Path dependence and Britain’s "coal wagon problem"

This article explores the nature and impact of path dependence in British rail coal haulage before 1939. It examines the factors which locked Britain's railways into a system of small coal wagons with highly fragmented ownership, the cost penalties of this system, and the reasons that attempts at modernization were unsuccessful. The analysis highlights the importance of decentralized ownership of a highly durable installed base of complementary infrastructure. Technical and institutional interrelatedness blocked incremental modernization, while the political requirement to compensate private wagon owners for the loss of their wagon stock made wholesale rationalization financially unattractive.

The distribution of London residential property prices and the role of spatial lock-in

Much of mainstream economic analysis assumes that markets adjust smoothly, through prices, to changes in economic conditions. However, this is not necessarily the case for local housing markets, whose spatial structures may exhibit persistence, so that conditions may not be those most suited to the requirements of modern-day living. Persistence can arise from the existence of transaction costs. The paper tests the proposition that housing markets in Inner London exhibit a degree of path dependence, through the construction of a three-equation model, and examines the impact of variables constructed for the 19th and early 20th centuries on modern house prices. These include 19th-century social structures, slum clearance programmes and the 1908 underground network. Each is found to be significant. The tests require the construction of novel historical datasets, which are also described in the paper.

Housing Policies in Latin America: overview of the four largest economies

The aim of this paper is to examine the differences and similarities in housing policies in the four Latin American countries of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. The article uses the welfare regime approach, modified by a recognition of path dependence, to identify a number of phases that each country has passed through. However, attention is drawn to the substantial differences in the circumstances in each country and the extent and duration of the different phases. It is concluded that it can be beneficial to use the concept of a Latin American housing regime, but that this general picture has to be used with an understanding of the path dependence caused by the different context in the individual countries.

Spatial housing economics: a survey

This introduction to the Virtual Special Issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neo-classical theory, through more recent developments in social interactions modelling, and touching on the role of institutions, path dependence and economic history. The survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature. The survey covers elements hedonic models, spatial econometrics, neighbourhood models, housing market areas, housing supply, models of segregation, migration, housing tenure, sub-national house price modelling including the so-called ripple effect, and agent-based models. Possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in Urban Studies. Nevertheless, there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention, arising at least partly from emerging policy problems. These include more research on housing and biodiversity, the relationship between housing and civil unrest, the effects of changing age distributions - notably housing for the elderly - and the impact of different international institutional structures. Methodologically, developments in Big Data provide an exciting framework for future work.

The dependence of cusp ion signatures on the reconnection rate

The interpretation of structure in cusp ion dispersions is important for helping to understand the temporal and spatial structure of magnetopause reconnection. “Stepped” and “sawtooth” signatures have been shown to be caused by temporal variations in the reconnection rate under the same physical conditions for different satellite trajectories. The present paper shows that even for a single satellite path, a change in the amplitude of any reconnection pulses can alter the observed signature and even turn sawtooth into stepped forms and vice versa. On 20 August 1998, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) craft F-14 crossed the cusp just to the south of Longyearbyen, returning on the following orbit. The two passes by the DMSP F-14 satellites have very similar trajectories and the open-closed field line boundary (OCB) crossings, as estimated from the SSJ/4 precipitating particle data and Polar UVI images, imply a similarly-shaped polar cap, yet the cusp ion dispersion signatures differ substantially. The cusp crossing at 08:54 UT displays a stepped ion dispersion previously considered to be typical of a meridional pass, whereas the crossing at 10:38 UT is a sawtooth form ion dispersion, previously considered typical of a satellite travelling longitudinally with respect to the OCB. It is shown that this change in dispersed ion signature is likely to be due to a change in the amplitude of the pulses in the reconnection rate, causing the stepped signature. Modelling of the low-energy ion cutoff under different conditions has reproduced the forms of signature observed.