status seeking income taxation and efficiency abstract it is well known that status seeking produces distortions in consumption competition to achieve status leads to over consumption of those goods which confer status it has been found that taxing such goods may even lead to pareto improvements in this paper we extend a model of status which relies on a signalling equilibrium approach to include the individual labour supply decision and an income tax we show that a pareto improving income tax can exist even with the simplest tax benefit scheme a number of results follow the model is extended to a two period analysis to accommodate the reputation building element of status achievement without altering the conclusions

comparative analysis of the social demographic and economic factors that influenced housing choices in spain in 1990 and 2000 the housing market is an important sector in the economy of any country residential demand also referred to as housing consumption depends on many demographic and social characteristics of the country s population and is also related to economic factors the aim of the present paper was to evaluate the joint effects of economic demographic and social factors on household behaviour with respect to housing choices in addition an attempt was made to determine the impact of recent economic and structural changes in spanish society in 1990 and 2000 on residential demand it was found that the consequences of these structural changes will have medium and long term effects on housing demand and that the current economic situation has significantly affected the short term changes in this demand

determinants of house price a decision tree approach the hedonic based regression approach has been utilised extensively to investigate th relationship between house prices and housing characteristics however this approach is subject t criticisms arising from potential problems relating to fundamental model assumptions an estimation such as the identification of supply and demand market disequilibrium the selectio of independent variables the choice of functional form of hedonic equation and marke segmentation this study introduces and utilises an alternative approach the decision tre approach which is an important statistical pattern recognition tool using the singapore resal public housing market as a case study the article demonstrates the usefulness of this techniqu in examining the relationship between house prices and housing characteristics identifying th significant determinants of housing prices and predicting housing prices the built tree show that homebuyers are more concerned about the basic housing characteristics of two and three r

government policies and household mobility behaviour in singapore this paper provides a rigorous study on the change in central provident fund cpf policy in singapore on 1 september 2002 on household mobility in general and on the affordability and accessibility of potential home buyers in particular the change brought about increased accessibility but reduced affordability for home buyers the latter has an impact on the shortfall months which are positively related to changes in mortgage rate mortgage term and property price and negatively related to the amount of cpf available for home purchases further the low critical price that households can afford without experiencing any shortfall implies that the majority of public and private home buyers will be affected by the policy change consequently the improvement in accessibility by allowing the use of cpf for downpayment may stimulate demand at the cost of higher financial risk to home buyers and mortgage lenders

co integration and error correction models the temporal causality between government taxes and spending several interesting papers have recently considered whether government taxes granger cause government spending or vice versa the findings based on standard granger 6 causality tests are not consistent manage and marlow 10 conclude that when evidence of one way causality exists federal taxes granger cause federal spending while anderson wallace and warner 1 conclude that the evidence supports one way causality in the opposite direction ram 11 reexamining the issue concludes that taxes granger cause spending at the federal level but that spending granger causes taxes at the state and local level von furstenberg green and jeong 13 in another related article examine the tax and spend spend and tax causality issue using a more general vector autoregressive var model they introduce in addition to federal taxes and spending two economic variables the gnp gap and the inflation rate decompose federal spending into several categories and remove the effects of automatic stabilizers when appropriate they find little evidence that taxes granger cause spending and limited evidence that spending causes taxes a finding which corresponds most closely to that of anderson wallace and warner 1 our purpose is to reconsider the causality issue with the aid of co integration and errorcorrection modeling our analysis illustrates with a specific example how sources of causality can be neglected in standard granger causality tests moreover addressing the question of temporal causality between government taxes and spending provides insight as to how different policies might or might not help control the growth of government the results of our estimating various co integration and error correction models with quarterly data suggest bi directional causality between government taxes and spending both for the federal and state and local sectors this finding counters the conclusions of previous studies when annual data are used however our

a constant quality price index for resale public housing flats in singapore largely because of the significant societal and economic aspects of public housing in singapore the current resale price index is published regularly by the housing and development board hdb based on average transaction prices this hdb index does not control for a shift in the mix of public housing resale flats transacted this paper looks into the usefulness of the current hdb resale price index that is reflective of pure price appreciation across time adopting the varying parameter technique a constant quality hdb resale price index is constructed instead for the period between january 1997 and june 2000 the usefulness of a constant quality resale price index is evaluated using three assessment criteria first through a series of comparative studies between a constant quality hdb resale price index and other resale price indices it is found that the constant quality resale price index provides a better indication of pure price appreciation secondly the parameters of price determinants are fo

status seeking and material affluence evaluating the hirsch hypothesis abstract when individuals hold a preference for high relative consumption competition to achieve social status can lead to inefficiently high levels of production and consumption contributing to natural resource depletion and environmental degradation in the 1970s fred hirsch argued that an increasing portion of expenditure is allocated to status seeking as average income rises this paper critiques this hypothesis from two points of view first we note examples from the historical and anthropological literatures suggesting that status seeking is often important in societies with relatively low incomes second we consider a set of analytical models that focus on the economic consequences of status seeking when social status is defined in terms of the algebraic difference between an individual s consumption of a status good and the average consumption level in society hirsch s hypothesis holds true and growth in the level of productivity and output can lead to declines in human welfare if on the other hand status is linked to the ratio of individual and average consumption hirsch s hypothesis is valid only if social status and non status goods are poor substitutes the paper also considers two cases in which social status is defined in terms of the amount of time people devote to status oriented activities under this assumption productivity growth leaves time use unchanged though the value of time devoted to status signaling increases in proportion to total expenditure

dynamic complexity in duopoly games abstract we discuss the occurrence of periodic and chaotic phenomena in infinite horizon duopoly games where firms maximize their discounted sum of profits and use markov perfect equilibrium strategies in the alternating case their corresponding actions are then constrained orbits of a map similar to a cournot t tonnement we show that any behavior is possible for small discount factors and that one obtains the cournot t tonnement as the discount factor goes to zero in the simultaneous case we show by mean of an example that many cournot t tonnements can be viewed as markov perfect equilibria of an infinite horizon game and that one obtains the nash equilibrium of the static game as the discount parameter goes to zero we are thus led to study in detail the dynamical properties of a cournot t tonnement

public housing in singapore interpreting quality in the 1990s while writings exist on various aspects of public housing in singapore recent developments in the 1990s have not yet been given any serious academic attention our intention in this paper is to fo

the international transmission of eurodollar and us interest rates a cointegration analysis abstract the relationship between us and eurodollar certificate of deposit cd rates for the period 1981 1988 is examined using an error correction model results indicate that there is a structural change in the cd rates in the earlier sub period 1981 1983 there exists unidirectional causality leading from the domestic to the external markets in the more recent sub period 1984 1988 however significant reverse causality is observed these results are likely due to expansion in the size of the eurodollar market and an increase in the volume of eurodollar futures trading

high rise living in singapore public housing in recent years amid the debates of sustainable development and urban compactness there has been a widening interest to reintroduce high rise living in cities several european cities including l

new supply and price dynamics in the singapore housing market in this paper var models are employed to trace the price response of existing houses to the quantity of new units launched by homebuilders in singapore between 1996 and 2009 contrary to the competition hypothesis prediction of a negative reaction it is found that marginal supply granger cause existing house prices in a positive manner the effect is robust to the inclusion of exogenous demand factors as well as price interaction in the primary new houses and secondary existing houses market segments the contagion effect is consistent with the hypothesis that developers due to their ability to predict the market are price leaders in the housing market it is also found that homebuilders exhibit herding behaviour in mimicking each other s timing on when to market their new residential projects

bandwagons and the threat of chaos interpersonal effects revisited abstract this paper extends granovetter and soong s work on bandwagons by introducing interpersonal effects at the level of preferences rather than at the level of demand it is found that markets generally will not follow the first order difference equations analyzed by g s because consumers will form expectations based on the market s entire history rather than the last period alone when those expectations are adaptive and the rate of expectations adjustment sufficiently low the threat of unstable and chaotic dynamics is eliminated the paper also describes the efficiency problems generated by interpersonal effects

how family networks drive residential location choices evidence from a stated preference field experiment in bogota colombia this research quantifies the relative importance of proximity to extended family networks in the stated residential location choices of bogota s low to middle income residents by applying a conditional logistic regression model and using data from an original choice experiment i find that the surveyed individuals prefer living near their extended family and on average prioritise it more than accessibility to the central business district those who have relied on help from extended family members in a personal or economic crisis situation have a stronger preference for living near extended family compared with those who have not as do those who are able to rely on extended family ties for childcare assistance

a dynamic model of trade frictions and disequilibrium in the housing market a dynamic stock flow model is developed to analyze and simulate housing markets with partial rent control trade frictions and spillovers a notion of equilibrium is suggested and related to walrasian equilibrium existence uniqueness and comparative statics properties of equilibria are analyzed in some examples of housing markets with and without price control stability properties and dynamic responses to demand and supply shocks are studied by means of computer simulations in a final simulation experiment a black market for rent controlled dwelling units is introduced

government policies and private housing prices in singapore regression models are used to show that interest rates income growth rates and the supply of housing have not played a statistically significant role in the determination of private housing prices in singapore between 1975 and 1994 instead private housing prices in singapore were highly correlated with the prices for public sector built housing moreover the timing of government policies relating to the use of compulsory savings for private housing finance purposes the liberalisation of rules on public housing ownership criterion as well as for housing finance had a significant impact on private housing prices

the international financial market and us interest rates abstract this paper examines the linkages between the eurodollar and us domestic financial markets it is shown that using weekly data allows the isolation of significant fluctuations being transmitted between markets in both directions in particular financial markets in the us are affected significantly by foreign events it is impossible to reach precise conclusions about the causes of historical variation in the rates however this paper provides evidence that at most 40 of the variation in eurodollar interest rates over the 1975 1978 period can be traced to domestic us sources and that between about one fifth and two thirds of the variation in domestic rates can be traced to foreign sources

autoregressive modelling and money income causality detection abstract a step wise procedure based on granger s concept of causality and abaike s final prediction error criterion is suggested as a practical means to identify the order of lags of each variable in a multivariate autoregressive process the model seems useful because it can serve as a reduced form formulation to avoid imposing often spurious or false restrictions of the model it also provides a reasonably powerful test of causality the idea is applied to u s postwar money and income data it is found that between m1 and gnp a bivariate feedback model fits the data best between m2 and gnp a one way causal model from money to income performs better diagnostic checks applied to our model seem to indicate the adequacy of our approach

efficient status seeking externalities and the evolution of status games abstract status seeking games are games in which an individual s utility is determined by his relative expenditure on status seeking activities rather than his absolute consumption there are a number of parallels between status seeking and rent seeking activities for example a tendency for pareto excessive private investment however many status seeking activities differ from rent seeking activities insofar as they generate significant benefits to individuals not actively involved in the game given an array of more or less productive status seeking games it is likely that relatively efficient status conferring mechanisms will tend to displace less efficient ones

the federal funds market and the overnight eurodollar market abstract this paper investigates the effect of daily management of federal reserve accounts by us depository institutions on the interest rate outside the us spindt and hoffmeister journal of financial and quantitative analysis 23 1988 401 griffiths and winters journal of banking and finance 19 1995 1265 and hamilton journal of political economy 104 1996 22 found that the fed funds rate exhibited calendar day effects caused by federal reserve regulations i find that the overnight eurodollar rate shows similar predictable daily changes as does the fed funds rate although the absolute magnitudes are slightly less the empirical results support the hypothesis that the tendencies in daily changes in the two overnight interest rates are caused by the characteristics of the fed funds market

an overview of the securitization of sba guaranteed loans originated by commercial banks securitization involves the repackaging of individual sba guaranteed loans made by financial institutions into pools of varying maturities for resale to intermediaries and final investors pool volume has been increasing at a rapid rate since the program s inception in 1985 national and regional investment companies acting as intermediaries are the major pool buyers investors in pools include banks savings loans associations and pension funds securitization has resulted in a major secondary market for institutions that make sba guaranteed loans public policy goals are served by the increase in sba lending activity that appears related to the securitization process

rational choice and erratic behaviour in this paper we show that rational choice in a stationary environment can lead to erratic behaviour when preferences depend on experience we mean by erratic behaviour choice sequences that do not converge to a long run stationary value or to any periodic pattern early investigations of the effects of experience on choice goes back to pareto see also benhabib 1979 some keynesian theories of the consumption function incorporate the effects of experience and habit formation on current levels of consumption duesenberry 1949 modigliani 1949 and brown 1952 a general model of experience dependent choice was described in day 1970 and investigated in day and kennedy 1971 while the specific issue of the existence of stable representable long run consumer demand when tastes vary endogenously has been treated by gorman 1967 pollak 1970 1976 weizsaicker 1971 mccarthy 1974 and hammond 1976 pollak gave conditions for the representability of long run choice when the equations of preference dependence are linear and utility additive hammond in a generalization of these findings provides conditions for stable representable long run choice when preferences are acyclic a condition which in essence assures convergence to a long run choice

some policy implications of bank participation in small business administration lending programs this study examines the relationship of bank participation in sba guaranteed lending programs to bank characteristics and market demographic characteristics band sba lending is related to per capita income in the bank s market area membership in a bank holding company the loan deposit ratio of the bank the percent business loans of the bank and the total assets of the bank in markets of 50 000 or less greater sba lending is associated with lower per capita income levels accordingly it appears that the economic development function of bank sba lending is linked to a greater extent with market areas of less than 50 000

the international transmission of interest rates a note on causal relationships between short term external and domestic u s dollar returns abstract this study extends the literature of capital market integration by investigating the relationship between u s dollar yield behavior in the domestic and in the external dollar market recognizing recent increases in world capital market speed of adjustment the analysis is based on daily changes in yields using granger causality tests much of the adjustmemt appears to be contemporaneous if contemporaneous is defined as weekly as opposed to daily changes and the eurodollar market adjusts more rapidly and more completely to changes in the domestic market than the domestic market adjusts to changes in the eurodollar market

a two stage housing choice forecasting model a new housing choice forecasting model is developed here to answer a practical question how to forecast housing demand at a disaggregate level being different from the previous housing choice mod

a modified cournot model of the natural gas market in the european union mixed motives delegation in a politicized environment with gazprom gaining prominence as the major supplier of natural gas in the european union the european gas market becomes more politicized we assume that gazprom s interest as a state monopolist is not only to maximize profit but also to seek market power presumably because this contributes to the geopolitical power of russia at large we introduce a modeling tool so called strategic delegation games to analyze the implications of gazprom s operation in the eu by way of illustration we model the case where gazprom competes against two profit maximizing rivals algerian sonatrach and norwegian statoil we prove that if gazprom serves any of a comprehensive type of nonprofit objectives the outcome is beneficial for the eu s consumers as gazprom s behavior shifts volumes up and brings prices down

a note on euroyen and domestic yen interest rates abstract this study examines interest rate transmission between the london euroyen market and the japanese domestic cd market the results which span 1984 through the beginning of 1993 indicate that these two interest rate series are cointegrated in the earlier part of the sample period causality is strongest from the euroyen market to domestic yen interest rates however strong feedback effects are observed in both directions in more recent years the use of both vector autoregressive modeling and cointegration analysis for forecasting is supported over random walk models

a non linear model of interdependent consumer behaviour abstract interdependent consumer behaviour in r 2 is studied in this paper while for various parameter constellations the feigenbaum scenario well known from r 1 is observed there are quite remarkable reversals of a bifurcation for other values of the system s parameters

lifetime income and housing affordability in singapore most commonly used measures of housing affordability are essentially short run indicators that compare current income with house prices or housing costs despite the emphasis in the literature on t

keeping up with the joneses abstract the paper is concerned with the dynamics of a two players status game there is a nash equilibrium in status seeking activities and one can show that chaotic adjustment pathe are possible for particular parameter constellations

causal linkages between us and eurodollar interest rates further evidence this study examines causal linkages between us and eurodollar interest rates during 1983 2002 recursive cointegration analysis shows that a stable cointegration relationship between the two interest rates emerges only since the early 1990s when the fed used federal funds rate targeting and eliminated the reserve requirement on eurocurrency deposits the study further reveals that bidirectional causality exists between the two rates over the period of 1993 to 2002 while unidirectional causality from eurodollar rate to the us rate is found to exist over the period of 1983 to 1991 these findings consistently support increased interest rate linkages especially since the early 1990s

the influence of green building certification schemes on real estate investor behaviour evidence from singapore based on an adaptive choice based conjoint analysis the aim of this paper is to ascertain the extent to which various characteristics of a condominium unit and in particular the building and cons

price discovery between private and public housing markets public and private housing markets are usually differentiated in terms of price regulations and policies but they are not necessarily segmented any integration as opposed to segmentation between private and public markets implies that the prices of private housing are interrelated with the prices of public housing determined in the open market if so information revealed in one market will be pertinent for making inferences on prices in the other market this paper addresses the price discovery or relation between public and private housing in view of singapore s substantial public housing programme that has an actively traded secondary market implications for the direction of price causality and upward mobility for households between housing price strata are examined

regional determinants of small firm loans under the u k loan guarantee scheme the loan guarantee scheme was initiated in 1981 in order to alleviate a perceived constraint in the ability of small firms to secure bank finance due to a lack of collateral this paper shows that a national small firms support scheme has at the point of delivery had quite different coverage across regions briefly the initial evidence suggests that the northern regions of england have been the major net beneficiaries of the scheme primarily at the expense of northern ireland and scotland further analysis identified house prices as the single most important determinant of loan size acting via a collateral effect on loan numbers and value fixed regional effects were dominant particularly in the south east and north west

a multivariate cointegration analysis of interest rates in the eurocurrency market abstract a multivariate cointegration methodology is utilized to analyze relations among interest rates on us dollars uk pounds german marks french francs and japanese yen in the eurocurrency market over a period with major capital market deregulations and increasingly globalized money market trading three major results appear it is appropriate to model these interest rates as a multivariate cointegrated system no interest rate may be excluded from the cointegrating relations a recursive cointegration approach indicates that the number of cointegration vectors increases in the later part of the sample period consequently this study supports the hypothesis of a substantial increase in euromarket interest rate comovements jel e40 f02 1997 elsevier science ltd

a hierarchical model of housing choice the main objective of this paper is the construction of an expanded model of housing choice that includes not only tenure choice which has traditionally been the subject of analysis but also other housing characteristic choices in this model the probability of the household making a given tenure choice is estimated at the first level of a choice hierarchy the family s choices over dwelling size and quality are then estimated at succeeding levels of that hierarchy conditionally on the choices which precede them these conditional probabilities can be combined with the probability of tenure choice to produce eight joint probabilities of housing choice in addition for a particular household or group of households we can determine the effect of a change in any of the systems variables on the probability of the families making a given housing choice in the empirical section it is demonstrated that this model provides much greater insight than the conventional tenure choice study regarding the effects o

discrete choice modelling of urban housing markets a critical review and an application the housing choice literature is a vast area of housing research which has resulted in giant leaps forward in recent years in terms of its econometric modelling this is due in large part to the significant increases now available in computing power allowing researchers to combine the latest advances in theory with empirical application this paper brings together and critically reviews the housing choice literature and techniques that have been used to model the household s housing choice decision the basic multinomial logit model is reviewed alongside the more recent advances in discrete choice modelling the nested multinomial logit model and the heteroscedastic extreme value model the various techniques are illustrated using data from the australian census of 1986 and 1996 to model housing choice in sydney the results show that careful consideration must be given to the assumptions underlying any chosen modelling technique if one is not to draw misleading conclusions from the analysis

foreign liquidity to real estate market ripple effect and housing price dynamics globalisation enables foreign liquidity to access local property markets this paper depicts a strong connection between foreigners property acquisitions and regional housing price movements in singapore testing structure breaks also illustrates a ripple effect of prices from the central city to suburbs a structural vector autoregression incorporates these two observations impulse response function and forecast error variance decomposition show that central region s foreign liquidity shocks can greatly impact housing price growth in not only the central region but also the non central region where foreign buyers are inactive the ripple effect of prices plays an important role non central region s foreign liquidity shocks in contrast have small effects on both regions impacts of foreign liquidity shocks can reach the public housing market where foreigners participation is prohibited the findings are useful to policy makers who consider regulations of foreign home buyers as an instrument to stabilise housing markets