Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare-State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

Welfare-state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.     

Arrow–Debreu equilibria for rank‐dependent utilities with heterogeneous probability weighting

We study Arrow–Debreu equilibria for a one‐period‐two‐date pure exchange economy with rank‐dependent utility agents having heterogeneous probability weighting and outcome utility functions. In particular, we allow the economy to have a mix of expected utility agents and rank‐dependent utility ones, with nonconvex probability weighting functions. The standard approach for convex economy equilibria fails due to the incompatibility with second‐order stochastic dominance. The representative agent approach devised in Xia and Zhou (2016) does not work either due to the heterogeneity of the weighting functions. We overcome these difficulties by considering the comonotone allocations, on which the rank‐dependent utilities become concave. Accordingly, we introduce the notion of comonotone Pareto optima, and derive their characterizing conditions. With the aid of the auxiliary problem of price equilibria with transfers, we provide a sufficient condition in terms of the model primitives under which an Arrow–Debreu equilibrium exists, along with the explicit expression of the state‐price density in equilibrium. This new, general sufficient condition distinguishes the paper from previous related studies with homogeneous and/or convex probability weightings.     

Bargaining externalities in a privatization programme

In privatization programmes, the state commonly keeps a minority ownership stake in firms. We provide an explanation based on the externality that privatization of one firm has on the profitability of others. If this externality is negative, as with oligopolistic firms, the government can gain a strategic advantage in bargaining over the sale of one firm if it keeps an ownership share in another. We consider both the simultaneous and the sequential sale of firms. The results apply to the period in which privatization takes place, and are consistent with the delayed sale of minority ownership often observed in practice.     

The State as Both Regulator and Player: The Politics of Transfer of Development Rights in China

The conventional argument that the introduction of transfer of development rights (TDR) shifts the power of land use regulation from the state to the market is increasingly under challenge. In China, the state's grip on land is reinforced through TDR, in which the state is both regulator and player. This state-dominated form of TDR affects China in three ways. First, competing aspirations of different scales of government complicate how TDR is implemented. Although the central state promotes TDR to maintain a national balance of arable land, some local states instrumentalize it to expand their landed basis of accumulation. Secondly, TDR tends to benefit the state but not its people. It may increase the fiscal income of the sending government and lessen the land shortage of the receiving government, but sometimes at the expense of the interests of land users without land ownership. Thirdly, given the state's deep involvement in TDR programs, the key for China's TDR to protect arable land lies not so much in clear property rights or a fully fledged market as in effective checks and balances regarding the state's powers over TDR. These three observations attest to the embeddedness of TDR in the local political economy.     

Informal Property Rights as Relational and Functional: Unravelling the Relational Contract in China's Informal Housing Market

In the face of state-led land grabs, enterprising Chinese peasants have started a revolution in the ambiguous and insecure rural tenure system by developing an extralegal property system known as the small property right (SPR). Using the SPR, peasants are able to capitalize on their property through the sale of houses built on collectively owned land. Little is known, however, about the specific process behind the development of the SPR by the peasants, or how this extralegal property system functions in terms of securing the use and transfer of property without the backing of law. This article aims to clarify the situation through the lenses of the Endogenous Nature of Institutions and Relational Contract Theory, aiming to understand the socially constructed, endogenous and relational nature of the property rights that make SPR functional. Based on an ethnographic investigation of Beijing's largest SPR housing settlement, we show how enterprising peasants develop long-term relational contracts with urban households for the provision of housing services, secured on the basis of the common interests and symbiosis of the two parties and a reputation system that serves to deter defaults. The discretionary treatment of SPR housing by local states serves as a further motivation for the village and the informal homeowners to preserve a stable property arrangement, with such a specific institutional setting being an exemplar of China's pragmatic state entrepreneurialism.     

To defer or not defer? UK state pension and work decisions in a lifecycle model

The UK state pension (which depends only on age) includes an option to defer take up which yields either a subsequent lump sum or higher weekly pension. We analyse the joint decisions on pension deferral and intertemporal labour supply/participation in a lifecycle setting. We show that deferral is purely a financial decision, but the impact of deferral on work decisions depends on preferences, wage rates, non-labour income and initial wealth. To exactly characterize this, we use a quasilinear utility function and provide calibrated simulations. We also discuss the choice between a lump sum or increased weekly pension.     

AGAINST LEVIATHAN: A REVIEW OF CLASSICAL LIBERALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF NORMAN P. BARRY1

Classical Liberalism in the 21st Century is a collection of essays from colleagues and friends of the late Norman Barry, Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Buckingham. Most share Barry's Hayekian perspective. The essays cover themes such as: international competition in trade and between jurisdictions; the corporate social responsibility fad; secular economic errors; policies relating to alleged global warming; the state's impotence at removing externalities; the moral functions of competition; and, above all, Barry's rigour and eloquence in the economic and political case for freedom.     

浅谈教练员的指导能力

教练员的指导行为是教练与运动员之间的心理沟通,是在训练和比赛、实现目标关系中的表现形式。团队的教练员,要领导好全体运动员内部的团结,全队上下能求同存异,相互理解和支持,心理上相容,是决定一个团队凝聚力和战斗力的关键因素。因此,作为教练员必须全面地发展运动员身体机能,提高运动员的专项运动技术水平,并使运动员心悦诚服地去接受教练员的领导,对其要求与指令认真地执行,这是运动员或团队实现目标的保证。     

国企民营化与企业创新效率：促进还是抑制?

文章基于混合所有制改革的背景，从创新效率的视角考察了微观创新主体民营化前后创新行为的变化。研究发现，民营化抑制了企业的创新效率，企业的专利数量显著减少，这种影响在缺乏原国有大股东制衡、无系族的上市公司以及外部产权保护较弱的地区更加显著，而且相对于创业型企业，民营化企业的创新效率更低。进一步研究发现，民营化抑制企业创新效率的一个重要途径是关联交易显著增加、投资显著减少，民营化后非国有大股东更多地表现出掏空动机，减少了创新活动，降低了创新效率。文章的研究结论为理解民营化企业的效率提供了新视角，有助于我们正确认识和理解新兴转轨经济体的民营化行为，而且对于监管层如何推进混合所有制改革具有重要的政策启示。     

Informality and mobility

Informality is a defining characteristic of labour markets in developing and transition countries. This paper analyzes patterns of mobility across different forms of formal and informal employment in Russia. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey household panel we estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model with individual heterogeneity and correct for the initial conditions problem. Simulations show that structural state dependence is weak and that transition rates from informal to formal employment are not lower than from non-employment. These results lend support to the integrated view of the labour market.