a model for the interaction of migration and commuting this paper presents a simultaneous equations model for the interaction of migration with changes in commuting employment and housing stocks and applies the model to census data for greater london england different spatial frames of reference are used intra metropolitan intra regional and national the results suggest an interdependence of migration and commuting with the decentralisation of employment within greater london migration is influenced by tenure structure and turnover in the existing housing stock as well as by the availability of new housing excerpt

towards an operational sustainability criterion abstract this paper examines the concept of sustainability and its implications for environmental policy analysis it builds on the premise that present society holds a moral obligation to pass on a world of undiminished life opportunities to members of future generations maintaining life opportunities in turn can be achieved by maintaining or improving a diverse set of resources and capabilities that support a person s freedom to define and pursue her own conception of the good life on an operational level this framework points to the following guideline for environmental policy protecting the rights of future generations requires either the conservation of environmental resources or compensatory measures including the provision of substitute technologies that ensure the fair and proportionate sharing of net benefits over intergenerational time scales in this framework resource depletion is permissible only if with reasonable certainty it would generate a pareto improvement relative to a baseline scenario involving strict resource conservation

housing allowances in the us under section 8 and in other countries a canadian perspective housing allowances are provided in the us by the federal government under section 8 of the 1974 housing and community development act this paper compares the design of section 8 certificates and vouchers with that of canadian housing allowances and with aspects of design in many other developed nations distinguishing elements of section 8 are discussed its minimum standards condition its use of a three way contract in which both the government housing agency and the tenant pays a private landlord its availability to only a limited number of eligibles the absence of a percentage of rent element in its formulas and the low required contribution of its recipients it is argued on the basis of an array of diverse evidence that these characteristics lead to perverse housing consumption effects stigma rent inflation and unnecessary restrictions on recipient choice the paper also addresses the standard objections to dropping the minimum standards condition and to incorporating a percentage of rent eleme

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

intraurban wage gradients evidence by race gender occupational class and sector abstract a general functional form is used to estimate intraurban wage gradients for various groups of workers with 1980 data from the philadelphia detroit and boston metropolitan areas as predicted by the standard monocentric model of urban land use the following results are obtained for most groups of white workers negative and statistically significant wage gradients steeper wage gradients for higher wage earners and an increase in the steepness of wage gradients as the cbd is approached positive wage gradients are not found for black workers despite the fact that suburban employers hire large numbers of these workers who reside within the central city this result is taken as support for the hypothesis that blacks have been disadvantaged by job suburbanization and continued housing market segregation

environmental valuation under sustainable development environmentalism has evolved since the 1960 s from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the american experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world northern anxiety spread to the loss of tropical rainforests and biodiversity in the south where environmentalism evolved further in an encounter with indigenous interpretations conditions and priorities by the late 1980 s climate change emerged as a central issue in a now global discourse on the relationship between environment and development the principle of sustainable development that current needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to present is now widely accepted this paper illustrates that incorporating environmental values per se in decision making will not bring about sustainability unless each generation is committed to transferring to the next sufficient natural resources and capital assets to make development sustainable 11 refs 3 figs

do benefit cuts boost job finding swedish evidence from the 1990s in june 1995 the swedish parliament decided to cut the replacement rate in unemployment insurance from 80 percent to 75 percent a change that took effect on january 1 1996 this paper examines h

a critical exploration of sponsorship infrastructure and new organizations this research focuses on the effects of public sponsorship and regional infrastructure on the emergence and survival of new organizations propositions are tested regarding the joint effects of sponsorship and infrastructure on industrial development in a randomly selected sample of fourteen regions the data include six measures of infrastructure sponsorship as measured by the total dollars spent for economic development and their individual and joint effects on the number of firms and employees in high technology industries for the years 1965 1970 1975 1980 and 1984 this preliminary analysis suggests that variation in the infrastructure and level of sponsorship within a region is related to the birth and survival of new organizations

the efficiency paradox bureaucratic and organizational barriers to profitable energy saving investments abstract the paradox of why profitable energy saving investments are not undertaken continues to provoke debate the underlying phenomenon might be called the efficiency paradox because it represents a case in which business firms which are often presumed or taken axiomatically to be economically efficient make decisions that do not maximize profits new data from one of the us environmental protection agency s voluntary pollution prevention programs enables this paradox to be explored statistically the data show that both the level and variation in returns to lighting upgrade investments cannot be explained by standard economic models substantial gains in energy efficiency can be achieved without sacrificing profitability both economic and organizational factors account for some of the variation in observed returns to these investments but the results suggest a need for improved and more comprehensive theories of the investment behavior of firms and other organizations

work location residence location and the intraurban wage gradient abstract the monocentric city model implies that work and residence locations are likely to be positively correlated and that wages decline with distance from the city center the first implication has not been explicitly tested before we provide strong support for it in census data for cleveland columbus dayton detroit indianapolis philadelphia and pittsburgh previous wage gradient estimates were hindered by lack of individual data on employment location and worker characteristics we solve this problem by estimating probit models that predict optimal work location and using the results to explain wages we find evidence of significant wage gradients

public capital and the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector numerous studies have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on business activity few have emphasised local public services and fewer still have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on the composition of business activity using newly derived estimates of regional public infrastructure the effect of public capital on the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector of 36 smsas during the 1970 78 period is examined the findings of this study indicate that public investment can play an important role in determining the composition of a region s industrial sector

chasing a dream the use of tax abatements to spur urban economic development in this paper i develop a systematic framework for assessing the effectiveness of granting tax abatements to encourage urban economic development this approach focuses upon the abatement s effect upon the firm s decision to invest and the impact of the investment upon the community current policy fails to take these considerations into account adequately i use this framework to evaluate the potential revenue gain to the city of detroit of offering variable abatement awards and suggest a set of proposals to improve program performance

the dynamics of housing assistance spells abstract over the past several years many researchers have examined public welfare programs but little of this research has examined housing assistance this paper focuses on the duration of housing assistance spells a hazard model is estimated using data from the survey of income and program participation the results suggest that although some people leave housing assistance after brief spells many will continue to receive assistance for relatively long periods the results also present evidence of the absence of duration dependence in housing assistance spells furthermore important interactions between housing assistance and receipt of other public assistance are found

economics and the well being of canadian children the basic argument of this paper is that as economists we need to pay more attention to how policy affects the well being of children as individuals not just as members of families except with reference to programs explicitly designed for children e g the child tax benefit the issue of how economic policy in general affects the well being of the children themselves is relatively missing in the economics literature though children constitute nearly 25 per cent of the canadian population for example discussions of monetary policy are unlikely to consider the impact of alternative choices for children s well being debates about the merits of labour market mobility do not pay much attention to the impact of mobility on children discussions of optimal tax structures do not look at the issue from the perspective of the child 2

on the causality of intraurban location abstract the patterns of decentralization of employment and population in american metropolitan areas are now well known to most urban economists while much time and space has been devoted to the economic and social causes of suburbanization understanding the nature of the process of decentralization is a prerequisite for the implementation of any government policy directed at the reversal or a slowing of the process as mills and price j urban econom 12 1 17 1984 suggest an uncertainty about the root causes of decentralization prevents an enlightened discussion of the appropriateness or desirability of various types of government intervention simple facts and causal models may have profound effects on the directions policy makers look for in government intervention the issue of causality lies at the heart of the process of decentralization and causality conclusions must be scrutinized before being accepted

an economic analysis of local inducements for business abstract this paper presents a theoretical and preliminary empirical examination of various local real estate subsidies to business local governments can subsidize the structure capital land or both at a particular urban site standard microeconomic theory is used to investigate the effects of subsidy programs on the structure land ratio the employment land ratio and the amount of real estate taxes collected at the site in question it is concluded that municipalities may benefit from subsidies to businesses even if those businesses would have located in the municipality without the subsidy

can local incentives alter a metropolitan city s economic development cities in the us and europe have chosen increasingly to offer incentives designed to attract and retain local economic development the increased use of local incentives has occurred with little or

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

efficiency sustainability and global warming abstract economic analyses of global warming have typically been grounded in the theory of economic efficiency such analyses may be inappropriate because many of the underlying concerns about climate change are rooted not in efficiency but in the intergenerational allocation of economic endowments a simple economic model is developed which demonstrates that an efficient economy is not necessarily a sustainable economy this result leads directly to questions about the policy relevance of several economic studies of the issue we then consider policy alternatives to address global warming in the context of economies with the dual objectives of efficiency and sustainability with particular attention to carbon based taxes

flexible parametric estimation of duration and competing risk models in this paper we specify and estimate a flexible parametric proportional hazards model the model specification is flexibly parametric in the sense that the baseline hazard is non parametric while the effect of the covariates takes a particular functional form we also add parametric heterogeneity to the underlying hazard model specification we specify a flexible parametric proportional competing risks model which permits unrestricted correlation among the risks unemployment duration data are then analysed using the flexible parametric duration and competing risks specifications we find an important effect arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance and significantly different hazards for the two types of risks new jobs and recalls

an empirical investigation of intraurban wage gradients abstract intraurban wage gradients have received little attention in the urban literature but have been shown theoretically to be important indicators of the spatial characteristics of urban economic activity this study examines the spatial distribution of wages of five groups of municipal public employees in the chicago smsa negative wage gradients significant at the 0 05 level are found for four of the five labor groups results show that monthly wages decrease on average as much as 24 per additional mile from the city center

the incremental cost principle and the conservation of globally important habitats a critical examination abstract this paper examines the application of the incremental cost ic principle for the conservation of globally important habitats it first describes the characteristics of the ic and how it became an important financial modality in multilateral conservation efforts the application of the ic is then examined taking into account characteristics of successful collaboration efforts for the global environment the paper finds that as currently applied the ic fails to be a robust financial mechanism for protection of globally important habitats it also heavily skews the bulk of conservation costs from developed to developing countries the paper concludes with a description of suggested changes to make the ic an effective tool in global conservation efforts

regulating global biodiversity what is the problem we distinguish between local problems of biodiversity loss and global ones where international cooperation is required global biodiversity regulation involves choosing the optimal stopping rule regarding global land conversions in order to ensure that some areas of unconverted natural reserves remain to support the production sector that exists on converted lands the basic difficulty with implementing a solution to this global problem lies in the asymmetry in endowments between those states that have previously converted and those that have not we demonstrate that the fundamental problem of global biodiversity regulation is similar to the bargaining problem analysed by nash rubinstein and others there are benefits from global land conversion and there must be agreement on their distribution before the conversion process can be halted since the institutions addressing global biodiversity problems are either highly ineffectual benefit sharing agreements prior informed consent clauses or very extreme incremental cost contracts the biodiversity bargaining problem remains unresolved for this reason we anticipate that suboptimal conversions will continue to occur as a way of protesting the ineffective and unfair approaches employed in addressing this problem to date

a general equilibrium model with agglomerative economies and decentralized employment abstract the standard urban general equilibrium model is extended in two ways first the central part of the city is occupied by the officer sector the office sector is subject to agglomerative economies arising from the need for face to face contact second residents choose between two employment areas in addition to the employment opportunities in the centralized office sector employment opportunities exist in a decentralized manufacturing sector the model is used to explore the general equilibrium effects of zoning policies

a new look at the determinants of the intrametropolitan distribution of population and employment in this paper we develop an econometric model that relates intra urban employment and population distributions to a variety of explanatory factors the geographical focus is on the united states the results suggest that housing costs and quality are the most important determinants of the population distribution which is the most important determinant of the employment distribution however causation between population and employment runs both ways excerpt

the optimal property tax with mobile nonresidential capital abstract implications of the dynamic nature of mobile nonresidential capital for community fiscal behavior are examined using the median voter framework the representative voter s control rule calls for the community to lower its current public service demand in order to retain or attract taxable capital the model predicts a positive short run and a negative long run income effect on public good demand incorporating intergovernmental aid into the model asymmetry between effects of the unconditional aid and of the voter income is demonstrated

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

an extension of the monocentric urban spatial equilibrium model to a multicenter setting the case of the two center city abstract firms in a monocentric city conforming in substance to the new urban economics produce an export commodity under agglomeration economies and employ homogeneous labor and capital workers reside about the cbd in decreasing densities with distance a developer establishes a second export production center within the city s residential area conditions for economic viability and growth of the subcenter are examined and its impacts on short run and long run city location patterns are discussed a limiting condition on subcenter employment size is provided

the economic effects of state and local business incentives dies they have proliferated to the point that a 652 page overview of and state by state guide to business incentives was recently published national association of state development agencies et al 1983 a major area of this controversy concerns the effects of local subsidies on local and national economic welfare 2 moes 1961 1962a and 1962b buchanan and moes 1960 laird and rinehart 1967 and 1972 and gray 1964 argued that situations exist where local subsidies can increase both local and national economic welfare but goffman 1962 and thompson 1962 argued that local subsidies are unlikely to increase local economic welfare and are likely to decrease national economic welfare to address this issue a series

the effect of state and local taxes on economic development a meta analysis economists and policy makers have long questioned the effect of state and local taxes on economic development according to schmenner 55 economists have long argued that taxes had little impact on business location decisions while development practitioners and elected officials ignored this advice and aggressively pursued development by using tax incentives more recent research using improved data and methodologies has begun to show that taxes can make a difference and the emerging consensus among economists now says that taxes do matter this changing view among researchers is perhaps best exemplified in a 1991 study by timothy j bartik 2 bartik examined 84 econometric studies completed since 1979 which assess the impact of state and local taxes on economic growth in the u s he concluded that the long run elasticity of business activity with respect to state and local taxes was between 10 and 60 for studies focusing on intermetropolitan or interstate business economic activity and between 1 0 and 3 0 for intrametropolitan areas however bartik s study did not control for a variety of study characteristics that may have influenced the measured elasticity this study builds upon bartik s analysis by performing a meta analysis of the studies bartik reviewed meta analysis is a method for statistically analyzing results across empirical studies though it has been little used by economists researchers in psychology education and health sciences have used meta analysis extensively this study uses a meta analytic technique suggested by stanley and jarrell 57 to analyze the studies reviewed by bartik the technique yields increased precision for our understanding of the relationship between state and local taxes and economic development the objective of this study is two fold first to derive a more precise estimate of the tax elasticity and second to determine how the inclusion and omission of key variables in the estimated equations influences the elasticity estimates

the effects of housing allowance benefit levels on recipient duration evidence from the swedish 1997 reform how the duration of housing allowance spells varies with the generosity of the housing allowance system carries important policy implications in 1997 the swedish housing allowance system implemented a drastic reform which substantially affected claimants who were couples with children in terms of their financial incentives to utilise housing allowance benefits however at the same time the 1997 reform largely left single parent claimants unaffected exploiting the quasi experimental feature of this reform this paper analyses the impacts of benefit shrinkage on couple with children recipients exit hazards using the dd difference in difference estimation strategy careful attention is given to measuring interaction effects appropriately in non linear models the findings in this paper suggest that the 1997 reform led to a sharp increase in the leaving speed of the recipients in the couples with children category

local response to fiscal incentives in heterogeneous communities abstract i examine the impact of a property tax relief program in new york state that lowered the marginal cost of school expenditure to homeowners i find that a typical school district which received 20 of its revenue through the program in the school year 2001 2002 raised expenditure by 4 1 and local property taxes by 6 8 in response to the program i then examine how the preferences of various groups of local taxpayers affect educational spending by identifying systematic variation across districts in the response to fiscal incentives these results support the hypothesis that homeowners are more influential on local expenditure decisions than renters owners of second homes or owners of non residential property

public infrastructure and regional economic development a simultaneous equations approach an analysis of how central bank exchange market intervention can affect both the level of exchange rates and the risk premium in asset returns showing how the risk premium is related to the conditional variances of intervention and other exogenous processes

the conditions for achieving environmentally sustainable development this paper is interested in the narrower interpretation the relationship between environmental quality and sustainable economic activity the latter is interpreted as that level of economic activity which leaves the environmental quality level intact with the policy objective corresponding to this notion being the maximization of net benefits of economic development subject to maintaining the services and quality of natural resources over time 3

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

intraurban manufacturing location decisions and local tax differentials abstract this study examines the role that fiscal factors play in the intrametropolitan location decisions of manufacturing firms emphasis is placed on analyzing location choices of relocating firms rather than existing patterns of economic activity or estimating changes in net employment the results indicate that the property tax rate is a significant location factor to relocating firms selecting sites within an urban area and that income tax differentials have a negative but weak influence on those decisions the location disincentives of property taxes are strongest for large firms and tend to decrease with firm size