Is the institutionalization of urban movements inevitable? A comparison of the opportunities for sustained squatting in New York City and Amsterdam

In this article the opportunity structures of New York City and Amsterdam for organized squatting are compared. New York City knew two distinct squatting waves, with an intermission of several years. The literature on US urban movements predicts transformation through cooptation and repression. Only the first wave, in which housing activists used squatting as a tactic, fits this prediction. The second wave of squatting in New York City, and squatting in Amsterdam in general, escaped cooptation because they involved a squatters' movement proper, in which squatting was not only a tactic but also central to its existence. Compared to Amsterdam, squatting in New York was hampered by technical difficulties and political isolation. Stricter protection of private property made New York squatters restrict themselves to publicly‐owned abandoned buildings. Turf conflicts tended to develop on the neighbourhood level when these buildings were later claimed for the development of low‐income housing. In Amsterdam this type of conflict was rare because of the broad support for low‐income (re)development. Instead, Amsterdam saw citywide protest directed at the real estate sector and municipal authorities. Cet article compare la structure des opportunités des villes de New York et Amsterdam concernant les squats organisés. New York a connu deux vagues de squattage séparées de plusieurs années. Les textes sur les mouvements urbains aux Etats‐Unis prévoient une mutation par cooptation et répression. Seule la première vague, pour laquelle les militants en faveur du logement ont utilisé le squattage comme tactique, répond à cette prédiction. La seconde vague d'opérations à New York, et celles d'Amsterdam en général, ont échappéà la cooptation, car il s'agissait de mouvements de squatters à proprement parler, où le squat n'était pas seulement une tactique mais surtout un fondement de leur existence. Comparéà Amsterdam, le squattage à New York s'est heurtéà des problèmes techniques et à un isolement politique. La protection plus stricte de la propriété privée a forcé les squatters new‐yorkais à se limiter aux bâtiments publics abandonnés. Des luttes de territoires ont eu tendance à se développer entre voisins lorsque ces bâtiments ont ensuite été réclamés pour aménager des logements à faible loyer. A Amsterdam, rare fut ce genre de conflit grâce au vaste soutien favorable au (ré)aménagement social; au contraire, une protestation générale s'est élevée à l'encontre du secteur immobilier et des autorités municipales.     

Foreign Factor Ownership and Optimal Tariffs

In the presence of foreign factor ownership tariffs change not only the terms of (goods) trade but also income flows between countries. Assume that only the home country owns factors abroad. Then the optimal tariff is negative if and only if foreign factor ownership entails trade-pattern reversals. Trade-pattern reversals are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a negative optimal tariff if the foreign country owns factors in the home country. Changes in the home country's tariff shift the foreign country's offer curve. This adds a new dimension to optimal tariff analysis.     

Through Trial and Error to Collusion*

In this article we study a very simple trial and error learning process in the context of a Cournot oligopoly. Without any knowledge of the payoff functions players increase, respectively decrease, their quantity as long as this leads to higher profits. We show that despite the absence of any coordination or punishing device this process converges to the joint‐profit‐maximizing outcome.     

Government Policy and the Evolution of the Market for Dutch Daily Newspapers

This paper investigates whether governments can change market structures through interventions. We study the effects of four political events over the life cycle of the market for daily newspapers in the Netherlands. We find that policy measures meant to lower entry barriers in an expanding industry created new entry and increased survival chances for potential entrants and incumbent newspapers. Exit barrier enhancing policies to reduce concentration tendencies have not been successful.     

Operations of a Pension Fund after the Asian Crisis: The Thai Experience*

During and after the Asian crisis, institutional investors and pension funds in Asian financial markets have been confronted with a number of difficulties effecting their performance and the way they carry out their role within the national pension system. We analyze these problems by comparing the actual investment policy of an institutional investor with an optimal investment strategy derived from the insights of modern portfolio theory. We also analyze whether the organizational set‐up of a pension fund allows it to adequately perform its role within the pension system. As an example, we examine the operations of the Thai Government Pension Fund (GPF). We find that allowing international investments and reducing restrictions on equity investments while lowering the implicit requirements for investments in government debt would allow the GPF to further diversify its investment risk and to increase its risk‐adjusted return. We also show that some changes in the governance structure of the GPF would lower the occurrence of conflicts of interest for the management and increase the efficiency of the GPF operations.     

Labor income and risky investments: can part-time farmers compete?

In the developed countries, a majority of farm households receive at least as much income from nonfarm sources as from the farm. Such part-time farms have survived inspite of lower returns than full-time farms. This paper considers when lower returns to part-time farming could be compensated by risk-reduction due to diversification of income sources. The paper uses a dynamic portfolio choice model with labor income. The model and results could be applied in other contexts as well.     

Estimating the Size of a Criminal Population from Police Records Using the Truncated Poisson Regression Model

The truncated Poisson regression model is used to arrive at point and interval estimates of the size of two offender populations, i.e. drunk drivers and persons who illegally possess firearms. The dependent capture–recapture variables are constructed from Dutch police records and are counts of individual arrests for both violations. The population size estimates are derived assuming that each count is a realization of a Poisson distribution, and that the Poisson parameters are related to covariates through the truncated Poisson regression model. These assumptions are discussed in detail, and the tenability of the second assumption is assessed by evaluating the marginal residuals and performing tests on overdispersion. For the firearms example, the second assumption seems to hold well, but for the drunk drivers example there is some overdispersion. It is concluded that the method is useful, provided it is used with care.     

General‐to‐Specific Model Selection Procedures for Structural Vector Autoregressions*

Structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models have emerged as a dominant research strategy in empirical macroeconomics, but suffer from the large number of parameters employed and the resulting estimation uncertainty associated with their impulse responses. In this paper, we propose general‐to‐specific (Gets) model selection procedures to overcome these limitations. It is shown that single‐equation procedures are generally efficient for the reduction of recursive SVAR models. The small‐sample properties of the proposed reduction procedure (as implemented using PcGets) are evaluated in a realistic Monte Carlo experiment. The impulse responses generated by the selected SVAR are found to be more precise and accurate than those of the unrestricted VAR. The proposed reduction strategy is then applied to the US monetary system considered by Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 78, pp. 16–34, 1996) . The results are consistent with the Monte Carlo and question the validity of the impulse responses generated by the full system.