tick size and the compass rose further insights abstract this paper investigates two differing perspectives on the compass rose those of crack and ledoit 1996 the journal of finance 51 2 751 762 and szpiro 1998 journal of banking and finance 22 1559 1569 neither perspective has explicitly considered the effect of time and we consider the implications of this with illustrations using market micro data

the public private wage differential in a poor urban economy the occupational structure of wages is generally more compressed in high than in low income countries the role of non market forces in determining the structure of wages is of interest for reasons of allocative efficiency as well as for distributional concerns this paper considers how wage differentials may be generated between the public and private sectors of a developing economy data from a 1971 household survey of the tanzanian urban wage labor force are used to determine the pattern of wage differences across employer groups after standardizing by worker characteristics public sector employees are found to have earned a substantial wage premium over workers employed in the private sector the non market character of these differentials is examined in light of a number of hypotheses on public sector wage determination

labor market discrimination in a poor urban economy labor market discrimination by sex and by race in a poor urban economy is analyzed using a survey of manufacturing employees in tanzania there are large differences in mean wages by both sex and race using techniques previously applied to developed countries it is found that whereas the sex difference in mean wages can be explained mainly in terms of sex differences in personal characteristics the race difference is mainly the result of wage and job discrimination an attempt is made to explain the results which run counter to common presuppositions about discrimination

parastatal pay policy in africa abstract public enterprises have grown to represent a significant share of modern sector employment in many african economies with wage and employment issues near the top of the policy agenda in africa attention should be given to public enterprise compensation and employment policies after describing the institutions which govern public enterprise pay in a number of sub saharan countries the paper considers the policy dilemma in choosing between the two basic alternative pay setting regimes for public enterprise enterprise wage autonomy versus unified salary scales with the civil service

uncovering nonlinear structure in real time stock market indexes the s p 500 the dax the nikkei 225 and the ftse 100 this article tests for nonlinear dependence and chaos in real time returns on the world s four most important stock market indexes both the brock dechert scheinkman and the lee white and granger neural network based tests indicate persistent nonlinear structure in the series estimates of the lyapunov exponents using the nychka ellner gallant and mccaffrey neural net method and the zeng pielke and eyckholt nearest neighbor algorithm confirm the presence of nonlinear dependence in the returns on all indexes but provide no evidence of low dimensional chaotic processes given the sensitivity of the results to the estimation parameters we conclude that the data are dominated by a stochastic component

a switching regression model for wage determinants in the public and private sectors of a developing country governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment the government wage bill h as come under increased scrutiny the central question is how do gove rnment wages compare with those in the private sector in this paper the authors develop and estimate a model to answer this question an important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice the estimation results full information maximum likelihood sound a strong warning against the use of ordinary least squares est imates that are based on sector specific samples data are from the i vory coast copyright 1988 by mit press

least cost 100 renewable electricity scenarios in the australian national electricity market least cost options are presented for supplying the australian national electricity market nem with 100 renewable electricity using wind photovoltaics concentrating solar thermal cst with storage hydroelectricity and biofuelled gas turbines we use a genetic algorithm and an existing simulation tool to identify the lowest cost investment and operating scenarios of renewable technologies and locations for nem regional hourly demand and observed weather in 2010 using projected technology costs for 2030 these scenarios maintain the nem reliability standard limit hydroelectricity generation to available rainfall and limit bioenergy consumption the lowest cost scenarios are dominated by wind power with smaller contributions from photovoltaics and dispatchable generation cst hydro and gas turbines the annual cost of a simplied transmission network to balance supply and demand across nem regions is a small proportion of the annual cost of the generating system annual costs are compared with a scenario where fossil fuelled power stations in the nem today are replaced with modern fossil substitutes at projected 2030 costs and a carbon price is paid on all emissions at moderate carbon prices which appear required to address climate change 100 renewable electricity would be cheaper on an annual basis than the replacement scenario

tick size the compass rose and market nanostructure abstract economists have begun using methods borrowed from the physical sciences to search for non linearities in economic and financial data the so called phase portrait from chaos theory in which the values of a time series are plotted against their delayed values is one of the techniques employed for this purpose it has recently been shown however that when returns on traded assets are plotted in this manner in two or three dimensional space surprising patterns arise which seriously distort the conclusions that can be drawn about the underlying data these patterns which resemble a compass rose reflect the microstructure of the market or more specifically the finite size of the ticks by which prices can change in a market the present paper clarifies the reason for this phenomenon it is shown that within the microstructure there exists nanostructure that becomes visible only when the computations are performed without approximation high frequency data from a foreign exchange market are used to illustrate this phenomenon

a note on the wang and wang measure of the quality of the compass rose abstract h wang and c wang visibility of the compass rose in financial asset returns a quantitative study j bank financ 26 2002 1099 1111 derive a measure of the visibility of the radial patterns that appear in a plot of current and past returns which are more commonly known as the compass rose in theory this measure should be positively related to the tick volatility ratio in practice however we find that this relationship does not hold for higher tick volatility ratios that are common to stock market data thus the use of this measure is limited in real world applications we propose a correction factor that improves the behaviour of the quality measure over higher tick volatility ratios however further research is required to fully identify and correct the problem

an explanation for the compass rose pattern abstract the compass rose pattern cannot be observed in daily returns in the spot foreign exchange forex market but is observable when intraday forex returns are used monte carlo simulations show that the pattern is visible only when the tick volatility ratio is above some threshold level a condition that is readily met with intraday returns

chaos and the compass rose abstract we show that the recently discovered compass pattern in stock returns that results from discrete jumps of stocks seriously distorts the null distribution of the brock dechert scheinkmann bds chaos test under the null hypothesis of i i d returns the true rejection probability exceeds the nominal size by wide margins which suggests that much of the evidence for chaos that has so far been found in stock returns might well be due to the fact that prices change only in discrete ticks

nonlinear dynamics and stock returns simple deterministic systems are capable of generating chaotic output that mimics the output of stochastic systems for this reason algorithms have been developed to distinguish between these two alternatives these algorithms and related statistical tests are also useful in detecting the presence of nonlinear dependence in time series in this article the authors apply these procedures to stock returns and find evidence that indicates the presence of nonlinear dependence on weekly returns from the center for research in security prices value weighted index copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

comparing earnings profiles in urban areas of an ldc rural to urban migrants vs native workers abstract we use tanzanian data to test a recently proposed hypothesis that rural to urban migrants have an incentive to supply greater work effort than native urban workers because of the migrants positive probability of returning to the low wage rural areas we treat the choice between public and private sector employment as endogenous and for theoretical and empirical reasons distinguish migrants with access to rural land from those without access our results show that migrants in both sectors face lower initial wage offers than native urban workers but the wage gap is eliminated within a decade or less and thereafter migrants surpass the wage offers of native workers

what has 20 years of public private pay gap literature told us eastern european transitioning vs developed economies this paper surveys the literature on public private sector pay differentials based on 20 years of research in transitioning countries of eastern europe ee and compares the results with estimates obtained from developed market economies the majority of empirical studies from ee economies found evidence of public sector pay penalties during the period of economic transition from a communist to market based economy in developed economies however the average differential is usually around zero or positive the public sector pay inequality reducing effect relative to the private sector is greater in transitioning economies than in developed economies nevertheless there is evidence that the sign of the public sector pay gap as well as the relative public sector pay distribution change with the progress of economic transition towards those usually observed in developed economies different pay setting arrangements between private and public sectors and competition for workers seem to be major arguments for the existence of systematic pay differences between the two sectors

can europe run on renewable energy a negative case the possibility of 100 renewable supply of european energy is analysed in terms of the amount of redundant plant required to cope with the intermittency of wind and solar energy and the limited biomass potential it is concluded that the capital cost would be unaffordable and that biomass resources are insufficient

wage differentials in brazil theory and evidence the investigation of wage determination and wage differentials in developing countries has concentrated on the effects of human capital and different sources of segmentation associated with institutional arrangements and structural characteristics on earnings in this article we use micro data for brazil for the 1980s and 1990s to test several competitive theories and models with segmentation explained by efficiency wages we find that unmeasured abilities and efficiency wage models seem to play a role in wage determination while compensating differentials and transitory difference theories were found to be irrelevant to wages formation

interest rate management in ldc s the mckinnon argument that higher time deposit rates raise output and lower inflation in the short run and increase medium term growth by raising the savings rate are shown to depend crucially on the assumption that portfolio shifts into td s come out of an asset providing less intermediation than the banking system we show that if instead the shift is out of an asset providing more intermediation e g loans on a curbmarket raising td rates is contractionary in the short run may have negative impacts on growth and can lead to more rather than less inflation in the short run

the effects of public sector hiring and compensation policies on the egyptian labor market this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these policies have encouraged queuing for government jobs contributed to high graduate unemployment rates and reduced the employment of graduates in the private sector despite substantial wage erosion in the public sector in recent years government wages when appropriately corrected for observed heterogeneity and sample selection are on a par with or higher than private sector wages especially for graduates when combined with the more desirable nonwage aspects of government jobs these compensation levels explain the attractiveness of public sector employment to graduates government pay scales are especially advantageous to female secondary school graduates who appear to face considerable discrimination in the private sector

modelling renewable energy impact on the electricity market in india renewable power generation development most notably for wind and solar has taken off at a rapid pace in india especially in the last 4 years while these developments have many positive aspects a rapid shift in balance of baseload and intermittent generation must be assessed carefully to ensure the share of renewable power generation increases without compromising system security and economics seasonal and spatial variability of wind and to a lesser extent that of solar can render these resources to have low availability for a significant part of the year leading to an increase in unserved energy i e deteriorate system reliability the intermittency of generation also impacts on inter state power flows and lead to higher congestion in the grid climate model results provide a rich set of information on the nature of solar wind variability that can be embedded in an electricity market simulation tool to assess these impacts on prices generation dispatch and power flows we have developed a modelling analysis for the indian national electricity market informed by csiro climate model results we have assessed the added costs arising from intermittency to put in perspective the true costs and benefits of renewable power we have focused on the near term developments in 2017 to show how some of the high renewable growth scenarios included in the indian national electricity plan may imply significant pressure on inter state region transfer capability and lead to a significant worsening of system reliability the outcome of our modelling analysis suggests that a more orderly and balanced development of renewable and conventional power generation capacity is needed with a stronger focus on system economics and security

can australia run on renewable energy the negative case abstract the current discussion of climate change and energy problems is generally based on the assumption that technical solutions are possible and that the task is essentially to determine the most effective ways this view relies heavily on the expectation that renewable energy sources can be substituted for fossil fuels australia is more favourably situated regarding renewable sources than almost any other country this discussion attempts to estimate the investment cost that would be involved in deriving australia s total energy supply from renewable sources when provision is made for intermittency and plant redundancy it is concluded that the total investment cost is likely to be unaffordable

visibility of the compass rose in financial asset returns a quantitative study abstract the compass rose phenomenon is studied based on the random walk model of stock prices it is found that the structure is inherently present in any financial data having a finite precision but becomes visible only under some conditions a quantitative description of the pattern visibility condition is given providing a method for the interpretation of pattern appearance and a more comprehensive understanding of the compass rose phenomenon this is achieved by defining a measure of pattern quality the arguments and the proposed method are supported by numerical examples one such example is the presentation of patterns in portfolios with some specific weights

baseline projections of energy and emissions in asia this paper analyzes the projected development of energy systems in the asia region in the hypothetical absence of future carbon policies baseline scenarios prepared by participating teams in the asia modeling exercise are used to generate a comprehensive assessment of the key drivers of co2 emissions for the next several decades especially for china and india we find a very wide range of projected emissions paths across the models and identify per capita income and energy intensity as the two major factors responsible for the variation while the range of assumptions for growth in the former is roughly consistent with historical experience in other asian economies models foresee faster reductions in the latter with respect to those observed in neighboring countries at similar stages of economic development on the other hand there is a considerable agreement on the evolution of the energy technology mix which is assumed to continue to be dominated by fossil fuels in the foreseeable future

educational expansion government policy and wage compression abstract the main objective is to measure the elasticity in the response of relative wages by education to relative supplies of educated labour using rigorously comparable urban wage labour market surveys an econometric comparison is made of kenya and tanzania countries which constitute a natural experiment having different secondary education policies but being similar in other relevant respects post primary educational expansion as kenya is an effective means of compressing wages however the tanzanian scarcity premium on post primary education is held down by the alternative means of public sector pay policy the analysis suggests an important role for occupation in the wage adjustment process

public private sector wage gap by gender in egypt evidence from quantile regression on panel data 1998 2018 abstract this paper estimates the public formal private wage gap in egypt using egypt labor market panel survey for the 20 year period of 1998 2018 for men and women separately we estimate the public formal private sector wage gap with wage equations including a public sector indicator both at the mean and at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution using the panel feature of the data we also address the endogenous employment and the sector of employment selection issue and find a persistent public wage penalty for the males and public wage premium for the females except at the top even after controlling for the observable and the time invariant unobservable characteristics we further examine the public wage gap over time and in different sub samples by potential experience skill levels and regions generally the results are consistent with a decrease in the public wage gap for both men and women over the period considered we further provide evidence on the quality of workers we find that the public sector fails to attract better quality men throughout the conditional wage distribution while it manages to attract better quality women in the lower parts of the conditional wage distribution but not at the top all on the basis of time invariant unobservable attributes these results indicate concern for the efficient provision of public services

burden of proof a comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100 renewable electricity systems an effective response to climate change demands rapid replacement of fossil carbon energy sources this must occur concurrently with an ongoing rise in total global energy consumption while many modelled scenarios have been published claiming to show that a 100 renewable electricity system is achievable there is no empirical or historical evidence that demonstrates that such systems are in fact feasible of the studies published to date 24 have forecast regional national or global energy requirements at sufficient detail to be considered potentially credible we critically review these studies using four novel feasibility criteria for reliable electricity systems needed to meet electricity demand this century these criteria are 1 consistency with mainstream energy demand forecasts 2 simulating supply to meet demand reliably at hourly half hourly and five minute timescales with resilience to extreme climate events 3 identifying necessary transmission and distribution requirements and 4 maintaining the provision of essential ancillary services evaluated against these objective criteria none of the 24 studies provides convincing evidence that these basic feasibility criteria can be met of a maximum possible unweighted feasibility score of seven the highest score for any one study was four eight of 24 scenarios 33 provided no form of system simulation twelve 50 relied on unrealistic forecasts of energy demand while four studies 17 all regional articulated transmission requirements only two scenarios drawn from the same study addressed ancillary service requirements in addition to feasibility issues the heavy reliance on exploitation of hydroelectricity and biomass raises concerns regarding environmental sustainability and social justice strong empirical evidence of feasibility must be demonstrated for any study that attempts to construct or model a low carbon energy future based on any combination of low carbon technology on the basis of this review efforts to date seem to have substantially underestimated the challenge and delayed the identification and implementation of effective and comprehensive decarbonization pathways

garch estimation and discrete stock prices an application to low priced australian stocks the garch model is misspecified if applied to returns calculated from discrete prices we propose a modification of the above model for handling such cases we find large differences between the standard and the extended model estimates although the results sometimes are obscured by large standard errors

wage differentials and moonlighting by civil servants evidence from cote d ivoire and peru as part of their efforts to reduce fiscal deficits many governments have allowed public sector salaries to erode often on the assumption that government workers are overpaid vis a vis those in the private sector that assumption is tested by analyzing public private pay differentials in cote d ivoire and peru switching regressions models are estimated using full information maximum likelihood fiml and the results are compared to those obtained using ordinary least squares ols techniques the ols yields seriously biased estimates of the pay structure suggesting that public wages are higher than private wages the fiml estimates show the opposite our probit analysis also shows that the wage disadvantage of civil servants is a determinant of the greater prevalence of moonlighting among public than private employees the evidence suggests that reductions in employment rather than pay while being less palatable in the short term will be more effective in the long run

robust structure without predictability the compass rose pattern of the stock market plotting daily stock returns against themselves with one day s lag reveals a striking pattern evenly spaced lines radiate from the origin the thickest lines point in the major directions of the compass this compass rose pattern appears in every stock it is caused by discreteness however counter examples demonstrate that the existence of exchange imposed tick sizes e g eighths is neither necessary nor sufficient for the compass rose the compass rose cannot be used to make abnormal profits it is structure without predictability among other consequences the compass rose may bias estimation of arch models and tests for chaos technical analysts attempt to identify recurring patterns in stock prices e g edwards and magee 1992 similarly chaos researchers embed time series of stock returns into multi dimensional spaces and attempt to identify lowdimensional attractors e g barnett and chen 1988 figure 1 the hope is that with structure comes predictability and abnormal profits in fact neither of these literatures has yet discovered indisputable structure we follow a procedure similar to a chaos researcher s we look at a simple scatter diagram of daily stock returns plotted against themselves with one day s lag we document a structural relationship the compass rose that is strikingly geometrical in contrast to the products of technical analysis and chaos theory the structure we find is indisputably present in every stock unfortunately the compass rose cannot be used for predictive purposes by market participants it is an artifact of market microstructure it follows that even a successful search for significant structure in stock market data need not enhance predictability nor lead to abnormal profits an equally important lesson is that microstructure effects can be spectacular in daily and even weekly data several areas for future research are given these include potential biases caused by the compass rose in the estimation of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch models and in a standard test for chaos

the interaction of factor and product market distortions in developing countries this essay will examine distortions in product and factor markets in developing countries and the interaction of these distortions in respect to the development strategies applied the analysis will concentrate on policy imposed distortions where departures from efficient resource allocation result from policy actions these contrast with distortions resulting from market imperfections 1

taxes and bribery the role of wage incentives this paper presents a simple model to evaluate alternative payment schemes for tax inspectors in the presence of corruption we consider problems of both moral hazard which arises because taking bribes cannot be observed without costly monitoring and adverse selection since not all potential tax inspectors can be identified as being honest or dishonest we identify three wage regimes first one could pay the same wage that a tax inspector could earn elsewhere his reservation wage second one could pay a wage which solves the moral hazard problem i e deters bribery this we call an efficiency wage by analogy with recent models examined i n macro economics third the government could pay a wage below the reservation wage at which only the dishonest become tax inspectors the capitulation wage we make precise the conditions under which each yields the greatest amount o f tax revenues net o f administrative costs many countries in the developing world are undergoing structural adjustment programmes which require fundamental fiscal changes outside agencies advise restoration of budget balance a task which involves expenditure cuts and tax increases the treatment of public employee pay scales often poses a particular dilemma i n this process wages and salaries are a significant component of government expenditures and one important question concerns the extent to which wages rather than employment cuts should be used to save money there is sometimes a reluctance to advocate wage cuts stemming in part from a feeling that this might impair the performance of the public sector hence tanzi 1990 argues that a policy of wage cutting is likely to increase the inefficiency of public sector employees especially at a time when the public sector is expected to play a larger role in restructuring the economy p 16 in the context of tax collection the issue is particularly pressing given the need to raise more tax revenues a reduction in efficiency in this branch of the government i s likely t o mean that fewer returns are processed and when individuals living standards are squeezed their incentive to accept bribes in lieu o f collecting taxes i s increased o n this count i t i s even sometimes suggested that wages of tax inspectors should be increased to aid the effort to the comments of henry bienen john hey and two anonymous referees have been helpful in revising this paper the authors are also grateful t o the john m olin program for the study o f economic organization and public policy at princeton university and the pew charitable trusts for financial support mclaren also acknowledges support from the international finance section of princeton university none of the above should be implicated in any way see for example goode 1984 chapter 1 3 and gould and amaro reyes 1983

public private wage differentials in haiti do public servants earn a rent abstract this study uses a newly collected data set on haiti where data are very limited to assess how individuals are selected into the public vs private sectors and to estimate public private sector wage differentials the central question is whether or not public servants are earning a rent the estimation procedure is an extension of heckman s 1979 sample selection technique to the case where two selection rules generate the sample the procedure first estimates by bivariate probit analysis the probability of employment in the public or private sector and then for those in the public sector the probability of employment in the state owned enterprises soes vs public administration wage functions are then estimated for all three sectors using the inverse mills ratios from reduced form probits selectivity bias is found to exist in one sector soes correction for this bias in the wage equations lowers the wage differentials between the soe and the private sector and the soe and public administration as is clearly demonstrated by the oaxaca decomposition of these estimated mean differentials nevertheless the corrected findings still indicate that the public sector especially the soes earn a sizable rent

a critique of jacobson and delucchi s proposals for a world renewable energy supply abstract jacobson and delucchi have recently put forward a detailed case in support of the claim that renewable energy sources can meet total world energy demand the following argument is that this proposal is unsatisfactory primarily because it does not deal effectively with the problems set by the variability of renewable energy sources and also because its analysis of investment costs is inadequate

public private employment choice wage differentials and gender in turkey abstract the main objective of this article is to examine the factors that explain the employment choice and the wage differentials in public administration state owned enterprises and the formal private wage sector in turkey selectivity corrected wage equations are estimated for each sector for men and women separately oaxaca blinder decomposition of the wage differentials between sectors by gender and between men and women by sector are carried out results indicate that when controlled for observed characteristics and sample selection for men public administration wages are higher than private sector wages except at the university level where the wages are at par state owned enterprise wages for men are higher than private sector wages similar results are obtained for women further while the wages of men and women are at parity in the public administration there is a large gender wage gap in the private sector in favor of men private returns to schooling are found to be lower in the noncompe

the central government private sector wage differential since ehrenberg and schwarz 1986 there has been a plethora of articles investigating the relationship between public and private sector wages this article examines part of this post 1986 literature by reviewing articles that examine central government private sector wage differentials in sum most articles find that there is a premium paid to central government workers although the premium has declined in recent years in developing countries however the differential is usually negative women and minorities tend to do better in the public sector relative to their private sector counterparts the evidence on union premiums between sectors is mixed although the premium tends to be higher in the private sector however public sector union workers do not do much better than private sector union members the magnitude of all of the wage differentials discussed are sensitive to the estimation technique and data source used the most common explanation for the public sector wage premium is economic rent accruing to government workers although the public sector wage determination literature suggests that the differential is due to returns to political and vote producing activities not relevant in the private sector