Housing Benefits and Monetary Incentives to Work: Simulations for France

Housing subsidies and work incentives in Great Britain.

In Great Britain the move away from rented accommodation to owner occupation is leaving behind a large group of households with low incomes, wages and hours of work, and high housing costs, who are increasingly in receipt of welfare transfers. The disparity along all of these dimensions between renters and owner occupiers has continued to grow since the 1970’s. The relationship between housing ...

Linking goals to monetary incentives

Every experienced executive knows the importance of rewarding good performance and also how difficult it is to design an incentive system that works as it is supposed to. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal1 reported that Hewitt Associates found that 83 per cent of companies with a pay-for-performance system said that their incentive plan was “only somewhat successful or not working at ...

Housing and Monetary Policy

When you look back over the past half-century in the United States you see a remarkable secular change in the housing cycle. Most importantly, the volatility or average size of the fluctuations in residential construction declined. The change occurred in the early 1980s. For example, compare two periods, the first before the early 1980s and the second since the 1980s. In the earlier period the ...

Increasing Financial Incentives to Work: The Role of In-work Benefits

Monetary Policy and Housing Booms

A multitude of factors contributed to the housing booms and crashes experienced in many countries and the ensuing global financial crisis. Much of the existing research on these issues assumes that agents have complete information about the economic environment and form rational expectations. This commentary argues that models with imperfect knowledge and learning provide a potentially rich ave...