Search results

House fire risk would be minimised if fire safety principles were incorporated at the design stage. This issue is rarely addressed in the literature. The purpose of this study is to propose a multi-criteria decision-making framework to evaluate fire risk of detached house designs in the United Arab Emirates and countries of similar cultural background.

The framework was developed based on function areas where (detached) house fires start, expert opinion and recommendations derived from the published literature on residential fire safety. This framework was applied to a sample of ten public detached house designs to check the applicability of the framework and to determine how safe these designs are from a fire safety perspective.

The proposed framework is proven to be an effective preliminary fire risk evaluation tool of detached house designs, and more research is needed in this area.

The proposed framework is an encouraging first step in incorporating fire risk minimisation at the design stage of detached houses based on determining the preferred location of function areas but requires further development and validation, especially in other design settings.

The proposed framework is an initial endeavour in helping designers of detached houses to minimise fire risk and its potential effects on residents.

This research proposes a way to minimise fire risk at the design stage of detached houses.

This chapter examines how democratic innovations can strengthen participation in the social housing sector. In Denmark, social housing offers affordable housing to a large number of Danes. The sector is grounded in traditions for resident involvement and engagement, and the democratic model in the sector is unique to Denmark. The residents have the majority say in all decision-making boards, which enables them to influence both the physical surroundings and social initiatives. Despite the positive merits, the sector faces challenges concerning increased segregation, municipalities allocating an increased share of socially and economically marginalised people to the sector, and less participation in the residential democracy. This chapter studies two cases of initiatives that experiment with democratic innovations to enhance participation in local housing associations. The two cases are innovative initiatives in the social housing sector and illustrate the potential benefits of increased participation. The chapter concludes that project-based initiatives might be on the rise and seem to hold considerable potential for enhancing participation. The challenge, then, is still to secure the coordination and strategic direction of the initiatives while combining them with the formal resident democracy.

The Bureau of Economics in the Federal Trade Commission has a three-part role in the Agency and the strength of its functions changed over time depending on the preferences and ideology of the FTC’s leaders, developments in the field of economics, and the tenor of the times. The over-riding current role is to provide well considered, unbiased economic advice regarding antitrust and consumer protection law enforcement cases to the legal staff and the Commission. The second role, which long ago was primary, is to provide reports on investigations of various industries to the public and public officials. This role was more recently called research or “policy R&D”. A third role is to advocate for competition and markets both domestically and internationally. As a practical matter, the provision of economic advice to the FTC and to the legal staff has required that the economists wear “two hats,” helping the legal staff investigate cases and provide evidence to support law enforcement cases while also providing advice to the legal bureaus and to the Commission on which cases to pursue (thus providing “a second set of eyes” to evaluate cases). There is sometimes a tension in those functions because building a case is not the same as evaluating a case. Economists and the Bureau of Economics have provided such services to the FTC for over 100 years proving that a sub-organization can survive while playing roles that sometimes conflict. Such a life is not, however, always easy or fun.

This paper aims to understand housing demand of urban Indian households in terms of housing and household-level characteristics. Because a house is a bundle of certain characteristics which vary across houses, each characteristic has an implicit price. Finding this implicit price for certain important characteristics is the first objective of this study. The second objective of the paper is to compute the income elasticity and price elasticity of housing demand for these cities.

To achieve comparable estimates, household-level data from India’s National Sample Survey Organisation housing surveys for the years 2002 and 2008-2009 have been used. A hedonic price function is estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) and Box-Cox functional forms to estimate the implicit prices of housing characteristics. This exercise is attempted for owned and rented houses separately. Demand function required for computing the elasticities, uses the hedonic price index derived from the implicit prices and household characteristics.

The study finds housing demand to be income elastic and price inelastic for the six cities across both the time periods.

Firstly, this study includes housing characteristics such as individual access to drinking water, modern sanitation facility, separate kitchen, condition of the structure, existence of a road with street light and whether the house is in a slum or non-slum area in the hedonic price function. These variables were not used in any of the earlier studies pertaining to India. Secondly, it uses the Box-Cox non-linear form to derive the hedonic price function, a specification not used earlier. Thirdly, this is the first study analysing housing demand across the six largest Indian cities.

Knight's Industrial Law Reports goes into a new style and format as Managerial Law This issue of KILR is restyled Managerial Law and it now appears on a continuous updating basis rather than as a monthly routine affair.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides:

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate three different models of how to organise services to tenants in municipal housing companies.

The empirical data used in this study are gathered from a detailed two‐year case study.

Three different functions are identified: customer service (e.g. reporting of faults); the letting process; and caretaking (day‐to‐day activities and control over in‐ and outdoor areas). The three models for local administration differ as to which functions are decentralised to a local group and which are centralised, and are evaluated from several different perspectives. The models where more decisions are decentralised leads to better information about the local conditions, makes it easier to coordinate work in an area, creates more motivation for the staff and makes it easier to involve the tenants. The main problem with the decentralised models is moral hazard problems, e.g. that the local team create their own agenda, are pressured by certain tenants to give them advantages and that the result is lack of control and an inconsistent policy in the company.

The primary issue of the study is how housing companies can organise their resources in order to create an efficient local administration in large housing estates. Further research is needed to decide if the economic profitability differs between different organizational models in relation to tenants' perceived service quality.

The research identifies and analyses different organisation models for local administration in large housing estates more thoroughly than earlier research.

Reviews a number of contributions to migration analysis. Discusses some of the rudiments of migration modelling before turning attention to specific applications. Pays particular attention to articles which have modelled the interaction between labour and housing markets.

The purpose of this study is to develop a spatio-temporal neighbourhood-level house price index (STNL-HPI) incorporating a geographic information system (GIS) functionality that can be used to improve the house price indexation system.

By using the Malaysian house price index (MHPI) and application of geographically weighted regression (GWR), GIS-based analysis of STNL-HPI through an application called LHPI Viewer v.1.0.0, the stand-alone GIS-statistical application for STNL-HPI was successfully developed in this study.

The overall results have shown that the modelling and GIS application were able to help users understand the visual variation of house prices across a particular neighbourhood.

This research was only able to acquire data from the federal government over the period 1999 to 2006 because of budget limitations. Data purchase was extremely costly. Because of financial constraints, data with lower levels of accuracy have been obtained from other sources. As a consequence, a major portion of data was mismatched because of the absence of a common parcel identifier, which also affected the comparison of this system to other comparable systems.

Neighbourhood-level HPI is needed for a better understanding of the local housing market.