the long run relationship between nominal interest rates and inflation the fisher equation revisited stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0022 2879 28199602 2928 3a1 3c102 3atlrbni 3e2 0 co 3b2 2journal of money credit and banking is currently published by ohio state university press your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals ohio press html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgmon aug 27 13 58 08 2007

the cliometrics of international migration a survey abstract this is a survey of some of the key studies in the literature on international migration in history that may be described as cliometric this literature uses the concepts and approaches of applied economics to investigate a range of historical issues and there are strong parallels with the questions that have been addressed in the literature on contemporary migrations here i focus on the period 1850 1940 and chiefly on migration from europe to the new world the survey is organized around six themes that include the forces driving migration over time and across space the assimilation of migrants and their effects on wages and income distribution in source and destination countries and the evolution of immigration policy although this literature has drawn heavily on the tool kit of applied economists it also provides a wider perspective on many of the issues that concern migration today

economic dispatch savings in the coal fired power sector an empirical study of china abstract the current equal share dispatch approach has often been criticized for its negative influence on the electricity system operation in china which worsens the energy security environmental sustainability and affordability problems to provide references for the on going electricity market reform this study employs an optimization model to quantify the economic dispatch savings in the coal fired power sector key findings are summarized as follows 1 the heat rates of 2803 coal generators in china range from 273 91 gce kwh to 348 38 gce kwh units in 2014 and the great differences among these generators at different geographical areas exhibit the necessity for economic dispatch 2 5 67 of the coal used for power generation could be saved from economic dispatch in a provincial level the monetary value of which can reduce the average electricity price by 0 0058 yuan kwh in 2014 3 three major political and economic challenges hinder the transition from the current dispatch mode to economic dispatch namely the insufficient running hours for cost recovery limited cross border trading due to electricity over supply and local protectionism and the political economy problems from generators of different ownership types

what are the effects of different tax policies on china s coal fired power generation industry an empirical research from a network slacks based measure perspective abstract data envelopment analysis dea has been widely applied to evaluate performance in the power generation industry nevertheless most studies view the production system as a black box few studies attempt to deal with the case of china s thermal power generation industry in the framework of network dea separating the overall power generation process into two internal stages the production stage and the pollutant abatement stage with the pollutant emissions as intermediate products this paper employs a network slacks based measure sbm model to research the production efficiency and environmental efficiency of china s coal fired power generation industry from 2006 to 2010 under two different tax policies these two tax policies are the pollution tax policy to negatively penalize for emissions of pollutants and the tax deductions or exemptions policy to positively encourage environmental protection the empirical results show that the effect of compulsory measures was better than that of self motivation measures for china s environmental protection in this observation period another important finding is that the year 2008 was a turning point in the five years statistical analysis shows that the effects of the two different policies were statistically independent

macroeconomics and the term structure this paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance the topic is important to investors and also to policymakers who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer term interest rates and take actions to influence those rates the simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis which posits that long term interest rates are expectations of future aver age short term rates in this paper we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis we review models that explain these anomalies using time varying risk premia although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role finally while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis jel e31 e43 e52 e58

measuring unified efficiency of chinese fossil fuel power plants intermediate approach combined with group heterogeneity and window analysis abstract as a newly proposed method intermediate approach has several unique features relative to conventional radial and non radial approaches this study contributes to the dea literature by combining intermediate approach with group heterogeneity in a time horizon this extended methodology has two important advantages since it can separate inefficiency related to different production frontiers originated from heterogeneity issue and provide steady results of time effects across periods empirically this method is used to examine unified efficiency of chinese fossil fuel power plants at provincial levels from 2005 to 2015 all provinces are classified into two regional groups our main findings are as follows first there exists significant group heterogeneity between coastal and inland provinces where coastal provinces outperform inland provinces second there are considerable differences in unified efficiency measures across provinces for most observations best practice gap ratio is the most important driving factor furthermore the relative importance of three decomposed indicators varies sharply across provinces finally the concept of managerial disposability should attract sufficient attention when designing environmental policies thus there should be more combined contributions from eco technology advancements along with managerial efficiency improvements by corporate leaders and policy makers this can a new direction for china s environmental policy

the effects of electricity reforms on productivity and efficiency of china s fossil fired power plants an empirical analysis abstract this paper investigates the effects of electricity reforms on productivity and efficiency of china s generation plants based on the third industrial census data and the first economic census data partial factor productivity pfp analysis indicates that the productivity improvements in labor and capital inputs associated with the reforms are approximately 26 and 45 respectively the effect of the reforms on fuel expense is weakly significant but there is evidence of significant productivity improvement in fuel usage further total factor productivity tfp analysis shows that the efficiency gain from the reforms is still significant when the substitution effect of labor and capital inputs are considered though the magnitude is much lower than that of the pfp analysis the effect of the reforms on technical efficiency becomes weakly significant when fuel expense is further included in tfp analysis but a significant positive effect is expected if fuel input is measured in physical quantity

inflation real interest rates and the bond market a study of uk nominal and index linked government bond prices this paper estimates expected future real interest rates and inflation rates from observed prices of uk government nominal and index linked bonds the estimation method takes account of imperfections in the indexation of uk index linked bonds it assumes that expected log returns on all bonds are equal and that expected real interest rates and inflation follow simple time series processes whose parameters can be estimated from the cross section of bond prices the extracted inflation expectations forecast actual future inflation more accurately than nominal yields do the estimated real interest rate is highly variable at short horizons but comparatively stable at long horizons changes in real rates and expected inflation are strongly negatively correlated at short horizons but not at long horizons

are inflation expectations rational abstract several recent papers report evidence of an apparent statistical bias in inflation expectations and interpret these findings as overturning the rational expectations hypothesis in this paper we investigate the validity of such an interpretation we present a computational dynamic general equilibrium model capable of generating aggregate behavior similar to the data along several dimensions by construction model agents form rational expectations we run a standard regression on equilibrium realizations of inflation and inflation expectations over sample periods corresponding to those tests performed on actual data and find evidence of an apparent bias in inflation expectations our experiments suggest that this incorrect inference is largely the product of a small sample problem exacerbated by short run learning dynamics in response to infrequent shifts in monetary policy regimes

assessing the anchoring of inflation expectations abstract this paper proposes a new approach to assess the degree of anchoring of inflation expectations we extend the static setup of the predominant news regressions by introducing exponential smooth transition autoregressive dynamics our approach provides estimates of a market perceived inflation target as well as the strength of the anchor that holds expectations at that target a cross country study based on a new data set of daily break even inflation rates for the us emu uk and sweden shows that the degree of anchoring varies substantially across countries and expectations horizons

testing the term structure of interest rates using a stationary vector autoregression with regime switching abstract the expectations model of the term structure for us data on three and six month treasury bills for the period 1962 1 1987 3 is explored the analysis allows for the nonstationarity of the data and for unobserved stochastic switches of regime by estimating vars in the yield spread and the change in the three month rate which allow the time series processes to change between regimes in contrast to other results for the expectations model such as those of hamilton 1988 mankiw and miron 1986 and others we find that the data do not reject the model

monetary policy trade offs and the correlation between nominal interest rates and real output the authors present a structural model of the u s economy that combines their price contracting specification with a term structure relationship an aggregate demand curve and a monetary policy reaction function the model matches important features of postwar data well and provides a structural explanation of the correlation between real output and the short term nominal rate of interest the authors perform a battery of monetary policy experiments that show that as viewed through the lens of this model monetary policy has struck a good balance recently among competing monetary policy objectives copyright 1995 by american economic association

dynamic specifications in optimizing trend deviation macro models abstract as noted in surveys by goodfriend and king in b bernanke j rotemberg eds nber macroeconomics annual mit press cambridge ma 1997 pp 231 283 and walsh monetary theory and policy mit press cambridge ma and exemplified by models analyzed in taylor 1999 there is encouraging progress in developing optimizing trend deviation macro models that provide useful insights into the transmission and design of monetary policy several controversial features of a minimalist trend deviation model with optimizing households firms and bond traders are examined dynamic specifications are suggested to improve the data based realism while preserving the simplicity of the minimalist model

inefficiency persistence and heterogeneity in colombian electricity utilities abstract the electricity reform in colombia has exhibited gains in terms of reliability but its effects on firm efficiency and service quality have not been clear previous studies evaluating the performance of distribution companies after the reform have not found evidence of improvements although large differences in efficiency have been found among firms this suggests high inefficiency persistence and heterogeneity in the colombian distribution sector in this paper we propose an extension of dynamic stochastic frontier models that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in the inefficiency persistence and in the technology the model incorporates total expenses service quality and energy losses in an efficiency analysis of colombian distributors over fifteen years after the reform we identify the presence of high inefficiency persistence in the sector and important differences between firms in particular rural companies and firms with small customers present low persistence and evidence the largest gains in efficiency during the period however increases in efficiency are only manifested during thelast five years when the main improvements in service quality and energy losses are presented overall inefficiency persistence customer density and consumption density are found to be important criteria to be considered for regulatory purposes

sustainability of energy production and use in iran abstract the issue of oil and gas policies in iran is rather complex in the present investigation it is aimed to formulate plans for increasing the capacity of the country s energy production analysis of energy consumption pattern over last decades is indicative of inefficient usage the low energy prices in iran do not reflect economic costs further distortions exist in the tariff structures of most energy sources and in their relative prices it is recognized that price reform is a key policy element for promotion of energy conservation and fuel substitution with renewable energies mitigation policies in the energy sector are crucial to iran s overall policies emission of greenhouse gases can be reduced from 752 156 to 560 791 gg co 2 equivalents in 2010 by implementing the policies proposed for the energy sub sectors enhancing energy efficiency including combined cycle power generation has proved to be the most economic option for greenhouse gases reduction in energy sector iran s energy consumption pattern is unsustainable and consumption oriented

eco efficiency change in power plants using a slacks based measure for the meta frontier malmquist luenberger productivity index abstract malmquist luenberger index is a popular index deployed for evaluating eco efficiency and productivity change over a certain period when both desirable and undesirable factors are jointly produced in some production processes however conventional data envelopment analysis dea models used for computing this index are unable to distinguish the various technologies employed by the decision making units when heterogeneity exists in the technology the meta frontier malmquist luenberger approach is adopted to evaluate eco efficiency and productivity change over a period when undesirable outputs are incorporated in the analysis of efficiency in this paper a new slacks based dea measure is developed and used to compute the meta frontier malmquist luenberger productivity index this approach is then deployed to evaluate 48 iranian thermal power plants productivity change in three different categories steam gas and combined cycle over an eight year period of restructuring in the power industry this technique enables the calculation of eco efficiency change of thermal power plants operating under different technologies as well as the technology gap ratios and measures the extent to which the efficiency frontiers of individual categories of power plants deviate from the meta frontier the results reveal that the last years of the restructuring period saw a greater rate of productivity growth compared to the initial years and evidence of significant eco efficiency improvements over the period in all the three types of the thermal power plants finally it is expected that the findings in this study aid policy makers and power industry regulators in developing sustainable energy policies towards environmental protection and planning power plant operations

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

dea approach for unified efficiency measurement assessment of japanese fossil fuel power generation this study discusses a new dea data envelopment analysis approach to measure the unified operational and environmental efficiency of energy firms it is widely known that they produce not only desirable good outputs e g electricity but also undesirable bad outputs e g co2 as a result of their plant operations the proposed approach incorporates an output separation desirable and undesirable outputs for the performance evaluation of energy firms in addition to the output separation this study separates inputs into energy and non energy inputs consequently the proposed approach incorporates not only the output separation but also the input separation within a computational framework of dea non radial measurement this study compares the proposed approach with other previous dea approaches used for the performance evaluation of energy firms after the methodological comparison this study applies the proposed approach for measuring the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation this empirical study confirms that the implementation of kyoto protocol 2005 has not been effective on the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation during the observed period 2004 2008 although the empirical result is inconsistent with the current japanese environmental policy under kyoto protocol it contains policy implications for guiding the future direction of japanese environmental policy on the electric power industry

effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

theories of cartel stability and the joint executive committee this article reexamines the experience of the joint executive committee an 1880s railroad cartel to assess the applicability of the green and porter 1984 and rotemberg and saloner 1986 theories of price wars after discussing necessary modifications to the theories i estimate a number of dynamic models to explore the causes of price wars the cyclical nature of pricing and the possibility that secret price cuts may have been given the estimates provide some support for the predictions of the first theory

returns to scale and damages to scale on u s fossil fuel power plants radial and non radial approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment paying attention to a methodological bias i e different methods produce different results dea is analytically classified into radial and non radial approaches the radial approach determines the level of unified operational and environmental efficiency by measuring an inefficiency score the score indicates the distance of a projection from an observed performance to an efficiency frontier in contrast the non radial approach determines the level of unified efficiency by measuring a total amount of slacks because each slack indicates inefficiency to avoid the methodological bias this study considers the use of radial and non radial approaches in this study we consider a production process where all organizations produce not only desirable good but also undesirable bad outputs as a result of their business operations to unify the two types of outputs this study discusses the concept of disposability which is separated into natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified efficiency by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change under the two disposability concepts this study discusses how to measure rts returns to scale under natural disposability and dts damages to scale corresponding to rts on undesirable outputs under managerial disposability the two scale measures are analytically discussed by the proposed radial and non radial approaches with scscs or without scscs where scscs indicate strong complementary slackness conditions an illustrative example on u s fossil fuel power plants indicates a policy implication that they need to introduce new technology for environmental protection this study also discusses a necessity of examining a methodological bias in energy studies empirical findings identified in this study document the practicality of the proposed approaches to measure rts dts

share green growth regional evaluation of green output performance in china abstract reducing carbon emissions is much more difficult than reducing other pollutants through current technology promoting the efficiency of energy use and developing clean energy are the only two economically feasible approaches for the future however without low carbon technology pursuing green growth could negatively affect production activities in this study we develop a directional distance function ddf model based on the slacks of the output oriented slack based measure along an endogenously determined directional vector we can calculate the efficiency scores by reducing the undesirable output and expanding desirable output simultaneously the global malmquist index is integrated with the ddf model to capture the dynamic change of output performance based on the output performance of green growth we use counterfactual thinking to evaluate gdp losses caused by limiting carbon emissions the empirical study using the provincial data of china shows that technological progress not efficiency change pushes green growth in china we also find that pursuing green growth in china would lead to a gdp loss of 7 8 furthermore a sub regional analysis shows that the eastern regions were almost immune to the strict carbon control policy while the midwestern regions were affected severely to alleviate the gdp loss we offer suggestion on setting up a green growth sharing mechanism among regions

efficiency evaluation of china s provincial power systems based on the dynamic network slacks based measure model abstract a power system contains generation transmission and distribution divisions policy reforms and management mechanisms may affect the environmental efficiency of certain divisions or the integrated power system this study applied the dynamic network slacks based measure dnsbm model to analyze the environmental efficiency of both the power systems and their divisions of provincial administrative areas in china and investigated the effects of the external environmental factors it employed scenario analysis to further explore the feasibility of separating the distribution from the transmission division the results indicate that 1 the dnsbm model takes the internal structure of the power system into account and provides a new perspective to seek the sources of the system and division efficiencies 2 customer density and energy consumption intensity have significant impacts on the system and division efficiencies while the power generation structure only affects the environmental efficiency of the generation division 3 the scenario analysis shows that the policy of separating power plants from grids improved the system efficiency to which the improvement in generation division is the main contributor and separating distribution from transmission may have great potential for enhancing the efficiencies of power systems

a metafrontier approach for measuring an environmentally sensitive productivity growth index this paper presents an alternative environmentally sensitive productivity growth index to incorporate group heterogeneities into a conventional malmquist luenberger productivity growth index the p

systematic departures from the frontier a framework for the analysis of firm inefficiency departures from a production or cost frontier may reflect the systematic effect of conditions that contribute to inefficiency to test whether some portion of frontier function departures can be systematically explained the frontier inefficiency error component is modeled as a function of various causal factors and a random component the functional form of the inefficiency error term model is chosen to assure strict one sidedness preliminary empirical results generated from electric utility data suggest the superiority of including both systematic and random components in the inefficiency error term

the un importance of forward looking behavior in price specifications the seminal work of edmund s phelps 1978 john b taylor 1980 and guillermo a calvo 1983 developed forward looking models of price determination that imparted inertia to the price level these models incorporate expectations of future prices and excess demand by imposing constraints typically lag lead symmetry constraints that force future variables to enter the specification in this paper the author tests the empirical significance of future prices in specifications like those of taylor he finds that expectations of future prices are empirically unimportant in explaining price and inflation behavior however the dynamics of a model that includes a purely backward looking inflation specification differ substantially and not altogether pleasingly from those with a forward looking specification copyright 1997 by ohio state university press

do stationary risk premia explain it all evidence from the term structure abstract predictable variations in excess returns have often been attributed to the presence of time varying risk premia in this paper we use an insight based upon new techniques from time series analysis to test whether stationary risk premia can alone explain the behavior of excess returns to long bonds relative to rolling over short rates surprisingly we reject this hypothesis using u s t bill returns we then show that either permanent shocks to the risk premia and or rationally anticipated shifts in the interest rate process could produce anomalous results

cartel organization price discrimination and selection of transatlantic migrants 1899 1911 we study the effects of trans atlantic passenger shipping cartels on tourist business and migrant traffic collusion had a smaller effect on first and second class service relative to third class service its effects were proportionately stronger eastbound but less important in absolute numbers given smaller eastbound traffic collusion driven consumer substitution across classes was small but non negligible thus collusion affected migrant traffic far more than tourist business traffic we also confirm that collusion led to higher fares across all cabin classes especially for steerage we construct and calibrate an analytical model and show that the pattern of observed prices and volumes are consistent with a profit maximizing cartel thus buttressing the hypothesis that the collusion effects were causal finally we document that collusion led to positive selection of migrants as measured by literacy rates and financial resources

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

the impact of industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency in china abstract regional disparity in terms of industrial energy efficiency is noticeable in china due to the unbalanced economic progress in past decades analyzing the provincial industrial energy efficiency and its influencing factors is of great significance to formulate differentiated policies to date the influence of many social economic factors on the industrial energy efficiency have been examined but the impact of the inter industry structure has almost been ignored in this paper the slacks based measure model incorporating undesirable output is applied to evaluate the industrial energy efficiency both at the provincial level and the sectoral level in china for the period 2010 to 2016 then industrial structure efficiency is introduced which reflects the inter industry structure and takes the sectoral level energy efficiency into consideration and the impact of the industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency is tested by tobit regression model the results show that huge discrepancies of provincial industrial energy efficiency exist and the industrial structure efficiency is confirmed to be a determinative factor to the provincial industrial energy efficiency with the coefficient of 0 525 policy recommendations are provided for adjusting the provincial inter industry structure and improving the industrial energy efficiency

passenger shipping cartels and their effect on trans atlantic migration abstract we investigate the impact of passenger shipping cartels on trans atlantic migration during the early twentieth century we assemble from primary sources a detailed database of passenger flows and cartel operations and show that cartel operation reduced migratory flows by approximately 20 to 25 further we show that there was no strong intertemporal substitution in migration to north america at least in the short run and therefore that the effects of cartel operation were not undone by later migration lastly we find that cartel operation had no appreciable effect on the variability of migration flows providing evidence against the notion that unfettered competition was destabilizing to turn of the century transportation markets

shifting endpoints in the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper links the term structure to perceptions of monetary policy long horizon forecasts of short rates required by no arbitrage term structure models are heavily influenced by the endpoints or limiting conditional forecasts of the short rate process common assumptions that the short rate is mean reverting or contains a unit root are shown to generate unrealistic yield predictions failures occur because these assumptions inadequately account for historical shifts in market perceptions of the policy target for inflation this paper links endpoint shifts to agent learning about shifts in long term policy goals shifting endpoints in short rate processes significantly improve yield predictions

an application of core theory to the analysis of ocean shipping markets he theory of the core implies that competition is frequently unstable and inefficient under some fairly common cost and demand conditions in particular when costs are characterized by indivisibilities for example avoidable costs and demand is finely divisible the core may be empty in other words a competitive equilibrium frequently fails to exist and as a consequence competitive interactions between firms cannot generate an efficient allocation of resources there are various means of addressing the empty core problem collusion between producers for example can limit competition efficiently thus cartelization may be an efficient response to the cost and demand conditions that preclude the existence of a competitive equilibrium in this article i test the ability of the theory to explain the organization of ocean shipping markets an examination of these markets reveals that the theory works well firms in liner shipping markets where costs are indivisible while demand is finely divisible have colluded consistently since the industry s birth in the mid nineteenth century conversely bulk shipping markets where demand is indivisible and hence empty core problems are not a serious concern have always been organized competitively this evidence is consistent with the theory s predictions

measuring the efficiency of grid companies in china a bootstrapping non parametric meta frontier approach abstract the unbundling policy reform of power industry has become a worldwide trend since 1980s there are quite many studies focusing on the efficiency changes of transmission and distribution sectors in european and latin american countries while few reports on china s issues have been found this paper employs a nonparametric frontier estimation combined with meta frontier and bootstrapping method to measure the productive efficiency and changes in the decomposition index for china s 31 grid companies from 2004 to 2013 in addition it further employs tobit regression model to analyze the influences of relevant policies and heterogeneity factors such as natural conditions and economic development the results indicate that the grouping approach extends the application of non parametric data envelopment analysis which may decrease the assumption of homogeneity for the decision making units and provide better efficiency estimates by increasing the credibility of the evaluation results overall productive efficiency increased during the whole study period with technology progress the main contributor to this improvement efficiency trends fluctuated with changes in economic development and power supply situation and the economics and customer density had positive effects on productive efficiency while the influence of clean power proportion is negative

testing the expectations hypothesis when interest rates are near integrated nominal interest rates are unlikely to be generated by unit root processes using data on short and long interest rates from eight developed and six emerging economies we test the expectations hypothesis using cointegration methods under the assumption that interest rates are near integrated if the null hypothesis of no cointegration is rejected we then test whether the estimated cointegrating vector is consistent with that suggested by the expectations hypothesis the results show support for cointegration in 10 of the 14 countries we consider and the cointegrating vector is similar across countries however the parameters differ from those suggested by theory we relate our findings to existing literature on the failure of the expectations hypothesis and to the role of term premia

consumer surplus enhancing collusion and trade that collusion among sellers hurts buyers is a central tenet in economics we provide an oligopoly model in which collusion can raise consumer surplus a differentiated product duopoly operates in two geographically separated markets each market is home to a single firm but can import at a cost from the foreign firm under some circumstances a perfect cartel relative to duopolistic competition raises the price of the imported good and lowers the price of the home good this raises welfare for most consumers and increases aggregate consumer surplus a similar possibility result applies to autarky our analysis applies beyond the spatial setting

the power industry reform in china 2015 policies evaluations and solutions abstract more than a decade ago in china s electric power industry the investment for generation side and power grids was inadequate and the gap between power supply and demand kept enlarging in order to relief the problems above power industry reform has been carried out in 2002 under the guidance of no 5 document by the central government the reform in 2002 has made a series of achievements including the enhancement of operation efficiency of power industry and the fulfillment of power demand all over the country during the past decade as the rapid development of the society and economy the external environment of china s power industry has changed greatly however the pricing and planning mechanism of china s power industry still operates following the requirements of no 5 document this has led to a number of problems including twisted pricing mechanism irrational power system planning inefficient utilization of renewable energy and so on these problems have not only hindered the development of power industry in china for quite a long time but also brought negative influence on the business operation of upstream and downstream industries therefore chinese government has issued no 9 document in 2015 and launched a new round of power industry reform policies were carried out to form new pricing mechanism new policies about renewable energy generation and power system planning process to solve the problems mentioned above this paper has reviewed the history of reform in 2002 and summarized the existing problems of china s power industry besides the main policies of no 9 document were deeply analyzed and their significance as well as backwards were illustrated at last solutions were proposed accordingly and these solutions have considerable theoretical and practical significance to china s electric power industry reform in the future

term structure views of monetary policy under alternative models of agent expectations abstract term structure models and many descriptions of the transmission of monetary policy rest on the empirical relevance of the expectations hypothesis small differences in the perceived policy reaction function in var models of agent expectations strongly influence the relevance in the transmission mechanism of the expected short rate component of bond yields mean reverting or difference stationary characterizations of interest rates require large and volatile term premiums to match the observable term structure however short rate descriptions that capture shifting perceptions of long horizon inflation evident in survey data support a more substantial term structure role for short rate expectations

was there a peso problem in the u s term structure of interest rates 1979 1982 during the period following october 1979 through 1982 the u s federal reserve allowed interest rates to fluctuate widely in contrast to its previous policy of targeting these rates in the 1970s the policy was abandoned in 1982 in favor of an operating procedure that reduced the variation in interest rates this paper implements an estimation method to identify from the term structure of eurodollar returns the market s beliefs that the federal reserve may revert to interest rate targeting the model is not rejected and gives plausible estimates of the probability of a switch in monetary regimes copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

rules communication and collusion narrative evidence from the sugar institute case detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion the sugar institute did not fix prices or output prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to make price cutting more transparent meetings were used to interpret and adapt the agreement coordinate on jointly profitable actions ensure unilateral actions were not misconstrued as cheating and determine whether cheating had occurred in contrast to established theories cheating did occur but sparked only limited retaliation partly due to the contractual relations with selling agents jel l13 l41 this paper reexamines the cartel problem by studying the private discussions within one cartel while we find much that is in accord with george j stigler s 1964 basic insight that firms would structure an agreement conscious of their later incentive to cheat on it we also uncover puzzles for established theory and identify elements that a richer theory should encompass especially regarding the role of communication in collusion our window into the inner workings of a cartel is a remarkable series of notes on the weekly meetings of the sugar institute this trade association was formed in december 1927 in the wake of several years of falling margins and excess capacity by 14 firms comprising nearly all the cane sugar refining capacity in the united states it operated until 1936 when the supreme court ruled its practices illegal among the top executives in regular attendance at the meetings was louis v place vice president of mccahan a midsize refinery in philadelphia place who was in charge of all activities of the company except production and raw sugar purchases wrote over 500 pages of single spaced detailed

making real progress toward more sustainable societies using decision support models and tools introduction to the special volume academics politicians professionals and the general public are aware that without stewarding our planet s natural resources man is on the pathway towards a global collapse over the next three decades mankind is expected to consume an estimated 140 billion tons of minerals ores fossil fuels and biomass per year three times current consumption social welfare and human wellbeing are threatened with the scarcity of natural resources consequently nations and their societies are also at risk of collapse the readers of this special volume will find a compilation of scholarly research papers with real life applications that take the challenge of proposing decision making models and tools to address sustainability challenges in integrative ways the main focus of this special volume is integration of sustainability dimensions economic social environmental ethical and time into decision support models and to identify pathways to achieve more sustainable societies the majority of the research in this special volume 74 percent focuses on environmental and economic dimensions only 26 percent integrated social dimensions with them methodologically a range of mathematical models and tools are presented to support prescriptive decision making with some descriptive models integrated to support decision makers in solving practical problems across a variety of industries and scenarios the breadth and complexity of issues facing organizations and society requires innovative applications of these methodologies the concerns cover a spectrum ranging from energy to solid waste management a multitude of levels from broad based policy concerns to strategic inter organizational sustainable supply chain management and significantly shop floor operational issues are also covered the variety of problems and solutions exemplifies the potential for modelling and operations research for addressing some of our world s most pressing concerns

interaction between output efficiency and environmental efficiency evidence from the textile industry in jiangsu province china environmental efficiency improvement has played a crucial role in the theory and practice of stimulating clean production this paper analyzes the interaction between environmental efficiency and output efficiency particularly whether they reinforce each other or compete with each other on the basis of a data set of 137 firms in the textile industry in china s jiangsu province in the first stage generalized data envelopment analysis is applied to calculate efficiency measures of energy waste water waste gas soot and output efficiency taking capital labor water and energy as inputs industrial output value as desirable output and waste water discharges waste gas and soot emissions as undesirable outputs in the second stage analysis a structural equation model with latent variables is applied to analyze the interaction between the latent variable environmental efficiency measured by the four observed environmental indicators and output efficiency taking also into account the endogenous variable profit the main outcomes of the structural equation model are the following firstly environmental efficiency negatively impacts on profit while profit positively impacts on environmental efficiency in a similar vein output efficiency is found to depress profit while profit increases output efficiency thirdly environmental efficiency has a positive impact on output efficiency while there is no effect of output efficiency on environmental efficiency fourthly taxes impair a firm s output efficiency from the findings it follows that a swap of general taxes for an energy tax is likely to improve both output efficiency and energy efficiency the latter outcome implies a win win situation which will facilitate the further implementation and adoption of environmental policy finally the paper illustrates the applicability of structural equation modeling in efficiency analysis

the impact of china s electricity price deregulation on coal and power industries two stage game modeling abstract the regulated price mechanism in china s power industry has attracted much criticism because of its incapability to optimize the allocation of resources to build an open orderly competitive and complete power market system the chinese government launched an unprecedented marketization reform in 2015 to deregulate the electricity price this paper examines the impact of electricity price deregulation at the industry level we first construct two stage dynamic game models to portrait the interaction between the coal and coal fired power industries using the models we compare analytically the equilibriums with and without electricity price regulation concerning electricity price electricity generation coal price and coal production the theoretical analyses find three regulated electricity price intervals that differentiate the reform impacts afterward we collect empirical data to estimate the model parameters the influences on the two industries in terms of market outcome and industrial profitability are simulated our results suggest that the current regulated electricity price falls within the medium interval which means deregulation will result in higher electricity price but lower coal price less coal production and less electricity generation the robustness analyses show that our results hold with respect to the electricity generation efficiency and price sensitivity of electricity demand

measuring energy performance with sectoral heterogeneity a non parametric frontier approach abstract evaluating economy wide energy performance is an integral part of assessing the effectiveness of a country s energy efficiency policy non parametric frontier approach has been widely used by researchers for such a purpose this paper proposes an extended non parametric frontier approach to studying economy wide energy efficiency and productivity performances by accounting for sectoral heterogeneity relevant techniques in index number theory are incorporated to quantify the driving forces behind changes in the economy wide energy productivity index the proposed approach facilitates flexible modelling of different sectors production processes and helps to examine sectors impact on the aggregate energy performance a case study of china s economy wide energy efficiency and productivity performances in its 11th five year plan period 2006 2010 is presented it is found that sectoral heterogeneities in terms of energy performance are significant in china meanwhile china s economy wide energy productivity increased slightly during the study period mainly driven by the technical efficiency improvement a number of other findings have also been reported

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

green efficiency and environmental subsidy evidence from thermal power firms in china abstract to achieve green development ample environmental subsidies have been invested into many energy intensive firms such as thermal power firms in china investigations of the effects of this kind of subsidy can help to provide specific and important implications for ongoing regulations unlike previous studies on the national regional or sectoral level this paper measures green efficiency and its compositions of thermal power firms and studies the impact of environmental subsidies on green efficiency by using the classical slacks based measure and tobit model the results show that the average green efficiency ranges from 0 509 to 0 663 during 2010 2015 which is much lower than the general efficiency the green scale efficiency is the main reason for the low green efficiency thus indicating large room for improvement environmental subsidies negatively affect green efficiency and its decompositions from 2010 to 2013 the negative effect becomes weak and insignificant in 2014 and the environmental subsidies start to significantly promote green efficiency and its decompositions in 2015 according to our findings some implications relating to improving green scale efficiency increasing the intensity of environmental subsidies to firms and strengthening their supervision are proposed

monetary policy shifts and long term interest rates the pure expectations hypothesis peh serves as the benchmark model for the relationship between yields on bonds of different maturities when coupled with rational expectations however empirical renderings of the model fail miserably i explore the possibility that failure to account for changes in monetary policy regime explains much of the failure of the peh estimating changing monetary regimes in conjunction with the peh significantly improves its performance the predicted spread between the long and short rates is highly correlated with the actual spread the standard deviation of the theoretical spread is nearly identical to that of the actual spread

a capacity investment model of wind power with uncertain supply price under high penetration rate abstract with the rapid development of renewable energy the proportion of wind power in power supply has grown significantly also it influences the power price fluctuation since the marginal cost of wind power is almost zero the growth of wind power s penetration rate has led to a crowding out effect and challenged traditional power generation technology substantially reducing the power price in the market in perfect competition market the real time balance between supply and demand of power is regulated by the real time power price fluctuation so this paper models the intermittence of wind power as uncertain supply and develops a capacity investment model under the uncertainties of both supply and demand we introduce priority dispatch elasticity to describe the crowding out effect and take the power price to be endogenous in order to model the situation of high penetration rate we compare the optimal wind power capacity decision under the strategy of priority grid connection and abandoned power management our results show that optimal capacity investment is inversely related to priority dispatch elasticity under both strategies however the profit from power generation is always higher when adopting the abandoned power management strategy

performance of wholesale electricity markets with high wind penetration abstract this paper examines the impact of progressively deeper levels of wind generation and or abatement on the performance of a wholesale market and its incumbent thermal generators with non convex unit commitment constraints comparison is made to the result that marginal cost pricing should induce investors to build the least cost capacity mix since it is not clear that this will hold in renewable rich systems it is first found that unit commitment and forecast uncertainty do not cause significant departure from this result when the generator fleet is optimal optimality in this sense is determined in a capacity expansion problem that does not feature unit commitment and which allows thermal generators to be built or retired as greater renewable generation or abatement is mandated in contrast the wholesale market with no retirement of thermal generation experiences progressively greater disparity between total system prices and costs and lower returns to generators simply due to over capacity rather than any form of variability related market failure a carbon price is observed to be far superior to a renewable portfolio standard when the existing set of thermal generators do not retire but this difference is less stark when the generation mix is optimal the implications of these results for market design and system planning are then discussed

decomposition of the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier with undesirable output abstract in this paper we present an alternative analysis framework to evaluate the effects of technology heterogeneities and undesirable output on environmental efficiency measurement the proposed framework combines the directional distance function and a meta frontier analysis it can be used to measure efficiency improvements brought about by enhanced technical management and technological advances for demonstration purposes we used the framework to measure the environmental efficiency in 90 countries worldwide for the 2003 2007 period the results showed that when the meta technology set is used as the evaluation basis the average environmental efficiency of high competitiveness countries is greater than that of lower middle low and upper middle competitiveness countries the upper middle competitiveness countries perform worse than the lower middle and low competitiveness countries because of the excessive labor force usage and carbon dioxide emissions in these countries we also found that the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier for high competitiveness countries can be attributed to managerial failure in the production process whereas that for upper middle lower middle and low competitiveness countries can be attributed to technological differences

a comprehensive review of data envelopment analysis dea approach in energy efficiency the main aim of this review article is to review of dea models in regarding to energy efficiency this paper reviewed and summarized the different models of dea that have been applied around the world to development of energy efficiency problems consequently a review of 144 published scholarly papers appearing in 45 high ranking journals between 2006 and 2015 have been obtained to achieve a comprehensive review of dea application in energy efficiency accordingly the selected articles have been categorized based on year of publication author s nationalities scope of study time duration application area study purpose results and outcomes results of this review paper indicated that dea showed great promise to be a good evaluative tool for future analysis on energy efficiency issues where the production function between the inputs and outputs was virtually absent or extremely difficult to acquire

optimal cartel equilibria with imperfect monitoring abstract there exist optimal symmetric equilibria in the green porter model 4 8 having an elementary intertemporal structure such an equilibrium is described entirely by two subsets of price space and two quantities the only production levels used by firms in any contingency the central technique employed in the analysis is the reduction of the repeated game to a family of static games

does the beige book move financial markets about two weeks prior to each federal open market committee fomc meeting the federal reserve releases a description of economic activity in a document called the beige book by creating a quantitative index of these qualitative reports we examine whether the content of the beige book affects asset prices the results indicate that more positive beige book reports on economic growth are associated with increases in interest rates particularly intermediate and long term rates but not after controlling for several other macroeconomic indicators the results are consistent with markets viewing the report as a summary indicator of economic growth but not of monetary policy moves in the near term

price wars and the stability of collusion a study of the pre world war i bromine industry between 1885 and 1914 us bromine producers colluded to raise prices and pro ts this collusion was disrupted by price wars bromine price wars are compared with the green porter and abreu pearce stacchetti models some price wars resulted from the imperfect monitoring problems which motivate these models several empirical implications of the aps model are borne out but the bromine industry s price wars were generally milder than contemplated by aps more severe price wars were part of a bargaining process in which rms tried to force renegotiation to a new collusive equilibrium with a diierent distribution of rents

environmental efficiency and abatement cost of china s industrial sectors based on a three stage data envelopment analysis abstract china has gained the reputation of global factory due to its phenomenal industrial growth over the past decades at the same time its industrial energy consumption has resulted in serious environmental problems accordingly there is an urgent and critical need to reduce industrial carbon emissions at a minimum cost without hampering the country s economic development the dual targets for carbon emission intensity and amount from the 12th five year 2011 2015 plan make it necessary to investigate the environmental efficiency and reduction costs of different sectors this study employs a three stage data envelopment analysis model based on a directional distance function approach with radial and non radial slacks of desirable and undesirable outputs considered to measure the environmental efficiency and marginal co2 emission abatement costs of china s 37 two digit industries during 2005 2014 based on the environmental efficiency and abatement cost of the industrial sectors we reached the following conclusions first the adjusted estimates differ significantly from the results that do not consider the influence of environmental factors and it is essential to consider the heterogeneity of industries in proposing emission reduction strategies in addition the stimuli for the smelting and pressing of metal industries result in cost reduction and the supervision on the top nine emitters and the equipment manufacturing industries should be strengthened finally the industrial sectors with large abatement potential are classified into short term and long term key target industries according to the emission abatement cost analyses

the determinants of the cost efficiency of electric generating plants a stochastic frontier approach this article provides a detailed analysis of generation plant operating cost efficiency over the period 1988 1997 i estimate a stochastic frontier cost function together with a model of plant inefficiencies to measure the operating efficiencies of individual plants and identify factors that are associated with variations in plant efficiencies i find evidence that plant efficiencies are associated with capacity utilization of the plant the number of plants under utility management and ownership form i also find that regulatory restructuring activity in certain states is associated with improvements in plant operating performance the purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the operating cost efficiencies of electricity generating plants over the period 1988 1997 i estimate the operating efficiencies of fossil fueled steam generating plants and examine factors that influence plant operating performance i use the estimation procedure of battese and coelli 1995 to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and a function relating plant efficiency levels to plant specific factors and other explanatory variables a comprehensive data set allows me to investigate the influence of capacity utilization ownership form and utility experience on plant efficiency levels since significant regulatory change in the electricity industry had begun during this time period i also investigate the impact of state level regulatory change on plant operating efficiency a number of authors have analyzed the efficiencies of electricity generating plants relative to a best practice frontier including kopp and smith 1980 schmidt and lovell 1979 stevenson 1980 cote 1989 reifschneider and stevenson 1991 hammond 1992 pollitt 1995 and fire grosskopf and logan 1983 1985 these studies find considerable evidence of inefficiency in electricity generation during the 1960s and 1970s the present study provides more recent information regarding generating plant efficiencies during a period of significant regulatory and structural change studies investigating the determinants of power plant departures from the frontier have focused primarily on the effects of ownership mode pollitt 1995 provides a comprehensive review of these studies reifschneider and stevenson 1991 examine the impact on cost efficiency of a number of variables including the capacity utilization of the firm s generating facilities more recently knittel 2001 examines the impact of incentive regulation on plant efficiency levels steiner

sale of visas a smuggler s final song is there a way of eliminating human smuggling we set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would be migrants a visa selling policy may be successful at eliminating human smugglers by eroding their profits but it necessarily increases immigration in contrast re enforced repression decreases migration but uses the help of cartelized smugglers to overcome this trade off we study how legalisation and repression can be combined to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows this policy mix also has the advantage that the funds raised by visa sales can be used to finance additional investments in border and internal controls employer sanctions and deportations simulations of the policy implications highlight the complementarities between repression and legalisation and call into question the current policies

a model of u k emigration 1870 1913 this paper develops a simple time series model of emigration and applies it to data for emigration from the united kingdom 1870 1913 the model is derived from a macroeconomic analysis of the migration decision and provides a specific functional form and dynamic structure it encompasses and explains many of the empirical findings of earlier research on the determinants of emigration over this historical period the results support the model strongly in most respects both wage rates and employment rates in the sending and in the receiving countries influenced fluctuations in emigration the short run fluctuations were driven largely by variations in employment rates while the long run level of emigration was determined largely by the relative wage

the effect of industrial agglomeration on green development efficiency in northeast china since the revitalization abstract using panel data from 2003 to 2016 this paper estimates the green development efficiency of 34 cities in northeast china based on the sbm dea model and determines whether industrial agglomeration promotes or impedes green development efficiency the results show the following 1 the average green development efficiency of northeast china exhibits a fluctuant upward trend in 2003 2016 and there are significant spatial differences 2 during the revitalization period industrial agglomeration hinders green development efficiency a u shaped relationship exists between industrial agglomeration and green development 3 economic development level and foreign direct investment are positively related to green development efficiency while industrial structure energy consumption structure and environmental regulation are negatively related economic development level has the greatest positive influence and environmental regulation the strongest negative influence on green development several corresponding policy implications are proposed for promoting green development and revitalization

permanent and transitory policy shocks in an empirical macro model with asymmetric information abstract an empirical model that allows for shifts in the inflation target and imperfect policy credibility is estimated imperfect credibility defined by differences between the perceived and actual inflation target obtains because private agents cannot correctly distinguish between permanent target shocks and transitory funds rate shocks learning affects responses to structural shocks important features include the absence of a price puzzle permanent nominal effects of aggregate supply shocks due to partial policy accommodation and the ability to examine responses to a permanent target change and expectations shocks perceptions of permanent target shocks explain sizable movements in bond yields and inflation

dea malmquist productivity measure new insights with an application to computer industry abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple inputs and multiple outputs dea based malmquist productivity index measures the productivity change over time the dea based malmquist productivity index can be decomposed into two components one measuring the technical change and the other measuring the frontier shift in the current study we provide an extension to the dea based malmquist approach by further analyzing these two malmquist components our proposed new approach not only reveals patterns of productivity change and presents a new interpretation along with the managerial implication of each malmquist component but also identifies the strategy shifts of individual dmus based upon isoquant changes we can make judgments on whether or not such strategy shifts are favorable and promising the approach is illustrated with a set of fortune global 500 computer and office equipment companies from 1991 to 1997

illegal immigration border enforcement and relative wages evidence from apprehensions at the u s mexico border we examine illegal immigration in the united states from mexico over the period 1976 1995 one challenge is that we do not observe the number of individuals that attempt to enter the united states illegally we only observe the number of individuals apprehended attempting to cross the u s mexico border illegally based on a simple migration model we postulate the existence of an apprehensions function which expresses apprehensions at the border as a function of illegal attempts to cross the border and u s border enforcement effort we find that a 10 decrease in the mexican real wage leads to a 7 5 to 8 8 increase in apprehensions at the border excerpt

collusion in ocean shipping a test of monopoly and empty core models in markets with avoidable fixed costs the core may be empty i argue that a reason for collusion is to impose an equilibrium where none exists i set up a framework for deriving testable implications from the model and compare those implications with those of a cartel model i compare the two models empirically with data from liner shipping conferences legal collusive agreements that have been in force for over a century and i conclude that the evidence supports the theory of the core

what do you expect imperfect policy credibility and tests of the expectations hypothesis abstract the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates describes a conventional view of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy where bond rates reflect current and expected movements in the policy controlled rate however empirical rejections of the expectations hypothesis are commonplace and lead many to question this description of policy transmission this paper argues that failure to account for imperfect policy credibility may explain empirical rejections empirical rejections may occur even when changing anticipations of future short rates are the primary source of variation in bond rates and the standard term structure transmission channel remains valid

tests of the expectations hypothesis resolving the campbell shiller paradox one of the more puzzling results in the expectations hypothesis eh testing literature is the campbell shiller paradox csp in an influential paper campbell and shiller 1991 found that the slope of the term structure almost always gives a forecast in the wrong direction for the short term change in the yield on the longer bond but gives a forecast in the right direction for long term changes in short rates this paper provides an econometric resolution to the csp specifically it shows that by their construction these tests can generate results consistent with the csp if the eh does not holdnwhatever the reason monte carlo experiments confirm that this explanation can account for campbell and shiller s paradoxical results for most pairings of short term and long term rates considered

the productivity and efficiency of the australian electricity supply industry australia s electricity supply industry has been through a period of reform over the last 10 years the purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes that have occurred to the australian electricity supply industry over the past 30 years in order to evaluate to what degree these reforms have improved the productivity and efficiency performance of the industry

deregulation vertical unbundling and the performance of china s large coal fired power plants article i nfo in 2003 china s integrated electricity utility the state power corporation spc was unbundled and dism antled into five generation groups and two grid companies in an effort to increase competition and improve ef ficiency in this paper we study the impact of this deregulation reform on the operational efficiency for a balanced panel of 34 large power plants for the period 1997 2010 we find that on average these power plants have converged to the technological frontier over the sample period controlling for substantial heterogeneity in the technical profile we also find that the unbundling reform has boosted productivity of china s large thermal power plants however the presumably differential impacts of the reform on the previously spc managed power plants and the independent power producers in our sample are insignificant

efficiency based rank assessment for electric power industry a combined use of data envelopment analysis dea and dea discriminant analysis da abstract this study discusses a combined use of dea data environment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis to determine the efficiency based rank of energy firms this type of performance evaluation is important because we often have a difficulty in accessing a large sample on energy firms to derive reliable empirical results the proposed approach is useful in dealing with such a limited number of energy firms often found in previous dea studies on energy industries in the world the proposed approach uses dea to classify energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups based upon their efficiency scores then it utilizes dea da to assess their efficiency scores and ranks in this stage we can find an adjusted efficiency score for each energy firm the proposed approach provides us with the following analytical capabilities all of which cannot be found in a conventional use of dea in assessing energy firms first the proposed dea approach can avoid zero in all multipliers on efficient energy firms by incorporating scsc strong complementary slackness condition so that it can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections the dea result classifies all energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups second dea da applied to the two groups evaluates all energy firms by an industry wide evaluation not depending upon a limited number of efficient energy firms in a reference set as found in a conventional use of dea the analytical capability can reduce the number of efficient energy firms third the proposed approach can provide their efficiency based ranking scores finally we can conduct a rank sum test based upon their ranking scores to obtain a statistical inference as an application this study uses the proposed approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power industry we find two economic implications one of the two implications is that no major change has occurred in the operational performance of japanese electric power industry because of japanese sluggish economy from 2005 to 2009 the other implication indicates that there are strategic differences in the operation of japanese electric power firms after the liberalization

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

rational expectations econometric analysis of changes in regime an investigation of the term structure of interest rates abstract this paper is of interest both for its methodological contribution of new tools for analyzing rational expectations models and for its substantive conclusions concerning the term structure of interest rates during the monetary experiment of october 1979 the paper studies systems subject to changes in regime interpreted here as occasional discrete shifts in the parameters governing the time series behavior of exogenous economic variables the specification is shown to be quite tractable both theoretically and empirically the technique is used to analyze yields on three month treasury bills and ten year treasury bonds during 1962 to 1987 a constant parameter linear model for short term rates is shown to be inconsistent both with the univariate time series properties of short rates and with the observed bivariate relation between long and short rates under the expectations hypothesis of the term structure an alternative nonlinear model that admits the possibility of changes in regime affords a much better description of the univariate process for short rates moreover the cross equation restrictions implied by the expectations hypothesis of the term structure are consistent with the nonlinear specification indeed the residuals of the restricted relation have a standard error of only 0 8 basis points this is a third less than that of a completely unrestricted linear regression of long rates on short rates and compares with an unconditional standard deviation of long rates of 142 basis points i conclude that once the recognition by bond traders of changes in regime is taken into account the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates holds up fairly well for these data

new hope for the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates survey data on interest rate expectations permit separate testing of the two alternative hypotheses in traditional term structure tests that the expectations hypothesis fails and that expected future interest rates are ex post inefficient forecasts we find that the source of the spread s poor predictions of future interest rates varies with maturity at short maturities the expectations hypothesis fails at long maturities however changes in the yield curve reflect changes in expected future rates one for one an implication of the expectations hypothesis this result confirms earlier findings that long rates underreact to short rates but now it cannot be attributed to term premia if the attractiveness of an economic hypothesis is measured by the number of papers which statistically reject it the expectations theory of the term structure is a knockout most tests beginning with macaulay 1938 find no evidence supporting the expectations hypothesis 1 many cannot even reject statistically the alternative hypothesis that the spread between long and short rates contains no information about future interest rate changes 2 to make matters worse in u s postwar data future long rates tend to rise when short rates are above long rates since the expectations hypothesis would predict that long rates tend to fall the theory often does worse than even the naive model that future interest

do expected shifts in inflation affect estimates of the long run fisher relation recent empirical studies suggest that nominal interest rates and expected inflation do not move together one for one in the long run a finding at odds with many theoretical models this article shows that these results can be deceptive when the process followed by inflation shifts infrequently we characterize the shifts in inflation by a markov switching model based upon this model s forecasts we reexamine the long run relationship between nominal interest rates and inflation interestingly we are unable to reject the hypothesis that in the long run nominal interest rates reflect expected inflation one for one

china s electricity market restructuring and technology mandates plant level evidence for changing operational efficiency abstract china s electricity sector has experienced substantial efficiency improvement during the last one and a half decades the recent literature has mostly attributed the efficiency improvement to the 2002 unbundling reform with little attention paid to the large scale retrofitting process introduced by technology mandates using a unique panel dataset for hundreds of power plants from 1997 to 2010 we are able to examine the contributions from technology mandates and market restructuring we confirm the significant contributions from the unbundling reform but more importantly technology mandates have contributed at least half of the observed efficiency improvement during this period the results have significant implications for efficiency and demand forecast in the future

greenspan s conundrum and the fed s ability to affect long term yields in february 2005 federal reserve chairman alan greenspan noticed that the 10 year treasury yields failed to increase despite a 150 basis point increase in the federal funds rate as a conundrum this paper shows that the connection between the 10 year yield and the federal funds rate was severed in the late 1980s well in advance of greenspan s observation the paper hypothesize that the change occurred because the federal open market committee switched from using the federal funds rate as an operating instrument to using it to implement monetary policy and presents evidence from a variety of sources supporting the hypothesis the analysis has implications for central banks interest rate policies

dynamics of productivity change in the australian electricity industry assessing the impacts of electricity reform the australian electricity industry has undergone a significant reform since the mid 1990s key changes comprised functional unbundling market restructuring regulatory reform public corporatisation and privatisation technological development has been another indisputable constituent of these changes in the wake of ict revolution the principle rationale behind these changes has been that they would improve productivity of the industry and social well being of people this paper examines the dynamics of productivity changes in the australian electricity industry and conducts several hypotheses testings to identify whether industry s efficiency measures are truly improved as a result of the reform driven changes malmquist total factor productivity index approach and anova are used for this purpose the results reveal that the productivity gains in the industry have been largely driven by technological improvements and to a lesser extent by reform induced comparative efficiency gains on average at national level and for the entire industry there are efficiency gains that to large extents can be attributed to functional unbundling and public corporatisation and to a lesser extent to market restructuring and privatisation the results however reveal that the reform driven changes have made insignificant contribution to comparative efficiency at the level of thermal generation

accounting for a shift in term structure behavior with no arbitrage and macro finance models this paper examines a shift in the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates in the u s during the mid 1980s we document this shift using standard interest rate regressions and using dynamic a ne no arbitrage models estimated for the pre and post shift subsamples the term structure shift largely appears to be the result of changes in the pricing of risk associated with a level factor using a macro nance model we suggest a link between this shift in term structure behavior and changes in the dynamics and risk pricing of the federal reserve s in ation target as perceived by investors

eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis abstract in public discussion on environmental policy the notion of eco efficiency is often used the joint production of goods and undesirable outputs such as pollutants which may not be freely disposable without costs causes difficulties to measure the overall performance of the firm because of the absence of market prices for the undesirable outputs we are not able to estimate the environmental costs some of the measurement and evaluation difficulties can be overcome by employing data envelopment analysis dea as the efficiency measurement vehicle we propose the use of two different approaches in the first approach we start by decomposing the problem into two parts 1 the problem of measuring technical efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the inputs and 2 the problem of measuring so called ecological efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the undesirable outputs separately those two efficiency indicators are then combined in the second approach we treat pollutants as the inputs in the sense that we wish to increase desirable outputs and decrease pollutants and inputs the approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the efficiency of 24 power plants in a european country