Developments in the provision of housing finance in the UK
Recommended reading for providers and designers of housing. The results of the housing finance changes in the UK included a wider range of institutions involved, significant developments in the source and delivery of that finance, as well as important changes in government policy opening up social housing to the private finance market, targeting subsidy more directly at particular groups of individuals and introduction of specific supply subsidies to new private rented sector. The considerable unease with certain outcomes is dealt with.
British housing since 1979: Has the system changed?
Abstract This article assesses the way the British housing system has responded to large changes in policy and economic variables since 1979 in order to determine whether behavioural relationships have remained stable during this period or whether underlying relationships have varied. Changes in demographic factors in relation to total supply, in the allocation of housing between different groups and different tenures, in rents, prices and the availability of finance are all reviewed to determine how the system has adjusted. The main conclusion is that on the demand side trends have continued, if anything more strongly, while on the supply side there has been a downward shift in new output levels which can be explained only partly by direct changes in government policy. This however can be explained in terms of adjustment and can best be described as adjusting td changes in constraints resulting in a tightening up of the system rather than to modifications in behavioural relationships.
When to Cross the Spread? Trading in Two-Sided Limit Order Books
In this paper the problem of optimal trading in illiquid markets is addressed when the deviations from a given stochastic target function describing, for instance, external aggregate client flow are penalized. Using techniques of singular stochastic control, we extend the results of [F. Naujokat and N. Westray, Math. Financ. Econ., 4 (2011), pp. 299--335] to a two-sided limit order market with temporary market impact and resilience, where the bid ask spread is now also controlled. In addition to using market orders, the trader can also submit orders to a dark pool. We first show existence and uniqueness of an optimal control. In a second step, a suitable version of the stochastic maximum principle is derived which yields a characterization of the optimal trading strategy in terms of a nonstandard coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE). We show that the optimal control can be characterized via buy, sell, and no-trade regions. The new feature is that we now get a nondegenerate no-...