Search

We study 2001-2004 and 2004-2007 rent growth of 18,000 rental units, ending our study prior to the Great Recession. Which variables correlate with rent growth: Location? Age? Rent level? Occupancy duration? Structure type? The answers deepen understanding of the rental market, help statistical agencies make decisions about sample stratification and substitution, and expose coverage problems. We document significant rent stickiness. Initial relative rent level is the best predictor, though mainly due to mean reversion. "Location" comes in second, though often not statistically significantly: the relative value of location is persistent. Age and occupancy duration are also notable. Our findings are reassuring to statistical agencies.

U.S. Rent inflation has often greatly exceeded Owners' Equivalent Rent (OER) Inflation. Why? Critics believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is making a faulty utilities adjustment to OER and that the Federal Reserve Board should focus only on Rent inflation. Both beliefs are misguided. Herein we decompose the historical Rent–OER inflation differential into its various determinants. The utilities adjustment, which is necessary, sometimes contributed, but is no smoking gun. The main culprit was an economically interesting pattern of differential rent inflation across locales within cities, one common to many cities. Surprisingly, rent control also played a role.

This article looks again at the ‘Peterloo massacre’ of 16 August 1819 in Manchester, and offers new evidence from the Home Office Disturbances Papers about how it came about and who was responsible. In Section I the revisionist case that Peterloo was a conflict rather than a massacre is examined and found wanting. Section II argues that in the months before Peterloo, the Home Office had consistently urged the Lancashire magistrates to combat radical agitation ‘either by the law or the sword’; its well-known advice for restraint on 16 August was a piece of qualified back-pedalling which came too late. It also argues that the authorities misinterpreted the peaceful mass platform agitation of 1819 in the light of their experience of the attempted insurrections of 1817. Section III shows that the prosecution at the Peterloo trial privately conceded that its own version of events had been discredited. Section IV suggests that both conservative and progressive versions of what happened at Peterloo are constricted by whiggish assumptions, proposes some questions for further study, and offers a brief summary explanation of the Peterloo massacre.

'Just what was William Lilly so good at?' asks Ann Geneva near the start of this interesting book. It is a question well worth the asking, for William Lilly's almanacs were one of the publishing phenomena of the Civil War period, selling in their tens of thousands to a public anxious for signs of what was to come, and supported by a parliament well aware of the value of works which declared that the heavens proclaimed the downfall of the king. In the war for hearts and minds, Lilly was parliament's secret weapon, 'the first astrological republican'. Moreover, not only did he write his predictions in an accessible way, he also explained his methods, breaking the magicians' code. He even issued a manual, Christian Astrology, in 1647. Lilly's combination of evangelicalism and predictive success did more than anything to popularize the arcane craft of astrology.