Changing Attitudes to Housing and Residential Location in Cities: The Cultural Clash and the Greyfield Solution

This chapter explores changes in attitudes and preferences—in other words, the underlying demand—for different types and locations of housing in Australia’s largest cities. Until recently, housing preferences have strongly favoured detached housing and low-density urban settings. This is now changing. This section reports on data from a major household survey that examined the attitudes of resident property owners in the middle suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne to neighbourhood change and medium-density housing development. It examines household preferences and trade-offs related to different ‘living arrangements’ (dwelling and location combinations) and attitudes to lot amalgamation and bottom-up redevelopment between neighbours. The survey identified clear shifts in ‘living arrangement’ priorities in the major capital cities that now reveal equivalent preferences for medium-density housing in established areas with good public transport versus detached housing in car-dependent suburbs.It highlights the lag in supply-side response by the property-development and building industries, as well as the missed steps by metropolitan and municipal governments in strategic planning and rezoning of established suburban greyfield precincts to accommodate medium-density housing at scale: in essence, GPR.

Household Preferences for Investing in Crowdfunding

Using representative survey data on the Dutch population, we analyze households’ actual participation and stated preferences for crowdfunding involvement at the extensive and intensive margin, with emphasis on the relation with investing in socially responsible assets. We find that crowdfunding investors are higher educated and more future oriented than others, whereas risk aversion plays a negative but insignificant role. Financial literacy is positively associated with knowing about crowdfunding, but not with actual participation. A stated choice preference experiment largely confirms these relations. At the intensive margin, however, results are rather different: Women have a stronger preference for crowdfunding than men do. Financial literacy reduces the preferred share invested in crowdfunding. We find a strong positive relation between crowdfunding and socially responsible investing. We identify several common factors: a desire to contribute to improving society and a lack of confidence in traditional financial institutions. Comparing stated and revealed preferences, we find that the potential for attracting more crowdfunding funders is much smaller than for attracting socially responsible investors.

THE ESTIMATION OF INFLUENCE OF THE SHARP OIL PRICES REDUCTION AND SANCTIONS ON THE DYNAMICS OF RUSSIAN CRUCIAL MACROECONOMIC INDICATORS

This article provides a brief analysis of the impact of various macroeconomic shocks caused by the sanctions regime and the sharp drop in oil prices from 2014 to 2018. The authors identified shocks that greater extent provoked a GDP decline and inflation increase using the constructed DSGE-model of the Russian economy and the obtained historical decomposition for the quarterly growth rates of the investigated macro-indicators. According to calculations, the inflation growth from 2014 to 2015 can be interpreted as the sum of the adverse effects from the change in household preferences, the shock in oil prices, and the negative contribution of the stabilizing monetary policy. The observed GDP decline from the second quarter of 2014 to the third quarter of 2015 is explained by the synergistic effect of monetary policy shocks and a sharp drop in oil prices.