Public Economics Commons^™

Do Small Dollar Loans Increase Low Income And Minority Homeownership? Evidence From The Usda Section 502 Lending Program, Luke Petach

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates the impact of small dollar mortgage lending on housing affordability and homeownership in the United States. Using data on small dollar mortgage lending at the state level from the USDA Section 502 Lending Program and data on housing affordability and homeownership at the household level from the American Community Survey, I show that an increase in the number of small dollar mortgage loans per-capita at the state level is positively associated with homeownership and housing affordability, particularly for low income households and non-white households. For Black, non-Hispanic households, doubling the number of USDA Section 502 loans per …

Deploying Digitalisation And Artificial Intelligence In Sustainable Development Research, Peter Yang

Faculty Scholarship

Many industrialised countries have benefited from the advent of twenty-first century technologies, especially automation, that have fundamentally changed manufacturing and industrial production processes. The next step in the evolution of automation is the development of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e. intelligence which is demonstrated by machines and systems, which cannot only perform tasks but also work synergistically with humans and nature. Intelligent systems that can see, analyse situations and respond sensitively to real-time cues, from human gestures and facial expressions to pedestrians crossing a busy street, will reshape transportation, precision agriculture, biodiversity conservation, environmental modelling, public health, construction and manufacturing, as …

Fair Innings? The Utilitarian And Prioritarian Value Of Risk Reduction Over A Whole Lifetime, Matthew D. Adler, Maddalena Ferranna, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich

Faculty Scholarship

The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual’s fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a “prioritarian” SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility.

We show that the prioritarian SVRR provides a rigorous basis in economic theory for the “fair innings” concept, proposed in the public health literature: as between an older individual …

Building A Good Jobs Economy, Dani Rodrik, Charles F. Sabel

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional models are failing throughout the world. In the developed world, the welfare state-compensation model has been in retrenchment for some time, and the drawbacks of the neoliberal conception that has superseded it are increasingly evident. Yet there is no compelling alternative on offer. In the developing world, the conventional, tried-and-tested model of industrialization has run out of steam. In both sets of societies a combination of technological and economic forces (in particular, globalization) is creating or exacerbating productive/technological dualism, with a segment of advanced production in metropolitan areas that thrives on the uncertainty generated by the knowledge economy co-existing …

A Better Calculus For Regulators: From Cost-Benefit Analysis To The Social Welfare Function, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

The “social welfare function” (SWF) is a powerful tool that originates in theoretical welfare economics and has wide application in economic scholarship, for example in optimal tax theory and environmental economics. This Article provides a comprehensive introduction to the SWF framework. It then shows how the SWF framework can be used as the basis for regulatory policy analysis, and why it improves upon cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

Two types of SWFs are especially plausible: the utilitarian SWF, which sums individual well-being numbers, and the prioritarian SWF, which gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. Either one of these …

Years Of Good Life Based On Income And Health: Re-Engineering Cost-Benefit Analysis To Examine Policy Impact On Wellbeing And Distributive Justice, Richard Cookson, Owen Cotton-Barrett, Matthew D. Adler, Miqdad Asaria, Toby Ord

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Neighborhoods By Assessment: An Analysis Of Non-Ad Valorem Financing In California, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ellen C. Seljan

Faculty Scholarship

Non-ad valorem assessments on property are a fiscal innovation born from financial stress. Unable to raise property taxes due to limitations, many localities have turned to these charges as an alternative method to fund local services. In this paper, we seek to explain differential levels of non-ad valorem assessment financing through the analysis of property tax records of a large and diverse set of single family homes in California. We theorize that assessments, as opposed to other forms of taxation, will be used when residents hold anti-redistributive preferences. We show that assessment financing is most common in cities with high …

The Social Value Of Mortality Risk Reduction: Vsl Vs. The Social Welfare Function Approach, Matthew D. Adler, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich

Faculty Scholarship

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost–benefit analysis—i.e., the “value per statistical life” (VSL) approach—and various social welfare functions (SWFs). The SWFs are either utilitarian or prioritarian, applied to policy choice under risk in either an “ex post” or “ex ante” manner. We examine the conditions on individual utility and on the SWF under which these frameworks display sensitivity to wealth and to baseline risk. Moreover, we discuss whether these frameworks satisfy related properties that have received some attention in the literature, namely equal value of …

The Governance Of China’S Finance, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter examines the governance of China's financial system, which, it shows, cannot be adequately explained using conventional paradigms that rely on ownership and legal or regulatory controls alone. Instead, China's governance regime relies heavily on human resource management, which uses control rights over the career path of top-level financial cadres. A commentary is included at the end of the chapter.

Private Business As Public Good: Hotel Development And Kelo, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2004, New Haven Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. announced plans to demolish the all-but-derelict New Haven Coliseum and replace it with a publicly financed redevelopment that would include a 300-room hotel. Critics of the plan immediately objected that the hotel-even if it were completed-was a poor public investment, that there was no demand for such a hotel, and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Some critics pointed to New Haven's own checkered history of major development projects, especially the failed downtown mall and the famously catastrophic Oak Street redevelopment. As of February 2006, the city …