international competition and real wages myriad politicians express concern over increased competition from abroad but among economists the home economy is widely believed to benefit from improvement in foreign economies jeffrey williamson 1991 work by a few economists john r hicks 1953 ronald jones 1979 paul krugman 1979 suggests that there is some truth to popular concerns over competitiveness the effect of foreign competition in reducing the relative price of the goods that the united states formerly exported can lower aggregate real income in the united states even as world income rises accordingly the success of japan western europe and more recently many other nations in producing goods that were as of the end of world war ii virtual monopolies of the united states is another potential candidate for explaining the fall relative to trend of the average living standard or real wage in the united states

land consumption and income in italy a case of inverted ekc abstract the ekc hypothesis postulates that the relationship between economic growth and environmental deterioration is represented by an inverted u shaped function its validity has been questioned from several perspectives and a need for public policies has been expressed this paper uses a heuristic approach to analyze the relationship between per capita income and land consumption as proxied by the number of building permits issued by public authorities using data from the italian regions we run a panel data regression model to test whether the ekc hypothesis holds results confute it evidencing a u shaped relationship in the authors opinion the combined effect of market conditions lifestyle evolution and institutional and political factors have produced an adverse effect on environment on this basis the paper claims that when social and intergenerational aspects are involved a balanced mix of market policies and institutional architecture is needed

explaining metropolitan housing price differences abstract housing prices differ substantially among metropolitan areas the rent and house price indexes used here measure this variation among 54 metropolitan areas a model of metropolitan housing price determination is presented and used to identify the sources of intermetropolitan price variation reduced form equations explain close to 90 of the variation in rental prices and close to 60 of the variation in house prices

sense and surprise in competitive trade theory 2010 weai presidential address i introduction the competitive theory of international trade is well known for its abundance of paradoxes perhaps the most widely known is the leontief paradox associated with the rather startling results presented by leontief 1953 that the trade pattern of the united states suggested that its export sectors were more labor intensive than factor proportions found in its import competing sectors this result stimulated decades of research but is not the focus of the present paper other so called paradoxes include the metzler 1949 result wherein a country levying a tariff on an imported item may end up with a lowering of its domestic price that is a tariff may not be protective 1 lerner 1936 who earlier hinted at the metzler outcome emphasized the possibility that a tariff might instead worsen a country s terms of trade which is at the opposite extreme to the metzler result both of these paradoxes are attributed to possible income effects in demand more recently income effects stemming from asymmetry in demand patterns among countries were shown to open the door to paradoxical results if one country makes a transfer to another in a world in which other countries are also engaged in trade in the same commodities the surprising results the giver in the transfer might end up better off i e it may pay to give rather than to receive and or the recipient of the transfer may end up worse off 2 finally a classic result that does not depend on asymmetries in taste patterns but rather upon the degree of elasticity in demand and the nature of growth is the question of whether a country that unequivocally grows transformation schedule shifts out can be made worse off as a consequence of growth the so called immiserizing growth paradox 3 this is an issue familiar to particular sectors of the economy for example agriculture can a good harvest yield lower returns because of the subsequent price fall instead of revisiting these familiar paradoxes here i wish to concentrate on the production side of competitive models used in international trade and to focus on the question involving ways of judging economic models clearly the question of realism often comes up whether it is in terms of assumptions made or of outcomes expected here i suggest a different criterion does the model conform in many ways to common sense that is would one be tempted to suggest that the model is not necessary because common sense would lead to the same results and if it does do the outcomes in certain scenarios seem to be paradoxical or surprising if so can the model reveal in simple terms why these somewhat surprising results make sense 4 i shall restrict myself to a pair of basic models of production used in competitive trade theory the specific factors model on the one hand and the heckscher ohlin model on the other i shall argue that in many ways both conform to common sense but in addition provide the very tools that expose the underlying rationale for surprise ii a preliminary question consider any economy that is characterized by competitive markets and constant returns to scale technology suppose for such an economy there is an increase in the factor endowment bundle to fix on an example suppose there is an increase in the economy s labor force the very general question i wish to ask is how does such an economy absorb this increased endowment to maintain full employment of all factors note that if this economy is not engaged in international trade there will likely result a change in commodity prices as they adjust in order to equilibrate local supply and demand given the points i wish to make later let me assume that the country is engaged in free trade with the rest of the world if this economy were particularly small world prices could be taken as given even if world prices are disturbed it is legitimate to ask how the economy absorbs the extra supplies before any change in commodity prices takes place

house prices and female labor force participation abstract is there a causal connection between house prices and labor force participation of married women the simple correlation between house prices and married women s labor force participation across u s metro areas is positive plausible informal arguments have been advanced to support causation in either direction prices raising participation negative income effects of higher house prices lead more married women to work or participation raising prices richer two earner households bid up the price of scarce housing i construct an equilibrium model of location labor supply and real estate land prices within a metro area which predicts that 1 metro areas with exogenously less buildable land will have higher house prices and more labor force participation of married women while 2 metro areas with married women exogenously more prone to work will have higher house prices using geographic instruments for housing supply i find little evidence of a positive effect of house prices on married women s labor force participation but a somewhat greater possibility that house prices raise their earnings likewise an instrument for married women s labor supply reveals no consistent significant causal effect of two earner households on housing prices although the possibility of a positive effect cannot be ruled out

planning delay and the responsiveness of english housing supply there is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing most research focuses on the supply impacts of prescribed limits on land use but housing supply may also be affected by the process of planning monitoring and approval but this is hard to measure in detail the uk has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it but does offer the opportunity of detailed site based investigation of planning delay this paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects in southern england the scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets hedonic modelling indicated that there is considerable variation in the time it takes local authorities to process planning applications housing association developments are processed more quickly than those of large developers and small sites appear to be particularly time intensive these results suggest that delays in development control may be a significant contributory factor to the low responsiveness of uk housing supply to upturns in market activity

urban land supply natural and contrived restrictions abstract both large bodies of water and local governments restrict the supply of urban land in this paper we measure water s restriction on supply and test its effect on land price we then extend hamilton s and fischel s pioneering work on governmental restriction providing an improved test of the monopoly zoning hypothesis that such restriction further affects land price regression analysis of data from 45 urban areas suggests that the two restrictions combine to explain 40 of typical interurban price differentials

brokerage pricing under competition abstract this paper reexamines the popular assumption that real estate commissions are fixed over time it shows how the competitively determined commission rate responds to changes in the housing market and broker cost conditions one testable implication is that competition promotes counter cyclical changes in the commission rate the empirical analysis of commission rate determinants using data covering an entire urban housing market through its downturn and expansion phases reveals the counter cyclical movement in commission rates predicted by the competitive model

does infrastructure investment stimulate building supply the case of the english regions ball m and nanda a does infrastructure investment stimulate building supply the case of the english regions regional studies policies to improve infrastructure to stimulate regional growth remain common this paper investigates whether increases in infrastructure investment in the english regions lead to subsequent rises in new commercial and residential property using time series modelling both physical roads and harbours and social infrastructure education and health impacts are investigated hardly any infrastructure effects with respect to commercial property investment were found which raises doubts about whether extra infrastructure creates employment though some impact was related to residential building overall these results raise doubts about the supposed direct effects of infrastructure policies on regional jobs and growth

on some effects of international fragmentation of production on comparative advantages trade flows and the income of countries in traditional trade models whether based on technological differences or on relative factor endowments merchandise composition and directions of trade are derived from closed economy conditions but nowadays one of the basic assumptions of traditional trade models i e that production processes are integrated within just one country is being increasingly violated as previously integrated productive activities are segmented and spread over an international network of production sites as a result an increasingly large share of trade flows is made up of intermediate and unfinished goods being transferred from one country to another in order to be processed in this paper we submit that such new configuration of production processes has important effects on at least three dimensions of economic research first we show that international disintegration of production processes leads to a lessening of the power of comparative advantages when it comes to explaining both merchandise composition and directions of trade while it is the concept of absolute advantage to become increasingly relevant second we show that empirical measures of revealed comparative advantages are inherently misleading if they do not account for differences in the stage of processing of traded goods third we estimate a simple model of aggregate demand accounting for international trade in intermediates results of estimation lend support to our prior that participation of a country in the process of international fragmentation of production plays a specific and significant role in determining its year over year change in gdp

labour s reward across regions of the eu a distributional dynamic approach a large number of empirical studies have tested for the presence of convergence for a variety of economic variables this paper examines the evolution of labour s reward across regions of the eu to identify whether factor price convergence has occurred density diagrams are used to illustrate static distributions while transitional matrices are employed to identify movements of the distribution over time the results presented suggest that the evolutionary paths of average regional pay are fairly stable with stratification and persistence identified as important characteristics there was uninterrupted convergence of average regional pay between 1980 1992 however between 1992 1994 this process reversed

dynamics of a protected housing market the case of switzerland this study posits that there may be a strong relationship between the high degree of protectionism of the swiss housing market and its stability the article provides an overview of the swiss housing policies that it is argued are highly conservative in the context of an international comparison the stability of the swiss housing economy is empirically tested based on the time period from 1990 to 2009 in which two substantial crises occurred house prices and construction activity are modelled the emerging results which are admittedly based on a very short time series are nonetheless consistent with previous theoretical and empirical research furthermore the findings indicate that the swiss housing economy operates in accordance with fundamentals based on a tentative approach that measures the occurrence of the crisis with annual indicator variables no effects of the crises on the swiss housing market can be detected

the aaea ever growing and changing research challenges the changing economic conditions over the past century along with changes in technology and developments in economic theory and quantitative methods helped shape the profession we currently refer to as agricultural and applied economics the broadening of the profession from the original focus on the farm and agricultural industry to encompass international affairs governmental policies resources and environmental and rural affairs is discussed within this context emergence of the subdisciplines and some of the major individual contributions are noted the final section argues that members of the profession are well positioned to continue contributing research that will help society achieve its goals and notes six challenges that provide such opportunities

the technology transfer paradox abstract this paper examines whether a country that enjoys a superior technology in all commodities in a two country multi commodity ricardian setting could actually gain if its technology in which it possesses its greatest comparative advantage is stolen or transferred to the other country without any compensation such a paradoxical possibility is shown always to exist with a finite number of commodities and equal shared cobb douglas demand conditions for certain ranges of relative country size

strategic public policy around population thresholds abstract political economists have long maintained that politicians respond to both re election and financial incentives this article contributes to the latter literature by analysing whether when and how local office holders respond to the economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and remuneration of local politicians building on insights from the urban economics and public finance literatures we argue that local politicians may strategically adjust fiscal and housing policies to stimulate in migration when approaching a population threshold where their remuneration increases using data from all 589 belgian municipalities over the period 1977 2016 our results confirm that approaching important population thresholds causes lower local tax rates and the granting of additional building permits particularly for apartments these policy changes occur early in the election cycle and at least for housing policy are restricted to incumbent mayors themselves expecting to benefit from crossing the population threshold

land values and housing rents in urban japan abstract this paper describes and systematically explains observed variation in land values and housing rents in urban japan it fits a structural model s reduced form equations to intertemporal data over 35 years intercity data across 27 major cities and intracity data in the three largest metropolitan areas explanatory variables are population income their growth rates the interest rate the inflation rate urban land supply and distance from the city center

tax subsidies to owner occupied housing an asset market approach inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation this paper presents an asset market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s which substantially reduced homeowners user costs could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner occupied housing

time on market and price trade offs in high rise housing sub markets this paper provides the first analytical study of the relationship between list price and time on market tom for high rise public housing flats stratified by sub markets in terms of geographical region and property type in addition the effects of macroeconomic variables pertinent to the price discovery process for property markets are analysed by using data from single listings with one major agency firm to control for brokerage effects the results obtained in this study are robust to incentive factors arising from firm size number of listings commission structure and incentive measures the key results are that floor level affects the relationship between pricing and tom and variations in determinants of tom exist across sub markets moreover tom is influenced by price movements in both the public and private housing markets as well as by individual agent effort

rabbit hutches on postage stamps planning development and political economy the supply of land for housing has been restricted by planning controls the prices of land and of houses have risen in consequence as a result land has been used with increasing intensity with infill town cramming and smaller houses on less land rabbit hutches on postage stamps a destruction of the urban environment of the many to preserve a rural environment for a few why is the supply of land restricted firstly it is suggested because the british misapprehend the degree of urbanisation in their own country secondly because rural and farming interests ensure that the planning system operates in their favour and thirdly and most importantly because the planning process is tilted in favour of the existing residents of an area who seek to preserve their environment by resisting intruders a number of suggestions are made to resolve the situation by increasing the supply of land or reducing the demand for land

land use planning and the housing market a comparative review of the uk and the usa this paper provides a review of some of the key articles and research examining the relationship between planning regulation and its impact on the housing market in the uk and the us in both count

the dangerous obsession with cost competitiveness and the not so dangerous obsession with competitiveness judging solely by the continued prevalence of the term in policy makers discourse paul krugman s now famous warnings as to the dangerous obsession of competitiveness have fallen on deaf ears in this paper i argue that this is at least in part because policy makers as distinct perhaps from business school gurus never understood competitiveness in quite the manner he assumed i suggest that krugman largely misdiagnosed the problem of competitiveness directing us to the link between competitiveness and protectionism that was always less prevalent and more tenuous than he imagined as a consequence he overlooked other more pertinent and problematic aspects of the discourse of competitiveness that persist relatively unchallenged in spite of his warnings more specifically i seek to show that krugman s understanding of competitiveness is insufficiently differentiated and rests on inferences drawn from an overly stylised model of competition for market share in product markets that exhibit a high demand price elasticity and in which success is associated exclusively with strategies of cost containment as i show through a series of extensions to his model this leads him to fail to see that it is the privileging of cost competitiveness specifically rather than the pursuit of competitiveness per se that is the dangerous obsession from which we most need protecting today

interaction between housing prices and household borrowing the finnish case abstract employing time series econometrics this study shows that there has been a significant two way interaction between housing prices and housing loan stock in finland since the financial liberalization in the late 1980s before the financial deregulation the interaction was substantially weaker furthermore housing appreciation has a notable positive impact on the outstanding consumption loan stock it appears that there is no similar relationship between stock prices and credit understanding the two way interaction between housing prices and credit is of importance since the interdependence is likely to augment boom bust cycles in the economy and increase the fragility of the financial sector

the politics of land supply and affordable housing auckland s housing accord and special housing areas increasingly planning for housing development involves political conflict between local government planning practices based on urban sustainability and housing intensification and central government housing policies centred on land supply and housing affordability this paper examines a key historical moment in the politics of housing supply and planning in new zealand drawing upon a discourse analysis of a range of housing policy documents and urban plans this paper traces the dynamic of local and central government negotiations and conflict arising from the development of auckland s spatial plan the development of the auckland housing accord a central and local government agreement to fast track planning permission for new housing and the implementation of the housing accords and special housing areas act the paper focuses on the manner in which certain policy knowledge is prioritised and applied in the construction of affordable housing policies and how this process which is presented as obj

a search model of housing market transactions arrive in a temporal sequence if an offer is received a seller must decide whether to accept the current offer or to reject that offer and continue to search it is this strategic choice and the possibility of not receiving an offer that results in extended selling periods and stocks of unsold houses rejection of offers and extended selling periods are to be expected in an uncertain environment where search may be used productively to obtain a higher selling price this paper considers the implications of a search environment for measurement of hedonic prices because an offer is observed only when it is acceptable to the seller sold houses constitute a self selected subsample in a search environment accurate measurement of hedonic prices in this situation may be obtained with the two stage procedure of heckman 3 and lee 5 or the maximum likelihood procedure summarized in amemiya 1 the empirical model presented in section ii is a generalization of the usual hedonic model in the sense that the pricing equation is supplemented with an exchange equation which determines probability of sale the coefficients in each equation provide useful information regarding housing search the coefficients in the pricing equation are marginal attribute prices while the attribute coefficients in the exchange equation are the standardized differences between the marginal attribute prices of buyers and sellers an interesting implication of this model is that attribute variation will not be systematically related to probability of sale if the marginal attribute prices of buyers and sellers equalize thus this model may be used to address two related questions regarding hedonic analysis in a search environment first does competition among buyers and sellers equalize marginal attribute prices in a search environment and second is accurate measurement of hedonic prices affected by the probabilistic nature of sale

offshoring administrative and technical work new fields for understanding the global enterprise in this paper we introduce the journal of international business studies special issue on offshoring administrative and technical services ats in doing so we have attempted to locate the topic within the international business research tradition as well as suggest challenges and opportunities that the phenomenon offers to theoretical and empirical research in the field we examine the interplay of costs knowledge and innovation in the evolution of ats offshoring from modest beginnings to its current stature as an accepted business practice we suggest that understanding the continuing evolution of ats offshoring requires researchers to take into account not only the business imperative of cost saving but also a more complex set of underlying factors and potential outcomes we argue that the rapid growth of ats offshoring has brought about an accumulation of resources including financial flows knowledge infrastructure and human capital to create new platforms for knowledge creation and innovation low costs may characterize the initial conditions for offshoring but they also provide the basis for up market moves as firms increasingly pursue innovation based strategies we introduce the papers in the special issue as integral elements in our discussion contributing new ideas that stimulated our thinking and hopefully will do the same for others seeking to understand this emerging area of globalization and international managerial practice journal of international business studies 2009 40 887 900 doi 10 1057 jibs 2009 22

the welfare economics of land use planning abstract this paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning the technique is applied in the context of the town and country planning system of the uk and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups the results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large

comparative advantage and the welfare impact of european integration this paper investigates the welfare gains from european trade integration and the role of comparative advantage in determining the magnitude of those gains we use a multi sector ricardian model implemented on 79 countries and compare welfare in the 2000s to a counterfactual scenario in which east european countries are closed to trade for west european countries the mean welfare gain from trade integration with eastern europe is 0 16 ranging from zero for portugal to 0 4 for austria for east european countries gains from trade are 9 23 at the mean ranging from 2 85 for russia to 20 for estonia for eastern europe comparative advantage is a key determinant of the variation in the welfare gains countries whose comparative advantage is most similar to western europe tend to gain less while countries with technology most different from western europe gain the most andrei a levchenko and jing zhang

what is the role of the asking price for a house abstract this paper considers the role of the asking price in housing transactions both theoretically and empirically significant fractions of housing transactions involve sales prices that are either below or above asking price which might suggest that asking price has limited relevance however many housing transactions involve a sales price exactly equal to asking price a fact that has previously drawn little notice strongly suggesting that asking price does matter the paper develops a model where asking price is neither a binding commitment nor a ceiling yet still directs buyer search and impacts sales price using novel survey data the paper provides empirical evidence consistent with asking price playing a directing role in buyer search consistent with theory this effect is stronger for more atypical houses and in bust markets

terrorism and attitudes towards minorities the effect of the theo van gogh murder on house prices in amsterdam abstract does fundamentalist islamic terrorism have an effect on the general attitudes towards muslim minorities we use the murder of theo van gogh as an event study to address this question specifically we use the hedonic market model and test for an effect on listed house prices in neighborhoods where more than 25 of the people belong to an ethnic minority from a muslim country type i relative to the other neighborhoods house prices in type i neighborhoods decreased in 10 months by about 3 with a widening gap over time our results are robust to several adjustments including using synthetic control groups finally we find evidence that segregation increased people belonging to the muslim minority were more likely to buy and less likely to sell a house in a type i neighborhood after the murder than before

price level co movements within currency unions an alternative integration metric this paper analyses currency union integration by testing whether price levels in member countries possess a common stochastic trend the trace statistic test for cointegration proposed by johansen 1995 demonstrates the presence of such a trend for most unions a disaggregated analysis identifies a common stochastic trend for several though fewer than half of country pairs within a union some unions such as the eurozone have small shares of cointegrated country pairs yet the share of cointegrated country pairs is large relative to countries outside currency unions comparison to a control group country pairs where one country belongs to a given union and the other country does not indicates that the cointegration found within a currency union is a union specific trait and not a feature of the individual countries within the union these results provide an alternative metric to intraunion trade for gauging the extent of currency union integration

economic influences on the structure of local government in u s metropolitan areas abstract there is a large degree of variation in the number of general purpose local governments and school districts per square mile and per person among united states metropolitan areas using data from 1982 this paper provides an empirical test of whether economic factors especially variation in demand for local government services partly account for these differences the empirical findings show that after controlling for political historic and institutional factors variations in the characteristics that affect demand for local government services do influence the number of local governments this result is consistent with the hypothesis first put forth by tiebout

the production life cycle tasks in production have different dynamics in comparison with individual products we build a general equilibrium model where three forces offshoring learning and wage interact to determine how production fragmentation evolves over time we show that the production process follows a life cycle its fragmentation emerges deepens and converges our model is stylized and versatile which can be used to tractably characterize the loci of global output productivity welfare and value added distribution as production fragmentation progresses this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

estimation of a type 2 tobit model with generalized box cox transformation this article considers estimation of a type 2 tobit model with bickel doksum transformation of the dependent variable of the regression equation the basic idea is that while the transformed depend

on the choice of functional form for hedonic price functions the empirical results presented in this paper demonstrate the usefulness of quadriatic models in the estimation of hedonic price functions we propose a quadriatic semi log model a restricted case of the quadriatic box cox model whose standardized marginal attribute prices are linear functions of the attribute vector this specification outperforms the linear box cox specification in terms of explanatory power and captures much of the increase in explanatory power provided by the quadriatic box cox model without the corresponding loss in the ability to interpret the coefficient estimates for policy applications the quadriatic semi log model provides a useful alternative to linear specification

the behavioral response to housing transfer taxes evidence from a notched change in d c policy abstract this paper estimates the behavioral response to residential real estate transfer taxes by studying notched tax rate changes in washington d c exploiting both a price and time notch as identifying variation we provide evidence that there is manipulation of the sales price to the lower tax rate region around the price notch and use this manipulation to show that there was significant awareness of the tax changes and the incentives they created we then construct difference in difference estimates to examine whether there is a lock in effect in the volume of house sales away from the price and time notches we find no evidence of a lock in effect in this setting taken together our results suggest that the welfare costs of a state introducing or eliminating a housing transaction tax are small

house price dynamics and market fundamentals the parisian housing market the paper compares two methods to evaluate the effect of market fundamentals on housing price dynamics the first method follows the traditional two step procedures found in the literature in which

estimating bargaining power in the market for existing homes although bargaining is common in markets for heterogeneous goods it has largely been ignored in the hedonic literature in a break from that tradition we establish sufficient conditions that permit one to identify the effect of buyer and seller bargaining on hedonic models our model is estimated using a previously overlooked feature of the american housing survey that permits us to observe characteristics of both buyers and sellers results suggest that household wealth gender and other demographic traits influence bargaining power in addition variation in bargaining power arising from the presence of school age children accounts for anomalous seasonal patterns reported in various widely cited indices of quality adjusted house prices

does offshoring of materials and business services affect employment evidence from a small open economy the fear of massive job losses has prompted a fast growing literature on offshoring and its impact on employment in advanced economies this paper examines the situation for belgium it improves the offshoring intensity measure by computing a volume measure of the share of imported intermediates in output and it is among the first to address both materials and business services offshoring to high wage and low wage countries estimations of static and dynamic industry level labour demand equations augmented by offshoring intensities do not reveal a significant impact of either materials or business services offshoring on total employment for belgium between 1995 and 2003

estimation and recent behavior of urban population and employment density gradients abstract the monocentric model of urban structure predicts that urban population density declines with distance from the central business district using the negative exponential function to approximate the decline mills e s mills studies in the structure of the urban economy johns hopkins press baltimore md 1972 estimated population and employment density gradients from 1948 to 1963 for a sample of 18 smsas this paper updates mills estimates and examines recent patterns in population and employment suburbanization the updated series estimated here is obtained using a corrected version of mills method the original procedure incorporated a bias which mills noted and later corrected e mills and k ohta in asia s new giant patrick and rosovsky eds the brookings institution washington d c 1976 the comparability of the series begun by mills and extended here is not interrupted however because as mills suspected the bias is indeed small provided smsa data are used on the other hand urbanized area definitions of metropolitan areas cause the original and corrected versions to yield significantly different results this finding has implications for the appropriate choice of data for urban studies

the stochastic city abstract this paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty household income rents and prices for land follow stochastic processes even though investors are risk neutral uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use is irreversible growth on the other hand affects urban and agricultural land prices but not the level of rents we show that uncertainty i delays the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use ii imparts an option value to agricultural land iii causes land at the boundary to sell for more than its opportunity cost in other uses and iv reduces equilibrium city size

housing price bubbles new supply and within city dynamics abstract although there is broad recognition that cities differ in their tendency to experience house price bubbles most studies assume away any possibility of within city heterogeneity in response to a bubble we develop a model that suggests that this assumption may be appropriate when markets are rising but can be far from reality on the bust side of a bubble during a housing boom new construction and related supply adjustments by developers ensure stable relative prices between low and high quality segments of the housing market on the bust side of a bubble however reduced housing starts allow demand side forces and mortgage default to create pressure for relative prices to diverge across market segments absent a change in technology as markets recover and new construction rebounds relative prices should revert back to pre crash levels evidence based on 2000 2013 single family home sales in phoenix arizona supports this modeling framework additional evidence also suggests that high rates of mortgage default contributed to divergence in relative prices when markets crashed

offshore outsourcing decision making a policy maker s perspective this research aims at finding the best governing policy for offshore outsourcing of business activities we use analytical network process a multicriteria decision making methodology to create the evaluation framework from the perspective of decision makers stakeholders and influence groups four policy options are evaluated with respect to approximately 50 economic political technological and other factors the model provides both long term and short term views of the outsourcing issue concerned to all parties the all inclusive approach helps policy makers to decide on the best policy and has the potential to ease tension between proponents and opponents of offshore outsourcing

the dynamic connectedness of uk regional property returns in this study we examine the network topology of uk regional property returns over the period 1973q4 2014q4 using a dynamic measure of connectedness developed by diebold and yilmaz 2014 overall

the evolution of comparative advantage measurement and welfare implications using an industry level dataset of production and trade spanning 75 countries and 5 decades and a fully specied multi sector ricardian model we estimate productivities at sector level and examine how they evolve over time in both developed and developing countries we nd that in both country groups comparative advantage has become weaker productivity grew systematically faster in sectors that were initially at the greater comparative disadvantage the global welfare implications of this phenomenon are signicant relative to the counterfactual scenario in which an individual country s comparative advantage remained the same as in the 1960s and technology in all sectors grew at the same country specic average rate welfare today is 1 9 lower at the median the welfare impact varies greatly across countries ranging from 0 5 to 6 among oecd countries and from 9 to 27 among non oecd countries remarkably for the oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in oecd countries and for the non oecd countries nearly all of the welfare impact is driven by changes in technology in non oecd countries

local taxation and urban development testing for the side effects of the italian property tax land is an essential yet limited natural resource its current unsustainable use asks for a better understanding of the main determinants of urban expansion a heuristic approach is used to analyze urban development in italy in particular the paper estimates an econometric model to test the impact of the italian property tax ici on the local authorities behavior and in particular on urban planning and development it tests whether its introduction has fostered rather than dampened construction activity the hypothesis put forward is that because of the concurrent market conditions the introduction of the tax has facilitated urban development the structure of the tax and the devolution process that began in the 90s induced local municipalities to adopt less tight accommodative urban policies to offset budgetary needs a more elastic urban policy reduces price volatility however its overall welfare effect is not clearly determined indeed ceteris paribus geographical areas with more elastic housing supply witness larger land consumption the land use changes we witnessed in the last decades could be the combined effect of financial and fiscal aspects if this is so careful attention should be given to the issue of whether leaving urban planning and the power to levy property taxes under the same jurisdiction

achieving fair trade through a social tariff regime a policy thought experiment this paper pursues a fair trade policy thought experiment that i presents the social index tariff structure sits regime and ii simulates a multilateral sits regime using bilateral trade flow data a sits regime seeks to promote strong labour and environmental standards and other initiatives that engender human development equality and sustainability it does this by institutionalising both the incentives and means for countries to enhance their performance in these areas we demonstrate that a multilateral sits regime would generate substantial and stable flows of development funds while incentivising an international race to the top in labour and environmental standards and more broadly in human development equality and sustainability

where ricardo and mill rebut and confirm arguments of mainstream economists supporting globalization most noneconomists are fearful when an emerging china or india helped by their still low real wage rates outsourcing and miracle export led developments cause layoffs from good american jobs this is a hot issue now and in the coming decade it will not go away prominent and competent mainstream economists enter into the debate to educate and correct warm hearted protestors who are against globalization here is a fair paraphrase of the argumentation that has been used recently by alan greenspan jagdish bhagwati gregory mankiw douglas irwin and economists john or jane doe spread widely throughout academia yes good jobs may be lost here in the short run but still total u s net national product must by the economic laws of comparative advantage be raised in the long run and in china too the gains of the winners from free trade properly measured work out to exceed the losses of the losers this is not by mysterious fuzzy magic but rather comes from a sharing of the trade induced rise in total global vectors of the goods and services that people in a democracy want never forget to tally the real gains of consumers alongside admitted possible losses of some producers in this working out of what schumpeter called creative capitalist destruction correct economic law recognizes that some american groups can be hurt by dynamic free trade but correct economic law vindicates the word creative destruction by its proof sic that the gains of the american winners are big enough to more than compensate the losers

the global urban housing affordability crisis this critical commentary confronts and explores the so far under recognised and under researched emergent global crisis of urban housing affordability and affordable housing provision this crisis results from the fact that housing related household expenses are rising faster than salary and wage increases in many urban centres around the world a situation triggered by at least three global post global financial crisis megatrends of accelerated re urbanisation of capital and people the provision of cheap credit and the rise of intra society inequality reflecting on the recent findings of extensive comparative ethnographic research across western countries and analytically approaching housing affordability and affordable housing issues from a broadly understood intersection of political and economic spheres e g issues of state and market governance and regulation policy and investment the paper pursues four key objectives raising awareness of the crisis showing its extent and context speci

the politics and economics of offshore outsourcing abstract this paper reviews the political uproar over offshore outsourcing connected with the release of the economic report of the president erp in february 2004 examines the differing ways in which economists and non economists talk about offshore outsourcing and assesses the empirical evidence on the importance of offshore outsourcing in accounting for the weak labor market from 2001 to 2004 even with important gaps in the data the empirical literature is able to conclude that offshore outsourcing is unlikely to have accounted for a meaningful part of the job losses in the recent downturn or contributed much to the slow labor market rebound the empirical evidence to date while still tentative actually suggests that increased employment in the overseas affiliates of us multinationals is associated with more employment in the us parent rather than less

investing in socially responsible companies is a must for public pension funds because there is no better alternative with assets of over us 1 0 trillion and growing public pension funds in the united states have become a major force in the private sector through their holding of equity positions in large publicly traded corporations more recently these funds have been expanding their investment strategy by considering a corporation s long term risks on issues such as environmental protection sustainability and good corporate citizenship and how these factors impact a company s long term performance conventional wisdom argues that the fiduciary responsibility of the pension funds trustees must be solely focused on their beneficiaries and therefore their investment criteria must be based strictly on narrowly defined financial measures it is also asserted that well established financial measurements of corporate performance already include long term risk assessment through discounted present value of future flow of earnings consequently all other criteria are contrary to the best interest of the pension funds beneficiaries in this paper we assert that contrary to conventional wisdom pension funds and for that matter other mutual funds must be concerned with the long term survival and growth of corporations these measures are generally referred to socially responsible investing sri and when applied to corporations it is termed socially responsible corporate conduct srcc we demonstrate that current measurement of future risk assessment invariably understates and quite often completely overlooks these long term risks because of the inherent bias towards short run on the part of financial intermediaries whose compensation depends greatly on short term results furthermore there is ample evidence to suggest that these intermediaries have been engaging in self serving practices and thus failing in their duties to serve their clients i e pension funds best interests because of their large holdings in the total market as well as individual companies these funds cannot easily divest from poorly performing companies without destabilizing the companies stock and overall markets hence they must opt for a strategy of emphasizing investment criteria that encourage companies to take into account long term aspects of their operations in terms of their impact on environment sustainability and community welfare to name a few we argue that an exclusionary and even a primary focus on short term financial criteria is no longer a viable option it also calls for the pension funds to encourage greater transparency and accountability of the entire corporate sector through improved corporate governance thus socially responsible investing practices are not merely discretionary and desirable activities they are a necessary imperative which both the corporations and public pension funds and other large institutional holders will ignore at serious peril to themselves finally the paper considers some of the recent developments where corporations have been responding to these challenges and how their actions might be strengthened through greater disclosure and transparency of corporate activities it also makes recommendations for the pension funds to support further research in creating new measurement standards that further refine the concept of socially responsible investing as a necessary ingredient of long term corporate survival and growth in the context of a changing economic environmental and socio political dynamic

what do chinese macro announcements tell us about the world economy we examine the effect of scheduled macroeconomic announcements made by china on world financial and commodity futures markets all announcements related to chinese manufacturing and industrial output move stock markets energy and industrial commodities as well as commodity currencies news about chinese domestic consumption leaves most markets unaffected suggesting that market participants view the announcements primarily as a signal of the state of the global economy rather than merely of china s domestic demand the market response to unexpectedly strong output announcements is not consistent with investors being concerned about tightening of chinese macroeconomic policy instead the world markets view strong chinese output as a rising tide that lifts all boats jel classification e44 g14 g15

channels and policy debate in the globalization inequality poverty nexus the process of globalization has led to a much greater integration of the world economy the flows of trade capital labour technology and information across national borders have accelerated since the 1980s and created an environment conducive to faster economic growth and transmission of knowledge it is evident that the forces of globalization provide a strong potential for a major reduction in poverty in the developing world however for a number of reasons brought out in this chapter the positive impact of globalization on poverty alleviation worldwide has not been as substantial as one might have expected in this chapter we explore structural factors and policies within the world economy and national economies that impede the full transmission of the benefits of the various channels of globalization to poverty reduction

demographic change and the housing market evidence from a comparison of scotland and england this paper examines the impact of demographic change on the housing market more specifically a difference in differences methodology is used to explore the effect of population decline and population ageing on house prices in scotland and england wales the analysis suggests that population decline and population ageing put downward pressure on prices therefore the long run trend of rising real house prices can not be assumed to continue into the future particularly in scotland

land use regulation and the intensive margin of housing supply abstract this paper proposes a method for estimating the extent to which density regulation causes the actual housing supply per land unit to deviate from the unconstrained amount i e the impact of density regulation on the intensive margin of housing supply to overcome the challenges that both the housing supply per land unit which is a combination of quantity and quality measures and its unconstrained amount are unobserved to the researchers we extend the framework of epple gordon and sieg 2010 by explicitly allowing substitution between the quantity and quality inputs in the housing production function and by imposing a regulatory upper limit on the use of the quantity input we show theoretically that the land share of the housing value can be used as a proxy for the stringency of the density regulation we apply this method in our investigation of the stringency of floor to area ratio far regulation in urban china at the land parcel level and find that the regulation imposes a significant binding constraint on the housing supply per land unit we then explore the spatial and temporal variations of far regulation stringency we also find that the far regulation stringency intensified the housing price appreciation that occurred during the economic stimulus period after 2008

ecological economics at a crossroads during the past decade theoretical and empirical advances in neoclassical economics have resulted in the virtual rejection of the two pillars of traditional welfare economics rational economic man and perfect competition surprisingly many ecological economists are moving closer to the discredited neo walrasian welfare model just at the time it is being replaced within the mainstream we call for a return to the roots of ecological economics and an engagement with current developments in mainstream theory this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

china s economic growth 1978 2025 what we know today about china s economic growth tomorrow summary this paper examines china s future growth prospects and the potential drivers of future growth using two approaches it first asks in how far china s recent economic development matches standard growth patterns identified in development economics and trade theory second gdp is decomposed into income components which in turn are explained for the reform period by the quantity and quality of labor future gdp can then be re composed from future labor data available today overall china s economic growth is likely to continue at current rates through 2015 before it gradually slows such a growth has numerous implications

land use regulations compliance and land markets in argentina empirical evidence on the impact of stringent land use regulations on the price of land and housing in urban areas is growing yet most research has been carried out in countries where ordinances are enforced if enforcement is lax the ultimate impact of strict rules on land and housing prices is unclear lower levels of compliance with rules can result in negative externalities and thereby exert downward pressure on the price of formal land this paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between land use regulations compliance and land prices in the three major metropolitan areas of argentina the country with the most stringent land use and urban development regulations in latin america using an original dataset gathered from parcel and municipal level surveys results show that municipalities with higher levels of regulation have lower rates of compliance with property laws and lots selling legally in these municipalities have lower land prices 2013 urban studies journal limited

search hedonic prices and housing demand the conventional model of the housing market does not take into account the search process for a suitable housing unit based on a dynamic search theory this paper develops and estimates a truncated regression model of the rental housing market with stochastic and unobserved truncation points the author s model provides a joint estimation of the hedonic rice and the reservation rent equations the results turn out to be superior to the ordinary least squares estimates of either the traditional housing demand function or the hedonic price equation copyright 1992 by mit press

sample truncation in fha data implications for home purchase indexes the home purchase index is the single most important price series in the consumer price index cpi in december 1980 for example the relative importance of home purchase in the cpi for all urban consumers was 10 3 percent another component of homeownership cost contracted mortgage interest had a weight of 9 8 percent in the cpi the mortgage cost index is computed as the product of the home purchase index and an index of mortgage interest rates thus a ten percent increase in measured home purchase prices is sufficient to increase the all items cpi by approximately two percent the importance of the home purchase index places great value on the accuracy of its measurement however the index is one of the most often criticized of all cpi series the primary objections result from the decision by the bureau of labor statistics bls to base the index on sales data provided by the federal housing administration fha these fha data have been employed in numerous econometric studies including analyses of housing demand 14 place to place house price indexes 16 and the substitutability of land and capital in the production of housing services 18 at the same time the fha samples are widely recognized to be unrepresentative of the universe of house sales with possible distorting effects in some applications also in recent years the home purchase index has differed markedly from other national level house price indexes published by the u s bureau of the census and the national association of realtors 2 probably the most critical problem with the fha data base results from the program s ceilings on the size of insurable mortgages these ceilings historically have

service offshoring and productivity evidence from the us the practice of sourcing service inputs from overseas suppliers has been growing in response to new technologies that have made it possible to trade in some business and computing services that were previously considered non tradable this paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in us manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000 it finds that service offshoring has a significant positive effect on productivity in the united states accounting for around 10 per cent of labour productivity growth during this period offshoring material inputs also have a positive effect on productivity but the magnitude is smaller accounting for approximately 5 per cent of productivity growth

public open space conservation under a budget constraint abstract this paper analyzes the fiscal and land value impacts of public open space conservation in a budget constrained city it derives the necessary and sufficient conditions for open space conservation to increase the level of municipal services and the total land value within the city the theoretical results together with the empirical evidence found in the literature suggest that open space conservation can increase the level of municipal services and total land value in a significant share of american cities even if it generates no amenities open space conservation will likely increase total land values and municipal services in metropolitan areas that have stringent land use regulations high development densities and relatively little open space but will likely reduce municipal services and total land values in small lightly regulated cities surrounded by rural land and fiscally constrained in providing essential public goods h4 r3 q2

the home selling problem theory and evidence this paper formulates and solves the problem of a homeowner who wants to sell their house for the maximum possible price net of transactions costs including real estate commissions the optimal selling strategy consists of an initial list price with subs equent weekly decisions on how much to adjust the list price until the home is sold or withdrawn from the market the solution also yields a sequence of reservation prices that determine whether the homeowner should accept bids from potential buyers who arrive stochastically over time with an expected arrival rate that is a decreasing function of the list price this model was developed to provide a theoretical explanation for list price dynamics and bargaining behavior observed for a sample of homeowners in england in a new data set introduced by