47 research outputs found

    Pricing and Unresponsive Flows Purging for Global Rate Enhancement

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    Improving U.S. Housing Finance Through Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Assessing the Options

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    Presents criteria for evaluating proposals for reforming the two government-sponsored enterprises. Outlines the key arguments for their structural strengths and weaknesses, a framework and goals for reform, and features of specific proposals to date

    Data management study. Volume 3 - Lunar/earth data bank study

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    Lunar/earth data bank study, with user information requirements and system design concep

    The Economic Case for Housing First

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    The federal government’s entry into regulating the US housing sector began with reforms initiated during the New Deal. Given the effects of the Great Depression, the New Deal was the perfect opportunity to implement housing policies that would have ensured a more equitable distribution of housing to all households, especially those which are on the lower end of the income distribution. However, as we shall see, federal housing policy has historically followed a path that focuses purely on demand-side measures. This is not by accident; the housing sector has long been seen as a macro-stabilizer that can be used to stimulate long-term growth in the economy through capital formation and employment created by the construction sector, specifically the residential construction sector. While demand-side measures are a Keynesian prescription for full employment, the lack of counter-balancing supply-side measures prevents the housing sector from achieving an equilibrium between supply and demand in both the short and long term, meaning that effective demand is never fully met. The reason for this is primarily the way in which the housing market functions; supply is relatively price inelastic compared to demand in the short run and more elastic overall in the long run. Supply is also restricted by external factors such as land use regulation. By imposing demand-side measures in a supplyrestricted market, the eventual rise in prices will tend to price out households on the lower end of the income spectrum. What results is both imminent homelessness and eventual homelessness as a result of economic rather than noneconomic conditions, which do not have supportive assistance on the homelessness policy side. This paper concludes with a proposal on how the gaps in housing policy and homelessness policy can be remedied through an increase in public housing stock combined with the Housing First1 approach; an approach that does not involve means testing and extends access to housing without the fulfillment of any prerequisite conditions

    Water, Human Rights and Governance

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    The overall goal of this particular publication is to explore the interlinked issues of water, human rights, and governance and to evaluate how such concerns could practically be addresses in global approaches to water development. Specific approaches include identifying and articulating the basic human rights issues associated with water management; exploring issues of governance and measures and identifying key points of leverage where human rights questions might become a mainstream feature in decision making management around water; developing a practical strategy for utilizing these points of leverage to mainstream the issues; establishing links between the diverse groups working on water, governance and human rights; and publishing a document highlighting results and disseminating it to key public and policy audiences

    Waste management in the coastal areas of the ASEAN region: roles of governments, banking institutions, donor agencies, private sector and communities

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    Waste disposal, Marine pollution, Pollution control, Coastal zone management, Environment management, ASEAN,

    Contingent Valuation of Environmental Goods: A Comprehensive Critique

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    Contingent valuation is a survey-based procedure that attempts to estimate how much households are willing to pay for specific programs that improve the environment or prevent environmental degradation. For decades, the method has been the center of debate regarding its reliability: does it really measure the value that people place on environmental changes? Bringing together leading voices in the field, this timely book tells a unified story about the interrelated features of contingent valuation and how those features affect its reliability. Through empirical analysis and review of past studies, the authors identify important deficiencies in the procedure, raising questions about the technique’s continued use

    Essays on the Economics of Education

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    Le résumé en français n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur.This thesis is composed of three chapters. The first two chapters consider specific aspects of the educational path and how these relate to, in the first case, earnings and occupation choice and, in the second, progress through school. The third chapter studies how variations in municipal finance affect investments in education. The first chapter of this thesis estimates the importance of two aspects of human capital accumulation: the acquisition of job-related skills, and the student's discovery of his relative abilities across disciplines. Specifically, we measure whether additional years of multi-disciplinary education help students make a better choice of specialization, and at what cost in foregone specialized human capital. We document that, in the cross section, students who choose their major later are more likely to change fields on the labor market. We then build and estimate a dynamic model of college education which captures the tradeoff between discovering comparative advantage and acquiring occupation-specific skills. Estimates suggest that delaying specialization is informative, although noisy. Working in the field of comparative advantage accounts for up to 20% of a well-matched worker's earnings. While education is transferable across fields with only a 10% penalty, workers who wish to change fields incur a large, one-time cost. The second chapter considers the impact of automatically promoting young children from one grade level to the next on retention and grade progression in primary school. Exploiting variation in grade repetition practices in Brazil, we study the effect of automatic promotion cycles on grade attainment and academic persistence of primary school children. The dynamic policy environment allows us to estimate the impact of the policy when applied at different times during schooling, both in the short term and as children exposed to the policy progress through primary school. We find that automatic promotion increases grade attainment: one year of exposure to the policy is associated with 3 students out of 100 studying one grade level above where they would be absent the policy. This effect persists over time, and cumulates with further exposure to the policy. The third chapter moves away from students to focus on education infrastructure. In the paper we seek to answer the question of how transfers from the federal government in Brazil affect both education spending and the resources available for education at the municipal level. We find that increased transfers lead to an immediate rise in current and capital spending. These increases are focused on education and welfare expenditure in poorer municipalities, while richer municipalities expand capital spending in the transport and housing sectors. Furthermore, particularly in wealthier municipalities, increases in transfers cause a short-term increase in local tax revenues. Positive transfer shocks are associated with increases in the number of teachers and, to a lesser extent, the number of classrooms. Transfers are also associated with substantial re-allocation of resources across schools offering classes at different levels, with secondary schools and schools teaching senior primary grades expanding at the expense of junior primary schools
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