Housing outcomes: an assessment of long-term trends

This paper was presented at the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being" as part of session 2, " Affordability of housing for young and poor families." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The authors examine trends in housing outcomes by income group. Orr and Peach indicate that there has been a substantial improvement in the physical adequacy of the housing stock over the past few decades, particularly for households in the lowest income quintile. Neighborhood quality for all income groups has also improved, although sharp differences in quality continue to exist across the groups. In one important respect, however, lower income households are worse off than before - housing costs now absorb a larger share of their income.Housing ; Housing - Finance

Space Shuttle Software Development and Certification

Man-rated software, "software which is in control of systems and environments upon which human life is critically dependent," must be highly reliable. The Space Shuttle Primary Avionics Software System is an excellent example of such a software system. Lessons learn from more than 20 years of effort have identified basic elements that must be present to achieve this high degree of reliability. The elements include rigorous application of appropriate software development processes, use of trusted tools to support those processes, quantitative process management, and defect elimination and prevention. This presentation highlights methods used within the Space Shuttle project and raises questions that must be addressed to provide similar success in a cost effective manner on future long-term projects where key application development tools are COTS rather than internally developed custom application development tool

Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being: summary of observations and recommendations

This is a summary of the proceedings of the conference "Unequal incomes, unequal outcomes? Economic inequality and measures of well-being." The conference was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on May 7, 1999. The conference was organized to focus on the evolution of more direct measures of the material well-being of Americans. Of particular concern was the impact of income inequality on trends in health, housing, and crime victimization. Conference participants also examined some of the changes in policymakers' responses to these trends, especially in the areas of education financing and local governance. Finally, the participants discussed efforts to evaluate the social consequences of policy reforms and offered some guidelines on the best direction for future research and policy initiatives.Income distribution ; Public policy

Remote functionalisation via sodium alkylamidozincate intermediates : access to unusual fluorenone and pyridyl ketone reactivity patterns

Treating fluorenone or 2-benzoylpyridine with the sodium zincate [(TMEDA)center dot Na(mu-Bu-t)(mu-TMP)Zn(Bu-t)] in hexane solution, gives efficient Bu-t addition across the respective organic substrate in a highly unusual 1,6-fashion, producing isolable organometallic intermediates which can be quenched and aerobically oxidised to give 3-tert-butyl-9H-fluoren-9-one and 2-benzoyl-5-tert-butylpyridine respectively

The International Criminal Court in Self-Referral States: Legitimacy, Reputation, and the Court’s Anti-Impunity Mandate

As per its establishing treaty, the Rome Statute, the mandate of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is to end impunity for the crimes falling under its jurisdiction, i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression (ICC-level crimes). Concerning investigations initiated by a State Party to the Rome Statute referring a situation within their own territory to the ICC (self-referral states), the ICC has been criticized for only indicting rebel/ non-state actors when there is credible evidence that state elite were complicit in ICC-level crimes in the situations under investigation. This criticism has been detrimental to the ICC’s legitimacy with many victims of ICC-level crimes and general proponents of international criminal law. Previous research has convincingly found that the ICC’s apparent inability and/or unwillingness to indict state elite in self-referral states emerges from its dependence upon this elite for protection and access during its investigations, but this work posits that these choices also illustrate the ICC favouring its interest in its immediate survival over its interest in genuinely fulling its mandate. Further aggravating this criticism is the previously discovered tendency for the political regimes of these states to co-opt the ICC’s investigations to enhance their international legitimacy and other related interests in the face of fierce challenges to their holds on power. Paying particular attention to this problematically political reality, this work articulates an approach to potentially mitigate the legitimacy costs of the ICC’s case selection strategy in self-referral states. This approach involves the ICC taking advantage of the interests motivating the political regimes of self-referral states to co-opt the ICC’s investigations by leveraging the reputations of these regimes and their political elite to incrementally improve their states’ domestic judicial systems so that these systems might get to a point where they are eventually able and willing to prosecute ICC-level crimes genuinely and impartially themselves. At the center of this approach is the goal of creating an incentive structure to motivate this political elite to engage with strategies embodying the long-established concept of positive complementarity

Has excess capacity abroad reduced U.S. inflationary pressures?

This article examines whether the sizable amount of excess capacity abroad in recent years has eased U.S. inflationary pressures by keeping import prices from rising as fast as the prices of U.S.-produced goods. The analysis finds that overall import price growth has roughly kept pace with U.S. inflation because the effects of lower inflation abroad have been offset by exchange rate changes. In the case of Japan, dollar depreciation has rendered excess capacity basically ineffective against U.S. inflationary pressures.Industrial capacity ; Imports ; Inflation (Finance) ; Prices