information precision transaction costs and trading volume abstract most theoretical models of trade pfleiderer 1984 grundy and mcnichols 1989 holthausen and verrecchia 1990 kim and verrecchia 1991 blume et al 1994 imply that the trading volume prompted by a public announcement is positively related to the announcement s precision relying upon this notion empirical researchers interpret high trading volume as an indication that an announcement is highly informative we argue that such interpretations are not in general correct in a world with transaction costs the relation between information precision and trading volume is ambiguous and can be negative this explains why in empirical tests using data from actual markets the relation between announcement precision and trading volume is not monotonically positive even though in laboratory experiments it is our results imply that trading volume reactions to public announcements are most sensitive to announcement precision among low transaction cost securities and in low cost trading regimes

relative earnings and individual union membership in the united kingdom considerable attention has been focused in recent years on the empirical analysis of the effect of trade unions on the structure of earnings such empirical investigation usually entails measurement of the union non union differential in wages or earnings at the level of the individual this involves comparison of the earnings of union members with estimates of what their earnings would be were they not union members or equivalently examination of differences in earnings between individuals comparable with regard to all other relevant characteristics who differ in their union membership alone in the united kingdom all previous attempts at estimation of this differential have used aggregate data at either the industry or occupation level 1 the conventional methodology involves regression of the logarithm of the average wage on either the proportion of workers who are union members or the proportion covered by a collective agreement together with a vector of industry characteristics that are deemed to determine the non union wage however several problems are immediately apparent with this methodology first the model ignores the possibility of variation in the differential across industries which has potentially serious consequences second the vector of other characteristics customarily used is somewhat limited and raises doubts concerning the adequacy of the standardization for what might loosely be termed labour quality third only a sub sample of industries is ever used owing to lack of data those industries excluded are generally smaller in terms of employment that those included if the differential varies with the size of the industry a further bias will be induced all of these problems are either removed or lessened by the use of individual level data for an analysis of their impact at the industry level see geroski and stewart 1981 2 as a result it is now widely accepted that the appropriate way to measure such differentials is to use micro data sets at the level of the individual worker until recently suitable data have not been available for the united kingdom and hence such analysis was not possible this paper presents the first estimates for the united kingdom based on individual level data if the value of the union non union differential were the same for all workers in the unionized sector analysis at the industry level and the individual level would produce similar results however the marshallian laws of derived demand suggest that this will not be the case despite this clear prediction of variation in the differential there has been little systematic investigation of the variation this paper also presents such an analysis since variation in the differential across industries results in aggregation bias in industry level studies such an analysis is of considerable relevance to the evaluation of the evidence from such studies as well as being of interest in its own right the paper is laid out as follows section i presents a method of estimating the union non union differential at the individual level while section ii

strikes and holdouts in wage bargaining theory and data we develop a private information model of union contract negotiations in which disputes signal a firm s willingness to pay previous models have assumed that all labor disputes take the form of a strike yet a prominent feature of u s collective bargaining is the holdout negotiations often continue without a strike after the contract has expired production continues with workers paid according to the expired contract we analyze the union s decision to strike or hold out and highlight its importance to strike activity strikes are more likely to occur after a drop in the real wage or a decline in unemployment

determination of network rental components in a competitive electricity market the locational marginal pricing lmp based settlement results in a surplus collected by the system operator from the consumers the nonlinear transmission losses and the constrained operation of the power system due to operating limits such as power flow limits on transmission lines cause the accumulation of this surplus this accumulated revenue referred to as the network rental in this paper has two main components loss rental and constraint rental this paper develops a method to calculate these different rental components paid by each consumer by combining the power flow tracing and kkt optimality conditions this yields quantitative determination of how each consumer has overpaid in the form of loss rental and constraint rental which in turn can be used to get a better insight of how the rental is accumulated simple three and four bus systems are used to demonstrate the proposed method

analysts forecasts as proxies for investor beliefs in empirical research abstract we analyze how analysts forecasts relate to investor beliefs and describe the implications of these relations for price and volume reactions to earnings surprises we show that dispersion among forecasts does not fully capture investor uncertainty we also show how the relations between market reactions and forecast properties differ under the alternative assumptions of exogenous and endogenous private information acquisition finally the analysis suggests refined tests for volume reactions at the time of an announcement our results indicate that the model is useful for understanding and interpreting empirical work and developing empirical tests of market reactions to announcements

a theory of trading volume a theory of trading volume is developed based on assumptions that market agents frequently revise their demand prices and randomly encounter potential trading partners the model describes two distinct ways informational events affect trading volume one is consistent with conjectures made by empirical researchers that investor disagreement leads to increased trading but the observation of abnormal trading volume does not necessarily imply disagreement and volume can increase even if investors interpret the information identically if they also have had divergent prior expectations simulation tests support the model and are used to contrast the random pairing environment with costless market clearing volume is lower in the costly market and volume increases caused by an informational event persist after the event period this is consistent with existing empirical evidence and suggests that markets do not immediately clear all orders or that investors have demands to recontract

regulation fair disclosure and the cost of adverse selection regulation fair disclosure fd imposed by the securities and exchange commission in october 2000 was designed to prohibit disclosure of material private information to selected market participants the informational advantage such select participants gain is unclear if multiple insiders receive identical information private information is immediately incorporated in price and each insider has zero expected profit if on the other hand regulation fd has curtailed the flow of information from firms private information becomes longer lived and more valuable hence market makers will demand increased compensation by widening the adverse selection component of the bid ask spread we identify the cost components of the bid ask spread for a sample of nasdaq stocks surrounding the implementation of regulation fd controlling for other factors affecting the spread we find that adverse selection costs increase approximately 36 after regulation fd we interpret our finding as regulation fd failing to achieve one of its desired objectives

directional preferences information processing and investors forecasts of earnings this paper investigates the effects of preferences on judgments in an investing context where investors should be motivated to interpret information objectively yet have clear preferences with respect to what the information they are evaluating conveys i e a gain or a loss on their investment the results of the experiment are consistent with theories of motivated reasoning that predict when and in what manner directional preferences affect how information is processed specifically investors are motivated to agree unthinkingly with information that suggests they might make money on their investment but disagree with information that suggests they might lose money in disagreeing long investors expect earnings to be relatively high and short investors expect earnings to be relatively low these results have implications not only for understanding investor behavior but also for understanding the biased behavior of market participants who face conflicts of interest such as analysts managers and auditors by providing direct evidence that such behavior can arise for purely psychological reasons

macroeconomic fundamentals price discovery and volatility dynamics in emerging bond markets abstract this study characterizes volatility dynamics in external emerging bond markets and examines how prices and volatility respond to macroeconomic news as in mature bond markets surprises about macroeconomic conditions in emerging markets are found to affect both conditional returns and volatility of external bonds with the effects on volatility being more pronounced and longer lasting than those on prices yet the process of information absorption tends to be more drawn out than in mature bond markets global and regional macroeconomic news is at least as important as local news for both price and volatility dynamics

the use of replacement workers in union contract negotiations the u s experience 1980 1989 it is argued in many circles that a structural change occurred in u s collective bargaining in the 1980s strike incidence declined dispute incidence increased and the composition of disputes shifted away from strikes and toward holdouts we investigate the extent to which the hiring of replacement workers can account for these changes for a sample of over 300 major strikes since 1980 we estimate the likelihood of replacements being hired we find that the risk of replacement is lower for bargaining units with more experienced workers and declines during tight labor markets the composition of disputes shifts away from strikes as the predicted risk of replacement increases in addition the overall level of disputes increases as a result of the shift in the composition of disputes based on our estimates reducing the predicted replacement risk faced by bargaining units to the pre 1982 levels would have lead to a reduction in the dispute incidence by around 5 percentage points an increase in the fraction of disputes involving a strike by around 4 percentage points and an increase in the strike incidence by around 0 8 percentage points

marginal loss pricing for hours with transmission congestion nodal electricity prices are designed to send efficient economic signals to market participants for operating and investment decisions the inherent nonlinearity of transmission losses and the use of marginal loss pricing can obscure the intended economic information in the loss component of nodal prices as one step in clarifying the determination of the marginal loss price component this paper discusses the calculation of nodal electricity prices in lossy networks and presents a variety of accepted methods for determining marginal loss this paper then proposes a method for calculating the marginal loss component of nodal prices during hours with congestion that reflects each market participant s contribution to marginal losses more accurately than current implementations the proposed method recognizes that increases in incremental energy flows cannot flow across constrained lines and thus system wide marginal losses should not be attributed to generators or loads in the constrained subregions the objectives of the discussion are to improve the understanding of how marginal losses are determined and also to improve the accuracy of the information conveyed in the marginal loss price component the ultimate goal is to promote more efficient price signals to electricity market participants for both transmission loss and congestion

price adjustment to news with uncertain precision abstract we analyze how markets adjust to new information when the reliability of news is uncertain and has to be estimated itself we propose a bayesian learning model where market participants receive fundamental information along with noisy estimates of news precision it is shown that the efficiency of a precision estimate drives the slope and the shape of price response functions to news increasing estimation errors induce stronger nonlinearities in price responses analyzing high frequency reactions of treasury bond futures prices to employment releases we find strong empirical support for the model s predictions and show that the consideration of precision uncertainty is statistically and economically important

public disclosure private information collection and short term trading abstract this paper examines how public disclosure affects private inforamtion acquisition activity in a market economy we analyze a setting where traders with short term investment horizons are allowed to trade on their private information prior to a public disclosure we demonstrate in this setting that public disclosure stimulates investment in private information acquisition this result is shown to have implications for the magnitude of the pre announcement and announcement price reactions to the disclosure

the creation and capture of rents wages and innovation in a panel of u k companies this paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of british firms a head count measure of major innovations between 1945 and 1983 is combined with share price and accounting information innovating firms are found to have higher average wages but rival innovation tends to depress own wages this appears consistent with a model where wages are partly determined by a sharing in the rents generated by innovation in other words innovation may be a good instrument for proxies for rents such as profitability quasi rents or tobin s average q instrumental variable estimates of the elasticity between wages and quasi rents are about 0 29

loss allocation in energy transmission networks abstract in this paper we study a cost allocation problem that is inherent to most energy networks the allocation of losses in particular we study how to allocate gas losses between haulers in gas transmission networks we discuss four allocation rules two of them have already been in place in real networks and two others that are defined for the first time in this paper we then present a comparative analysis of the different rules by studying their behavior with respect to a set of principles set forth by the european union this analysis also includes axiomatic characterizations of two of the rules finally as an illustration we apply them to the spanish gas transmission network

towards a cost causation based tariff for distribution networks with dg this paper decomposes the effects of the transition from an average cost distribution tariff to a cost causation based distribution tariff in terms of time and location that uses nodal prices to recover losses and an extent of use method to recover fixed network costs based on use at coincident peak our decomposition is designed so that the effects of using coincident peak and location for fixed network charges as well as using marginal losses under constraints recovering the exact amount of losses and recovering exactly the cost of network service in total can be isolated and analyzed separately we apply our tariff transition and decomposition method to an example network with data from uruguay to isolate the various effects with and without a distributed generation dg resource we show moving to coincident peak charges and to fully charging for marginal losses while rebating the merchandising surplus through the fixed charges have the greatest effects on changes in distribution tariff charges dg provides countervailing cost changes to distribution tariffs for loads through loss reductions and the implicit creation of new network capacity for which it is paid the interaction of all these effects may lead to outcomes that are counter intuitive which further supports the need to decompose the tariff changes to fully understand the reasons for the direction and magnitude of changes in tariff charges in the transition to tariffs based more on cost causation

unbundling of transmission and ancillary services ii cost based pricing framework for pt i see ibid vol 12 no 2 1997 this paper presents a systematic framework for pricing transmission and ancillary services in competitive power markets this framework is based on the recovery of fixed and operating costs and it meets the traditional revenue requirements it is practical feasible easy to implement and to regulate it can be implemented with minimum transition cost this network flow dependent and nondiscriminatory framework is based on the decomposition approach presented in part i of this paper this decomposition forms an essential part of the proposed framework for usage based recovery of the fixed and operating costs the transmission system related fixed cost component is recovered from all transactions based on percentage utilization of the transmission system equipment the charge is based on the actual network power flows the ancillary service charge for a given transaction can be computed as the sum of the costs incurred at secondary generation for compensating the imbalance caused by that specific transaction the path providing function of the transmission grid is viewed as a true monopolistic service its pricing is cost based and charge for its use is usage based the generation based ancillary service supply can be made competitive its pricing is market based and charge for it is usage based a global overview of the proposed pricing strategy is analyzed in the context of other alternatives especially cost based methods a numerical example on a five bus system is given to illustrate the use of this pricing strategy

a probabilistic approach for determining the optimal amount of transmission system usage over the past decade electric power systems have been restructured based on different models to introduce competition among market participants transmission open access for suppliers and customers is one of the most prevailing unbundling services usually a connection tariff is established based on different market factors including the actual usage of the transmission network in brazil most vertically integrated companies owned by the federal and state governments were unbundled and new transmission companies are being created these companies make their assets available to the independent system operator designated as operador nacional do sistema eleacutetrico ons one of the main objectives of ons is to manage transmission services over a certain voltage level to ensure nondiscriminatory access to the grid all transmission users including regional distribution companies pay wheeling transmission charges at each delivery or connection point with the major brazilian network administrated by ons this paper presents a methodology for determining the optimal amount of transmission system usage atsu that must be contracted by a regional distribution company at each connection point in the proposed approach the maximum flow at each connection is represented as a random variable in order to obtain the distribution probability of the transmission charges as a function of the atsu parameter besides providing the optimal amounts to be contracted the proposed probabilistic methodology allows quantifying the risks of violation of each contract and estimating possible penalties all methodology development steps are described and illustrated through numerical examples an application to a typical brazilian regional distribution company is also discussed

allocation of transmission losses to bilateral contracts in a competitive environment under open access market driven transactions have become the new independent decision variables defining the behavior of the power system understanding the impact of bilateral transactions on system losses is important to be able to allocate a loss component to each individual transaction and improve economic efficiency the theory presented here is based on the argument that it is always possible to compute the exact loss allocation corresponding to an infinitesimal bilateral transaction this leads to a set of governing differential equations whose solution yields the loss allocation for contracts of any size several examples illustrate the properties of both the proposed allocation equations and other methods the dependence of the proposed solution on the path of integration and a number of implementation issues

the impact of macroeconomic news on quote adjustments noise and informational volatility we study the impact of the arrival of macroeconomic news on the informational and noise driven components in high frequency quote processes and their conditional variances bid and ask returns are decomposed into a common efficient return factor and two market side specific components capturing market microstructure effects the corresponding variance components reflect information driven and noise induced volatilities we find that all volatility components reveal distinct dynamics and are positively influenced by news the proportion of noise induced variances is highest before announcements and significantly declines thereafter moreover news affected responses in all volatility components are influenced by order flow imbalances

industry profits and competition under bilateral oligopoly abstract we show that contrary to the key result of the standard cournot nash oligopoly model industry profits can increase with the number of firms if input prices are not exogenous but are determined by bargaining in bilateral oligopoly

wage bargaining inventories and union legislation this paper analyses a strategic bargaining game where the firm may or may not be able to sell out of its inventory of finished goods during a strike firms and the union are both risk neutral and have the same discount rate it is shown that the wage equilibrium corresponds to the axiomatic nash bargaining solution where the threatpoints are the agents payoffs should bargaining continue indefinitely we use the 1980 and 1982 employment acts to test this theory interpreting that legislation change as changing the firm s threatpoint but not its bargaining power this allows us to identify the value of the firm s threatpoint post 1982 formal tests support the theory also consistent with the theory it is found that union wages decrease with inventories after 1982 but not before and that the union wage gap is smaller after 1982 wage bargaining as described in the strategic bargaining literature is a peaceful affair if there is no agreement workers simply withdraw their labour for one period and there is a consequent one period loss of production for the firm but strikes tend to generate a lot of conflict in the u k in the 1970s striking unions would form picket lines across the factory gates their aim was not only to prevent strikebreakers going to work but also to stop lorries delivering goods conversely firms often with the help of the police would try to get the lorries across those lines the employment acts of 1980 and 1982 stopped this struggle stopping lorries crossing picket lines had always been illegal but this new legislation gave firms power to have picket lines immediately lifted should striking workers act illegally the courts would immediately sequester the union s assets if its members refused to comply with the law using the strategic bargaining approach this paper considers the equilibrium effect of this change in legislation on union wage formation using wage and inventory data from a panel of firms across this time period this paper also formally tests that theory there have been two main approaches to bargaining theory the strategic bargaining

social custom management opposition and trade union membership abstract this paper investigates the determinants of voluntary unionization in the labor market in a discrete time version of the social custom model employer behavior in form of management opposition to union membership is explicitly taken into account conditions for the existence of unions in the long run are determined it is shown that increasing the surplus per worker or the union bargaining power may have a negative impact on union density via more management opposition different incentives for management opposition can explain the greater success of unions in centralized bargaining systems

transmission loss allocation through equivalent bilateral exchanges and economical analysis a new loss allocation la scheme based on the principle of equivalent bilateral exchanges ebes is presented and compared with other available techniques formulation and results from extensive simulations including consistency tests show that the suggested methodology has several desirable properties it is flow based requiring only a solved load flow for its implementation it is not dependent on the choice of a slack bus it is straightforward to apply undesirable negative loss allocation is not produced and low volatilities are shaped an economic analysis with various la methods is also carried out when these are integrated into a combined economic dispatch load flow dispatch strategy a likely scenario for la in a real system this combined dispatch strategy yields prices charged to the loads and rates received by the generators that account for loss allocation and loss supply results show that these economic indexes are very close to the marginal costs derived from an optimal power flow opf approach with the advantage of reducing volatility

union membership and wage bargaining when membership is not compulsory this paper provides a formal model of union wage and membership determination where the union is recognized for bargaining purposes where membership of the union is not compulsory and where the union faces a budget constraint in its organization activities this simultaneous equation model is then used as the basis for estimation of manual wages and union density for the private sector using the 1990 workplace industrial relations survey copyright 1995 by royal economic society

the effect of earnings surprises on information asymmetry abstract we examine the effect of earnings surprises on changes in information asymmetry we hypothesize and find that asymmetry is lower higher in the quarter following positive negative earnings surprises compared to firms that meet the consensus analyst earnings forecast the relations between earnings surprises and information asymmetry are stronger when the surprises are more likely to capture investors attention examining the source of these changes we show that decreased information search activities is the most important factor for asymmetry declining after positive surprises for negative surprises decreased uninformed trading plays a dominant role increasing asymmetry

transmission loss allocation a comparison of different practical algorithms a pool operated electricity market based on hourly auctions usually neglects network constraints and network losses while applying its market clearing mechanism this mechanism determines the accepted and nonaccepted energy bids as well as the hourly market clearing prices as a result ex post procedures are needed to resolve network congestions and to allocate transmission losses to generators and demands this paper focuses on transmission loss allocation procedures and provides a detailed comparison of four alternative algorithms 1 pro rata pr 2 marginal allocation 3 unsubsidized marginal allocation and 4 proportional sharing a case study based on the ieee rts is provided different load scenarios covering a whole year are analyzed finally conclusions and recommendations are stated

the union membership wage premium puzzle is there a free rider problem economists have long suggested that labor unions suffer a free rider problem the argument is that since union set wages are available to all workers covered by unions irrespective of their union status and union membership entails costs workers will only join if they are coerced or are offered non wage goods that they value above membership costs yet u s and british empirical research has found a substantial union membership wage premium among private sector union covered workers implying that there is no free rider problem the authors of this study hypothesize that these findings arise due to selectivity problems associated with identifying the union membership effect their analysis which uses rich data from a new linked employer employee survey for britain and exploits the within establishment variation in wages as a function of individual union membership status demonstrates that the apparent wage premium for members is illusory hence a potential free rider problem remains author s abstract free full text download available at http digitalcommons ilr cornell edu ilrreview

transmission loss allocation through complex power flow tracing this paper presents a new method for transmission loss allocation the method is based on tracing the complex power flow through the network and determining the share of each load on the flow and losses through each line transmission losses are taken into consideration during power flow tracing unbundling line losses is carried out using an equation which has a physical basis and considers the coupling between active and reactive power flows as well as the cross effects of active and reactive power on active and reactive losses a tracing algorithm which can be considered direct to a good extent as there is no need for exhaustive search to determine the flow paths as these are determined in a systematic way during the course of tracing results of application of the proposed method are also presented

does anonymity matter in electronic limit order markets we develop a model in which limit order traders possess volatility information we show that in this case the size of the bid ask spread is informative about future volatility moreover if volatility information is in part private we establish that i the size of the bid ask spread and ii its informativeness about future volatility should change in the same direction when limit order traders identifiers stop being disclosed we test these predictions using data from the paris bourse as expected we find that the average quoted spread and its informativeness are significantly smaller when limit order traders identifiers are concealed these findings suggest that the limit order book is a channel for volatility information

combined pool bilateral dispatch i performance of trading strategies this three paper series deals with the dispatch of power networks under mixed pool bilateral trading the major questions examined are i to what degree does the relative level of pool versus bilateral trading influence performance in terms of individual power levels costs prices revenues and expenditures ii what is the comparative performance of mixed trading with firm and nonfirm bilateral contracts under various curtailment strategies and iii is the revenue derived from the pool and bilateral trading consistent with the corresponding unbundled costs the above issues are sequentially addressed in each of the three parts the eventual goal of these results is to help generator and load serving entities choose appropriate relative levels of pool versus bilateral trades while considering risk economic performance as well as physical constraints this paper proposes a one step optimal power flow model that dispatches the pool in combination with the privately negotiated bilateral contracts while minimizing cost and accounting for both losses and congestion in part i notions of pool bilateral demand and generation as well as a number of technical and economic performance measures for each competing entity are defined this dissection of total and individual financial measures according to pool or bilateral trading allows the market participant to evaluate the profitability of each component of its chosen pool bilateral mix a number of simulation results illustrate the effect of varying the relative levels of pool bilateral trading on the values of individual performance measures

trading volume reactions to annual accounting earnings announcements the incremental role of predisclosure information asymmetry abstract this study provides empirical evidence regarding the effect of annual accounting earnings announcements on investors trading behavior we find that the magnitude of trading volume reaction is an increasing function of both the magnitude of the associated price reaction and the level of predisclosure information asymmetry these results are consistent with kim and verrecchia s 1991a theoretical trading volume proposition

complex losses allocation to generators and loads based on circuit theory and aumann shapley method this paper presents a new method to allocate active and reactive losses simultaneously to generators and loads the allocation is calculated for each transmission branch identifying and quantifying the buses responsibilities in losses this is a two step process in the first step generators are modeled as current injections and loads as constant admittances in order to determine generator participations in losses in the second step loads are modeled as current sources and generators as constant admittances in order to determine load participations in losses the aumann shapley and circuit theories are used to calculate the participation of each real and imaginary current component considering them as independent players in the complex losses allocation game the properties of the aumann shapley method ensure equitable allocation and recovery of the total active and reactive losses counter flow cross subsidy and negative allocation issues are discussed numerical results are presented and discussed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method

the effects of sfas 131 geographic segment disclosures by us multinational companies on the valuation of foreign earnings foreign operations are becoming increasingly important for us companies we investigate whether the market s valuation of foreign earnings is a function of the firm s geographic segment disclosures specifically we examine the effects of an increase in the number of geographic segments disclosed and the inclusion of earnings measures in geographic segment disclosures following the adoption of sfas 131 we find strong evidence that our proxies for increased disclosure are positively associated with the valuation of foreign earnings our results are robust to a number of sensitivity analyses taken together our results suggest that the pricing of foreign earnings is associated with important aspects of the firm s information environment

the impact of electricity market liberalization in turkey free consumer and distributional monopoly cases abstract electricity sector has grown substantially in turkey since the early 1960s as a result of rapid industrialization and urbanization the vertically integrated state owned company had a legally established monopoly on the generation transmission and distribution of electricity in turkey with the support and encouragement of international organizations like the world bank turkey has initiated a comprehensive program to liberalize and privatize the electricity market in 2001 the liberalization of the electricity market in turkey started in the distribution side of the market the distribution network was divided into 21 distribution regions and in each of these separate initially state owned distribution companies have been authorized to distribute and sell electricity the plan envisaged to complete privatization of all distribution companies until the end of 2006 this study compares the welfare implication of privatization of the distribution networks by comparing two extreme cases a pure regional distributional monopoly case and a representative pure free consumer case with a benchmark case of administered price regulation for this purpose we develop a simulation model of the turkish electricity system and use the data on generation and distribution costs our simulation analysis shows that substantial welfare losses occur if the distributional companies behave as regional monopolists our findings reiterate the importance of regulation and market design

closure to discussion of transmission loss allocation part i single energy market for original article by a m leite da silva and j g de carvalho costa see ibid vol 18 p 1389 94 nov 2003 and for discussion by a j conejo and f d galiana see ibid vol 19 no 4 p 2111 nov 2004

union s threats and wage determination this paper considers local wage bargaining as a sequential game and focus es on how different rules of the game affect employment and equilibri um payment to workers and employers work to rule and other go slow t hreats lead to low employment while strike threats lead to high empl oyment an increase in the bargaining power of the union induces high er or unchanged equilibrium employment in the strike threat case whi le employment is reduced in the slow down case finally if all kinds of industrial actions are legal only one is credible which type de pends on the parameters of the model copyright 1988 by royal economic society

differential interpretation of public signals and trade in speculative markets most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically we provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption we then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume return relation then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts earnings forecasts the hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data

pre announcement and event period private information abstract pre announcement information is private information gathered in anticipation of a public disclosure event period information is private information useful in conjunction with the announcement itself typically rational models of trade are based exclusively on one type of information such models are less descriptive of real market settings and misspecified empirically therefore we introduce a model of rational trade with both features and discuss its implications

transmission loss unbundling and allocation under pool electricity markets this paper presents a methodology based on the circuit theories for unbundling and allocation of transmission losses among the participants of a pool based electricity market starting from a known operation point and using the basic network equations without additional assumptions an expression of the branch losses based on nodal current injections is derived since the power flow equations and circuit theories are satisfied the methodology turns explicit in a natural way separating the losses at each system branch and assigning the responsibility to the respective market participants it means that the loss allocation of each branch which is produced by each generator and consumer is obtained extensions and strategies considering unsubsidized and predefined proportion based loss allocation as well as issues related with the allocation fairness and transparency are also included comparisons with previous methods and validation tests of the proposed method are reported by using the ieee reliability test system

prospective reconciliation of transmission loss cost in alberta one of the challenges in alberta s deregulated electricity market is to recover transmission loss costs in a fair and equitable manner the independent system operator iso the alberta electric system operator or aeso in alberta canada has introduced a new prospective methodology to reconcile the transmission loss revenue to loss cost on an annual basis since january 1 2006 in the reconciliation process a quarterly calibration factor cf is calculated to true up the difference between loss revenue and loss cost the cf is defined as the percentage of the combined actual and forecasted difference in loss revenue and loss cost divided by the loss factor customer volumes and pool price the focus behind this chosen methodology is to have a small cf in each quarter a stable reconciliation pattern and a small year end difference the new methodology has met these three goals in alberta s deregulated electricity market

nodal uniform or zonal pricing distribution of economic surplus competitive markets for electricity determine either a uniform marginal price ump a set of nodal marginal prices nmps or a smaller set of zonal marginal prices zmps in theory the nmp system is best as it correctly accounts for transmission constraints and losses in some versions but critics allege that the large number of prices is confusing since the ump or zmp solution must be adjusted to account for transmission constraints and losses it is reasonable to consider a market design in which actual dispatch corresponds to an nmp model that accounts for losses and if a ump or zmp model is used at all it is only to compute prices for settlements and compensation for constrained on or off generation or load we prove that if used in this way the ump or zmp models a do not affect the total economic surplus b redistribute the surplus among generators and loads at the different nodes and c give perverse incentives for generation expansion we illustrate on a realistic system

cost of long distance electricity transmission in china abstract china s energy resources reserves are concentrated on the central and western regions meanwhile the major energy demand is distributed in the eastern region large scale of cross regional electricity transmission is implemented to guarantee the power supply the long distance electricity transmission ldet cost is an essential component of the final detail price this paper proposes a new method to evaluate the real cost of ldet which mainly focuses on the price mark up between the electricity exporter and importer a weighted least square regression model is applied to evaluate the influence of the factors that could impact the real operating cost of the ldet furthermore we apply the ldet cost model to evaluate the synthesize cost of renewable energy and find the current renewable policy of china is inefficient

an economic theory of the open shop trade union there has been significant interest recently both in the empirical investigation of the determinants of trade union membership in the u k and elsewhere and in the theoretical analysis of the economic effects of the closed shop trade union however there is little rigorous microeconomic explanation of union membership which is relevant for much of the u k and similar labour markets where the open shop union is prevalent this paper attempts to overcome the free rider problem of explaining union membership in the open shop we argue that both private pecuniary gains and social influences affect the individuals union membership decisions citing evidence in support of these basic assumptions we show that stable intermediate union density is a possible equilibrium outcome in a generalised social custom model we also analyse the simultaneous determination of wages and union membership deriving a number of comparative static results in particular we find that both wages and union density depend upon inter alia the level of strike pay the net cost of union membership and the individual s sensitivity to social custom and associated solidarity effects we argue that the approach is consistent with various stylised facts concerning both wage bargaining and union membership and is able to explain a number of otherwise puzzling features of union membership

do bright line earnings surprises really affect stock price reactions several influential studies have concluded that earnings surprises just to the right or to the left of a hypothesized bright line produce distinct price reactions compared with surrounding earnings surprises because they convey special meaning in this study we examine whether previous inferences of asymmetric stock price reactions to bright line surprises are observed when empirical tests are designed to be consistent with a rational expectations equilibrium focusing on a small range of earnings surprises around hypothesized bright lines we find no evidence of asymmetric price reactions once investors ex ante expectation of bias in earnings surprises is controlled results from additional tests yield support for the external validity of the theoretical framework underlying our bright line pricing tests our findings suggest simple refinements to traditional bins comparison and regression tests for asymmetric price reactions to bright line earnings surprises which account for necessary conditions imp

market response to financial reports abstract a two date rational expectations model is analyzed at the first date traders can privately acquire a costly signal that provides imperfect information about a public report that will be issued at the second date equilibrium characterizations are provided for the fraction of traders that become informed and the informativeness of the first date price as well as the price change variance and the expected trading volume at the second date comparative statics identify how the above variables are influenced by changes in the information content of the public report and in particular how market phenomena at the public release date are influenced by endogenous prior information acquisition and trading in response to the forthcoming public release

determinants of the informativeness of analyst research abstract we examine cross sectional determinants of the informativeness of analyst research i e their effect on security prices controlling for endogeneity among the factors affecting informativeness analyst reports are more informative when the potential brokerage profits are higher e g high trading volume high volatility and high institutional ownership and lower when information processing costs e g more business segments are high we also find that the informativeness of analyst research and informativeness of financial statements are complements

improved transmission representations in oligopolistic market models quadratic losses phase shifters and dc lines practical models of competition among power generators who possess market power have generally had to use simplified models of transmission costs and constraints in order to be tractable in particular the linearized dc load flow model has been popular in complementarity and other types of oligopoly models in this paper we show how such models can be generalized to include quadratic losses controllable dc lines and phase shifting transformers these generalizations preserve convexity of the feasible region a property that facilitates computation and proof of solution uniqueness and existence piecewise and successive linearization formulations are also provided that allow consideration of nonlinear losses in models that require linear constraints a simple six bus example illustrates the application of these generalizations in that example the impact of losses on prices is much greater under strategic behavior than under competition large scale applications of these approaches to markets in western north america and the european union illustrate how inclusion of nonlinear losses and controllable dc lines can affect estimates of prices flows and economic efficiency indices resulting from oligopoly models

nondiscrinilnatory system losses dispatching policy in a bilateral transaction based market in this paper a new method to allocate transmission losses for simultaneous bilateral transactions is proposed the methodology uses a circuit approach of the system in conjunction with a classical power flow for a given operating point it is possible to derive system loss expression as a sum of partial terms due to each transaction these transaction loss components supplied by slack buses can turn into costs associated with the respective transactions alternatively in this paper it is proposed that each transaction provides for its own loss thus eliminating the need for a balancing mechanism in this case the developed methodology evaluates the increase of active power at each transaction generator through loss contributions not arbitrarily assumed but calculated from a developed loss allocation formula the main advantage of the developed method lies in its simplicity and capability of treating multiple transactions simultaneously

the more we know about the fundamental the less we agree on the price i allow trading horizon heterogeneity across groups in a standard differential information model of a financial market this approach can explain the well established phenomenon that after a public announcement trading volume increases more private information is incorporated into prices and volatility increases in such environments public information has the important secondary role of helping agents learn about the information of other agents therefore whenever the correlation between the private information of different groups is sufficiently low a public announcement increases disagreement among short horizon traders regarding the expected selling price even as it decreases disagreement about the fundamental value of the asset additional testable implications are also suggested

a physical flow based approach to allocating transmission losses in a transaction framework a physical flow based approach to allocating transmission losses in a multiple transaction system is presented the allocation scheme is developed using a framework in which the transactions are explicitly represented the proposed scheme is based on expressing losses explicitly in terms of all the transactions in the system an important property of the allocation scheme is its effective capability to deal with counter flows that result in the presence of specific transactions extensive numerical testing indicates that the allocation scheme produces loss allocations that are appropriate and that behave in a physically reasonable manner test results on several systems are presented

how does public information affect the frequency of trading in airline stocks abstract this paper examines how firm specific and macroeconomic announcements affect transaction rates in u s airline stocks using a version of the autoregressive conditional hazard framework of hamilton and jorda 2002 that incorporates market microstructure variables we show that on average trading intensity spikes prior and consequent to macroeconomic announcements but decreases around firm specific releases further when we use intraday crude oil futures returns as a proxy for industry relevant and globally important news we find that their effects are statistically significant with higher oil futures returns increasing the probability of trade

economic inefficiencies and cross subsidies in an auction based electricity pool this paper compares two contrasting yet often used electricity market clearing procedures i an auction based algorithm including congestion management and transmission loss cost allocation and ii an optimal power flow the auction procedure produces a single period unit commitment and hence can be compared directly to an optimal power flow solution these algorithms are compared in terms of the economic efficiency of the solution attained and in terms of cross subsidies among generators and demands the purpose of this comparison is to quantify the actual cost to market participants of using a simple seemingly transparent procedure such as an auction based algorithm versus an integrated but computationally intensive one such as an optimal power flow

open shop unions and product market competition in this paper we analyse the impact of changes in product market competition on wage outcomes in the presence of an open shop union with less than full union membership product market competition is shown to aect not only a unionised rm s pro ts but also its payoin the event of a dispute in contrast to the pre diction of the standard model increases in product market competition may now increase wage levels the model is therefore able to accommodate the mixed empir ical ndings regarding the impact of product market competition on union wages

price drift before u s macroeconomic news private information about public announcements we examine the price behavior of stock index and treasury futures around the release of u s macroeconomic announcements seven out of 18 market moving announcements show evidence of informed trading before the ocial release time for these announcements prices begin to drift in the correct direction about 30 minutes before the announcement time the pre announcement drift accounts on average for about half of the total price adjustment we consider two explanations for this preannouncement drift information leakage and superior forecasting release procedures that may aect information leakage vary greatly across organizations we nd some evidence of predictability of announcement surprises based on reprocessing of public information and on private data collection which might explain the drift