macroeconomic implications of production bunching factor demand linkages abstract existing empirical evidence suggests that output is more variable than consumption so that production smoothing is not apparently present in this paper we investigate some macroeconomic implications of the proposition that the empirical evidence reflects the presence of some firms in the economy that produce with nonconvex technologies overall when activities are sufficiently complementary and inventory holding is sufficiently costly nonconvexities at the firm level can generate a pattern of output and sales such that the variance of output exceeds that of sales at an aggregate level in this way nonconvexities at the individual firm level may have macroeconomic consequences

reduction potentials of energy demand and ghg emissions in china s road transport sector abstract rapid growth of road vehicles private vehicles in particular has resulted in continuing growth in china s oil demand and imports which has been widely accepted as a major factor effecting future oil availability and prices and a major contributor to china s ghg emission increase this paper is intended to analyze the future trends of energy demand and ghg emissions in china s road transport sector and to assess the effectiveness of possible reduction measures a detailed model has been developed to derive a reliable historical trend of energy demand and ghg emissions in china s road transport sector between 2000 and 2005 and to project future trends two scenarios have been designed to describe the future strategies relating to the development of china s road transport sector the business as usual scenario is used as a baseline reference scenario in which the government is assumed to do nothing to influence the long term trends of road transport energy demand the best case scenario is considered to be the most optimized case where a series of available reduction measures such as private vehicle control fuel economy regulation promoting diesel and gas vehicles fuel tax and biofuel promotion are assumed to be implemented energy demand and ghg emissions in china s road transport sector up to 2030 are estimated in these two scenarios the total reduction potentials in the best case scenario and the relative reduction potentials of each measure have been estimated

modelling the transport sector fuel demand for developng economies abstract this paper concentrates on the transport sector of six developing countries with similar common denominators namely turkey thailand pakistan morocco tunisia and malaysia by using standard econometric techniques we analyse the evolution of oil demand for road transport in these countries in relation to independent variables such as income population price of gasoline and diesel etc unlike the treatment in the present literature on the subject gasoline and diesel consumption are estimated separately due to the high share of diesel in the total transport sector consumption on the basis of the estimation over the period 1970 1990 on a country by country basis we forecast the demand for these six countries until 2010 the results of this study indicate that the transport sector will be the driving force for energy and oil demand as part of economic growth in these developing countries its share in the future energy market structure is expected to grow consequently the pricing policies of oil products in this sector have a crucial role for shaping rational economic and energy strategies within the framework of rising environmental concern

the demand for international reserves in china an ecm model with domestic monetary disequilibrium this paper employs a version of the error correction model to investigate the demand for international reserves in a typical planned economy china disturbances from the domestic markets are considered by incorporating the monetary disequilibrium into the model the authors main conclusions are that 1 reserve holdings in china have maintained a long run relationship and a stable dynamic relationship with several determinants since the 1950s confirming china s prudential foreign reserve policy and 2 monetary disequilibrium has significant short run effects on reserve holdings reflecting the authorities general balancing policy in their annual planning copyright 1994 by the london school of economics and political science

the demand for gasoline abstract sufficient time must be allowed to elapse to assess fully the response of gasoline demand to price changes hitherto empirical work on the subject has generally not examined the period beyond 1975 moreover the extant time series studies concentrate almost exclusively on the usa this study extends both the observation period and the country coverage a vehicle stock adjustment model is estimated via its reduced form without explicit consideration of the vehicle stock itself however the estimation procedure incorporates the structure by way of constraints on the parameters cross section analysis offers additional evidence concerning the truly long run price elasticity the results suggest that there is no need to resort to elaborate models to explain adequately gasoline demand gasoline demand exhibits a long run price elasticity near unity with time lags exceeding six years while there is tentative evidence that the duration of these lags is not fixed

the who and why of lottery empirical highlights from the seminal economic literature lotteries operate today in many countries around the world this type of gambling is usually run by governments and is sometimes described as regressive lottery is an unfair bet so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk averse consumers has been a challenge for economic theory lotteries can be analysed from either of two economic perspectives as a source of public revenue or as a consumer commodity in this paper the state of economic research on lotteries is reviewed focusing on its main empirical findings

state lotteries and consumer behavior abstract this paper investigates two central issues regarding state lotteries first analyses of multiple sources of micro level data demonstrate that household lottery spending is financed primarily by a reduction in non gambling expenditures not by a reduction in expenditures on other forms of gambling the introduction of a state lottery is associated with an average decline of 46 per month or 2 4 percent in household non gambling expenditures low income households reduce non gambling household expenditures by 2 5 percent on average 3 1 percent when the state lottery includes instant games these households experience statistically significant declines in expenditures on food and on rent mortgage and other bills second consumer demand for lottery products responds positively to the expected value of the gamble controlling for other statistical moments and product characteristics including the nominal top prize amount this finding is consistent with informed choice among consumers of lottery products although other forms of irrational or misinformed choice cannot be ruled out

further evidence on the asymmetric behavior of economic time series over the business cycle evidence has recently been presented by salih neftci to support the hypothesis that recessions in economic activity tend to be steeper and more short lived than recoveries in economic activity that evidence however was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate in the united states in this paper it is shown that when neftci s methods are applied to analyze the behavior of real gross national product investment and productivity in the united states or when they are used to analyze industrial production abroad the asymmetry hypothesis seems to be less compelling

the uk transport carbon model an integrated life cycle approach to explore low carbon futures abstract current debate focuses on the need for the transport sector to contribute to more ambitious carbon emission reduction targets in the uk various macro economic and energy system wide top down models are used to explore the potential for energy demand and carbon emissions reduction in the transport sector these models can lack the bottom up sectoral detail needed to simulate the effects of integrated demand and supply side policy strategies to reduce emissions bridging the gap between short term forecasting and long term scenario models this paper introduces a newly developed strategic transport energy emissions and environmental impacts model the uk transport carbon model uktcm the uktcm covers the range of transport energy environment issues from socio economic and policy influences on energy demand reduction through to life cycle carbon emissions and external costs the model is demonstrated in this paper by presenting the results of three single policies and one policy package scenario limitations of the model are also discussed developed under the auspices of the uk energy research centre ukerc the uktcm can be used to develop transport policy scenarios that explore the full range of technological fiscal regulatory and behavioural change policy interventions to meet uk climate change and energy security goals

the relative regressivity of seven lottery games we study the implicit tax incidence of raising state revenue through a monopoly state run lottery using a new dataset on individual minnesota lottery game sales by zip code we use the bootstrap to compute ses and construct confidence intervals for suits indices of seven lottery products we conclude that the implicit tax on each product is regressive and find statistically significant differences in regressivity between some products minnesota s newly introduced g3 instant scratch product printed at time and place of purchase is also the most regressive lottery game

seasonality and habit persistence in a life cycle model of consumption summary the allocation of non durable consumers expenditure over the four quarters of the year reflects choices made by consumers implying a utility function exhibiting seasonality incorporating such a function the life cycle model fails to explain fully the observed dynamics in uk seasonally unadjusted data seasonal habit persistence effects are introduced and found to be significant although this generalized model stands up well to testing in a univariate context it fails to exclude a predictive role for lagged income changes seasonality is inherent in many economic time series but it is rarely considered to be an issue of interest in econometric model building rather than explicitly investigating the economics underlying seasonal variation modellers typically try to remove its effects either by using seasonally adjusted data or by including seasonal intercept dummies in their equations the former practice is criticized by wallis 1974 who shows that it may distort the relationship between variab le the latter assumes that the function simply shifts up or down with the season however except for degrees of freedom considerations there seems to be no a priori reason why the same parameters or functional form should apply at different times of the year indeed gersovitz and mackinnon 1978 argue that realistic utility cost or production functions result in models in which seasonal influences cannot be separated out in a simple fashion in the present study seasonality is treated as one of the features to be explained within the economic model thus in the particular application to non durable consumers expenditure it is argued that the allocation of expenditure over the year reflects seasonal tastes and hence seasonality in the underlying utility function the implications of this are explicitly investigated the framework for our analysis is the influential paper by hall 1978 who derives a randomwalk model for real non durable consumers expenditure when rational expectations are combined with a life cycle theory of consumption hall does not investigate seasonality at all and employs seasonally adjusted values in his empirical analysis although subsequent us authors have examined many aspects of this theory the type of data used has rarely been

taxation of petroleum products theory and empirical evidence the domestic taxation of petroleum products is an important source of revenue in most countries however there is a wide variation of tax rates on petroleum products across countries which cannot be explained by economic theory alone this paper surveys different considerations advanced for taxing petroleum and presents petroleum tax rate data in 120 countries

issues involved with the seasonal adjustment of economic time series in the first part of this article we briefly review the history of seasonal adjustment and statistical time series analysis in order to understand why seasonal adjustment methods have evolved into their present form this review provides insight into some of the problems that must be addressed by seasonal adjustment procedures and points out that advances in modem time series analysis raise the question of whether seasonal adjustment should be performed at all this in turn leads to a discussion in the second part of issues involved in seasonal adjustment we state our opinions about the issues raised and review some of the work of other authors first we comment on reasons that have been given for doing seasonal adjustment and suggest a new possible justification we then emphasize the need to define precisely the seasonal and nonseasonal components and offer our definitions finally we discuss criteria for evaluating seasonal adjustments we contend that proposed criteria based on empirical compariso

world transport energy demand modelling methodology and elasticities abstract this paper presents the international energy agency s iea approach of modelling transport energy demand fuel demand which is not a demand per se is derived whenever possible from the economic activity in the transport sector and not estimated directly ie using one equation or simultaneous equation system in general the transport models employ a two step approach in the first step transport activity the sector s relevant energy service is estimated econometrically in the second step the transport activity projections are then combined with estimates of efficiency improvements car turnover rates and diesel gasoline penetration assumptions in order to arrive at projections of fuel demand the principal advantages of this approach are that the relevant energy services are modelled and that for model simulation efficiency improvements can be dealt with explicitly the effectiveness of economic instruments is a function of the reaction of consumers and businesses to income and price changes an in depth understanding of income and price elasticities of transport demand and transport energy demand is important in order to be able to assess the effectiveness of policies considered the paper also shows the underlying long term income and price elasticities for oecd and non oecd regions

the sudan demand for international reserve a case of a labour exporting country an empirical analysis of the demand for international reserves in the sudan is presented based on the error correction model this model is parametrically rich enough to allow the division of the effects into long run influences short term adjustments and proportional equilibrium impacts beside addressing conventional issues in reserve demand literature the model explicitly incorporates the impact on reserve demand of remittances transferred by sudanese nationals working abroad and the impact due to money market disequilibrium the demand function is found to be stable and characterized by constant returns to scale copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

the demand for international reserves and monetary equilibrium some evidence from developing countries traditionally two alternative explanations have been offered for the behavior of international reserves through time on the one hand the literature on the demand for international reserves postulates that reserves movements respond to discrepancies between desired and actual reserves onthe other hand according to the monetary approach to the balance of payments changes in international reserves will be related to excess demands or excess supplies for money the purpose of this paper is to empirically integrate these two basic explanations for international reserves movements this is done by estimating a dynamic equation that explicitly allows reserves movements to reflect the monetary authority s excess demand for international reserves and the public s excess demand for money the results obtained using a sample of 23 developing countries that maintained a fixed exchange rate during period 1965 1972 confirm the hypothesis that reserves movements respond both to monetary factors and to differences between actual and desired reserves these results indicate that the exclusion of monetary considerations from the dynamic analysis of international reserves will yield biased coefficients this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

modelling future private car energy demand in ireland abstract targeted measures influencing vehicle technology are increasingly a tool of energy policy makers within the eu as a means of meeting energy efficiency renewable energy climate change and energy security goals this paper develops the modelling capacity for analysing and evaluating such legislation with a focus on private car energy demand we populate a baseline car stock and car activity model for ireland to 2025 using historical car stock data the model takes account of the lifetime survival profile of different car types the trends in vehicle activity over the fleet and the fuel price and income elasticities of new car sales and total fleet activity the impacts of many policy alternatives may only be simulated by such a bottom up approach which can aid policy development and evaluation the level of detail achieved provides specific insights into the technological drivers of energy consumption thus aiding planning for meeting climate targets this paper focuses on the methodology and baseline scenario baseline results for ireland forecast a decline in private car energy demand growth 0 2 compared with 4 in the period 2000 2008 caused by the relative growth in fleet efficiency compared with activity

fiscal policy monetary targets and the price level in a centrally planned economy an application to the case of china this paper presents a planned economy monetary model of china a money supply equation links changes in broad money to government transactions evaluated at official prices the demand for real money balances by consumers equals the nominal demand for money deflated by an unobserved true price index the model explains money demand as the divergence between the then official and true price indices changes in the money supply are explained by government transactions while money demand is explained by real income and the anticipated true rate of inflation the true rate of inflation is 2 5 times the official rate copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

projection of future transport energy demand of thailand the objective of this study is to project transport energy consumption in thailand for the next 20 years the study develops log linear regression models and feed forward neural network models using the as independent variables national gross domestic product population and the numbers of registered vehicles the models are based on 20 year historical data between years 1989 and 2008 and are used to project the trends in future transport energy consumption for years 2010 2030 the final log linear models include only gross domestic product since all independent variables are highly correlated it was found that the projection results of this study were in the range of 54 84 59 05 million tonnes of oil equivalent 2 5 times the 2008 consumption the projected demand is only 61 65 of that predicted in a previous study which used the leap model this major discrepancy in transport energy demand projections suggests that projects related to this key indicator should take into account alternative projections because these numbers greatly affect plans policies and budget allocation for national energy management

the limits of human development and the use of energy and natural resources the development of nations is an unquestionable requirement a lot of challenges concerning health education and economy are present a discussion on these development models has occupied the minds of decision makers in recent years when energy supply and demand is considered the situation becomes critical and the crucial question is how to improve the quality of life of developing countries based on available models of development that are related to the life style of developed countries for which the necessary use and waste of energy are present how much energy is essential to humanity for not so as to endangering the survival conditions of future generations the human development index hdi establishes the relationship among energy use economic growth and social growth here it can be seen that 75 of the world population has a significant energy consumption potential this is a strong reason to consider that the sustainable development concepts on energy policies are strategic to the future of the planet this paper deals with the importance of seeking alternative development models for human development balance natural resources conservation and environment through rational energy use concepts

what is the optimal design for lottery linked savings programmes in this article we determine the optimal design of lottery linked savings lls programmes lls vehicles such as lottery bonds are financial instruments that preserve depositors principal but provide randomized variable returns to these depositors through periodic lottery drawings in lieu of the regular coupon payments traditionally received by bondholders this type of asset is very popular in europe we note that the framing of lls instruments is linked to their popularity and we attempt to elucidate that link and thereby determine the optimal structure of payments for lls programmes our goal is to frame lls programmes in a manner that both maximizes their investors satisfaction and preserves their ability to serve as inexpensive sources of capital for their issuers we demonstrate that the optimal pay off structure is characterized by a high level of skewness as investors are willing to accept a decrease in the small and medium prizes of the lottery in exchange for an increase in the grand pri

the leviathan lottery testing the revenue maximization objective of state lotteries as evidence for leviathan unlike other governmental units statelottery agencies publicly acknowledge thattheir primary objective is revenuemaximization this claim and the inherentmonopoly power of lottery agencies providesa unique arena to test for leviathan withdata obtained from united states lotterygames i perform a laffer curve analysis toderive the optimal lottery tax rates fordifferent categories of games theseoptimal tax rates and monte carlosimulations are then used to test whetherthe current tax structure of lottery gamesis indeed the revenue maximizing structure i find strong empirical evidence for the leviathan lottery

gambling by auctions abstract we provide theoretical and empirical analysis of a selling mechanism used by an internet web site that combines important features of auctions and gambling this is the first analysis of such a selling mechanism which provides insights into how the two kinds of behavior might be related in real life the winner of the object is the bidder with the highest bid not submitted by any other bidder in the equilibrium of our game theoretical model each bid made with positive probability yields the same probability of winning bidders are more likely to submit higher bids and the bid distribution does not depend on the value of the object or the highest bid allowed if one controls for the number of bidders most of these key theoretical predictions are confirmed by the data

the demand for international reserves and exchange rate adjustments thecase of ldcs 1964 1972 in this paper the relationship between the demand for international reserves and exchange rate adjustments is empirically investigated for agroup of ldc s it is shown that countries that have maintained a fixed exchange rate for a long period of time have a different demand function than countries that have occasionally used exchange rate adjustments for correcting payments imbalances the dynamics of the adjustment for both groupsof countries are also analyzed the results show that while both groups tend to eliminate reserve disequilibria fast those countries that have maintained a fixed rate tend to do it more slowly than countries that have occasionally devalued their currency it is also shown that the year prior to a devaluation international reserves have been on average 30 below their short run desired level these results are important since they indicate that not all ldc s should be aggregated for prediction purposes the results also have implications for the analysis of the adequacy of international reserves in less developed countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract wa this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

have postwar economic fluctuations been stabilized previous investigations of whether the volatility of the u s economy diminished after world war ii have been inconclusive because of questionable prewar macroeconomic aggregates we examine more broadly the hypothesis of the stabilization of the postwar economy by focusing on the duration of business cycles rather than their amplitude in the process we avoid the debate about the quality of prewar aggregates using distribution free statistics we find clear evidence of postwar duration stabilization in terms of a shift toward longer expansions and shorter contractions moreover we find no shift in whole cycle durations which suggests a reallocation of the business cycle away from contraction and toward expansion

an analysis of gasoline demand elasticities at the national and local levels in mexico abstract the majority of evidence on gasoline demand elasticities is derived from models based on national data since the largest growth in population is now taking place in cities in the developing world it is important that we understand whether this national evidence is applicable to demand conditions at the local level the aim of this paper is to estimate and compare gasoline per vehicle demand elasticities at the national and local levels in mexico national elasticities with respect to price income vehicle stock and metro fares are estimated using both a time series cointegration model and a panel gmm model for mexican states estimates for mexico city are derived by modifying national estimates according to mode shares as suggested by graham and glaister 2006 and by estimating a panel within groups model with data aggregated by borough although all models agree on the sign of the elasticities the magnitudes differ greatly elasticities change over time and differ between the national and local levels with smaller price responses in mexico city in general price elasticities are smaller than those reported in the gasoline demand surveys a pattern previously found in developing countries the fact that income and vehicle stock elasticities increase over time may suggest that vehicles are being used more intensively in recent years and that mexico city residents are purchasing larger vehicles elasticities with respect to metro fares are negligible which suggests little substitution between modes finally the fact that fuel efficiency elasticities are smaller than vehicle stock elasticities suggests that vehicle stock size rather than its composition has a larger impact on gasoline consumption in mexico city

applying the seasonal error correction model to the demand for international reserves in taiwan abstract a dynamic demand function for international reserves based on the seasonal difference is derived our model of using seasonal difference distinguishes the present study from previous studies in three aspects first the dependent variable is seasonally differenced instead of being first order differenced next the local money market disequilibrium included is also in fourth difference form finally given the existence of stochastic seasonality a new model using a seasonal error correction rather than the conventional error correction is specified and estimated based on this new specification the results yielded are more sensible than those of using a differenced model

austria s demand for international reserves and monetary disequilibrium the case of a small open economy with a fixed exchange rate regime using a vector error correction approach i estimate austria s demand for international reserves over the period 1985 1 1997 4 and test for short run effects of the disequilibrium on the national monetary market i find that austria s long run reserve demand can be described as a stable function of imports uncertainty and the opportunity cost of holding reserves with strong economies of scale the speed of adjustment takes a value of 38 per cent the results confirm that an excess of money demand supply induces an inflow outflow of international reserves as postulated by the monetary approach to the balance of payments

fuel consumption in road transport a comparative study of china and oecd countries abstract energy conservation and emissions reduction have been the focus of the road transport sector due to its energy intensive and air pollution intensive nature it also embodies the imprints of human technological progress this paper compares the energy consumption of the road transport sector in china and oecd countries we used time series and panel data co integration analysis error correction model and dynamic model to study the impacts of the major influencing factors such as income income structure urbanization price and technological advancement on gasoline and diesel consumption in road transport overall china s fuel consumption is influenced mainly by investment government expenditure and demographic changes such as urbanization while the fuel consumption of oecd countries is mainly driven by household final consumption expenditure in the short run and from a dynamic perspective china s fuel consumption is less influenced by its historical consumption than current influencing factors while that of oecd countries is more affected by historical fuel consumption based on the analysis and findings of this study some policy implications are proposed

long term outlook of energy use and co2 emissions from transport in central and eastern europe a forecast of transport activity energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions from transportation carried out under business as usual economic assumptions is presented for the 10 countries of central and eastern europe that have acquired the status of accession countries to the european union energy demand is projected under considerations of the dynamic evolution of transport modes and their use the evolution of automotive fuel prices which are assumed to gradually converge with western european price levels within the current decade and assumptions on efficiency improvements in all transport modes according to current technological trends and european regulations the results showing transportation energy demand to double and co2 emissions to be 70 higher in 2030 compared to 2000 are compared with other published forecasts and discussed with a view to potential future energy and environmental impacts in these countries outlining major policy implications r 2002 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

validating energy oriented cge models although cge models have received heavy usage they are often criticized as being insufficiently validated key parameters are often not econometrically estimated and the performance of the model as a whole is rarely checked against historical outcomes as a consequence questions frequently arise as to how much faith one can put in cge results in this paper we employ a novel approach to the validation of a widely utilized global cge model gtap e by comparing the variance of model generated petroleum price distributions driven by historical demand and supply shocks to the model with observed five year moving average price distributions we conclude that energy demand in gtap e is far too price elastic over this time frame after incorporating the latest econometric estimates of energy demand and supply elasticities we revisit the validation question and find the model to perform more satisfactorily as a further check we compare a deterministic global general equilibrium simulation based on historical realizations over the 2001 2006 period during which petroleum prices rose sharply along with growing global energy demands as anticipated by the stochastic simulations the revised model parameters perform much better than the original gtap e parameters in this global general equilibrium context

empirical assessment of the determinants of road energy demand in greece this paper attempts to cast light on the determinants of road energy demand in greece for this purpose we used cointegration techniques and vector autoregression var analysis in order to capture short run and long run dynamics for gasoline and diesel demand respectively from the empirical analysis that covers the period 1978 2003 we find that in the long run gasoline energy demand appears to be price and income inelastic while diesel demand appears to be price inelastic and income elastic we also found that the absence of close substitutes in the road sector denotes the low level of energy switching in greece

shocks individual risk attitude and vulnerability to poverty among rural households in thailand and vietnam summary we examine whether the experience of shocks influences individual risk attitude we measure the risk attitude of more than 4 000 households in thailand and vietnam via a simple survey item the experience of adverse shocks which is typical for poor and vulnerable households is related to a higher degree of risk aversion even when controlled for a large set of socio demographic variables therefore shocks perpetuate vulnerability to poverty via their effect on risk attitude we extend this general finding to various categories of shocks and find differences between thailand and vietnam this suggests that risk coping strategies profit from case specific design

the sunk cost fallacy in penny auctions this article theoretically and empirically analyses behaviour in penny auctions a relatively new auction mechanism as in the us dollars or war of attrition players in penny auctions commit higher non refundable costs as the auction continues and only win if all other players stop bidding i first show that in any equilibria that does not end immediately players bid probabilistically such that the expected profit from every bid is zero then using two large data sets covering 166 000 auctions i calculate that average profit margins actually exceed 50 to explain this deviation i incorporate a sunk cost fallacy into the theoretical model to generate a set of predictions about hazard rates and player behaviour which i confirm empirically while players do slowly learn to correct this bias and there are few obvious barriers to competition activity in the market is rising and concentration remains relatively high

leviathan governments and carbon taxes costs and potential benefits abstract this paper addresses positive aspects of the global warming debate that so far has been concerned by and large with normative issues the paper considers a consumers government that appreciates tax revenues as such leviathan in addition to conventional measures of welfare i e carbon taxes serve the dual purpose of correcting for externalities here global warming or more generally a stock externality from energy use and of raising revenues this government faces either a competitive or a perfectly cartelized supply the major findings are 1 i consumers may benefit from a leviathan government that appropriates some of the monopoly rent by deterring preemption to some extent 2 ii the leviathan motive raises initial taxes and thereby lowers initial emissions but increases the long run stock externality in a play with linear strategies 3 iii there exists a continuum of equilibria in nonlinear markov strategies which are however pareto inefficient compared with the linear strategies 4 iv but in case of a binding resource constraint nonlinear strategies are the only feasible ones

are economic time series asymmetric over the business cycle it has long been argued that major cyclical variables such as the unemployment rate display an asymmetric behavior over various phases of the business cycle the paper provides a statistical test for this hypothesis using the framework of finite state markov processes i implement a test to see if the behavior of the unemployment rate is characterized by sudden jumps and slower drops it is argued that the framework provided in the paper can also be used to test other sample path properties of economic time series

who plays the numbers games in the middle of the day we analyse the increase in sales of pick 3 and pick 4 daily numbers lottery games and other ohio lottery games after ohio introduced midday drawings for the pick 3 and pick 4 games in august 1999 the midday drawings increased pick 3 sales by 5 pick 4 sales by 12 and total lottery sales by 2 based on our analysis of a 36 month panel dataset of ohio lottery sales by zip code midday drawings raise more revenue from the strongly regressive daily numbers games however the introduction of midday drawings does not change the negative income elasticities of demand for numbers games in an economically meaningful manner

review of key international demand elasticities for major industrializing economies abstract this paper conducts a selective review of various estimates for energy demand responses focused specially upon lower income industrializing economies rather than richer mature nations it emphasizes recent trends from empirical studies that have been published after 2000 emphasis is placed on the five major emerging or transitional economies in brazil china india mexico and russia although other important nations like chile and south korea are also discussed when studies are available the review focuses attention on the long run responses to changes in prices and income after capital stock turnover has been completed the terminology often refers to elasticities or the percentage change in energy use divided by the percentage change in price or income holding constant all other factors that could influence energy use decisions estimates cover petroleum products natural gas and electricity although the available studies often ignore coal they also include the economy wide impacts real gdp to price changes most studies have focused upon household and transportation use of liquid fuels many fewer studies have investigated fuels used by industry or commerce or for electric generation based upon the available estimates price and income elasticities for liquid fuels are generally less than one unity for many countries and sectors except for the long run income effect for transportation purposes which can range widely by country between 0 24 and 1 75 while averaging 0 94 for all countries

measurement of repressed inflation in china abstract we estimate a measure of the repression of the chinese price level by developing a simple analytical model which derives a true rate of inflation on the basis of the different rates of change of the stock of money in circulation and the nominal value of retail sales this true rate of inflation is then used to explain changes in quasi money balances we estimate this model for the period 1979 1988 using quarterly data the results strongly support the hypothesis of repressed inflation the annual rate of inflation of the true price index is approximately 12 4 percent higher than that of the official price index over the 10 year period

on the economics of state lotteries s tate lotteries can be evaluated from either of two perspectives familiar to economists as a consumer commodity or as a source of public revenue l as a commodity the lottery is notable for its broad market penetration and rapid growth sixty percent of the adults in lottery states play at least once in a year the annual growth in real per capita sales in lottery states has averaged 12 percent rising in 1989 dollars from 22 in 1975 to 108 in 1989 as a source of public revenue lotteries account for a rather modest fraction of revenue in states that run them 3 3 percent in 1986 but they are nonetheless one of the most visible state government activities lottery sales exceed those of all other products sold directly by state governments to the public and are larger than all but three major activities of state government education public welfare and highways clotfelter and cook 1989 table 2 5 moreover lotteries are a qualitatively new activity for state governments in that they are a business operated in effect for profit state liquor stores are perhaps the closest analog but they were created to encourage temperate drinking practices and do not engage in the sales promotion and marketing activities that are characteristic of the lotteries lotteries enjoy an honored place in american history as a device for raising funds for public purposes funding for such institutions as the jamestown settlement harvard college and the continental army as well as hundreds of bridges fire houses and schools came from lotteries but after the

an error correction approach to money demand the case of sudan abstract an empirical analysis of money demand behavior in sudan is presented based on the dynamic error correction model a theoretical basis for the model is offered which allows an explicit parameterized division of effects into long run influences short term adjustments and proportional equilibrium conditions we refute previous claims that income and price effects may be abnormally high in sudan in part by accounting for both foreign exchange and inflationary influences

the economics of casino taxation in this article a model of the costs of a casino is developed that focuses on the implications for economic welfare of different taxation schemes for casinos the situation being considered is in a country where casinos cater exclusively to foreign tourists the goal of the country is to determine the maximum amount of taxes that can be extracted from the activities of this sector under different systems of taxation when the price of gambling is set by regulation above its competitive level the economic losses created by excessive investment in the sector can be reduced by taxation a turnover tax on the amount gambled can maximize both tax revenue and the economic welfare of the country due to administrative constraints a number of countries rely on the taxation of the casinos fixed assets or a combination of a turnover tax and a tax on fixed costs the model is applied to the situation in north cyprus the annual economic efficiency loss from its poorly designed tax policies on casino gambling is

analysing gasoline demand elasticities a survey this paper is a survey of studies on gasoline demand although there are very many dxerent studies in this eld which sometimes appear to arrive at contradictory results we find that with proper stratification of studies by model and data type much of the contict turns to consensus in this survey we classtfy studies by data type and by ten d erent categories of model and with the exception of estimates on seasonal data which tend to be unstable and of certain inappropriate model formulations we find a fair degree of agreement concerning average short run and even long run income and price elasticities

unkind roll of the dice drivers of lottery crimes in the united states using data on u s states this paper studies the factors driving lottery related crimes focusing on spillovers from other gambling and corruption although state sponsored lotteries have become q

business cycle duration dependence a parametric approach this paper reexamines duration dependence in u s business cycles using parametric hazard models positive duration dependence would indicate that expansions or contractions are more likely to end as they become older this paper provides statistically significant evidence of positive duration dependence for expansions before world war ii and contractions after world war ii the evidence is stronger than in earlier research utilizing nonparametric techniques because certain nonparametric techniques have low statistical power against the type of duration dependence found in this paper evidence is also presented suggesting that expansions became longer on average after world war ii while contractions became shorter copyright 1991 by mit press

estimating the demand for gasoline in developing countries senegal abstract this paper estimates the aggregate demand for gasoline in senegal from 1970 to 2008 the long term and short term elasticities of demand with respect to gasoline prices and income are of paramount interest in this study in senegal rising food prices unemployment and shortage of electric supply are always associated with the spiking cost of world oil prices to understand the external shocks of world oil price and demand for gasoline in senegal this study tested a log linear model against the linear model of the demand for oil function with lagged dependent variables as an explanatory variable here the linear specification of the demand for oil is rejected in this study in favor of the log linear the natural log transformation is typical when using high frequency data and significantly reduces skewness and kurtosis generally in this study i found that short run elasticity is smaller than long run elasticity and gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to both price and income for both the short and long runs in senegal this is why researcher like moosa posits that this assertion can be rationalised on the grounds that oil is such an important commodity that does not have close substitutes at least for its uses 1998 p 3

education s gambling problem earmarked lottery revenues and charitable donations to education i examine the impact that lotteries introduced to support education have on voluntary contributions to education state lotteries and the causes they are introduced to support are highly publicized this provides the opportunity to assess whether donors are crowded out by government spending of which they are almost certainly aware using donor level survey data and nonprofits tax returns i find that donations to education related organizations fall with the introduction of a lottery this result is driven by donors response to the new highly publicized government revenue source rather than a decrease in nonprofit fundraising efforts jel d64 h3 h75

on the periodic structure of the business cycle this article tests whether an economic recovery is equally likely to occur in any month of the year i test this hypothesis with a homogeneous markov switching regime model and use the turning point dates for business cycles marked by the national bureau of economic research and romer i tend to find unequal probabilities to switch from recession to expansions in particular the spring and the month of december appear to have higher incidence of economic recovery my results also imply that recessions and expansions are on average longer or shorter depending on what time of the year they start this suggests the presence of a seasonal pattern in business cycle durations though such a notion of seasonality is quite different from the common one based on unobserved component linear time series models i investigate issues that go beyond linear dependence between seasonality and business cycles

consumer value maximizing sweepstakes and contests abstract sweepstakes and contests are some of the most frequently used promotional tools consumers participating in sweepstakes or contests have an opportunity to win prizes through a random draw the authors examine how commonly used sweepstakes formats that vary in the number of winners and the allocation of the total reward money among the winners affect consumer valuations of the promotion given a fixed amount of reward money the authors examine alternative reward formats based on the promotional objectives consumer risk aversion and degree of subadditivity they test the analytical results using an experimental approach

government borrowing using bonds with randomly determined returns welfare improving randomization in the context of deficit finance abstract we study the problem of a government that wishes to share optimally the burden of deficit finance among agents with differential access to investment opportunities in the presence of private information it is pareto efficient for the government to borrow in a way that amounts to non linear taxation and it must treat agents with access to the best investment opportunities preferentially to keep them in the bond market in addition with private information about access to assets it is often desirable to randomize extraneously the return on the highest yielding government liabilities the optimal government policy is shown to accord well with historical observations and provides insight into why explicit randomization is not often observed in private contracts

the market for sweepstakes this paper studies the market for monopolistically supplied sweepstakes we derive equilibrium demands for fixed prize and variable prize sweepstakes and determine the profit maximizing prize level and pay out ratio respectively it can be profitable to offer each type of sweepstake when there is a large enough number of weighted utility consumers who have constant absolute risk attitudes are strictly averse to small as well as symmetric risks and display longshot preference behaviour moreover for the variable prize sweepstake the supplier will generally find it profitable to combine sweepstakes targeting two smaller populations and offer a single sweepstake to the combined population this implication is corroborated by the recent spate of mergers of smaller state lotteries into larger ones

investigating efficiency in betting markets evidence from the greek 6 49 lotto abstract in this paper we investigate the existence of profit opportunities in the greek market for the 6 49 lotto under the assumption of random number selection we find evidence suggesting that the market is efficient because number selection is found to deviate from randomness we further investigate the existence of profit opportunities due to number unpopularity the evidence suggests that although unpopular numbers exist they are not sufficiently unpopular so as to generate positive expected payoffs

demand for international reserves and exchange rate intervention policy in an adjustable peg economy abstract this paper develops and estimates a model of the joint determination of the official and black market exchange rates private and government demand for international reserves and the rate of inflation under an adjustable peg system the framework presented combines and extends aspects of the monetary approach to the balance of payments and exchange rate determination with the theory of the demand for international reserves the role of expectations about devaluation is taken into account the model is estimated by full information maximum likelihood on the basis of quarterly data for turkey

lottery expenditures in canada a regional analysis of determinants and incidence this article examines two issues first it evaluates the statistical significance of a number of socio economic and demographic variables on the level of household lottery expenditures in the six regions of canada while some household characteristics vary in the extent to which they significantly affect the level of lottery expenditures across regions wealth age occupation mother tongue and urban location for example others are significant in every region regional consistency exists in the statistical significance of after tax household income sex and education of the head of household lottery expenditures increase as incomes increase lottery expenditures are significantly lower for female heads of households than for their male counterparts lottery expenditures decline as the education level of the head of household increases second lottery expenditures are found to be regressive although the degree of regressivity is less than for lotteries in the united states

a nonparametric investigation of duration dependence in the american business cycle does the termination probability of a business expansion or contraction increase with age this question may be formally addressed by analyzing the nature of duration dependence in aggregate economic activity our null hypothesis is that there is no duration dependence which we test via intentionally nonparametric procedures we also argue that common notion of business cycle periodicity can be usefully interpreted in terms of whole cycle duration dependence we find some evidence for duration dependence in whole cycles and in prewar expansions but little evidence elsewhere

neighborhood effects on speculative behavior abstract speculative behavior plays a key role in numerous markets but little is known about its causes we test for neighborhood effects on speculative behavior using daily lottery sales data from 20 states in the u s in a sample of 160 000 retailers lottery sales in a census block increase by 0 26 on average for each 1 increase in neighboring blocks we test whether this correlation is attributable to contextual effects correlated effects or endogenous effects our analysis suggests that social interaction is an important cause of speculative behavior

a model of chinese national income determination a model consisting of a consumption function and an investment function is used to explain chinese annual data in constant prices from 1953 to 1982 the data confirm robert hall s version of the permanent income hypothesis and the accelerations principle deviations of the observations from predictions of this model are attributed to political factors including the great leap forward in 195962 the cultural revolution in 1967 68 and the special government policies in 1978 and 1981