an efficiency theorem for incompletely known preferences there are n agents who have von neumann morgenstern utility functions on a finite set of alternatives a each agent i s utility function is known to lie in the nonempty convex relatively open set ui suppose l is a lottery on a that is undominated meaning that there is no other lottery that is guaranteed to pareto dominate l no matter what the true utility functions are then there exist utility functions ui ui for which l is pareto efficient this result includes the ordinal efficiency welfare theorem as a special case

on the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm abstract this study analyzes a preference revelation game in the student optimal deferred acceptance algorithm in a college admission problem we assume that each college s true preferences are known publicly and analyze the strategic behavior of students we demonstrate the existence of a strictly strong nash equilibrium in the preference revelation game through a simple algorithm that finds it specifically i the equilibrium outcome from our algorithm is the same matching as in the efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm and ii in a one to one matching market it coincides with the student optimal von neumann morgenstern vnm stable matching we also show that i when a strict core allocation in a housing market derived from a college admission market exists it can be supported by a strictly strong nash equilibrium and ii there exists a strictly strong nash equilibrium under the college optimal deferred acceptance algorithm if and only if the student optimal stable matching is pareto efficient for students

integration of spatial markets studies of spatial market integration draw their implications from a theory which assumes that there are no intraregional transport costs an alternative theory is offered based on the assumptions that buyers and sellers are spatially dispersed and intraregional transport costs are significant this implies that the market is a linked oligopoly or oligopsony and that market integration tests are tests of alternative oligopoly price formation processes for example collusive basing point pricing produces results typically assumed to imply efficiently integrated markets while competitive fob pricing does not the theoretical implications are illustrated with an analysis of hog prices in canada

on two competing mechanisms for priority based allocation problems we consider the priority based allocation problem there is a set of indivisible objects with multiple supplies e g schools with seats and a set of agents e g students with priorities over objects e g proximity of residence area we study two well known and competing mechanisms the agentoptimal stable mechanism aosm allots objects via the deferred acceptance algorithm the top trading cycles mechanism ttcm allots objects via gale s top trading cycles algorithm we show that the two mechanisms are equivalent or ttcm is fair i e respects agents priorities or resource monotonic o rpopulation monotonic if and only if the priority structure is acyclic furthermore if aosm fails to be efficient consistent for a problem ttcm also fails to be fair consistent for it however the converse is not necessarily true

boston versus deferred acceptance in an interim setting an experimental investigation abstract while much of the school choice literature advocates strategyproofness recent research has aimed to improve efficiency using mechanisms that rely on non truthtelling equilibria we address two issues that arise from this approach we first show that even in simple environments with ample feedback and repetition agents fail to reach non truthtelling equilibria we offer another way forward implementing truth telling as an ordinal bayes nash equilibrium rather than as a dominant strategy equilibrium we show that this weaker solution concept can allow for more efficient mechanisms in theory and provide experimental evidence that this is also the case in practice in fact truth telling rates are basically the same whether truthtelling is implemented as an ordinal bayes nash equilibrium or a dominant strategy equilibrium this provides a proof of concept that ordinal bayes nash design might provide a middle path achieving efficiency gains over strategy proof mechanisms without relying on real life agents playing a non truth telling equilibrium

the institutional causes of china s great famine 1959 1961 this paper studies the causes of china s great famine during which 16 5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas we document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food production a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years we provide evidence that an inflexible and progressive government procurement policy where procurement could not adjust to contemporaneous production and larger shares of expected production were procured from more productive regions was necessary for generating this pattern and that this policy was a quantitatively important contributor to overall famine mortality

constrained school choice an experimental study 31 pages 18 tables jel classification c72 c78 d78 i20 trabajo publicado como articulo en american economic review 100 4 1860 1874 2010 http dx doi org 10 1257 aer 100 4 1860

efficient resource allocation under multi unit demand abstract we study resource allocation with multi unit demand such as the allocation of courses to students in contrast to the case of single unit demand no stable mechanism not even the student proposing deferred acceptance algorithm achieves desirable properties it is not strategy proof and the resulting allocation is not even weakly efficient under submitted preferences we characterize the priority structure of courses over students under which stability is consistent with strategy proofness or efficiency we show that stability is compatible with strategy proofness or efficiency if and only if the priority structure is essentially homogeneous this result suggests that efficient allocation under multi unit demand is difficult and that the use of stable mechanisms may not deliver desirable outcomes

embodied carbon in trade a survey of the empirical literature this paper critically reviews the literature on embodied carbon in trade and evaluates our present empirical understanding of these flows a careful comparison of quantitative results from this literature exposes significant inconsistencies for instance estimates for emission embodied in world trade in 2004 range between 4 4 gt and 6 2 gt co2 the difference corresponding to around half of europe s annual emissions a few consistent themes do nevertheless emerge from the literature most importantly emissions in trade constitute a large and growing share of global emissions uncertainty about country level embodied emissions remains large however which presents severe limitations for the practical application of embodied carbon principles in climate policy

matching markets with mixed ownership the case for a real life assignment mechanism we consider a common indivisible good allocation problem whose popular applications include on campus housing kidney exchange and school choice we show that the so called new house 4 nh4 mechanism which has been in use at mit since the 1980s is equivalent to a natural adaptation of the well known gale shapley gs mechanism we run two experiments comparing nh4 with the prominently advocated top trading cycles ttc mechanism and nh4 with gs we find that under nh4 the participation rate is significantly higher than under ttc based on a new ordinal test of efficiency nh4 is more likely to pareto dominate ttc

how natural disasters affect the evolution of grain markets evidence from 18th century china abstractmarket is the foundation of modern society however how did market evolve previous research has explored the impacts of spatial distance and transportation conditions on market integratio

impact of financial development on trade embodied carbon dioxide emissions evidence from 30 provinces in china abstract the literature on financial development and carbon dioxide co2 emissions is extensive however previous studies have not found the impact of financial development on trade embodied co2 emissions therefore we build a dynamic panel model based on the extension of the stirpat model to verify the overall and indirect impact of financial development we calculate trade embodied co2 emissions of 30 provinces in china in 2000 2014 using the single region input output model srio by eliminating the impact of imported intermediate products on co2 emissions embodied in exports exc in order to measure financial development in china more comprehensively we use financial scale development financial efficiency and financialization to define it results show that the environmental kuznets curve is confirmed at the level of china s provinces in most provinces exc began to increase in 2006 and decline in 2010 but co2 embodied in net exports ec began to decrease in 2005 and increase in 2010 the results of overall impact indicate that different financial development indicators have different effects on ec but they all reduce exc the results of indirect impact through imitation innovation ic and independent research and development rd find that financial scale development increases exc however financial efficiency and financialization decreases exc financial scale development and financial efficiency can decrease ec but financialization increases ec the results of indirect impact through fdi show that financial scale development and financial efficiency can decrease exc and ec financialization decreases exc but the impact of financialization on ec has obvious threshold characteristics when the level of financialization is lower than the threshold value financialization will reduce ec there is regional heterogeneity in the impact of financial development on trade embodied co2 emissions the conclusions of this paper are of great reference value for improving the level of financial development so as to realize the development of china s green trade

broadening the market design approach to school choice school choice refers to policies that allow parents preferences to be an input to the decision of which school a student will attend a rich body of research has developed over the past 10 15 years to study mechanisms that implement school choice this literature has mostly taken the inputs of school choice preferences priorities and capacities as exogenous more recently researchers have sought to embed the school choice problem into its wider context thereby broadening the scope of market design questions and enriching the analysis this article discusses current school choice policy issues in light of this recent literature and outlines remaining open questions

the equitable top trading cycles mechanism for school choice the equitable top trading cycles mechanism a particular adaptation of gale s top trading cycles ttc procedure applied to school choice the so called ttc mechanism has attracted much attention both in theory and practice due to its superior efficiency and incentive features we discuss and introduce alternative adaptations of gale s original procedure that can offer improvements over ttc in terms of equity along with various other distributional considerations instead of giving all the trading power to those students with the highest priority for a school we argue for the distribution of the trading rights of all slots of each school this allows them to trade in a thick market where additional constraints can be accommodated by choosing an appropriate pointing rule we propose a particular mechanism of this kind the equitable top trading cycle ettc mechanism which is also pareto efficient and group strategy proof just like ttc and eliminates avoidable justified envy situations ettc generates significantly fewer justified envy situations than ttc both in simulations and the lab

a review of recent multi region input output models used for consumption based emission and resource accounting abstract the interest in consumption based emission and resource accounting has grown significantly many studies juxtapose consumer emissions carbon footprint and producer territorial emissions of greenhouse gases in order to demonstrate the effects of trade on the national emission budget to this end a respectable number of studies have been undertaken worldwide in order to estimate emissions embedded in international trade of numerous countries and world regions input output approaches and increasingly multi region input output mrio models are commonly chosen as they provide an appropriate methodological framework for complete carbon footprint estimates at the national and supra national level with increasing processing capabilities of computers and a wider availability of economic accounts environmental accounts and trade data such models are now being implemented on a wide scale after a brief overview of salient single region input output studies i provide an in depth review of the most recent multi region input output models used for the purpose of consumption based environmental accounting the main methodological features and important results are described for around twenty studies covering the years 2007 to 2009 this is followed by a detailed review of studies dealing with uncertainty in mrio analysis an area which has not received a lot of attention so far i conclude that further research is mainly needed in two areas a improvements in data availability and quality and b improvements in the accuracy of mrio modelling

factors influencing renewable energy consumption in china an empirical analysis based on provincial panel data abstract the development of renewable energy is the key to deal with climate change and low carbon economy development in china here based on a balanced panel dataset of 30 provinces in china cover the period of 1996 2013 this paper explores the effect of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade exports or imports and urbanization on renewable energy consumption at the national and regional levels by using a dynamic system gmm panel model the empirical results show that the influence of economic growth co 2 emissions foreign trade and urbanization on the renewable energy consumption is heterogeneous across regions first economic development has an important positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region follows by the national central and western regions second co 2 emissions have a significant positive impact on renewable energy consumption in the central and national regions however co 2 emissions have a weak negative impact on the consumption of renewable energy in the eastern region and have no impact in the western region third per capita exports are found to have a positive effect on the renewable energy consumption with the greatest impact in the central region followed by the eastern and national regions and have a weak negative impact in the western regions fourth per capita imports have a negative effect on renewable energy consumption in the eastern western and national regions and have a weak positive effect in the central region finally the changes in the urbanization level significantly affect the renewable energy consumption in the four panels we consider and the impact is the greatest in the eastern region with high level of urbanization follow by the central and western regions on the basis of this study we put forward the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions to achieving sustainable development in china

internal rebellions and external threats a model of government organizational forms in ancient china in ancient china a ruler needed to handle both internal rebellions and external threats to decrease the possibility of internal rebellions a ruler could organize the government to establish the balance of power among ministers while effective in preventing internal rebellions this approach could make the defense of the country against external threats less effective the tradeoff between preventing internal rebellions and dealing with external threats in a ruler s choice of government organizational form is affected by the size of the population the level of coordination efficiency and the degree of increasing returns in the military sector if the magnitude of external threats increases regardless of the type of equilibrium organizational form the equilibrium level of the concentration of power among division heads increases

two further impossibility results on responsive affirmative action in school choice abstract this paper investigates the responsiveness of priority based affirmative action in school choice we consider two efficiency improved mechanisms kesten s eadam efficiency adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism and da ttc mechanism running deferred acceptance and then running top trading cycles algorithm we show that neither eadam nor da ttc is minimally responsive to the priority based affirmative action policy that is under eadam or da ttc there are market situations in which a stronger affirmative action policy may result in a pareto inferior assignment for the minority students

financial development and energy consumption in central and eastern european frontier economies this study examines the impact of financial development on energy consumption in a sample of 9 central and eastern european frontier economies several different measures of financial development are examined including bank related variables and stock market variables the empirical results obtained from dynamic panel demand models show a positive and statistically significant relationship between financial development and energy consumption when financial development is measured using banking variables like deposit money bank assets to gdp financial system deposits to gdp or liquid liabilities to gdp of the three stock market variables investigated only one stock market turnover has a positive and statistically significant impact on energy consumption both short run and long run elasticities are presented the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

measurement of market integration and arbitrage we develop a measurement theory of market integration based on two notions of integrated markets first two markets cannot be perfectly integrated in any sense if one can construct two portfolios one from each market that have identical payoffs but different prices in that case the law of one price is violated across the markets second they cannot be integrated in a stronger sense if there are cross market arbitrage opportunities two measures of market integration are developed respectively reflecting these notions the smaller the measures the more closely integrated in the respective senses the markets among other things they are interpreted as measuring pricing discrepancy between markets article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

china s carbon emissions embodied in normal and processing exports and their driving forces 2006 2012 abstract this paper constructed a time series extended input output dataset 2006 2012 to analyze china s carbon emissions embodied in both normal and processing exports at a detailed 135 sector level the structural decomposition analysis sda was further applied to shed light on the driving forces behind the changes in their embodied emissions over the entire time period this empirical study confirms the importance of using the extended model for analyzing the trade related embodiment especially for processing exports the embodied emissions in both normal and processing exports first increased from 2006 to 2008 then dropped during the global financial crisis 2008 2009 and then rose again after 2009 the embodied emissions as a percentage of total co2 emissions were quite stable before and after the global financial crisis at around 24 over the 2006 2008 period and 18 over the 2010 2012 period from 2006 to 2012 emission intensity played the key role in reducing the embodied emissions around 595 mt co2 while the total export effect contributed the most to the increase in embodied emissions around 552 mt co2 similar analysis can be applied to other indicators such as energy water ghg emissions pollutants and materials

how is the liberalization of food markets progressing market integration and transaction costs in subsistence economies we propose a modification of baulch s parity bounds model to measure the market integration of food markets in developing countries instead of extrapolating a single observation of transaction costs we estimate transaction costs predicted transaction costs compare well with survey data of traders probabilities of market regimes computed on the basis of predicted transaction costs fluctuate significantly and do not support fixed regime probabilities over time the probability of market integration with trade decreases consistently during food shortages increasing either the probability of no trade or loss making trade or the probability of profitable but unexploited trade opportunities the data further support a negative trend in market integration with trade

are energy conservation policies effective without harming economic growth in the gulf cooperation council countries abstract this study explores the fossil fuels electricity consumption growth of the gross domestic product gdp relationship in the six gulf cooperation council gcc countries for the period 1980 2012 the aim of this study is to examine whether energy conservation policies are appropriate for these countries to reduce their high levels of electricity consumption the autoregressive distributed lag ardl and the toda yamamoto dolado lutkepohl tydl methodologies were employed to investigate this relationship the ardl results revealed that fossil fuels electricity consumption has a long run positive effect on gdp growth in the gcc countries however the tydl granger causality revealed different causality relationships among the countries a bi directional causality was found between fossil fuels electricity consumption and gdp growth in bahrain and the united arab emirates uae while one way causality from fossil fuels electricity consumption to gdp growth was found in oman and qatar on the other hand no causality was concluded between the variables in kuwait and saudi arabia from the results it is clear that energy conservation is not an ideal policy for the bahrain uae oman and qatar because it will have a negative consequence on their output however this policy can be implemented in kuwait and saudi arabia since it will not harm their output

unraveling reduces mobility in a labor market gastroenterology with and without a centralized match the entry level market for american gastroenterologists was organized by a centralized clearinghouse from 1986 to 1996 before and since it has been conducted via a decentralized market in which appointment dates have unraveled to well over a year before the start of employment we find that both before and after the years in which the centralized clearinghouse was used gastroenterologists are less mobile and more likely to be employed at the same hospital in which they were internal medicine residents than when the clearinghouse was in use this suggests that the clearinghouse not only coordinates the timing of appointments but also increases the scope of the market compared to a decentralized market with early appointments

market definition in antitrust analysis a regression based approach alleged violations of either sherman 2 s antimonopoly strictures or clayton 7 s proscriptions against anticompetitive mergers necessarily involve a particular product and must occur in a particular place that is the plaintiff in either a 2 or 7 suit must define a relevant market within which the violation alleged has occurred even in the most mundane antitrust analysis however market definition is rarely readily accomplished and unaccompanied by a series of caveats and the possibility of the opposing parties in an antitrust suit failing to contest each other s proffered definition is virtually nil 2 because economists from

the welfare effects of coordinated assignment evidence from the new york city high school match abstract coordinated single offer school assignment systems are a popular education reform we show that uncoordinated offers in nyc s school assignment mechanism generated mismatches one third of

the impact of growth energy and financial development on the environment in china a cointegration analysis this article aims to investigate the impact of financial development economic growth and energy consumption on environmental pollution in china from 1953 to 2006 using the autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing procedure the main objective is to examine the long run equilibrium relationship between financial development and environmental pollution the results of the analysis reveal a negative sign for the coefficient of financial development suggesting that financial development in china has not taken place at the expense of environmental pollution on the contrary it is found that financial development has led to a decrease in environmental pollution it is concluded that carbon emissions are mainly determined by income energy consumption and trade openness in the long run moreover the findings confirm the existence of an environmental kuznets curve in the case of china

affirmative actions the boston mechanism case we consider three popular affirmative action policies in school choice quota based priority based and reserve based affirmative actions the boston mechanism bm is responsive to the latter two policies in that a stronger priority based or reserve based affirmative action makes some minority student better off however a stronger quota based affirmative action may yield a pareto inferior outcome for the minority under the bm these positive results disappear once we look for a stronger welfare consequence on the minority or focus on bm equilibrium outcomes

survey measures of family decision processes for econometric analysis of schooling decisions in this article we consider the collection of novel subjective data on family processes of schooling decisions in particular we review recent progress on survey measurement of expectations information and locus of decision of american families within the context of secondary schooling and we discuss possible future developments by providing concrete examples from recent exploratory efforts we argue that collection of data on adolescents and parents perceptions of the available school options and the application and admission rules their subjective expectations about short and long term consequences of alternative choices and their assessments of the locus of decision making within families could greatly enhance economic modeling and contribute to effective econometric analysis of schooling decisions jel c83 d19 d79 d83 d84 i21 i26 j24

affirmative action through minority reserves an experimental study on school choice abstract minority reserves are an affirmative action policy proposed by hafalir et al 2013 in the context of school choice in a laboratory experiment we find that adding minority reserves to the gs and ttc mechanisms has positive effects on stability but is quite disappointing in terms of efficiency also gs induces higher rates of truth telling by minority students and thus outclasses ttc

foreign direct investment and decoupling between energy and gross domestic product in developing countries on a sample of 20 developing countries we noticed a clear decline in the energy intensity as foreign direct investment increases the reason for that probably is the use of modern technologies that came with foreign direct investment i e a leapfrogging over the old fashioned traditional technologies in use in these countries

the gains from merger or collusion in product differentiated industries a merger in an industry with differentiated products increases the market power of the merging firms to the extent that their products are close substitutes and that other firms produce only more distant substitutes such a merger makes the residual demand curve of each partner steeper by shifting each in the direction of the industry demand curve 2 the extent of this increase in market power depends upon the own elasticity of demand for each merging firm s product as well as the cross elasticity of demand for each with all other firms products as a result evaluating the effect of a merger between two firms with n 2 other competitors would seem to require the estimation of at least n2 parameters all of the price elasticities of demand a formidable task that extremely difficult estimation task is unnecessary however the necessary information is contained in the slopes of the two single firm residual demand curves before the merger and the extent to which the merged firm will face a steeper demand curve for example suppose a merger between two u s brewing firms say pabst and anheuser busch were proposed it is not particularly important to determine whether it is competition from miller or competition from stroh or from heileman or which puts the most effective brake on anheuser busch s pricing only the total effect of these other firms and the particular effect of competition from pabst are of interest this paper proposes econometric procedures for estimating the demand system that merger partners will face based only on pre merger data the key to the procedures is that the effects of all other firms in the industry are summed together formally we start with a model of an n firm product differentiated industry manipulation of the model removes the prices and quantities of all but two firms this reduces the dimensionality of the problem to manageable size rather than an n firm demand system we estimate a two firm residual demand system in this way the technique extends our econometric method for

reserve design unintended consequences and the demise of boston s walk zones we show that in the presence of admissions reserves the effect of the precedence order i e the order in which different types of seats are filled is comparable to the effect of adjusting reser

the extent of the market examines the classical theory of the market in this paper authors consider the role of price market determination price movement in competitive and monopolistic markets extension of commodity markets

effects of financial development indicators on energy consumption and co2 emission of european east asian and oceania countries the financial crisis is considered a major economic issue and energy consumption and pollution are believed to be one of the most important environmental concerns in the new millennium the review on investigation of the nexus among energy consumption gdp growth financial development and co2 emission has shown no definitive conclusion apart from that the effects of financial development on energy consumption are not yet understood properly thus this article investigates the effects of financial indicator shocks i e credit market and stock market shocks on energy consumption and carbon dioxide co2 emissions and vice versa panel vector auto regression pvar models were employed to investigate the relationships in 13 european and 12 east asia and oceania countries from 1989 to 2011 findings emphasize the important role of co2 emission and energy consumption on explaining each other s deviation with only the degree of effect differing although energy consumption and co2 emission shocks on financial indicators such as private sector credit is not very pronounced in both groups of countries but the strength of energy consumption shock on stock return rate in european countries is greater than east asian and oceania countries conversely shocks to stock return rate influence energy consumption especially in long horizon in case of east asia and oceania countries

china s foreign trade and climate change a case study of co2 emissions abstract the globalization of trade has numerous environmental implications trade creates a mechanism for consumers to shift environmental pollution associated with their consumption to other countries carbon leakage exerts great influences on international trade and economy applying an input output approach the paper estimates the amount of carbon dioxide co2 embodied in china s foreign trade during 1997 2007 it is found that 10 03 26 54 of china s annual co2 emissions are produced during the manufacture of export goods destined for foreign consumers while the co2 emissions embodied in china s imports accounted for only 4 40 1997 and 9 05 2007 of that we also estimate that the rest of world avoided emitting 150 18 mt co2 in 1997 increasing to 593 mt in 2007 as a result of importing goods from china rather than manufacturing the same type and quantity of goods domestically during 1997 2007 the net additional global co2 emissions resulting from china s exports were 4894 mt then the paper divides the trade embodied emissions into scale composition and technical effect it was found that scale and composition effect increased the co2 emissions embodied in trade while the technical effect offset a small part of them finally its mechanism and policy implications are presented

designing random allocation mechanisms theory and applications randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation we generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi unit allocations and various real world constraints such as group specific quotas controlled choice in school choice and house allocation and scheduling and curriculum constraints in course allocation we develop new mechanisms that are ex ante efficient and fair in these environments and that incorporate certain non additive substitutable preferences we also develop a utility guarantee technique that limits ex post unfairness in random allocations supplementing the ex ante fairness promoted by randomization this can be applied to multi unit assignment problems and certain two sided matching problems jel c78 d82

pricing efficiency in centralized and noncentralized markets pricing efficiency in centralized markets is compared with that in noncentralized markets on the basis of a price formation model centrally discovered prices are hypothesized to adjust more slowly to equilibrium but to have lower unpredictable variability than noncentrally discovered prices these hypotheses are borne out strongly in market experiments mean squared error is found to be lower in centralized than in noncentralized trading suggesting centralized markets are the more price efficient

leveling the playing field sincere and sophisticated players in the boston mechanism empirical and experimental evidence suggests different levels of sophistication among families in the boston public school student assignment plan we analyze the preference revelation game induced by the boston mechanism with sincere players who report their true preferences and sophisticated players who play a best response we characterize the set of nash equilibrium outcomes as the set of stable matchings of a modified economy where sincere students lose priority to sophisticated students any sophisticated student weakly prefers her assignment under the pareto dominant nash equilibrium of the boston mechanism to her assignment under the recently adopted student optimal stable mechanism jel d82 i21

on the extent of the market wholesale gasoline in the northeastern united states this paper develops the classical view of the extent of markets by introducing explicitly in the analysis the concept of arbitrage costs arbitrage or transaction costs imply that market boundaries are essentially stochastic while a set of products or regions may have binding arbitrage conditions i e may be in the same market at a given point in time they may not at another thus in defining a market the probability that a set of agents or regions would h3ve binding arbitrage conditions has to be assessed this paper develops an econometric methodology to estimate the transaction costs required to arbitrage among a given set of products as well as the probability that that set of products would be bound by binding arbitrage condi tions finally the methodology is applied to wholesale gasoline in the northeastern part of the united states address for communications pablo t spiller herbert hoover memorl l bldg 9348 stanford ca 94305

markets in china and europe on the eve of the industrial revolution prevailing views suggest the industrial revolution began in europe because markets had gradually become more efficient and by the 18th century the scope of economic activity was far larger than in other parts of the world this paper compares the actual performance of markets in europe and china two regions of the world that were relatively advanced in the pre industrial period but would start to industrialize about 150 years apart the analysis covers economies that account for about two fifths of the world s population in the mid 18th century and it considers some three centuries of data our findings suggest that relative levels of market function in china and europe were similar prior to the industrial revolution higher efficiency in europe is seen only in the nineteenth century when industrialization was already underway moreover these improvements occurred in a dramatic and sudden fashion further casting doubt on an evolutionary view of market development rather than being a key condition for subsequent growth gains in efficiency appeared simultaneously with the turning point of modern growth we discuss the implications of these findings for a number of explanations for long run growth and the industrial revolution

nexus between green finance non fossil energy use and carbon intensity empirical evidence from china based on a vector error correction model abstract previous studies have considered the effect of financial development on carbon emissions however few studies have explored the role of green finance in carbon mitigation to bridge this gap the current study constructs a green finance development index based on four indicators green credit green securities green insurance and green investment a vector error correction model is used to analyze relationships between the development level of green finance non fossil energy consumption and carbon intensity using data from 2000 to 2018 we find that china s green finance industry developed rapidly and improvements in the green finance development index as well as the increasing use of non fossil energy contributed to a reduction in carbon intensity simultaneously an increase in carbon intensity inhibited the expansion of non fossil energy use impeded the investment flow to green projects and ultimately led to a deterioration of green finance development in addition non fossil energy consumption in china was primarily influenced by green finance and carbon intensity with clear policy driven effects however the impacts of green finance policies continually fell short and lacked continuity this study proposes ways in which to improve the effect of green finance policy implementation expand the consumption of non fossil energy and develop a carbon trading market

an index decomposition analysis of china s interregional embodied carbon flows abstract being the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world china also possesses enormous regional disparities in terms of carbon dioxide emissions significant carbon emission flows from developed regions to undeveloped regions through inter regional trade have been observed in china in order to examine the determining factors of such virtual carbon flows an index decomposition analysis was conducted to investigate emissions embodied in trades among eight regions which were grouped with recourse to the latest available provincial i o tables in china this paper finds that trade balance and energy intensity are two most salient factors with regard to interregional carbon flows in the largest outsourcing region the northwest region of china the two factors account for 35 6 59 1 of the total carbon surplus respectively thus china is experiencing more efficiency losses than efficiency gains resulting from carbon transfers in order to switch to a future efficiency gain situation policies and supports for technology innovation in and transfer to inland regions as well as enhanced technology standards for expanded carbon intensive productions in less developed regions are suggested to complement the current policy of carbon intensity target

testing restrictions on a model of japanese meat demand tests for quasi separability net substitutability and perfect substitutability are developed and implemented on an almost ideal demand system model of the japanese meat sector the data set satisfies both symmetry and homogeneity there is evidence of net complimentarity between chicken and dairy beef and chicken and pork the tests indicate that japanese wagyu beef is considered a separate commodity to both imported beef and dairy beef the results also indicate that fish can be treated as separable in the japanese meat demand system

matching with branch of choice contracts at the united states military academy branch selection is a key decision in a cadet s military career cadets at usma can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement this real life matching problem lls an important gap in market design literature although priorities fail a key substitutes condition the agent optimal stable mechanism is well dened and in contrast to the current usma mechanism it is fair stable and strategy proof adoption of this mechanism benets cadets and the army this new

does higher economic and financial development lead to environmental degradation evidence from bric countries abstract a vast number of studies addressed the environmental degradation and economic development but not financial development moreover as argued by stern 2004 the rise and fall of the environmental kuznets curve world development 32 1419 1439 they present important econometric weaknesses using standard reduced form modeling approach and controlling for country specific unobserved heterogeneity we investigate the linkage between not only economic development and environmental quality but also the financial development panel data over period 1992 2004 is used we find that both economic and financial development are determinants of the environmental quality in bric economies we show that higher degree of economic and financial development decreases the environmental degradation our analysis suggests that financial liberalization and openness are essential factors for the co 2 reduction the adoption of policies directed to financial openness and liberalization to attract higher levels of r d related foreign direct investment might reduce the environmental degradation in countries under consideration in addition the robustness check trough the inclusion of us and japan does not alter our main findings

the long run and causal analysis of energy growth openness and financial development on carbon emissions in turkey abstract the aim of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between financial development trade economic growth energy consumption and carbon emissions in turkey for the 1960 2007 period the bounds f test for cointegration test yields evidence of a long run relationship between per capita carbon emissions per capita energy consumption per capita real income the square of per capita real income openness and financial development the results show that an increase in foreign trade to gdp ratio results an increase in per capita carbon emissions and financial development variable has no significant effect on per capita carbon emissions in the long run these results also support the validity of ekc hypothesis in the turkish economy it means that the level of co 2 emissions initially increases with income until it reaches its stabilization point then it declines in turkey in addition the paper explores causal relationship between the variables by using error correction based granger causality models

what parents want school preferences and school choice we investigate parents preferences for school attributes in a unique data set of survey administrative census and spatial data using a conditional logit incorporating characteristics of households schools and home school distance we show that most families have strong preferences for schools academic performance parents also value schools socio economic composition and distance which may limit the potential of school choice to improve academic standards most of the variation in preferences for school quality across socio economic groups arises from differences in the quality of accessible schools rather than differences in parents preferences although more advantaged parents have stronger preferences for academic performance

market emergence and transition arbitrage transaction costs and autarky in china s grain markets using trimonthly chinese provincial grain prices from 1988 to 1995 we estimate a parity bounds model of interregional trade for four subperiods to characterize how multiple aspects of market performance change during the process of economic transition for each period we estimate the extent to which arbitrage opportunities are realized by traders the transaction costs between location pairs and the likelihood that regions do not trade trade restrictions cannot explain the pattern of uneven market development over time infrastructure bottlenecks managerial incentive reforms and production specialization policies all were likely important factors affecting market performance

school choice impossibilities for affirmative action abstract this paper investigates the welfare effects of affirmative action policies in school choice we show that affirmative action policies can have perverse consequences specifically we demonstrate that there are market situations in which affirmative action policies inevitably hurt every minority student the purported beneficiaries under any stable matching mechanism furthermore we show that another famous mechanism the top trading cycles mechanism suffers from the same drawback

an experimental study on decentralized networked markets abstract we design a laboratory experiment to investigate matching in a decentralized market of deferred acceptance agents are undifferentiated and may have multiple partners their payoff depends on who they match with the experiment is designed in such a way that a stable configuration exists but cannot be eyeballed by the participants due to the computational complexity of the game in spite of this subjects are remarkably good at reaching a stable match even when the payoffs of others are not publicly observed more information does however speed up convergence thanks to self censoring we trace irrational matching choices mostly to two sources the tendency of over think in a setting where strategic thinking is not necessary and the reluctance to accept matching offers from those who have been disloyal in the past

silver points silver flows and the measure of chinese financial integration abstract to what degree were chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 revolution and to what extent was the chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period we estimate silver points for the shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions our inferred measures are small in value favorably match measured costs of the silver trade derived from contemporary accounts and fare well in the comparison to estimates of trans atlantic gold points this leads to the conclusion that the degree of chinese financial market integration was substantial however during and immediately after world war i our estimates of the silver points increased appreciably foreshadowing the collapse of china s linkages to world financial markets beginning in the 1930s

strategy proofness and stability of the boston mechanism an almost impossibility result abstract public school systems generally use one of the three competing mechanisms the boston mechanism the deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycle mechanism for assigning students to specific schools although the literature generally claims that the boston mechanism is pareto efficient but neither stable nor strategy proof this study delineates a subset of school priority structures for which it fulfills all three criteria we show that the boston mechanism is stable if and only if it is strategy proof if and only if the priority structure is strongly acyclic however we find that the condition of strong acyclicity is nearly impossible to satisfy any priority structure is quasi cyclic whenever there are two schools whose admission quotas are less than the number of students seeking admission

priorities in school choice the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona abstract the boston mechanism is a school allocation procedure that is widely used around the world and has been criticized for its incentive problems in order to resolve overdemands for a given school most often priority is given to families living in the neighborhood of the school using a very rich data set on school applications for the case of the boston mechanism in barcelona we exploit an unexpected change in the definition of neighborhood this change allows us to identify that a large fraction of families systematically ranks first high priority schools neighborhood schools in this case additional data on school enrollment decisions and census data shows that some seemingly unsophisticated parents are high income families that can rank hard to get schools because they can afford the outside option of a private school in case they do not get in this sheds light on important inequalities beyond parents lack of sophistication found in the literature

on responsiveness of top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action abstract in school choice priority based affirmative action favors minority students by means of promoting their priority ranking at schools this paper investigates the responsiveness of the top trading cycles mechanism to priority based affirmative action when schools priority structure satisfies a certain acyclicity condition when schools priority under the problem without affirmative action satisfies virtual homogeneity condition a weak responsiveness result is obtained

market integration efficiency of arbitrage and imperfect competition methodology and application to u s celery this paper develops and applies a methodology to test for efficiency of interregional commodity arbitrage application of the methodology requires only time series data on prices for alternative cities regions countries or product forms yet the approach is capable of generating evidence on a number of market parameters including market integration arbitrage efficiency the magnitude of marketing margins product substitutability and competitiveness of markets estimation is based on a switching regression model with three regimes efficient arbitrage relative shortage and relative glut results from application of the model to u s celery marketing indicated significant departures from efficient arbitrage for both california and florida celery

how to control controlled school choice we characterize choice rules for schools that regard students as substitutes while expressing preferences for a diverse student body the stable or fair assignment of students to schools requires the latter to regard the former as substitutes such a requirement is in conflict with the reality of schools preferences for diversity we show that the conflict can be useful in the sense that certain unique rules emerge from imposing both considerations we also provide welfare comparisons for students when different choice rules are employed

climate shocks state capacity and peasant uprisings in north china during 25 1911 ce china provides an interesting case study of civil conflict because of her long history and rich records using a unique dynastic panel dataset for north china during 25 1911 ce this study finds that severe famines and dynastic age were positively correlated with peasant uprisings whereas government disaster relief as a proxy for state capacity played a significant mitigating role negative climate shocks e g severe drought locust plagues affected peasant uprisings primarily through the channel of severe famines the effects of population density temperature and other climate shocks e g flood levee breaches snow disasters and frost were either not robust or insignificant

responsive affirmative action in school choice a comparison study abstract this note provides a comparison study on responsiveness of two extensively used mechanisms to affirmative action in school choice for priority based affirmative action we show that if a stronger priority based affirmative action favors minority students by giving full priority to the minority then such a policy makes each minority student weakly better off under the student proposing deferred acceptance henceforth da mechanism however the top trading cycles henceforth ttc mechanism does not satisfy this property under the da mechanism if the original problem gives full priority to the minority then the assignment of minority students does not change when the problem moves to a higher level of affirmative action on the contrary this property does not hold under the ttc mechanism

mistaken play in the deferred acceptance algorithm implications for positive assortative matching abstract recent literature has documented failures of truthful preference reporting in the strategy proof deferred acceptance algorithm i consider the implications of these strategic mistakes for a common welfare consideration the ability of the mechanism to sort the best students to the best schools i find that these mistakes have the potential to significantly help or significantly hinder sorting through this channel the presence of mistaken play may have widely varying welfare effects i discuss related considerations in the welfare evaluation of mistaken play in the deferred acceptance algorithm and the implications for nudges that correct these mistakes

transport costs and the geography of arbitrage in eighteenth century china trade has been considered a condition for growth and development a view that might have merits in explaining the rise of the western world i use a new data set from archival sources of eighteenth century china to revisit this question this analysis suggests previous studies of market integration which attribute much growth to a reduction in transport costs have overestimated these effects ifind the overall level of market integration in china was higher than previously thought and intertemporal effects are important substitutes for trade both factors reduce the importance of trade as a unique explanation for subsequent growth jel 013 018 r1l n25

demand analysis using strategic reports an application to a school choice mechanism several school districts use assignment systems that give students an incentive to misrepresent their preferences we find evidence consistent with strategic behavior in cambridge such strategizing can complicate preference analysis this paper develops empirical methods for studying random utility models in a new and large class of school choice mechanisms we show that preferences are non parametrically identified under either sufficient variation in choice environments or a preference shifter we then develop a tractable estimation procedure and apply it to cambridge estimates suggest that while 82 of students are assigned to their stated first choice only 72 are assigned to their true first choice because students avoid ranking competitive schools assuming that students behave optimally the immediate acceptance mechanism is preferred by the average student to the deferred acceptance mechanism by an equivalent of 0 08 miles the estimated difference is smaller if beliefs are biased and reversed if students report truthfully

threshold cointegration and spatial price transmission when expectations matter we examine the performance of the threshold cointegration approach specifically band tvecm to price transmission analysis in an explicit context where trade decisions are made based on expectation of final prices because trade takes time we find that following a standard inference strategy a large portion of three regime cases are not identified as such results show that transfer costs are systematically underestimated particularly in three regime models the speed of price transmission is also biased in three regime models furthermore inferences about occurrence of trade are poor with estimated models suggesting far lower market integration than is true in the data generating process

testing market integration a model of spatial price differentials for a tradable good is proposed which avoids the inferential dangers of received methods using static price correlations the proposed method also extracts more information on the causes of price differentials from the same data the method is illustrated using monthly rice price data for postindependence bangladesh including the very substantial regional price shocks during the 1974 famine impediments to market integration are indicated

recombinant estimation for normal form games with applications to auctions and bargaining abstract when analyzing economic games researchers frequently estimate quantities describing group outcomes such as the expected revenue in an auction for such applications we propose an improved statistical estimation technique called recombinant estimation the technique takes observations of players strategies and recombines them to compute all possible group outcomes that could have resulted from different player combinations in applications to an auction and a bargaining game the improved efficiency of our estimator is equivalent to increasing the sample size between 25 and 200 we discuss how to design experiments in order to utilize recombinant estimation we also discuss practical computational issues and provide software for computing estimates and standard errors

the impact of financial development on carbon emissions an empirical analysis in china given the complexity between china s financial development and carbon emissions this paper uses some econometric techniques including cointegration theory granger causality test variance decomposition etc to explore the influence of financial development on carbon emissions results indicate that first china s financial development acts as an important driver for carbon emissions increase which should be taken into account when carbon emissions demand is projected second the influence of financial intermediation scale on carbon emissions outweighs that of other financial development indicators but its efficiency s influence appears by far weaker although it may cause the change of carbon emissions statistically third china s stock market scale has relatively larger influence on carbon emissions but the influence of its efficiency is very limited this to some extent reflects the relatively lower liquidity in china s stock markets finally among financial development indicators china s fdi exerts the least influence on the change of carbon emissions due to its relatively smaller volume compared with gdp but it is mainly utilized in carbon intensive sectors now therefore with the increase of china s fdi in the future many efforts should be made to adapt its utilizing directions and play its positive role in promoting low carbon development