housing finance and urban infrastructure finance financing issues received major attention in the discussions of human settlement development policy through the preparatory process for habitat ii and at the conference itself this paper presents

food stamp participation among adult only households abstract several recent changes in the food stamp program have been directed toward households without children including new work requirements for able bodied adults without dependents abawds and easier application and recertification procedures for the disabled and the elderly despite their relevance to policy makers adult only households have not been extensively examined we use administrative records from south carolina to investigate how spells of food stamp participation for adult only households vary with abawd provisions recertification intervals and other characteristics we find that households that were subject to abawd policies had shorter spells and lower rates of food stamp participation than other households we also find that households were much more likely to leave the food stamp program at recertification dates than at other dates we further find that time limits were associated with exits with and without earnings suggesting that this policy increased self sufficiency for some households but left others without support

the effect of food stamps on labor supply a bivariate selection model abstract although there is a large literature on the effects of u s transfer programs on labor supply this is the first such study of the food stamp program we model the nonlinearity and nonconvexity of the budget constraint and use maximum likelihood methods to estimate hours of work functions for female heads of household the largest recipient group in the program we also model the joint response to afdc and food stamps and we account for the existence of a significant number of eligible households who do not participate in the programs a three equation bivariate selection model is estimated on a sample of eligible households with maximum likelihood

accounting for the decline in afdc caseloads welfare reform or the economy we use state level monthly panel data to assess the relative contributions of the macroeconomy and welfare reform in accounting for the 1993 96 decline in aid to families with dependent children afdc caseloads our results suggest that the decline in per capita afdc caseloads is attributable largely to the economic conditions in states and not to waivers from federal welfare policies nationwide we attribute 66 percent of the decline to the macroeconomy however we do find substantial heterogeneity in the impact and timing of alternative waivers on afdc caseloads states with waivers impacting parental responsibilities experienced greater caseload declines than states with waivers that made work more attractive overall our model predicts that had it not been for the influence of economic factors welfare reform would not have led to any decrease in aggregate caseloads

how much does the supplemental nutrition assistance program reduce food insecurity nearly 15 of all u s households and 40 of near poor households were food insecure in 2009 the supplemental nutrition assistance program snap is the cornerstone of federal food assistance programs and serves as the first line of defense against food related hardship this paper measures the effectiveness of snap in reducing food insecurity using an instrumental variables approach to control for selection our results suggest that receipt of snap benefits reduces the likelihood of being food insecure by roughly 30 and reduces the likelihood of being very food insecure by 20

the effect of safety net programs on food insecurity we investigate to what extent major safety net program benefits affect food insecurity in families we impute program eligibility and benefits in each state for 2001 2009 accounting for cross program eligibility rules we use simulated eligibility and benefits for a nationally representative sample as instruments for imputed eligibility and potential benefits among nonimmigrant low income single parent families 1 000 in potential cash or food benefits reduces the incidence of food insecurity by 1 1 percentage points on a base of 33 percent cash and food both reduce food insecurity the results highlight the importance of jointly considering a full range of safety net programs

tax reform and automatic stabilization an income tax provides implicit insurance by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption using an empirical framework derived from the consumption insurance literature and data from the panel study of income dynamics we examine the effect of federal income tax reforms of the 1980 s on automatic stabilization of consumption overall erta and tra86 reduced consumption stability by about 50 percent recently increased eitc generosity restored or enhanced consumption insurance the welfare cost of moving to the post tra86 system is sizable for relatively risk averse households facing large income risk but is much more modest for the typical household jel h21

if at first you don t succeed applying for and staying on the supplemental nutrition assistance program we examine households applications to and participation in the supplemental nutrition assistance program using administrative records from south carolina we model application resolutions with multinomial logit mnl specifications where the possible outcomes are acceptance denial due to income ineligibility denial due to a failure to provide sufficient information and denial due to other reasons for cases with successful applications we model the durations of participation spells using competing risk hazard specifications that distinguish among exits that result from missed recertifications financial ineligibility incomplete or missing information and other reasons the application and hazard outcomes depend on past programme behaviour and observed characteristics the results indicate that a household s application and participation history affect its subsequent application success and programme tenure

financing housing in developing countries a review of the pitfalls and potentials in the development of formal housing finance systems effectively addressing the existing and continuously growing enormous demands and needs for shelter depends critically on the availability of long term housing finance on a fairly large and sustain

the effects of the macroeconomy and welfare reform on food stamp caseloads since 1994 there has been an unprecedented decline in the number of people receiving food stamp benefits from a record high of 27 5 million in 1994 the number of food stamp recipients fell over 30 to 18 0 million by mid 1999 during this period the united states has experienced the third longest economic expansion of the twentieth century this has resulted in a dramatic growth of new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in a generation simultaneously the welfare system has undergone a major transformation beginning in the early 1990s when many states made changes to their welfare programs through federal waivers from aid to families with dependent children afdc requirements the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 prwora furthered these changes by replacing afdc where states contributions were matched by the federal government with a block grant program called temporary assistance for needy families tanf prwora introduced new rules on tanf recipients such as terminal time limits work requirements and personal responsibility measures it also directly changed the food stamp program by ending the eligibility of some recipients and reducing average benefit levels at the same time innovative changes in the delivery of food stamp benefits have been taking place with the introduction of electronic benefit trans

food stamp caseloads over the business cycle 1 introduction the onset of the current economic downturn following the longest expansion in u s history has renewed interest in the role of automatic stabilizers designed to insure households against negative cyclical income shocks this system of income and consumption stabilizers includes among others the individual income tax and the panoply of social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance and the food stamp program while the income tax and unemployment insurance have received recent attention gruber 1997 auerbach and feenberg 2000 kniesner and ziliak 2002a b little is known about the role of food stamps as an automatic stabilizer even though the program served over 27 million americans at its peak in 1994 this gap in the literature is particularly acute in light of passage of the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 welfare reform act which introduced new rules on cash assistance recipients and thus the nearly half of food stamp recipients who also receive cash welfare moreover the 1996 welfare reform also had a direct administrative effect on the food stamp program by ending the eligibility of some recipients reducing average benefit levels and requiring states to replace paper coupons with electronic benefit transfer cards importantly the welfare reform act also eliminated the entitlement status of the main cash welfare program aid to families with dependent children afdc thus positioning food stamps as a more prominent countercyclical consumption stabilizer a first task in assessing the possible stabilization role of food stamps in the era of welfare reform is to identify the cyclical sensitivity of food stamp caseloads if food stamp caseloads are acyclical then we would expect no role for food stamps in smoothing consumption over the business cycle if however food stamp caseloads are highly cyclical then food stamps may function as an important antirecessionary tool by the same token the new welfare policies may independently affect food stamp caseload movements and interact with the business cycle thereby altering the possible stabilization role of the program in this paper we specify a dynamic model of food stamp caseloads to estimate the responsiveness of the caseload to the business cycle to welfare policies and to interactions between the business cycle and welfare policies unlike cash welfare there has been scant research on the cyclicality of food stamp caseloads 1 wallace and blank 1999 are a recent exception in their use of both static annual and dynamic monthly food stamp caseload models based on state level panel data for the 1980 to 1998 federal fiscal years with annual data food stamp caseloads were strongly countercyclical and reform of afdc led to weak declines in total caseloads 2 specifically they attribute up to 44 of the 1994 to 1998 food stamp caseload decline to economic conditions and about 6 of the decline to welfare reform they reach broadly similar conclusions with monthly data however wallace and blank calculate that upward of 85 of the post 1996 decline in food stamp caseloads can be attributed to welfare reform if one is willing to ascribe all the unexplained residual to welfare reform which as the authors note is undoubtedly an overestimate of welfare reform s effect on food stamp caseloads p 85 in their static models figlio gundersen and ziliak 2000 reached conclusions similar to wallace and blank s estimates with annual level data in their preferred dynamic models they attribute about 35 of the 1994 to 1998 caseload decline to the macroeconomy and virtually nothing to welfare reform we improve on this previous research on food stamp caseloads along several dimensions first we not only follow other research in estimating the impact of afdc policy changes on food stamp caseloads but also examine the impact of policies that are focused directly on food stamps

food stamps as money the macroeconomics of a transfer program food stamps represent nearly 11 billion of personal income in the united states the coupons that are issued to provide purchasing power to recipients are also reserves for the commercial banking system this study asks at what rate these coupons are substitutable for what is usually considered money the results based on estimates for 1959 81 suggest that food stamp coupons are substitutable for m1 on a one for one basis and a revised money supply series including food stamp money is included together with other estimates showing that the marginal propensity to consume out of food stamps is higher than that out of ordinary income the results suggest that the food stamp program is an automatic fiscal and monetary stabilizer under its provisions both the money stock and disposable income are increased during a recession

bond market and stock market integration in europe a smooth transition approach this article investigates whether there has been a structural increase in financial market integration in nine european countries and the us in the period 1980 to 2003 we employ a garch model with a smoothly time varying correlation to estimate the date of change and the speed of the transition between the low and high correlation regimes our test produces strong evidence of greater comovement across the board for both stock markets and government bond markets dates of change and speeds of adjustment vary widely across country linkages stock market integration is a more gradual process than bond market integration the impact of european monetary union emu is rather limited as it has mainly affected the timing of bond market correlation gains but hardly their size and has had little discernible effect on stock market integration

convergence of real capital market interest rates evidence from inflation indexed bonds this paper investigates the convergence of long term ex ante real interest rates rirs obtained from canadian french uk and u s inflation indexed government bonds in contrast to previous research our evidence suggests full convergence in the long run and hence capital market integration for the same sample period global convergence is rejected for rirs measured in conventional terms from these results we conclude that previous tests of the long run real interest rate parity might have suffered from weak measurement of real capital market interest rates

have the gipsi settled down breaks and multivariate stochastic volatility models for and not against the european financial integration we investigate the integration of the european peripheral financial markets with germany france and the uk using a combination of tests for structural breaks and return correlations derived from several multivariate stochastic volatility models our findings suggest that financial integration intensified in anticipation of the euro further strengthened by the emu inception and amplified in response to the 2007 2008 financial crisis hence no evidence is found of decoupling of the equity markets in more troubled european countries from the core interestingly the uk despite staying outside the emu is not worse integrated with the gipsi than germany or france 2013 elsevier b v

heterogeneity of the determinants of euro area sovereign bond spreads what does it tell us about financial stability abstract in this paper we assess the movements of euro area sovereign bond yield spreads vis a vis the german bund as processes specified across different levels of volatility and subject to movements in asset prices and economic conditions the determinants we use are grouped into domestic and euro area aggregates thus allowing us to derive results on their relative explanatory power and compare them across time and the spectrum of countries we find that volatility influences the deterministic processes of the euro area sovereign spreads and that identical determinants have effects on spreads that vary considerably across countries furthermore we find that variables reflecting investment confidence conditions and perceptions for the upcoming economic activity are significant determinants and their significance remains to a large extent even when controlling for fiscal variables

measuring time varying financial market integration an unobserved components approach abstract we measure the time varying degree of world stock market integration of five developed countries germany france uk us and japan over the period 1970 1 2011 10 time varying financial market integration of each country is measured through the conditional variances of the country specific and common international risk premiums in equity excess returns the country specific and common risk premiums and their conditional variances are estimated from a latent factor decomposition through the use of state space methods that allow for garch errors our empirical results suggest that stock market integration has increased over the period 1970 1 2011 10 in all countries but japan and while there is a structural increase in stock market integration in four out of five countries all countries also exhibit several shorter periods of disintegration reversals i e periods in which country specific shocks play a more dominant role hence stock market integration is measured as a dynamic process that is fluctuating in the short run while gradually increasing in the long run

emu and european government bond market integration in this study we adopt the capm based model of bekaert and harvey 1995 to compare the differences in the relative importance of two sources of systemic risk world and eurozone on government bond returns in two groups of countries in eu 15 results show that euro markets are less vulnerable to the influence of world risk factors and more vulnerable to emu risk factors however they are only partially integrated for their part the markets of the countries that decided to stay out of the monetary union present a higher vulnerability to external risk factors

the european union the euro and equity market integration abstract we use industry valuation differentials across european countries to study the impact of membership in the european union as well as the eurozone on both economic and financial integration in integrated markets discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one industry irrespective of the country implying narrowing valuation differentials as countries become more integrated our analysis of the 1990 2007 period shows that membership in the eu significantly lowered discount rate and expected earnings growth differentials across countries in contrast the adoption of the euro was not associated with increased integration our results do not change when the sample is extended to include the recent crisis period

country v sector effects in equity returns and the roles of geographical and firm size coverage since roll the journal of finance 47 1 3 41 1992 and heston and rouwenhorst journal of financial economics 36 3 27 1994 there has been a debate whether country factors in international stock returns are typically more variable than sector factors the addition of emerging markets ems does boost the ratio of country factor variance relative to industry factor variance these markets have a higher variability but are also less related to global factors investigating to what extent this phenomenon can be tracked down to the impact of adding more small firms we find the following 1 small firms do have higher volatility but only after controlling for country and sector affiliation 2 small firms do have weaker sector affinity as expected 3 small firms unexpectedly have weaker local market sensitivities than large firms facts 2 and 3 mean that adding more small firms to the data base has a diversifying effect on both the sector and country factor variance while the impact on sector variance is larger the net effect turns out to be tiny 4 adding emerging markets has a very marked impact on the variance ratio in fact the addition of small stocks to the sample hardly dents the effect of adding ems thus the role of ems cannot be reduced to just a small firm phenomenon

what causes public assistance caseloads to grow this paper uses state panel data to investigate changes in public assistance caseloads through the end of the afdc program in 1996 with particular attention to the rapid increase in caseloads between 1990 and 1994 previous research has focused on total caseloads with attention to economic and policy variables and does a relatively poor job of explaining this caseload increase this paper utilizes a much richer set of control variables to investigate the causes of caseload change it separates afdc caseloads into three subcomponent programs separately investigating changes within the afdc up program afdc child only cases and the remaining core afdc cases with benefits paid to single mothers and their children and it explores whether this caseload rise was driven by changes in takeup rates versus in eligibility the results indicate a large unexplained rise in total afdc caseloads even with a very rich specification a good share of this is due to sharp increases in child only cases driven by program and demographic shifts to a lesser extent this rise was caused by the expansion of afdc up to all states these two factors explain half of the overall rise and all of the unexplained rise in afdc caseloads the remaining increase in core afdc cases benefits received by single mothers and their children is well explained within the model and is the result of economic demographic political and policy changes these variables appear to have increased eligibility among the core afdc population in the early 1990s during the economic slowdown takeup rates also increased during this time period but not by a large amount

the significance of federal taxes as automatic stabilizers using the taxsim model for the period 1962 95 we consider the federal tax system s impact as an automatic stabilizer despite the many changes in the tax system there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer we estimate that individual federal taxes offset perhaps as much as 8 percent of initial shocks to gdp we also suggest that the progressive income tax may help to stabilize output via its effect on the supply of labor an additional effect that may even be of similar magnitude to the more traditional path of stabilization through aggregate demand

can an islamic model of housing finance cooperative elevate the economic status of the underprivileged abstract a formal home loan is onerous to subprime borrowers in efficient markets this can deter home ownership for financially strapped individuals leading to a market failure this paper proposes a special form of cooperative mortgage financing practiced in oman to overcome this market failure we integrate the literature of mortgage design with that of informal savings schemes i e roscas ascras to illustrate that this mode of financing dissipates credit risk better than the

the euro and corporate valuations in this paper we study the changes in corporate valuations induced by the adoption of the euro as the common currency in europe we use corporate level data from seventeen european countries of which eleven adopted the euro we show that the introduction of the euro has increased tobin s q ratios by 17 1 in the euro area countries that previously had weak currencies part of the increase in corporate valuations is explained by the decrease in interest rates and by the decrease in the cost of equity the increases in tobin s q are larger for firms that would be harmed by currency devaluations the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

international co movements of real and financial economic variables this study presents a first attempt at investigating whether the international co movements of real economic activity conform to the same international co movements of financial activity this study tests the international co movements of real economic activity on the one hand and financial variables such as stock returns interest rates inflation rates and risk premiums on the other hand we employ a dynamic correlation model on data from oecd countries for the period 1980 2010 our findings demonstrate that international stock markets co react in accordance with the underlying international economic forces we also document three other results first the correlation among countries with respect to real economic activity is statistically positive but the level of this correlation is lower than that of financial variables second there is a significant increase over time in the international correlation level with respect to the financial variables finally the creation of the euro monetary union

global market integration an alternative measure and its application global markets seem to be increasingly integrated but there is no well accepted measure of integration we show that the correlation across markets is a poor measure perfectly integrated markets can exhibit weak correlation we derive a new integration measure based on the explanatory power of a multi factor model and use it empirically to investigate recent trends in global integration for most countries there has been a marked increase in measured integration over the past three decades but this is not indicated by correlations among country indexes

factor decomposition and diversification in european corporate bond markets in this paper we present an analysis of diversification strategies on portfolios of european corporate bonds from the perspective of a us based investor we study whether mean variance diversification strategies change as a result of the introduction of the european economic and monetary union emu using a comprehensive and unique data set of european corporate bonds we show that country factors are more important than industry factors to describe the cross section of european corporate bonds in particular we find that in the post emu period country factors remain important

european equity market integration and joint relationship of conditional volatility and correlations abstract we analyse the integration patterns of seven leading european stock markets from 1990 to 2013 using daily data and mismatched monthly macroeconomic data to study the mismatch of data frequencies we use the dcc midas dynamic conditional correlation mixed data sampling technique developed by colacito engle and ghysels journal of econometrics 2011 we benchmark european integration patterns against the german stock market the reported integration patterns show a clear divide between large and relatively small equity markets short run and long run return correlations the small markets display higher short run european convergences than the large markets and vice versa the across the board divergence from greek risk during the crisis period is the most unambiguous conclusion of our study during this period cross country joint relationships of conditional variances and return correlations a convergence of risks resulting in global regional contagious spillovers are typically positive only exceptions are the german stock market s joint relationships

emu and european stock market integration the launch of the single currency in europe in january 1999 was preceded by a period of regulatory harmonization convergence in bond yields and inflation rates and strict fiscal policy across the eurozone countries we examine whether the 1990s also were characterized by increased stock market integration the results indicate that as forward interest differentials benchmarked against germany and inflation differentials benchmarked against the three best performing states shrank toward zero stock markets converged toward full integration the united kingdom a country that chose not to enter the eurozone shows no such increase in stock market integration

dynamics of international integration of government securities markets abstract this paper investigates the dynamics of international government bond market integration in six of the g7 economies over two decades leading up to the global crisis it examines whether such integration had been significant the extent to which integration at the short and long end of the yield curve differed the nature of such integration and the extent of the decoupling of the long rates from short rates these issues are investigated using the rigorous smooth transition copula garch model framework the results show that integration at the long end of the yield curve had been increasing had become pronounced and was significantly greater than at the short end decoupling between the short and long end of the yield curve was notable with important implications for the efficacy of monetary policy in the period before the crisis

the relationship between risk and expected return in europe abstract we employ midas mixed data sampling to study the risk expected return trade off in several european stock indices using midas we report that in most indices there is a significant positive relationship between risk and expected return this strongly contrasts with the result we obtain when we employ both symmetric and asymmetric garch models for conditional variance we also find that asymmetric specifications of the variance process within the midas framework improve the relationship between risk and expected return as an additional application we analyze the extent to which european stock markets are integrated which is a particularly relevant issue especially following the launch of the euro in january 1999 finally we propose a bivariate midas specification to test the pricing significance of the hedging component within an intertemporal risk return trade off with multiple european market indices

do in work tax credits serve as a safety net we test the eitc s response to economic need using irs data we exploit differences in timing and severity of economic cycles across states because the eitc requires earned income there is a theoretical ambiguity in the credit s cyclicality we find higher unemployment leads to increased likelihood of eitc recipiency and in credit amounts received for married couples but has insignificant effects for single individuals the eitc s protective effects are concentrated among skilled workers the eitc mitigates income shocks for married couples with children and groups likely to have moderate earnings but does not for most recipients single parents with children

the euro and european financial market dependence a time varying copula model is used to investigate the impact of the introduction of the euro on the dependence between 17 european stock markets during the period 1994 2003 the model is implemented with a gjr garch ma t model for the marginal distributions and the gaussian copula for the joint distribution which allows capturing time varying non linear relationships the results show that within the euro area market dependence increased after the introduction of the common currency only for large equity markets such as in france germany italy the netherlands and spain structural break tests indicate that the increase in financial market dependence started around the beginning of 1998 when euro membership was determined and the relevant information was announced the uk and sweden but not other european countries outside the euro area are found to exhibit an increase in equity market co movement which is consistent with the interpretation that these countries may be expected to join the euro in the future

housing sector performance in global perspective a cross city investigation this paper measures and accounts for variations in housing sector performance using the unchs and world bank s housing indicators database of a diverse sample of 52 cities the first stage of the empirical analysis based on a principal components analysis indicates that housing sector performance can be evaluated in terms of six distinct dimensions these are poor housing conditions house price appreciation public sector housing provision home ownership housing finance and the absence of homelessness the second stage of the analysis reveals that intercity variations in these dimensions can be accounted for by differences in the levels of economic development the macroeconomic environment demographic characteristics the efficiency of the construction industry expenditure on infrastructure and the regulatory and institutional environment governing the housing delivery process

the role of food stamps in consumption stabilization although the food stamp program is the largest universal entitlement program in the social safety net little is known about its stabilizing role in household income and consumption using data from the panel study of income dynamics spanning 1980 99 we estimate the volatility of income with and without food stamps coupled with a variance decomposition of consumption among families at high ex ante risk of food stamp participation food stamps reduced income volatility by about 12 percent and food consumption volatility by about 14 percent there was however a marked decline in consumption smoothing benefits of the program in the early 1990s relative to the 1980s

european financial market dependence an industry analysis this paper uses a copula model to investigate the degree and determinants of european market dependence across 10 industries in 12 euro zone and 8 non euro zone stock markets during the period 1992 2011 most of the industries in euro countries show a dependence increase with the euro area after the introduction of the euro the effects are strongest in countries with larger market capitalization and in the financials industrials consumer goods utilities technology and telecommunications industries overall the export intensity interest rate sensitivity and competitiveness of an industry and the financial development and economic openness of a country are the most important determinants of changes in equity market dependence the period around the lehman collapse also shows higher equity market dependence between european countries while the lower dependence increase during the period of the recent european sovereign debt crisis suggests that country specific factors may matter more than before

the impact of snap on material hardships evidence from broad based categorical eligibility expansions this article examines whether expanding supplemental nutrition assistance program snap eligibility reduces material hardships of low income households during the great recession many states expanded the income threshold of eligibility for snap i show that expansions in eligibility increased the snap participation rate by 3 5 percentage points i also find that the expansion leads to a modest decrease in nonfood hardships such as rent and utility delinquencies however the increase in snap enrollment does not lead to greater food spending or a reduction in food insecurity except for households with children

the more things change the more they stay the same the safety net and poverty in the great recession much attention has been given to the large increases in safety net spending during the great recession we examine the relationship between poverty the safety net and business cycles historically and test whether there has been a significant change in this relationship we find that post welfare reform temporary assistance for needy families did not respond during the great recession and extreme poverty is more cyclical than in prior recessions food stamps and unemployment insurance are providing more protection or no less protection in the great recession and there is some evidence of less cyclicality for 100 poverty

poverty and progress reflections on housing and urban policies in developing countries 1976 96 the habitat ii conference in june 1996 was more determined by retrospect and prospect than by the discussions during the several days in istanbul the policy outcomes were fashioned by reforms and