The worst-case housing needs of low-income households arise largely from their high rent
burdens, not from physically inadequate housing. Thus, the programs of housing assistance
for these households initiated in the Great Depression should now be recognized as a
part of the nation’s welfare system, not as an infrastructure investment program. This
paper considers the most important implications of these facts for the design of housing
assistance programs and for the administration of housing subsidies.

The real estate sector accounts for more than a third of global greenhouse gas
emissions and thus offers great potential for carbon abatement. Energy efficient
and green buildings are rapidly transforming the commercial property sector,
and institutional investors can benefit from that transformation through the
value created by the greening of their real estate holdings. This article develops a
global survey for property portfolios, measuring the environmental performance
of listed property companies and private property funds. Based on the objective
set of environmental survey data, we construct an environmental scorecard – the
Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. The results reported in this article
suggest that the environmental performance of the global property investment
industry can be substantially improved. For institutional investors, the survey
results and the scorecard metrics benchmark the current environmental
performance of their property portfolio, and show the way to improving it.

Research on climate change suggests that small improvements in the
“sustainability” of buildings can have large effects on greenhouse gas emissions and on
energy efficiency in the economy. This paper analyzes the economics of “green”
building. First, we analyze a panel of office buildings certified by independent rating
agencies, finding that large recent increases in the supply of green buildings and the
unprecedented volatility in property markets have not significantly affected the relative
returns to green buildings. Second, we analyze a large cross section of office buildings,
demonstrating that economic premiums in rent and asset values of buildings certified for
energy efficiency are substantial. Third, we relate the economic premiums for green
buildings to their relative efficiency in energy use, documenting that the attributes rated
for both thermal efficiency and sustainability contribute to premiums in rents and asset
values. Even among green buildings, increased energy efficiency is fully capitalized into
rents and asset values.

We report on an experiment in which new commercial savings products, informed by the
behavioral finance literature, were offered to the microfinance borrowers of Guatemala’s largest
public-sector bank. We find that giving these borrowers the opportunity to plan, and be reminded
of, saving at the time of loan repayment resulted in a doubling of savings deposits relative to the
control, and that proposing a default contribution of 10% of the loan payment caused deposits to
double again. The savings treatments also generate faster pay-down of debt and weakly better
overall repayment performance, suggesting that simultaneous savings and borrowing can be
complementary activities. A theoretical model shows that the simultaneous provision of debt and
commitment savings products helps a greater fraction of the population to eventually escape a
debt-financed equilibrium. Mainstreaming the most successful product tested here would allow the
bank to mobilize savings sufficient to leverage 50% of its short-term loan portfolio.

This paper traces the evolution of the global trading system from the 19th century to the present-day GATT/WTO arrangements, calling attention to the key roles of reciprocity and non-discrimination and taking note of how the system is now challenged by the new paradigm of global market integration. The main features of the WTO are described, the boundaries of the WTO identified, and how the expansion of these boundaries may result in the over-extension and weakening of the effectiveness of the WTO.

This paper explores how far free trade agreements (FTAs) have strengthened or weakened global governance of the trading system. We open with an analysis of the altered political and economic context within which countries have come, in recent years, to assign a new importance to regional and bilateral trade agreements in their trade policies. We then consider each of the main provisions included in FTAs and comment on how these may separately affect the management of trade relations. We conclude with some observations of the broader trends affecting global governance that are associated with the spread of trade agreements as a whole.

Analyses of the determinants of land prices in urban areas typically base inferences on
housing transactions which combine payments for land and long-lived improvements.
These inferences, in turn, are based upon assumptions about the production function for
housing and the appropriate aggregation of non-land inputs. In contrast, we investigate
directly the determinants of urban land prices. We assemble more than 7,000 land
transactions in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1990-2009 period, and we analyze
the link between the physical access of sites, the topographical and demographic
characteristics of their local environment, and the prices of vacant land on those sites. We
investigate in detail the link between variations in the quality of public services and the
value of developable land. Most importantly, our analysis documents the powerful link
between variations in the regulatory environment within a metropolitan area and the
prices commanded by raw land as an input to residential or commercial development.
Finally, we relate these large variations in land prices to the prices paid by consumers for
housing in the region

We re-examine the link between changes in housing wealth, financial wealth, and consumer
spending. We extend a panel of U.S. states observed quarterly during the seventeen-year period,
1982 through 1999, to the thirty-one year period, 1978 through 2009. Using techniques reported
previously, we impute the aggregate value of owner-occupied housing, the value of financial
assets, and measures of aggregate consumption for each of the geographic units over time. We
estimate regression models in levels, first differences and in error-correction form, relating per
capita consumption to per capita income and wealth. We find a statistically significant and rather
large effect of housing wealth upon household consumption. This effect is consistently larger
than the effect of stock market wealth upon consumption. This reinforces the conclusions
reported in our previous analysis.

In contrast to our previous analysis, however, we do find – based on data which include the
recent volatility in asset markets – that the effects of declines in housing wealth in reducing
consumption are at least as large as the effects of increases in housing wealth in increasing the
course of household consumption.