returns to scale damages to scale marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution in dea environmental assessment abstract this study discusses a new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution between desirable and undesirable outputs to discuss mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of corporate strategies to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the concept of disposability is separated into natural and managerial disposability then this study explores the computational framework of rts returns to scale and dts damages to scale the type of rts is measured within the natural disposability while the type of dts is measured within the managerial disposability considering the two types of disposability this study discusses mrt and rs between desirable and undesirable outputs as an illustrative example this study applies the proposed approach to evaluate the performance of us coal fired power plants this study finds that the regulation policy on no x and so 2 has been effective on their emission controls under us clean air act caa the regulation on co 2 or a major source of the global warming and climate change is still insufficient in the united states therefore this study recommends that us federal and local governments should regulate the amount of co 2 emission under the caa

sustainability development for supply chain management in u s petroleum industry by dea environmental assessment abstract environmental assessment and protection are important concerns in modern business consumers are interested in environmental protection they avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies the green image is very important for business survivability in our global market a business concern associated with the green image is how to attain corporate sustainability where companies can attain both economic success and pollution prevention in their operations there is tradeoff between economic prosperity and environmental concern to attain a high level of corporate sustainability companies need to measure the current performance in terms of their operational and environmental achievements this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for such assessment the proposed dea assessment provides corporate leaders and managers with not only the measure of corporate sustainability but also information regarding how to invest for technology innovation for abatement of undesirable outputs e g co 2 as an application this study utilizes the proposed approach to measure the corporate sustainability of petroleum firms in the united states the petroleum industry is functionally separated into integrated and independent companies the integrated companies referred to as major have their large supply chains for both upstream e g exploration development and production of crude oil or natural gas and downstream e g oil tankers refineries storages and retails meanwhile the independent companies focus upon the upstream function but not the downstream in their business operations the empirical comparison between the two groups of petroleum firms identifies that the integrated companies outperform the independent companies because a large supply chain incorporated into the former group provides them with both a scale merit in their operations and an opportunity to obtain consumer s opinions on their business operations thus the large supply chain system covering business functions for upstream and downstream enhances corporate sustainability in the u s petroleum industry it is easily envisioned that the empirical findings discussed in this study are useful in preparing business strategy and industrial policy for the petroleum industry of not only the united states but also other nations involved in oil and gas production

capital flows in the euro area and target2 balances abstract this paper explores how the uneven recourse by national banking systems in the euro area to the ecb s unconventional refinancing operations that led to the accumulation of large target2 balances at the ncbs has contributed to the evolution of aggregate economic activity in important member states of the euro area for the period between 2008 and 2014 we estimate a panel var model and identify the structural shocks by means of sign restrictions our results suggest that the build up of target2 balances was driven mainly by capital flow shocks while being barely responsive to other aggregate shocks furthermore on the basis of counterfactual experiments we find that the ability to build up sizeable target2 liabilities has contributed substantially to avoiding deeper recessions in the distressed euro area member countries like spain italy ireland and portugal while to a smaller extent depressing aggregate economic activity in core member states such as germany the netherlands and finland

dea radial and non radial models for unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability theoretical extension by strong complementary slackness conditions abstract this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment all radial and non radial models are discussed under natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability implies corporate strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to decrease a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy supported by economists indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its performance by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy supported by corporate strategists in u s business schools indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change on undesirable outputs using the proposed dea assessment this study examines the relationship among energy consumption economic development and environmental protection in japanese prefectures to theoretically extend the use of dea for environmental assessment this study incorporates strong complementary slackness conditions scscs into the proposed radial models the incorporation of scscs has three methodological strengths first dea scscs can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections second the incorporation of scscs makes it possible to restrict dual variables multiples in a specific range without any prior information finally dea scscs can bypass the conventional procedure i e a radial model combined with an additive model used for dea radial measurement

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

efficiency analysis of chinese industry a directional distance function approach two efficiency measures of chinese industry were estimated at the provincial level from 1994 to 2002 using a directional output distance function one is a traditional efficiency measure that considers only desirable output while the other considers both desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously a comparison of the two measures revealed that efficiency levels are biased only if desirable output is considered five coastal provinces municipalities that have attracted a large amount of foreign direct investment are found to be the most efficient when only desirable output is considered and also when both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered however omitting undesirable output tends to lead to an overestimate of industrial efficiency levels in shandong sichuan and hebei provinces we also found that a province s industrial structure has significant effects on its efficiency levels

japanese fuel mix strategy after disaster of fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant lessons from international comparison among industrial nations measured by dea environmental assessment in time horizon abstract on june 1 2015 the japanese government has announced that the fuel mix will consist of nuclear generation with a range between 20 and 22 and renewable generation with a range between 22 and 24 of the total electricity generation by 2030 a difficulty in understanding the governmental future energy plan is that it does not contain any scientific evidence concerning why japan needs to maintain the amount of nuclear generation and that of renewable at the level between 20 and 22 and between 22 and 24 respectively to investigate the future energy plan this study uses data envelopment analysis dea as a methodology the proposed dea approach incorporates the property of translation invariance the property indicates that an efficiency measure should not be influenced even if inputs and or outputs are shifted toward a same direction by adding or subtracting a specific real number the property makes it possible that we can evaluate the performance of organizations whose production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs contain many zeros and negative values in a data set such an occurrence of zero and negative in production factors is widely observed in many dea performance evaluations this study first uses the desirable property for dea environmental assessment in a time horizon the proposed dea environmental assessment identifies that the reasonable ranges for japanese future fuel mix are a combustible fuel generation within the range between 34 5 and 56 1 b hydro generation within the range between 22 4 and 40 5 c nuclear generation within the range between 10 4 and 13 7 d pumped hydro generation within the range between 3 9 and 6 9 and e renewable generation within the range between 3 7 and 8 4 all of which are measured by these generation capacities it is clearly identified that the future fuel mix proposed by the japanese government is inconsistent with the estimated one which we determine by relatively comparing it with the energy structures of 33 industrial nations the comparison indicates that the japanese future energy plan will be too ambitious to implement the future goal it is easily envisioned that the energy plan will have a considerable difficulty in future it is hoped that the electric power industry can access drastic technological advancements including eco technology innovation and then japan will be able to change the future direction on fuel mix as the government expects

inference in structural vector autoregressions when the identifying assumptions are not fully believed re evaluating the role of monetary policy in economic fluctuations abstract point estimates and error bands for svars that are set identified are only justified if the researcher is persuaded that some parameter values are a priori more plausible than others when such prior information exists traditional approaches can be generalized to allow for doubts about the identifying assumptions we use information about both structural coefficients and impacts of shocks and propose a new asymmetric t distribution for incorporating information about signs in a nondogmatic way we apply these methods to a three variable macroeconomic model and conclude that monetary policy shocks are not the major driver of output inflation or interest rates

trade related intellectual property rights to biological resources socioeconomic implications for developing countries abstract the uruguay round of the general agreement on tariffs and trade proposed conferring trade related intellectual property rights trips to international firms on a variety of life forms and on biotechnology this proposal has been denounced by developing countries many developing countries have relied heavily on indigenous biotechnology from several decades in the area of high yielding seeds bio pesticides and fertilizers herbal medicines and household consumables this study analyzes the social economic and preservation implications of trips for three types of biological resources physically nonexhaustible resources physically exhaustible resources under current use and physically exhaustible potential future resources the study concludes that each of these resources may require different degrees of intellectual property right ipr protection for their sustained use further establishing ipr to products derived from genetic and biochemical resources is certainly necessary but not sufficient for biodiversity prospecting and the long term survival of these resources along with the ipr protection developing countries have to develop suitable institutions and policies governing the use of their open access biological resources and enabling local communities to receive partial benefits of biodiversity conservation and prospecting

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

inequality and the business cycle evidence from u s survey data we study the effects of macroeconomic shocks on measures of economic inequality obtained from u s survey data to identify aggregate supply aggregate demand and monetary policy shocks we estima

testing for indeterminacy an application to u s monetary policy reply this paper considers a prototypical new keynesian model in which the equilibrium is undetermined if monetary policy is passive the likelihood based estimation of dynamic equilibrium models is extended to allow for indeterminacies and sunspot fluctuations we construct posterior weights for the determinacy and indeterminacy region of the parameter space and estimates for the propagation of fundamental and sunspot shocks according to the estimated model u s monetary policy post 1982 is consistent with determinacy whereas the pre volcker policy is not we find that before 1979 indeterminacy substantially altered the propagation of shocks

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

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

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

dea environmental assessment on u s industrial sectors investment for improvement in operational and environmental performance to attain corporate sustainability abstract environmental assessment has recently become an important business concern because consumers are interested in environmental protection they try to avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies which do not pay attention to environmental protection even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies thus a green image is very important for corporate survivability in a global market this study considers corporate sustainability indicating that companies need to consider both economic prosperity and pollution prevention in their operations to discuss the issue from corporate strategy for modern business this study discusses a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by focusing upon research and development r d strategy as well as technology innovation and selection for reduction of undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission this type of research has never been explored in previous studies it is easily envisioned that the proposed dea environmental assessment will guide corporate leaders in identifying how to invest for technology innovation to reduce an amount of undesirable outputs to discuss the practicality this study applies the proposed approach to 153 observations on s p 500 corporations in 2012 and 2013 the empirical investigation confirms that investors pay more serious attention to company s green image and the reality for a long run sustainability than profitability in a short run concern furthermore the energy sector is the best investment target among seven industrial sectors examined in this study the measurement of corporate sustainability can serve as an empirical basis in selecting what type of technology is fitted for a specific industry

operational synergy in the us electric utility industry under an influence of deregulation policy a linkage to financial performance and corporate value abstract sueyoshi et al 2009 have examined a synergy effect between electricity and gas services in the us electric utility industry they have compared electricity specialized firms with diversified utility firms in their financial performance and corporate value a problem of their study is that it has not empirically measured the operational performance of the electric utility firms as an extension of the preceding study this research investigates the operational performance of 104 us electric utility firms 1990 2004 by fully utilizing dea data envelopment analysis this study finds the three new policy implications first the synergy effect has not existed in the operational performance of diversified utility firms before and after the deregulation on the us electricity markets thus core business concentration is more effective for electric utility firms than corporate diversification to enhance their operational performance under the current us deregulation policy second the operational performance has had an increasing trend until 1996 and a decreasing trend after 1996 thus the us deregulation policy has been influential on their operational performance third the enhancement in operational performance of electric utility firms has improved their financial performance the improvement in financial performance has increased their corporate value thus this study finds the business causality among operational performance financial performance and corporate value in the us electric utility industry

efficiency evaluation and dynamic evolution of china s regional green economy a method based on the super pebm model and dea window analysis abstract given the current circumstances of increasingly serious resource consumption and environmental pollution the development of china s green economy will profoundly impact the nation s future economic prosperity and even global economic development based on panel data from 2008 to 2017 this paper measures the green economic efficiency gee of chinese regions and analyzes its dynamic evolution using time series based on a novel data envelopment analysis dea model using environmental dea techniques this paper introduces the super pebm ebm based on pearson correlation coefficient model which is developed from the epsilon based measure ebm model and combines super pebm with the window analysis method firstly environmental dea technology is used to analyze gee at the regional level in china secondly based on panel data the window analysis method is used to analyze the regional differences of china s regional gee finally the development trend of china s regional gee in different time windows is obtained by combining the super pebm model and window analysis the empirical analysis results using panel data for regions in china from 2008 to 2017 show that 1 the overall gee of china is slowly increasing and the regional differences are still significant and 2 the improvement of gee can help to reduce regional differences

data envelopment analysis for environmental assessment comparison between public and private ownership in petroleum industry abstract environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue in the world this study discusses how to apply data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment an important feature of the dea environmental assessment is that it needs to classify outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because private and public entities often produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the three types of unification for dea environmental assessment by using non radial dea models the first unification considers both an increase and a decrease in the input vector along with a decrease in the direction vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification measures unified efficiency the second unification considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability and measures unified efficiency under natural disposability the third unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as managerial disposability and measures unified efficiency under managerial disposability all the unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs to document their practical implications this study has applied the proposed approach to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil firms this study identifies two important findings on the petroleum industry one of the two findings is that national oil companies under public ownership outperform international oil companies under private ownership in terms of unified operational and environmental efficiency and unified efficiency under natural disposability however the performance of international oil companies exhibits an increasing trend in unified efficiency the other finding is that national oil companies need to satisfy the environmental standard of its own country while international oil companies need to satisfy the international standard that is more restricted than the national standards as a consequence international oil companies outperform national oil companies in terms of unified efficiency under managerial disposability

government spending and heterogeneous consumption dynamics abstract what is the effect of government spending on consumption neoclassical and new keynesian models deliver opposing predictions and empirical studies differ in their conclusions this paper takes a data driven approach and exploits information from over 200 variables via a bayesian factor augmented var model i use sign restrictions for identifying effects that both classes of models agree upon this approach imposes a minimal set of restrictions on the empirical model leaving the sign and magnitude of the effect of government spending on consumption free to be determined by the data i find that i government spending increases aggregate consumption ii the estimated spending multiplier is close to 2 iii there exists heterogeneity even within durable nondurable and service consumption variables which is undocumented in the literature finally i show that my identified structural shocks are not predictable by economic agents and are uncorrelated with traditional monetary policy shocks suggesting that these effects are not confounded by monetary policy

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

revisiting the effects of monetary policy shocks evidence from svar with narrative sign restrictions abstract this article analyzes the effects of monetary policy shocks using a structural vector autoregression svar model that is identified using a combination of narrative sign restrictions and sign restrictions on the systematic component of monetary policy we find that contractionary monetary policy shocks induce real gdp to drop with very high posterior probability when narrative sign restrictions are included the posterior probability intervals of the structural parameters in the monetary policy equation based on our restrictions are smaller than those constructed by arias et al 2019 excluding some implausible large values subsample analysis shows that the price puzzle disappeared during the great moderation

radial and non radial approaches for environmental assessment by data envelopment analysis corporate sustainability and effective investment for technology innovation abstract environmental assessment and protection are important concerns in modern business consumers are interested in corporate effort and investment for environmental protection it can be easily imagined that they avoid purchasing products from dirty imaged companies even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies a green image is recently a very important concern for corporate survivability in a competitive global market by extending previous works on environment assessment and corporate sustainability where companies need to consider both economic prosperity and pollution prevention in their operations this study discusses a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by utilizing its radial and non radial measurements the proposed radial and non radial approaches may guide corporate leaders managers and policy makers by providing not only quantitative assessment on their efforts for environmental protection but also information regarding how to invest for technology innovation on abatement of undesirable outputs the empirical investigation identifies that the green investment in u s energy industry is useful for improving its unified operational and environmental performance if operational performance is measured by roa return on assets and an amount of co 2 emission reduction because the industry is the largest emitter among seven industry sectors examined in this study the green investment makes it possible that firms can increase their net incomes by a good corporate image however if the financial measure is replaced by a corporate value i e tobin s q ratio mainly measured by stock price the energy industry does not exhibit the best investment opportunity because the effect of green investment is limited on enhancing its corporate value the energy industry is a very large process industry so that the green investment does not immediately increase its corporate value as found in the other industrial sectors such as information technology industry

ecological total factor energy efficiency of regions in china most existing energy efficiency indices are computed without taking into account undesirable outputs such as co2 and so2 emissions this paper computes the ecological total factor energy efficiency etfee of 30 regions in china for the period 2005 2009 through the slack based model sbm with undesirable outputs we calculate the etfee index by comparing the target energy input obtained from sbm with undesirable outputs to the actual energy input findings show that china s regional etfee still remains a low level of around 0 600 and regional energy efficiency is overestimated by more than 0 100 when not looking at environmental impacts china s regional energy efficiency is extremely unbalanced the east area ranks first with the highest etfee of above 0 700 the northeast and central areas follow and the west area has the lowest etfee of less than 0 500 a monotone increasing relation exists between the area s etfee and china s per capita gdp the truncated regression model shows that the ratio of r d expenditure to gdp and the degree of foreign dependence have positive impacts whereas the ratio of the secondary industry to gdp and the ratio of government subsidies for industrial pollution treatment to gdp have negative effects on the etfee

property rights issues involving plant genetic resources implications of ownership for economic efficiency the economic theory of property rights is applied to the issue of the conservation of plant genetic diversity an issue often discussed in terms of benefit sharing in order to demonstrate that the assignment of property rights is important for reasons of efficiency as well as for equity given the existence of transaction costs within an industry the location of a property rights assignment is a crucial factor determining the incentives for efficient levels of investment at various levels of that industry in the context of plant genetic resources this means that property rights that are located at the retail end of the pharmaceutical and plant breeding industries may not have sufficient effect to generate the incentives to supply adequate amounts of plant genetic resources to the research and development sectors at the base of these industries

var analysis and the great moderation post world war ii us macroeconomic history is usually divided into two distinct subperiods the former period which extends up to the end of the volcker disinflation is characterized by a significant extent of macroeconomic turbulence with highly volatile inflation and output growth the latter period from the end of the volcker disinflation up to the present day is marked in contrast by significantly smaller volatilities for both inflation and output growth these dramatic changes in the reduced form properties of the us economy over the last several decades char acterize a phenomenon known as the great moderation see in particular chang jin kim and charles nelson 1999 margaret mcconnell and gabriel perez quiros 2000 a vast empirical literature has investigated the source s of the great moderation in an attempt to disentangle the relative contributions of two main explanations good policy and good luck based on time varying or markov switching structural var methods the good luck hypoth esis has been advocated by a number of authors including james h stock and mark w watson 2003 giorgio e primiceri 2005 christopher sims and tao zha 2006 and luca gambetti evi pappa and fabio canova 2008

investigating inflation persistence across monetary regimes under inflation targeting estimates of the indexation parameter in hybrid new keynesian phillips curves are either equal to zero or very low in the united kingdom canada sweden and new zealand analogous results hold for the euro area under the european monetary union and for switzerland under the new monetary regime under stable regimes with clearly defined nominal anchors inflation appears to be purely forward looking these results question the notion that the intrinsic inflation persistence found in post wwii u s data is structural in the sense of lucas carnegie rochester conference series on public policy 1 1976 19 46 and suggest that hardwiring inflation persistence in macroeconomic models is potentially misleading

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

dea duality on returns to scale rts in production and cost analyses an occurrence of multiple solutions and differences between production based and cost based rts estimates this article discusses the concept of rts returns to scale in the framework of dea data envelopment analysis production and cost analyses focusing on an occurrence of multiple solutions and how to deal with such a difficulty dual relationships between production based and cost based rts estimates are also theoretically discussed in this study

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

shifts in monetary policy and exchange rate dynamics is dornbusch s overshooting hypothesis intact after all abstract how do nominal exchange rates adjust after surprise contractions in monetary policy while the seminal contribution by dornbusch provides concise predictions exchange rates appreciate i e overshoot on impact before depreciating gradually empirical support for his hypothesis is at best mixed i argue that the failure to discover overshooting may result from assumptions researchers have imposed to recover structural vars specifically simultaneous feedback effects between interest rates and exchange rates which are inherently forward looking variables are often excluded or modeled alongside with strong restrictions in this paper i identify u s monetary policy shocks using surprises in federal funds futures around policy announcements as external instruments which recent literature has established to represent the appropriate laboratory in settings encompassing macroeconomic and financial variables resulting adjustments of the dollar conditional on shifts in policy generally align with dornbusch s predictions during the post bretton woods era including volcker s tenure as fed chair

energy and ghg emission efficiency in the chilean manufacturing industry sectoral and regional analysis by dea and malmquist indexes abstract global warming produced mainly by the emission of greenhouse gases is currently a worldwide concern in the last few decades since the 1950s many of the changes observed in the world climate have been meaningful this paper presents an analysis of energy efficiency and of greenhouse gas emissions in the chilean manufacturing industry by region and sector taking into consideration time sequences data envelopment analysis dea models are used for the analysis three ways to handle undesirable outputs are compared the source of inefficiency in each decision making unit dmu is calculated using scale efficiency and the evolution over time is analyzed using the malmquist index the results indicate that the industries located in the chilean regions of coquimbo la araucania and aysen were the most efficient while the industries in the regions of tarapaca antofagasta and biobio were less efficient the most efficient industrial sectors were those involving communications equipment base metals and clothing the least efficient were those concerned with food and beverages textiles and nonmetallic minerals due to the treatment of the undesirable outputs differences were found in the efficiency indexes obtained by the three models this finding suggests using a model better adapted to the characteristics of the outputs in question and the viability of improving industrial practices

environmental assessment for corporate sustainability by resource utilization and technology innovation dea radial measurement on japanese industrial sectors abstract this study proposes a new use of dea data envelopment analysis radial approach to examine the corporate sustainability of japanese industrial sectors the concept of corporate sustainability is measured by its subcomponent measures including uen unified efficiency under natural disposability uem unified efficiency under managerial disposability uenm unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uei unified efficiency for intermediate measurement and uenm dc unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability with desirable congestion among the five measures the uei examines a degree of how each firm can efficiently utilize its resources the uenm dc examines a degree of how the firm can reduce an amount of undesirable outputs by technology innovation and or managerial change such a combined use between uei and uenm dc has been never explored in dea environmental assessment the empirical results obtained from the proposed approach have identified two important implications one of the two implications is that the japanese energy industry has been long under governmental regulation so that energy firms do not have corporate governance capabilities at the level of other industrial sectors which are competing in a global market in particular the implication is applicable to japanese electric power firms it is necessary for them to change their corporate governances e g by adding new executive board members who have international experience and or woman executives as widely found in american and european energy industries so that they can pay attention to consumers not regulatory agencies of the japanese government the other implication is that technology innovation can more effectively improve the performance of the energy sector employing high efficiency and low carbon generation technologies to achieve desirable fuel mix is essential for improving the corporate sustainability of the japanese energy sector

capturing the pharmaceutical value of biodiversity in a developing country the conservation of biodiversity is increasingly being defined as a process made up of three components saving studying and sustainably using biodiversity if the conservation of process is expanded to incorporate the need for both the protection of biodiversity either in situ or ex situ and the generation of valuable information about biodiversity an important issue is the correct balance of investment in these two types of activities this paper explores this issue by focusing on efforts in a developing country to capture the pharmaceutical potential of biodiversity and species information a model of biodiversity investment choice is developed and an analysis of royalty returns to effort in biodiversity protection taxonomic information and the collection of biotic samples is conducted based on data from costa rica the results suggest that although a country can be adequately compensated for its investment in the generation of taxonomic information it is unlikely that pharmaceutical prospecting alone will cover the high opportunity costs of biodiversity protection

photovoltaic power stations in germany and the united states a comparative study by data envelopment analysis abstract this study compares photovoltaic pv power stations between germany and the united states to examine which country more efficiently provides renewable energy in their usages for the comparative analysis this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea as a methodology to evaluate the performance of pv power stations from the perspective of both solar and land usages a total of one hundred sixty pv power stations eighty in germany and eighty in the united states are used for this comparison the demand for sustainable energy and energy security has been rapidly increasing over the past decade because of concerns about environment and limited resources pv solutions are one of many renewable technologies that are being developed to satisfy a recent demand of electricity germany is the world s top installer and consumer of pv power and the united states is one of the top five nations germany leads the way in installed pv capacity even though the nation has less solar resources and land area due to limited solar resources low insolation and sunshine and land area the united states should have a clear advantage over germany however the empirical result of this study exhibits that pv power stations in germany operate more efficiently than those of the united states even if the latter has many solar and land advantages the surprising result indicates that the united states has room for improvement when it comes to utilizing solar and land resources and needs to reform the solar policy for such a purpose feed in tariff fit may be an effective energy policy at the state level in the united states because the fit provides investors such as utility companies and other types of energy firms with financial incentives to develop large pv power stations and generation facilities for other renewable energy it may be true that the fit is a powerful policy tool to promote pv and other renewable installation and support a reduction of an amount of greenhouse gases however the fit poses a large financial burden to consumers with a massive increase in renewable energy installation like in germany and spain therefore it is necessary for the united states to consider how to align a policy with a speed of technology innovation to balance between the benefit and the cost derived from the policy implementation on renewable energy in addition this study discusses policy issues regarding cost allocation due to fit among stakeholders related to the electric power industry at the end this study proposes a new type of wholesale electricity market that provides simultaneous trading on electricity and greenhouse gas emissions by fully utilizing modern computer science technology that exists in universities and national laboratories of the united states

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

weak and strong disposability vs natural and managerial disposability in dea environmental assessment comparison between japanese electric power industry and manufacturing industries the economic concept of weak and strong disposability has long dominated studies on dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment this study reviews the two disposability concepts from their conceptual and methodological implications in particular this study is interested in the concept of weak disposability because the concept is believed to have an analytical capability to measure an occurrence of congestion the two economic concepts on disposability accepted by production economists are replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation in contrast the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified performance by utilizing new clean air technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two groups of disposability this study compares between weak strong disposability and natural managerial disposability in terms of their conceptual and methodological differences focusing upon the concept of congestion and technology innovation furthermore using the concept of natural and managerial disposability this study compares japanese electric power firms with manufacturing firms this study finds that the manufacturing firms outperform the electric power firms under natural disposability an opposite result is found under managerial disposability this empirical study also finds that the two groups of japanese firms have attained desirable good congestion due to technology innovation based upon such empirical results this study identifies two policy implications one of the two implications is that the two groups of japanese industries have attained a high level of technology innovation by a result of environmental regulation the other is that the electric power industry operates more efficiently to reduce the co2 emission than the manufacturing industries

farmer s rights and genetic conservation in traditional farming systems abstract crop genetic resources are concentrated in some of the world s poorest farming systems these resources have been used by industrial countries without compensating farmers concerns for equity and conservation have led to proposals to protect crop genetic resources as intellectual property this paper argues that conventional intellectual property regulations e g utility patents and plant variety protection should not be used to protect crop genetic resources it suggests that farmers rights as an alternate form of intellectual property rights be used to indirectly compensate farmers by supporting genetic conservation it examines methods of in situ conservation for crop genetic resources

the biodiversity bargaining problem we employ cooperative bargaining theory and nash s rational threats idea to cast light on the biodiversity bargaining problem the problem of global environmental negotiations is argued to be of the nature of a bargaining problem in which bargainers must agree on the distribution of cooperative surplus in order to move to the bargaining frontier we discuss the importance of both efficiency bargaining frontier and fairness recognition of characteristics of bargainers in the choice of the appropriate contract we show that the incremental cost contract used to resolve the biodiversity bargaining problem is of the form of an extreme point contract that fails to recognise the contributions of the south to the production of cooperative surplus a rational response to such a contract is the use of threats of biodiversity destruction contracts must evince both efficiency and fairness in order to represent lasting solutions

dea radial measurement for environmental assessment and planning desirable procedures to evaluate fossil fuel power plants abstract energy policy depends on a proper use of methodology in guiding a large energy issue such as the global warming and climate change dea is one of such methodologies that are often used for preparing environmental policy which is closely linked to various energy issues unfortunately the use of dea applied to environmental policy is insufficient often misguiding policy makers and other individuals who are involved in energy issues this study provides three guidelines for a use of dea in preparing environmental assessment first it is important to prepare both primal and dual formulations to confirm whether information regarding all production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs is fully utilized in dea assessment second dea has model variations in radial and non radial measurements it is necessary for us to examine environmental issues by different models in order to avoid a methodological bias existing in those empirical studies finally dea environmental assessment needs to incorporate the concept of natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates that a firm negatively adapts a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates that a firm positively adapts the regulation change because the firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity

social sustainability measured by intermediate approach for dea environmental assessment chinese regional planning for economic development and pollution prevention abstract this study examines the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the level of sustainability by a newly proposed intermediate approach conventionally dea data envelopment analysis for performance evaluation was used to assess various economic activities of organizations that utilized inputs e g the number of employees to yield desirable outputs e g the number of products the methodology was usually classified into radial or non radial category in an effort of extending it to environmental assessment dea needs to incorporate undesirable outputs e g the amount of co 2 into the computational framework this type of assessment is referred to as dea environmental assessment the proposed intermediate approach develops a new type of dea environmental assessment by combining the analytical features of radial approach with those of non radial approach the new approach measures the level of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores a rank sum test and a mean test are additionally incorporated into the proposed intermediate approach such a combination enhances the statistical capability as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the application finds four policy implications first it is important for china to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments second the government continues to reinforce the policy making effort on environmental protection by paying attention to central and southern regions the chinese industries need to transfer toward green energy the transfer should be efficiently executed for their future developments third the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally the policy implementation needs a time lag until it becomes effective the time lag on economic policy is longer than that of environmental policy the economic policy has historically produced a regional imbalance often leading to educational and income imbalances among chinese provinces

the biodiversity conservation game with heterogeneous countries biodiversity is an essential resource which we classify as conditionally renewable in order to achieve conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity virtually all nation states signed the united nations convention on biological diversity in this paper we investigate how the heterogeneity of countries in regard to ecosystems and wealth influences the stability of international biodiversity conservation agreements both without and with transfers we further examine the effect of different degrees of ecosystem substitutability we model a coalition formation game with players that have a continuous conservation choice the conservation benefit is dependent on wealth and ecosystem quality aggregation of global benefits respects differences in ecosystem substitutability in case of transfers a fund redistributes coalition benefits according to a sharing rule the main finding is that in the absence of transfers compared to the homogeneous situation heterogeneity in ecosystems and wealth reduces the size of a stable coalition the destabilising effect is stronger the higher the ecosystem substitutability optimal transfers facilitate a large stable coalition

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

returns to scale and damages to scale under natural and managerial disposability strategy efficiency and competitiveness of petroleum firms environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue all over the world this study discusses how to use data environment analysis dea for environmental assessment for planning corporate strategy and international competitiveness an important feature of dea environmental assessment is that it classifies outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because all private and public entities produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the two types of output unification for dea environmental assessment by using a non radial model one of the two output unifications is that it considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability the other unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of strategy is referred to as managerial disposability both unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs after developing the two concepts on disposability this study theoretically explores how to measure returns to scale rts under natural disposability and damages to scale dts under managerial disposability to document the practicality of the proposed approach this study applies it to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil companies this study identifies four important findings on the petroleum industry first national oil companies outperform international oil companies in the unified efficiency under natural disposability second international oil companies outperform national oil companies in the unified efficiency under managerial disposability third national oil firms exhibit a mixed result on rts while international oil firms exhibit decreasing rts finally both national and international oil companies exhibit increasing dts implying that all oil firms need to decrease their operational sizes for improving their environmental performance on co2 emission as an alternative strategy the result suggests that they need to introduce technology innovation e g clean air technology into their business operations the technology based strategy has more practicality than the size reduction in their operations

methodological comparison among radial non radial and intermediate approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study compares three dea approaches for environmental assessment all of which are designed to examine the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the degree of sustainability development dea standing for data envelopment analysis has been widely applied for performance assessment in the past five decades a new type of applications is referred to as dea environmental assessment and it measures the performance of many organizations that utilize inputs to produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 in the previous studies dea based performance evaluation for environment assessment is methodologically classified into radial or non radial category recently a new intermediate approach analytically locating between the radial and non radial measures has been proposed as the third alternative a use of the intermediate approach has several unique features all of which cannot be found in the radial and non radial ones the new approach measures the degree of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores this study discusses the analytical features by comparing the intermediate approach with the radial and non radial ones the methodological comparison attempts to convey a message that dea is indeed an important methodology but not perfect rather it is an approximation approach to examine the performance of various organizations many dea applications on energy and environment often suffer from a methodological bias implying that different approaches produce different empirical results thus in guiding a large policy issue such as the global warming and climate change it is necessary for us to compare several different approaches e g models and concepts to derive a reliable empirical suggestion the importance of such a message is applicable to not only dea but also the other types of empirical research in natural and social sciences therefore this study discusses the methodological bias issue from the practicality of the three dea approaches in assessing various concerns on energy and environment

drawing conclusions from structural vector autoregressions identified on the basis of sign restrictions abstract this paper discusses the problems associated with using information about the signs of certain magnitudes as a basis for drawing structural conclusions in vector autoregressions we also review available tools to solve these problems for illustration we use dahlhaus and vasishtha s 2019 study of the effects of a u s monetary contraction on capital flows to emerging markets we explain why sign restrictions alone are not enough to allow us to answer the question and suggest alternative approaches that could be used

china s regional sustainability and diversified resource allocation dea environmental assessment on economic development and air pollution abstract environmental protection including the prevention of air pollution and health hazard materials such as pm2 5 and pm10 is now a very serious policy issue in china after attaining the rapid economic growth and development the pm stands for particular matter indicating the size of both solid particles and liquid droplets found in air unfortunately the economic development has produced a serious healthcare problem in not only china and other surrounding nations to enhance people s healthcare and appeal a good national image to the world china is recently looking for the new industrial and environmental policy direction to attain social sustainability in terms of economic development and environmental prevention to discuss policy implications on the new policy direction this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea for assessment on its regional performance by incorporating pm2 5 and pm10 as undesirable outputs along with two disposability concepts i e natural disposability and managerial disposability no previous dea study has incorporated the amount of pm2 5 and pm10 in empirical investigation using a simulated data set for the period of 2013 2014 this study measures the efficiency of municipality cities under four different types of regional classifications the empirical results indicate that the chinese government should distribute its economic resources to cities which locate in the northwest region including lanzhou xining yinchuan and urumqi and reinforce more strict regulation on energy consumptions for environmental prevention in major cities e g beijing tianjin shanghai and chongqing the industrial policy change from the economic growth to the environment protection is essential for the future of china which is currently the second largest economic power in the world the environmental protection can enhance the china s image of contributing in economics industry and environmental protection to all other nations it can be envisioned that the new policy effort reduces the regional imbalance and increases the social sustainability in china the empirical findings and policy implications discussed in this study are applicable to not only china but also other industrial and developing nations and those are useful in guiding their industrial and environmental policy development

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

environmental assessment by dea radial measurement u s coal fired power plants in iso independent system operator and rto regional transmission organization abstract the economic concept of weak and strong disposability on undesirable outputs dominated the previous discussions on dea data envelopment analysis radial measurement for environmental assessment this study reexamines the economic concept from the perspective of corporate strategies on how to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the economic concept of disposability conventionally accepted by production economists is replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy that a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector the firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation meanwhile the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change on undesirable outputs as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified operational and environmental performance by utilizing new technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two types of disposability this study discusses how to measure unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability by dea radial models to document the practicality of the proposed dea environmental assessment this study applies it to compare the performance of u s coal fired power plants under isos rtos independent system operators regional transmission organizations with that of the other power plants not belonging to any organization this study identifies two empirical findings one of the two findings is that the latter coal fired power plants outperform the former power plants belonging to isos rtos in terms of three efficiency measures this result indicates that isos and rtos do not provide an effective coordination for coal fired power plants at the level that can be found in the other power plants the other finding is that there is technological improvement in the operation of coal fired power plants

consumer choice on ecologically efficient water heaters marketing strategy and policy implications in japan abstract this study examines how consumers select ecologically efficient water heaters in japan energy conservation in household water heating is increasingly important for reducing an amount of co 2 emission because the share of water heating in household energy consumption is approximately 30 recently japanese households have widely used ecologically efficient electric heat pump water heaters eco cute or gas fired water heaters eco jozu the total number of such efficient water heaters sold in japan was more than 2 5 million at the end of 2008 this study investigates various factors and impacts of marketing strategy for promoting the appliances in japan we apply mixed and nested logit models to a disaggregated choice data on water heaters from 2004 to 2008 this study considers retail energy prices a government financial support and marketing activities as important factors for appliance selection in addition we consider consumers housing attributes such as floor space and age of building this empirical study finds two business implications one of the two implications is that an increase in an energy price may enhance a choice probability of eco cute and eco jozu because a price increase invites consumer s consciousness on energy conservation so that a cost reduction on energy consumption becomes essential in a use of the efficient appliances the other implication is that marketing activities especially by recommendations from sales representatives and or housing suppliers are important for consumer behaviors the other important findings are discussed in this study this business experience in japan is useful to the other countries where ecologically efficient water heaters are not popular at the current moment

investment strategy for sustainable society by development of regional economies and prevention of industrial pollutions in japanese manufacturing sectors abstract a balance between industrial pollution prevention and economic growth becomes a world wide issue to develop a sustainable society in many industrial nations to discuss the issue this study proposes a new use of dea environmental assessment to determine how to effectively allocate capital for developing regional industries the amount of capital is used to invest for technology innovation for both local economic growth and environmental protection in this study the proposed approach separates outputs into desirable and undesirable categories inputs are also separated into two categories one of which indicates an amount of investment on capital assets the other category is used for production activities the proposed approach unifies them by two disposability concepts this study has evaluated the performance of manufacturing industries in 47 prefectures local government units in japan by unified efficiency under natural disposability uen unified efficiency under managerial disposability uem and unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uenm the uenm is further separated into its two cases with and without a possible occurrence on desirable congestion or technology innovation on undesirable outputs this study has empirically confirmed that japanese manufacturing industries need to make their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution substances by investing in technology innovation furthermore most of economic activities are currently located at metropolitan regions e g tokyo in japan to develop a sustainable society japan needs to allocate capital into regions with a high level of investment effectiveness by shifting the manufacturing industries from the metropolitan regions to much promising local areas identified in this study such a shift along with technology innovation makes it possible to reduce air pollutions in the entire japan by balancing economic growth and pollution prevention this empirical study confirms that the proposed approach is useful in both guiding regional planning and developing a sustainable society it is easily envisioned that the proposed approach is useful for not only japan but also the other industrial and developing nations

an alternative explanation of the price puzzle abstract this paper proposes an explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in vars designed for monetary policy analysis it assumes that the data are generated by a model in which output and output gap are not equivalent while an econometrician follows the common practice of including only output in the var the omission of the output gap is shown to spuriously produce a price puzzle and several other incorrect conclusions in a class of commonly used models this can happen even if the model admits a triangular identification and if the forecasts produced by the misspecified var are optimal when the model is tested on us data all predictions are supported a commodity price index is not needed to solve the puzzle

dea environmental assessment in time horizon radial approach for malmquist index measurement on petroleum companies abstract the climate change and various pollutions have been influencing our societies and economies the environmental assessment to be discussed in this study is increasingly important because it serves as an initial step toward pollution prevention corporate leaders policy makers researchers and individuals who are interested in environmental protection have been paying attention to the assessment so that they can prepare policy suggestions on the global warming and climate change as a methodology for the assessment this study proposes a use of data environment analysis dea in a time horizon most of data sets on the climate change are sampled in a time series where the performance of organizations fluctuates every moment in applying the dea environmental assessment to such a data set it is necessary for us to classify outputs into desirable e g oil production and undesirable e g co 2 emission categories because all organizations usually produce not only desirable but also undesirable outputs as a result of their economic activities to unify the two different types of outputs this study incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of dea and extends them into a time horizon for the research purpose this study incorporates malmquist index into the proposed dea environmental assessment to examine an occurrence of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is further separated into four subcomponents in a time horizon these subcomponents are differently expressed under the natural and managerial disposability thus eight different subcomponents on the malmquist index are proposed to measure the frontier shift as an application this study uses the proposed dea approach to examine whether the frontier shift due to technology progress occurs or not in the petroleum industry from 2005 to 2009 our empirical study finds that the industry has not exhibited any major frontier shift under natural disposability but showing a considerable frontier shift under managerial disposability in other words the petroleum firms have improved their environmental performance by eco technology to reduce an amount of co 2 emission during the observed annual periods

malmquist index measurement for sustainability enhancement in chinese municipalities and provinces abstract this study discusses a use of dea environmental assessment in a time horizon we use a radial approach to examine a dynamic change of index measures related to china s regional development and industrial pollution prevention in applying the proposed assessment to a time series data we need to examine components that produce a shift of an efficiency frontier in a time horizon a unique feature of the proposed assessment is that it incorporates a framework of malmquist index to examine the frontier shift among multiple periods here the frontier shift indicates a progress potential on technology development and or managerial improvement among observed periods thus it is not an efficiency measure rather the measurement eliminates inefficiency by shifting an organization to an efficiency frontier in this study the index is conceptually separated into 6 subcomponents which are further disaggregated into 12 different elements 6 subcomponents 2 disposability concepts under natural and managerial disposability concepts the proposed index measurement needs to consider a possible occurrence of a frontier crossover among different periods because technology diffusion on production activities usually has a time lag until it becomes really effective methodologically this study conveys the message that dea is an approximation method so being not perfect therefore it is necessary for us to use several different approaches e g potential improvement by measuring a frontier shift and efficiency analysis to obtain reliable empirical evidence as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 municipalities and provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the following six policy implications are obtained in this study first all municipalities and provinces have made a considerable progress on their economies and pollution prevention efforts second the effect of the frontier crossover is limited in china because they attain a high level of their potentials on economic development and pollution prevention of course this effort is within the chinese boundary not international because this study does not compare them with other industrial nations third china needs to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments fourth the government should reinforce efforts on environmental protection in central and southern regions fifth the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban municipalities and provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally different empirical results are confirmed by the potential analysis which consists of the malmquist index measurement and the efficiency analysis both approaches need to be examined for future planning on chinese regional development

the convention on biological diversity and agriculture implications and unresolved debates1 summary the convention on biological diversity addresses two controversies that surround plant genetic resources pgrs one debate has been over property rights governing pgrs and the distribution of benefits from their use the second has been over the adequacy of measures to maintain crop genetic diversity this paper examines how these two debates are linked and reviews previous multilateral attempts to address them the convention signals wider international acceptance of stricter property rights over pgrs and the need for multilateral assistance for pgr conservation however current proposals to implement the convention appear too limited in scope to achieve their stated conservation objectives while several areas of controversy remain these include debates over i intellectual property protection for biological inventions ii control over pgrs in international gene banks iii the international biosafety protocol regulating biotechnology iv mechanisms to finance pgr conservation and v the allocation of funds between in situ and ex situ conservation q 1998 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

dea environmental assessment in a time horizon malmquist index on fuel mix electricity and co2 of industrial nations abstract climate change and global warming become a major policy issue in the world economic activities produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission the important policy issue is how each nation can balance between economic development and environmental protection to attain a sustainable society in attaining the sustainable society environmental assessment is increasingly important because it can serve as an initial step toward the green growth of each nation for the purpose this study proposes a new use of dea data environment analysis for environmental assessment in a time horizon the proposed use of dea incorporates malmquist index to examine the degree of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is conceptually separated into six subcomponents which are further divided into twelve different subcomponents six subcomponents two disposability concepts under the natural and managerial disposability in the index measurement it is necessary for us to consider a frontier crossover among different periods because technology innovation usually has a time lag until it really appears as an empirical application this study utilizes the proposed approach to identify the relationship among fuel mix electricity and co 2 of ten industrial nations this study finds three important empirical findings first there is a time lag in technology innovation on electricity generation and co 2 emission reduction consequently it is necessary to consider the existence of a frontier crossover in assessing the electric power industry second nuclear generation as found in france as well as hydro and renewable energy as found in netherlands are important for the development of a sustainable society although the former is associated with a very high level of risk and the latter has a limited generation capacity finally the electric power industry has been making a corporate effort to reduce the amount of co 2 emission by utilizing nuclear and renewable energy

how trade related are intellectual property rights abstract there is little empirical evidence about whether differing international levels of patent protection influence trade flows if a nation strengthens its patent laws it could experience higher or lower imports we specify an empirical model in which deviations of bilateral sectoral imports from anticipated levels are related to income trade barriers and patent laws patent regulations in the importing country are corrected for endogeneity through the use of instrumental variables the results of the final equations indicate that increasing patent protection has a positive impact on bilateral manufacturing imports into both small and large developing economies

the political economy of international trade enduring puzzles and an agenda for inquiry a similar set of concepts has been central to the literatures on the formation of trade policy coalitions and the new economics of institutions the political and economic consequences of the degree to which assets are specific to a particular economic activity in this survey the authors take the necessary first step of summarizing the main findings of these two literatures and then suggest ways in which the issue might be joined in addition to providing a more coherent understanding of the findings of these two literatures and some new directions for them the authors show that many puzzles remain in the field of trade politics puzzles for which there are no appealing answers or where there are answers no strong evidence in support of them this essay then in addition to being a theoretical review of the literature puts forward an agenda for future study of international trade politics

bayesian methods for dynamic multivariate models if dynamic multivariate models are to be used to guide decisionmaking it is important that probability assessments of forecasts or policy projections be provided when identified bayesian vector autoregression var models are presented with error bands in the existing literature both conceptual and numerical problems have not been dealt with in an internally consistent way in this paper the authors develop methods to introduce prior information in both reduced form and structural var models without introducing substantial new computational burdens their approach makes it feasible to use a single large dynamic framework for example twenty variable models for tasks of policy projections copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

on biodiversity access intellectual property rights and conservation abstract recent international agreements such as the convention on biological diversity and the trade related intellectual property rights have called for increased mutual transfer of biodiversity and biotechnology between poor and rich countries these agreements also call for the protection of intellectual property rights ipr on biotechnology transferors in the receiving countries this paper examines the biodiversity conservation implications of providing physical access and ipr protection to foreign consumers of biodiversity an integrated model of optimal resource extinction and shared resource harvesting game is presented the model results show that as foreign and indigenous users compete for the same open access resource optimal extinction may occur as a noncooperative equilibrium under certain bioeconomic conditions extinction may be prevented by forging successful cooperation between consumers initiating a joint harvesting process depending upon the model parameters even under cooperation increased patent protection and physical access either promotes the conservation of biodiversity or enhances its physical exploitation patent protection and resource access must therefore be developed carefully by biodiversity rich countries to successfully balance their domestic conservation and socioeconomic goals

priors from general equilibrium models for vars abstract this paper uses a simple new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model as a prior for a vector autoregression shows that the resulting model is competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting and can be used for policy analysis jel classification c11 c32 c53 key words bayesian analysis dsge models forecasting vector autoregressions 1 introduction dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models are popular nowadays in macroeconomics they are taught in virtually every economics ph d program and represent a predominant share of publications in the field yet when it comes to policy making these models are scarcely used at least from a quantitative point of view the main quantitative workhorse for policy making at the federal reserve system is frb us a macro econometric model built in the cowles foundation tradition a style of macroeconomics that is no longer taught in many ph d programs 1 in their decision process fed policy makers rely heavily on forecasting they want to know the expected path of inflation in the next few quarters and by how much a 50 basis point increase in the federal funds rate would affect that path frb us offers answers to these questions answers that many macroeconomists would regard with suspicion given both the lucas 1976 critique and the fact that in general the restrictions imposed by cowles foundation models are at odds with dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomics sims 1980 general equilibrium models on the other hand have a hard time providing alternative answers the fact that these models are perceived to do badly in terms of forecasting as they are scarcely parameterized is perhaps one of the reasons why they are not at the forefront of policy making while progress is being made in the development of dsge models that deliver acceptable forecasts e g smets and wouters 2003 this paper proposes an approach that combines a stylized general equilibrium model with a vector autoregression var to obtain a specification that both forecasts well and is usable for policy analysis specifically the approach involves using prior information coming from a dsge model in the estimation of a vector autoregression loosely speaking this prior can be thought of as the result of the following exercise i simulate time series data from the dsge model ii fit a var to these data in practice we replace the sample moments of the simulated data by population moments computed from the dsge model solution since the dsge model depends on unknown structural parameters we use a hierarchical prior in our analysis by placing a distribution on the dsge model parameters a tightness parameter controls the weight of the dsge model prior relative to the weight of the actual sample markov chain monte carlo methods are used to generate draws from the joint posterior distribution of the var and dsge model parameters the paper shows that the approach makes even a fairly stylized new keynesian dsge model competitive with standard benchmarks in terms of forecasting real output growth inflation and the nominal interest rate the three variables that are of most interest to policy makers 2 up to this point our procedure borrows from the work of dejong ingram and whiteman 1993 and ingram and whiteman 1994 who are the first to use priors from dsge models for vars ingram and whiteman showed that prior information from the bare bones stochastic growth model of king plosser and rebelo 1988 is helpful in forecasting real economic activity such as output consumption investment and hours worked in addition to documenting the forecasting performance of a trivariate var with a prior derived from a monetary dsge model this paper makes two contributions that significantly extend the earlier work first we show formally how posterior inference for the var parameters can be translated into posterior inference for dsge model parameters

dea environmental assessment on us petroleum industry non radial approach with translation invariance in time horizon abstract this study empirically assesses the performance of the petroleum industry focusing upon independent companies in the united states us for the empirical study we use the data envelopment analysis dea that has been widely used for environmental assessment and performance measurement the conventional use of dea requests that all observations in the data set should be positive prohibiting an occurrence of zero and or negative values the requirement of non negative value is inconsistent with the reality of us petroleum industry because many oil firms recently experience negative shocks in financial performance to overcome the obstacle this study discusses the property of translation invariance under undesirable congestion e g capacity limit in the transportation pipeline network and desirable congestion e g green technology innovation based on the non radial models the property implies that the unified efficiency measure should be not influenced even if production factors are shifted toward the same direction by adding or subtracting a specific real number the property makes it possible that we can evaluate the performance of firms whose production factors contain zero and or negative values this study is empirically concerned with practical implications of translation invariance from energy and environmental perspectives in addition this study examines the proposed environmental assessment in a time horizon for the purpose this study uses window analysis to examine an efficiency change along with a time shift our empirical investigation finds the following three implications first under the natural disposability the oil firms efficiency growth rates have become less than unity implying the industry wide difficulty or inability to cut back their drilling and production operations second all firms have been under regulatory and stakeholder pressures on air pollution therefore the efficiency growth rates under managerial disposability have not exhibited a major change during the observed annual periods finally such implications are statistically reconfirmed by regression analysis that examines how the change of energy price influences unified efficiencies under natural and managerial disposability an exception can be found in the natural disposability where energy prices influence their efficiency growths thus an increase in energy prices is important in maintaining a high level of efficiency growths in the us petroleum industry

property rights genetic resources and biotechnological change it is well recognized that wild genetic resources the genetic constitutions of plants and animals have substantial social and economic value as repositories of genetic information today genetic information provides direct and indirect inputs into plant breeding programs the development of natural products including drugs and pharmaceuticals and increasingly sophisticated applications of biotechnology 2 recognition of the potential of wild genetic resources in the development of drugs has led the national cancer institute to initiate a massive plant collection project 3 which is a follow up to an earlier 1970s project that sought to identify drugs effective against a variety of cancers and to look at the immune system effects of various drugs it is estimated that 70 percent of the 3 000 species known to have anticancer properties are found in the tropical forests 4 in recent years a number of widely used drugs have been developed from plants including two important anticancer drugs derived from the rosy periwinkle found in tropical madagascar with the recent major breakthroughs in biotechnology the future potential of these resources seems limitless species that have no current commercial application have useful natural chemicals or are as yet undiscovered never

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

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