results indicate that accumulated value subjects took more risk and made more inconsistent decisions.     

Regulatory Constraints on Performance-Based Managerial Compensation,Bank Monitoring,and Aggregate Loan Quality

This paper evaluates the effects of binding regulatory restraints on the rate of performance-based management compensation within a banking framework in which a primary function of bank management teams is to monitor loans in order to eliminate deadweight default losses. Available management teams are endowed with heterogeneous levels of monitoring efficiencies, and obtaining services from more efficient monitoring teams requires payment of higher rates of performance-based compensation. In equilibrium, a fraction of banks choose to employ management teams that monitor. With or without binding capital requirements, imposing binding restraints on the allowed rate of performance-based compensation results either in lower bank efficiency or in a reduced fraction of monitoring banks and, hence, lower aggregate loan quality.     

Comparative advantage FDI? A host country perspective

Recent empirical studies of the determinants of multinational activity across countries have found overwhelming support for a horizontal rather than a vertical model of foreign direct investment (FDI). They all use US or other developed country data. This paper, in contrast, uses a detailed industry-level data set on FDI in a relatively skilled-labor and capital scarce country, Mexico, to shed light on the determinants of FDI between largely dissimilar countries. The results indicate considerably more support for a comparative advantage motive for FDI, although a market access motive is present as well. The correlation between skill differences and FDI is positive in all industries, but when differences are large, FDI flows into sectors that are intensive in total labor, regardless of skill level. The concentration of multinational activity in (unskilled) labor intensive industries suggests a potential for spillover effects.