household electricity demand revisited respond to price changes this paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use the model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity and consumption aggregation over appliances and time we estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 california households the results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response we then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing this interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets and policy makers concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers how new pricing mechanisms would affect households consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty however this uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena hampering market reforms using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges these include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances and the interdependence of energy use with longer term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics the first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption the third issue imposes high data requirements information on household specific appliance holdings and residence features and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods when the researcher s objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff s consumption and revenue consequences in this paper we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used

strategic trade policy intellectual property rights protection and north south trade abstract in this paper we analyze the issue of optimal tariffs when the northern and southern firms compete in quantities in an imperfectly competitive northern market and there are potentially varying degrees of intellectual property rights ipr violation by the south ipr violation is reflected through the leakage of technological knowledge spillovers from the northern to the southern firm creating unit cost reduction it is shown that optimal tariffs in this framework are always higher than in the simple duopoly model since they serve here not only as profit shifting devices but also as instruments that influence domestic innovative activity generate scale economies and countervail the ipr violation of the south the other notable difference from the standard duopoly model is that positive tariffs may be desirable from the world welfare point of view

estimating electricity demand the cost of linearising the budget constraint this paper derives elasticity estimates for the electricity demand of a cross section of residential customers in medellin colombia where prices follow a rising block scheme it contrasts methods following jerry hausman 1979 1985 with those based on harvey rosen 1976 to resolve the difference between the results produced by the two methods it uses a generalized selectivity bias corrections method due to frank vella 1990 copyright 1992 by mit press

royalties vs fees how do firms pay for foreign technology abstract the theoretical determinants of technology licensing contracts have been extensively studied but empirical evidence is scarce we assemble a data set of all the foreign technology licensing agreements entered into by manufacturing firms in india between 1989 and 1993 industry firm and contract characteristics are used to explain differences between the forms of payment in licensing contracts our findings support theoretical arguments licensing contracts are more likely to use royalties when sales are relatively high while increased volatility of sales and greater profitability favor fixed fee contracts we also find that firms are more likely to use output based payments to control the sale and diffusion of r d or brand intensive know how to unaffiliated firms

imports domestic production and transnational vertical integration a theoretical note suppose a developing country has the choice of importing cars i or producing them at home in a subsidiary s of a transnational company or in a domestic firm under a licensing l contract from a transnational which ties the import of components from the latter if the criterion of national benefit is given by consumer surplus under i or s and by consumer surplus plus the profits of the domestic firm under l we compare the benefits from the alternative regimes i s or l under different market structure assumptions in most cases the regime s seems to dominate the conclusions are then modified by pointing to factors excluded from the basic model

the role of uncertainty and learning for the success of international climate agreements abstract transnational externalities e g transboundary pollution trade contagious diseases and terrorism warrant coordination and cooperation between governments but this proves often difficult one reason for the meager success is the public good character of many of these economic problems encouraging free riding another reason one might suspect is uncertainty surrounding most environmental problems and in particular climate change this provides often an excuse for remaining inactive paradoxically some recent papers have concluded just the opposite the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of international environmental cooperation in this paper we explain why and under which conditions this can be true however we argue that those conditions are the exception rather than the rule most important we suggest a mechanism for those conditions where learning has a negative effect on the success of cooperation which removes this effect or even turns it into a positive effect our results apply beyond the specifics of climate change to similar problems where cooperation generates positive externalities

moral hazard and the demand for physician services first lessons from a french natural experiment abstract this paper presents empirical results on moral hazard in demand for medical care using a longitudinal dataset on 4578 individuals followed during two years the dataset contains two subgroups one for which a copayment rate of 10 for physician visits was introduced in 1994 and an other for which no change occurred during the period of the study this enables us to use these data as coming from a controlled natural experiment we test if the number of visits per agent was modified by this copayment rate the data reject the hypothesis for office visits but do not for home visits this suggests that there is moral hazard in demand for some physician services but also that when non monetary costs are important small changes in monetary price may not induce any major change in behavior

a welfare analysis of global patent protection in a model with endogenous innovation and foreign direct investment abstract this paper constructs a north south quality ladder model in which foreign direct investment fdi is determined by the endogenous location choice of firms and examines analytically how strengthening patent protection in the south affects welfare in the south strengthening patent protection increases the south s welfare by enhancing innovation and fdi but it also allows the firms with patents to charge higher prices for their goods which decreases welfare however the model shows that the former positive welfare effect outweighs the latter negative effect moreover introducing the strictest form of patent protection in the south that is harmonizing patent protection in the south with that in the north may maximize welfare in the south as well as in the north further a similar result can also be obtained in a nonscale effect model

intellectual property rights and developing country agriculture abstract theoretical studies indicate that the welfare of the developing countries might either be improved or damaged by the strengthening of their own intellectual property rights net gains through their agricultural sectors will be positive if the payoff from new innovations is sufficiently different as compared to the technology exporting countries scattered evidence supports the hypotheses that agricultural r d is responsive to iprs in developing countries but there is also evidence that developed country technology is sufficiently appropriate for developing countries as to offer substantial free rider gains however without iprs it seems unlikely that the agricultural productivity rates in developing countries can begin to catch up with those in developed country agriculture

priority rules and other asymmetric rationing methods in a rationing problem each agent demands a quantity of a certain commodity and the available resources fall short of total demand a rationing method solves this problem at every level of resources and individual demands we impose three axioms consistency with respect to variations of the set of agents upper composition and lower composition with respect to variations of the available resources in the model where the commodity comes in indivisible units the three axioms characterize the family of priority rules where individual demands are met lexicographically according to an exogeneous ordering of the agents in the more familiar model where the commodity is divisible these three axioms plus scale invariance independence of the measurement unit characterize a rich family of methods it contains exactly three symmetric methods giving equal shares to equal demands these are the familiar proportional uniform gains and uniform losses methods the asymmetric methods in the family partition the agents into priority classes within each class they use either the proportional method or a weighted version of the uniform gains or uniform losses methods

censored quantile instrumental variable estimates of the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care efforts to control medical care costs depend critically on how individuals respond to prices i estimate the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care using a censored quantile instrumental variable cqiv estimator cqiv allows estimates to vary across the conditional expenditure distribution relaxes traditional censored model assumptions and addresses endogeneity with an instrumental variable my instrumental variable strategy uses a family member s injury to induce variation in an individual s own price across the conditional deciles of the expenditure distribution i find elasticities that vary from 0 76 to 1 49 which are an order of magnitude larger than previous estimates

a proposal for social pricing of water supply in cote d ivoire we consider the design of a nonlinear social tariff for residential water in cote d ivoire which is a case of a monopolistic private operator supplying a population of heterogeneous consumers the proposed optimal tariff includes an initial social block with a low unit price and higher consumption blocks with a monopoly pricing rule this optimal nonlinear tariff is calibrated using econometric estimates of a panel data residential water demand equation welfare changes associated with moving from the actual tariff to approximations of the optimal pricing system are computed under different tariff scenarios we find that gains in consumer welfare would outweigh losses in producer surplus in a majority of ivorian local communities

sustainable allocation of greenhouse gas emission permits for firms with leontief technologies abstract in this paper we deal with production situations where a cap or limit to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions permitted is imposed fixing a tax for each ton of pollutant emitted is also considered we use bankruptcy rules to define cooperative games with externalities associated with these situations and analyze the existence of coalitionally stable allocations of the emission permits we prove that the constrained equal awards cea rule provides stable allocations and as a direct mechanism it is incentive compatible these two facts have interesting managerial implications to control pollution emissions

carbon dioxide emissions allocation a review carbon dioxide co2 emissions allocation plays a fundamental role in determining reduction responsibility at economy level or emission permits at firm level past decades have seen the development and applications of various methods for co2 emissions allocation this paper provides a literature review of co2 emissions allocation with emphasis on the evolution of allocation methods used it begins with a summary of the most popular allocation principles and criteria that lay a foundation for the development of allocation methods we then classify the existing allocation methods into four groups namely indicator optimization game theoretic and hybrid approaches the main features and findings of past studies are identified and summarized while the fairness principle prevails in earlier studies the efficiency principle has been found to receive increasing attention recently we also present a comparison of the empirical results based on ten popular indicator methods to show how indicator choice affects the allocation results issues related to selecting appropriate methods in co2 emissions allocation are finally discussed further research may be carried out to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency so that the allocation results become more widely acceptable and economically feasible

intellectual property rights violations and spillovers in north south trade abstract the article examines the role of technological spillovers when northern and southern firms compete in quantities on the common world market and when only the northern firm is supposed to conduct innovative activity the intensity of spillovers is interpreted as an indicator of the strength of intellectual property rights ipr protection in this light the paper reconsiders the questions raised in the recent economic analysis of ipr protection in north south relations when and whether the southern countries benefit in welfare terms from protecting ipr how the north fares in this story how large is the conflict between the north and south and what is the optimal level of ipr protection at the world level the paper shows that the common belief that the south generally benefits from relaxing ipr protection while the north is worse off does not carry over in the applied duopoly model with spillovers in this respect the congruence of interests between north and south with respect to southern ipr protection regime should not be an exceptional or even impossible state of affairs

trips trade and technology transfer a north south model of unintentional technology transfer is developed where the stringency of southern patent protection provides the institutional backdrop for a strategic game in a high tech goods market the appropriability regime is set endogenously and combines elements of imperfect southern patent protection with the protection afforded by market made northern technology masking less stringent protection of northern intellectual property can work much like other strategic trade policies therefore developed countries appear to be right in demanding discussion of intellectual property rights in gatt

equity implications of two burden sharing rules for stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations this paper focuses on the equity aspects of international burden sharing for global co2 emission stabilization it first summarizes and classifies equity principles proposed in the published literature of the field of these the authors selected three major equity principles i e egalitarian equity horizontal equity and proportional equality often referred to also as sovereign equity to carry out a detailed examination of two sets of quantitative emission entitlements which are based on two burden sharing rules i e the equal emissions per capita approach and the carbon intensity approach the two burden sharing rules were chosen as not only particularly popular but also because their application results in distinctly different burden sharing among countries to make the two rules comparable we used a global carbon emission path until the year 2050 that leads to an atmospheric co2 concentration of 550 ppm we then used the two rules for allocating the global emissions described by that path to allocate carbon emission entitlements to 67 countries and 9 world regions in general developing countries receive relatively higher entitlements under the equal emissions per capita approach whereas industrialized countries are relatively better off under the carbon intensity approach in some countries and regions emission entitlements as calculated by any of the two burden sharing rules are so low that it would be unrealistic to assume that actual emissions can be limited to the emission entitlements assigned to them without using flexibility mechanisms such as those defined in the kyoto protocol in this sense the calculated entitlements can be also interpreted as the initial allocation of tradable emission allowances of countries or regions nonetheless we considered any numerical determination of resulting carbon trade flows to be outside the scope of our paper

the economic effects of intellectual property right infringements in this article the authors use data from a small but varied sample of u s companies to examine the static welfare consequences of foreign infringement of u s intellectual property rights in five industry sectors they estimate that infringement causes profit losses for the legitimate u s suppliers that are at least one percent as great as their total sales that the static gains to consumers are more than half as great as the losses of legitimate producers and might exceed these losses and that the losses of the legitimate producers exceed the profits of infringers they also find that legitimate producers spend relatively little to combat foreign infringement less than 4 percent as much as their losses from such infringement copyright 1990 by the university of chicago

licensing versus direct investment a model of internalization by the multinational enterprise a firm must decide whether to serve a foreign market by exporting building a foreign branch plant or licensing the production to an existing foreign producer the existence of reputations implies that any licensing agreement must provide a licensee with the incentive to maintain the reputation this creates a motive for the firm to internalize transactions by building a branch plant i e by becoming a multinational the model reflects a more general notion that the inability of the firm to control a licensee s agent s actions can provide incentives for multinational activity the paper explores the determinants of the firm s mode of operation as well as the consequences of certain government policies

game theoretic analysis of a bankruptcy problem from the talmud abstract for three different bankruptcy problems the 2000 year old babylonian talmud prescribes solutions that equal precisely the nucleoli of the corresponding coalitional games a rationale for these solutions that is independent of game theory is given in terms of the talmudic principle of equal division of the contested amount this rationale leads to a unique solution for all bankruptcy problems which always coincides with the nucleolus two other rationales for the same rule are suggested in terms of other talmudic principles needless to say the rule in question is not proportional division

a comparison of optimal tariffs and welfare under no lobbying domestic lobbying and domestic foreign lobbying whether and what type of the lobbying induced trade policies can improve the domestic welfare we show that as compared to the case of no lobbying and the case of domestic lobbying the domestic foreign lobbying may achieve the lowest tariff and may also realise the highest welfare for the domestic country our finding provides a theoretical explanation to the prevalent lobbying competition between asian firms and us firms in usa recently we argue that the domestic foreign lobbying may contribute to a freer trade in the domestic country and lobbying competition may be one of the strongest forces pushing for trade liberalisation

patent protection imitation and the mode of technology transfer abstract this paper analyzes a model in which a firm endowed with a new technology can choose between exports licensing and direct investment as entry modes in a foreign market i endogenize the vintage of the transferred technology and allow for imitation by the licensee subsidiary production and exports circumvent imitation but involve higher costs for the innovating firm the firm can strategically use the vintage of the technology to deter imitation by the licensee as a result transfers to affiliates might be of later vintage than technologies sold to outsiders through modification of the imitation costs the host country s system of patent protection influences the mode of technology transfers which in turn affects the welfare of the recipient economy

using differences in knowledge across neighborhoods to uncover the impacts of the eitc on earnings we develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy we apply this method to characterize the impacts of the earned income tax credit eitc on earnings using administrative tax records covering all eitc eligible lers from 19962009 we begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the eitc schedule the degree of sharp bunching at the exact income level that maximizes eitc refunds by individuals who report self employment income the degree of self employed sharp bunching varies signi cantly

the rand health insurance experiment three decades later we re present and re examine the analysis from the famous rand health insurance experiment from the 1970s on the impact of consumer cost sharing in health insurance on medical spending we begin by summarizing the experiment and its core findings in a manner that would be standard in the current age we then examine potential threats to the validity of a causal interpretation of the experimental treatment effects stemming from different study participation and differential reporting of outcomes across treatment arms finally we re consider the famous rand estimate that the elasticity of medical spending with respect to its out of pocket price is 0 2 emphasizing the challenges associated with summarizing the experimental treatment effects from non linear health insurance contracts using a single price elasticity

trade related intellectual property rights north south trade and biological diversity in the trade related intellectual property rights trips agreement of gatt 1 january 1995 it was agreed to harmonise intellectual property rights ipr on an international level and to include the option for patent protection for all life forms such as plants and animals article 27 3 b patenting however leads to considerable conflicts between international trade and protection of biological diversity which can be illustrated by the example of seed production we make use of a three stage game to show the strategic incentives for implementation of two different property rights regimes patents and farmers rights on competition and biodiversity we show that the southern government has no incentive to acknowledge international patents even if farmers rights do exist the northern producer will always dominate in the output market if patents are applied but without farmers rights biodiversity will not be maintained by the southern government thus total payoff of the northern firm is maximized if both ipr regimes are implemented however if only farmers rights are valid biodiversity will be maximal

licensing versus direct investment implications for economic growth we develop a symmetric two country model of foreign direct investment fdi that captures the internalization decision and its implications for both the rate and magnitude of innovations when mode choice licensing versus fdi is fixed a subsidy to multinational production increases the rate but decreases the size of innovations when mode can switch the rate and size of innovations both increase provided the subsidy is not too large although innovation size decreases for industries where firms already were choosing fdi innovation size increases for industries where firms switch from licensing to fdi because multinationals choose larger innovations than licensors 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

technology transfer under asymmetric information licensing contracts for newly patented innovations are observed to vary along several dimensions including the form and size of the payment to the inventor fixedfee versus some output based royalty the degree of exclusivity and the division of rents in this article we show that theform of the contract can be explained by two problems in technology exchange the superiority of a licensor s precontractual information about the economic value of the innovation and thefact that sharing this information with the licensee mayfacilitate imitation we show that a licensor signals her technology type with an output based payment or royalty and may leave some of the rents with the licensee conditions under which exclusive license contracts linear and nonlinear and nonexclusive linear contracts are used to transfer technology are identified

does emission permit allocation affect co2 cost pass through a theoretical analysis abstract carbon emissions trading may result in co 2 cost pass through and its rate is influenced by a number of factors this paper theoretically investigates how emission permit allocation affects co 2 cost pass through rate by developing a nash cournot oligopolistic market equilibrium model we find that the derived co 2 cost pass through rates are consistent when grandfathering and auctioning rules are used for permit allocation which are higher than that for benchmarking rule it has also been found that the magnitude of co 2 cost pass through rate is relevant to the type of definition product market structure and average carbon intensity of the industry we suggest that policy makers first use benchmarking rule to attract firms to participate at the early stage of emissions trading system ets and then take auctioning rule when ets is well developed

estimating demand elasticities using nonlinear pricing abstract nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care public utilities and telecommunications however this pricing scheme introduces bias into estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes i develop a local elasticity estimation method that uses nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases this method improves over previous approaches by using commonly available observational data and requiring only a single general monotonicity assumption using claims level data on health insurance with two nonlinearities i am able to measure two separate elasticities and find that elasticity declines from 0 26 to 0 09 by the second nonlinearity these estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss this method enables estimation of many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address

international equity and differentiation in global warming policy ne of the major obstacles to reaching a comprehensive agreement on global warming is the setting of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for individual countries long standing tensions between industrialized and developing countries have raised the issue of equity in burden sharing moreover individual industrialized nations have pleaded special circumstances and have sought differentiation in their obligations this paper analyzes alternative rules for distributing tradable carbon dioxide emissions permits a non linear programming model which distinguishes between allocation based and outcome based rules is used to analyze the relative welfare outcomes the model is applied to the world body of nations and yields several important policy implications

a noncooperative view of consistent bankruptcy rules abstract we introduce a game form that captures a noncooperative dimension of the consistency property of bankruptcy rules any consistent and monotone rule is fully characterized by a bilateral principle and consistency like the consistency axiom our game form together with a bilateral principle yields the corresponding consistent bankruptcy rule as a result of a unique outcome of nash equilibria the result holds for a large class of consistent and monotone rules including the constrained equal award the propositional rule and many other well known rules moreover all of the subgame perefect equilibria are coalition proof in the associated game in strategic form journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 and d63

multinationals multi plant economies and the gains from trade a general equilibrium model of a multinational enterprise based on economies of multi plant operation is developed these economies are modelled as arising from the existence of a joint input whose productivity in each production facility is independent of the number of facilities maintained by a firm the multinational thus offers the world increased technical efficiency by eliminating the duplication of the joint input that would occur with independent national firms since this technical efficiency may come at the expense of increased market power the full determinants of home country host country and world welfare are considered

welfare effects of global patent protection this paper uses a simple model of invention and patent protection to examine the welfare effects of extending patent protection from the country where invention takes place to another country that is only a consumer of invented products it is shown that while the welfare of the inventing country certainly rises with the extension of patent protection that of the other country probably falls and may well fall by more than the increase in welfare of the inventing country in particular as patent protection is extended to a larger and larger portion of the world the effect on the welfare of the world as a whole of extending it to the rest of the world becomes negative

price elasticity of expenditure across health care services policymakers in countries around the world are faced with rising health care costs and are debating ways to reform health care to reduce expenditures estimates of price elasticity of expenditure are a key component for predicting expenditures under alternative policies using unique individual level data compiled from administrative records from the chilean private health insurance market i estimate the price elasticity of expenditures across a variety of health care services i find elasticities that range between zero for the most acute service appendectomy and 2 08 for the most elective psychologist visit moreover the results show that at least one third of the elasticity is explained by the number of visits the rest is explained by the intensity of each visit finally i find that high income individuals are five times more price sensitive than low income individuals and that older individuals are less price sensitive than young individuals

the demand for episodes of treatment in the health insurance experiment abstract this paper analyzes claims data from the rand health insurance experiment which were grouped into episodes of treatment the insurance plans in the experiment have coinsurance and a cap on out of pocket spending using new statistical techniques to adjust for the increased sickliness of those who exceed the cap the effects of coinsurance on cost per episode and number of episodes are estimated cost sharing reduced the number of episodes but had little effect on cost per episode people in the experiment responded myopically as their current insurance status changed through the year the price elasticity of spending was about 0 2 throughout the range of coinsurance studied when data permit it the study of episodes complements analyses of annual medical spending by revealing more about how decisions to spend are made within the year

intellectual property piracy in a north south context empirical evidence the protection of intellectual property rights ipr has been a contentious issue for more than 20 years industrialized nations have moved to knowledge based economies and simultaneously trade barriers have fallen making intellectual property ip vulnerable adding to this vulnerability are conflicting international institutional environments belief systems and economic realities the debate over ipr protection has become a significant global trade issue pitting the net technology producing north against the net technology consuming south with this in mind there has been much debate about the impact of alternative ipr regimes tight or loose on the welfare of southern economies policy makers in both the south and the north search for arguments to convince recalcitrant southern countries to follow the northern model of strict ipr regimes the south faced with a dilemma searches for arguments to justify looser regimes or convince its populace that tighter regimes are in the best interest of the nation the objective of this research is to add empirical clarity about the welfare impacts of weak ipr on the firm and host country to this end we employ a novel methodological design and unique context the research design is deductive in that we use the empirical setting of pioneer argentina s a a seller of bioengineered agricultural seeds to test the existing theory of weak ipr impacts in a north south context

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

restoring a fish stock a dynamic bankruptcy problem total allowable catch tac regulating schemes have been introduced in most fisheries tac distribution following the proportional rule based on historical catches implies that harvesters or vessel groups that have captured more in the past and contributed to overfishing are getting larger quotas than groups that have contributed less to overfishing in contrast to this rule a more egalitarian rule the constrained equal award rule is proposed for distributing the tac contingent upon the fishing techniques used by the harvesters it is demonstrated how the fish stock recovery period harvest and profitability may vary according to these two rules

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

residential demand for electricity under inverted block rates evidence from a controlled experiment block rate structures are used extensively in public utility pricing including residential electricity estimating price elasticities in this context is complicated by the resulting nonlinearity of the consumer s budget constraint this article estimates the demand for electricity under inverted block rates using data from a residential rate experiment the study provides an opportunity to obtain short run price elasticities in an experimental setting and to compare alternative estimators developed for nonlinear budget constraints elasticities of demand with respect to individual components of the block rate are developed using a modification of the structural maximum likelihood estimator

the allocation of co2 emissions as a claims problem abstract in the context of multilateral negotiations on climate change this paper proposes to use the claims approach as a reasonable and practicable alternative in order to allocate the admissible co2 emissions per region the proposed methodology entails analyze the application of a broad group of theoretical solutions through the establishment of equity and stability criteria to this regard the empirical analyzing combines several co2 world endowments from meinshausen et al 2009 together with claims forecasts associated with the rcp representative concentration pathways scenarios the results obtained indicate that the constrained equal awards and minimal solutions are clearly equity sensitive given that the co2 emission reduction imposed by the constrained equal awards solution on asia and the oecd are very important and considering the better balance between equity and proportionality associated with the min solution it could be that this latter solution would be the most practicable and acceptable

the value of free water analyzing south africa s free basic water policy this paper analyzes south africa s free basic water policy under which households receive a free water allowance equal to the world health organization s recommended minimum of 6 kiloliters per month i structurally estimate residential water demand evaluate the welfare eects of free water and provide optimal price schedules derived from a social planner s problem i use a unique dataset of monthly metered billing data for 60 000 households for 2002 2008 from a particularly disadvantaged suburb of pretoria the dataset contains rich price variation across 18 dierent nonlinear tarischedules and includes a policy experiment which removed the free allowance i nd that without government subsidy the mean monthly consumption would decrease from 12 6 to 5 6 kiloliters which is below the clean water consumption recommended by the who however it is possible to reallocate the current subsidy to form an optimal tari without a free allowance which would increase welfare while leaving the water provider s revenue unchanged this optimal tariwould also reduce the number of households consuming below the who recommended level

patent protection and r d with endogenous market structure in a model with endogenous number of innovating firms we show that whether patent protection increases r d investment is ambiguous and depends on the market demand function and the cost of r d if the market size increases with number of firms patent protection reduces r d investment if the cost of r d is sufficiently high and higher product differentiation increases the possibility of lower r d investment under patent protection if the market size does not increase with number of firms patent protection never reduces r d investment we find that welfare is lower under patent protection than under no patent protection

estimation and allocation of cost savings from collaborative co2 abatement in china abstract as an increasingly accepted way of relieving global warming collaborative carbon dioxide co2 abatement could improve not only emission performance but also cost effectiveness of abatement in this study we analyze the cost savings and benefits of collaborative abatement in the context of china by using data envelopment analysis dea approach specifically we establish 63 collaborative abatement scenarios by dividing the mainland china into six main regions and then estimate the costs savings in each collaboration abatement scenario through investigating the gains for each region in various scenarios the best collaborative partners for each region are suggested from perspectives of benefit maximization furthermore the contribution of each region to collaborative abatement cost saving is also differentiated with the shapley value approach

reducing conflict in global warming policy the potential of equity as a unifying principle abstract international agreement on global warming mitigation is likely to prove difficult efficiency based policies will result in disparate costs and benefits among nations and thus hinder cooperation this paper suggests that consideration be given to an equitable sharing of the economic impacts of global warming policy acknowledging that there is no universally held concept of equity the policy implications of several alternatives are explored because there is considerable variation in these implications it will be important for decision makers to clarify their preferred concepts of equity during the course of their negotiations on policies to address global warming

intellectual property rights and the mode of technology transfer abstract transferring technology in an environment where patent protection is uncertain can pose significant risks to an innovating firm s ability to appropriate rents this paper incorporates asymmetric information in a screening game where the innovating firm has the choices of licensing a new product at arm s length to a foreign firm exporting it or licensing it to a subsidiary subsidiary production avoids the risk of imitation but involves higher costs for the innovating firm the gains to the southern country from the lack of intellectual property right protection may be offset by strategic behavior by northern firms who opt for technology transfer via subsidiary or monopoly production

patent protection southern innovation and welfare in a north south trade model in a north south trade model we analyse the implications of southern patent protection on southern innovation profits and welfare southern patent protection may make the northern firm worse off and the southern firm better off by increasing the southern firm s incentive for innovation and affecting the nature of competition in the world market the impact of southern patent protection on a country s welfare and on world welfare depends on the cost of southern innovation and the degree of product substitutability we provide important insights into the outcomes of international negotiations regarding patent enforcement in the southern countries

the design of stable international environmental agreements economic theory and political economy international environmental agreements typically strive for the solution of a common property resource dilemma since the sovereignty of states precludes external enforcement international environmental agreements must be self enforcing game theoretical models explain why rewards and punishments imposed through the environmental externality generally fail to enforce full cooperation therefore environmental treaties incorporate provisions that enhance the incentives for participation such as transfers sanctions and linkage to other negotiation topics in international politics moreover interaction with markets and governments as well as the rules and procedures adopted in the negotiation process influence the design and the effectiveness of an international environmental agreement

interpreting bargaining strategies of developing countries in climate negotiations a quantitative approach despite the efforts made during the last climate conferences cops countries participating in the negotiation process are still far from reaching an agreement on the implementation of a new post kyoto climate regime the growing role played by developing countries in negotiations is one of the main causes behind the deadlock further attention should therefore be paid to the composition of the alliances formed by developing countries in order to better understand the key structural features driving their bargaining positions by applying a cluster analysis this paper aims to investigate the role played by heterogeneity in specific characteristics of developing countries in explaining divergent costs and benefits associated with alternative climate negotiation outcomes by clustering developing countries according to their economic geographic environmental energy and social characteristics the paper presents some considerations on climate political economy strategies in these countries with respect to existing bargaining coalitions