rent controls and rental housing quality a note on the effects of new york city s old controls rent controls are used in many cities throughout the united states and many other countries there is a lengthy literature on the conceptual effects of rent controls this is not surprising given the size of housing in the u s asset base and the political importance attached to homeownership and quality housing it is surprising how little evidence there is on many of the supposed effects of rent controls the evidence on these impacts is relatively slim for a variety of reasons first the data needed to document some of the predicted impacts are not good for example it is difficult to measure effective maintenance inputs and it is costly to obtain any such data on a wide variety of buildings convincing ceteris paribus experiments are difficult to perform because there typically are many other factors for which it is hard to control additionally the negative theoretical implications appear to be so clear that many economists may not have felt much need to quantify the extent of the damage nevertheless there is some evidence on the influences of rent controls from studies estimating the price elasticity of the supply of structures economists have estimated the likely effect of rent controls on the supply of new structures in a city rydell et al lo and fallis and smith 3 have

rent control and prices of owner occupied housing we examine the relation between rent control and prices of owner occupied housing in th e presence of different qualities of housing while a rent ceiling and the price of condominiums are substitutes if housing is undifferentiated it is shown that this is not necessarily the case when housing differs in quality a complete dismantling of rent control may in fact increase the price of condominiums

the financial crisis and the geography of wealth transfers abstract this paper studies the geography of wealth transfers between 2007q4 and 2008q4 at the height of the global financial crisis we construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity direct investment and portfolio debt to measure who benefited and who lost on their external exposure we find a very diverse set of fortunes governed by the structure of countries external portfolios in particular we are able to relate the gains and losses on debt portfolios to the country s exposure to abs abcp conduits and the extent of dollar shortage

external liabilities and crises abstract we examine the determinants of external crises focusing on the role of foreign liabilities and their composition using a variety of statistical tools and comprehensive data spanning 1970 2011 we find that the ratio of net foreign liabilities to gdp is a significant crisis predictor this is primarily due to the net position in debt instruments the effect of net equity liabilities is weaker and net fdi liabilities seem if anything an offset factor we also find that i breaking down net external debt into its gross asset and liability counterparts does not add significant explanatory power to crisis prediction ii the current account is a powerful predictor iii foreign exchange reserves reduce the likelihood of crisis more than other foreign asset holdings and iv a parsimonious probit containing those and a handful of other variables has good predictive performance in and out of sample the latter result stems largely from our focus on external crises sensu stricto

an economic analysis of the homeownership decision analysts of the homeownership decision have traditionally asserted that owning makes much greater sense than renting 16 p 359 for families in high tax brackets however empirical studies of homeownership propensities indicate that not all high income families own nor do all low income families rent for example li 8 p 1081 notes that a large number of studies find that a variety of variables such as family size age of the head and race are generally found to be determinants of homeownership even when income or the marginal tax bracket are held constant previous attempts to explain why the marginal tax bracket is not a sufficient statistic for homeownership argue that people differ in their preferences for homeownership either because owning and renting are not perfect substitutes in consumption see for example 13 141 or because of differences in liquidity mobility ability at home repairs and home management and simply peculiar circumstances 4 p 14 this paper develops a general model of the homeownership decision and explores two alternative explanations of why the marginal tax bracket is not a sufficient statistic this is accomplished by incorporating both transaction costs and housing market quality sorting into the model section ii derives a simple parametric statement of the homeownership decision the third section examines the special case which yields a homeownership decision rule which is comparable to existing models an alternative special case is presented in the fourth section which incorporates consumer sorting across quality markets it is demonstrated that the housing market may adjust until

state misallocation and housing prices theory and evidence from china this paper examines the equilibrium price effects of the privatization of housing assets that were previously owned and allocated by the state i develop a theoretical framework that shows that privatization can have ambiguous effects on prices in the private market and that the degree of misallocation of the assets prior to privatization deter mines the subsequent price effects i test the predictions of the model using a large scale housing reform in china the results suggest that the removal of price distortions allowed households to increase their consumption of housing and led to an increase in equilibrium hous ing prices jel l33 018 p25 r31 r38 state participation in the housing market occurs in several forms in countries throughout the world the provision of subsidized housing as a welfare benefit to low income households is common throughout the western hemisphere in addition local governments in several cities in the united states have implemented regula tions that limit the increase of rents charged by landlords 1 this paper focuses on a form of state intervention in housing that occurs through the provision of subsidized homes to state employees the economic consequences of this area of research are potentially large as employer provided housing in the state sector is common throughout the developing world particularly in asia and sub saharan africa government regulation of the private market or the creation of a separate mar ket ensures that certain households have access to housing at prices that are below market value state interventions that aim to bring affordable housing to particu lar subsegments of the population can create economic inefficiencies they distort the decisions that individuals make regarding residential mobility joseph gyourko and peter linneman 1989 gordon a hughes and barry mccormick 1987 and employment michael svarer michael rosholm and jakob roland munch 2005 wang forthcoming and they lead to underinvestment in the construction and main

a persistencia das flutuacoes no produto uma analise secular do crescimento economico brasileiro this paper analyzes the long memory properties of economic growth in brazil taking into consideration a series of annual data ranging from 1900 to 2008 we make use of arfima models as well as unit root tests with structural breaks the results show that both output and output per capita are highly persistent the trend cycle decomposition shows that the per capita gdp suffered stagnation in its long run trend in the beginning of the last century and in the 1980 s improving only in the 2000 s as for the gdp it shows a less erratic growth calling the attention the brazilian miracle period and the stagnation of the 1980 s

preference revelation and monopsony abstract 1 johnson demonstrated the formal equivalence between the free rider problem and monopsony 2 vickrey s method for eliminating the inefficiencies resulting from monopsony monopoly works by converting simple monopsonists monopolists into perfectly discriminating monopsonists monopolists 3 we show that three recently proposed solutions to the free rider problem have the same rationale i e they use clarke taxes to convert johnson s simple monopsonists into perfectly discriminating monopsonists the three mechanisms are those of i clarke and groves ii groves and ledyard and iii arrow the relationships between these mechanisms and between each of them and monopsony are analyzed diagrammatically

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

the missing wealth of nations are europe and the u s net debtors or net creditors this paper shows that official statistics substantially underestimate the net foreign asset positions of rich countries because they fail to capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens drawing on systematic anomalies in portfolio investment positions and a unique swiss dataset i find that 8 of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens 6 of which goes unrecorded on the basis of plausible assumptions accounting for unrecorded assets turns the eurozone officially the world s second largest net debtor into a net creditor it also reduces the u s net debt significantly the results shed new light on global imbalances and challenge the widespread view that after a decade of poor to rich capital flows external assets are now in poor countries and debts in rich countries i provide concrete proposals to improve international investment statistics

measurement problems in quantifying the distributional effects of subsidy programs abstract use of estimated compensating or equivalent variation benefit measures to analyze the distributional effects of subsidy programs can lead to biased results the vast majority of previous studies have used average elasticity parameters to calculate individual compensating or equivalent variations this can lead to measurement errors which are systematically related to program targeting criteria and result in biased distributional impacts being identified from analysis of cross sectional estimated program benefits the seriousness of this problem is illustrated in a case study with simulated data the results suggest that much greater effort and care are warranted in ascertaining the robustness of estimates of the cross sectional variation in the benefits of many subsidy programs

households willingness to pay for public housing in the presence of price controls nonmarket housing allocation mechanisms such as queueing prevent households from revealing their marginal willingness to pay for housing through market prices we derive the households marginal willingness to pay using the intuitive idea that the length of the queue for a specific house reflects the households willingness to pay for housing characteristics we apply our methodology to public housing in the amsterdam metropolitan area and show that on average the households marginal willingness to pay for a unit of public housing is close to its marginal costs this suggests that the welfare loss of public housing through distortions in housing supply is rather limited and is mainly through distortions in housing demand we provide indirect evidence of the latter by showing that queueing induces inefficient matching of households and housing

analysing inflation by the fractionally integrated arfima garch model this paper considers the application of long memory processes to describing inflation for ten countries we implement a new procedure to obtain approximate maximum likelihood estimates of an arfima garch process which is fractionally integrated i d with a superimposed stationary arma component in its conditional mean additionally this long memory process is allowed to have garch type conditional heteroscedasticity on analysing monthly post world war ii cpi inflation for ten different countries we find strong evidence of long memory with mean reverting behaviour for all countries except japan which appears stationary for three high inflation economies there is evidence that the mean and volatility of inflation interact in a way that is consistent with the friedman hypothesis

the impact of rent control on rents in the free sector in most cases rent control covers only a part of the housing stock this note provides a simple analysis of the impact which rent control and non price rationing exert on the rent in the free sector it is shown that depending on the rationing mechanism rents in the free sector can be higher or lower than in the absence of rent controls

the effects of rent control expansion on tenants landlords and inequality evidence from san francisco using a 1994 law change we exploit quasi experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in san francisco to study its impacts on tenants and landlords leveraging new data tracking individuals migration we find rent control limits renters mobility by 20 percent and lowers displacement from san francisco landlords treated by rent control reduce rental housing supplies by 15 percent by selling to owner occupants and redeveloping buildings thus while rent control prevents displacement of incumbent renters in the short run the lost rental housing supply likely drove up market rents in the long run ultimately undermining the goals of the law

mitigating the price effects of growth control a case study of davis california american cities and suburbs have long used their zoning powers to exclude certain groups usually the poor or racial minorities davidoff and davidoff 1971 bosselman 1973 in the last decade many communities have adopted regulations that directly or indirectly control their socioeconomic composition as well as their rate of growth white 1978 dowall 1984 these communities typically justify growth control by asserting that new development does not pay its way the property tax revenues it generates do not pay for the services it requires that population growth will degrade the character of the community and that development will come at the expense of more desirable uses of the land farming or parkland schwartz et al 1979 regardless of the community s rationale for limiting growth the result may be the exclusion of poor households from the community studies of growth control support the assertion that growth control increases the price of housing in a community estimates of the increase in the market price of housing due to growth control have ranged from 13 to 50 percent katz and rosen 1980 gruen and gruen 1977 schwartz et al 1979 legal attacks on stringent growth control programs have been based largely on the public welfare and equal protection issue arguing that the increase in housing prices excludes lower income households from the community several communities have introduced growth controls with accompanying measures designed to reduce the increase in the price of housing an assessment of the effectiveness of these measures

security of tenure costly tenants and rent regulation many jurisdictions give residential tenants legislated packages of rights known generically as security of tenure and some protect tenants further by prohibiting unjustified rent increases the paper considers the effects of security of tenure on a competitive rental housing market to illustrate the concepts the paper describes current security of tenure and rent regulation provisions in the province of ontario canada a model of rational behaviour by landlords is then presented in which landlords choose simultaneously a rent for a standard lease and the quality of tenant to be accepted heterogeneity among landlords and tenants and imperfect information are introduced the effect of security of tenure legislation on this behaviour is assessed the paper then considers the difficulty of defining an unjustified rent increase when some tenants are more costly to serve than others and when the landlords have imperfect information about prospective tenants

valuation effects and the dynamics of net external assets abstract valuation effects can imply that the traditional current account is an inaccurate measure of the change in the net foreign asset nfa position this paper uses new developments in the analysis of portfolio choice in general equilibrium to investigate valuation effects in a two country model broadly speaking the valuation effects in the model correspond to those observed in the data but there is a key distinction between unanticipated and anticipated valuation effects unanticipated effects can be large dominating the movement in nfa but anticipated effects arise only at higher orders of approximation and are small for reasonable parameterizations

long memory and persistence in aggregate output abstract we examine persistence in u s aggregate output by estimating fractionally integrated arima models these models provide better low frequency approximations to the wold representation than previous stochastic specifications and earlier results on the importance of a permanent component emerge as special cases we find evidence of long memory which induces persistence though this long memory need not be associated with a unit root our point estimates indicate that macroeconomic shocks while persistent are distinctly less persistent than many earlier studies suggest however confidence intervals associated with the long run response are quite wide

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

current account deficits during heightened risk menacing or mitigating large current account deficits and the corresponding reliance on capital flows from abroad can increase a country s vulnerability to periods of heightened risk we develop a framework to evaluate such vulnerabilities and clarify which characteristics of a country s international investment portfolio determine whether a current account deficit is menacing or mitigating financial factors namely international investment income and valuation changes on international investments are critical our framework explores how domestic and global risk shocks affect these factors an application to 10 oecd economies shows that a substantial degree of international risk sharing can occur through current accounts and international portfolios

cross border returns differentials were the u s to persistently earn substantially more on its foreign investments u s claims than foreigners earn on their u s investments u s liabilities the likelihood that the current environment of sizeable global imbalances will evolve in a benign manner increases however we find that the returns differential of u s claims over u s liabilities is far smaller than previously reported and importantly is near zero for portfolio equity and debt securities for portfolio securities we confirm our finding using a separate dataset on the actual foreign equity and bond portfolios of u s investors and the u s equity and bond portfolios of foreign investors in the context of equity and bond portfolios we find no evidence that the u s can count on earning more on its claims than it pays on its liabilities finally we reconcile our finding of a near zero returns differential with observed patterns of cumulated current account deficits the net international investment position and the net income balance jel codes f3

commodity chain systems and the housing market abstract a system of gross substitutes referred to here as a chain system is analyzed and the results applied to the housing market the stability conditions and comparative statics properties of the system are examined in detail one of the results is that a specific numerical magnitude is of special importance to the system s stability and comparative statics behavior implications of the analysis for the housing market and for government policy are discussed

rent control and housing maintenance controls on the conditions of renting housing can take many different forms with different consequences for the market this paper contains analyses of the effects of different regulatory forms on in particular the maintenance decision we review and extend previous approaches and find that not all of the familiar predictions of the basic neoclassical model can be generated by a more sophisticated model others have extended the basic model focusing on the maintenance aspect but we cannot agree entirely with their conclusions a careful specification of the relationship between costs and quality is necessary to derive useful predictions about the effects of rent and eviction controls

a structural decomposition of the u s trade balance productivity demographics and fiscal policy abstract the us external deficits have been the most striking manifestation of global imbalances this paper investigates the contribution of productivity growth demographics and fiscal policy in accounting for the evolution of the us external imbalances against industrialized countries during the last three decades productivity growth plays a dominant role demographics explain a non negligible and nearly permanent component of the us trade deficit furthermore the international demographic transition is crucial for large us external imbalances to be consistent with the persistent decline of world real interest rates observed in the data fiscal policy is of minor importance

towards an optimal public housing policy the prevalent practice of public participation in housing is taken as indicating a revealed public preference for better housing for the poor assuming that sufficient external benefit exists to justify public housing this paper attempts to derive analytically the best public housing strategy the proposed conditional bidding mechanism consists of the free but not entirely open market renting or selling of public housing units to eligible target group households only market allocation according to the conditional equilibrium price is shown to be more efficient and more equitable than administratively based allocation schemes

an econometric and cultural analysis of rent control in kumasi ghana an empirical analysis of rent control in kumasi ghana is presented based upon a consumer demand model for housing controlled rent to income ratios are exceptionally low for a developing country moreover the asante housing market exhibits unusual cultural attributes and problems in estimating the without rent control situation benefits and costs of rent control are presented by housing types and income levels and distributional impacts assessed

the persistence of unemployment in the usa and europe in terms of fractionally arima models this article examines the persistence of unemployment in the usa and four european countries by means of fractionally integrated arma arfima models in doing so a type of flexibility in modelling low frequency dynamics not achieved by non fractionally arima models can be provided the results indicate that the unemployment series are much more persistent in some countries such as the uk and france than in others including germany or the usa

external adjustment and the global crisis abstract the period preceding the global financial crisis was characterized by a substantial widening of current account imbalances across the world since the onset of the crisis these imbalances have contracted to a significant extent in this paper we analyze the ongoing process of external adjustment in advanced economies and emerging markets we find that countries whose pre crisis current account balances were in excess of what could be explained by standard economic fundamentals have experienced the largest contractions in their external balance we subsequently examine the contributions of real exchange rates domestic demand and domestic output to the adjustment process allowing for differences across exchange rate regimes and find that external adjustment in deficit countries was achieved primarily through demand compression rather than expenditure switching finally we show that changes in other investment flows were the main channel of financial account adjustment with official external assistance and ecb liquidity cushioning the exit of private capital flows for some countries

the external wealth of nations measures of foreign assets and liabilities for industrial and developing countries abstract although capital flows are closely monitored surprisingly little is known about the accumulated stocks of foreign assets and liabilities held by various countries especially in the developing world this paper constructs estimates of foreign assets and liabilities and their equity and debt subcomponents for a sample of 67 industrial and developing countries it characterizes the stylized facts of international balance sheets and asks whether there are trends in net foreign asset positions and shifts in debt equity ratios over time finally it explores the sensitivity of estimated stock positions to the treatment of valuation effects not captured in balance of payments data

the effects of partial coverage rent control on the price and quantity of rental housing abstract rent control is widely used but its effects are little understood a two sector model is provided that predicts the effects of rent control on both the price and quantity of rental housing and allows estimates of the size of these effects with limited amounts of data from jurisdictions which have controlled and uncontrolled sectors among other things the model indicates the relationship between the price of rental housing in the absence of rent control and controlled and uncontrolled rent levels under a partial coverage regime

economics and underdetermination a case study of urban land and housing economics underdetermination associated with the duhem quine thesis is a familiar if under researched theme in economics in the light of this we examine the development of urban land and housing economics through its cartesian dualistic delineation of theory and data the contemporary mainstream approach appears unable to circumvent the problem of underdetermination in effect it employs the strong version of duhem quine in its retention of the assumption of a single unitary competitive market and associated access space trade off conversely we highlight the affinity of ely s and the later columbia school s approach to pragmatists dewey and peirce which provides a more fruitful basis for explanation

on resolving the dilemma of rent control this research examines the motivations for adopting rent control and discusses a policy alternative designed to respond to the political appeal of rent control while minimising the investment distortion capricious redistribution and administrative complexity of most controls the policy involves limiting regulation to those rents paid by households in the tenant population that are deemed unable to afford adequate housing all rental units in a jurisdiction register their rents with the relevant authority and are assigned a controlled rent landlords must charge the controlled rent only for eligible households but receive the difference between that rent and the market rent from the government the analysis considers the design of such a policy its behavioural incentives and some administrative implications there is also consideration of the appeal of this policy relative to both conventional controls and policies more popular in the literature such as a housing allowance

the demand for space in china abstract we review the evolution of housing policy in the people s republic of china as the government has between 1949 and the present shifted the provision of housing services from a market system to a planned system and back again properly designing and assessing housing policies in china or elsewhere requires knowing the price and income elasticities of housing demand while demand elasticities for housing have been much studied around the globe relatively few studies have estimated housing elasticities in formerly planned economies we use the unusually rich data from the 1991 to 2006 chinese health and nutrition surveys to estimate that in china s renewed market phase the permanent income elasticity of housing services demand in china is 70 and the elasticity of housing services demand with respect to the price of space is 64 we also estimate that in china the own price and income elasticities of the demand for habitable space are 38 and 29 respectively

equity and efficiency aspects of rent control an empirical study of new york city modem rent controls arose during world war ii to deal with the war related influx into urban areas since then numerous cities have either considered adopted or eliminated rent controls the policy debate about the desirability of rent controls continues unabated and becomes particularly acute when high inflation rates drive up rents rapidly rent controls have both efficiency and distributional consequences the economics literature has produced theoretical insights about the inefficiencies created by rent controls this literature is frequently cited by opponents of rent controls who argue that the efficiency costs of rent controls are manifested in a decaying housing stock and altered mobility patterns proponents of rent control invariably argue that the distributional impacts of rent controls outweigh efficiency costs considering the large number of cities that have investigated or adopted rent controls relatively little empirical research documents either the efficiency or distributional effects of rent controls the most notable exceptions are the studies of new york city by de salvo 3 olsen 13 and roistacher 15 and the studies of los angeles by rydell et al 16 and fallis and smith 4 more recently linneman lo and marks 12 have further examined ramifications of rent controls in new york city and vancouver this paper fills some gaps in knowledge about the effects of rent controls we examine rent controls in new york city in 1968 using the new york city housing and vacancy survey 2 the paper extends the work of olsen 13 although there are important differences in both the questions addressed and methodology used this paper examines in detail the distributional consequences of rent controls for new york city residents both

what has happened to the bottom of the us housing market housing quality has improved dramatically for most low income households but they are paying much larger shares of their income for it many discussions of the bottom of the market focus on either the rising costs the bad news or the rising quality the good news both points of view have some merit this paper takes a positivist approach to the question what s happening to the bottom of the housing market we use a variety of indicators to look at whether the supply of low cost units has fallen we then focus on whether this dwindling supply reflects a market failure if the market for low income housing is indeed failing we would observe relatively high prices per unit of housing services provided by low quality housing obstructions to the supply of low cost housing which arises largely from filtering and high vacancy rates we find evidence of market failure in some markets but not in others finally we focus on one possible source of market failure excessive regulation to see whether it

rent control its rationale and effects this paper discusses the rationale behind rent control and analyses its effects using a capital theory framework in combination with traditional bid rent analysis the experience in hong kong and o

economics of multihabitation housing conditions household occupancy and household structure under rent control inflation and nonmarketability of ownership rights abstract multihabitation in terms of sharing facilities in a dwelling or extended family occupancy is common in parts of the third world this paper uses the ghanaian housing market to assess the impact of multihabitation on house condition and on household occupancy rates per room as distinct from the influence of other factors on these variables multivariate statistical techniques form the method of analysis and the models have a high predictive accuracy the impacts of current government policies such as rent control on house condition and occupancy rates is also discussed along with cultural attitudes to ownership and obligations to the extended family

the price adjustment process for rental housing and the natural vacancy rate institute of a university of ii business and california economic research berkeley center for real estate and urban economics working paper series working paper 82 53 the price adjustment process for rental housing and the natural vacancy rate by kenneth t rosen lawrence b smith these ers are preliminary in natu heir purpose 39 to stimulate discussion comm therefore t are n ted or q d in any pub on wit the express permissi the author graduate school of business administration

does the current account still matter do global current account imbalances still matter in a world of deep international financial markets where gross two way financial flows often dwarf the net flows measured in the current account contrary to a complete markets or consenting adults view of the world large current account imbalances while very possibly warranted by fundamentals and welcome can also signal elevated macroeconomic and financial stresses as was arguably the case in the mid 2000s furthermore the increasingly big valuation changes in countries net international investment positions while potentially important in risk allocation cannot be relied upon systematically to offset the changes in national wealth implied by the current account the same factors that dictate careful attention to global imbalances also imply however that data on gross international financial flows and positions are central to any assessment of financial stability risks the balance sheet mismatches of leveraged entities provide the most direct indicators of potential instability much more so than do global imbalances though the imbalances may well be a symptom that deeper financial threats are gathering

international currency exposures valuation effects and the global financial crisis abstract we examine the evolution of international currency exposures with a particular focus on the 2002 12 period during the run up to the global financial crisis there was a widespread shift towards positive net foreign currency positions such that relatively few countries exhibited the archetypal emerging market short foreign currency position on the eve of the global financial crisis during the crisis the upheaval in currency markets generated substantial currency generated valuation effects much of which were not reversed there is some evidence that the distribution of valuation effects was stabilizing in the sense of showing a negative covariation pattern with pre crisis net foreign asset positions