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This paper provides novel evidence on the role of income taxes for residential rents and spatial sorting. Drawing on comprehensive apartment-level data, we identify the effects of tax differentials across municipal boundaries in Switzerland. The boundary discontinuity design (BDD) corrects for unobservable location characteristics such as environmental amenities or the access to public goods and thereby reduces the estimated response of housing prices by one half compared to conventional estimates: we identify an income tax elasticity of rents of about 0.26. We complement this approach with census data on local sociodemographic characteristics and show that about one third of this effect can be traced back to a sorting of high-income households into low-tax municipalities. These findings are robust to a matching approach (MBDD) which compares identical residences on opposite sides of the boundary and a number of further sensitivity checks., KOF Working Papers, 362

We analyze the economic impact of the German high-speed rail (HSR) connecting Cologne and Frankfurt, which provides plausibly exogenous variation in access to surrounding economic mass. We find a causal effect of about 8.5% on average of the HSR on the GDP of three counties with intermediate stops. We make further use of the variation in bilateral transport costs between all counties in our study area induced by the HSR to identify the strength and spatial scope of agglomeration forces. Our most careful estimate points to an elasticity of output with respect to market potential of 12.5%. The strength of the spillover declines by 50% every 30 minutes of travel time, diminishing to 1% after about 200 minutes. Our results further imply an elasticity of per-worker output with respect to economic density of 3.8%, although the effects seem driven by worker and firm selection.

The theme of this paper centres on the convergence and divergence of housing policy between two regimes inhabiting the same geographical space on the island of Ireland, as reflected in the development of the private rented sector (PRS) in both jurisdictions. Using a historical comparative analysis of key indicators, this paper aims not just to present an accurate picture of the state of policy towards the sector in both jurisdictions today, but to place this analysis within a framework which looks at the backdrop of overall housing systems. The paper postulates that while Northern Ireland and the South of Ireland are reflective of the Anglo Saxon tradition in housing, major historical differences in their pathways have brought clearly identifiable policy outcomes indicative of their differing status in comparative welfare analysis. While both jurisdictions have diverged significantly during the course of the twentieth century in the profile of policy and housing tenure mix, showing examples of path dependency at work, there is clear evidence of more recent convergence. More recent changes in housing policy in both jurisdictions away from direct social housing provision and the changing role of the private rented sector are also examined and a convergence theory is proposed.

We estimate the effect of increasing the supply of housing vouchers on rents using a panel of housing units in the American Housing Survey. We do not find that an increase in vouchers affected the overall price of rental housing but do estimate differences in effects based on an individual unit's rent before the voucher expansion. Our results are consistent with voucher recipients renting more expensive units after receiving the subsidy. We also find that the largest price increases were for units near the maximum allowable voucher rent in cities with an inelastic housing supply. (JEL H23, I38, R31, R38)

Evidence of spatial dependence in land use regulatory levels was first found in Brueckner (1998) for California cities. Recent research has not incorporated this consideration despite the considerable consequences of the relationship. We seek to expand the empirical findings to a current, larger and more diverse data set for municipalities across the United States. Analyzing regulatory levels and their determinants from over 2,000 municipalities and 300 Metropolitan Statistical Areas, we find strong evidence of spatial dependence at the local level and aggregated metropolitan level. This suggests that political competition, rather than welfare maximization exclusively, may be influencing the level of regulations adopted.

In the past four years, Chinese tourists’ consumption in Taiwan has contributed to the Taiwanese economy. However, there is a limited literature documenting the actual tax effects under the aviation deregulation. Based on the models established by Leontief (1966) and Miyazawa (2002) and by adding the effective tax rate, which is employed by the Japan National Tourism Organization (2010), the present study measures the indirect tax, the personal income tax, and the corporate income tax resulting from the change in the transport policy. This allows us to get better understanding the tax effects of the change in a transport policy. The empirical results show that the total tax revenue of the aviation deregulation generated for US$1,047.3164 million, equivalent to the total tax revenue of 1.78% in 2011 in a small open economy. The indirect tax revenue, the personal income tax revenue and the corporate income tax revenue accounted for 0.76%, 0.81%, 0.21%, respectively. As for the industrial sector, the tax revenue from the service-related industry is US$939.7126 million, which accounts for up to 89.73% of the total tax revenue under the aviation deregulation.

Existing literature is characterized by certain deficiencies in measuring housing bubbles in China. By extending the analytical framework of Black et al. (2006) to a spatial panel VAR structure, this paper measures housing bubbles in China's 35 major cities from 1999Q2 to 2012Q3 and analyzes the spatial-temporal changes of the housing bubbles in these cities. Results indicate that 1) changes to housing bubbles in most cities highly correspond with changes in the main real estate policies of the country and 2) housing bubbles in eastern developed cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Ningbo, have been relatively large in recent years although the average housing bubble is not very serious over the 35 major cities. Through the Kernel Density Function and local indicators of spatial autocorrelation analysis, this paper finds that housing bubbles are concentrated in several eastern developed cities. Based on empirical analysis, this paper proposes policy recommendations on inhibiting the expansion and diffusion of housing bubbles.

This paper aims to assess whether and how current Portuguese national spatial planning policy and regional spatial plans are based on evidence revealing trends and patterns of population decrease and rural and urban shrinkage in Portugal. Firstly, built on a literature review, we identify the consequences of population decrease, the so-called characteristics of shrinkage, and we briefly look at dominant approaches and strategies to deal with it. Secondly, we review macro level policy documents to access global awareness and perception of shrinkage from a transnational perspective. Finally, after sketching an international framework on our subject matter shrinkage, a content analysis is applied to the Regional Spatial Plans of the Metropolitan Area of Lisbon and of the Northern Region. Urban shrinkage and shrinking cities are not explicitly mentioned in these documents. This is partly understandable because it is an emergent phenomenon in Portugal, in comparison with other countries, and because the concept is recent and it has not yet come to light in Portuguese planning practice. In addition, results suggest that the doctrine of growth is still embedded in Portuguese planning culture. In sum, despite clear evidence of population decrease in Portugal, spatial planning policy and regional spatial plans have either disavowal or reactive character pertaining population decrease and shrinkage.

We estimate the effect of the UK Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) - a transfer tax on the purchase price of property or land - on different types of household mobility using micro data. Exploiting a discontinuity in the tax schedule, we isolate the impact of the tax from other determinants of mobility. We compare homeowners with self-assessed house values on either sides of a cut-off value where the tax rate jumps from 1 to 3 percent. We find that a higher SDLT has a strong negative impact on housing-related and short distance moves but does not adversely affect job-induced or long distance mobility. Overall, our results suggest that transfer taxes may mainly distort housing rather than labor markets.

In this article, we study the impact of a French enterprise zone program—the ‘Zones Franches Urbaines’ (ZFUs) policy—on establishment location decisions and on labor market outcomes. Our main identification strategy, which combines spatial and time differencing, shows that conditional on locating in a municipality that hosts a ZFU, the policy has a positive and sizable impact on the probability to locate in the ZFU part rather than in the non-ZFU part of municipalities. However, the impact is highly heterogeneous across zones, industries and firms. We also show that this positive effect is entirely due to within-municipality diversion effects. Regarding labor market outcomes, the policy has a positive effect on employment, especially for low-wage workers. As for wages, the effect is null for low-wage workers, and negative for high-wage ones.

Desegregation is a key policy issue in many countries. I investigate a residential desegregation program in Singapore - the ethnic housing quotas. I show that choice restrictions imposed on apartment blocks above the quota limits (constrained) could have distortionary effects, causing price and quantity differences for constrained versus unconstrained blocks. I test these predictions by hand matching more than 500,000 names in the phonebook to ethnicities, to calculate ethnic proportions at the apartment block level. I can then investigate differences for constrained and unconstrained blocks close to the quota limits and test for sorting around the limits. I find price differences are between 3% and 5%. Quantity effects are economically significant, translating to longer time-on-market durations by 1 to 1.4 months. Selection cannot fully explain these results. My results point to challenges in achieving desegregation using quantity restrictions.

I evaluate the empirical premise and the economic logic of the Dodd-Frank Act's requirement that issuers of asset-backed securities retain credit risk.

While filtering has long been considered the primary mechanism by which markets supply low-income housing, direct estimates of that process have been absent. This has contributed to doubts about the viability of markets and to misplaced policy. I fill this gap by estimating a “repeat income” model using 1985–2011 panel data. Real annual filtering rates are faster for rental housing (2.5 percent) than owner-occupied (0.5 percent), vary inversely with the income elasticity of demand and house price inflation, and are sensitive to tenure transitions as homes age. For most locations, filtering is robust which lends support for housing voucher programs. (JEL R21, R31, R38)

Social housing organisations? activity and strategy are tightly linked to their stock of dwellings. A proper knowledge of these assets is therefore a necessary prerequisite to understand the sector?s challenges. As a consequence of a strong construction pace in the thirty-year post-war boom period, today?s average age of social dwellings is high, at 36 years. But beyond the average figures, social housing stock is not evenly distributed throughout the French territory, and its characteristics (such as age, type of dwelling, etc.) vary according to its location. Indeed, the construction of social dwellings has occurred in successive waves, each of which has concentrated in certain regions, following the demographic and economic evolutions in French society. Today?s social housing stock therefore reflects the location and the main characteristics of each period?s buildings. The current and future dynamics of social housing, both in terms of construction and rehabilitation works, are thus partly determined by the state of the housing stock in each territory, and its adequacy to societal changes. Classification JEL: R31, R38.

Linking economic growth and climate change is crucial policy issue for the developing economy and India is one among them. But to understand the implication of economic growth on GHG emission and input use efficiency improvement on economic growth, it requires an accounting framework which can integrate both the economic and environmental indicators. In this context this study has focused on construction of ESAM and further applied it to the ESAM multiplier model for impact analysis. The analysis presented in this study shows that 5% increase in overall export along with the 10% increase in efficiency in fertilizer, coal, petroleum and electricity use will boost the economic growth by around 2% and reduce CO2 emissions by around 11%. But this study also shows that the input use efficiency results cost advantages to the investors at a greater extent than employment generation and it cause further income inequality. However, the positive implication is that the efficiency improvement for input which are highly subsidised would improve economy’s fiscal health which can further be used for employment generation.

Facing a long lasting housing crisis, France has set itself ambitious goals : build 500,000 new dwellings per year, including 150,000 social housing ; speed up energetic renovation of housing stock and extend urban renewal program. The difficult record of national public finances, the complexity of housing market where mid-term rationalization collide with short term effects, and the unfortunate choice that has been made in our country for ?land rent? make their realization difficult. HLM providers are major operators of the rental market and take their due part in the national goals. The economic model of social housing in France is based on a system that is both classic (debt leverage, subsidies) and specific (tax free savings scheme, housing allowances). This system has produced a housing stock of more than 4 million dwellings giving both safety to renters and financial security to moneylenders and public authorities. Classification JEL: R31, R38.

La volonté de posséder son « chez soi » et de se constituer un patrimoine est largement généralisée en Europe. La baisse des taux d’intérêt au cours des années 2000 et la concurrence accrue entre établissements bancaires ont favorisé la distribution du crédit, avant que la crise financière de 2007 ne remette en question ces évolutions. Malgré des mesures publiques de soutien au secteur immobilier, la chute du crédit (dans un contexte d’assainissement du bilan des banques et de ralentissement de la croissance du revenu des ménages) s’est accompagnée, après une décennie de boom immobilier, d’une baisse des prix immobiliers dans de nombreux pays européens. L’exception notable étant l’Allemagne où après dix ans de baisse, les prix se sont stabilisés au milieu des années 2000 et remontent même depuis 2010. Face à ces évolutions, nous observons ici dans quelle mesure d’une part la mobilité des ménages a évolué et d’autre part comment le contexte macroéconomique a modifié le profil des ménages qui achètent. Changes in Owner Households’ Characteristics during the Crisis in Europe The desire to own one’s home and to accumulate housing wealth is largely widespread in Europe. The fall in interest rates during the 2000s and the increased competition between banks have promoted the distribution of credit before the financial crisis. Despite public measures to support the housing sector, house prices and credit have collapsed in many European countries, after a decade of real estate boom. These evolutions result from the strengthening of bank balance sheets and from the slowdown in household income growth. Germany is an exception. After ten years of decline, prices have stabilized in the mid-2000s and even increased since 2010. In this context, we will first focus on the trend in household mobility and then analyse how the macroeconomic environment has impacted the profile of households who have recently purchased their home. Our logit regressions show that younger and/or lower income households have been the first victims of tighter credit conditions. Indeed, in all the countries studied (Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom), low-income households have seen their probability of purchase greatly reduced. This is the case even in Germany, where the probability of purchase for other households has tended to stagnate or to grow. The purchase likelihood of households under 30 years has strongly decreased in Spain. On the contrary, the probability of young households to buy their home in France has remained constant, due to quite favourable credit conditions, the “zero interest loan” reform and increased donations.

Le logement est le premier poste de depenses des menages et sa part a progresse de maniere quasiment continue depuis 20 ans, en lien avec l’amelioration du confort. De son cote, l’investissement en logement represente 28,9 % de l’investissement national. La construction neuve focalise l’attention et elle est le poste le plus sensible a la conjoncture, mais elle ne represente que la moitie de ce pourcentage. Le logement, finance en majorite par le credit banalise, constitue egalement un levier essentiel d’accumulation du patrimoine des Francais, dont il represente pres des deux tiers, avec de fortes inegalites. Enfin, les aides au logement, dans un contexte de tension des finances publiques, ont fortement cru durant la derniere decennie pour atteindre en 2011 un pic de 44,9 Md€, soit 2,3 % du PIB, une decrue ayant ete amorcee en 2012 et 2013. L’Etat apporte un peu plus de la moitie des aides : les aides a la personne sont les plus elevees mais relativement contenues, les aides a la pierre sont tres minoritaires, et ce sont les multiples aides fiscales qui ont ete les plus dynamiques lors de la derniere decennie, avec une forte inertie des aides a l’investissement locatif. Esperons que ces chiffres permettront d’eclairer les debats – trop souvent teintes d’ideologie et de vecu personnel – sur l’efficacite des politiques du logement. Classification JEL : R20, R30, R28, R38.

Cet article etudie l’effet de la reglementation du secteur locatif sur le role de la location privee dans differents pays europeens et sur l’evolution actuelle des dispositifs reglementaires. Il developpe les trois types de reglementations qui ont ete mises en pratique depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale et leurs effets sur les motivations des proprietaires et des locataires. Il montre que les formes traditionnelles de reglementation qui maintenaient les loyers en dessous des prix du marche aboutissent a long terme au dysfonctionnement du secteur locatif. Cependant, des systemes de controle des loyers de « troisieme generation », dans lesquels les loyers initiaux sont fixes par le marche mais avec des baux longs et des taux d’augmentation determines, peuvent aider a reduire les defaillances du marche. Il est aussi montre que la portee de la reglementation n’induit pas necessairement des changements de taille du secteur, principalement du fait de l’influence d’autres facteurs. Cet article etudie les systemes en vigueur dans plusieurs pays europeens, notamment en Allemagne, aux Pays-Bas et en France. Il s’interesse en particulier a la facon dont, dans de nombreux pays, les gouvernements repondent aux pressions du marche en augmentant le controle et aux consequences potentielles de ces controles. Classification JEL : R28, R30, R38.

This paper examines the impact of the combined U.S. state and federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on homeownership attainment, using data from 1984 to 2007 and exploiting variation in the subsidy arising from changes in the MID within and across states over time. We test whether capitalization of the MID into house prices offsets the positive effect on homeownership. We find that the MID boosts homeownership attainment only of higher-income households in less tightly regulated housing markets. In more restrictive places, an adverse effect exists. The MID is an ineffective policy to promote homeownership and improve social welfare. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Personne ne remet en cause qu’il faille construire plus de logements. Le consensus sur les besoins se situe aujourd’hui a plus de 400 000 unites par an. La quantite n’est pas tout. La question de la localisation s’avere cruciale. Certes, aucune partie du territoire, compte tenu des besoins de renouvellement, ne peut etre negligee, mais l’accent doit etre clairement porte sur les zones les plus tendues, la meme ou le recul des realisations est le plus marque depuis 2000. Si la penurie de foncier est denoncee comme la cause majeure de ce deficit structurel de logements et de ses consequences en termes de prix du bien, il faut souligner a contrario qu’elle n’apparait pas comme un obstacle a la construction de bâtiments hors logement. En clair, les elus privilegient la construction non residentielle au detriment du logement pour des raisons purement politiques. C’est sur ce point qu’il est necessaire de faire changer les mentalites pour s’atteler veritablement a un debut de resolution de la crise du logement, restee trop longtemps cantonnee dans le domaine du discours. Classification JEL : R30, R31, R32, R38.

In reviewing the Challenger tragedy, Richard Feynman identified a flawed O-Ring as the proximate cause and NASA's flawed safety culture as a deeper cause. There has been no similar investigation of the mortgage mess, which has been baptized rather than understood. In part, this is due to committed ideological views in the public and press that eliminate the call for expert analysis and reform. Broader and deeper policy problems are identified and illustrated using NASA's past behavior and FHA's ongoing behavior. The Columbia tragedy sounds an ominous warning on the future stability of housing finance markets.

Since the seventies, most countries have implemented policies fostering homeownership. The global financial crisis addresses the relevance of such policies. Indeed, they reduce the size of the private rental sector and, in progressively refocusing the social housing sector, limit the latter towards those who cannot afford a dwelling in the market. Households particularly suffered from the crisis in countries combining the following factors: a high rate of home owners, a high and fast increasing level of mortgages, a credit supply process that shelters lenders vis-à-vis the risk of credit defaults, and a weak consumer?s and borrower?s protection. The crisis is a result of the excesses of finance, rather than a matter of tenure. However, policies too exclusively based on home ownership speed up the rise of housing prices, deepen wealth inequalities and cannot fit the needs in high-cost markets, namely those of metropolitan areas, and in certain populations especially the poor, the young and the people relocating frequently. Classification JEL: R21, R31, R38.

Environment, history and chance, shape people and cultures, which shape cities, which shape people and cultures, and so on, in a Systemic Retroactive Game. The quintessential essence of Isotropic (or Isobenefit) Urbanism is to solve Systemic Retroactive Game problems downstream rather than upstream and, also, to give a beautiful city to everyone, rather than just to the richer. Spatial Equilibrium assumptions, Underground Hedonic Theory and Isobenefit Lines, are shortly reminded in order to have a better vision of the Isotropic approach. The Isotropic City is the habitat of a virtual future society that aspires to live in a city where each individual can enjoy an equal level of wellbeing and advantage from the urban quality, services and job location. It is shown by a few visionary examples of virtual future societies habitats such as the Ring City (a city without the ‘city centre’, where the ‘city centre’ is all around the peripherical ring, or in a serial of rings), the Homogeneous City (a city where the ‘city centre’ is everywhere), the Annulus City (a city without any geometrical centre in the city) and the Punctiform City (an interconnected net of urban hyperdense ‘points’ throughout nature, parks and lands). Finally I will show some simulations on more realistic cases which could be of interest as support to urban and public policies in respect to a social wellbeing point of view as well as to urban theory such as urban economy (i.e., by the relation between an Isobenefit scenario and Property value), urban morphology (influence of different urban forms), urban sociology (how different location of centralities and amenities give advantage for social life and wellbeing of citizens).

Programs ECHO and OBNOVA were first assistance programs which the European Union pursued in the Republic of Croatia in the period since 1991 to 2000. These programs have greatly helped in the return of refugees, reconstruction of war-torn areas, humanitarian action, and freedom of speech. Assistance program CARDS and pre-accession programs PHARE, ISPA, SAPARD have been active since 2000 to 2007, when they are replaced by a single IPA program. The main aim and purpose of the IPA program is providing assistance to candidate countries and potential candidate countries in the harmonization and implementation of legal, political and economic acquis communautaire and to prepare them for the use of the Cohesion Fund and the structural Funds. This paper analyses the competence of project managers, barriers to application and implementation of the projects (the inability to pre-finance and co- financing, the complexity of application procedures, the adequacy of human resources, language barriers, and lack of defined strategic priorities, not preparation of project documentation, lack of motivated managers and project team members). Research results will help organizational units in the Republic of Croatia to more effectively use the resources of the Structural instruments with the aim of further regional development.

This study investigates factors determining the location of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Sweden. The main purpose is to examine the link between FDI and public incentives, in the form of regional grants, which make up a central part of the Swedish regional policy and state expenditures that explicitly addresses regional development. Our main finding is that there is no evidence of a robust relationship between grants and the location of FDI. However, a statistically significant effect is found for investment support and transport allowance, which are grants that aims at promoting development in designated areas. This by supporting investments in machines, buildings, and so on, and offset costs disadvantages in the northern parts of the country. We conclude that a better integration between the work on FDI and regional development may be a plausible route to promote economic development in Sweden, particularly in deprived regions.

Our paper focus to approch an analitical analysis between the quality assurance process and the organizational quality culture. The main but was to demonstrate that, the both process are providing together to Romanian universities performance.

Households “sort” across neighborhoods according to their wealth and their preferences for public goods, social characteristics, and commuting opportunities. The aggregation of these individual choices in markets and in other institutions influences the supply of amenities and local public goods. Pollution, congestion, and the quality of public education are examples. Over the past decade, advances in economic models of this sorting process have led to a new framework that promises to alter the ways we conceptualize the policy evaluation process in the future. These “equilibrium sorting” models use the properties of market equilibria, together with information on household behavior, to infer structural parameters that characterize preference heterogeneity. The results can be used to develop theoretically consistent predictions for the welfare implications of future policy changes. Analysis is not confined to marginal effects or a partial equilibrium setting. Nor is it limited to prices and quantities. Sorting models can integrate descriptions of how nonmarket goods are generated, estimate how they affect decision making, and, in turn, predict how they will be affected by future policies targeting prices or quantities. Conversely, sorting models can predict how equilibrium prices and quantities will be affected by policies that target product quality, information, or amenities generated by the sorting process. These capabilities are just beginning to be understood and used in applied research. This survey article aims to synthesize the state of knowledge on equilibrium sorting, the new possibilities for policy analysis, and the conceptual and empirical challenges that define the frontiers of the literature. (JEL C63, D04, E61, H41, R23, R31, R38)

The European Union created rural development policies in order to reduce disparities between member states. The policies consist in financial instruments that can be accessed for financing rural communities. The diversity of projects that can be funded denotes the complex problems that rural areas are facing on an European scale. The study has as hypothesis the evaluation of rural development in Botosani county because of Romania’s accession to the European Union and its influence. Thus we can observe priority areas for accessing european funds. Qualitative and quantitative data on rural development projects are used to identify rural distribution projects and priority areas. The influence of policies and development strategies reduces intra disparities, ensuring authorities competitiveness needed to develop and implement other projects with the same goal.

The first part of the study concerns the concept ”sustainable renovation”. Four parts are identified and then used in the case study: environmental sustainability (including energy efficiency and choice of materials); social sustainability (interpreted as that the current tenants should be able to stay in the area), economic sustainability (the the project does not have to be subsidized and that there is no increase in cost for the social authorities) and finally a new interpretation that is called technical sustainability, which means that solutions with long term reliability is chosen even if this is not necessarily best from an economic and environmental perspective. The second part of the study applies this framework to analyze the renovation strategy of a municipal housing company in the suburbs of Stockholm. This case was chosen because they had clear social ambitions and offered the tenants three alternative renovation options called mini, midi and maxi. Most tenants chose the minialternative and this meant that they could afford to stay and that there was not any increase in the cost for the social authorities. An investment analysis showed that the minialternative had a positive net present value, but that the midi/maxi alternative where more profitable. The company had no specific environmental focus and energy use was only reduced with 8%. Technological sustainability was more important for the company. As a conclusion the study shows that a sustainable renovation is possible but that there are a number of conflicts between the different dimensions of sustainability. Giving more weight to environmental sustainability would increase cost and rents which create problems from a social perspective. From an economic perspective the midi/maxi alternatives were more profitable but then some households would have to move out because too high rents.

This study examines the changing competitiveness of financial centres in mainland China and Hong Kong based on the geography of equity listing of mainland Chinese firms. Pre-listing firm characteristics are used to explore firms’ motives for listing on a particular exchange and whether these motives have changed over time. The results show that Hong Kong’s prominence as an international financial centre is attracting the largest and, recently, also the best performing mainland Chinese state-owned enterprises to go public. Less differentiation exists between the competitiveness of Shanghai and Shenzhen, although the renewed strategy of the Shenzhen stock exchange to attract smaller firms appears to be successful.

This study examines the case for cluster policy. This case is theoretically ambiguous and empirically very weak.

During last years, a central issue of theory debate and economicpolicy is clearly manufacture clusters and the local capabilities which take part,promote and condition its competitiveness. This article analyzes two local experiencesin Argentina —the Agricultural Machinery District and Las Parejas Cluster—connecting topics such as innovation, learning and other difficulties (endogenousand exogenous), which disturb the normal cluster operations of localindustrialized agglomerations. From this perspective, innovation processes, firmrelationships and institutional network actions are analyzed. This study concludeswith some associations which identify similar local trajectories from others peripheryexperiences.

With regard to home ownership and mortgage lending in Western Europe in general three models are referred to; the main criterion for classification of the types is who the home is owned by and how great a role mortgage lending plays. In Hungary the higher than 90 per cent rate of homes inhabited by owners represents one of the extremes of the resident-owner model. The problem of this model is that if the costs of home acquisition have not been incorporated into wages, then newcomers can be excluded. Borrowing, on the other hand, can burden residents for decades. It is difficult to move out of settlements characterised by lower home prices. The problems in Hungary would be alleviated if the proportion of social tenement flats and market rental homes were to increase by 5–10 percentage points each. The potential number of those seeking market tenement flats is up to 8–10 per cent of the population. A portion of the potential landlords are deterred by the taxation and uncertain regulatory environment. Housing subsidies must be concentrated on those younger than 38–39 years of age, as they were unable to partake in the previous allowances. Among them the proportion of people living in their own home is much lower, and only half of young people have received a family subsidy toward the purchase of a home. In personal taxation a tax refund should be given, for which only younger people (born after 1972) could be eligible. The amount thereof should be limited depending on how many children they have, whether they owned a home in 2010, and whether there was a lien on it. The (proposed) targeted use of the tax allowance: home purchase (construction), the repayment of housing loans, and home rental.

Problems with mortgage financing are widely considered to be a major cause of the recent financial meltdown. Several modern programs have been designed to mimic the Home Owners' Loan Corporation of the 1930s. The HOLC replaced the toxic assets on the balance sheets of financial institutions by buying troubled mortgages and then refinanced the mortgages to allow home owners to avoid losing their homes. We analyze the impact of the HOLC on the nonfarm rental and owned home markets after developing a new data set for over 2800 counties in the United States. In counties with fewer than 50,000 people, where financial markets were not as well developed as in larger cities, the HOLC's financial interventions helped stimulate the demand for owned housing more than it influenced the supply. In rental markets the HOLC appears to have contributed to an increase in the supply of rental housing that was likely associated the improvement of the balance sheets of lending institutions.

The post-accession programs supported mainly by the European Union create a better chance for the modernization of the agricultural sector and the rural area in Romania. However the funding process depends highly on the absorption capacity of the potential beneficiaries. The paper focuses on the regional distribution of financial allocations for rural development, especially for agricultural holdings, by correlating them to the determinant factors of the absorption capacity. The distribution of selected applications at regional NUTS3 level reveals that poorer regions with high employment in agriculture have no advantage in the access to development funds.

Consumers often shop with incomplete infor mation about prices. Even when prices have a take-it-or-leave-it character, as at the grocery store, most shoppers don't know the price of milk at all nearby stores. In markets where prices are dickered, finding the best deal is more challenging. The car shopper paying cash has to make offers and counteroffers to get an idea of the lowest price acceptable to a dealer, and work one dealer against another. In the mortgage market, the shopper's task is even more difficult. Not only are prices dickered, but price has two dimensions?the interest rate on the loan and

This paper studies the impact of a WTO withdrawal of trade concessions against countries that fail to respect globally recognized environmental standards. We show that a punishing tariff can be effective when environmental and trade policies are endogenous. When required standards lie within a reasonable range, compliance along with free trade as a reward is the unique equilibrium outcome. A positive optimal tariff in the case of non-compliance prevents pollution-motivated delocation, but only works as a successful credible threat and does not emerge in equilibrium. Results are consistent with broad empirical evidence that disputes the pollution haven hypothesis and suggests capital movements to be non-pollution related.

To study the house price dynamics in China, this paper extends the traditional life-cycle model by incorporating land supply, regime shifts and government regulation factors. The models are estimated with an error correction framework using quarterly data from 2000 to 2007 in Beijing. The conclusions are as follows. (1) There exits a stable co-integration relationship between house price and fundamentals; land supply and financial regimes are also important determinants of long-run equilibrium house prices. (2) Short-run dynamics depend on changes of fundamentals and the adjustment process of housing market. Land supply has a significant impact on house price fluctuations while demand factors such as user costs, income and residential mortgage loan have greater influences. The adjustment speed of real house prices to the long-run equilibrium has been reduced significantly since 2005 which means exogenous shocks can cause prolonged deviation of real house prices from the equilibrium level.

This article identifies preferences of US cow-calf producers for voluntary traceability systems to better identify the potential success of alternative voluntary traceability systems. Results suggest that notable heterogeneity exists between cow-calf producers in their preferences and the welfare effects of mandating traceability adoption. Producers are sensitive to price, managing entity and information requirements. We provide forecasts of voluntary participation rates under different price premium and discount scenarios that producers may face. This analysis has policy implications as success of voluntary traceability systems hinges critically upon cow-calf producer preferences.

More and more, society is becoming aware that regulations, while necessary, also impose high costs on individuals, businesses and the public sector. Regulations that are unclear, obsolete and bad-ly designed prevent achievement of the intended social and economic goals. Therefore, governments all over the world initiate programs on better regulation. As the Serbian government recognized the problem of a large number of inefficient regulations in its system, it enacted in July 2008 its regulatory reform project or its well known “guillotine” in-volving the one-time rendering of inefficient regulations ineffective or their amendment. After introduction, it is elaborated upon the drivers of the OECD and the European Union Pol-icy on Better Regulation, their experience in improving regulatory environment and policy lessons gained. The next part examines how the Serbian government actually goes about creating better busi-ness regulation. Here is the review of the Serbian Comprehensive Regulatory Reform or Regulatory Guillotine as a first stage in the Strategy of Regulatory Reform. The last part of article points to the coming challenges in governance architecture for steering regulatory reform in Serbia: credibility, evidence based solution for any kind of regulation problem, legitimacy, transparency.

The triple bottom line (economic, environmental, and social performance) is an important approach to long-term sustainability of a manufacturing company. However, a manufacturer will always feel pressure to focus on the economic bottom line and to give at least equal importance to the second and third bottom lines (environmental and social performance). As environmental issues become more important to citizens, they demand enhanced environmental performance from companies by exerting pressure on public policy makers to enact regulations, taxes, permits, and penalties that motivate companies to improve their environmental performance. We present a model that could be used by governmental policy makers to predict the effects from reducing the number of emissions permits and increasing the penalties for exceeding allowable emission limits. Our model is for a product that has a limited selling season. We propose a newsvendor model to estimate a manufacturing company’s optimal production quantity based on maximization of expected profits given the cost of emission permits and penalties for exceeding emission limits allowed by the permits. In addition, the newsvendor model provides insights to policy makers on the effects of adjusting the regulatory levers of emission permits and penalties.

Crises and sharp economic downturns, while undesirable, provide economists with a unique opportunity to test and hone economic theory. Indeed, some of the most influential advance ments in economic thought, including Milton Friedman’s monetarist tradition, John Maynard Keynes’ fiscal theory, and Irving Fisher’s debtdeflation hypothesis, emerged from analysis of the Great Depression. The current economic malaise, which we refer to as “The Great Recession,” provides another watershed moment to reevaluate our core economic beliefs. However, in contrast to our peers in previous crises, we are fortunate to have access to large-scale microeconomic datasets and advancements in computational capacity. These advantages allow for a more rigorous analysis of the current recession and therefore a more informed understanding of its origins, propagation, and consequences. Our purpose is to highlight how a micro-level analysis of the Great Recession provides us with important clues to understand the origins of the crisis, the link between credit and asset prices, the feedback effect from asset prices to the real economy, and the role of household leverage in explaining the downturn. We hope that our discussion also serves as an example of the useful ness of incorporating microeconomic data and techniques in answering traditional macroeco nomic questions. I. What Were the Origins of the Credit Cycle: Credit Demand or Credit Supply?

A térbeli számszerűsített általános egyensúlyi modellek az új gazdaságföldrajz empirikus alkalmazásainak eszközei. Szemléleti-módszertani gyökereiket tehát az új gazdaságföldrajzi és a számszerűsített általános egyensúlyi modellekben találjuk meg. Tanulmányunkban a Nemzeti Fejlesztési Ügynökség részére az Új Magyarország Fejlesztési Terv hatáselemzésére kidolgozott GMR-Magyarország elnevezésű modellrendszerbe épített modellt ismertetjük, valamint egy szimulációval illusztráljuk a modell használatát. Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) kód: C68, D58, R13, R38, R58., Spatial, numerical models of general equilibrium are empirical tools of the new economic geography, with their methodology and outlook rooted in the new economic geographical and numerical models of general equilibrium. The study presents the new GMR-Hungary model system devised for the National Development Agency for the New Hungary De-velopment Plan, and illustrates its use with a simulation.

We examine whether partisan political differences have important effects on policy outcomes at the local level using a new panel data set of mayoral elections in the United States. Applying a regression discontinuity design to deal with the endogeneity of the mayor's party, we find that party labels do not affect the size of government, the allocation of spending or crime rates, even though there is a large political advantage to incumbency in terms of the probability of winning the next election. The absence of a strong partisan impact on policy in American cities, which is in stark contrast to results at the state and federal levels of government, appears due to certain features of the urban environment associated with Tiebout sorting. In particular, there is a relatively high degree of household homogeneity at the local level that appears to provide the proper incentives for local politicians to be able to credibly commit to moderation and discourages strategic extremism.

This paper organizes the judgments of economists regarding the impact of rent controls in the American context. The review is limited to journal articles listed by the American Economic Association’s electronic bibliography, EconLit, under the subject search “Rent Control,†and articles cited by those EconLit-listed articles. My findings cover research on many dimensions of the issue, including housing availability, maintenance and housing quality, rental rates, political and administrative costs, and redistribution. It is fair to say that the literature points to a conclusion against rent control, yet as of 2001, about 140 jurisdictions in the United States persist in some form of the intervention.

Governance is a manner of undertaking activities performed for a state’s people by the state’s government to ensure development. Hence, it has scope of having conflicts between state policy and government bodies resulting poor quality of governance: abuse of rule of law, bureaucratic discrimination, corruption, poverty, inequality, low level of human resource development, low level of per capita income, poor utilization of country resources, etc. The reason for conflicts is poor governance vis-à-vis the result from poor governance, i.e., as there has conflict, there exists poor governance and at the same time as there exists poor governance, there has conflict. On the other hand, interrelationships between state policy and government bodies assist ensuring good governance: participatory, consensus oriented, transparent and accountable, equitable and efficient, etc. Developing nations like Bangladesh require having good governance in their countries for promoting development indicators: ‘country resource’ mobilization, increasing GDP growth, increasing per capita income, enhancing quality of socioeconomic indices of people, etc. The major of findings from this paper is ‘good governance for sustainable development’. This paper addresses issues of historical performance of governance exercise, obstacles towards good governance, and reforming agendas come up in past studies. The authors conclude by explaining why and how good governance is essential in Bangladesh for sustainable development.

Regions are increasingly becoming a main engine of globalization and are playing a more and more important role in economic development policies. As a consequence, regional authorities must be very attentive to the competitiveness of their region. In a first part of the paper, some main economic European indicators are analyzed for the traditional industrial regions and metropolitan areas in order to put forward the real position of the Walloon as well as Brussels-Capital regions. As other European regions, Walloon and Brussels policy-makers have implemented a new industrial policy based on the promotion and the support of competitiveness clusters. The main characteristics of this policy and of its implementation as well as its forces and weaknesses are reviewed in the second part of the paper. JEL Codes – R58, R38, R11.

Academic interest in Local Productive Systems (LPS) is on the rise. So are public policies specifically directed to such systems, which may be defined as a territorial agglomeration of interacting economic, social and political actors focused on a specific set of economic activities. Part of such interest derives from the hypothesis that such agglomerations lead to gains in efficiency which the components of the system would not be able to achieve in isolation, i.e. that in such systems, there is a "collective efficiency" in operation, which provides the system with a specific competitive advantage.

Religious conflict is an important problem in many ethnically diverse countries (Horowitz 1985). A growing literature in economics suggests that conflict over resources is frequently at the root of such violence (see, for instance, Esteban and Ray 2007). A number of recent empirical papers provide evidence that negative economic shocks to a community, and the consequent struggle for control over resources, can help explain the eruption of historic tensions into acts of violence (Miguel et al. 2004, Oster 2004 and Miguel 2005). We explore this link further by studying the relationship between Hindu-Muslim violence and living arrangements – in particular residential segregation – within cities in India. That is, conditional on city-level demographics and the overall degree of ethnic tension, what are the characteristics of specific locations within a city where communal violence tends to emerge and what can this tell us about why some neighborhoods erupt in this manner at certain points in time? Communal violence at the neighborhood-level