Suchergebnisse

According to economic theory, there are no strong reasons to tax (or to subsidise) residential moves, although low levels of taxation may be potentially justified to deal with the presence of externalities and economic stability. This is in contrast to practise in most countries where governments have created strong barriers to moving (transaction taxes, rent control) which induces substantial transaction costs. Likely, the welfare losses due to these government-induced transaction costs are substantial.

According to economic theory, there are no strong reasons to tax (or to subsidise) residential moves, although low levels of taxation may be potentially justified to deal with the presence of externalities and economic stability. This is in contrast to practise in most countries where governments have created strong barriers to moving (transaction taxes, rent control) which induces substantial transaction costs. Likely, the welfare losses due to these government-induced transaction costs are substantial.

Why are regional unemployment differentials in Europe so persistent if, as the wage curve literature demonstrates, there is no compensation through wages? Using Urban Audit data for 142 cities over 12 EU countries, as well as a Dutch household survey, we estimate relationships between local labour market indicators and the average house price level. The evidence suggests that workers are compensated in housing markets to a significant extent, so that regional differences in unemployment may reflect an equilibrium outcome.

We introduce and apply a method for estimating workers' marginal willingness to pay for job attributes employing data on job search activity. Worker's willingness to pay for the remaining duration of the employment contract is derived. We provide evidence that workers attach substantial value to the remaining contract duration. A temporary worker with a remaining contract of six months is willing to pay about 10% of the monthly wage to increase the contract by one month.

Abstract
We analyse the effects of the Dutch Act on Extraordinary Measures for Urban Problems. This allows local governments to prohibit non-employed households from entering into public housing in targeted neighbourhoods to improve social mixing. We show that the Act is largely ineffective in changing the demographic composition of neighbourhoods. At the same time, due to prominent advertising of targeted deprived neighbourhoods, a stigma may have been created. We adopt a hedonic price approach and use a boundary-discontinuity (within 100 m of neighbourhood borders) to quantify the overall effect of the policy. We thus exploit spatio-temporal differences in house prices and find a sizeable price reduction of about 3–5%. The magnitude of this effect is confirmed for two other national place-based policy programmes, adding to the external validity of these findings. Our results suggest that neighbourhood stigma is important, which implies that individuals living in deprived neighbourhoods experience dis-utility from living in a place with a low status.

Low water levels are a potential threat to the inland navigation market. We develop a theoretical model to analyze low water-level uncertainty in the inland navigation market. A negative effect of climate change on welfare is expected due to the increase in cost per tonne of transport when low water levels occur more frequently. The market actors may take measures to adapt to the new situation of climate change. As an example, we study barge-size adjustments by barge operators. We show that in the current market (both before and after climate change) there are incentives to almost double the barge size. The reason that this still has not occurred may be explained by the long lifetime of barges that are currently in use. Thus, climate change does not provide a reason to stop the current trend towards larger barges. The only effect is that this trend towards larger barges will end at a lower size than would be the case without climate change. The public sector may also take measures to decrease the harm caused by climate change. In this study we consider an investment in infrastructure by means of dredging. We find a benefit-cost ratio higher than for this for investments both before and after climate change. Thus, both with and without climate change, welfare would increase if government intensifies dredging. After climate change, public adaptation may be more important than private adaptation when the situation is optimal before climate change. For the combined effect of barge-size adjustment and infrastructure investment, it can be concluded that the benefit in terms of expected welfare is 'super-additive' for the situation before climate and also for the situation after climate change when starting from the current situation. This 'super-additivity' property can be attributed to the opportunity for barge operators to hold even larger barges in the new environment where low water is less harmful for their capacities. However, for the situation after climate change, when starting from an optimized situation, super-additivity no longer holds.