Suchergebnisse

Capital leakage is defined as the conversion into disposable income of capital invested in housing assets. In debates on the capital demands of owner-occupation, one concern is the extent to which demand for mortgage finance results from the withdrawal of capital from owner-occupied housing and its expenditure elsewhere. The paper centres on an attempt to Quantify the likely dimensions of capital leakage using national statistical sources. Within severe data constraints it is estimated that capital release may fall in the range of £1,400–£2,600 million a year at 1980 prices. The paper concludes by considering policy implications in forms of any distorting effects on the savings and housing markets.

This paper examines the effects of a generous, spatially-targeted economic development policy (the federal Empowerment Zone program) on local neighborhood characteristics and on the neighborhood quality of life, taking into account the interactions amongst the policy, changes in neighborhood demographics and neighborhood housing stock. Urban economic theory posits that housing prices in a small area should increase as quality of life increases, because people will be more willing to pay to live in the area, but these changes in prices and quality of life will also affect the demographics of the population through sorting and the housing stock through reinvestment. Using census block-group-level data, we examine how housing prices respond to the Empowerment Zone policy intervention. Changes in the other dimensions of neighborhood quality (demographics and housing stock characteristics) will also help determine the total, or full effect on housing values of the policy intervention. This paper estimates these direct and indirect effects in a simultaneous equations setting, compares indirect and full effects, and examines the robustness of the effects to alternate estimation strategies. We find strong evidence for substantively large and highly significant direct price effects, while results suggest that the indirect effects are substantively small or even negative.

Owner-occupation has become a major tenure form in Western Europe. Yet, relatively little is known about the way owner-occupation is provided, since most studies tend to concentrate only on the effects of different forms of state support for the tenure. This survey examines owner-occupied housing markets in five European countries, Britain, France, West Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Their housing markets vary substantially, but differences are especially marked between Britain and the rest of Europe. Differences in owner-occupied housing markets between these countries arise in the timing of the expansion of owner-occupation; in the relation between the building industry and dominant forms of housing promotion; in the roles played by the market for secondhand housing and in the importance of mortgage finance. One common characteristic of all these countries, however, has been the appearance of house-price inflation during the 1970s. The rising long-term trend of house prices has been punctuated by periodic booms and slumps. Market instability has helped to cause the major crises of housing production that exist in all countries. The survey concludes by indicating the dilemmas under the current structures of provision for state policies aimed at expanding owner-occupation.

Imputed income from owner-occupied housing is generally not included in analyses of the distribution of income. Yet the value of homeownership is undoubtedly an important element distinguishing the economic status of one family from another. In this paper, using a new method to decompose income inequality by income source, we analyze the impact of potential income derived from the net worth of housing on a representative national sample of US homeowners. Using 1980 Survey of Residential Finance data, we find that housing income adds less to inequality per dollar of income than does income from all other sources.