renegotiation on incomplete procurement contracts abstractthis article examines the impact of incomplete contracts on procurement costs in road construction auctions ex ante contracts in these auctions often fail to specify all of the potential construction contingencies and consequently changes in scope are necessary after construction begins using vermont road construction contract data this study finds evidence that there is a statistically significant difference in costs of firms between auctions with and without extra work adjustments substantial adaptation costs are responsible for the higher procurement outlays in incomplete contract i also find that bidders inflate their bids to incorporate risk premiums in incomplete contracts however my estimates suggest that this bidding behaviour does not affect their profit margins

deciding between competition and collusion we develop an approach to identify and test for bid rigging in procurement auctions first we introduce a general auction model with asymmetric bidders second we study the problem of identie cation in our model we state a set of conditions that are both necessary and sufe cient for a distribution of bids to be generated by a model with competitive bidding third we discuss how to elicit a prior distribution over a e rm s structural cost parameters from industry experts given this prior distri bution we use bayes s theorem to compare competitive and collusive models of industry equilibrium finally we apply our methodology to a data set of bidding by construction e rms in the midwest the techniques we propose are not computationally demanding use e exible functional forms and can be programmed using most standard statistical packages

prices and the winner s curse we usually assume that increases in supply allocation by rationing and exclusion of potential buyers reduce prices but all these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common value assets are sold furthermore when we make the assumptions needed to rule out these anomalies for symmetric buyers small asymmetries among the buyers necessarily cause the anomalies to reappear our results help explain rationing in initial public offerings and outcomes of spectrum auctions we illustrate our results in the wallet game and in another new game we introduce the maximum game

empirical implications of equilibrium bidding in first price symmetric common value auctions this paper studies federal auctions for wildcat leases on the outer continental shelf from 1954 to 1970 these are leases where bidders privately acquire at some cost noisy but equally informative signals about the amount of oil and gas that may be present we develop tests of rational and equilibrium bidding in a common values model that are implemented using data on bids and ex post values we also use data on tract location and exposr values to test the comparative static prediction that bidders may bid less aggressively in common value auctions when they expect more competition we find that bidders are aware of the winner s curse and their bidding is largely consistent with equilibrium

subcontracting and the survival of plants in the road construction industry a panel quantile regression analysis this paper investigates how subcontracting parts of contracted work shapes entrants success and survival we find that newly developed quantile regression approaches can be adapted to study survival of firms competing for government contracts in road construction the method is applied on a data set that includes patterns of firm entry exit and auction related information we find an apparent increase in the business life of firms who subcontract out part of their projects in texas these subcontracting effects appear to be more pronounced for firms with few or no options outside the industry and among firms who contract out part of their work to disadvantaged business enterprises

spatial sustainability trade and indicators an evaluation of the ecological footprint the search for frameworks and indicators of sustainable development has taken a prominent place in this journal however some specific aspects have received little or no attention notably the spatial dimension and the role of international trade in indicator development moreover many sustainable development indicators comprise implicit valuations weighting schemes and policy objectives which are insufficiently recognised as such this contribution tries to highlight these issues by means of a review of a recently proposed indicator for ecological economic analysis namely the ecological footprint that has been developed by wackernagel and rees its concept and calculation procedure are criticised on a number of points and it is concluded that the ecological footprint is not the comprehensive and transparent planning tool as is often assumed in explaining our position we will argue that spatial sustainability and regional sustainable development have not been precisely discussed so far neither in the literature on trade and environment nor in that on sustainable development we will defend the view that trade can contribute positively and negatively to environmental unsustainability consequently indicators and models are needed that allow for analysing interactions and trade offs between such opposite effects 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

1979 and all that a 40 year reassessment of margaret thatcher s legacy on her own terms there is a growing disaffection with mainstream politics in the world s liberal democracies in particular the uk has become an increasingly divided nation as evidenced by for example increasing inequality an emphasis on individualism the so called north south divide and the polarised debate about the uk s leaving the european union many leading uk politicians claim inheritance of the thatcher legacy to legitimate their proposed policies yet it is not clear what is that legacy thatcher s policies instituted in the 1980s and broadly pursued by subsequent governments changed the economic and social outlook of the uk criticism of her record is taken to indicate one is a left wing ideologue our contribution in the following is that we judge thatcher s policies by no standards other than her own utilising an holistic approach we consider whether neo liberal policies facilitated or undermined the uk s achieving thatcher s stated moral outcomes the growth of democratic capitalism and the strengthening of the moral economy we demonstrate in contrast to contemporary narratives of her saving the country the neo liberal economic experiment has failed to deliver even on thatcher s own terms this analysis has contemporary domestic and global implications as generally thatcherite policies continue to be applied in the uk and in other nations around the world

equilibrium in auctions with entry the authors model entry incentives in auctions with risk neutral bidders and characterize a symmetric equilibrium in which the number of entrants is stochastic the presence of too many potential bidders raises coordination costs that detract from welfare the authors show that the seller and society can benefit from policies that reduce market thickness i e the relative abundance of buyers their analysis extends well known revenue equivalence and ranking theorems but also demonstrates that variations in the auction environment affect optimal policies e g reservation prices in ways not anticipated by models that ignore entry copyright 1994 by american economic association

an empirical analysis of entrant and incumbent bidding in road construction auctions this paper explores differences in the bidding patterns of entrants and incumbents in road construction auctions we find that entrants bid more aggressively and win auctions with significantly lower bids than incumbents the differences in their bidding patterns are consistent with a model of auctions in which the distribution of an entrant s costs exhibits greater dispersion than that of an incumbent s and relations of stochastic dominance in the distributions do not persist for the entire range of estimated costs we also find that more efficient firms bid on average more aggressively and firms with greater backlogs bid less aggressively

a first empirical comparison of energy footprints embodied in trade mrio versus plum abstract the ecological footprint as an indicator that accounts for human demand on global bioproductivity sets out to quantify the impacts associated with consumption in a given country including the impacts associated with trade the national footprint accounts nfa by global footprint network gfn calculate trade embodied footprints by multiplying yield and embodied energy factors with mass volumes of traded goods in a product land use matrix plum this article compares energy footprints embodied in trade from and to the united kingdom in 2002 as calculated by the nfa plum with the results from a recently developed multi region input output model mrio for the uk although totals for imports and exports are comparable breaking down the results by economic sectors reveals large differences and hardly any correlation between the two methods the omission of trade in services especially transport services and upstream impacts of energy goods fossil fuels and the use of inappropriate embodied energy factors in the nfa plum method are identified as the main reasons for these differences in the light of the results it seems that a comprehensive footprint account of trade can better be achieved with an input output based approach i conclude that mrio models once fully developed will be particularly suitable in the future to estimate the ecological footprints of imports and exports of nations with the possibility to track their origin via inter industry linkages international supply chains and multi national trade flows

perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital economics from an ecological footprint perspective this paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality far from encouraging investment in natural capital actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks moreover conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem this paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept to develop the argument the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses it shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital it picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles it draws lessons for current development

responsibility and trade emission balances an evaluation of approaches this paper compares two concepts to evaluate the international responsibility of a country with respect to its emissions using a multi regional input output model we show that the trade emission balance and the responsibility emission balance yield the same result in practical work however a lack of data availability implies that the same technology assumption has been commonly adopted in that case also a third alternative exists which simply evaluates the emissions embodied in the trade balance of the country this third alternative yields the same results as the other two approaches at the aggregate level at the level of individual products however the results are clearly different and it turns out that the third alternative answers a different question that is it is appropriate for measuring the emission content of the products that cross the border in our empirical application we consider spain in 1995 and 2000 distinguishing nine different gases co 2 ch 4 n 2 o sf 6 hfcs pfcs so 2 nox and nh 3 c 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

procurement contracting with time incentives theory and evidence in public procurement social welfare often depends on how quickly the good is delivered a leading example is highway construction where slow completion inflicts a negative externality on commuters in response highway departments award some contracts using scoring auctions which give contractors explicit incentives for accelerated delivery we characterize efficient design of these mechanisms we then gather an extensive data set of highway projects awarded by the california department of transportation between 2003 and 2008 by comparing otherwise similar contracts we show that where the scoring design was used contracts were completed 30 40 faster and the welfare gains to commuters exceeded the increase in procurement costs using a structural model that endogenizes participation and bidding we estimate that the counterfactual welfare gain from switching all contracts from the standard design to the efficient apb design is nearly 22 of the total contract value 1 14 billion copyright 2011 oxford university press

regional size industrial location and input output expenditure coefficients mccann p and dewhurst j h ll 1998 regional size industrial location and input output expenditure coefficients reg studies 32 435 444 this paper develops some of the themes raised in a recent paper by flegg et al 1995 the question we explore is the relationship between the size of a region and the values of the expenditure coefficients as estimated using location quotients by using hypothetical examples we show that there is no theoretical relationship between regional size and the value of a regional expenditure coefficient the reason is that it depends on the spatial distribution of activity and industrial linkages on the other hand it would also appear that in many cases there does seem to be an empirical relationship and that this observation is worthy of further research mccann p et dewhurst j h ll 1998 taille des regions localisation industrielle et coefficients input output de depense reg studies 32 435 444 cet article developpe certaines des questions soulevees re

the effect of information on the bidding and survival of entrants in procurement auctions in government procurement auctions of construction contracts entrants are typically less informed and bid more aggressively than incumbent rms this bidding behavior makes them more sus ceptible to losses aecting their prospect of survival in april of 2000 the oklahoma department of transportation started releasing the internal cost estimates to complete highway construction projects using newly developed quantile regression approaches this paper examines the impact of the policy change on aggressive entrants first we nd that the information release eliminates the bidding dierential between entrants and incumbents attributed to informational asymmetries second we argue that the policy change aects the prospects of survival of entrants in the market we nd that those who used to exit the market relatively soon are now staying 37 percent longer while at the median level bidding duration increased by roughly 68 percent the policy has the potential to encourage entry in government procurement auctions and thus increase competition

embedded carbon footprint of chinese urban households structure and changes reducing environmental pressure is a major concern for china but despite the improvements in energy efficiency its gross carbon dioxide co2 emissions have maintained an upward trend consistent with the jevons paradox a fundamental shift is thus needed at all levels including the household this paper explores the embedded carbon footprint ecf of chinese urban households associated with activities such as food personal transport communications education recreation health and hygiene it uses an input output model for carbon emissions and 2003 2009 urban household data the results show that the total ecf emission intensity increases when an individual s consumption is higher than 10 000 yuan structural changes are further observed with consumption expenditure above 10 000 food clothing and other survival oriented emissions intensities as well as education health and development oriented emissions intensities reduce transport recreation housing and enjoyment oriented emissions intensities increase or remain stable and the total emissions intensity increases currently per capita consumption expenditure of chinese urban residents exceeds 10 000 and as income continues to rise china will remain on a high carbon track there is a need for better policies management and behavioural change and the study provides some policy suggestions including a carbon quota system to guide individual consumption

efficiency in auctions with private and common values an experimental study this discussion has resulted in a publication in the american economic review 2002 92 3 625 43 auctions are generally not efficient when the object s expected value depends on private and common value information we report a series of first price auction experiments to measure the degree of inefficiency that occurs with financially motivated bidders while some subjects fall prey to the winner s curse they weigh their private and common value information in roughly the same manner as rational bidders with observed efficiencies close to predicted levels increased competition and reduced uncertainty about the common value positively affect revenues and efficiency the public release of information about the common value also raises efficiency although less than predicted

moral hazard incentive contracts and risk evidence from procurement deadlines and late penalties are widely used to incentivize effort tighter deadlines and higher penalties induce higher effort but increase the agent s risk we model how these contract terms affect the work rate and time to completion in a procurement setting characterizing the efficient contract design using new micro level data on minnesota highway construction contracts that includes day by day information on work plans hours worked and delays we find evidence of ex post moral hazard contractors adjust their effort level during the course of the contract in response to unanticipated productivity shocks in a way that is consistent with our theoretical predictions we next build an econometric model that endogenizes the completion time as a function of the contract terms and the productivity shocks and simulate how commuter welfare and contractor costs vary across different terms and shocks accounting for the traffic delays caused by construction switching to a more efficient contract design would increase welfare by 22 5 of the contract value while increasing the standard deviation of contractor costs a measure of risk by less than 1 of the contract value

can the seller benefit from an insider in common value auctions abstract in existing models of first price common value auctions heterogeneous bidder information characterized by a well informed insider is detrimental to the seller s revenue we show that this is not a general principle the linkage effect of increased information identified by milgrom and weber has force in our model of heterogeneous bidders and dominates any adverse effects of an insider on revenues in addition a bidder with garbled information can profit in a first price auction if his information is private and an inside bidder may prefer to have less information about the outside bidder s signal journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 d82

an empirical study of an auction with asymmetric information this paper examines federal auctions for drain age leases on the outer continental shelf from 1959 to 1969 these are leases that are adjacent to tracts on which a deposit has been discovered the authors find that the data strongly support the hypotheses that neighbor firms are better informed about the value of a lease than nonneighbor firms that neighbor firms coordinate their bidding decisions and that both types of firms bid strategically in accordance with the bayesian nash equilibrium model for first price sealed bid auctions with asymmetric information

additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy turner k 2006 additional precision provided by region specific data the identification of fuel use and pollution generation coefficients in the jersey economy regional studies 40 347 364 a debate is currently ongoing in the uk regarding the need to collect and report data at the regional level one specific area of this debate is the extent to which region specific economic and environmental data are required to carry out analyses of devolved sustainability policy issues this paper uses the jersey economy as a case study to assess the added precision from using good quality region specific data compared with adjusted national uk data it is found that due to differences in polluting technology between jersey and the uk estimates based on national emissions intensities produce results that are misleading in terms of both absolute pollution levels and the relative contribution of different activities to total emissions in the economy while jersey may be regarded as atypical in many ways relative

regulating bidder participation in auctions regulating bidder participation in auctions can potentially increase efficiency compared to standard auction formats with free entry we show that the relative performance of two such mechanisms a standard first price auction with free entry and an entry rights auction depends nonmonotonically on the precision of information that bidders have about their costs prior to deciding whether to participate in a mechanism as an empirical application we estimate parameters from first price auctions with free entry for bridge building contracts in oklahoma and texas and predict that an entry rights auction increases efficiency and reduces procurement costs significantly

predicting bid prices by using machine learning methods abstractit is well known that empirical analysis suffers from multicollinearity and high dimensionality in particular this is much more severe in an empirical study of itemized bids in highway pr

subcontracting and competitive bidding on incomplete procurement contracts this article examines the impact of incomplete contracts on subcontracting and the design of procurement auctions i estimate the effect of ex post contract revisions on unit costs for both subcontracted and in house performed work items on bridge projects procured by the california department of transportation i model a scoring auction showing how ex post revisions skew bidding decisions and estimate unit costs from bid data using the method of sieve estimation the results highlight the cost implications of incomplete contracting frictions subcontracting decisions and bidding distortions in conclusion i propose alternative auction mechanisms that could improve outcomes

alternative common value auction procedures revenue comparisons with free entry the logic of revenue comparisons for different types of common value auctions is substantially altered if the number of participants rather than being fixed responds endogenously to the expected profitability from participating in a thoroughly symmetric model a seller may prefer that competition be indirect an auction procedure in which fewer participants are needed to drive the expected profitability from participating down to the level obtainable in other auctions in the economy can attain higher expected revenue if a sale is sufficiently likely this insight allows a complete revenue ranking of standard auction procedures with endogenous entry

5 information impact and allocation rules in auctions with affiliated private values a laboratory study in affiliated private value auctions each bidder has perfect information regarding his her own value for the object at auction but higher values of the item for one bidder make higher values for other bidders more likely we report on a series of experiments examining three key implications of these auctions i in a first price auction public information about rivals values increases expected revenue ii an english auction increases expected revenue compared to a first price auction and iii a second price auction is isomorphic to an english auction in examining these issues we compare predictions of some ad hoc bidding models with nash equilibrium predictions in the first price auction experiments nash equilibrium bidding theory organizes the data better than either of two ad hoc bidding models public information about others valuations does increase average revenue but the increase in revenue is smaller and less reliable than predicted under risk neutral nash equilibrium bidding lower average revenue might be attributed to risk aversion while the high variability is attributed to a sizable frequency of individual bidding errors relative to the theory bidding theory precisely organizes english auction outcomes after a brief initial learning period the dominant strategy equilibrium does not organize second price auctions nearly as well as market prices persistently exceed predicted prices the difference between english and second price outcomes is attributed to effects of different information flows inherent in the structure of the two institutions on eliminating bidding errors revenue impacts of these two institutions relative to a first price auction are examined in light of observed bidding patterns

new methodology for the ecological footprint with an application to the new zealand economy abstract sustainable development has become a primary objective for many countries throughout the world since the late 1980s a major difficulty associated with sustainable development objectives however is the absence of reliable indicators to measure progress towards the goal of sustainability the ecological footprint provides an estimate of the land area necessary to sustain current levels of resource consumption for a given population on an aggregate basis the ecological footprint may be compared with the amount of ecologically productive land available to give an indication of whether consumption patterns are likely to be sustainable this paper proposes the use of a modified form of input output analysis to calculate the ecological footprint the input output approach provides a consistent means of calculating an ecological footprint using data collected as part of the system of national accounts in most developed countries in addition it makes explicit the link between the level of economic activity in a country and its corresponding impact on the environment an application of this methodology to new zealand indicates that it takes 3 49 has of ecologically productive land per year to sustain the average new zealander s current level of consumption

using composition of land multiplier to estimate ecological footprints associated with production activity abstract ecological footprint ef a measure of sustainability represents the areas of land and water required to produce the goods and services for satisfying the consumption of a defined human population or economy and to provide environmental assimilation capacity for keeping its environmental quality at a given level production land footprint a main component of the ef represents the lands used by production sectors for producing the goods and services for the final consumption of a given human population there have been at least two alternatives in estimating the production land footprint one is based on the estimates of apparent consumption of each type of resource along the line of the methodology proposed by wackernagel and rees wackernagel m rees w e 1996 and its later refinement the other suggested by bicknell et al 1998 is based on the monetary values of products that are delivered to domestic final demand the information recorded in an input output table the former faces the challenge of distinguishing the commodities used as intermediate input from those as final consumption although its recent development has tried to calculate the raw materials used directly in traded manufactured products wackernagel m lewan l hansson c b 1999a it is not an easy job because the indirect input requirements are also involved using input output analysis which has been widely used to consider the direct and indirect input requirements of supporting final demand may alleviate this difficulty bicknell et al 1998 adopted input output analysis to estimate the footprint of new zealand in their calculation they used land multipliers to obtain the production land areas required to produce the outputs for domestic final consumption directly and indirectly and presented the estimates under three land categories agricultural land forest land and degraded land however this presentation causes errors in the concept and calculation this is because that the area requirement of sector j s production land is obtained by multiplying sector j s land multiplier with its output for domestic final consumption the result would contain not only sector j s own production land but also those of other sectors whose outputs sector j uses as inputs thus the ensuing estimates on sectoral production lands cannot be presented by land category using the hypothetical data in the article of bicknell et al 1998 this paper explains the reasons for using the composition of land multipliers instead of land multipliers in estimating the production land footprint so that the calculated areas can be expressed by land category the revised calculation is then applied to taiwan for estimating her two footprint components production land and energy land in 1991

information disclosure as a matching mechanism theory and evidence from a field experiment market outcomes depend on the quality of information available to its participants we measure the effect of information disclosure on market outcomes using a large scale field experiment that randomly discloses quality information in wholesale automobile auctions we argue that buyers in this market are horizontally differentiated across cars that are vertically ranked by quality this implies that information disclosure helps match heterogeneous buyers to cars of varying quality causing both good and bad news to increase competition and revenues the data confirm these hypotheses these findings have implications for the design of other markets including e commerce procurement auctions and labor markets jel c93 d44 d82 l15

energy requirements of sydney households supporting the lifestyles of the populations of modern cities requires vast quantities of natural resources and leads to environmental stresses such as air and water pollution research into the metabolism of cities therefore aims at understanding the physical flows into within and out of cities with a view to reducing the use of resources and the environmental impacts one important physical indicator is energy use most studies on cities only consider direct or end user energy consumption since the function of cities is to serve the lives of their residents indirect energy use in cities or energy embodied in the consumption of goods and services by its residents can be regarded as being as important as direct energy use however physical models of cities are extremely complex and have difficulty in dealing with boundary issues and hence the indirect resource requirements in this paper we use input output analysis and detailed household expenditure data to yield comprehensive energy use breakdowns for the 14 statistical subdivisions of sydney multivariate regression and structural path analysis spa are used to interpret the results clear correlations can be drawn between energy use and income household size age and degree of urbanity the structural path analysis is used to demonstrate how significant differences in lifestyles between inner and outer areas of sydney leads to different energy use characteristics this final consumption based approach to analysing the energy requirements for households has important implications for measures aimed at reducing energy use which tend to only consider direct energy use d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

price adjustment policies in procurement contracting an analysis of bidding behavior the fluctuations in fuel prices over the past decade led a number of government agencies to introduce price adjustment clauses in procurement contracting those clauses were primarily designed to reduce contractors uncertainty without considering the impact of such initiatives on bidding and the budget we analyze a newly constructed detailed panel of observations on bids for construction contracts and compare bidding behavior across periods and projects and across items within projects estimates from a difference in differences approach indicate that bidding becomes more aggressive and less dispersed after the implementation of this policy the difference is more pronounced when we consider itemized bids than overall project bids alternative techniques of regression discontinuity and nonparametric estimation are applied and yield consistent results

applying physical input output analysis to estimate land appropriation ecological footprints of international trade activities in the last few years some studies have been presented which link land use accounting and input output analysis based on monetary input output tables miots for the calculation of direct and indirect land appropriation of production and consumption activities the compilation of the first comprehensive physical input output tables piots for some western european countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input output analysis using a physical multiplier for this kind of calculation is more appropriate as the most land intensive sectors are also the sectors with the highest amounts of material flows physical input output analysis illustrates land appropriation in relation to material flows of each of the sectors which is more appropriate from the point of view of environmental pressures than land appropriation in relation to monetary flows of a miot physical input output analysis has so far not been applied for any land related studies based on a physical input output model of the eu 15 physical input output analysis is applied in this paper in order to calculate direct and indirect land requirements for the production of exports from eu 15 to the rest of the world

ecologically unsustainable trade abstract international trade although balanced in monetary terms may be unequal in terms of the exchange of biomass and sink capacity it may also be unilaterally or mutually unsustainable if it implies the overuse of the biocapacity in either one or both of the trading partners in this article the ecological footprint concept is used to distinguish different types of ecologically unsustainable trade but the issue of the possible effects of trade on the ecological footprints is also raised we distinguish four such effects an allocative effect an income effect a rich country illusion effect and a terms of trade effect since international trade can be a subtle mechanism by which ecological sustainability is preserved locally by means of importing biomass and sink capacity from other countries it can also blur the view of responsibility for the ecological effects of production and consumption at the end of this article some ethical and political dilemmas related to these issues are raised

allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis we present and discuss a method that allows the disaggregation of national ecological footprints by economic sector detailed final demand category sub national area or socio economic group this is done by combining existing national footprint accounts with input output analysis calculations in the empirical part are carried out by using supply and use tables for the united kingdom covering the reporting period 2000 ecological footprints are allocated to detailed household consumption activities following the coicop classification system and to a detailed breakdown of capital investment the method presented enables the calculation of comparable ecological footprints on all sub national levels and for different socio economic groups the novelty of the approach lies in the use of input output analysis to re allocate existing footprint accounts in the detail of disaggregation by consumption category and in the expanded use of household expenditure data this extends the potential for applications of the ecological footprint concept and helps to inform scenarios policies and strategies on sustainable consumption the method described in this paper can be applied to every country for which a national footprint account exists and where appropriate economic and environmental accounts are available the approach helps to save time in data collection and improves the consistency between ecological footprint estimates for a particular human society from different researchers for these reasons the suggested methodology includes crucial steps on the way towards a standardisation of ecological footprint accounts

accounting for the economic growth of firms in uk manufacturing since 1973 the dual relationship between the growth of total factor productivity and the growth of the price differential between inputs and outputs is used to decompose productivity changes since 1973 the decline in total factor productivity 1973 79 is best explained by the dual increase in the average output price input price differential resulting from the squeeze in profit rates in 1979 86 the average increase in total factor productivity was not significantly different from zero there was no thatcher productivity miracle growth of output is determined primarily by growth of inputs and not by general increases in efficiency c 1996 academic press limited copyright 1996 by oxford university press

water pollution in the spanish economy analysis of sensitivity to production and environmental constraints abstract in this paper we discuss the relationships between production processes and water pollution based on the recent satellite water accounts swa ine spanish national statistics institute 2002 and the 1997 input output tables for the spanish economy the study focuses on four pollutants biological oxygen demand bod metals nitrogen and phosphorus and seven sector blocks firstly we identify the roles of the various sector blocks as generators and consumers of each type of pollution secondly we examine how pollution responds to changes in unit coefficients of pollution and final demand patterns to obtain the shadow prices for the different pollutants the results obtained provide a sound basis for the design of improvements in environmental policy

sharing resources the global distribution of the ecological footprint abstract this paper examines how the human demand on bioproductive lands as measured by the ecological footprint is distributed across the globe using methods commonly used to measure the distribution of income measuring the distribution of natural resource use will be necessary to achieve an economy that is sustainable just and efficient currently different nations place different demands on the environment i e the ecological footprint is not evenly distributed across the globe calculation of the gini coefficient for total ecological footprint and its components explains the sources of inequality in overall resource use calculation of the atkinson index shows how inequality in the ecological footprint is related to the inequality of income and environmental intensity

disadvantaged business enterprise goals in government procurement contracting an analysis of bidding behavior and costs programs that encourage the participation of disadvantaged business enterprises dbe as subcontractors have been a part of government procurement auctions for over three decades in this paper we examine the impact of a program that requires prime contractors to subcontract out a portion of a highway procurement project to dbe firms we study how dbe subcontracting requirements affect bidding behavior in federally funded projects within a symmetric independent private value framework we use the equilibrium bidding function to obtain the cost distribution of firms undertaking projects either with or without subcontracting goals we then use nonparametric estimation methods to uncover and compare the cost of firm bidding on a class of asphalt projects related to surface treatment in texas the analysis shows little differences in the cost structure between projects that have subcontracting goals and those that do not

equilibria in open common value auctions abstract a sufficient condition for uniqueness of nash equilibrium in second price common value auctions is identified we establish that there exists a continuum of equilibria in irrevocable exit common value auctions for the case of two bidders we provide plausible sufficient conditions under which the expected seller revenue is maximized at the symmetric equilibrium an example in which the auctioneer s revenue at the symmetric equilibrium in a second price auction is strictly greater than the revenue at many asymmetric equilibria in the corresponding irrevocable exit auction is provided

from ecological footprint to ecological rent an economic indicator for resource constraints abstract this paper takes as a starting point a combination of an input output model with a national ecological footprint account for germany in the spirit of wiedmann et al wiedmann t minx j barrett j wackernagel m 2006 allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis ecological economics 56 28 48 footprint as well as biocapacity is dealt with at the industry level gross output of each industry and final demand for each industry can then be split up into a share that is reconcilable with biocapacity and another share that corresponds to the ecological deficit the ecological footprint concept is extended in this study by introducing the additional biocapacity necessary for sustaining the given level of economic activity it is assumed that each industry had to rent the corresponding areas and to apply a given technology in order to make this additional land biophysically productive that results in an additional technology for each industry leading to an increase in costs and prices the new price level is directly linked to the share of output that corresponds to biocapacity overshooting which is defined by the ecological deficit economic indicators can be derived by measuring the income difference brought about by the price increase this difference corresponds to a ricardian rent which is due to resource constraints on output growth

development of ecological economics in australia and new zealand abstract this paper reviews the development of ecological economics in australia and new zealand since its beginnings in the late 1970s a historical account is presented that focuses particularly on the activities of the australia new zealand society for ecological economics and key ecological economics research activities achievements of ecological economics in australia and new zealand are assessed using a range of quantitative and qualitative data the main areas of expertise developed by australian and new zealand ecological economists were found to be theoretical foundations and visions for ecological economics biodiversity and resilience input output analysis heterodox valuation approaches analysis of economy environment interactions sustainability indicators sustainable agriculture fisheries and oceans and energy thermodynamics both countries are ranked at the top or near the top of the world rankings in terms of per capita isee membership and publication rates in ecological economics a defining feature of ecological economics in australia and new zealand has also been its practical and problem solving focus and the level of end user engagement the paper concludes by discussing the challenges that face the future development of ecological economics in australia and new zealand

waiting for mr right rising inequality and declining marriage rates abstract this paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality and examines several alternative explanations a causal link is established by controlling for city fixed effects and city specific time trends and by using inequality in the woman s state of birth as a proxy for local male inequality increasing inequality explains about 25 of the marriage rate decline over the last few decades and this is not due to the endogenous moving or labor force decisions of women nor to the marital decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages

sustainability of nations by indices comparative study between environmental sustainability index ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices abstract the present work makes a comparison between the two most used environmental sustainability indices of nations ecological footprint and environmental sustainability index with two emergy ratios renewability and emergy sustainability index all of them are gaining space within the scientific community and government officials despite the efforts for obtaining an index that adequately represents the sustainability of a region according to the result of this research nowadays there is not yet a completely satisfactory index we consider that all of them need to be improved but the results point out the possibility of obtaining one better index of sustainability through the junction of ecological footprint with renewability emergy index

total embodied energy requirements and its decomposition in china s agricultural sector abstract humanity faces the important challenge of understanding and integrating human and natural processes including agriculture in china the scarcity of arable land 0 09 ha per capita increasing population and migration of the workforce to cities pose a significant challenge for food security agricultural energy productivity has therefore become a key concern in this study we used input output analysis to measure energy productivity at a national agro ecosystem scale for china using the total embodied energy requirement teer to reveal hidden energy flows we introduced a structural decomposition technique that reveals how changes in teer for the agricultural sector were driven by changes in energy use technology and the inter relationships among two agricultural sectors farming and animal husbandry the results will help both policymakers and farmers to improve the efficiency and environmental compatibility of agricultural production declining teer for both sectors means that china s overall agro ecosystem has increased its energy productivity since 1978 due to improved relationships between the agricultural sectors and increased use of biological energy however the net positive energy income decreased in the farming sector and an increasing proportion of fossil energy use accompanied by increased energy income in the animal sector provide incentives to increase yield and decrease labor by using more fossil energy thus raising more animals in the animal husbandry sector overuse of fossil energy since 1990 has resulted in decreasing fossil energy efficiency requiring immediate measures to improve the use of fossil fuel intensive materials such as fertilizers

virtual land use and agricultural trade estimating environmental and socio economic impacts abstract liberalization has caused an increase in the global trade of goods and services in particular the value and physical volume of agricultural goods traded have largely increased as the environmental and social consequences of trade are complex they are rarely included in the national and international agricultural policies one reason is that there is a lack of concepts and methods for assessing the environmental and social impacts of trade policies in this paper we develop a method for quantifying and assessing the land use hidden in the export and import of agricultural goods for the case of switzerland for our analysis we focus on arable crops the first methodological step of our research illustrates the spatial relationship of switzerland with countries all over the world through the import and export of land use for arable crops the second step links this spatial dimension with a qualitative assessment of the environmental and socio economic impacts of agricultural land use we applied the method to the case of wheat cultivation within switzerland and import to switzerland the major problem we were confronted with was the availability of data which had both to be reliable and available for the countries wheat is imported from the results show that the calculation of land use is credible in spite of the problems related with data availability the assessment results for each indicator are in agreement with the current situation in the respective countries in addition the aggregation seems to accurately reflect the countries agricultural polices the developed method is used to estimate the overall environmental and socio economic impacts of an increase in wheat imports to switzerland we argue that this method could be applied for anticipating potential impacts of trade agreements still further research is required for fine tuning of the utility functions including a weighting procedure in the aggregation procedure for practical applications important aspects like water shortage should enlarge our limited set of indicators in addition the average impact on a country level was assessed to refine that different agricultural systems ranging from intensive to extensive to organic should be considered beyond our scope was to analyze impacts due to other life cycle stages than the agricultural production for informed decision however information on the whole life cycle of agricultural products is required

bidder behavior in multiunit auctions evidence from swedish treasury auctions we analyze a unique data set on multiunit auctions which contains the actual demand schedules of the bidders as well as the auction awards in over 400 swedish treasury auctions first we document that bidders vary their prices bid dispersion and the quantity demanded in response to increased uncertainty at the time of bidding second we find that bid shading can be explained by a winner s curse driven model in which each bidder submits only one bid despite the fact that the bidders in our data set use much richer bidding strategies third we explore the extent to which the received theories of multiunit auctions are able to offer insights into the bidder behavior we observe our empirical evidence is consistent with some of the predictions of the models of auctions that emphasize private information the winner s curse and the champion s plague while the models of multiunit auctions serve as useful guideposts our empirical findings also point to several new areas of research in multiunit auctions

examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis in recent years there have been a number of attempts to develop a more comprehensive approach to the issue of measuring resource use and or pollution generation embodied in trade flows including contributions that combine input output techniques and ecological footprint analysis in this two part paper we describe how to enumerate the resource and or pollution content of inter regional and inter national trade flows part 1 and we present a literature review of recent methodological and empirical developments part 2 it is straightforward in principle to extend the basic input output approach to capture international trade flows however in practice problems of data availability and compatibility and of computability of extended input output matrices mean that simplifying assumptions are generally applied but with the implications of these assumptions often not made fully explicit what appears to be absent from previous applications is an account of the analytical method by which ecological footprints should ideally be estimated in an international input output accounting analysis this allows an explicit analysis of the problems that prevent the application of the full method and identification of the most appropriate short cut methods in a transparent way the objective of this paper is to provide such an account

greening regional development employment in low carbon and renewable energy activities abstractgreening regional development employment in low carbon and renewable energy activities regional studies the promotion of low carbon and renewable energy lc re activities has become an important element of development policy in many regional economies in practice defining and measuring these activities presents conceptual methodological and operational challenges this paper illustrates these difficulties using three recent estimates of lc re jobs for scotland it proposes that information on the lc re sector should be embedded in a set of input output accounts this would facilitate the planning implementation and monitoring of lc re based regional development policy

a three perspective view of greenhouse gas emission responsibilities in new zealand abstract while responsibility for the environmental impacts of production has been commonly assigned to producers production is driven by consumer demand and it is valid to question whether impacts should instead be assigned to consumers however in each of these approaches producers and consumers either bear the full burden of responsibility or none at all an example of this is the kyoto protocol where all greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the producer and no consideration is given to where goods are finally consumed rather than taking the conventional producer or consumer responsibility approach a third perspective is possible in which responsibility is shared we use input output analysis to apply all three of these responsibility perspectives to new zealand s domestic greenhouse gas emissions our main findings from the shared responsibility approach are that new zealand producers are responsible for 44 of domestic emissions new zealand consumers take 28 and 27 are exported a shared responsibility approach appears to distribute the burden of responsibility and associated liability between parties more fairly and is likely to be more widely acceptable than pure producer or consumer perspectives

applying input output analysis to scenario analysis of ecological footprints abstract application of input output analysis to ecological footprints efs is shifting from an ex post static calculation toward an ex ante scenario analysis for enhancing the policy relevance of ef analysis this change in application prompts two issues requiring careful examination 1 what is measured by leontief inverses or extended environmental leontief inverses and 2 whether a sector s land multiplier or compositions of land multiplier can appropriately reflect the effect of delivering one unit of the sector s output to final demand on the required area s of production lands used by the sector itself and by other producing sectors whose products are contributed directly and indirectly to its production the underlying message of these two questions is whether the assumed linear marginal relationship between a sector s output and its intermediate inputs input output coefficients a critical assumption made by w leontief to transform a transactions table from an accounting framework into the input output model can be extended to assume that the marginal relationship between a sector s output and the area of production land it uses for generating output is fixed land output marginal coefficient equal to average coefficient by reviewing the literature on input output analysis and its application to environmental issues and by theoretically and empirically examining the relation between sector output and land appropriation this study advises against the use of land multipliers or their compositions in the ef scenario analysis to apply the input output model to ef scenario analysis for enhancing policy relevance with due attention to the relationship between sector output and land appropriation this study suggests a two stage ef calculation procedure in the first stage the input output application estimates only the required raw materials or generated pollutants for meeting a given consumption pattern which is the objective of environmental input output analysis in the second stage the estimated amount of raw materials or pollutants is converted into land water area and a choice of conversion methods is suggested according to the research questions and the availability of conversion methods and required data

increasing competition and the winner s curse evidence from procurement we assess empirically the effects of the winner s curse which in common value auctions counsels more conservative bidding as the number of competitors increases first we construct an econometric model of an auction in which bidders preferences have both common and private value components and propose a new monotone quantile approach which facilitates estimation of this model second we estimate the model using bids from procurement auctions held by the state of new jersey for a large subset of these auctions we find that median procurement costs rise as competition intensifies in this setting then asymmetric information overturns the common economic wisdom that more competition is always desirable

evaluating the effects of embodied energy in international trade on ecological footprint in china based on sub sectoral level of economy and detailed traded items embodied energy ee in international trade flow in china is estimated during 1996 2004 and the effects of ee on sustainability are quantified by using one of the most popular indicators ecological footprint ef a framework of ef method which is more relevant to realism of specific country is proposed in this paper the results show that china is a net importer of ee during the period covered by this study except for the year from 1997 to 1999 imported exported and net imported ee tends to increase sharply along time series net imported energy would increase 38 and energy consumption would increase 2 8 in 2004 if ee were taken into account footprint energy is the most important part of ef components and is significantly affected by ee and the effects of ee on ef are similar to that of footprint energy footprint energy ef and ecological deficit of 2004 will be underestimated about 2 92 1 36 2 83 respectively if ee is not taken into the national energy budget continuous increase of ef and ecological deficit along time series indicates that china is moving away from sustainability 1 47 times chinese territories are accurately occupied by china in 1996 while 1 71 times in 2004 obviously unsustainability procedure of china is accelerated by ee the contribution of ee to ef and ecological deficit is small in absolute terms expressed in per capita but the effects on whole nation are huge if the population of china multiplies them to curb the increase of ef and ecological deficit and to achieve the goal of sustainability some policy and measures are also proposed c 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

product level embodied carbon flows in bilateral trade as increasingly complex modelling approaches to quantifying embodied carbon in trade have become popular the lack of disaggregation has been identified as a key weakness this paper quantifies embodied carbon in bilateral trade at the product level this is done using the material balance approach by collecting product carbon intensity factors from multiple data sources and combining with bilateral trade data in physical quantities the dataset covers trades between 195 countries for 1080 products in 2006 the detailed mapping of trade embodied carbon provides detailed insights into the nature of the flows that were previously masked or under reported for example it finds that the lion s share of global trade embodied emissions are concentrated in a relatively small number of product categories of traded goods suggesting that focusing mitigation efforts and trade measures on these products would be an effective strategy to address potential carbon leakage and to decarbonise international supply chains the results also highlight that embodied carbon is focused in regional trade thus regional harmonisation of climate mitigation policy will be effective in mitigating leakage

the co2 trade balance between scotland and the rest of the uk performing a multi region environmental input output analysis with limited data in this paper we attempt an empirical application of the multi region input output mrio method proposed by turner lenzen wiedmann and barrett turner k lenzen m wiedmann t barrett j 2007 examining the global environmental impact of regional consumption activities part 1 a technical note on combining input output and ecological footprint analysis ecological economics 62 1 37 44 in a recent issue of this journal in order to enumerate the co2 pollution content of interregional trade flows between scotland and the rest of the uk ruk we extend the analysis to account for direct emissions generation by households as final consumers and to a social accounting matrix sam where a more comprehensive account of incomes and expenditures is possible while the existence of significant data problems mean that the quantitative results of this study should be regarded as provisional the interregional economy environment io and sam framework for scotland and ruk allows an illustrative analysis of some very important issues in terms of the nature and significance of interregional environmental spillovers within the uk and the existence of a co2 trade balance between scotland and ruk

is urbanization eco friendly an energy and land use cross country analysis abstract urbanization imposes complicated and heterogeneous impacts on ecosystems with the purpose of reflecting the comprehensive influence of urbanization on the ecosystem we choose the ecological footprint to represent the ecosystem s integrated change and distinguish low income middle income and high income countries to reflect the nonlinear impact this paper uses both static and dynamic stirpat stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology models to analyze 72 countries at different income levels during the 1980 2008 period the results show that the overall ecological elasticity of urbanization at the global level is negative specifically results suggest urbanization associated to increased income to have eco friendly potential in terms of decreased ecological footprint to explain such results this paper answers two questions why does urbanization show ecological protection effects why does a more pronounced protection effect seem associated to increased income levels improved market mechanism increased resource use efficiency as well as increased environmental awareness in urban areas associated to increased income levels are likely to support an eco friendly urbanization process burden shift to low income countries also needs to be taken into account in order to avoid policies that increase wellbeing locally at the expenses of far away areas

the economic consequences of mrs thatcher it is difficult to overstate the gravity of what is now happening to the uk economy output is falling at an almost unprecedented rate unemployment is at a level not experienced since the inter war depression and is increasing rapidly towards 3 million or 13 of the labour force which would mean rates of 20 and above in large areas of the country nor is there any foreseeable prospect of unemployment coming down instead all the signs point to a continuing increase the social and political consequences of this are hard to predict it is not just a matter of the financial hardship suffered by those thrown out of work through no fault of their own or of the strain imposed on the social welfare system but also of the mental stress disillusionment and sense of helpless ness which come with not being able to find a job this could well have a damaging long term effect on attitudes towards work particularly among young people con demned to go straight from school on to the unemployment register and is almost bound to lead to widespread social unrest the cause of sudden high unemployment in the uk is a backlash against the consensus post war economic policies of demand management to maintain near full employment of support for industry and of income maintenance and the provision of social welfare services policies which were developed in response to the experience of the inter war years the thatcher government has embraced a doctrinaire monetarist strategy for controlling inflation and a laissez faire approach to the supply side of the economy without attempting to moderate the social impact of these policies the extreme nature of this experiment has attracted a good deal of interest from abroad especially from the usa where the new president has expressed admiration for mrs thatcher and what her government is doing if only because there is a danger of governments in other countries following the uk s lead particularly as both the imf and oecd have recently urged the pursuit of similar policies it is important to draw international attention to what is now happening in the uk 18 months after mrs thatcher took office in sharp contrast to the rhetoric of government promises the economy has been set on a path of rapidly falling output and escalating unemployment leading towards the destruction of large parts of manufacturing industry at the same time the social advances which have been made during the post war period are beginning to be reversed as the government desperately seeks ways of offsetting the increase in its budget deficit caused by deepening recession

the impact of public information on bidding in highway procurement auctions a number of papers in the theoretical auction literature show that the release of information regarding the seller s valuation of an item can cause bidders to bid more aggressively this widely accepted result in auction theory remains largely untested in the empirical literature recent theoretical work has also shown that this effect can be more pronounced in auctions with larger common cost uncertainty we examine the impact of a policy change by the oklahoma department of transportation that led to the release of the state s internal estimate of the costs to complete highway construction projects we perform a differences in differences analysis comparing bidding in texas a state that had a uniform policy of revealing the same information all throughout the period of analysis to bidding in oklahoma our results show that in comparison to texas auctions the average bid in oklahoma fell after the change in engineers cost estimate ece policy this decline in bids was even larger for projects where the common uncertainty in costs is greater moreover the within auction standard deviation of bids fell after the change in ece policy with the most significant decline observed again in projects with greater common cost uncertainty

capacity constraints and information revelation in procurement auctions i introduction procurement auctions are one of the most widely used mechanisms in modern economies to disburse funds for public works projects a substantial portion of these funds are spent on the construction and maintenance of roads and highways an activity on which the u s government for instance spends 160 billion annually in this article we examine the bidding behavior of experimental participants in order to shed light on the strategic incentives generated by these auctions our investigation is centered on two observations made in the existing literature in a typical state level procurement auction held in the united states firms submit sealed bids for a particular project that has been advertised in advance by the state s department of transportation subject to some qualifications the lowest bidder wins the project and is paid the amount of its bid empirical work analyzing these auctions has found that construction firms suffer from capacity constraints whereby a firm with a larger backlog of preexisting work commitments finds it more costly to add new work to its roster de silva dunne and kosmopoulou 2003 jofre bonet and pesendorfer 2003 1 bidders with larger backlogs therefore tend to submit higher bids and win fewer auctions because a typical department of transportation auctions off hundreds of such projects a year capacity constraints create an intertemporal linkage between adjacent auctions a bidder that wins a given auction incurs an opportunity cost in terms of forgoing expected profits in future auctions on account of its anticipated higher costs our first research question therefore is how does the presence of capacity constraints affect the bidding behavior of experiment participants our second research question is inspired by the fact that procurement markets have been found to be vulnerable to collusion by bidders bajari and ye 2003 porter and zona 1993 in most states contracts are typically won by a small set of firms that interact repeatedly in procurement auctions over the course of the year this can provide an ideal setting for a bid rigging scheme in procurement auctions where firms compete by setting prices observing the prices set by one s rivals can be crucial to the feasibility of any collusive scheme porter 2005 if bidders are not colluding and if past bids are not correlated with current costs then observing a rival s past bids will not lead to observable variation in a firm s bids if however firms are attempting to collude a change in the bid revelation policy of the procurer might lead to a measurable change in bids thus revealing the past bids of players can influence their strategic behavior as it alters the ways in which they can provide information to each other about their strategies even in the absence of explicit collusion when all bids are revealed a firm may be able to signal its desire to tacitly collude by submitting noncompetitive bids 2 this leads us to the question what is the effect of varying the amount of information revealed about past bids on the current bids of experimental participants competing in dynamic auctions the answer to this question may be useful for policy makers given that currently most state departments of transportation in the united states publicize all the bids from past auctions the central contribution of our article is to answer the two questions posed with evidence collected from laboratory economic experiments in the experimental sessions bidders play one shot two round and infinite horizon procurement auction games where winning an auction can increase a bidder s cost in the next auction in half of the experimental sessions only the winning bid is revealed after each auction this is done to restrict the amount of information that is shared between bidders explicit communication is not allowed in the other half of the sessions we reveal winning and losing bids at the conclusion of each auction

the potentials of a reverse auction in allocating subsidies for cost effective roof top photovoltaic system deployment abstract photovoltaic pv has developed to one of the most promising technologies for renewable electricity generation the austrian government currently provides subsidies for roof top pv systems through a constant administratively determined feed in tariff or an investment co funding in both subsidy schemes applications are approved on a first come first served basis there are concerns about i the selection of suitable roofs for pv systems and ii allocating subsidies among applicants to deploy roof top pv systems cost effectively thus we analyze the potentials of a simple discriminative first price reverse auction application scheme applicants define individually the required level of subsidy and those with the lowest request for subsidies are selected in an ex post analysis we evaluate the potentials of such a scheme in increasing power output and saving public spending for the federal state of vorarlberg in austria results indicate a potential increase of cumulated produced electricity between 15 and 18 in comparison to the current policy in addition a reverse auction based system would lead to savings of public spending per kwh between 20 and 41

trading spaces calculating embodied ecological footprints in international trade using a product land use matrix plum abstract nations import and export biophysical resources with many ecosystems worldwide under mounting stress countries may be increasingly interested in knowing the extent and origin of their ecological imports and dependencies in this paper the ecological footprint is used as a tool to measure the biophysical as opposed to financial value of international trade flows this paper attempts to answer the following question how large of an ecological footprint does a given country exert inside the borders of each of its trading partners records in the un comtrade bilateral trade database are multiplied by a matrix of per product footprint yield coefficients to translate from values in dollars and tonnes to units of hectares the results show that the largest interregional flows are from latin to north america and from north america to asia pacific grouping countries by gdp high and middle income countries appear in footprint terms to trade predominantly with other high and middle income countries and much less with low income countries

integrating the valuation of ecosystem services into the input output economics of an alpine region traditional economic accounting mostly ignores the benefits provided by nature and thus falls short in giving incentives for improving the way the economy uses natural resources in this study we develop a general framework for integrating the value of ecosystem services into an input output table in particular we integrate regionally valued ecosystem services on the supply side of an input output table to quantify what natural resources offer to economic development using several different indicators we show the benefits of the ecosystem services under the status quo and a scenario for regional development our results suggest that economic activities should be encouraged to use the ecosystem services more intensively while landscape development should aim at providing the required services we conclude that such an approach can provide a platform for decision makers to learn quantitatively about the dependency of the regional economy on natural services

bidding off the wall why reserve prices may be kept secret abstract this note shows by means of an example that in a common value auction a seller with a random reservation value can increase her ex ante expected profits by following a policy of conducting an auction in which her reserve price is kept secret compared to an auction in which the reserve price is announced by keeping the reserve price secret the seller is able to encourage greater participation from the bidders and can therefore increase the linkage of the price paid to the value of the purchased object journal of economic literature classification numbers d82 d44

information returns and bidding behavior in ocs auctions 1954 1969 this paper examines federal auctions for leases on the outer continental shelf in the light of the predictions of the first price sealed bid common values model of auctions the authors find that the data strongly support the model for auctions in which one bidder is better informed than the other bidders the evidence for auctions in which bidders have noisy but qualitatively similar information is less conclusive but is consistent with a model in which each bidder does not know either the actual or potential number of bidders on a lease copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd