the effect of the food stamp program on nutrient intake i introduction one of the goals of the food stamp program as stated in the preamble of the law is to ensure that low income households have the opportunity to attain a nutritionally adequate diet previous economic studies evaluating the effects of food stamp income on nutrient intake have typically found a positive usually small correlation between the receipt of food stamps and nutrition two recent papers by devaney and moffitt 1991 and horton and campbell 1991 reach very positive conclusions concerning the effect of income in general papers from the nutrition literature generally find positive but weak and often insignificant effects of income on nutrition we employ information on two groups of low income people and find slightly different results for the two groups but very different results from many of the other studies for a sample of rural families taken from data from the rural income maintenance experiment we find almost no effect of food stamp income or evidence of selection bias 1 however for a sample of elderly people from the food stamp cashout project we find strong evidence that self selection into the food stamp program is highly correlated with attaining nutritional adequacy and that controlling for the self selection food stamp income and other income have a negative effect on nutrition we re examine the relationship between food stamp income and the nutrient intake of the poor and improve upon the existing literature in several important ways first it is possible that the positive correlation between the receipt of food stamps and nutrition is not a direct causal link but rather is the result of other factors affecting both for example in one of the samples examined in this paper only 50 percent of those eligible actually apply for and receive food stamps it could be the case that those who care more about nutrition are at the same time more likely to apply for and receive food stamps and more likely to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet these possible self selection problems can be disentangled from possible direct effects of food stamp income on nutrition using estimation procedures which correct for selection bias another issue which our research addresses is that the level of one nutrient may be correlated with the levels of other nutrients this may occur either because individuals who care about nutrition may be more likely to attain adequate levels of all nutrients or because combinations of nutrients occur naturally in foods we posit a multi equation model of the levels of nutrients and allow the disturbances in each equation to be correlated none of the previous studies considered this correlation finally we recognize the fact that above some level extra nutrients are superfluous if an individual has attained a nutritionally adequate diet then whether or not food stamp income allows him or her to consume more nutrients is irrelevant we are primarily interested in therefore whether or not an individual attains an adequate level of a nutrient rather than the absolute amount of a nutrient consumed in previous studies devaney and moffitt 1991 had addressed simultaneously the issues of selection bias and the superfluity of nutrients above some level the finding that food stamp income actually lowers nutrient intake ceteris paribus is a novel result for studies of the food stamp program but it would not be novel in the literature on nutrition in less developed countries pitt and rosenzweig 1985 behrman and deolalikar 1987 it is reasonable to believe that as income increases households employ relatively more money than time in household production this is silberberg s 1985 explanation for decreased efficiency in producing pure nutrients in other words as income increases people spend less time preparing meals and more money on foods which are easier to prepare if as is often the case foods which are more convenient to prepare are less nutritious than foods which require a lot of time to prepare then our result is not surprising

housing choices and uncertainty the impact of stochastic events abstract in our model a household recognizes that family size is stochastic when making its tenure and housing consumption decisions it also recognizes that initial choices constrain later behavior because they affect the amount of savings simulations of the model show that housing consumption and the duration of stay in a residence are sensitive to whether the realization of the stochastic event is the expected value based on this observation we suggest that empirical housing studies should include both the expected and realized values of stochastic explanatory variables we find few behavioral responses to changes in the variance of an uncertain event even though increased uncertainty is passed through to after tax income and the user cost of owning a notable exception is that if a household knows that a change in an influential variable will occur but it does not know the direction of change it is more likely to rent initially

permanent income hedonic prices and demand for housing new evidence abstract housing demand is examined by looking quite specifically at the income and price variables based on individual household data permanent and transitory incomes are computed through instrumental variables related to human and nonhuman wealth a price is constructed by spatially varying hedonic techniques separation of measured income into permanent and transitory components substantially improves the predictive power of the housing demand estimation and leads to demand elasticities of 1 and 1 with respect to permanent income and price the permanent income elasticity is roughly twice the measured income elasticity

housing prices and the savings of renters abstract this paper studies the effects of housing prices on the net worth of young households because prospective homeowners must accumulate down payments a change in housing prices can change their savings patterns theoretically the effect of increases in house prices on savings is ambiguous because households can increase their saving to afford the larger down payment or decrease their saving because they have chosen to delay or forego purchasing a house using data from the 1984 panel study of income dynamics 27 i show that empirically the effect of increased housing prices on saving is positive and quite large relative to the savings of young households young renter households living in cities with high housing prices have more net worth than those living in cities with lowering housing prices controlling for both the income of the households as well as the per capita income of the city in which they live

the dynamics of real estate prices institute of university of i business and v california at i economic research berkeley fisher center for real estate and urban economics p working paper series working paper no 88 151 the dynamics of real estate prices by these papers are preliminary in nature their purpose is to i e z i d 2f iz e ey bradford case are nottobccited ortluotedin john mq quigley any publication without the ex press permission of the author walter a haas school of business

joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

return seasonality in stocks and their underlying assets tax loss selling versus information explanations results of tests contrasting tax loss selling with intertemporal information variation as explanations of the january seasonal in stock returns are reported closed end fund shares display the typical size related january seasonal while their net asset values do not interpreting the net asset value return as a proxy for information about underlying assets this result indicates information variation is not a necessary condition for the january effect in stocks the share returns at the turn of the year are negatively related to their mean preceding year returns and positively related to the standard deviations of their preceding year returns these results are consistent with tax loss selling article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

transaction taxes in a search model of the housing market abstract we incorporate transaction taxes in a housing market search model with endogeneous house prices and show that these taxes unambiguously create lock in effects that reduce welfare the lock in effects are larger at low vacancy rates seller taxes raise prices and buyer taxes lower them and this asymmetry helps to explain the differences in the welfare effects of the two taxes lock in effects are smaller with a buyer tax since the price reduction dampens the negative effect on search effort caused by the tax

intergenerational transfers borrowing constraints and saving behavior evidence from the housing market abstract we examine the effects of intergenerational transfers on saving behavior by analyzing transfers targeted to first time home purchases transfer recipients have a shorter time to save for a down payment of 9 20 for each dollar of transfer received total savings falls by 29 40 cents and the down payment rises by 61 71 cents transfer recipients increase the value of the home purchased but by an amount that is much lower than possible if the transfer were fully leveraged in addition transfers appear to help households achieve certain down payment thresholds that give favorable mortgage terms

housing tenure and labor market impacts the search goes on abstract we develop two search theoretic models emphasizing firm entry to examine the oswald hypothesis the idea that homeownership is linked to inferior labor market outcomes and compare their predictions to three extant theories the five models have surprisingly different predictions about the labor market at both the aggregate and micro levels using a suitable instrumental variable strategy we estimate both micro and aggregate level regression models of wages and unemployment and compare the estimates to those predictions we find that while homeowners are less likely to be unemployed they also have lower wages all else equal compared to renters in addition higher regional homeownership rates are associated with a greater probability of individual worker unemployment and higher wages the outcome of a horserace between our new search theoretic models is mixed the wage posting model predicts observed unemployment impacts while a bargaining variant does a better job explaining observed wages and aggregate labor market outcomes overall we conclude that firm behavior is important for understanding the labor market impacts of homeownership because this is the case regional homeownership rates are not good instruments for individual tenure choice in empirical work and while individual homeowners may have inferior labor market outcomes as compared to renters from the viewpoint of society higher homeownership rates may result in greater job creation and overall production among other benefits

the impact of transaction costs and the expected length of stay on homeownership abstract economic theory suggests that an increase in the expected length of stay in a dwelling increases the probability of a household choosing to own a house rather than rent this hypothesis is derived from recognition that there are substantial transaction costs associated with homeownership and increased expected time in the home reduces the annualized transaction cost using a military data set we confirm that expected length of stay in a dwelling and the transaction costs of selling are very important to the ownership decision our best estimate of the transaction costs of selling a home are the sum of 3 of house value and 4 of household earnings

allocation inflexibilities female labor supply and housing assets accumulation are women working to pay the mortgage this article uses data from the 1986 canadian family expenditures survey to estimate a life cycle consistent model of household labor supply and commodity demand that incorporates a mortgage qualification constraint based on earnings both the parametric and nonparametric implications of the model suggest that the labor supply of a nontrivial percentage of married women is constrained by mortgage commitments the results of generalized selectivity models of female labor force participation and labor supply show that the positive effect of a high debt service ratio exceeds the negative effect of young children

measuring the importance of location in house price appreciation abstract this paper examines the variation in the rates of price appreciation within an individual metropolitan market a methodology is developed to examine the locational variation in house price changes in dade county miami florida from 1971 to 1992 house price appreciation appears to be somewhat spatially related that is it varies by municipality with distance from the cbd with local changes in population and housing units and by ethnic mix however these relationships have minimal explanatory power controlling for the census tract group location of each home explains only around 12 of the residual variation in the appreciation of individual homes that is not explained by metropolitan wide changes in house prices the effect of tract group location appears to be dominated by the idiosyncratic influences of individual homes and their immediate environments

housing tenure job mobility and unemployment in the uk this article examines the effects of housing tenure on individuals job and unemployment durations in the uk we examine job to job transitions and transitions from unemployment we take account of whether or not the arrival of a job was synonymous with a non local residential move tenure endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneity we find that home ownership is a constraint for the employed and public renting is more of a constraint for the unemployed employed home owners have a lower transition into employment with a distant move and unemployed public renters have a lower probability of gaining employment in more distant labour markets the nature of housing tenure has long been blamed for discouraging spatial mobility and thereby having an impact upon labour market outcomes in the early 1980s in the uk the main culprit was deemed to be local authority housing mccormick 1983 hughes and mccormick 1981 1987 examined the longer distance migration rates of those in local authority housing and found that they had lower longer distance migration rates compared to both owner occupiers and those in private rented accommodation although the latest research suggests that these effects may have lessened hughes and mccormick 2000 the relative immobility of public renters may stem from public housing rents being below market rates the restricted transferability within public housing high waiting lists and security of tenure public renters are then locked in and face higher costs if they accept a job that involves a long distance move more recently the blame has been pinned on private home ownership oswald 1996 1999 in a series of papers using macro time series and cross section data for oecd countries and regions within a number of those countries has argued that home own ership causes unemployment one explanation revolves around the reduced mobility of home owners relative to private renters owing to the costs of buying and selling homes subsequent and arguably more sophisticated micro econometric tests have placed doubt upon the alleged relationship coulson and fisher 2002 for the us find that unemployment duration is shorter for home owners relative to renters though neither is unobserved heterogeneity nor the endogenous nature of housing tenure accounted for van leuvensteijn and koning 2004 do account for the endogeneity of home ownership and find using dutch data that employed home owners are less likely to become unemployed relative to employed renters more recently munch et al 2006a using danish data find shorter unemployment spells amongst home owners compared to renters after controlling for the endogeneity of home ownership

tax subsidies and household saving evidence from canada targeted tax based saving incentives can be a powerful tool for promoting household and national saving this study examines the effect of the cancellation of the registered home ownership savings plan rhosp a canadian tax subsidized saving program on household saving the cancellation provides exogenous variation in eligibility for the subsidy that is uncorrelated with householdspecific heterogeneity in saving behavior the empirical analysis suggests that the subsidy had a substantial impact on saving each dollar contributed to the program represented 56 93 and 20 57 cents of new household and national saving respectively

equity and time to sale in the real estate market evidence from the boston condominium market of the early 1990s reveals that an owner s equity position determines his experience as a seller an owner of a property with a high loan to value ratio sets a higher asking price has a higher expected time on the market and if he sells receives a higher price than an owner with proportionately less debt the down payment requirement for purchasers but not incumbent owners provides a simple explanation for this phenomenon among owner occupants the results provide supporting evidence for equity based aggregate theories of price volume movements in the housing market copyright 1997 by american economic association

robust inference concerning recent trends in us environmental quality understanding trends in environmental quality is important for individuals and policymakers typically trends in environmental quality are determined solely through comparisons of unconditional or conditional mean pollution levels however reaching unambiguous conclusions on the basis of only the first moment of the unconditional or conditional distribution is problematic since it ignores what is occurring in different regions of the distribution even relying on indices that incorporate both mean and variance is suspect to the extent that relative rankings are not typically robust to index choice addressing these concerns we adapt recent developments in the stochastic dominance literature to test for unambiguous relations between current and past distributions of toxic releases using epa data from 1988 1999 we find statistically significant evidence that the unconditional 1999 distributions of air land underground and total toxic releases dominate in a first degree sense their respective 1988 distributions while some of this improvement is explained by economic growth pollution net of income improved over the sample period as well finally we document robust differences in the distribution of pollution across regions in the us copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

the tenure transition decision for elderly homeowners abstract there exists evidence of a sizable shift of elderly households away from homeownership the paper explores two sets of potential determinants of this decision one set derives from the life cycle hypothesis a second set is intended to apply to households that do not conform to the predictions of life cycle theory the results from estimating a tenure transition likelihood function provide some support for each set of explanations in particular they suggest that it is premature to dismiss the role of life cycle hypothesis behavior in explaining the decision of elderly households to terminate homeownership

rehabilitation decisions in rental housing an empirical analysis abstract housing policy makers show increased interest in encouraging rehabilitation of the existing housing stock but little is known about what factors influence the decision to invest particularly in rental housing making policy design difficult this paper presents an empirical analysis of individual landlords housing rehabilitation decisions in one housing market the analysis tests hypotheses about the impacts of detailed neighborhood structure and site characteristics on each owner s investment activity findings support the general hypothesis that economic returns to investment have a major effect on rehabilitation decisions identify some other important circumstances and suggest which among many specific policy levers should be effective

estimating the consumption and investment demands for housing and their effect on housing tenure status theoretical work suggests that families live in owner occupied housing if their investment demand for housing exceeds their consumption demand for housing using household data from the 1983 survey of consumer finances the authors test this theory by estimating an ordered probit model of whether families rent without owning property rent while owning property other than their home own their home without owning other properties or own their home in addition to other properties for owner occupiers who own additional property both the investment and consumption demands are directly observed enabling the authors to separately identify these functions copyright 1994 by mit press

do council housing policies reduce migration between regions data from the 1973 general household survey of great britain are used to examine whether the council house system which currently provides a dwelling for one british family in every three tends to discourage long distance migration controls are introduced for various socioeconomic variables and the importance of occupation sector of employment age and education in explaining migration is discussed comparisons are also made between local movements and long distance migration the findings indicate that over longer distances council tenants have much lower migration rates than owner occupiers

a debt owing democracy the political impact of housing market recession at the british general election of 1992 the 1992 british general election took place in the context of a severe housing recession which hit hardest in those regions from which the government usually drew much of its electoral support the slump notwithstanding however the government went on to win its fourth successive election victory the paper investigates the impact of the housing recession on the geography of the vote at the 1992 general election party fortunes were linked to local housing market conditions and the failure of the housing market was a factor in reducing support for the government negative equity is identified as a particularly important problem in this regard

housing decisions of american youth abstract prior studies of household tenure choice have not accounted for possible simultaneity with household formation and labor supply decisions we address these methodological issues and introduce new measures of the relative cost of homeowning and potential earnings capacity we also estimate the demand for the quantity of owner occupied housing accounting for the limitation of the sample to those choosing to live alone and be homeowners potential earnings and housing rental costs affect young adults decisions of whether to live alone as single or married or with parents or some other group of adults tenure choice is influenced by wealth the relative cost of homeowning and a number of demographic variables housing demand depends on owner costs elasticity near 0 5 and potential earnings elasticity near 0 5

home ownership and unemployment in the us in this paper we scrutinise oswald s evidence that home ownership and unemployment are correlated across the us states in order to abstract from state fixed effects in levels we analyse the cross sectional variation in changes in home ownership and unemployment rates between 1970 and 1990 after duplicating nearly oswald s result we illustrate the importance of weighting the state observations by the fraction of total us households in 1970 that resided in the respective states and of abstracting from the ageing of the population between 1970 and 1990 this causes oswald s correlation to to disappear secondly we estimate the relationship for six different age classes and for household heads and total population we find that the relationship is non existent for both young households and old households but exists for middle aged households young households have accumulated little wealth and have had less time to become attached to the geographical area than middle aged households and thus are more

cross tenure differences in home maintenance and appreciation this paper investigates the relative maintenance levels of owner and renter occupied housing by examining their short and long run appreciation rates we modify the standard repeat sales estimation procedure to test whether owner occupied housing appreciates faster than renter occupied housing this procedure holds constant all structural factors except for aging hence appreciation is estimated net of physical depreciation i e routine aging deficient and deferred maintenance we find only weak evidence to support the notion that long term rates of appreciation and maintenance levels are substantially different between owner and renter occupied housing

an analysis of female labor supply housing demand and the saving rate in japan abstract the paper considers household savings the labor supply of married women and the demand for housing within a unified framework using the cross section data with 8 000 observations we estimate the saving and labor supply functions by the method which takes explicitly into account a change in tenure choice our results show for example that a rise in land price raises the saving rate for those who keep housing purchase plans but lowers it among those who give up the plans we also discuss the implications of these findings for the aggregate saving rate in japan

interest rate variations mortgage prepayments and household mobility the volatility of interest rates and the deregulation of the mortgage lending sector have meant that many homeowners also own mortgages at terms more favorable than current interest rates this paper presents a model of residential mobility decisions and an empirical analysis that evaluates the importance of the ownership of these mortgages upon the mobility of homeowners the results based upon proportional and nonproportional hazard models indicate that these effects are quite large the empirical analysis distinguishes between different regulatory regimes that govern the assumption of existing mortgages and indicates the implications of these findings for the pricing and valuation of mortgage backed securities copyright 1987 by mit press

capital gains taxation and residential mobility in sweden abstract theoretical studies have shown that capital gains taxes in the housing market may create lock in effects but so far no empirical evidence has been presented regarding the size of these effects for a panel of swedish house owners in 1984 1990 we show that lock in effects only appear for households with income reductions the size of these lock in effects crucially depends on the magnitude of the income loss the theoretical model and features of the swedish tax system imply that lock in effects depend on the degree of mismatch in the current residence and whether the households buy up or buy down

the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition abstract we investigate the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition using household data from cashout experiments in alabama and san diego california we apply dominance methods to test for differences in nutrient distributions at or below the recommended dietary allowances

how property markets determine welfare outcomes an equilibrium sorting model analysis of local environmental interventions this paper examines the pivotal role played by property markets in determining the magnitude and distribution of welfare changes resulting from localised environmental change we address that issue using an equilibrium sorting model esm calibrated by way of example to the circumstances of a road infrastructure project in the english town of polegate previous esm research has tended to assume that all households rent property from a fixed property stock the narrative that arises from those models concerns environmental gentrification wherein access to environmentally improved locations is appropriated by the relatively wealthy through their ability to out compete the less wealthy in the rental property market our research shows that to be only part of a much more complex story we develop a model that extends the sophistication with which esms replicate property market dynamics allowing for households to choose whether to rent or purchase their home and introducing greater realism into housing supply responses to changing market conditions our research shows that property markets redistribute welfare gains across the population in complex ways in which tenure choice and housing supply constraints play central roles

the courage of misguided convictions the field of modern financial economics assumes that people behave with extreme rationality but they do not furthermore people s deviations from rationality are often systematic behavioral finance relaxes the traditional assumptions of financial economics by incorporating these observable systematic and very human departures from rationality into standard models of financial markets we highlight two common mistakes investors make excessive trading and the tendency to disproportionately hold on to losing investments while selling winners we argue that these systematic biases have their origins in human psychology the tendency for human beings to be overconfident causes the first bias in investors and the human desire to avoid regret prompts the second

fixed rate mortgages labor markets and efficiency the paper studies the effects of mortgage choices between fixed rate mortgages frms and adjustable rate mortgages arms on labor market efficiency frms provide insurance for risk averse borrowers in the sense that they pay the same rate over time and are not subject to uncertain spot market rates frms however discourage borrowers from moving to other regions despite better employment opportunities as they terminate the frm contracts in order to move and their new loan interests may be higher as frm borrowers do not move to other regions due to the interest lock ins entrepreneurs in other regions lose the potential surpluses from productive matches that would have occurred between borrowers workers and entrepreneurs borrowers ignore this negative externality they impose on the entrepreneurs when choosing their mortgages and too many borrowers choose frms relative to the efficient level if frms are eliminated and arm insurance that protects arm borrowers against uncertain adjustable interest rates is created it will improve efficiency the paper also assesses quantitatively the welfare effects of eliminating frms and providing arm insurance

tenure choice and expected mobility a synthesis abstract this study employs a joint logit probability model to estimate the effects of a vector of independent variables on the household s current tenure choice and expected mobility which are hypothesized to be simultaneously determined in the empirical analysis it was found that the coefficient on the endogenous variables tenure choice and expected mobility is the most highly significant of all the coefficients estimated in addition in previous analyses the age of the household head has always exhibited a highly significant positive effect on the probability of ownership however in this analysis it is demonstrated that this age variable was acting as a proxy for the expected mobility and wealth of the household

the allocation of capital between residential and nonresidential uses taxes inflation and capital market constraints we have constructed a simple two sector model of the demand for housing and corporate capital economic growth and an increase in the inflation rate were then simulated with a number of model variants the model and simulation experiments illustrate both the tax bias in favor of housing and the manner in which the increase in inflation between 1965 and 1978 magnified it the existence of capital market constraints offsets the bias against corporate capital but it introduces a sharp inefficient reallocation of housing from less wealthy constrained households to wealthy households who do not have gains on mortgages and are not financially constrained

houses and or jobs ownership and the labour market in belgian districts isebaert d heylen f and smolders c houses and or jobs ownership and the labour market in belgian districts regional studies a j oswald argues that high rates of homeownership may imply inferior labour market outcomes using a panel of forty two belgian districts since the 1970s and accounting for other key determinants of employment this paper confirms the oswald hypothesis a 1 percentage point rise in the rate of ownership in a district implies a statistically significant fall in the employment rate by about 0 35 percentage points this negative effect declines in the fraction of the high skilled in a district the results underscore the importance of controlling for unobserved district specific fixed effects and common time effects and of appropriately dealing with endogeneity

the dispersion of us state unemployment rates the role of market and non market equilibrium factors partridge m d and rickman d s 1997 the dispersion of us state unemployment rates the role of market and nonmarket equilibrium factors reg studies 31 593 607 european nations particularly the uk have been observed to have persistent dispersion in regional unemployment rates the dispersion is often hypothesized to be caused by centralized collective bargaining and government policies that limit regional labour market adjustments although the us labour market is considered more exible possessing higher rates of labour mobility and less government mandates there also is persistent dispersion in us state unemployment rates this paper investigates the factors that underlie the persistent dispersion in us state unemployment rates the factors examined include amenities crime education home ownership and residency patterns industry composition and international migration partridge m d et rickman d s 1997 la dispersion des taux de chomage aux etats unis sur le plan des etats l importa

explaining the vote for slow growth a model of equilibrium rent determination is developed to incorporate both the scarcity and amenity effects associated with limits to new housing construction in a non open city where demand for housing has increased implications of the model are tested with data from california cities to determine which factors increase the probability that a local growth control ballot measure is proposed or passed it is found that limits to new housing development occur with greater frequency in communities where fewer substitute cities exist and where certain socioeconomic characteristics predominate but not where current population densities or growth are high

the effect of home ownership on labor mobility in the netherlands abstract in various macro studies home ownership is found to hamper job mobility and to increase unemployment this paper addresses similar issues but uses a micro econometric framework where both individual job mobility as well as the probability of being homeowner are modeled simultaneously using a panel of individual labor and housing market histories for the period 1989 1998 we estimate a nonparametric model of both job durations and home ownership we do not find homeowners to change less from jobs than tenants instead our results suggest that the housing decision is driven by job commitment and not the reverse we do however find homeowners to be less vulnerable to unemployment

racial discrimination and redlining in cities we propose a model where employers have two types of prejudices racial and spatial discriminations because of the rst one black workers have less chance than white workers to nd a job because of the second one workers living closer to the city center have less chances than suburban workers to nd a job in this context we show that depending on the importance of access costs to employment centers two urban equilibria may emerge in equilibrium 1 the access cost for blacks is quite large black and white workers are totally separated while in equilibrium 2 the access cost for blacks is relatively small workers are separated by their employment status the unemployed versus the employed we then study the labor market equilibrium and its interactions with the land market we show in particular that both race and space matter to explain high unemployment rates among blacks

relative undernutrition in puerto rico under alternative food assistance programmes in the early 1980s puerto rico experienced a conversion from the food stamp program fsp to the nutrition assistance program nap and a severe recession to compare relative undernutrition in puerto rico in 1977 and 1984 stochastic dominance methods and statistical inference procedures are applied to nutrient distributions to separate the effect of the recession from the effect of converting food coupons to cash benefits a multiple regression model of nutrient consumption is also estimated in the dominance comparisons every improvement in nutrition status between 1977 and 1984 is statistically significant at the lowest quintile while no case of worsening undernutrition is significant at the lowest quintile the multiple regression model provides some evidence that the conversion from food coupons to cash might have reduced nutrition status in the lowest quintile but a larger proportion of food assistance was allocated to low income households under the nap than under the fsp no evidence of signi

a note on the benefits of homeownership abstract this brief note adds to recent work that attempts to identify externalities associated with homeownership the results suggest that some of the homeownership effect found by green and white is driven by family characteristics associated with homeownership especially residential stability however as much as homeownership increases residential stability it appears to be correlated with higher school attainment attempts to control for endogeneity cannot eliminate this finding

homeownership and investment in risky assets abstract this paper uses the 1989 survey of consumer finances to show that committed expenditures related to homeownership cause agents to hold their financial assets in a safe form this work follows theoretical results by fratantoni 5 which show that the mortgage commitment leads to reduced risky asset holding and empirical results by guisoet al 7 which show that agents with uncertain labor income hold fewer risky assets i find that doubling the median homeowner s mortgage payment income ratio leads to a 15 decrease in the risky share

prices parents and young people s household formation an economic theory of young people s decision to live apart from parents is presented and used to structure econometric analyses of the processes of leaving the parental home and returning to it which employ data from the british household panel survey for the first half of the 1990s the econometric estimates support the predictions of the theory in particular tighter housing markets as indicated by higher regional relative house prices significantly retard home leaving especially the formation of partnerships and encourage returns to the parental home young people with larger current income are more likely to leave but less likely to return to the parental home

spatial lock in do falling house prices constrain residential mobility abstract falling house prices have caused numerous homeowners to suffer capital losses those with little home equity may be prevented from moving because of imperfections in housing finance markets the proceeds from the sale of their home may be insufficient to repay their mortgage and provide a down payment on a new home a data set of mortgages is used to examine the magnitude of these constraints estimates show that average mobility would have been 24 higher after 3 years had house prices not declined and after 4 years it would have been 33 higher among those with high initial loan to value ratios the differences are even greater

consumption and investment motives in housing wealth accumulation a french study abstract the dual motives of housing behavior consumption and investment make the analysis of housing purchases quite difficult nevertheless it is better to refer to a model that keeps the two dimensional aspect of housing henderson and ioannides am econ rev 73 93 111 1983 in the absence of institutional considerations this model predicts that it is the difference between the investment demand for housing and the consumption demand that explains decisions to purchase dwellings for owner occupation and for renting out we have tested the model on the french data of the survey actifs financiers 1992 results show that the difference between the two demands cannot in itself explain housing purchases transaction costs the tax system the public aid policies for home ownership and other market imperfections are inadequately dealt with moreover estimation and identification of housing demand functions both for consumption and investment tend to show that there are portfolio motives in the factors that determine housing demand for owner occupation french households behave in a different way than u s households for them the difference between the two demands for housing explains behavior and consumption motives dominate primary residence purchase ioannides and rosenthal rev econ statist xx 127 141 1994

home ownership unemployed s job search behavior and post unemployment outcomes using detailed german survey data we show that home owners freshly entering unemployment are less geographically mobile than their renting counterparts however they do not compensate their restricted mobility by more intensive or different search behavior and do not face negative effects on labor market outcomes one year later

a heterogeneous model of disposition effect a portfolio choice model is provided to illustrate the disposition effect under irrational belief in mean reversion assumption higher cognitive reference stronger irrational belief in mean reversion magnitude and less risk aversion all strengthen the disposition effect in the model the equilibrium market interest rate is priced after the market clearing condition is employed the grater disposition effect reduces the capital mobility from the stock market to the bond market and thus mitigates the dropping of the market interest rate

residential mobility housing equity and the labour market henley a g 1998 residential mobility housing equity and the labour market economic journal 108 447 414 427

redlining in boston do mortgage lenders discriminate against neighborhoods historically lenders have been accused of redlining minority neighborhoods as well as refusing to lend to minority applicants considerable bank regulation is designed to prevent both actions however the strong correlation between race and neighborhood makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of geographic discrimination from the effects of racial discrimination previous studies have failed to untangle these two influences in part because of severe omitted variable bias the data set in this paper allows the distinct effects of race and geography to be identified and it shows that the evidence for redlining is weak

why are there nimbys an owner occupied home is an un usual asset because it cannot be diversi ed among locations and because it is the onlysizable asset that most owners possess among the unin sured risks of homeownership is devaluation by nearby changes in land use opponents of land use change are called nimbys not in my back yard this article submits that nimbyism is a rational response to the uninsured risks of home ownership it explores the possibilities and draw backs of providing an insurance market to cover such risks it concludes that some progress is being made towards developing such markets jel r52 residents who strenuously oppose devel opment of land in their immediate area are often called nimbys the acronymic per soni cation of the expression not in my backyard the oppositionof neighbors is an importantproblemin americanland use reg ulation itcanfrustrate the implementationof carefully planned residential development locally desired industrial development and placement of the necessary nuisances of ur ban life such as power plants and land lls downs 1994 fischel 1991 nelson 1999 portney 1991 rephann forthcoming nimbys sometimes appear to be irratio nal in theiroppositionto projects in the sense that they express far fetched anxieties or doggedly ght projects whose expected neighborhood effects seem small or even be nign i submit in this note that such anxieties might not be irrational if we consider that most nimbys are homeowners and that homeowners cannot insure their major and often only asset against devaluation by neighborhood effects nimbyism mightbet ter be viewed as a risk averse strategy i con clude with a few notes about how an insur ance market might be developed to head off

what are the social benefits of homeownership experimental evidence for low income households abstract we estimate the social benefits of homeownership using an exogenous instrument based on randomly assigned treatment status from a field experiment that subsidized saving for home purchase for low income renters through individual development accounts idas this approach attempts to eliminate the potential correlation present in previous analyses between unobserved individual characteristics leading to homeownership and traits leading to provision of social capital or local amenities consistent with previous work we show that homeownership positively affects political engagement in simple probits instrumental variable probits however show no impact of homeownership on political involvement iv results for other social outcomes are less conclusive the analysis suggests that with the use of an exogenous instrument it is possible to generate results that are different from the previous literature our results also suggest that being eligible to open an ida did not spur households to provide more social capital or local amenities

the social and private micro level consequences of homeownership abstract this paper reviews the literature that describes the micro level economic and social consequences of homeownership we adopt an interdisciplinary approach and include studies from economics sociology geography political science psychology and other disciplines our focus is on the set of consequences of homeownership in developed countries our list of potential outcomes of homeownership includes the impact on household wealth and portfolio choice mobility labor force participation urban structure and segregation home maintenance political and social activities health demographics self esteem and child outcomes there is substantial evidence that homeownership has important effects on some household behaviors and outcomes however we find that much of the past 30 year s literature on consequences of homeowning is deficient from a theoretical or econometric perspective we suggest solutions and identify research gaps present in the literature

consumption down payments and liquidity constraints one frequently cited explanation for the empirical failure of the orthodox life cycle permanent income hypothesis lc pih is the presence of binding liquidity constraints households inability to borrow and lend at the same interest rate or to borrow the desired quantity can distort household consumption profiles depressing consumption during periods when constraints bind whether or not liquidity constraints bind has important implications for the sensitivity of consumption to fluctuations in income the neutrality of government debt and the structure of taxation despite the potential importance of liquidity constraints in understanding macroeconomic behavior there has been comparatively little research into the effect of specific constraints on consumption one area of consumer behavior where liquidity constraints arguably may be important is in housing decisions and mortgage markets households wishing to own a first home must accumulate a down payment in order to qualify for a mortgage loan currently for conventional mortgages in the united states most lending institutions require between s percent and 20 percent of the purchase price of the home put down in advance of the purchase 2 without access to private gifts or loans many

aging and the income value of housing wealth abstract the potential of reverse annuity mortgages to increase the current income of the elderly is analyzed we conclude that most low income elderly also have little housing equity in general a reverse annuity mortgage would substantially affect the income only of the single elderly who are very old whose life expectancy is short on the other hand if the transfer were in the form of a lump sum payment rather than an annuity the payment would increase the liquid wealth of most elderly families by a large fraction thus legislation that would facilitate the market for reverse mortgages could improve substantially the financial status of a small proportion of the elderly

the transition to home ownership and the black white wealth gap this paper analyzes differences in the likelihood that black and white families become homeowners by following a sample of black and white renters over time we are able to separately study racial differences in the likelihood of applying for a mortgage and in the likelihood that a mortgage application is accepted although its effect on the race gap in housing transitions is small we find strong evidence that black applicants are almost twice as likely as comparable white households to be rejected even when credit history proxies and measures of household wealth are accounted for we show that the housing transition gap exists primarily because blacks are less likely to apply for mortgages in the first place the analysis suggests that differences in income family structure and in the ability and willingness of parents to provide down payment assistance are the primary reasons for this applications gap we speculate that the portion of the gap that remains unexplained after controlling for income d

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

the economic determinants of young people s household formation the paper derives predictions about the impact of the price of housing young adults income and parental income on the probability that a young adult in the united kingdom lives apart from his her parents it shows that the predicted effect of the price of housing is intimately related to the price elasticity of housing demand it uses longitudinal data on a cohort of britons born in 1958 surveyed in the national child development study to estimate dynamic models of first departure from the parental home and particularly to estimate the impact of housing price on the timing and destination of first departure excerpt

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

understanding the tax revolt eight explanations numerous explanations of the tax revolt have been offered since california s adoption of proposition 13 in 1978 unfortunately many of these explanations remain untested or have been tested inappropriately and the explanations are often jumbled together in a fashion that precludes theoretical clarity we extract eight explanations from the literature each of which assumes that the tax revolt is a systematic national phenomenon that is a function of individual level social economic and political factors having tested these explanations by means of a discriminant analysis of data from the 1978 american national election study we find little empirical corroboration for any of them this leads us to consider two alternative research programs one of which interprets the tax revolt within a symbolic politics framework

transfer taxes and household mobility distortion on the housing or labor market we estimate the effect of the uk stamp duty land tax sdlt a transfer tax on the purchase price of property or land on different types of household mobility using micro data exploiting a discontinuity in the tax schedule we isolate the impact of the tax from other determinants of mobility we compare homeowners with self assessed house values on either sides of a cut off value where the tax rate jumps from 1 to 3 percent we find that a higher sdlt has a strong negative impact on housing related and short distance moves but does not adversely affect job induced or long distance mobility overall our results suggest that transfer taxes may mainly distort housing rather than labor markets

the effect of food stamp cashout on food expenditures an assessment of the findings from four demonstrations using findings from four demonstrations we examine estimates of the effect on household food expenditures of converting food stamps into a cash transfer we provide arguments for why the estimate produced by one of the demonstrations should be regarded as an outlier the disparity in the difference in means estimates from the remaining three demonstrations is reduced when each is normalized by dividing by the average value of benefits in the respective demonstration site the normalized estimates imply a reduction in food expenditures of between 18 and 28 cents for each dollar of food stamps cashed out at the aggregate level these estimates imply that nationwide cashout would result in a reduction in household food spending of between 4 2 and 6 5 billion dollars whereas the associated reduction in the cost of administering the food stamp program would be about 0 3 billion dollars

a european cross country comparison of the impact of homeownership and transaction costs on job tenure de graaff t and van leuvensteijn m a european cross country comparison of the impact of homeownership and transaction costs on job tenure regional studies this paper looks at the impacts across european countries of homeownership and transaction costs on job tenure the analysis is based on a representative household sample of fourteen european countries covering the period 1994 2001 these data are merged with country specific transaction tax data and aggregate homeownership rates similar to previous microeconomic studies the results indicate that homeownership reduces job mobility as well as the probability of becoming unemployed or economically inactive it is found however that this effect is severely mitigated by two factors first it decreases when aggregate homeownership rates are higher thus homeowners have larger job tenures but more so in countries with low homeownership rates second transaction costs on the housing market are positively associated with the probability of becoming

are professional traders too slow to realize their losses data on a u s proprietary stock trading team provide evidence of the tendency of traders to hold on to their losers too long and sell their winners too soon that is the disposition effect the group of traders studied earned more than 1 4 million in intraday trading profits but they realized their winning trades at a much faster rate than their losing trades this tendency lowered their profitability when the traders limited their risk exposure by trading in small share sizes in low priced stocks or during periods of low volatility the discrepancy between losing and winning holding times rose an analysis of intraday prices suggests that traders could increase trading profits by holding winners longer and selling losers sooner

home ownership job duration and wages we investigate the impact of home ownership on individual job mobility and wages in denmark we find that home ownership has a negative impact on job to job mobility both in terms of transition into new local jobs and new jobs outside the local labor market in addition there is a clear negative effect of home ownership on the unemployment risk and a positive impact on wages these results are robust to different strategies for correcting for the possible endogeneity of the home owner variable

testing the central prediction of housing tenure transition models abstract housing tenure choice is usually assumed to depend on relative tenure specific user costs controlling for the household s lifetime income these models assume perfect capital markets however there is substantial evidence that potential first time homebuyers face significant borrowing constraints this paper proposes a tenure choice model based on tenure transition theory principles that recognizes the existence of both exogenous and endogenous liquidity constraints it predicts that tenure choice depends centrally on a household s liquefiable wealth controlling for the asset price of housing this prediction is tested using household survey data from both the united states and canada

nominal loss aversion housing equity constraints and household mobility evidence from the united states abstract this paper exploits the recent variation in us house prices to examine the effect of equity constraints and nominal loss aversion on household mobility detailed data from the 1985 1996 national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 were matched with house price data from 149 metropolitan areas to estimate instrumental variables linear probability and semi parametric proportional hazard models of intra metropolitan mobility household mobility is significantly influenced by nominal loss aversion there is little evidence that low equity because of fallen house prices constrains mobility