Cyclical and structural change in the UK housing market

Purpose – This paper aims to examine factors affecting house prices separating cyclical and structural influences. In addition to considering the role of income and interest rates, it examines whether access to a key source of liquidity, mortgage finance, could affect the long-term behaviour of the market rather than being a short run impact. In addition, the paper considers whether the effects of mortgage funding and the financial crisis affect all regions equally or whether there exist particular differences across regions of the UK. Design/methodology/approach – Using quarterly time series data from 1983q1 to 2011q2, the paper employs a Johansen cointegration approach to identify the long-run (permanent) and short-run (transitory) factors affecting house prices both at national and regional levels. It identifies whether there is a separate influence for mortgage lending from interest rates and general money market liquidity, as captured by money supply M3, and whether these effects are permanent or temporary. The paper employs impulse response functions to examine house price evolution due to innovations in mortgage lending and quantifies these effects with and without the financial crisis. Findings – The findings indicate that real personal disposable income, mortgage market liquidity, interest rates and money supply as well as housing stock supply impact house prices permanently with the expected signs. The findings are broadly consistent at national and regional level, although there are some significant regional variations in results. The mean reversion of the housing markets is captured via the error correction term which is significant at the national level and in all but three regions. Impulse response functions show how house prices respond to shocks in mortgage lending and how this varies with and without a financial crisis

How to Know if You\u27re an Extremist

I’m a serious West Wing fan. I love it because it not only gives me a little insight into what is obviously a totally accurate depiction of what life is like working in the White House (right?) but it also makes me think. Take this scene from season 3 as an example: Josh Lyman, the Deputy White House Chief, is stuck in the White House cafeteria with a group of high school students while the White House is under emergency lockdown. Since the students have been promised the opportunity to speak to influential people in D.C. during their visit, Lyman lets them ask him any questions they want. One student asks him, “Why are Muslims out to kill us?” Josh Lyman challenges the student’s statement with the following: “Islamic Extremist is to Islam as the Ku Klux Klan is to Christianity.” [excerpt

Fearless Friday: Jeffrey White

In today’s edition of Fearless Friday, Surge is thrilled to honor the work of the incomparable Jeffrey White ’17. Jeffrey is a junior from Baltimore, Maryland, who is majoring in Religious Studies and minoring in Music. As an incredibly active member of the campus community, he is involved in leadership roles in many facets of campus life. He works as a Resident Assistant (RA), serves as the Program Organizer for the Office of Intercultural Advancement, the Live Music Chair of the Campus Activities Board (CAB), and devotes time to being a Peer Learning Assistant for Anthropology 103 as well. [excerpt

Book Review

Review of: STUART M. SPEISER, LAWYERS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM. (Evans 1993) [430 pp.] Endnotes with full citations, index, and lexicon (lay definitions of legal terms). LC 93-35272; ISBN 0-87131-724-9. [$16.95 paper. 216 E. 49th Street, New York NY 10017.

The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002: A Potemkin Village

Due to the daunting possibilities of cyberwarfare, and the ease with which cyberattacks may be conducted, the United Nations has warned that the next world war could be initiated through worldwide cyberattacks between countries. In response to the growing threat of cyberwarfare and the increasing importance of information security, Congress passed the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA). FISMA recognizes the importance of information security to the national economic and security interests of the United States. However, this Note argues that FISMA has failed to significantly bolster information security, primarily because FISMA treats information security as a technological problem and not an economic problem. This Note analyzes existing proposals to incentivize heightened software quality assurance, and proposes a new solution designed to strengthen federal information security in light of the failings of FISMA and the trappings of Congress’s 2001 amendment to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Tensor Anisotropies in an Open Universe

We calculate the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background induced by long-wavelength primordial gravitational waves in a universe with negative spatial curvature, such as are produced in the ``open inflation'' scenario. The impact of these results on the COBE normalization of open models is discussed.Comment: 5pgs, 2 figs.; also avalable at http://www.sns.ias.edu/~whu, revision reflects ApJL published version, model dependence clarifie

Investigating the dynamics of, and interactions between, Shanghai office submarkets

The Shanghai office market has developed rapidly over the past two decades. As a consequence of this development, two, apparently distinct, office submarkets, Puxi and Pudong have developed in central Shanghai. This raises the issue as to whether the Shanghai office market can be viewed as a homogeneous entity or whether there is imperfect substitutability across office locations within the city. The latter case raises the possibility of the existence of office submarkets. In this paper, we examine intra-metropolitan rental dynamics in the Puxi and Pudong submarkets, identifying any interrelationships between these markets, and consider whether they form distinct office submarkets. We find no interaction between the two submarkets. Further, we find no evidence of lead-lag relationships between the two submarkets. Finally, when we test for convergence in rental performance between the two submarkets, the tests reveal that we can reject the null of no convergence