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(2007-09-13)Working PaperIntegrating China’s 200 million rural-to-urban migrants into urban society is a critical challenge that, if unsuccessful, could undermine the entire urbanization project. To this end, understanding and responding to migrants’ housing needs, goals, and difficulties is an important aspect of ‘successful’ urbanization. Doing so is difficult, however, because of the complex legacy of housing reform and the transitional state of the housing market, and because so little is known about migrants’ housing preferences and behavior. This paper fills some of the gaps regarding migrant housing choice, demand, and quality using data from a purpose-designed survey of 800 low-status migrants in Tianjin. Results show that in many cases these individuals do not to exercise housing ‘choice’ as much as they undergo housing ‘sorting’ that follows from occupational choices. That is, less than half of our respondents got their housing through the private rental market and only a slightly higher share pay any rent. Employment variables (industry sector, employer type) are consistently and strongly significant across our housing choice models and significantly affect housing quality as well. Nonetheless, a low-cost rental sector does exist, serving about two-fifths of migrants in our sample. Within this subset, housing demand is more consistent with theory in the sense that income and life cycle factors are important and the role of employment characteristics is diminished. In all models individual migration characteristics, such as duration of residence, future migration plans, and sending remittances home, are significant, though which particular characteristics matter varies. We take this as an indication that migration status affects housing outcomes in multiple and subtle ways. This perspective differs, somewhat from the literature on housing choice in urban China, which emphasizes the role of institutional factors in determining cross-group housing outcomes. Although our results do not directly contradict these claims, our findings of (1) substantial variation in the determinants of housing choice/demand within the migrant pool, combined with (2) the ‘sorting’ of migrants into housing based on employment choices, suggests that at least some of the differential in housing outcomes between migrants and other urban groups is a result of individual migration characteristics and employment choices rather than institutional factors in the housing market. Ultimately, we read the empirical results of our study as indicating that the primary policy prescription of the urban China housing choice literature – to eliminate residual barriers that prevent migrants from accessing low-cost public-sector rentals is insufficient and may not respond to the concerns of migrants themselves. Of course, removing such barriers would not be an unwelcome step but, for instance, it is unlikely to have any impact on the housing situations of the half of all migrants that obtain housing through their employer. In short, a range of policies will be necessary to support the housing goals of migrants who have different housing needs and face different constraints in meeting them.
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(2017-12-01)Working PaperThe January 2017 decision of the Federal Court of Australia may not have settled the question: what types of metadata is personal information? The court was not asked to determine this question. However, all the events that led up to the judgment, and primarily the AATs December 2015 decision, does give legal recognition to some types of location data, call detail records, cell site location information, device identifiers and user identifiers, as personal information. This would include the IMSI and IMEI, for example. It is not quite clear whether Australia legally identifies URLs, IP addresses allocated to the device and the temporary allocated IMSI (TIMSI) as personal information. In this paper we identify the two categories of metadata, one category that is legally recognised as personal information and the other category that is not settled. In regards to the latter category, a technical analysis of the functionality of the types of metadata is conducted. This analysis is contrasted against the legal definition of personal information. The conclusion reached is that the URL, IP addresses contained in the authority portion of the URL and the temporary IMSI is personal information and must be legally recognised as such. The TMSI is about the person, the network, the device and about the source and destination of sent and received communications, and the ability to intercept those communications, despite its ephemeral nature.
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(2016-12-21)Working PaperThe hierarchical credibility model was introduced, and extended, in the seventies and early eighties. It deals with the estimation of parameters that characterize the nodes of a tree structure. That model is limited, however, by the fact that its parameters are assumed fixed over time. This causes the model’s parameter estimates to track the parameters poorly when the latter are subject to variation over time. The present paper seeks to remove this limitation by assuming the parameters in question to follow a process akin to a random walk over time, producing an evolutionary hierarchical model. The specific form of the model is compatible with the use of the Kalman filter for parameter estimation and forecasting. The application of the Kalman filter is conceptually straightforward, but the tree structure of the model parameters can be extensive, and some effort is required to retain organization of the updating algorithm. This is achieved by suitable manipulation of the graph associated with the tree. The graph matrix then appears in the matrix calculations inherent in the Kalman filter. A numerical example is included to illustrate the application of the filter to the model.
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(2017-12-13)Working PaperStrong and rising empirical evidence across countries finds that longevity is highly heterogeneous in key socioeconomic characteristics, including income. A positive relationship between lifetime income and life expectancy at retirement amounts to a straight tax/subsidy mechanism when the average cohort life expectancy is applied for annuity calculation, as done under nonfinancial defined contribution (NDC) schemes. Such a regressive redistribution and the ensuing labor market distortion put into doubt main features of the NDC scheme and call for alternative benefit designs to compensate for the heterogeneity. This paper explores five key mechanisms of compensation: individualized annuities; individualized contribution rates/account allocations; a two-tier contribution structure with socialized and individual rate structure; and two supplementary approaches under the two-tier approach to deal with the income distribution tails, and the distortions above a ceiling and below a floor. Using unique data from England and Wales and the United States, the analysis indicates that both individualized annuities and a two-tier contribution scheme are feasible and effective and thus promising policy options. To this end, however, a de-pooling of gender will be required.