Browsing by Author "Bieri, David S."

Now showing 1 - 9 of 9
  • Thumbnail Image
    Amenities, affordability, and housing vouchers
    Bieri, David S.; Dawkins, Casey J. (Blackwell Publishing Inc., 2018-06-19)
    Against the background of an emerging rental affordability crisis, we examine how the standard rule that households should not spend more than 30% of their income on housing expenditures leads to inefficiencies in the context of federal low-income housing policy. We quantify how the current practice of locally indexing individual rent subsidies in the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program regardless of quality-of-life conditions implicitly incentivizes recipients to live in high-amenity areas. We also assess a novel scenario for housing policy reform that adjusts subsidies by the amenity expenditures of low-income households, permitting national HCV program coverage to increase.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Back to the Future: Lösch, Isard, and the Role of Money and Credit in the Space-Economy
    Bieri, David S. (Virginia Tech, 2016-08)
    The recent financial crisis has been a powerful reminder that the intersectoral flow of funds is also—always and everywhere—a local phenomenon with real effects. Yet, the contemporary canon of regional economic theory has enshrined the classical dichotomy, treating the spheres of money and production as analytically distinct. Consequently, the current literature has little to say about monetary phenomena and their spatial consequences. The widespread disengagement of regional scientists with respect to issues of money, credit and banking represents a radical break with the discipline’s intellectual origins over half a century ago. This chapter re-examines the monetary content of some of the foundational works in regional science. In particular, I argue that August Lösch andWalter Isard, the former a student of Joseph Schumpeter’s and the latter a student of Alvin Hansen’s, both represent important branches in the long lineage of 20th century continental and U.S. monetary thought, respectively. In doing so, this chapter also outlines key elements of a research agenda that reengages with regional aspects of money and credit, casting them as central pillars of a Lösch-Isard synthesis.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Central Banks and the Governance of Monetary Space
    Bieri, David S. (2019-04-04)
  • Thumbnail Image
    Conceptualizing Financial Resilience: The Challenges for Urban Theory
    Bieri, David S. (Virginia Tech, 2016-01)
    This chapter outlines an urban theory of ‘financial resilience’ that accounts for the fact that the concurrent processes of urbanization and financialization render the economic system at once resilient and unstable. The notion of financial resilience thus conceived helps to advance our understanding of the processes of globalized urbanization in an era of financialized capitalism. Rejecting the classical notion of ‘monetary neutrality’, such a theory of resilience highlights that the particular behavioral attributes of a capitalist economy evolve around the (spatial) impact of money, credit and finance upon system behavior. One of my central claims in this regard is that the resilience of the monetary-financial system is an enduring theme that characterizes the historical reality of the American metropolis. The position outlined here envisions establishing ‘financial resilience’ as an analytical concept for urban theory that captures the systemic behavior of capitalist development in terms of the historical and institutional co-evolution of the process of urbanization and the monetary-financial system as a whole. In relating financial resilience to modes of urban capitalist governance and regulation, the discussion of the spatial aspects of financial resilience is cast both in terms of an institutional view of resilience (the resilience of both micro- and macro-level entities) and, in terms of a functional view of resilience (the resilience of funding flows and asset flows).
  • Thumbnail Image
    Financial Stability Rearticulated: Institutional Reform, Post-Crisis Governance, and the New Regulatory Landscape in the United States
    Bieri, David S. (Virginia Tech, 2015-02)
    The recent financial crisis was a powerful reminder that the inherent instability of the monetary-financial system is likely to entail serious consequences for the real economy. In the U.S., the monumental Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (“Dodd-Frank Act”) has provided legislation that aims to institutionalise several aspects a new thinking on financial stability. In addition to the interagency Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”), the creation of the The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) marks an important departure from the U.S. regulatory tradition of de-centralized agencies whereby the institutional locus of financial oversight depended on the precise nature of the legal structure of and business activities pursued by individual financial intermediaries. In its mandate and institutional structure, the CFPB unifies both “micro-prudential” and “macro- prudential” principles of financial regulation to enhance overall financial stability. From an historical perspective, the creation of the CFPB does not change the regulatory landscape to the same extent as did the creation of the Federal Reserve after the Panic of 1907 or the creation of the FDIC after the 1933 Banking Crisis. At the same time, however, the CFPB represents an important historical shift in the policy focus of U.S. financial regulation away from bank stability bank to a broad notion of financial stability that recognises the increased financialisation of households’ welfare.
  • Thumbnail Image
    The Fiscal Resilience of American Cities
    Spencer, Samuel Summers (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-11)
    This paper brings together the concepts of fiscal health and resilience as they are understood in a contemporary context while seeking to establish whether a quantitative model of analysis can be meaningfully derived and applied to major American cities. Using major recessions from 1977 to 2015 as an exogenous shock, the values for fiscal health are assessed temporally to arrive at an assessment for whether a certain group of cities is inherently more resilient than others. Given subjective nature of the concepts used, this paper also grapples with the fact that any results must be analyzed within a local context. The end result is aimed to produce a tool for cities to compare how they performed in the wake of a recession and eventually work towards an understanding of what policy actions can be done to make a city more resilient.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Das Geld im Raum: August Löschs Geldtheorie und ihre Bedeutung für regionalökonomische Verteilungsfragen
    Bieri, David S. (Duncker and Humblot, 2019-02)
    Der zeitgenössische Kanon der Raumwirtschaftslehre stützt sich---besonders unter dem Einfluss der angelsächsischen Literatur---auf die klassischen Dichotomie und beinhaltet daher nur wenige theoretische Ansatzpunkte die räumlichen Auswirkungen von Geld- und Kreditphänomenen grundlegend zu erfassen. Eine solche Ausklammerung geldtheoretischer Aspekte aus dem Wirkungsfeld der raumwirtschaftlichen Analyse stellt einen deutlichen, in die Nachkriegsjahre zu datierenden Schnitt in der dogmentgeschichtlichen Richtungsentwicklung der Regionalökonmie dar. Tatsächlich beschäftigte sich bereits HEINRICH VON THÜNEN vor bald zweihundert Jahren explizit mit den Wechselwirkungen von Raum und Geld. Eine Neubewertung von AUGUST LÖSCHS geldtheoretischen Arbeiten---unter besonderer Betrachtung seines Hauptwerkes Die räumliche Ordnung der Wirtschaft (1940, 1944) sowie seines posthum erschienenen Fragments «Die Theorie der Währung» (1949)---zeigt auf, dass LÖSCH, der in mancher Hinsicht als einer der wichtigsten Begründer der modernen Raumwirtschafslehre gilt, geld- und kredittheoretische Elemente als integrale Aspekte des Verständnises von räumlichen Ungleichgewichtsbildungen und regionalökonomischen Verteilungsfragen im Sinne des Transferproblems betrachtete. Diese Aspekte des LÖSCH’SCHEN Systems sind jedoch heute fast komplett in Vergessenheit geraten. So stellen Fragen zur räumlichen Neutralität des Geldes, sowie dessen endogene Schaffung, zentrale Elemente der Theoriebildung bei LÖSCH dar, deren intellektuelle Abstammungslinie direkt zu SCHUMPETERS Geld- und Kredittheorie führt. In diesem Zusammenhang argumentiert der vorliegende Beitrag weiter, dass sich in LÖSCHS geldtheoretischen Betrachtungen auch primäre Aspekte einer in den letzten Jahren der Weimarer Republik sich langsam etablierenden Kreditansicht niederschlugen. So bildet das Geld bei LÖSCH auch einen zentralen Pfeiler seines Anspruchs eine «Konjunkturtheorie im Raum» zu entwickeln, deren hauptsächliches Augenmerk nicht beim Standort per se liegen, sondern bei den Auswirkungen der wechselseitigen Verknüpfungen zwischen Handel und internationalen Konjunkturbewegungen auf die endogen bestimmten Wirtschaftsgebiete. In diesen Aspekten stützt sich LÖSCH vorallem auf HABERLERS konjunkturtheorie Synthese der späten 1930er Jahre, aber auch, besonders bezüglich der Rolle von Kapitalflüssen und Änderungen in Preiseniveaus als Auslöser von Zyklen, auf NEISSERS Werk. Allein aus diesen Gründen ist die mangelnde Anerkennung von LÖSCHS Beiträgen zur raumbetonten Geldtheorie, geschweige denn sein (wenn auch teils nur in rudimentären Ansätzen vorhandener) Versuch, real- und geldwirtschaftliche Elemente in einer Synthese der Raumwirtschaftslehre mit der Kredittheorie zu verknüpfen---ganz gemäss «Ohlin's Traum»---, eine dogmengeschichtliche Anomalie, wenn nicht gar ein Rätsel.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Housing Provision through Real Estate Development: Adopting Public-Private Partnerships for Affordable Housing Delivery in Brazil
    Izar, Priscila (Virginia Tech, 2018-03-28)
    This dissertation analyzes contemporary transformations in urban policy and space production in Brazil; in particular, those associated with state efforts to attract the private sector to participate in the design, finance, development and long-term management of infrastructure and housing provision systems. While the study's focus is on adoption of the public-private partnership (PPP) mechanism in the affordable housing sector, empirical research is based on the case study analysis of Casa Paulista Program, the first PPP for affordable housing delivery in the country, sponsored by the State Government of São Paulo and implemented in the central districts of the city of São Paulo, the state's capital. Specific questions driving the research are twofold: in the first, I ask what were the characteristics of the Casa Paulista PPP model, and in the second, how public and private agents, including social groups, affected the evolution of the model. Permeating this analysis is the concern as to how housing provision through PPPs may affect the ability of local populations to access adequate housing and fully participate in city living, as demanded by social housing movements and urban reform advocates and predicted in Brazil's Federal Constitution, and rights-based urban policy at national and local levels. Findings indicate that the Casa Paulista model, while neither leveraging private capital nor scaling up housing production, facilitates rearrangements in the private local housing market, urban policy, and social relationships around housing provision. These efforts are successful only with support of the development and finance industries operating beyond the local scale. I argue that these new rearrangements support a publicly funded, privately managed model to support predominantly residential real estate development projects of large scale and which are debt financed through long term agreements. This dynamic generates risk to society's ability to control urban transformation in the central city area and support preservation of a stock of public and private land where affordable housing development is currently prioritized, an outcome I describe as 'privatizing planning and socializing risk'.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Location Choice, Linkages and the Spatial Economy: Essays on Theory, Evidence and Heterodox Assessment
    Bieri, David S. (Virginia Tech, 2010-08-12)
    The essays in this dissertation represent theoretical and empirical contributions to urban economics and regional science, focusing on the growing importance of nonmarket interactions. There is increasing evidence that the process of globalization is rendering the world "spiky" rather than "flat". Nonmarket interactions, such as knowledge spillovers, innovation or amenity-based externalities, play a central role in this process. As economic activity is not evenly spread across space, a detailed understanding of the economic linkages between regions is key to the design of effective public policy. This is particularly important in the context of economic linkages between regions or cities, highlighting the key adjustment mechanisms -- via both market and nonmarket transactions -- and their long-run implications for incomes, the cost of living, and the spatial distribution of population. Both the neoclassically-grounded field of urban economics and the rapidly expanding New Economic Geography (NEG) literature pioneered by Krugman offer a variety of models and (not infrequently competing) predictions about the factors and processes that shape the spatial structure of the economy. At the same time, the dialogue between qualitative and quantitative discourses in regional science has been marred by an increasingly embittered dispute over methodology. While acutely pronounced in economics, this development has re-shaped large parts of its sister disciplines as well, particularly sociology and geography. Across the board, proponents of quantitative science methodology increasingly likened themselves to their natural science counterparts, whereas qualitative methods had become the last bastion of "true social scientists". Today, these so-called "science wars" have rendered "qualitative" and "quantitative" analysis into almost mutually exclusive concepts.