retrospectives the law of diminishing returns from introductory economics to theoretical papers the law of diminishing returns is a part of every economist s tool kit but the evolution of this law in the history of economic analysis reveals more complexity than is perhaps generally understood even among those most responsible for its evolution the law has been loosely defined and many so called proofs of the law have been weak and incomplete moreover those who expounded the law and its economic implications rarely offered empirical evidence to support it in fact economists have offered alternative explanations for rising short run marginal cost curves and other implications of the law of diminishing returns this last point raises an interesting question have economists used the law of diminishing returns simply for convenience or is the law fundamental to economic analysis

degree of scale economies and congestion a unified dea approach abstract there are increasing concerns about how increase in congestion can adversely affect output as well as about the relative benefit cost ratio or return on investment associated with alternative projects or policies to address those problems regardless of what policy strategies are used to address congestion the fact remains that we cannot assess the economic benefits of congestion reduction strategies unless we are able to measure the extent to which congestion affects productivity in general and scale economies in particular this paper makes a novel attempt to suggest a method in a non parametric framework to measure scale elasticity in production in the presence of congestion

statistical analysis and combination forecasting of environmental efficiency and its influential factors since china entered the wto 2002 2010 2012 abstract since china became a member of world trade organization wto its economy develops at a fast speed at the same time the environmental problem becomes more and more serious and increasingly affects economic development studying the factors that influence environmental efficiency has become an essential point in dealing with the relationship between economy and environment considering the differences in space and economic development among different districts this paper discusses the quantitative relationship among exports figure imports figure gdp per capita industrialization level fiscal decentralization and environmental efficiency of each chinese province by using statistical analysis furthermore this paper discusses differences among each district s influential factors from the perspective of spatial economics and makes combination forecast on the trend of environmental efficiency it also shows that the environmental efficiency of chinese provinces is generally at a low level in addition as the economic statuses of different provinces vary and the factors that influence environmental efficiency in different provinces also have significant differences each province should take certain measures to design the environmental protection policy in line with its local circumstance

the structure of technical efficiency it is common practice to decompose measures of efficiency into component measures of technical and allocative efficiency in this paper we show how and why to decompose a general measure of technical efficiency into component measures of purely technical efficiency congestion and scale efficiency and we investigate the properties of each measure we do so for a multiple output technology which satisfies a weak axiom system that does not include either constant returns to scale or strong input disposability

energy efficiency and congestion assessment with energy mix effect the case of apec countries abstract to save energy and improve the environment has become a general consensus in the whole asia pacific economic cooperation region this study focuses on the issue of energy congestion which has been considered as one of the key factors influencing energy efficiency we employ a two stage data envelopment analysis model to assess the energy efficiency and congestion of asia pacific economic cooperation countries from 1995 to 2013 it is worth pointing out that the model takes undesirable outputs into account and is able to recognize energy mix effect on energy congestion there are some discussions which based on the empirical results it indicates that energy congestion has led to almost 20 percent of energy waste in asia pacific economic cooperation countries the conclusions are as follows in general energy efficiency of developing countries is lower than that of developed countries besides energy congestion mainly comes from fossil energy use however the congestion of non fossil energy shows a rising trend in recent years in addition a multiple liner regression analysis indicates that energy consumption and industry value added per gdp have positive effects on energy congestion and gdp per capita has negative effect on energy congestion at last we promote several policy recommendations to improve energy efficiency

assessing the energy implications of replacing car trips with bicycle trips in sheffield uk a wide range of evidence supports policies which encourage people to cycle more and drive less for health and environmental reasons however the likely energy implications of such a modal shift have remained relatively unexplored in this paper we generate scenarios for increasing the cycling rate in sheffield between 2010 and 2020 this is done through the novel application of a simple model borrowed from population ecology the analysis suggests that pro cycling interventions result in energy savings through reduced consumption of fuel and cars and energy costs through increased demand for food the cumulative impact is a net reduction in primary energy consumption the magnitude of which depends on a number of variables which are subject to uncertainty based on the evidence presented and analysed in this paper we conclude that transport policy has a number of important energy implications some of which remain unexplored we therefore advocate the formation of closer links between energy policy and transport policy in academia and in practice our approach provides a simple yet flexible framework for pursuing this aim in the context of modal shift

monetary policy shifts and the term structure we estimate the effect of shifts in monetary policy using the term structure of interest rates in our no arbitrage model the short rate follows a version of the taylor s 1993 discretion versus policy rules in practice carnegie rochester conference series on public policy 39 195 214 rule where the coefficients on the output gap and inflation vary over time the monetary policy loading on the output gap has averaged around 0 4 and has not changed very much over time the overall response of the yield curve to output gap components is relatively small in contrast the inflation loading has changed substantially over the last 50 years and ranges from close to zero in 2003 to a high of 2 4 in 1983 long term bonds are sensitive to inflation policy shifts with increases in inflation loadings leading to higher short rates and widening yield spreads

the behavior of money and other economic variables two natural experiments abstract the object of this paper is to test the performance of the quantity theory model and the related proposition of monetary neutrality in a context in which to use bernanke s phraseology money move d for reasons that were plausibly unrelated to the current state of the economy we investigate this question using data from two recent episodes of monetary policy regime change the move to floating exchange rates throughout the industrialized world following the breakdown of bretton woods in the early 1970s and the shift toward less expansive monetary policy that to varying degrees took place in these countries a decade or so later the results of this exercise are highly positive the money price relationship that we observe is fully consistent with theory growth shifts in the nominal stock of money and in the price level are highly correlated and bear a one to one relation to one another growth shifts in exchange rates are significantly related both to growth shifts in relative price levels and to growth shifts in relative excess supplies of money the classical neutrality proposition in this context superneutrality in general receives strong though not totally unambiguous support

monetary policy rules macroeconomic stability and inflation a view from the trenches i estimate a forward looking monetary policy reaction function for the federal reserve for the periods before and after paul volcker s appointment as chairman in 1979 using information that was available to the fomc in real time from 1966 to 1995 the results suggest broad similarities in policy and point to a forward looking approach to policy consistent with a strong reaction to inflation forecasts during both periods this contradicts the hypothesis based on analysis with ex post constructed data that the instability of the great inflation was the result of weak fomc policy responses to expected inflation a difference is that prior to volcker s appointment policy was too activist in reacting to perceived output gaps that retrospectively proved overambitious drawing on contemporaneous accounts of fomc policy i discuss the implications of the findings for alternative explanations of the great inflation and the improvement in macroeconomic stability since then

efficient energy saving targets for apec economies abstract energy saving target ratios estr for 17 apec economies during 1991 2000 are computed in a total factor framework all nominal variables are transformed into real variables by the purchasing power parity ppp at the 1995 price level the data envelopment analysis dea approach is used to find the energy saving target est for apec economies without reducing their maximum potential gross domestic productions gdps in each year energy labor and capital are the three inputs while gdp is the single output our major findings are as follows 1 china has the largest est up to almost half of its current usage 2 hong kong the philippines and the united states have the highest energy efficiency 3 the energy efficiency generally increases for apec economies except for canada and new zealand 4 chile mexico and taiwan have significantly improved their energy efficiency in the last 5 years 5 an inverted u shape relation exists between per capita est and per capita gdp 6 estr has a positive relation with the value added percentage of gdp of the industry sector and a negative relation with that of the service sector

renewable energy and macroeconomic efficiency of oecd and non oecd economies abstract this article analyzes the effects of renewable energy on the technical efficiency of 45 economies during the 2001 2002 period through data envelopment analysis dea in our dea model labor capital stock and energy consumption are the three inputs and real gdp is the single output increasing the use of renewable energy improves an economy s technical efficiency conversely increasing the input of traditional energy decreases technical efficiency compared to non oecd economies oecd economies have higher technical efficiency and a higher share of geothermal solar tide and wind fuels in renewable energy however non oecd economies have a higher share of renewable energy in their total energy supply than oecd economies

changes in federal reserve preferences abstract using a model of optimizing central bank behavior i estimate the dynamic behavior of preferences which are captured by the relative weight put on stabilizing inflation versus minimizing the output gap unlike previous work i let this parameter vary continuously over time there is a drastic but steady rise in the weight on inflation around the appointment of paul volcker however i find variation in preferences throughout the sample period the results suggest that preference changes have been more complex than typically assumed in the literature the estimated preference series is used to perform counterfactual experiments and to construct a new measure of monetary shocks

using data envelopment analysis for estimating energy saving and undesirable output abatement a case study in the organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries abstract environmental protection is one of the main concerns of the international community countries show meticulous attention to environmental issues by considering eco efficiency the eco efficiency evaluation of countries is a complex and multidisciplinary topic data envelopment analysis has widely been applied to measure the eco efficiency of organization for economic co operation and development countries in previous studies energy inputs have not been contemplated the subject becomes more important when there are non discretionary factors in this paper the eco efficiency of countries in the organization for economic co operation and development is assessed given energy inputs undesirable outputs and non discretionary factors to this end slack based and range adjusted measures are extended also new environmental indices are introduced the relationship between consumption of energy inputs and production of undesirable outputs can be addressed by two new environmental indices spearman correlation test indicates a direct and positive relationship between potential of energy saving and potential of undesirable output abatement france germany luxemburg norway sweden and the united kingdom are recognized as eco efficient countries south korea and italy have the highest and lowest potential for energy saving respectively poland and iceland are countries with the highest and lowest potential for undesirable output abatement respectively it can be concluded that countries producing high undesirable outputs may not operate eco efficiently and thus have an extreme potential to save the optimum energy moreover countries consuming low energy may operate eco efficiently and have a low potential to reduce undesirable outputs

dea congestion and returns to scale under an occurrence of multiple optimal projections abstract economic implications of congestion have been recently discussed in many dea data envelopment analysis studies in addition several previous research efforts have explored a theoretical linkage between returns to scale rts and the concept of congestion because the two economic concepts are closely connected to each other tone and sahoo tone k sahoo b k 2004 degree of scale economies and congestion a unified dea approach european journal of operational research 158 755 772 have published the theoretical linkage in this journal all of the previous studies including their research 2004 assume a unique optimal solution in the investigation on dea based congestion when multiple solutions occur in dea based congestion measurement the economic implications of congestion obtained from the previous research are all problematic from both theoretical and practical perspectives to deal with the issue this study explores how to deal with the occurrence of multiple solutions in the dea based congestion measurement this study proposes a new approach for the congestion measurement and theoretically compares the proposed approach with tone and sahoo 2004

congestion measurement for regional industries in china a data envelopment analysis approach with undesirable outputs abstract the industry in china has been developing extensively in the last few decades large investments in china s industry may cause congestion because congestion is a widely observed economic phenomenon in such a scenario in order to know the performance and allocate resources well it is necessary for the chinese government to measure congestion of the industry many scholars have studied this topic by means of data envelopment analysis dea however previous studies only pay attention to the framework of desirable outputs in fact undesirable outputs often accompany desirable outputs in production thus in this study a new approach for measuring congestion with undesirable outputs is proposed and applied to analyzing congestion of the industry in 31 administrative regions of china the results show that five regions have congestion in their industry in 2010 besides the regions located in the east of the country perform the best in ecological efficiency followed by regions in central and west china based on these findings this paper proposes some political schemes to improve regional industrial efficiency

sharing sustainability how values and ethics matter in consumers adoption of public bicycle sharing scheme this study investigates the antecedents and mechanisms of consumers adoption of a public bicycle sharing scheme pbss as a form of shared sustainable consumption drawing on marketing ethics and sustainability literature it argues that cultural and consumption values drive or deter the adoption of pbss through the mediating mechanism of ethical evaluation this study tests its hypotheses using a sample of 755 consumers from one of the largest pbss programs in china the results confirm the significance of collectivism man nature orientation materialism and face consciousness as key determinants of the adoption of pbss interestingly these values play mixed roles in influencing pbss adoption it also finds that such values and beliefs need to be effectively translated into ethical evaluations of pbss adoption and need to be addressed in the specific social context thus ethical evaluation constitutes a cognitive strategy that allows consumers to justify and defend their adoption of sustainability practices the results suggest that a desirable sustainability program needs to not only cater to the cultural and psychological motivations of consumers but also reflect the social norms and social context in which the sustainability practices and consumers are embedded

bad luck bad policy and learning a markov switching approach to understanding postwar u s macroeconomic dynamics abstract this paper evaluates the role of monetary policy in understanding the u s post war macroeconomic fluctuations we construct a medium size dsge model in which the central bank through a real time learning process can make mistakes in estimating key elasticities between macroeconomic aggregates and the central banks objectives may change over time the model also features time varying volatilities of non policy shocks we find that misperceptions of the persistence of inflation and the slope of the phillips curve could affect optimal monetary policy decision making therefore their accurate prediction is key for achieving successful monetary policy outcomes in addition we argue that the monetary policy shift geared toward inflation stabilization in the late 1970s changed the composition of output making the marginal efficiency of investment shock that proxies for the functioning of the financial sector the most important contributor to the business cycle

the congestion total factor energy efficiency of regions in taiwan abstract this study applies the congestion total factor energy efficiency model to analyze the energy efficiency of 20 administrative regions in taiwan from 2004 to 2013 by studying four kinds of energies amount of electricity for manufacturing industry use amount of electricity consumed for lighting amount of gasoline sales and amount of diesel sales the main findings are that i in terms of these four energies only taipei city taitung county and penghu county among the 20 administrative regions exhibit no phenomenon of energy input congestion during the whole data period ii more attention should be put on energy efficiency improvement in diesel use than on electricity for manufacturing industry use electricity consumption for lighting and gasoline usage and iii the energy efficiency outcomes in taiwan correlate to the country s regional development features such as its tourist regions including taitung county and penghu county which have nature green and environmental protection characteristics

degrowth energy descent and low tech living potential pathways for increased resilience in times of crisis the use or misuse of advanced technology is a key factor driving global environmental degradation but advanced technology is also widely assumed to be the solution to many environmental problems in contrast to that dominant approach this paper outlines a variety of what the authors call low tech options such as solar shower bags washing lines alternative heating and cooling methods and cycling and raises questions about the extent to which these types of simple living practices could help increase household resilience in conditions of economic disruption instability or crisis the analysis is framed by an energy descent scenario in which an individual household or community either chooses a reduced energy way of life motivated by climate change mitigation or has such a way of life imposed upon them due to declining fossil fuel availability or economic disruption the authors see such a future as plausible and in some contexts has already arrived or has always been the case hence the relevance of this analysis which has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions furthermore while the focus herein is on low tech living at the household level it is argued that prefiguring a simpler way to live has deeper significance too in that it could help create the cultural conditions needed for a politics and macroeconomics of degrowth to emerge which the authors maintain is a necessary part of any decarbonisation project challenges facing low tech options are also acknowledged including the ever present risk of rebound effects and other indirect impacts

environmental assessment by dea radial measurement u s coal fired power plants in iso independent system operator and rto regional transmission organization abstract the economic concept of weak and strong disposability on undesirable outputs dominated the previous discussions on dea data envelopment analysis radial measurement for environmental assessment this study reexamines the economic concept from the perspective of corporate strategies on how to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the economic concept of disposability conventionally accepted by production economists is replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy that a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector the firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation meanwhile the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change on undesirable outputs as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified operational and environmental performance by utilizing new technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two types of disposability this study discusses how to measure unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability by dea radial models to document the practicality of the proposed dea environmental assessment this study applies it to compare the performance of u s coal fired power plants under isos rtos independent system operators regional transmission organizations with that of the other power plants not belonging to any organization this study identifies two empirical findings one of the two findings is that the latter coal fired power plants outperform the former power plants belonging to isos rtos in terms of three efficiency measures this result indicates that isos and rtos do not provide an effective coordination for coal fired power plants at the level that can be found in the other power plants the other finding is that there is technological improvement in the operation of coal fired power plants

congestion and returns to scale in data envelopment analysis congestion indicates an economic state where inputs are overly invested evidence of congestion occurs whenever reducing some inputs can increase outputs return to scale is another related important economic implication of dea efficiencies in this research we discuss together the problems of congestion constant return to scale increasing return to scale and decreasing return to scale by output oriented dea models c2r model bc2 model fg model st model and a modified model we identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the evidence of congestion constant increasing and decreasing returns to scale we show the exclusive relationships between the concepts of congestion and returns to scale numerical examples are provided for illustration

congestion measurement in nonparametric analysis under the weakly disposable technology abstract congestion is a widely observed economic phenomenon where outputs are reduced due to excessive amount of inputs the previous approaches to identify congestion in nonparametric analysis only consider desirable outputs in the production process undesirable outputs are usually jointly produced with desirable outputs in this paper we propose an approach for measuring congestion in the presence of desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously the proposed approach can discriminate between the congested dmus and the truly efficient dmus which are all efficient according to the scores calculated by the directional distance function finally an empirical example is used to illustrate the approach

a note on input congestion abstract the notion of effective space is introduced and input congestion is explained by economic activities exhaustion of effective space in this setting i show that profit maximization is inconsistent with input congestion at the firm level but not necessarily with input congestion at the industry level when effective space is shared among producers

total factor energy efficiency in developing countries this paper uses a total factor framework to investigate energy efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980 2005 we explore the total factor energy efficiency and change trends by applying data envelopment analysis dea window which is capable of measuring efficiency in cross sectional and time varying data the empirical results indicate that botswana mexico and panama perform the best in terms of energy efficiency whereas kenya sri lanka syria and the philippines perform the worst during the entire research period seven countries show little change in energy efficiency over time eleven countries experienced continuous decreases in energy efficiency among five countries witnessing continuous increase in total factor energy efficiency china experienced the most rapid rise practice in china indicates that effective energy policies play a crucial role in improving energy efficiency tobit regression analysis indicates that a u shaped relationship exists between total factor energy efficiency and income per capita

driving effect of technology innovation on energy utilization efficiency in strategic emerging industries abstract under the policy of energy saving and emission reduction technological innovation has become the key power driver to improve energy utilization efficiency by using the panel data of 21 industrial segments between 2000 and 2015 this paper investigates the driving effect of technological innovation on energy utilization efficiency in strategic emerging industries and analyzes the critical factors influencing the driving effect of technological innovation by the stochastic frontier analysis method the empirical result shows that technological innovation between 2000 and 2015 has had a significant positive driving effect on the energy utilization efficiency of strategic emerging industries and exhibits a development trend of year by year steady state growth on the whole the greater the value of the development expenditure of new green products and the investment in environmental pollution treatment the greater the technological efficiency the greater the value of the transformation expenditure of energy saving technology the greater the technological inefficiency finally the paper proposes the countermeasures and suggestions for the driving effect of technological innovation on energy utilization efficiency in strategic emerging industries an empirical study is made to analyze the driving effect of technological innovation on energy utilization efficiency the positive and negative factors of technological innovation are forgotten strategic emerging industries can select optimal innovation behavior to improve quality and efficiency of energy utilization based on the results

from inflation to more inflation disinflation and low inflation volume 2 of a history of the federal reserve forthcoming covers the years of inflation and disinflation followed by a return to relatively low inflation it addresses four questions why did inflation start why did it continue for 15 or more years from 1965 to about 1982 why did it end why did it not return as we look back to the 1950s and 1960s two of the many changes in the federal reserve system affecting inflation deserve comment first in the 1950s the goal was price stability and zero reported inflation not inflation of about 2 percent the 1959 1960 disinflation brought reported consumer price index cpi inflation measured as a 12 month moving average to less than 1 percent from march through august 1959 this measure again was below 1 percent through most of 1961 and it did not reach 2 percent until early 1966 properly measured and adjusted for biases in the price index the true price level probably declined modestly during this period this period of deflation was also a period of sustained economic growth it and several periods of deflation discussed in volume 1 of a history of the federal reserve 2003 show no evidence of the liquidity trap that absorbed much recent attention in the united states and japan a second major change is the role of economists and economic research at the federal reserve board and in the federal reserve banks in the 1950s the board had no economists as members and there were few economists as

alternative treatments of congestion in dea a rejoinder to cooper gu and li abstract this paper is a response to cooper w w b gu and s li comparisons and evaluations of alternative approaches to the treatment of congestion in dea european journal of operational research this issue who claim that the standard fgl procedure by fare grosskopf and lovell for dealing with congestion in dea can i fail to identify congestion when it is present and ii identify congestion when it is not present we clarify the notion of congestion and its relationship to structural efficiency and free disposability respectively to point out that the fgl approach was originally intended for measuring structural efficiency i e the influence of congestion on the efficiency of a particular production unit not for identifying occurrence of congestion in any feasible production vector moreover we point out that the result of cooper et al partially arises from ignorance of some key maintained assumptions underlying the fgl approach further we present some counter examples which demonstrate that the alternative approach advocated by cooper et al can equally fail in identification of congestion finally some remarks on the influence of sampling error and errors in variables on the two stage dea approaches are presented

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

estimation and allocation of cost savings from collaborative co2 abatement in china abstract as an increasingly accepted way of relieving global warming collaborative carbon dioxide co2 abatement could improve not only emission performance but also cost effectiveness of abatement in this study we analyze the cost savings and benefits of collaborative abatement in the context of china by using data envelopment analysis dea approach specifically we establish 63 collaborative abatement scenarios by dividing the mainland china into six main regions and then estimate the costs savings in each collaboration abatement scenario through investigating the gains for each region in various scenarios the best collaborative partners for each region are suggested from perspectives of benefit maximization furthermore the contribution of each region to collaborative abatement cost saving is also differentiated with the shapley value approach

corporate real estate analysis evaluating telecom branch efficiency in greece this article proposes productivity analysis for evaluating the relative efficiency in corporate real estate usage across decision making units using data from the greek telecommunications organization gto we measure the productivity of 127 branches using the number of employees and the total area covered per building as inputs and the number of telephony access lines as outputs we apply three nonparametric data envelopment analysis dea models assuming constant returns to scale crs variable returns to scale vrs and slacks based measures sbm respectively we discuss how the proposed approach can provide real estate managers and analysts a multi informational tool that allows the quantification of targets and may serve as a guide tool for the efficient employment of real estate assets

a commentary on does the fed contribute to a political business cycle abrams and iossifov 2006 find that during 1957 2004 monetary policy turned significantly more expansionary prior to u s presidential elections when the federal reserve chairman and the incumbent president belonged to the same political party however their long sample period obscures changes in trends during the period stemming from advances in macroeconomic theory and in the implementation of monetary policy indeed when one considers only the volcker greenspan era 1979 2004 there is insufficient evidence to accept the notion of a political business cycle effect

comparisons and evaluations of alternative approaches to the treatment of congestion in dea abstract this paper examines the two approaches that are presently available in the data envelopment analysis dea literature for use in identifying and analyzing congestion the first approach due to fare et al fare r grosskopf s lovell c a k 1985 the measurement of efficiency of production kluwer nijhoff boston has been extensively employed to identify congestion in areas such as the provision of health services the latter approach due to cooper et al cooper w w thompson r g thrall r m 1996 annals of operations research 66 3 45 was subsequently extended by brockett et al brockett p l cooper w w shin h c wang y 1998 socio economic planning sciences 32 1 20 to treat tradeoff possibilities between employment and output in chinese production when congestion is present in contrast with cooper et al examples are provided in this paper which show that the fare et al approach can fail in both modes it can show congestion to be present when this is not consistent with the observed behavior it can also fail to exhibit congestion when the data show it to be present suggestions are offered both for i taking precautions before using the fgl approach and for ii overcoming these shortcomings