energy prices and co2 emission allowance prices a quantile regression approach we use a quantile regression framework to investigate the impact of changes in crude oil prices natural gas prices coal prices and electricity prices on the distribution of the co2 emission allowance prices in the united states we find that i an increase in the crude oil price generates a substantial drop in the carbon prices when the latter is very high ii changes in the natural gas prices have a negative effect on the carbon prices when they are very low but have a positive effect when they are quite high iii the impact of the changes in the electricity prices on the carbon prices can be positive in the right tail of the distribution and iv the coal prices exert a negative effect on the carbon prices

the role of farming experience on the adoption of agricultural technologies evidence from smallholder farmers in uganda abstractthis article investigates the relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies we use both non parametric and parametric estimations on data from rural farmers in uganda we find an inverted u relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies in banana coffee and maize this suggests that farming experience is useful in early stages of adoption of a given technology when farmers are still testing its potential benefits which later determine its retention or disadoption over time thus gradual advances in technology development and continuous retraining of farmers are essential for sustainable adoption of agricultural technologies for some crops

role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in price correlations and volatilities between carbon markets the present paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in volatilities and price correlations between the eu and kyoto protocol emissions trading schemes a supply and demand based correlation model between eua and scer price returns is proposed in detail using inverse box cox type marginal abatement cost mac curves and simple emission reduction volume processes the model includes financial players eua scer swap transaction in boom periods of carbon prices using the logit model for eua and eua scer swap volume correlations and stronger energy price impacts on eua prices than scer prices using a mean reverting lognormal process for energy prices the empirical studies using eua and scer prices estimate the model parameters resulting in a positive eua volume impact on eua scer swap transactions and a positive energy price impact on eua prices it is shown that high eua scer price correlations during high eua price periods stemmed from eua scer swap transactions whereas high eua scer price correlations during the period of financial turmoil with low eua prices came from the drop in energy prices we also show that the leverage effects often observed in security markets exist in both the eua and scer markets according to the price volatility relation

statistical efficiency of double bounded dichotomous choice contingent valuation the statistical efficiency of conventional dichotomous choice contingent valuation surveys can be improved by asking each respondent a second dichotomous choice question which depends on the response to the first question if the first response is yes the second bid is some amount greater than the first bid while if the first response is no the second bid is some amount smaller this double bounded approach is shown to be asymptotically more efficient than the conventional singlebounded approach using data from a survey of californians regarding their willingness to pay for wetlands in the san joaquin valley we show that in a finite sample the gain in efficiency can be very substantial

a trait based model of the potential demand for a genetically engineered food crop in a developing economy we predict the potential demand of smallholder farmers for genetically transformed varieties of a food crop the cooking banana of the east african highlands farmer demand for planting material is derived in an agricultural household model that accounts for variety traits and missing markets the demand for candidate host varieties is predicted using a zero inflated poisson zip regression system the fitted model is used to illustrate the sensitivity of farmer demand for improved planting material to a investments in research and development represented by the effectiveness of gene insertion and expression and b other public investments in education extension and market infrastructure that support diffusion by comparing the characteristics of agricultural households we demonstrate that the choice of host variety can have social consequences favoring one rural population compared with another clients for transgenic banana planting material are likely to be poorer subsistence oriented farmers in areas greatly affected by biotic constraints a model of this type might be useful in assessing the investments needed to support the systematic dissemination of improved planting material the approach can be generalized to other crop biotechnologies for smallholder farming systems particularly in developing economies

estimating willingness to pay from survey data an alternative pre test market evaluation procedure closed ended contingent valuation surveys are used to assess demands in hypothetical markets and recently have been applied widely to the valuation of non market environmental resources this int

genetically modified crops corporate pricing strategies and farmers adoption the case of bt cotton in argentina this article analyzes adoption and impacts of bt cotton in argentina against the background of monopoly pricing based on survey data it is shown that the technology significantly reduces insecticide applications and increases yields however these advantages are curbed by the high price charged for genetically modified seeds using the contingent valuation method it is shown that farmers average willingness to pay is less than half the actual technology price a lower price would not only increase benefits for growers but could also multiply company profits thus resulting in a pareto improvement implications of the sub optimal pricing strategy are discussed recently genetically modified gm crops have brought about important changes in the global market for agricultural technologies especially seeds prospects of high economic returns and tightened intellectual property rights iprs have provided new incentives for the private sector to invest in crop improvement and extend its business to nontraditional markets the increasingly proprietary nature of seed technologies has implications for farmers adoption and benefit distribution private innovators endowed with a patent on a technology will attempt to capture the gains from their innovation through monopoly pricing moschini and lapan recent studies have looked into the partitioning of welfare created by gm crops among agricultural producers consumers and innovating input firms e g moschini lapan and sobolevsky falckzepeda traxler and nelson in these studies however the market price of the technology is

estimating the demand for a new technology bt cotton and insecticide policies this article examines the potential demand for bt cotton in the southeast from information gathered in the first year of commercialization we combine revealed preference rp data on adoption of bt cotton varieties with stated preference sp data on willingness to adopt to estimate demand using a double bounded maximum likelihood procedure using estimated demand equations we simulate the costs of reducing conventional insecticide applications through subsidization of bt cotton results indicate that reducing cotton insecticide applications by 40 in the southeast would require a 21 acre subsidy with total annual program costs between 53 million and 60 million

the effect of unanticipated money on the money and foreign exchange markets abstract a number of studies have attempted to determine why unanticipated increases in the money supply are positively correlated with money market interest rates by examining the response of the foreign exchange market to unanticipated changes in the money stock they have found a significant positive relationship between unanticipated increases in the money supply and the foreign exchange value of the dollar and have interpreted this as evidence for the anticipated liquidity effect hypothesis however these results support this hypothesis only if both markets respond simultaneously to unanticipated changes in money this paper examines the cross market consistency of the response using six bilateral exchange rates and the treasury bill rate all measured over a narrow time interval the results show that in general these markets do not respond simultaneously to money announcements

a multimarket decision making framework for genco considering emission trading scheme in a multimarket environment a genco produces electricity subject to a number of factors including physical and environmental constraints together with trading strategies in the electricity market em fuel market fm and carbon market cm to assist a genco to maximize its profits from em fm and cm this paper proposes a dynamic decision making model with two consecutive stages fuzzy differential evolution algorithm is used to solve this decision making problem taking transactions in the three interactive markets into account the proposed model has been tested for a genco consisting of seven thermal units and a wind farm a rational tradeoff between the profit making and emission reduction has been demonstrated by the genco using the proposed model indicating a well alignment with the intended goal of the introducing emission trading scheme ets

nonparametric modeling of carbon prices this paper constitutes the first exercise of nonparametric modeling applied to carbon markets the framework of analysis is carefully detailed and the empirical application unfolds in the case of bluenext spot and ecx futures prices the data is gathered in daily frequency from april 2005 to april 2010 first we document the presence of strong nonlinearities in the conditional mean functions second the conditional volatility functions reveal an asymmetric and heteroskedastic behavior which is dramatically different between carbon spot and futures logreturns the results for spot prices are also robust to subsamples decomposition third we show in an out of sample forecasting exercise that nonparametric modeling allows reducing the prediction error by almost 15 compared to linear ar models this latter result is confirmed by the diebold mariano pairwise test statistic

surplus distribution from the introduction of a biotechnology innovation we examine the distribution of welfare from the introduction of bt cotton in the united states in 1996 the welfare framework explicitly recognizes that research protected by intellectual property rights generates monopoly profits and makes it possible to partition these rents among consumers farmers and the innovating input firms we calculate a total increase in world surplus of 240 3 million for 1996 of this total the largest share 59 went to u s farmers the gene developer monsanto received the next largest share 21 followed by u s consumers 9 the rest of the world 6 and the germplasm supplier delta and pine land company 5

an econometric analysis of emission allowance prices knowledge of the statistical distribution of the prices of emission allowances and their forecastability are crucial in constructing among other things purchasing and risk management strategies in the emissions constrained markets this paper analyzes the two emission permits markets co2 in europe and so2 in the us and investigates a model for dealing with the unique stylized facts of this type of data its effectiveness in terms of model fit and out of sample value at risk forecasting as compared to models commonly used in risk forecasting contexts is demonstrated

intellectual property rights and the welfare effects of agricultural r d the profound changes that have affected agriculture in modern times are perhaps best illustrated by the evolution of production techniques due to mechanization new chemical inputs such as herbicides pesticides and fertilizers genetic selection of crops and animals new crop varieties and countless other technical and organizational improvements these innovations have allowed a generalized increase in physical output while at the same time agriculture has suffered a massive exodus of labor forces towards the non farm sectors indeed a stylized fact of developed countries post war growth is that productivity in agriculture has grown faster than in other sectors jorgenson and gollop 1992 this remarkable record naturally begs the question of what is at its root and a view that commands considerable consensus is that agricultural productivity growth is due to past investments in scientific research and development r d

pro poor agricultural biotechnology can the international research system deliver the goods abstract while global investment in agricultural research by the private sector is increasing with growth in developing country markets and the emergence of new technologies complementary public sector investment is stagnating or declining in many developing countries this review argues that the changing roles of the public and private sectors in generating new scientific knowledge may adversely affect the diffusion of explicitly pro poor technologies technologies that are simultaneously yield enhancing and poverty reducing comparing historical evidence from the green revolution with recent evidence from the emerging era of agricultural biotechnology this review argues that a more pluralistic international system for agricultural research will be more responsive to poverty only if the strategic leadership role of the public sector is strengthened certain research functions are reallocated to the private sector and new policy and organizational mechanisms are used to stimulate pro poor research in and for developing country agriculture

carbon trading thickness and market efficiency abstract this note tests for the efficient market hypothesis emh in the market for co 2 emission allowances in phase i and phase ii of the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets as usually is the case in emerging and non competitive markets such as the eu ets trading often not occurs on a frequent basis this has adverse implications for both the gains from permit trade as well as biases the emh tests variance ratio tests are employed to adjust for the thin trading effect the results indicate that phase i the trial and learning period was inefficient whereas the first period under phase ii shows signs of restoring market efficiency

an empirical analysis of energy cost pass through to co2 emission prices abstract we use the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nardl model to analyze the asymmetric and nonlinear pass through effects of changes in crude oil prices natural gas prices coal prices and electricity prices on the co 2 emission allowance prices we find that i the crude oil prices have a long run negative and asymmetric effect on the co 2 allowance prices ii the decreases in the coal prices have a stronger impact on the carbon prices in the short run than the increases iii the natural gas prices and electricity prices have a symmetric effect on the carbon prices but this effect is negative for the former and positive for the latter these findings are robust when using both monthly and daily data and when considering bivariate and multivariate models

price discovery and volatility spillovers in the european union emissions trading scheme a high frequency analysis abstract this paper models the relationship of european union allowance spot and futures prices within the second commitment period of the european union emissions trading scheme based on high frequency data we analyze the transmission of information in first and second conditional moments to reveal long run price discovery we compute common factor weights of schwarz and szakmary 1994 and information shares of hasbrouck 1995 based on estimated coefficients of a vecm to analyze the short run dynamics we perform granger causality tests we identify the futures market to be the leader of the long run price discovery process whereas the informational role of the futures market increases over time in addition we employ a version of the ueccc garch model as introduced by conrad and karanasos 2010 to analyze the volatility transmission structure the volatility analysis indicates a close relationship between the volatility dynamics of both markets whereas in particular we observe spillovers from the futures to the spot market as a whole the investigation reveals that the futures market incorporates information first and then transfers the information to the spot market

environmental prices uncertainty and learning there is an increasing demand for putting a shadow price on the environment to guide public policy and incentivize private behaviour in practice setting that price can be extremely difficult as uncertainties abound there is often uncertainty not just about individual parameters but about the structure of the problem and how to model it a further complication is the second best nature of real environmental policy making in this paper we propose some practical steps for setting prices in the face of these difficulties drawing on the example of climate change we consider how to determine the overall target for environmental protection how to set shadow prices to deliver that target and how we can learn from the performance of policies to revise targets and prices perhaps most significantly we suggest that estimates of the marginal cost of environmental protection rather than the marginal benefit will often provide the more consistent and robust prices for achieving targets

ex ante analysis of the benefits of transgenic drought tolerance research on cereal crops in low income countries this article develops a framework to examine the ex ante benefits of transgenic research on drought in eight low income countries including the benefits to producers and consumers from farm income stabilization and the potential magnitude of private sector profits from intellectual property rights iprs the framework employs country specific agroecological drought risk zones and considers both yield increases and yield variance reductions when estimating producer and consumer benefits from research benefits from yield variance reductions are shown to be an important component of aggregate drought research benefits representing 40 of total benefits across the eight countries further estimated annual benefits of us 178 million to the private sector suggest that significant incentives exist for participation in transgenic drought tolerance research

a model for energy pricing with stochastic emission costs we use a supply demand approach to value energy products exposed to emission cost uncertainty we find closed form solutions for a number of popularly traded energy derivatives such as forwards european call options written on spot prices and european call options written on forward contracts our modeling approach is to first construct noisy supply and demand processes and then equate them to find an equilibrium price this approach is very general while still allowing for sensitivity analysis within a valuation setting our assumption is that in the presence of emission costs traditional supply growth will slow down causing output prices of energy products to become more costly over time however emission costs do not immediately cause output price appreciation but instead expose individual projects particularly those with high emission outputs to much more extreme risks through the cost side of their profit stream our results have implications for hedging and pricing for producers operating in areas facing a stochastic emission cost environment

smart srec a stochastic model of the new jersey solar renewable energy certificate market markets for solar renewable energy certificates srecs are gaining in promi nence in many states stimulating growth of the u s solar industry however srec market prices have been extremely volatile causing high risk to participants and potentially less investment in solar power generation such concerns necessitate the development of realis tic flexible and tractable models of srec prices that capture the behavior of participants given the rules that govern the market we propose an original stochastic model called smart srec to fill this role building on established ideas from the carbon pricing liter ature and including a feedback mechanism for generation response to prices we calibrate the model to the new jersey market and backtest it analyzing parameter sensitivity and demonstrating its ability to reproduce historical dynamics finally we run simulations to investigate the role and impact of regulatory parameters thus providing insight into the crucial role played by market design

fifteen years of bt cotton in china the economic impact and its dynamics summary even though the economic benefit of bt cotton adoption in the short run has been well documented the dynamics of this benefit remain unclear in particular the possibility of pest resistance build up and secondary pest outbreaks has caused concern regarding the sustainability of this economic benefit in the long run hence this study analyzes the economic impact of bt cotton and its dynamics in china using nationally representative long panel data for 1997 2012 we show that this economic benefit continues 15 years after the commercialization of bt cotton

the potential benefits of herbicide resistant transgenic rice in uruguay lessons for small developing countries abstract in many developing countries the potential benefits from adopting a transgenic variety developed by a multinational corporation are limited by the crop s small production base this paper presents an ex ante evaluation of the economic impact of herbicide resistant transgenic rice in a small developing country uruguay to fully account for the multinational s market power the firm s seed markup is assumed to affect the adoption rate for the variety stochastic simulation techniques are employed to understand how potential benefits may vary with changes in technology yield costs and adoption parameters the results indicate a 1 82 million mean net present value for producers from the development and utilization of transgenic rice in uruguay and 0 55 million for the multinational these relatively small multinational firm benefits suggest that a firm will not undertake significant efforts to develop transgenic varieties adapted to local conditions without either strategic partnerships with local institutions or access to wider regional markets

forecasting carbon futures volatility using garch models with energy volatilities abstract this article examines the volatility forecasting abilities of three approaches garch type model that uses carbon futures prices an implied volatility from carbon options prices and the k nearest neighbor model based on the results we document that garch type models perform better than an implied volatility and the k nearest neighbor model this result suggests that carbon options have little information about carbon futures due to their low trading volume we also investigate whether the volatilities of energy markets i e brent oil coal natural gas and electricity forecast following day s carbon futures volatility according to the results we suggest that brent oil coal and electricity may be used to forecast the volatility of carbon futures

multiple bubbles in the european union emission trading scheme abstract the european union emission trading scheme eu ets is the first large scale co 2 emission trading system in the world carbon allowances are financial assets potentially vulnerable to the behavior of traders and investors in fact the carbon price has been quite volatile since the inception of the market and it has recently hit very low values however to date no work exists to evaluate whether volatility and price spikes are due to episodes of speculation and price bubbles our paper fills this gap we use the recent approaches developed by phillips and yu 2010 phillips et al 2011 and phillips et al 2015a 2015b who propose a recursive right sided unit root approaches to detect and date stamp mildly explosive behaviors and carbon market exuberance we complement this methodology by using the wild bootstrap procedure by goncalves and kilian 2004 to control for the heteroschedasticity of carbon price data analyzing the eu ets front month contract price from 2005 to 2014 we find different episodes of price bubbles these episodes are not explained by similar behavior of the fundamentals but seem related to energy and environmental policy announcements our results can provide insightful policy implications in the context of the actual carbon market reform as well as the implementation of stricter financial regulations rules to co 2 trading

market efficiency in the european carbon markets in this paper we study the relationship between futures and spot prices in the european carbon markets from the cost of carry hypothesis the aim is to investigate the extent of efficiency market the three main european markets bluenext eex and ecx are analyzed during phase ii covering the period from march 13 2009 to january 17 2012 futures contracts are found to be cointegrated with spot prices and interest rates for several maturities in the three co2 markets results are similar when structural breaks are taken into account according to individual and joint tests the cost of carry model is rejected for all maturities and co2 markets implying that neither contract is priced according to the cost of carry model the absence of the cost of carry relationship can be interpreted as an indicator of market inefficiency and may bring arbitrage opportunities in the co2 market

the willingness to adopt agro ecological innovations application of choice modelling to caribbean banana planters this paper proposes an ex ante evaluation of the willingness to adopt agro ecological innovations aimed at reducing pesticide use for banana production in the french west indies four innovative systems including intercropping improved fallow and new pest tolerant varieties are proposed to a sample of 607 planters with innovation and policy attributes calibrated from a bio economic farm model the model interacts technological and economic innovation attributes with farmer individual factors and allows for a dual source of unobserved heterogeneity we estimate a system of random coefficient logit models to obtain marginal values of innovation traits that can be useful for targeting farm types with appropriate innovations and designing policies for securing agricultural revenue

infringement of intellectual property rights causes and consequences parallel revolutions in molecular biology and the legal framework that assigns intellectual property rights iprs to plant genetic resources have resultedin the emergence of agricultural biotechnology andthe introd uction of genetically modified gm products into the foodsystem iprs create economic incentives for research andd evelopment by making the innovator the residual claimant of the benefits associatedwith the new technology whereas iprs purport to protect intellectual property full appropriation of the benefits from the innovation is not a given when infringement of iprs i e piracy is profitable rational economic agents compliance with ipr provisions is by no means assured costly monitoring and enforcement are requiredto d eter unauthorized illegal use of the new technology experience from various countries aroundthe worldind icates that ipr enforcement is far from being perfect andmany successful innovations are

causes of the eu ets price drop recession cdm renewable policies or a bit of everything new evidence the price of eu allowances euas in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets fell from almost 30 tco2 in mid 2008 to less than 5 tco2 in mid 2013 the sharp and persistent price decline has sparked intense debates both in academia and among policy makers about the decisive allowance price drivers in this paper we examine whether and to what extent the eua price drop can be justified by three commonly identified explanatory factors the economic recession renewable policies and the use of international credits capitalizing on marginal abatement cost theory and a broadly extended data set we find that only variations in economic activity and the growth of wind and solar electricity production are robustly explaining eua price dynamics contrary to simulation based analyses our results point to moderate interaction effects between the overlapping eu ets and renewable policies the bottom line however is that 90 of the variations of eua price changes remains unexplained by the abatement related fundamentals together our findings do not support the widely held view that negative demand shocks are the main cause of the weak carbon price signal in view of the new evidence we evaluate the eu ets reform options which are currently discussed

village wide effects of agricultural biotechnology the case of bt cotton in india previous studies on impacts of agricultural biotechnology have mostly focused on direct effects we suggest an economy wide framework to analyze income distribution aspects more carefully for a village in india a micro social accounting matrix sam is developed and used to simulate the effects of bt cotton adoption overall the technology is employment generating although family labor in cotton production is saved while substantial benefits are observed for small and large farmers total household income effects are bigger for larger farms this is mostly due to differential opportunity incomes of saved family labor some research and policy implications are discussed

shadow prices of social capital in rural india a nonparametric approach this article studies the role of social capital on cotton production efficiency and productivity for a sample of small farms in maharashtra india using data envelopment analysis input shadow prices are computed as an indicator of the importance of social capital relative to other inputs results suggest social capital to be the input with the highest contribution to production efficiency after land the luenberger indicator is used to assess the productivity improvement associated to an investment in social capital which is found to be on the order of 12 undertaking collective production activities is found to play an important role in improving productivity this is especially relevant to agricultural households facing important economic and institutional restrictions that make it difficult to increase conventional expensive inputs

estimating the adoption of bt eggplant in india who benefits from public private partnership the study analyzes ex ante the adoption of insect resistant bt eggplant technology in india farmers willingness to pay wtp is estimated using the contingent valuation method given the economic importance of insect pests in eggplant cultivation the average wtp for bt hybrids is more than four times the current price of conventional hybrid seeds since the private innovating firm has also shared its technology with the public sector proprietary hybrids will likely get competition through public open pollinated bt varieties after a small time lag this will reduce farmers wtp for bt hybrids by about 35 thus decreasing the scope for corporate pricing policies nonetheless ample private profit potential remains analysis of factors influencing farmers adoption decisions demonstrates that public bt varieties will particularly improve technology access for resource poor eggplant producers the results suggest that public private partnership can be beneficial for all parties involved 2006 published by elsevier ltd

the politics of technological upgrading international transfer to and adaptation of gm cotton in argentina summary we describe patterns of international transfer to and adaptation of genetically modified gm cotton in argentina and ask whether political bargaining between the technology owner a multinational enterprise mne and host country actors may have influenced upgrading we suggest that the mne was able to use its exclusive capacity to upgrade gm cotton technologies as a negotiation tool to persuade host actors to change the rules that affected its multi lines of business in the country this implies wider policy scope to encourage technology upgrading host actors could negotiate over a wider range of aspects of interest to mnes

on the adoption of genetically modified seeds in developing countries and the optimal types of government intervention given the proprietary nature of most genetically modified gm seed technologies the question arises as to how farmers in developing countries can gain proper access based on empirical observations a theoretical model is developed focusing on farmers adoption decisions in response to pricing strategies of a foreign monopolist and a domestic supplier of conventional seeds government interventions such as seed subsidies encouragement of r d and intellectual property rights ipr enforcement and their effects on gm coverage and national welfare are analyzed the possibility of the government obtaining a license to distribute gm seeds domestically through a transfer to the monopolist is also considered

fat tails and volatility clustering in experimental asset markets abstract this paper presents results from experimental asset markets with asymmetric fundamental information we observe leptokurtic returns and a slowly decaying autocorrelation function of absolute returns in contrast to results from heterogeneous agent models hams we find that noise has no significant influence on the emergence of fat tails instead we observe a significantly positive relationship between the degree of heterogeneity of fundamental information and absolute returns which suggests that heterogeneous fundamental information is the source of fat tails with respect to volatility clustering we discover an intra periodical pattern where absolute returns decrease after the arrival of new asymmetric fundamental information

modeling persistence of carbon emission allowance prices this study reexamines the issue of persistence in carbon emission allowance spot prices using daily data and covering the period from 28 2 2007 to 14 05 2014 for this purpose we use techniques based on the concept of long memory accounting for structural breaks and non linearities in the data with both of these aspects potentially affecting the degree of persistence our results indicate that while there is no evidence of non linearity when allowing for structural breaks persistence of shocks to the carbon emission allowance is markedly reduced with the same being transitory in nature for recent sub samples

agricultural biotechnology adoption in developing countries over the last ten years modern agricultural biotechnology has been adopted rapidly at the global level including in several developing countries this trend has been most apparent for genetically modified gm crops while the first gm crops were officially commercialized in the united states in 1995 in 2004 gm crops were already grown by more than 8 million farmers in seventeen countries on a total area of 81 million hectares james this is the fastest diffusion of any new crop technology in the history of humankind the most widely used gm technologies involve herbicide tolerance ht applied in soybean and canola and insect resistance based on genes isolated from bacillus thuringiensis bt applied in maize and cotton recent studies about the agronomic and economic impacts demonstrate that on average adopting farmers benefit from income increases through reduced pest control costs and higher effective yields carpenter et al traxler et al pray et al morse bennett and ismael thirtle et al qaim and zilberman qaim and de janvry 2005 qaim and traxler these studies even suggest that the farm level benefits tend to be bigger in developing than in developed countries

the spread of illegal transgenic cotton varieties in india biosafety regulation monopoly and enforcement summary plantings of unapproved genetically modified seeds gm happen in many developing countries including brazil china and india even though the law does not permit it is regulation impossible and what does that imply for safe use of gm seeds this paper examines these questions in the case of unapproved gm cotton plantings in gujarat india we find that enforcement was possible and that there are no obvious bio safety implications the popularity of unapproved seeds confirmed by contingent valuations the de facto intellectual property of legal seeds and the federal polity of india contributed to non compliance this could matter for future innovations

the efficacy of the european union emissions trading scheme depicting the co movement of carbon assets and energy commodities through wavelet decomposition abstract environmental system thresholds have been crossed for a number of dimensions of global environmental pollution such as greenhouse gas emissions under this scenario institutions and corporations are required to implement sustainable policies as a condition for humanity staying within planetary boundaries accordingly the european union created the largest emissions trading scheme in the world with the aim of properly managing corporations carbon dioxide reductions this paper aims to contribute to the literature focused on testing the effectiveness of institutional environmental management policies specifically this research evaluates whether the objectives of the european union emissions trading scheme are partially achieved by analyzing the dynamics of carbon assets and the main energy commodities worldwide this paper provides relevant information both for policy makers and company managers so that contributions towards the common goal of developing a clean energy future and curbing climate change are ameliorated based on wavelet coherence analysis this paper proposes a model free way of estimating the time varying correlations between carbon assets and energy commodities at both high and low frequencies our central results reveal that carbon assets and energy commodities present a changing lead lag behavior at different frequencies the energy commodities lead the european union allowances returns at medium frequencies but the contrary was true for the highest investment horizons this finding should be in line with the goal of significantly reducing emissions because during long cycles if the majority of companies have not switched to cleaner industrial processes they must buy more carbon assets increasing their prices in that case energy commodities would be more expensive because of the energy commodities market behavior during long term horizons with european union allowances lead the certified emissions reductions lead in a negative way most of the energy commodities at medium frequencies thus indicating that investors handling energy commodities oriented portfolios could incorporate the mentioned carbon assets for diversification purposes these specific findings suggest that polluting activities would be more expensive which would provide an incentive to companies to implement environmentally friendly industrial processes the european union emissions trading scheme can result in significant emission reductions and compliance of the european union with the objectives of the kyoto protocol

the forecasting accuracy of implied volatility from ecx carbon options abstract this study analyzes the forecasting accuracy of the implied volatility of options on futures contracts for the delivery of co 2 emission allowances carbon options traded on the european climate exchange we demonstrate that option implied volatility is highly informative about the variance of returns realized over the remaining life of the options it is also directionally accurate in predicting future volatility changes however we also find that implied volatility of carbon options is biased especially for periods of time which do not coincide with the remaining life of the option this suggests that the market has yet to fully mature