rational versus adaptive expectations in present value models using data on stock price and dividends and on long term and short term interest rates we test an important implication of present value models that current value is a linear function of the conditional expectations of the next period value and the current determining variable this implication combined with rational expectations re is strongly rejected combined with adaptive expectations ae it is accepted the latter model can also explain the observed negative relation between the rate of return and stock price thus the re assumption should be used with caution the ae assumption may be useful in econometric practice

a behavioral framework for time diversification the box of factors that we call risk is both too large and too small the box is large enough to include many sometimes conflicting measures of risk variance and semivariance probabilities of losses and their amounts but the box is too small to include factors that affect choices but fall outside the boundaries of risk frames and cognitive errors self control and regret we explore the role of these factors in time diversification the belief that time diversification reduces risk underlies the current drive to invest social security funds in stocks but is such investment prudent we discuss the role of advisors in providing prudent advice changes in the standards of prudence over time the use of time diversification in guiding investors to prudent portfolios and its use in the current debate on social security

tourism and environmental taxes with special reference to the balearic ecotax abstract during the last few decades tourism has undergone rapid growth however it seems clear that this growth is not exempt from certain costs economists attention is increasingly directed at the economic social cultural and environmental repercussions of tourism regarded as externalities focusing on the aforementioned repercussions the aim of this study is to confirm both the existence of external environmental costs and the need to internalise them with the aid of appropriate economic instruments in this respect an outline is given of the recent proposal by the government of the autonomous community of the balearic islands to introduce a tourist tax on visitors presented to public opinion in the form of an environmental tax and a critical review is made of the proposal in the light of a number of criteria regarded as relevant in the description design and implementation of these taxes

the dynamic correlation and volatility of real estate price and rental an application of msv model this article investigates the dynamic conditional correlation between price and rental among four types of real estate markets namely housing retail office and factory in the case of hong kong from january 1993 to december 2008 the dynamic conditional correlation multivariate stochastic volatility dcc msv model and bayesian markov chain monte carlo mcmc are employed to capture the volatility and time varying correlation of property price and rental in each market the empirical results demonstrate that the volatilities of price are significantly larger than those of rental for each type of real estate markets throughout the whole sample period besides the findings indicate that the correlations between price and rental are time varying and the average correlation in the housing market is much larger than those in the other three markets also the conditional correlations in the factory market are the most volatile while those in the office market are relatively stable additionally two pa

road pricing lessons from london lessons from london this paper assesses the original london congestion charging scheme lccs and its impacts and it simulates the proposed extension which will include most of kensington and chelsea it also touches upon the political economy of the congestion charge and the increase of the charge from 5 to 8 per day the possibility of transferring the experience to paris rome and new york is also discussed the lccs has had positive impacts this was despite the considerable political influences on the charge level and location it is difficult to assess the impacts of the increase of the charge from 5 to 8 which took place in july 2005 because no data have yet been released by transport for london the proposed extension of the charging zone does not seem to be an efficient change on economic grounds at least for the specific boundaries method of charging and level of charging that is currently planned our benefit cost ratios computed under different assumptions of costs and benefits are all below unity overall the experience shows that simple methods of congestion charging though in no way resembling first best pigouvian taxes can do a remarkably good job of creating benefits from the reduction of congestion nevertheless the magnitude of these benefits can be highly sensitive to the details of the scheme which therefore need to be developed with great care georgina santos and gordon fraser

risk rationality and time diversification the validity of the concept of time diversification is the subject of long running debate supporters of the concept argue that risk decreases as investment horizon increases detractors suggest that the concept is false on the face of it we argue that time diversification is consistent both theoretically and empirically with current conceptions of risk and rationality and we also note the implications of changes in investment horizon for stock market behavior

optimal environmental road pricing abstract an optimal first best road charge should not only be differentiated with respect to factors that affect the direct external environmental and time costs from the road user himself indirect effects such as the fact that others cars will be more polluting when congestion increases should also be taken into account

the invisible hand and externalities when economists contemplate the invisible hand at work they generally think of competitive markets but there are some circumstances in which markets are not supposed to operate well i e in which the invisible hand is thought to falter a leading cause of market failure many argue is the presence of significant externalities with such externalities the first welfare theorem does not apply and so competitive equilibrium if it exists at all is not typically pareto optimal in the tradition of a c pigou 1932 the typical response to this lack of optimality is for the government to step in and introduce corrective policy usually in the form of taxes or subsidies there is of course a strong antipigouvian tradition as well specifically proponents of the coase theorem ronald coase 1960 have contended that despite externalities unrestrained bargaining and contracting ought to be sufficient to generate an efficient outcome indeed coase s own celebrated example was a case of externalities thus even if formal markets themselves fail the invisible hand nevertheless succeeds and outside intervention or design is not required recently joseph farrell 1987 argued that even when free bargaining is permitted the laissez faire conclusion inherent in the coase theorem may founder if agents have incomplete information about one another s relevant characteristics i shall show however that the problem that farrell identified is due only to monopoly power and is not peculiar to externalities indeed in this paper i shall take a modified coasian stance i shall attempt to show that in spite of externalities and incomplete information private contractual agreements suffice to achieve efficiency as long as no agent is big enough to have significant market power this conclusion must be qualified however with the proviso that if the externality is nonexcludable i e no one can be excluded from its effects the government must intervene to prevent free riding on the agreements intervention in this case amounts to establishing the right of an agent providing a positive external effect to collect a fee for increasing the effect from all who enjoy it even if they are not parties to a contract with the provider symmetrically providers of a negative externality can collect a fee for diminishing the effect from all their victims in either case however the fee is set endogenously that is it is determined by the contractual arrangements rather than by the government this result for nonexcludable externalities which include pure public goods provides support for a fairly laissez faire stance toward externalities but turns on an important assumption namely that parties always write contracts so as to maximize their social surplus subject to incentive and individual rationality constraints i will return to this assumption in the final section

maintaining consistent global asset views with a little help from euclid global economic and capital market integration has led to a host of new concerns for plan sponsors and money managers in such an environment ensuring consistent capital market expectations policies and strategies among different base currencies is important a primary difficulty is translating risk and correlation estimates from the home currency into any other currency we provide a method for converting risk and correlation views the method makes use of a geometric interpretation of risks and correlations dramatically simplifying the requisite calculations

road transport externalities during the last decade much progress has been made in defining measuring the external costs of transport as the cost of tolling equipment falls the set of realistic policy options to internalise these externalities will continue to grow this will determine the research and policy agenda we make three points firstly empirical work is still necessary to better identify marginal external costs including congestion accident and environmental costs secondly any assessment of policy options should treat externalities simultaneously the use of pricing instruments and emissions standards are discussed within this framework thirdly we emphasise the role of government designing the optimal road pricing institutions requires consideration of horizontal and vertical tax competition while double dividend arguments are central to the question of securing public support

the mean variance optimization puzzle security portfolios and food portfolios the markowitz mean variance optimization framework presents a puzzle although it is the standard model of portfolio construction investors rarely use it and when used it is constrained so much that portfolios reflect the constraints more than the optimization why do investors dislike unadulterated optimized mean variance portfolios the typical answer focuses on biases introduced by estimation errors more important is the fact that investors goals are quite different from mean variance optimization people care about more than cost and nutrition when they construct their diets they also care about palatability similarly investors care about more than expected returns and variance as they construct their securities portfolios they also care about the investment equivalent of palatability we use an analogy between security portfolios and food portfolios to explore the nature of the gap between intuitively appealing portfolios and mean variance optimized portfolios

demand elasticity estimates for new zealand tourism demand elasticities for new zealand tourism are estimated for 16 different international visitor segments segments are differentiated by origin purpose of visit and travel style elasticities for both international visitor arrivals and on the ground expenditure per arrival are estimated for each segment using time series data in general on the ground consumption per arrival is more price sensitive than number of arrivals and asian market segments are found to be more price sensitive both in terms of arrivals and on the ground expenditure compared to international visitors from other regions an application of the results is presented giving the total effect of exchange rate changes on expenditure by international visitors in new zealand and management implications are discussed

determinants of land value volatility in the u s corn belt understanding land value volatility and its reaction to exogenous shocks helps land owners investors and lenders assess risk land value volatility the variance of the unpredictable component of

pricing and congestion economic principles relevant to pricing roads u k expenditures on roads or road costs average l4 34 billion per year from the 24 6 million vehicles registered road taxes of l12 7 billion were collected 2 9 times road costs from 1978 88 the average daily traffic on each km of road rose by 34 percent with a consequent serious increase in congestion road space is a valuable and scarce resource and road users should logically pay the marginal social cost if they are to make efficient transport and location decisions the paper estimates these costs and the appropriate charges for britain and identifies the major policy issues total road charges ignoring hard to quantify accident costs should yield l13 8 billion of which congestion charges would be l12 8 billion though close to road taxes in total amount replacing current taxes by road pricing would reduce congestion improve public transport and avoid perverse consequences from road expansion copyright 1990 by oxford university press

cooperation in service systems we consider a number of servers that may improve the efficiency of the system by pooling their service capacities to serve the union of the individual streams of customers this economies of scope phenomenon is due to the reduction in the steady state mean total number of customers in the system the question we pose is how the servers should split among themselves the cost of the pooled system when the individual incoming streams of customers form poisson processes and individual service times are exponential we define a transferable utility cooperative game in which the cost of a coalition is the mean number of customers or jobs in the pooled system we show that despite the characteristic function is neither monotone nor concave the game and its subgames possess nonempty cores in other words for any subset of servers there exist cost sharing allocations under which no partial subset can take advantage by breaking away and forming a separate coalition we give an explicit expression for all infinitely many nonnegative core cost allocations of this game finally we show that except for the case where all individual servers have the same cost there exist infinitely many core allocations with negative entries and we show how to construct a convex subset of the core where at least one server is being paid to join the grand coalition

the value of transport safety recent years have witnessed an increasing tendency for public sector and related agencies to reject the traditional but poorly founded lost output approach to the valuation of transport safety in favor of the altogether more defensible willingness to pay approach the purpose of this paper is to examine some of the more significant implications of this revolution in the way in which transport safety is evaluated in particular the paper outlines the case in favor of the willingness to pay approach summarizes the results of empirical work in this area and examines the allocative implications of adopting the kind of values that emerge from such empirical work the paper then considers the extent to which road risks can be regarded as externalities assesses the implications of asymmetries in the treatment of safety on various different transport modes in the u k and finally proposes an agenda for future research in the economics of transport safety copyright 1990 by oxford university press

scale economies analysis for urban highway networks abstract extending scale economies analysis from an individual highway to an urban highway network leads to an interesting new problem when demand increases in a network establishing a new long run equilibrium may require either increasing the capacities of existing links or adding new links e g new roads interchanges overpasses this paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing economies of scale in this setting and then uses that framework to obtain a psuedo empirical estimate of returns to scale the results suggest that mild scale economies exist in urban highway travel

the accident externality of driving evidence from observance of the jewish sabbath in israel we document and measure an externality of driving whereby a driver s decision to take to the road affects fellow drivers risk of accident because religious jews refrain from driving during the sabbath traffic on israeli roads decreases sharply when the sabbath begins each friday at a precisely defined time before sundown and increases after the sabbath ends on saturday evening at a precisely defined time after sunset using plausibly exogenous variation in traffic volume associated with the sabbath we estimate the effect of traffic volume on the risk of fatal or injurious accident we find that a positive accident externality emerges only at the sabbath exit when traffic volumes are greater remarkably similar results arise when the analysis is confined to non jewish drivers whose travel choices are not bound by the precise timing of the sabbath supporting the interpretation that our findings reflect an externality finally the effect emerges mainly on a class of road sections that is considered highly perilous suggesting that the interaction of traffic volume and road perilousness is important for understanding this issue and shaping implicated policy

the assessment economic policy for transport this paper considers the economic principles underlying contemporary british transport policy issues and the contributions that recent theoretical and empirical work can make to assessing policy solutions it discusses two alternative highly stylised approaches to transport policy 1 transport services supplied by privately owned companies and financed by charges to users 2 statutory publicly owned transport monopolies it considers the corresponding problems of market failure and regulatory failure types of market failures include circumstances where competitive solutions are either 1 feasible but not achieved because of actions by companies or 2 achieved but undesirable for various reasons or 3 not feasible because the relevant sectors have natural monopolies and high entry costs the authors conclude that both the stylised approaches that they analysed have serious drawbacks the most important consequence of the nationalisation of uk transport in the late 1940s was significant inefficiency in production and pricing the public transport deregulation of the 1980s resulted in significant product innovation and changes in the level and structure of prices however artificial restriction of competitive outcomes seems to be the most important source of regulatory failure

does britain or the united states have the right gasoline tax this paper develops an analytical framework to assess the second best optimal level of gasoline taxation taking into account unpriced pollution congestion and accident externalities as well as interactions with the broader fiscal system we provide calculations of the optimal taxes for the us and the uk under a variety of parameter scenarios under our central parameter values the second best optimal gasoline tax is 1 01 gal for the us and 1 34 gal for the uk current tax rates are much lower than this in the us and higher in the uk the calculations are moderately sensitive to alternative parameter assumptions the congestion externality is the largest component in both nations revenue raising needs also play a significant role as do accident externalities and local air pollution potential welfare gains from reducing the current uk tax rate are estimated at nearly one fourth the production cost of all gasoline used in the uk even larger gains could be achieved by switching to a tax on vehicle miles with equal revenue yield for the us the welfare gains from optimizing the gasoline tax are smaller but those from switching to an optimal tax on vehicle miles are very large

regulation by prices quantities or both a review of instrument choice choosing appropriate policy instruments is an important part of successful regulation once objectives are agreed and suitable targets adopted policy makers can employ command and control regulation and or economic instruments and choose between fixing a price or a quantity this paper examines the relative advantages of price quantity and hybrid instruments according to their efficiency under uncertainty the trade off between credible commitment and flexibility implementation international considerations and political economy various illustrations of the theory are provided with two detailed applications to climate change and transport policy specifically congestion and safety pricing

comparing the efficiency of alternative policies for reducing traffic congestion abstract this paper compares the efficiency of a single lane toll a uniform congestion tax across freeway lanes a gasoline tax and a transit fare subsidy at reducing congestion there are three conditions for an efficient outcome relating to travel across modes across peak and off peak periods and sorting out drivers with high and low time costs across faster and slower freeway lanes each policy involves some inefficiency indeed the single lane toll gasoline tax and transit subsidy forego at least two thirds of the efficiency gains under an ideal congestion tax that varies across lanes however the uniform congestion tax achieves over 90 of these gains

the time diversification controversy some financial theorists reject the widely held practitioner belief in time diversification the theorists argue that given serially uncorrelated returns holding a risky asset over longer periods of time will not reduce its inherent riskiness the argument is supported by references to economic models of risk aversion such as mean variance optimization and expected utility theory mean variance optimizers however are not indifferent to investment horizon and investment horizon indifference is only a special case within expected utility theory furthermore to the extent that models reject the notion of time diversification they are inadequate because they are inconsistent with common sense measures of risk at very long horizons

information and usage of free access congestible facilities with stochastic capacity and demand we investigate the effect of information on users participation decisions at a free access congestible facility that is subject to unpredictable fluctuations in capacity and demand with demand isoelastic in user cost and user cost isoelastic in the ratio of demand to capacity optimal design capacity is larger with mean preserving spreads in capacity and demand if and only if demand elasticity is less than one expected welfare is greater with better information interestingly with nonconstant elasticity demand and or user costs information can be welfare reducing

energy tax and competition in energy efficiency the case of consumer durables the purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of anenergy tax on technical improvements and on prices ofconsumer durables induced by strategic competition inenergy efficiency if the gasoline tax is raised thisdoes in principle not affect the producers of carsbecause the motorist pays for it in terms of a highercost of using the car this however affects the unitsales of car producers because of substitution towardsother modes of transportation a second element ofreaction to energy price variation is an indirect oneand relates to the effect of energy prices ontechnology competition forces car producers todevelop more energy efficient cars in order to reducethe cost of using a car this indirect effect canpartly offset the direct effect of higher energyprices on demand if it is profitable for theautomobile industry to engineer more energy efficientequipment we will analyze the impact of an energy taxon energy efficiency and on the price of a durablegood this will be done within the framework of aduopoly competing in prices and in the energyefficiency of its products the government chooses awelfare maximizing energy tax as an incentive toinnovate then we will analyze a strategic two stagedecision process in which the duopolists first decideabout energy efficiency and then compete in prices

modelling oecd industrial energy demand asymmetric price responses and energy saving technical change abstract the industrial sector embodies a multifaceted production process consequently modelling the derived demand for energy is a complex issue made all the more difficult by the need to capture the effect of technical progress of the capital stock this paper is an exercise in econometric modelling of industrial energy demand using panel data for 15 oecd countries over the period 1962 2003 exploring the issue of energy saving technical change and asymmetric price responses although difficult to determine precisely it is tentatively concluded that the preferred specification for oecd industrial energy demand incorporates asymmetric price responses but not exogenous energy saving technical change

economies of scale and self financing rules with non competitive factor markets abstract when a firm or public enterprise prices output at marginal cost its profits are related to the degree of local scale economies in its cost function i show that contrary to common belief this result holds even when scale economies are affected by a rising factor supply curve thus marginal cost pricing may be profitable even with constant returns to scale examples are provided for a monopsonist both with and without price discrimination and for a case such as highways where congestion prone inputs are supplied by users court rulings governing land purchase for highways illustrate the applicability of the results

the net benefits of incentive based regulation a case study of environmental standard setting economists interested in environmental safety and health regulation have long argued that decentralized incentive based or ib policies are more efficient than centralized command and control or cac approaches see charles schultze 1977 for instance these arguments generally have been based on the assumption that ib policies will accomplish the same goals as their cac counterparts but at less cost to society however some of those touting ib policies have overlooked an important point environmental workplace or even productsafety standards typically take the form of maximum permissible concentrations of harmful substances so that compliance only requires that all monitoring points or samples register readings below these critical levels for this reason ib policies typically assign a shadow price of zero to improvements that exceed the standard s while more crude cac policies generally result in overcontrol beyond the standards if there is no value to this overcontrol cac policies will not improve at all on ib approaches and will indeed be more expensive if however reduced concentrations below the level of the standards bring with them further improvements in health or the environment cac approaches will produce greater benefits than ib approaches thus a fair comparison between the two necessitates that any additional benefits associated with cac policies be offset against the cost advantages enjoyed by their ib counterparts although this possibility has been recognized by others scott atkinson and t h tietenberg 1982 for instance it is little appreciated and its empirical significance has never been ascertained that is our purpose here we do so by developing data on the costs and benefits of controlling a common air pollutant total suspended particulates or tsp in baltimore by comparing the tsp levels likely under both ib and cac approaches we are able to estimate the marginal costs and benefits associated with a variety of alternative air quality standards which take the form of maximum permissible concentrations this in turn allows us to determine the net benefits arising from the two kinds of regimes in the next section we present a simple conceptual framework for our analysis section ii describes the estimation of the costs and benefits of our hypothesized air pollution controls in baltimore section iii presents our somewhat surprising findings and section iv discusses those findings and their potential significance for regulation in the real world

externalities tangible externalities and queue disciplines externalities are the marginal costs that a user of a common resource imposes on others we introduce the efficient measure of tangible externalities that are the costs that a user imposes on others while being served then for a single server queueing system under various service disciplines we compute the expected externalities and the expected tangible externalities conditioning on the length of the service requirement

behavioral portfolio theory we develop a positive behavioral portfolio theory bpt and explore its implications for portfolio construction and security design the optimal portfolios of bpt investors resemble combinations of bonds and lottery tickets consistent with friedman and savage s 1948 observation we compare the bpt efficient frontier with the mean variance efficient frontier and show that in general the two frontiers do not coincide optimal bpt portfolios are also different from optimal capm portfolios in particular the capm twofund separation does not hold in bpt we present bpt in a single mental account version bpt sa and a multiple mental account version bpt ma bpt sa investors integrate their portfolios into a single mental account while bpt ma investors segregate their port folios into several mental accounts bpt ma portfolios resemble layered pyramids where layers are associated with aspirations we explore a two layer portfolio where the low aspiration layer is designed to avoid poverty while the high aspiration layer is designed for a shot at riches

interdependencies between transport fuel demand efficiency and quality an application to austria abstract this paper focuses on the interdependencies between technical efficiencies and energy demand which are often either treated in isolation or do not get the sufficient attention in the literature more precisely this paper uses technical efficiencies as one crucial determinant of energy demand in order to integrate at least two issues that are usually investigated separately from each other the rebound effect resulting from improved technical efficiencies and the asymmetry of energy demand in this regard our paper sets out a theoretical framework which has the following implications higher efficiency increases service demand first order rebound low fuel prices and higher efficiency increases the demand for quality second order which in turn increases service demand further third order ceteris paribus energy price shocks should increase scrapping rates fuel prices direct the rd those on engine efficiency are irreversible which has the consequence that energy price elasticities depend on the history of energy prices rather than being asymmetrical derived implications are subsequently tested on austrian data in particular the purchasing decision diesel versus gasoline powered cars allows to refute the myth that consumers apply high implicit rates for discounting the future benefit from efficient cars

user delay costs and internal pricing for a service facility this paper studies optimal pricing and capacity decisions for a service facility in an environment where users delay cost is important the model assumes a general nonlinear delay cost structure and incorporates the tradeoff between the delay cost and capacity cost we find necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a pricing rule that charges out service resources at their marginal capacity cost we examine the issue of budgetary balance and find that net value maximization entails a budget deficit for the service facility that is the service facility should be evaluated as a deficit center the results provide guidelines under which the optimal magnitude of the deficit can be determined

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

taxing tourism the case of rental cars in mallorca abstract tourism statistics point towards increased tourist mobility in holiday destinations with a subsequent rise in associated externalities above all those related with the use of hire cars this paper therefore suggests that a fixed rate tax should be levied on vehicle hire in order to reduce congestion externalities and thus achieve more efficient traffic levels with this purpose in mind count data models were used to assess alternative ways of modelling the demand function for hire cars in mallorca spain so that the corrective potential of the proposed tax could then be analysed although the inelasticity that was observed might indicate a low short run capacity to internalise costs it also represents a high potential for raising revenue that could be used to fund alternative means of group transport in the mid run this would lead to increased elasticity and in consequence to better internalising effectiveness

selection and recreation demand increased use of on site and user group surveys to estimate travel cost demand models e g caulkins bishop and bowes smith and desvousges has raised inevitable questions about the significance of relying on demand estimates derived solely from surveys of users many of the questions relate to selection effects that is the potential for specification errors and bias caused by an inability to reflect the decisions of nonusers with these types of surveys this issue has received some attention in the recreation literature brown et al bockstael and mcconnell but specific empirical evidence on the implications of alternative approaches for estimating demand models from on site surveys does not exist this article reports the first such evidence using a data set based on a general population sample to compare five methods for estimating travel cost demand models with microdata the findings suggest that the differences in the demand and in the benefit estimates raised by treating the problem using models with either single heckman or double selection catsiapis and robinson ham poirier effects are small however the effects of using alternative estimators for site demands are not these findings are limited because they apply to only one site nonetheless they do highlight the importance of the assumptions used to consider the behavior of nonusers consequently they provide direct motivation for more detailed conceptual and empirical work on the choice processes underlying recreation decisions

the role of efficiency improvements vs price effects for modeling passenger car transport demand and energy demand lessons from european countries abstract the objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of changes in fuel prices and fuel intensity i e liters of fuel used per 100 kilometers on overall fuel gasoline and diesel consumption and on the demand for vehicle km driven in car passenger transport this is important for deriving effective policy portfolios consisting of fuel taxes and technical standards such as fuel intensity mandates or specific co 2 emission limits to extract these impacts we apply cointegration analyses to six european countries and their aggregate over the period 1970 2007 we consider the impact of fuel prices household income and fuel intensity on fuel consumption furthermore we investigate how changes in fuel prices and fuel intensity interact analyzing the rebound effect due to lower fuel intensity and due to the switch to diesel because we find a high rebound effect with 44 more km driven if fuel intensity is improved 100 the major conclusion of our analysis for policy makers is that technical standards as the only policy instrument will have limited success rather we recommend increased fuel taxes along with fuel intensity standards so that the taxes compensate for the rebound due to the standards

a framework for analyzing changes in strategic performance in this paper we present a framework for analyzing changes in strategic performance traditional measures for comparing the strategic performance across firms or over time have been return on investment roi and its component ratio return on sales ros we decompose the ros ratio into four separate ratios that capture the impact of changes in a firm s productivity price recovery product mix and capacity utilization on its profitability these ratios help to highlight the micro sources of strategic success or failure they can be used to assess changes in the performance of a firm compared to itself over time or to other firms in its industry group this framework can also be used to evaluate changes in the dynamic performance of an industry as a whole we illustrate the use of these ratios with a 4 year analysis of the performance of a large manufacturing company we also demonstrate how the technique can be applied to an industry with an evaluation of the performance of u s telecommunications firms between 1975 and 1987 a period during which the industry experienced a progressive increase in competitive pressure

short and long run adjustments in u s petroleum consumption long run adjustments in petroleum consumption are not only larger than short run adjustments they may also be motivated by entirely different price events this analysis shows that new price peaks have both short run and long run consumption responses a result that is starkly different than price changes that track previous price paths it also establishes significant trend effects where gasoline and residual fuel oil consumption decline over time the analysis explores these adjustments by establishing long run cointegrating relationships for different petroleum product groupings an important implication is that price increases above historical levels may be providing substantially greater incentives for significant long run demand adjustments than would be the case otherwise

optimal metering in the bottleneck congestion model abstract this paper examines whether metering entry to highways can reduce commuting costs we consider a modified version of the bottleneck congestion model which includes travel time downstream of the bottleneck the highway authority s choice of an entry rate enables it to substitute queuing time for travel time the authority s choice is constrained by the road s speed flow curve we find that the benefits of metering increase as the speed that would prevail in the absence of metering decreases and as the speed flow curve gets flatter the major cost of metering is providing a holding area for vehicles waiting to enter

spatial lock in do falling house prices constrain residential mobility abstract falling house prices have caused numerous homeowners to suffer capital losses those with little home equity may be prevented from moving because of imperfections in housing finance markets the proceeds from the sale of their home may be insufficient to repay their mortgage and provide a down payment on a new home a data set of mortgages is used to examine the magnitude of these constraints estimates show that average mobility would have been 24 higher after 3 years had house prices not declined and after 4 years it would have been 33 higher among those with high initial loan to value ratios the differences are even greater

learning adaptive expectations and technology shocks this study explores the macroeconomic implications of adaptive expectations in a standard growth model we show that the self confirming equilibrium under adaptive expectations is the same as the steady state rational expectations equilibrium for all admissible parameter values but that dynamics around the steady state are substantially different between the two equilibria the differences are driven mainly by the dampened wealth effect and the strengthened intertemporal substitution effect not by escapes emphasised by williams 2003 consequently adaptive expectations can be an important source of frictions that amplify and propagate technology shocks and seem promising for generating plausible labour market dynamics

evaluating a seasonal fuel tax in a mass tourism destination a case study for the balearic islands abstract this paper estimates the monthly aggregate demand for diesel oil and gasoline in a mass tourism region characterized for a high level of seasonality using time series models price elasticities are estimated with special emphasis in evaluating differences between seasons in order to assess the consequences of a fuel tax applied exclusively during the high season using the case study of the balearic islands spain from january 1999 to december 2010 results from a partial adjustment model show a relatively low price elasticity evidencing how the internalizing mechanism that could be argued for introducing the tax in order to reduce transport externalities does not work additionally no statistical differences have been found between seasons for both fuels invalidating the argument that tourism activity reacts differently to host activity

quality of life and the wtp for an increased life expectancy at an advanced age abstract in this study we report an attempt to measure the value adult swedes impute to an increased survival probability at high ages a rating scale between the worst possible quality of life 1 and the best possible quality of life 10 is used to indicate the quality of life a person expects to achieve at an advanced age we find a highly significant correlation between this quality measure and the insurance premium a person is willing to pay in exchange for a programme increasing the expected length of life by one year conditional on having survived until the age of 75 years the maximum insurance premium the average person is willing to pay for such a programme is less than 1500 the willingness to pay increase with a person s age but at a low rate the implied average marginal rate of time preference is about 1 percent

road accidents and traffic flows an econometric investigation this paper develops an empirical model of the relationship between road traffic accidents and traffic flows the analysis focuses on the accident externality which is determined mainly by the difference between the marginal and average risks the model is estimated using a new data set which combines hourly london traffic count data from automated vehicle recorders together with police records of road accidents the accident flow relationship is seen to vary considerably between different road classes and geographical areas more importantly even having controlled for these and other differences the accident externality is shown to vary significantly with traffic flows in particular while the accident externality is typically close to zero for low to moderate traffic flows it increases substantially at high traffic flows

white certificates energy efficiency programs under private information of consumers abstract energy efficiency is an objective of public interventions at least since the public utility regulatory policy act of 1978 purpa recently conservation has received considerable attention in the united states and in particular in the european union but this time in order to mitigate global warming policy measures include regulations at the technical level and the introduction of white certificates in order to force utilities and firms to invest into conservation in a way similar to the already existing renewable energy quota this paper derives the optimal mechanism if utilities must deal with white certificates facing consumers holding private information the optimal mechanism has some theoretically interesting features like restricted participation and a discontinuity

using count data models in travel cost analysis with aggregate data estimators of recreational demand models frequently use continuous functional forms such as ordinary least squares ols on log transformed variables e g ziemer musser and hill however the nature of trip demand introduces complicating factors first trips occur in nonnegative quantities failure to control for this censoring will lead to biased estimation second because trips are available only in integer quantities the usual demand models which correlate marginal quantity with marginal price may be inapplicable in light of these factors a natural alternative is to use statistical models that explicitly recognize the count nature of trip demand several recent papers e g shaw smith grogger and carson creel and loomis have applied count models to the travel cost model these works largely have focused on truncated data sets based on choice based samples in this study the focus is on the older problem where zero demanders are included in particular the application of several robust estimators of count models to aggregated data will be considered the poisson distribution forms the foundation for the count models examined in this study although the poisson is a convenient distribution to work with it imposes some stringent constraints on the demand distribution in particular the poisson distribution assumes the variance of trip demand is equal to the expected value of trip demand to loosen these constraints a generalization of the poisson the negative binomial is discussed robust estimation procedures that permit further loosening of a priori assumptions are then reviewed permit data from the boundary waters canoe area are used to examine the effects of these count models on consumer surplus estimates and on coefficient variability

adaptive expectations underparameterization and the lucas critique abstract a striking implication of the replacement of adaptive expectations by rational expectations was the lucas critique which showed that expectation parameters and endogenous variable dynamics depend on policy parameters we consider this issue from the vantage point of bounded rationality where for transparency we model bounded rationality by means of simple adaptive expectations we show that for a range of processes monetary policy remains subject to the lucas critique however there are also regimes in which the expectation parameter is locally invariant and the lucas critique does not apply

on the economics of philanthropy friedman says that he accepts this argument as justifying governmental action to alleviate poverty economists will be familiar with this kind of argument someone takes as a premise that a particular activity is the subject of altruistic concern by individuals he shows that if matters are left to unco ordinated private philanthropy a free rider problem will arise and then he claims that this problem can be solved by some kind of intervention by government this strategy has been used to justify many kinds of intervention including compulsory transfers of income through the tax system hochman and rodgers i969 public policy to stimulate saving and investment marglin i963 sen i967 and the subsidisation or public provision of health care arrow i963 lindsay i969 culyer i976 this whole line of argument rests on a particular theory of private philanthropy which in turn relies on three principal assumptions first there is the publicness assumption the charitable activity in question say the relief of poverty or the provision of health care is a common argument in many individuals utility functions and so is a public good in the theoretical sense samuelson i954 in some cases of private philanthropy it is indisputable that the charitable activity is a public good from which donors derive utility consider for example the case of yachtsmen contributing to the royal national lifeboat institution or potential cancer victims contributing to the cancer research campaign in other cases the assumption takes on a rather different character rich britons contribute towards famine relief in cambodia childless old age pensioners contribute towards the care of handicapped children in such cases one would have to be extremely cynical to believe that the charitable activity furthers the self interest of the donor in any significant way but one might suggest that for purely altruistic reasons the donor derives utility from knowing that less fortunate people are being made better off such an effect will be called an altruistic externality friedman along with all of the other writers quoted in the first paragraph of this paper relies on altruistic externalities to justify the publicness assumption the second assumption is that of utility maximisation each individual s decisions concerning his philanthropic

the microeconomic analysis of the external costs of road accidents a disaggregated model of the marginal external costs of road accidents imposed by different road users is developed the model explicitly specifies the adjustment of road users to increases in accident risks imposed by additional road use and is used to estimate the marginal external costs of road accidents the results under certain assumptions are up to 50 less than those obtained using the methods of previous studies however the adjustment to the increased risks of accidents leads to other costs such as congestion and reduced pedestrian mobility these costs should be included in a comprehensive analysis

free access versus private property in a resource income distributions compared distributions of income are compared under the alternative regimes of free access to and private property in a resource it is shown that in several analytically distinct cases all those deprived of free access on conversion of a resource to private property can be better off even though no compensating transfers are made this resu lt can hold even if the granting of private property rights also conf ers monopoly or monopsony power copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

expectation volatility and liquidity in the housing market measuring housing price volatility is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of housing price risk this article aims to explore whether a liquidity factor plays a role in explaining the second moment i e the volatility of housing prices housing price volatility is measured as the conditional variance of a generalized auto regressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch model under the adaptive expectations framework the empirical evidence reveals that volatility transmits from smaller housing units to larger housing units which indirectly supports the trade up effect discussed in the literature in addition less liquid housing classes are more sensitive to unexpected liquidity shocks and the starter housing class is extraordinarily sensitive to negative liquidity shocks consistent with friction search theory pricing errors are alleviated as the trading volume increases because the valuation price tends to be more accurate as more information is available

on the risk of stocks in the long run a familiar proposition is that investing in common stocks is less risky the longer an investor plans to hold them if this proposition were true then the cost of insuring against earning less than the risk free rate of interest should decline as the investment horizon lengthens this paper shows that the opposite is true even if stock returns are mean reverting in the long run the case for young people investing more heavily than older people in stocks cannot therefore rest solely on the long run properties of stock returns for guarantors of money fixed annuities the proposition that stocks in their portfolios are a better hedge the longer the maturity of their obligations is unambiguously wrong

portfolio insurance and prospect theory investors popularity and optimal design of capital protected financial products abstract portfolio insurance strategies are used on both the institutional and the retail side of the asset management industry while standard utility theory struggles to provide an explanation this study justifies the popularity of portfolio insurance strategies in a behavioral finance context we run monte carlo simulations as well as historical simulations for popular portfolio insurance strategies and benchmark strategies in order to evaluate the outcomes using cumulative prospect theory our simulation results indicate that most portfolio insurance strategies are the preferred investment strategy for a prospect theory investor moreover the analysis provides insights into how portfolio insurance products should be designed and structured to meet the preferences of prospect theory investors as accurately as possible

the value of automobile travel time implications for congestion policy abstract public policy has remained stoutly resistant to the economic profession s call to use congestion tolls to minimize the social costs from automobile congestion this paper explores this issue by using stated preference models to estimate the value that commuters are willing to pay to save travel time we find that this value is low and surprisingly insensitive to travel conditions and how toll revenues are used it appears that even high income commuters having adjusted to congestion through their modal residential workplace and departure time choices simply do not value travel time savings enough to benefit substantially from tolls

determinants of housing price volatility in canada a dynamic analysis this article tries to identify the determinants of housing price volatility and to examine the dynamic effects of these determinants on volatility using quarterly data for canada the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic garch and the vector autoregressive var models have been employed to analyse possible time variation of the housing price volatility and the interactions between the volatility and the key macroeconomic variables we find the evidence of time varying housing price volatility for canada our var granger causality and variance decomposition vdc analyses demonstrate that housing price volatility is affected significantly by gross domestic product gdp growth rate housing price appreciation rate and inflation on the other hand volatility affects gdp growth rate housing price appreciation and volatility itself the impulse response analysis reveals the asymmetric of the positive and negative shocks the findings of this article have important implications particu

comparing alternative policies to reduce traffic accidents abstract this paper derives and implements formulas for the welfare effects of uniform mileage taxes gasoline taxes per mile insurance premiums and mileage taxes differentiated across vehicle and driver groups for reducing the external costs of passenger vehicle accidents the average external accident cost is estimated at 2 2 6 6 cents per mile accidents costs differ substantially across driver groups but only moderately across vehicles groups annual welfare gains from a mileage tax equal to marginal external costs for each driver vehicle group are 9 4 billion in the benchmark case the uniform mileage tax and per mile insurance reform can achieve 76 and 65 of this welfare gain respectively while the gasoline tax can achieve only 28 of the welfare gain unlike other policies the gasoline tax induces costly improvements in average fleet fuel economy that have little effect on reducing external costs

fuel demand on uk roads and dieselisation of fuel economy abstract because of high oil prices and climate change policy governments are now seeking ways to improve new car fuel economy thus contributing to air quality and energy security one strategy is to increase dieselisation rates of the vehicle fleet recent trends in fuel economy show improvement since 1995 however efforts need to go further if the eu voluntary agreement targets on co 2 a greenhouse gas emission standard are to be achieved trends show diesel car sales have accelerated rapidly and that the advantage of new car fuel economy of diesel cars over gasoline ones is narrowing posing a new challenge we estimate the demand for new car fuel economy in the uk in the long run consumers buy fuel economy but not in the short run we found that long term income and price changes were the main drivers to achieve improvements particularly for diesel cars and that there is no break in the trend of fuel economy induced by the agreement adopted in the 1990s policy should target more closely both consumer choice of and use of diesel cars

economies of scale in networks abstract a network s capacity can typically be increased in a variety of ways for example in a highway network existing roads can be made wider or new roads added this paper is concerned with the determination of the degree of local economies of scale in the cost function for the outputs of a congestible network when there are multiple margins for making adjustments to capacity the main result is that under the provision of a cost minimizing network one for which the sum of user and capacity costs for the network s outputs is at a minimum the degree of local economies of scale in the cost function for the network s outputs is the same along all margins for adjusting capacity this includes what routes to establish

the london congestion charge by the 1990s the average speed of trips across london was below that at the beginning of the twentieth century before the car was introduced and by the end of that decade public concern over levels of traffic congestion was high in early 2003 london imposed a congestion charge a daily charge for driving or parking a vehicle on public roads within central london between the hours of 7 00 a m and 6 30 p m on workdays traffic congestion has declined substantially and the program is largely popular this article describes the origins of the london congestion charge how it overcame practical and theoretical difficulties and what effects it has had the introduction of the london congestion charge is in important respects a triumph of economics it represents a high profile public and political recognition of congestion as a distorting externality and of road pricing as an appropriate policy response

revenue recycling and the welfare effects of road pricing the authors explore the interaction between taxes on work related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market a congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in lump sum transfers the resulting efficiency loss in the labor market can be larger that the pigouvian efficiency gains from internalizing the congestion externality by contrast if congestion tax revenues are used to reduce labor taxes the net impact on the labor supply is positive and the efficiency gain in the labor market can raise the overall welfare gains of the congestion tax by as much as 100 percent recycling congestion tax revenues in public transit subsidies produces a positive but smaller impact on the labor supply in short the authors results indicate that the presence of preexisting tax distortions and the form of revenue recycling can crucially affect the size and possibly even the sign of the welfare effect of road pricing schemes the efficiency gains from recycling congestion tax revenues in other tax reductions can amount to several times the pigouvian welfare gains from congestion reduction

economic modelling of energy services rectifying misspecified energy demand functions abstract although it is well known that energy demand is derived since energy is required not for its own sake but for the energy services it produces such as heating lighting and motive power energy demand models both theoretical and empirical often fail to take account of this feature in this paper we highlight the misspecification that results from ignoring this aspect and its empirical implications biased estimates of price elasticities and other measures and provide a relatively simple and empirically practicable way to rectify it which has a strong theoretical grounding to do so we develop an explicit model of consumer behaviour in which utility derives from consumption of energy services rather than from the energy sources that are used to produce them as we discuss this approach opens up the possibility of examining many aspects of energy demand in a theoretically sound way that have not previously been considered on a widespread basis although some existing empirical work could be interpreted as being consistent with this type of specification while this formulation yields demand equations for energy services rather than for energy or particular energy sources these are shown to be readily converted without added complexity into the standard type of energy demand equation s that is are typically estimated the additional terms that the resulting energy demand equations include compared to those that are typically estimated highlight the misspecification that is implicit when typical energy demand equations are estimated a simple solution for dealing with an apparent drawback of this formulation for empirical purposes namely that information is required on typically unobserved energy efficiency indicates how energy efficiency can be captured in the model such as by including exogenous trends and or including its possible dependence on past energy prices the approach is illustrated using an empirical example that involves estimation of an aggregate energy demand function for the uk with data over the period 1960 2011

the effects of price risk on housing demand empirical evidence from u s markets this article examines how price risk affects housing demand it identifies two relevant channels a financial risk effect that reduces demand and a hedging effect that increases demand since current homes may hedge future housing costs the latter dominates when hedging incentives are strong namely when the likelihood of moving up the housing ladder is high and the tendency to move across markets is low for households with weak hedging incentives the article finds negative effects of price risk on the timing and size of home purchases but positive effects for households with strong hedging incentives

bullish or bearish the sentiment of newsletter writers whether bullish or bearish does not forecast future returns but past returns and the volatility of those returns do affect sentiment high returns over four week periods are associated with a migration of newsletter writers from the bearish camp into the bullish camp high returns over periods of 26 and 52 weeks are associated with nervous bullishness a migration of newsletter writers from the bearish camp into both the bullish and the correction camps high volatility instead of scaring newsletter writers into bearishness reduces the effects of both positive and negative returns on sentiment also contrary to a popular hypothesis the crash of 1987 had no significant effect on the pattern of forecasts

the incidence of congestion tolls on urban highways abstract the incidence of an optimal short run congestion toll is investigated using an equilibrium model of modal choice and congestion on a highway corridor served by express bus transit it is argued that for an externality tax the usual equi revenue analysis of burdens is inappropriate instead welfare effects are computed under three alternative assumptions about redistribution of toll revenues in almost all cases the net result is benefits for all income groups it is concluded that congestion tolls should not be rejected on grounds of income distribution but that an explicit package of tolls and revenue uses is probably a political prerequisite for adoption

the rebound effect for space heating empirical evidence from austria abstract the major focus of this paper is to investigate the magnitude of the rebound effect for space heating in austria different approaches are applied and compared the most important result of this investigation is that despite the fact that all approaches applied have their weaknesses and some results were not highly significant the final outcomes of the different approaches show quite good coincidence they provide evidence of a rebound effect between 20 and 30 the most important conclusions for energy policy makers are i standards with respect to building codes are very important tools to increase the thermal quality of new buildings ii due to prevailing low energy prices a triggering tool which may be rebates or loans has to be implemented to increase the efficiency of the building stock