A Brief History of Affordable Housing Cooperatives in the United States

For over 75 years housing cooperatives have been a source of affordable housing. Currently, the 376,000 dwelling units of affordable cooperatives is equivalent to seventeen percent of the rent reduction units owned by publichousing authorities. Understanding that affordable cooperatives have been developed under varying historical circumstances provides insights on how they could play a role in the future supply of affordable housing. The history of affordable co-ops starts during the 1920s and after World War II with the ethnic, union, and New York government financed co-ops. Through the 1960s and the early 1970s cooperatives were financed by various federal direct assistance programs. Since the late 1970s co-ops have been sponsored by nonprofit organizations and by federal and municipal government privatization programs. A workable institutional structure for affordable cooperatives has developed as a result of this historical evolution.

Asymmetric Information, Tax Evasion and Alternative Instruments of Government Revenue

Using a pure-exchange overlapping generations model, characterized with tax evasion and information asymmetry between the government (the social planner) and the financial intermediaries, we try and seek for the optimal tax and seigniorage plans, derived from the welfare maximizing objective of the social planner. We show that irrespective of whether the economy is characterized by tax evasion, or asymmetric information, a benevolent social planner, maximizing welfare and simultaneously financing the budget constraint, should optimally rely on explicit rather than implicit taxation.

Technical Efficiency of State Owned Enterprises in China (1980-1989): An Assessment of the Economic Reforms

This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis to examine changes in levels of technical efficiency over time in China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs) during 1980-1989. Our paper adds to the growing body of literature in this area by obtaining measures of technical efficiency of individual SOEs over years and by identifying how different aspects of the reforms have affected efficiency. We estimate a Tobit regression model, using the technical efficiency score as the dependent variable and a set of reform variables and firm attributes as regressors. We find that specific aspects of the reforms were very effective in improving technical efficiency.

Risk, Transaction Costs, and Tax Assignment: Government Finance in the Ottoman Empire

Risk and transaction costs often provide competing explanations of institutional outcomes. In this paper we argue that they offer opposing predictions regarding the assignment of fixed and variable taxes in a multi-tiered governmental structure. While the central government can pool regional risks from variable taxes, local governments can measure variable tax bases more accurately. Evidence on tax assignment from the mid-sixteenth century Ottoman Empire supports the transaction cost explanation, suggesting that risk matters less because insurance can be obtained in a variety of ways.