- Inflation and Activity – Two Explorations and Their Monetary Policy Implications, Olivier J. Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti & Lawrence H. Summers, HKS Working Paper No. 070.
- Real Estate Value Impacts from Fracking: Industry Response and Proper Analytical Techniques, Richard Roddewig & Rebel A. Cole, Real Estate Issues 39(3), 2014, 6–20.
- How Auctions Amplify House-Price Fluctuations, Alina Arefeva.
- Marketing and Product Description: Value Added in the Real Estate Market, Sebastien Gay & Allen T. Zhang.
- Strategic Information Disclosure and Bank Lending, Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet & Qi (Susie) Wang.
- S. Bank Market Structure: Evolving Nature and Implications, David G. McMillan & Fiona Jayne McMillan.
- Before a Fall: Impacts of Earthquake Regulation and Building Codes on the Commercial Building Market, Levente Timar, Arthur Grimes & Richard Fabling.
- Demand and Supply of Mortgage Credit, Alex van de Minne & Federica Teppa, De Nederlandsche Bank Working Paper No. 486.
Tag Archives: marketing
NYC’s Changing Neighborhood Demographics
The Citizens Housing Planning Council has released a cool interactive map of NYC, Making Neighborhoods. It “follows change across the city by putting people at the center of analysis. Our work measures and visualizes the movements of groups of New Yorkers who share demographic characteristics.”
The press release continues,
The project uses cluster analysis methodology–common in economic or marketing studies–to form 14 distinct groups, or “population clusters,” and follow their locations in 2000 and 2010. By comparing the two years, we can see which population types grew in number or geographic size, or moved into new areas; if their numbers declined or they retreated from their neighborhoods and were replaced by others; or if groups remained relatively unchanged in a decade. By following groups of people with shared characteristics, we see a different portrait of a changing city. It is one that New Yorkers will recognize, as it reflects the neighborhoods they make for themselves.
Making Neighborhoods stands out among neighborhood-level research being done today in two ways. First, it ignores government-drawn boundary lines like community districts and sub-borough areas, which often obscure important patterns that cross these borders. Second, it captures intersectional change: rather than measuring individual changes in income, race, education type, and so on, this study shows changes in all of those dimensions.
Our work on this project includes three main outputs. First, a full academic paper details the research methods, the cluster traits, their changes over the study period, and policy implications. We also created a report that summarizes and draws out the highlights of the full-length paper. Finally, we created–with help from Van Dam, Inc.–interactive maps that communicate this fairly complex study in a stunning visualization.
In addition to distilling five overarching trends from the population cluster changes, CHPC and lead researcher Raisa Bahchieva performed an analysis of housing distress citywide. By measuring and locating the filing of lis pendens notices and housing code violations, we are able to see which population clusters are experiencing mortgage foreclosure or poor housing, respectively.
This is another cool mapping tool that helps to make sense of NYC’s complex geographic, political and social environment.
Performance-Based Consumer Law
Lauren Willis has posted Performance-Based Consumer Law to SSRN. This article
makes the case for recognizing performance-based regulation as a distinct tool in the consumer-law regulatory toolbox and for employing this tool broadly. Performance-based consumer law has the potential to incentivize firms to educate rather than obfuscate, develop simple and intuitive product designs that align with rather than defy consumer expectations, and channel consumers to products that are suitable for the consumers’ circumstances. Moreover, the process of establishing performance standards would sharpen our understanding of our goals for consumer law, and the process of testing for compliance with those standards would produce data about how to meet those goals in a continually evolving marketplace. Even if performance-based regulation does not directly lead to dramatic gains in consumer comprehension or marked declines in unsuitable uses of consumer products, the process of establishing and implementing such regulation promises dividends for improving traditional forms of regulation. (1)
This seems like a pretty radical change from our current approaches to the regulation of consumer financial transactions. Willis argues that disclosure does not work (no argument there) and industry can easily circumvent bright line rules (no argument there). She claims that a suitability regime, like ones that exist in the brokerage industry, offer a superior alternatives. She writes,
Suitability standards would be closer to traditional substantive regulation, but more flexible. Regulation might define suitable (or unsuitable) uses of types or features of products, or firms might define suitable uses of their products, provided that they did so publicly. Although suitability might be required of every transaction, testing every transaction for suitably would often be prohibitively expensive and ad hoc ex post enforcement would create only limited incentives for firm compliance. Better to set performance benchmarks for what proportion of the firm’s customers must use the products or features suitably (or not unsuitably) and use field-based testing of a sample of the firm’s customers to assess whether the benchmarks are met. Enforcement levers could include, e.g., fines, rewards, licensing consequences, regulator scrutiny, or unfair, deceptive, or abusive conduct liability. (4)
This is certainly intriguing. But just as certainly, one can see the consumer finance industry raising concerns about a lack of clear rules to guide their actions and the after-the-fact evaluations that this approach would subject them to. Willis is too quick to reject such concerns, but they are legitimate ones that would need to be addressed if performance-based consumer law was to be widely adopted. Nonetheless, this is an intriguing paper and its implications should be further explored.
