project based mechanisms for emissions reductions balancing trade offs with baselines project based mechanisms for emissions reductions credits like the clean development mechanism pose important challenges for policy design because of several inherent characteristics participation is voluntary so it will not occur without sufficient credits evaluating reductions requires assigning an emissions baseline for a counterfactual that cannot be measured some investments have both economic and environmental benefits and might occur anyway uncertainty surrounds both emissions and investment returns and parties to the project are likely to have more information than the certifying authority the certifying agent is limited in its ability to design a contract that would reveal investment intentions as a result rules for benchmarking emissions may be systematically biased to overallocate and they also risk creating inefficient investment incentives this paper evaluates in a situation with asymmetric information the efficacy of the main baseline rules currently under consideration historical emissions an average industry emissions standard and expected emissions

demand elasticities for food products in brazil a two stage budgeting system the object of this article is to estimate demand elasticities for a basket of staple food important for providing the caloric needs of brazilian households these elasticities are useful in the measurement of the impact of structural reforms on poverty a two stage demand system was constructed based on data from household expenditure surveys pof produced by ibge the brazilian bureau of statistics in 1987 88 and 1995 96 we have used panel data to estimate the model and have calculated income own price and cross price elasticities for eight groups of goods and services and in the second stage for 11 sub groups of staple food products we estimated those elasticities for the whole sample of consumers and for two income groups

the distributional impact of public services when needs differ this is the accepted version of a work that was accepted for publication in journal of public economics changes resulting from the publishing process such as peer review editing corrections structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication a definitive version was subsequently published in journal of public economics 94 9 10 549 562 october 2010

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

the influence of household composition on household expenditure patterns theory and spanish evidence a concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods adult goods that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics the numbers or ages of children that there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of rothbarth s method for measuring child costs we propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of spain the econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions

older people s participation in extra cost disability benefits the targeting of an uk extra cost disability benefit for older people attendance allowance is analyzed using longitudinal data from the british household panel survey first a binary model of benefit participation is used to investigate whether receipt is responsive to the onset of disability second matching estimators are used to evaluate the consequences of missed participation on later financial wellbeing results indicate that participation is highly responsive to the onset of disability although the chance of delays in receipt emerges personal characteristics unrelated to eligibility also appear to influence benefit receipt translating into sizeable differences in the amount of cash support received the comparison of recipients with observationally equivalent non recipients confirms that timely participation reduces disabled older people s financial strain

household equivalence scales and interpersonal comparisons recent papers have used household equivalence scales to construct measures of welfare inequality this procedure rests on an often implicit value judgement namely that if after adjustment for demographic characteristics two households are on the same indifference curve they are equally well off that value judgement is not compelling and there are situations in which it is ethically repugnant this is particularly likely if tastes are functions of past experience and income

non linearities and equivalence scales this paper focuses on the estimation and testing of equivalence scales in the context of a demand system with nonline ar logarithmic expenditure effects in its budget share equations the authors show that such nonlinearity enables one to identify the scal es without demographic separability restrictions on preferences and to avoid false rejection of the hypothesis that the scales are independ ent of the base utility level the empirical analysis is based on micro data drawn from the u k family expenditure survey copyright 1993 by royal economic society

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

the additionality problem with offsets optimal contracts for carbon sequestration in forests abstract carbon offsets are a frequently discussed tool for reducing the costs of an emissions reduction policy however offsets have a basic problem stemming from asymmetric information sellers of offsets have private information about their opportunity costs leading to concerns about whether offsets are additional non additional offsets can undermine a cap and trade program or if the government purchases them directly result in enormous government expenditures we analyze contracts for carbon sequestration in forests that mitigate the asymmetric information problem landowners are offered a menu of two part contracts that induces them to reveal their type under this scheme the government is able to identify ex post how much additional forest each landowner contributes and minimize ex ante its expenditures on carbon sequestration to explore the performance of the contracting scheme we conduct a national scale simulation using an econometric model of land use change the results indicate that for an increase in forest area of 61 million acres government expenditures are 5 3 billion lower under the contracting approach compared to a uniform subsidy offered to all landowners this compares to an increase in private opportunity costs of just 110 million dollars under the contracts thus the contracting scheme is preferable from society s perspective

does self assessed health measure health despite concerns about reporting biases and interpretation self assessed health sah remains the measure of health most used by researchers in part reflecting its ease of collection and in part the observed correlation between sah and objective measures of health using a unique australian data set which consists of survey data linked to administrative individual medical records we present empirical evidence demonstrating that sah indeed predicts future health as measured by hospitalizations out of hospital medical services and prescription drugs our large sample size allows very disaggregate analysis and we find that sah predicts more serious chronic illnesses better than less serious illnesses finally we compare the predictive power of sah relative to administrative data and an extensive set of self reported health measures sah does not add to the predictive power of future utilization when the administrative data is included and improves prediction only marginally when the extensive survey

contemporaneous and intertemporal child costs equivalent expenditure vs equivalent income scales abstract parents may provide for their children by drawing on savings or borrowing as well as by reducing current consumption this means that child costs may be partly paid from reducing consumption in periods when the children themselves are not in the family static comparisons of consumption costs between households with and without children are therefore affected by the extent to which parents are willing and able to meet child costs through intertemporal transfers this paper analyses the implications of this argument for the estimation of adult equivalent scales and provides empirical illustrations using individual household data

revealed community equivalence scales abstract this paper estimates the equivalence scale revealed by discretionary community allocations of welfare benefits to poor households i apply the proposed approach to a subsidized rice program in indonesia in which villages designated program beneficiaries and estimate the equivalence scale implicit in the beneficiaries they selected i find that the revealed community equivalence scale for this program lies much closer to per capita expenditure than traditional demand based equivalence scales particularly in the poorest communities this suggests that per capita expenditure may be closer to how poor communities actually compare households when allocating aid than previously thought

welfare comparison under exact aggregation new econometric model of aggregate consumer behavior in the united states and to apply this model to the analysis of impacts of alternative economic policies on the welfare of individual consuming units the model incorporates time series data on quantities consumed prices the level and distribution of income and demographic characteristics of the population it also incorporates cross section data on the allocation of consumer expenditures for households with different demographic characteristics our econometric model is based on the theory of exact aggregation developed by lau 1977a c this theory makes it possible to dispense with the notion of a representative consumer in constructing models of aggregate consumer behavior one of the most remarkable implications of lau s theory of exact aggregation is that systems of demand functions for individuals with common demographic characteristics can be recovered uniquely from the system of aggregate demand functions using the individual demand functions we can analyze the impact of economic policy on consumer welfare

self selection bias in the evaluation of voluntary energy conservation programs while voluntary energy conservation programs have been extensively promoted by electric utilities and public utility commissions their effectiveness has been insufficiently critiqued this paper contributes to the growing evaluation of such programs by measuring the net energy savings directly attributable to an actual set of programs the analysis explicitly corrects for the self selection bias that can arise in program evaluation the correction is found to be important traditional evaluation methods are subject to considerable bias correcting for this bias the amount of program induced energy savings is found to be considerably less than traditionally believed copyright 1988 by mit press

factors affecting the efficiency of wind power in the european union countries abstract the study uses the two stage bias corrected dea approach of simar and wilson 2007 to assess the efficiency of the eu countries in terms of their wind power investment in 2015 the set of input variables includes installed wind power capacity and average wind power density while output variables include wind generated electricity and three additional aspects environmental economic and energy security next the study examines the effect of renewable energy policy regarding wind energy the energy mix and the offshore wind power utilisation on the wind power efficiency of the analysed countries the results obtained reveal that the united kingdom sweden denmark and ireland are the most efficient countries in terms of wind power investment the inclusion of additional aspects demonstrates the greatest improvement of efficiency in belgium cyprus the netherlands estonia and germany the results seem to indicate that economic instruments used within renewable energy policy have a positive effect on wind power efficiency while policy support and regulatory instruments might negatively impact moreover the results show that the energy mix explains the variation of the efficiency of the eu countries when their economic and environmental aspects are considered the analysis of the geographic location indicates that countries with a high share of offshore wind capacity are the most efficient

designing efficient markets for carbon offsets with distributional constraints abstract this paper presents an assessment of the relative efficacy of three key instruments baselines trade ratios and limits which are under policy discussion in the design of carbon offset programs we rank the instruments by their implications for total emissions economic efficiency and efficiency gain relative to a distributional transfer from capped to uncapped sectors we find that the baseline is the best instrument for maximizing welfare as it directly reduces the share of offsets that are non additional and that second best policies do not sacrifice much welfare relative to the standard first best policy prescription

scale and transfers in international emissions offset programs abstract voluntary emissions offset programs between developing and industrialized countries suffer from adverse selection because participants will self select into the program in contrast pure subsidies for mitigation lead to full participation and hence efficiency but require large financial transfers which make them unattractive to industrialized countries we present a simple model to demonstrate the impact of three policy options on the performance of offset programs 1 baseline scale increases 2 offset discounting and 3 setting stringent baselines with baseline scale increases entire political jurisdictions such as regions or nations are assigned a single aggregate baseline and must choose whether to participate as one entity we find that increasing scale both improves efficiency and reduces transfers from offset buyers to sellers offset discounting means paying less than the value of abatement and can be paired with trading ratios between offsets and allowances in a cap and trade system we show that discounting is inefficient but can make offsets more attractive to industrialized countries setting stringent baselines also involves a tradeoff between efficiency and transfers we finally show that pareto efficient policies that are individually rational for buyers and sellers entail some combination of discounting and or stringent baselines offset policies are never first best but can be efficiency improving especially with increased scale

simple tests of distributional effects on macroeconomic equations the presence of distributional effects in macroeconomic equations is shown to coincide with nonlinearity in micro behavioral relationships parameters estimated with aggregate data as in representative agent models contain distributional biases that are not measurable using aggregate data alone tests for distributional effects and other measures of the extent of aggregation problems are derived using distributional data observed over time significant distributional effects are noted for a model of annual aggregate u s commodity expenditure data a static model that accommodates individual heterogeneity is found to be statistically equivalent to a simply dynamic model that accommodates first order autocorrelation

life cycle expenditure allocations and the consumption costs of children abstract in this paper we assess whether it is changing needs or intertemporal substitution that dominate household expenditure responses to the presence of children over the life cycle we construct lifetime expenditure paths for households with different demographic profiles and consider the shape of these paths and some possible implications for welfare measures simulated expenditure paths based on consistent single period and multi period models indicate that it is indeed changing needs that dominate such paths in periods when children are present in the household however allowing for intertemporal substitution is still shown to be important since it can introduce new information relevant to the calculation of household welfare

equivalence scales and the costs of disability abstract the impact of disability on household welfare is estimated by equivalence scales using data from the 1986 1987 fes disability survey three methods of identifying scales from cross section data are considered these imply a series of restrictions that are tested on quadratic logarithmic engel curves the results indicate that there are substantial consumption costs associated with physical disability

international emissions trading with endogenous allowance choices abstract this paper compares endogenous choices of tradable and non tradable emission allowances by non cooperative countries i find that the cost savings of trading do not necessarily lead to less pollution in particular environmentally more concerned countries usually choose less allowances if these are tradable but this may be offset by the choice of more allowances on the side of environmentally less concerned countries moreover if the establishment of a trading system requires the unanimous approval of all countries there may be no agreement on trading even if it were to lead to less pollution overall conversely a trading system may find unanimous approval even if it induces more pollution

voluntary compliance with market based environmental policy evidence from the u s acid rain program the u s acid rain program implemented a nationwide market for electric utilities sulfur dioxide so2 emissions and included voluntary compliance possibilities for nonaffected sources i observe significant voluntary participation albeit with small impact on the so2 market mostly from sources with counterfactual emissions below their allowance allocations an ex post analysis suggests that costs from the resulting higher emissions outweigh savings from shifts in emissions reductions from high cost affected sources to low cost nonaffected sources further utilities voluntary participation is well explained by economic variables which provides new evidence of cost effective compliance strategies and low transaction costs

mitigation incentives with climate finance and treaty options abstract future greenhouse gas ghg mitigation action of current non climate policy np countries is considered to take two alternative forms 1 climate finance payments received in return for future reductions in its ghg emissions below a defined baseline and 2 join a climate treaty whereby the required emissions reductions are formally binding it is assumed that baselines defining climate finance payments and required emissions reductions under a treaty depend positively on current emissions it is then shown that making such future options available reduces current ghg mitigation in np countries leading to higher emissions in the short run this effect is stronger when future climate finance payments are higher the required relative emissions reductions under a treaty are greater when commitments under a treaty are longer lasting and mitigation targets depend more on current emissions such short run increases in emissions can sometimes more than fully eliminate the effect of the subsequent policy when climate finance and treaties are both future alternatives more generous climate finance can make it harder and more expensive to induce the country to join a climate treaty

costs of alternative environmental policy instruments in the presence of industry compensation requirements abstract this paper explores how the costs of meeting given aggregate targets for pollution emissions change with the imposition of the requirement that key pollution related industries be compensated for potential losses of profit from the pollution regulation we apply a numerically solved general equilibrium model to compare the incidence and costs of emissions taxes fuel intermediate input taxes performance standards and mandated technologies in the absence and presence of this compensation requirement compensation is provided either through industry tax credits or industry specific cuts in capital tax rates we analyze the added costs from the compensation requirement in terms of 1 an increase in intrinsic abatement cost reflecting a lowered efficiency of pollution abatement and 2 a lump sum compensation cost that captures the efficiency costs of financing the compensation the compensation requirement affects these components differently depending on the policy instrument involved and the required extent of pollution abatement as a result it can change the cost rankings of the different instruments in particular when compensation is provided through lump sum tax credits the lump sum compensation cost is higher under the emissions tax than under the command and control policies performance standards and mandated technologies a reflection of the higher compensation requirements under the emissions tax when the required pollution reduction is modest imposing the compensation requirement causes the emissions tax to lose its status as the least costly instrument and to become more costly than command and control policies in contrast when required abatement is extensive the emissions tax again becomes the most cost effective instrument because of its advantages in terms of lower intrinsic abatement cost

household equivalence scales and welfare comparisons abstract the ratio of cost functions of different households facing the same prices and attaining the same utility level is a true cost of demographic characteristics index this index is independent of a base level of income or utility ib if and only if it equals a ratio of household equivalence scales that are themselves ib applied cost index and equivalence scales specifications are usually ib this paper describes the general restrictions on cost functions and social welfare functions required for ib scales and for their use in welfare analysis

pricing monitoring uncertainty in climate policy this article assesses the environmental and economic efficiency of three different approaches to treat monitoring uncertainty in climate policy namely prescribing uncertainty setting minimum certainty thresholds and pricing uncertainty through a discount our model of the behavior of profit maximizing agents demonstrates that under the simplest set of assumptions the regulator has no interest in reducing monitoring uncertainty however in the presence of information asymmetry monitoring uncertainty may hamper the economic and environmental performance of climate policy due to adverse selection in a mandatory policy prescribing a reasonable level of uncertainty is preferable if the regulator has enough information to determine this level for voluntary mechanisms such as carbon offsets allowing agents to set their own monitoring uncertainty below a maximum threshold or discounting carbon revenues in proportion to monitoring uncertainty are the best approaches for the regulator to mitigate the negative effects of information asymmetry these conclusions are much more pronounced when agents do not accrue revenues from their mitigation action other than carbon our analysis of monitoring uncertainty under information asymmetry which results in heterogeneity in the agents benefits from abatement generalizes the classical trade off between production efficiency and information rents

the effects of male and female labor supply on commodity demands we examine the effects of male and female labor supply on household demands and present a simple and robust test for the separability of commodity demands from labor supply using data on individual households from six years of the uk fes we estimate a demand system for seven goods which includes hours and participation dummies as conditioning variables allowance is made for the possible endogeneity of these conditioning labor supply variables we find that separability is rejected furthermore we present evidence that ignoring the effects of labor supply leads to bias in the parameter estimates

emissions trading with offset markets and free quota allocations we study optimal climate policy for a policy bloc of countries facing a market where emissions offsets can be purchased from a non policy fringe of countries such as with the cdm policy bloc firms benefit from free quota allocations which are updated according to either firms past emissions or outputs we show that the resulting abatement and its allocation between policy bloc and fringe are both inefficient when all quotas are traded freely at a single price the policy bloc chooses to either not constrain the offset market leading to suboptimal policy bloc mitigation or ban offsets completely the former latter case occurs when free allocation of quotas is not very generous and the offset market is large small it is preferable for policy bloc countries governments to instead buy offsets directly from the fringe at a quota price below marginal damage cost of emissions while the policy bloc quota price will be above this cost with maximization of global welfare and a unified quota price this price is higher and offsets constrained in fewer cases but the solution still inefficient full efficiency then requires a higher quota price in the policy bloc than in the fringe

prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement abstract i study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price e g taxes and quantity e g tradeable quotas instruments results indicate that a second best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty if these curves are uncertain to the regulator however the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument the reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed which makes this instrument come closer to a non linear instrument

renewable heating perspectives and the impact of policy instruments in the light of the eu directive for renewable energy 2009 28 ec this paper deals with the question how various policy instruments could impact the development of renewable heating technologies the paper applies the simulation model invert ee lab for the building related heat demand in selected european countries austria lithuania and united kingdom the resulting scenarios up to 2030 are compared to res heat targets from literature stakeholder consultation processes and the targets in the national renewable energy action plans submitted by eu member states in 2010 the results demonstrate that use obligations for renewable heating can be effective in achieving res heat market growth however in order to attain a balanced technology mix and more ambitious targets policy packages are required combining use obligations with economic incentives and accompanying measures technology specific conclusions are derived moreover conclusions indicate that the action plans are not always consistent with policy measures in place or under discussion

on reducing the windfall profits in environmental subsidy programs investment subsidies are widely used to induce adoption of new technologies that can lower the marginal cost of reducing emissions to economize on these subsidies governments would like to distinguish between firms that need to receive a subsidy to adopt a new technology and firms that would adopt that technology even without subsidies we show that policies consisting of a menu of emission taxes and investment subsidies can potentially induce firms to self select

the impact of heat waves on electricity spot markets abstract thermoelectric power plants depend on cooling water drawn from water bodies low river run off and or high water temperatures limit a plant s production capacity this problem may intensify with climate change our study quantifies the impact of forced capacity reductions on market prices production costs consumer and producer surplus as well as emissions by means of a bottom up power generation system model first we simulate the german electricity spot market during the heat wave of 2006 then we conduct a sensitivity study that accounts for future climatic and technological conditions we find an average price increase of 11 during the heat wave 2006 which is even more pronounced during times of peak demand production costs accumulate to an additional but moderate 16 m due to the price increase producers gain from the heat wave whereas consumers disproportionately bear the costs carbon emissions in the german electricity sector increase during the heat wave the price and cost effects are more pronounced and increase significantly if assumptions on heat sensitive demand hydropower capacity net exports and capacity reductions are tightened these are potential additional effects of climate change hence if mitigation fails or is postponed globally the impacts on the current energy system are very likely to rise increases in feed in from renewable resources and demand side management can counter the effects to a considerable degree countries with a shift toward a renewable energy supply can be expected to be much less susceptible to cooling water scarcity than those with a high share of nuclear and coal fired power plants

optimal design of a phase in emissions trading program abstract this paper studies a phase in emissions trading program with voluntary opt in possibilities for non affected firms and derives optimal permits allocations to affected and opt in firms when the environmental regulator has incomplete information on individual unrestricted emissions and control costs the regulator faces a trade off between production efficiency minimization of control costs and information rent extraction reduction of excess permits allocated to opt in firms the first best equilibrium can be attained if the regulator can freely allocate permits to affected and opt in firms otherwise a second best equilibrium is implemented the latter is sensitive to uncertainty in control costs and benefits

a unified approach to incorporating demographic or other effects into demand systems a general method of introducing demographic effects into any demand system using modifying functions is described which permits complicated interactions of demographic variables with prices and expeditures theorems give properties the modifying functions must have to ensure integrability of the resulting system demand equations of the new system are given explicitly as functions of the original demand equations and the modifying functions the procedure is interpreted as altering a households technology and is shown to encompass adult equivalent scales and related methods examples of modifying functions are derived and applications of the technique to uses other than demographic variation are considered excerpt

measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal health status measurement for use in economic appraisal of health care programmes is reviewed in this paper with particular emphasis on utility measurement a framework for economic appraisal is presented displaying the various components that must be measured and showing how the three forms of analysis cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis and cost utility analysis relate to the framework and to each other one of the components in the framework is health status it can be measured using ad hoc numeric scales willingness to pay receive or health state utilities the determination of health state utilities is reviewed covering the following issues alternative sources of utilities health state descriptions multi attribute utility approach determination of appropriate subjects utility aggregation and accuracy three measurement techniques for health state utilities are described in detail rating scale standard gamble and time trade off the use of these methods is described for both chronic and temporary health states and for both health states considered better than death and those considered worse than death

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

climate change impact and resilience in the electricity sector the example of austria and germany abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the resilience of possible future electricity and heating systems in regard to climate change and fuel price shocks the dynamical simulation model hireps of the austrian and german electricity heating and cooling sectors was used for this analysis the electricity generation cost and changes in the required secured capacity were used as indicators for the resilience of the energy system the results show that the analysed changes in the natural gas price have larger impact on the electricity generation cost than weather variability between different years or climate change especially the fossil fuel based scenario showed high sensitivity to the gas price analysis of the required secured capacity shows that in the last quarter of the 21st century the annual maximum residual loads are growing and are dominated by strong cooling demand peaks promoting passive cooling options efficient building designs and options for a controlled down regulation of cooling devices seems to be advisable to avoid installing large thermal power plant backup capacities the evaluated climate model simulations show only small changes in photovoltaic wind and hydro power generation for 2051 2080 in austria and germany