estimating residential water demand under multi part tariffs using aggregate data using a new model formulation and data from a sample of colorado utilities we investigated the price specification controversy marginal price versus average revenue when estimating residential water demand the improved statistical fit using average

parametric rationing methods abstract in a rationing problem a single homogeneous good is allocated among agents with possibly complex characteristics or types when types are single positive numbers agents claims young s theorem says that in the presence of continuity a method of rationing is consistent and symmetric if and only if it can be represented by a continuous parametric function this theorem is generalized to all separable type spaces related results include a characterization of non continuous parametric methods and a simple criterion for deciding when a two agent method can be consistently extended to a multi agent method an application to the multi category bankruptcy problem is described

household electricity demand revisited respond to price changes this paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use the model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity and consumption aggregation over appliances and time we estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 california households the results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response we then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing this interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets and policy makers concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers how new pricing mechanisms would affect households consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty however this uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena hampering market reforms using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges these include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances and the interdependence of energy use with longer term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics the first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption the third issue imposes high data requirements information on household specific appliance holdings and residence features and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods when the researcher s objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff s consumption and revenue consequences in this paper we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used

water and energy price impacts on residential water demand in copenhagen while water price effects on residential water demand have been studied for several decades the impact of energy prices does not seem to have received much attention in this paper a residential water demand function derived from a model of household production of final consumption goods taking water energy and an aggregate of other goods as inputs is estimated on pooled time series data we find negative energy cross price elasticities around 0 2 and water price elasticities in the order of 0 1 or smaller

estimating electricity demand the cost of linearising the budget constraint this paper derives elasticity estimates for the electricity demand of a cross section of residential customers in medellin colombia where prices follow a rising block scheme it contrasts methods following jerry hausman 1979 1985 with those based on harvey rosen 1976 to resolve the difference between the results produced by the two methods it uses a generalized selectivity bias corrections method due to frank vella 1990 copyright 1992 by mit press

the effect of gender and race differentials on public private wage comparisons a study of postal workers this study argues that the aggregative specifications often used to examine wage diferentials fail to control for important demographic variations in wage patterns in testing how postal wages comp

common agency and coordination general theory and application to government policy making we develop a model of common agency with complete information and general preferences with nontransferable utility and we prove that the principals nash equilibrium in truthful strategies implements an efficient action we apply this theory to the construction of a positive model of public finance where organized special interests can lobby the government for consumer and producer taxes or subsidies and targeted lump sum taxes or transfers the lobbies use only the nondistorting transfers in their noncooperative equilibrium but their intergroup competition for transfers turns into a prisoners dilemma in which the government captures all the gain that is potentially available to the parties

consistent solutions in atomless economies we consider the problem of allocating a bundle of commodities among a group of agents who are collectively entitled to them we prove for an atomless economy with possibly satiated preferences any solution that is efficient equitable and consistent must select allocations that are supported by equal budget walrasian equilibria with slack we consider the problem of allocating a bundle of commodities among a group of agents who are collectively entitled to them we search for systematic methods or solutions of resolving this problem for a solution to be considered desirable we propose that it should satisfy several requirements first it should be efficient second it should be equitable a variety of distributional require ments have been proposed in the literature the requirement we will impose here is that it select allocations at which no agent would prefer the equal division of the social endowment to his own consumption in addition to these two basic efficiency and equity conditions we require that the solution be consistent the recommendations it makes for any economy are never contra dicted by the recommendations it makes for any reduced economy obtained by allowing some subgroup of agents to leave the scene with their allotted consumptions the requirement of consistency is very natural here is a motivation for it offered by thomson 1988 consider all the resources available on the planet earth one would like not only that they be distributed fairly when the planet is considered as a whole but also that whatever resources end up in each continent country city be fairly distributed among the members of that subpopulation when considered in isolation in this paper we study economies with a large number of agents modelled as a complete atomless measure space our main result is a characterization of the solutions that satisfy all three requirements of efficiency equity and con sistency it follows from our result that under standard assumptions on preferences any such solution must select allocations that are supported by equal income walrasian equilibria however our characterization holds for more general economies since it applies to economies in which preferences are possibly satiated mas colell 1988 extended traditional general equilibrium theory to the class of such economies by introducing the notion of walrasian

poverty among ethnic minorities the transition process inequality and economic growth abstractthis article investigates the process of reducing poverty in ethnic minority households using two recent vietnam household surveys we find that ethnic minority households are more likely to be persistently poor and less likely to be persistently non poor than ethnic majority households the within group component generated by the variation in income within each ethnicity group explains more than 90 of the change in total inequality income redistribution plays an important role in decreasing the poverty gap and decreasing poverty severity different ethnic groups have different poverty patterns which should be noted when designing policies to alleviate poverty and inequality

privately operated water utilities municipal price negotiation and estimation of residential water demand the case of france this paper addresses the issue of price negotiation between a municipality and a private water utility operator and its implications for residential water demand estimation we use appropriate econometric procedures to estimate a water demand equation on a panel of french municipalities we find evidence that negotiated water price depends on municipality s characteristics causing endogeneity of price in the demand equation the impact of average household income housing and system features such as metering is investigated both on municipal consumption and price estimated price and income elasticities are significant and close to previous household level studies

demand side management policies for residential water use who bears the conservation burden to assess the potential for urban demand side management dsm policies as a water resource management tool we analyze the extent to which price and alternative policy instruments such as use and quantity restrictions and subsidies for water efficient technologies reduce residential demand and their distributional implications by type of household using detailed household level panel data for two california communities the results suggest that the ultimate effects of dsm policies in terms of the reduction in aggregate demand and distribution of water savings among household classes depend both on the policy instrument selected and the composition of aggregate demand

the econometrics of kinked budget constraints in the last several years a branch of applied econometrics has developed which is devoted to the development of techniques for the estimation of demand and other functions when the budget constraint is piecewise linear or kinky that is when the constraint consists of a number of segments joined together at kink points such constraints most frequently arise from government tax and transfer programs for example the federal income tax imposes a piecewise linear schedule by the use of constant marginal tax rates within brackets a problem analyzed by hausman 1981 the payroll tax in the social security system likewise generates a kinked schedule inasmuch as the marginal tax rate on earnings is zero above a certain earnings maximum federal and state transfer programs for the poor result in piecewise linear constraints because transfer benefits are taxed in the sense of a negative income tax as income rises and because that tax rate falls to zero at the kink point where an individual or family loses eligibility for the benefit altogether many government transfer programs impose additional nonlinearities by altering this tax rate by discrete amounts over the range of positive benefits as well but kinked constraints sometimes arise in nongovernment contexts a well known example being the block pricing schedule commonly set by utilities and volume discounting in general kinked budget constraints create two difficulties that have several interesting facets one difficulty is that changes in tax and transfer schedules can have unexpected effects that can be exactly the opposite in sign to those expected from economic theory examples of this phenomenon are given below the second difficulty that with which this paper is mostly concerned relates to the implications of kinked budget

regulating a polluting firm under asymmetric information this paper reinterprets the laffont tirole model of regulation under asymmetric information to cover the case of pollution control the asymmetry of information concerns the firm s cost of lowering its pollution the regulator has three objectives ensuring an efficient abatement level generating green taxes and securing the survival of the firm we show that when optimal abatement is important relative to tax generation the regulator cannot use the policy of offering the firm a set of linear tax schemes from which to choose by contrast this policy is optimal in the laffont tirole model under certain not very restrictive assumptions we proceed to establish a simple rule for when to shut down inefficient types in an example with specific functional forms we derive the optimal tax function both analytically and graphically we show the effect on the optimal tax system of a change in a technological parameter

independence of irrelevant alternatives and revealed group preferences it is shown that a pareto optimal and continuous single valued choice function defined on the compact convex subsets of the positive orthant of the n dimensional euclidean space maximizes a real valued function if and only if it satisfies the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition if n 2 and the strong axiom of revealed preference otherwise the results can be applied to consumer demand theory to deal with nonlinear budget sets and to bargaining game theory to generalize the nash bargaining solution

microeconometric analysis of residential water demand this paper develops a structural model for obtaining price elasticities and evaluating consumer s response to changes in nonlinear tariffs when only panel data on household consumption are available the model and the empirical strategy address problems implied by nonlinear tariffs existence of a fixed cost and use of limited data giving rise to a random effects model with a nonlinear individual effect results show that the estimated model does well at fitting data and demand is inelastic although elasticity varies by initial consumption block then i estimate welfare consequences of implementing several demand policies

sheltered labor markets public sector employment and socioeconomic returns to education of arabs in israel this study expands the theoretical discussion of ethnic economies by focusing on public sector employment and the role the state plays in affecting the socioeconomic fortunes of ethnic minorities the authors argue that under certain circumstances public sector employment helps ethnic minorities attain higher socioeconomic rewards the findings of the study indicate that arab employees in israel receive higher returns to education in the ethnic labor market compared with the dominant market and in the public sector rather than the private sector the latter result also holds true when arab workers are compared to jews revealing the benefits derived from the sheltered labor market

estimating residential water demand in the presence of free allowances the main aim of this paper is to quantify the impact of a rate structure which includes a free allowance on residential water consumption the analysis here differs from most previous research in that it explicitly recognizes that water consumption above the free allowance being sensitive to price responds less to social and climatic factors than consumption below the free allowance while the model specification and estimation procedures used here should be of interest to those interested in the demand for water the results using data for adelaide south australia on the determinants of water consumption should be of interest to water authorities

a discrete continuous choice approach to residential water demand under block rate pricing reply waldman is quite correct in noting that the microeconomic theory of block rate pricing in hewitt and hanemann hh 1995 is given for the general case of a k block rate structure whereas the econometric theory is largely confined to the case of exactly two blocks the extension in waldman to the more general case of k blocks is correct although the extension itself could be even more general if it addressed the nonnegativity of demand as is demonstrated below that no apparent attention was paid to the nonnegativity of demand in hh may be attributed to the fact that the need to do so was negated by a fortuitous assumption in the earlier work although that assumption that the errors are multiplicative and lognormally distributed was only maintained and not tested in hh i now estimate two models with the more common assumptions of linear demand and additive and normally distributed errors both with and without a modification for

regulation of prices and pollution under incomplete information abstract regulation of prices and pollution for a monopolist with private information is considered with a focus on the relative efficiency of standard setting and emissions taxation approaches to pollution control with incomplete information emissions taxation is a dominated regulatory instrument for abatement purposes because it generates information costs that can be avoided when an abatement standard and prices are set by the regulator an emissions tax has value however as a means of reducing those information costs but its use for this purpose may increase pollution

utilitarianism egalitarianism and the timing effect in social choice problems two theorems are derived about social choice functions which are defined on comprehensive convex subsets of utility allocation space theorem 1 asserts that a linearity condition together with pareto optimality implies that a social choice function must be utilitarian theorem 2 asserts that a concavity condition together with pareto optimality and independence of irrelevant alternatives implies that a social choice function must be either utilitarian or egalitarian these linearity and concavity conditions have natural interpretations in terms of the timing of social welfare analysis before or after the resolution of uncertainties and its impact on social choices

a rational expectations critique of merger policy analysis abstract a stricter merger control policy increases the expectation of future price competition in response firms increase product differentiation to sustain higher prices failing to account for such policy variant prices may lead to overestimation of the increase in consumer surplus due to the stricter merger policy rendering the policy analysis subject to the lucas critique

the choice of a liability regime when there is a regulatory gatekeeper consider a firm planning a project that poses a risk of environmental spillovers such a firm might be deterred by the threat of legal liability or restrained by gatekeeper regulation if regulators would be perfect gatekeepers then negligence based liability combined with regulation is more efficient that strict liability with or without regulation however if the regulator has incomplete information then any of a variety of regimes could be the most efficient harsher regimes regulation rather than laissez faire and strict liability rather than negligence are more appropriate for larger risks the choice of a liability regime is more complicated however if regulators are biased if they are biased against projects then negligence plus regulation is less likely to be the most efficient regime if regulators are biased toward projects then it is possible that apparently soft liability regimes are more desirable when risk is high

wage discrimination across ethnic groups evidence from israel i introduction wage differentials and occupational segregation have been intensively studied and well documented in the economic literature empirical analyses have demonstrated differences by gender and ethnicity and theoretical studies have attempted to explain the results polachek 1975 1993 leads the group that emphasizes human capital differences in explaining wage differences and segregation while bergmann 1974 1986 is in the forefront of a second group of scholars who claim that discrimination is the major source of inequality of wages and occupations in the united states race differentials in earnings and racial segregation decreased dramatically during the 1960s and the 1970s but sex differentials did not in 1980 the duncans 1955 segregation index calculated by fuchs 1989 across 503 occupations was about 30 for blacks versus whites and about 60 for men versus women 1 fuchs 1989 also showed that by 1980 the wage differential between white and black men 15 percent was less than half the difference between white men and white women 40 percent polachek and siebert 1993 137 39 present data showing that in 1990 the pay of u s women averaged 65 to 90 percent of that of men depending on the occupational category the gap has been relatively constant but there is some evidence that it has been narrowing in recent years they also find that earning ratios by occupation in the u k are very similar to parallel ratios in the u s chiswick 1983a 1983b and carlson and swartz 1988 among others examine earnings of ethnic minorities they find that most ethnic groups fare quite poorly compared to the white population but a few minorities jews chinese and japanese do as well or even better than the white majority the earnings gap for most groups declined over the 1960s and the 1970s and the portion of that gap that might be assignable to discrimination also declined in this study we examine ethnic wage differentials discrimination and segregation in the israeli labor market israel provides a tailor made setting for ethnic studies since its jewish population 4 335 million in 1993 consists of people with a large diversity in their countries of origin the first wave of jewish immigrants following the establishment of the state of israel in 1948 were holocaust survivors from europe or refugees from the predominantly moslem countries of north africa the middle east and yemen others came from north and south america western europe south africa and australia to live a more meaningful jewish life in the homeland israel encouraged and assisted these immigrants as part of an active pro immigration ideology and policy the main wave of immigration arrived in the late 1940s and early 1950s as friedlander 1975 shows between 1948 and 1952 the jewish population in israel increased from about 630 000 to nearly one and a half million an annual average growth rate of over 24 percent later there were three significant waves of immigration the first occurred at the beginning of the 1960s with annual immigration reaching an average of 57 000 per year an increase of 2 percent per year in population the second occurred in 1972 73 when 55 000 immigrants arrived annually an annual population increase of 1 7 percent the third large wave began in august 1989 with a massive influx of immigrants from the former u s s r generating about a 10 percent increase in the population in the years 1990 93 the absolute figures are 199 516 immigrants in 1990 176 100 in 1991 77 057 in 1992 and 66 145 in 1993 israel central bureau of statistics 1994 in 1991 about 15 000 ethiopian jews also arrived in israel the major ethnic division in israel is based on the country of origin although jews of various origins speak a number of different languages and perceive themselves as having some distinctive ethnic characteristics the main distinction is between jews originating from asia and africa excluding south africa easterners and those from america europe south africa and australia westerners

hourly earnings in the united states another look at unionization schooling sickness and unemployment using psid data this paper makes use of panel data to consider the effects of unionization schooling sickness and unemployment on individual earnings our results may be summarized as follows the unionization effect is around 15 20 this measure is consistently estimated controlling for both fixed individual attributes and serially uncorrelated measurement error sickness has little immediate impact but there is some indication that after 4 years earnings have fallen permanently by around 8 consequent on a 10 week spell of sickness a spell of unemployment on the other hand leads to a sharp fall in earnings but this effect decays rapidly leaving the possibility of a small permanent impact finally controlling for all fixed individual attributes we are unable to pin down the schooling effect with any accuracy owing to the absence of instruments that are both valid and effective within the data set

specification of block rate price variables in demand models using a new model formulation and data from a sample of colorado utilities we investigated the price specification controversy marginal price versus average revenue when estimating residential water demand the improved statistical fit using average

the choice between emission taxes and output taxes under imperfect monitoring we consider a regulator s choice between environmentally motivated emissions taxes and output taxes we investigate how the optimal instrument depends on the monitoring cost function the firm s technology and on social preferences regarding output and environmental quality pure emissions taxes are usually not optimal with monitoring costs pure output taxes are optimal under sufficiently high monitoring costs sufficiently limited options for emission reduction by means other than output reduction and sufficiently high substitutability of the output finally conditions for the optimality of mixed taxes are given

game theoretic analysis of a bankruptcy problem from the talmud abstract for three different bankruptcy problems the 2000 year old babylonian talmud prescribes solutions that equal precisely the nucleoli of the corresponding coalitional games a rationale for these solutions that is independent of game theory is given in terms of the talmudic principle of equal division of the contested amount this rationale leads to a unique solution for all bankruptcy problems which always coincides with the nucleolus two other rationales for the same rule are suggested in terms of other talmudic principles needless to say the rule in question is not proportional division

proportional concessions and the leximin solution in this note we introduce a new axiom for bargaining solutions named proportional concession monotonicity pcm which imposes that no player benefits when all players collectively make proportional concessions with respect to their respective utopia values we reconsider the leximin solution imai 1983 and obtain an alternative characterization on the basis of pcm

noncooperative regulation of a nonlocalized externality with a nonlocalized pollution externality different groups bear the costs and benefits of abatement in the case of acid rain these groups are respectively consumers in the midwest and pollutees in the northeast these groups have conflicting interests that are represented respectively by a public utilities commission and an environmental regulator we analyze a model in which the environmental protection agency acting as a von stackelberg leader regulates pollution and the public utility commission regulates the price for a monopolist that has private information about the effectiveness of its abatement alternatives we characterize a noncooperative equilibrium and compare it with a cooperative equilibrium a nonlocalized pollution externality poses special regulatory problems when the benefits and the costs of abatement are borne by distinct groups whose interests are represented by different regulatory agencies a relevant example is acid rain which is believed to be caused in part by coal fired electricity generating plants these emit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide which upon contact with moisture in the atmosphere form acid that falls with rain measures to reduce these emissions are of concern to the residents of the states in which the coal fired generating plants are located because abatement costs increase the prices they pay for electricity a number of plans have been proposed for distributing those costs more broadly but the costs of reducing the emissions of generating plants located in ohio will likely be borne in large part by ohio consumers and utilities while the benefits from abatement will largely be realized by the residents of the northeast and canada the control of a nonlocalized externality such as acid rain raises the issue of the relationship between the environmental regulator the environmental protection agency epa and the public utility commission the former is responsible for achieving an acceptable balance between the damage from pollution and the cost of abatement the latter is responsible for pricing electricity on the basis of the costs of production and pollution control one possibility is that cooperation between the two regulators leads to the joint regulation of emissions and prices cooperation would internalize the conflicting interests and mandates of the regulators but the distributive consequences of the regulatory alternatives inhibit cooperation the public utility commission for example has an interest in avoiding abate

a simulation based welfare loss calculation for labor taxes with piecewise linear budgets graduated income tax rates and transfer programs create piecewise linear budget constraints that consist of budget segments and kink points with any change in these tax rules each individual may switch between a kink point and a budget segment between two budget segments or between two kink points with errors in the estimated labor supply equation the new choice is uncertain and so the welfare effects of a tax change are uncertain we propose a simulation based method to compute expected welfare effects that is easy to implement and that fully accounts for uncertainties about choices around kink points our method also provides information about expected changes in working hours d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

asymmetric parametric division rules we describe and characterize the family of asymmetric parametric division rules for the adjudication of conflicting claims on a divisible homogeneous good as part of the characterization we present two novel axioms which restrict how a division rule indirectly allocates between different versions of the same claimant we also show that such division rules can alternately be represented as the maximization of an additively separable social welfare function

the econometrics of piecewise linear budget constraints a survey and exposition of the maximum likelihood method in this article maximum likelihood techniques for estimating consumer demand functions when budget constraints are piecewise linear are exposited and surveyed consumer demand functions are formally derived under such constraints and it is shown that the functions are themselves nonlinear as a result the econometric problems in estimating such functions are exposited and the importance of the stochastic specification is stressed in particular the specification of both unobserved heterogeneity of preferences and measurement error econometric issues in estimation and testing are discussed and the results of the studies that have been conducted to date are surveyed

urban residential demand for water in the united states further discussion using a new model formulation and data from a sample of colorado utilities we investigated the price specification controversy marginal price versus average revenue when estimating residential water demand the improved statistical fit using average

stability and collective rationality the principle of pairwise comparisons is a well established one in social choice theory the idea of collective rationality that social decisions be made consistently with the maximization of some ordering of the alternatives is the most familiar application of this principle and indeed is a defining property of the social welfare functions of bergson 1938 and samuelson 1947 and of arrow 1951 as is well known the idea of collective rationality involves comparing every social state to every other social state in terms of the welfare assigned by those states to a given group of individuals and declaring a social state to be fair or good if it is good when considering all such pairwise comparisons with other social states alternatively one could imagine a social decision process based on comparing every individual to every other individual in terms of the welfare assigned to those individuals by a given social state and declaring a social state to be good or fair if it is fair when considering all such pairwise comparisons of individuals a social decision process in this spirit has been suggested by harsanyi 1959

beyond nash bargaining theory the nash set abstract we extend nash s bargaining theory to non convex and coalitional problems this paper investigates the implications of nash like axioms for bilateral problems and the properties of consistency and converse consistency over multilateral settings the result is a characterization of the nash set of ntu games defined as the solution concept where each pair of players is splitting the gains from trade at a point where the nash product of their utilities subject to efficiency is critical the intersection of the nash set and the core is also characterized with the same axioms for the class of games where the core is non empty journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 c78

economic dualism a critical review in this paper we examine the model underlying the dual economy approach to labor market segmentation we provide a specification of the components of the model as well as the linkages between components this construction of the underlying model allows us to evaluate it systematically as a model to consider and to evaluate each component and linkage separately while we conclude that there are several important contributions to retain from the dual approach including the insight that capital structure conditions labor market outcomes we argue that it is inadequate for sustaining theoretical and empirical development as a new starting point for the study of economic and labor market segmentation we suggest a resource perspective which retains insights from the dual approach but avoids its overly restrictive assumptions

learning from a piece of pie we investigate the empirical content of the nash solution to two player bargaining games the bargaining environment is described by a set of variables that may affect agents preferences over the agreement sharing the status quo outcome or both the outcomes i e whether an agreement is reached and if so the individual shares and the environment including the size of the pie are known but neither are the agents utilities nor their threat points we consider both a deterministic version of the model in which the econometrician observes the shares as deterministic functions of the variables under consideration and a stochastic one in which because of latent disturbances only the joint distribution of incomes and outcomes is recorded we show that in the most general framework any outcome can be rationalized as a nash solution however even mild exclusion restrictions generate strong implications that can be used to test the nash bargaining assumption stronger conditions further allow to recover the underlying structure of the bargaining and in particular the cardinal representation of individual preferences in the absence of uncertainty an implication of this finding is that empirical works entailing nash bargaining could and should use much more general and robust versions than they usually do copyright 2012 oxford university press

the choquet bargaining solutions abstract we axiomatically investigate the problem of rationalizing bargaining solutions by social welfare functions that are linear in every rank ordered subset of r n such functions the so called choquet integrals have been widely used in the theories of collective and individual choice we refer to bargaining solutions that can be rationalized by choquet integrals as choquet bargaining solutions our main result is a complete characterization of choquet bargaining solutions as a corollary of our main result we also obtain a characterization of the generalized gini bargaining solutions introduced by blackorby et al 1994 econometrica 62 1161 1178 journal of economic literature classification numbers d71 c78

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

bi ethnic labor markets mono ethnic labor markets and socioeconomic inequality the research examines the role of local opportunity structure in the determination of social and economic outcomes by focusing on the impact of local labor market segregation on socioeconomic inequality between jews and arabs in israel analysis of the 1983 israeli census reveals that the rules by which minority members achieve socioeconomic status vary considerably across bi ethnic and mono ethnic labor markets arabs working in jewish communities bi ethnic labor markets suffer the detrimental consequences of both occupational and income discrimination more than any other group by contrast arabs working in arab communities mono ethnic labor markets are occupationally advantaged with the absence of competition they produce incumbents for positions usually held by jews the findings suggest that the magnitude of disadvantages that superordinate groups force on minority groups is highly dependent on the degree of group competition in the local labor market

comparing residential water demand estimates under decreasing and increasing block rates using household data using a new model formulation and data from a sample of colorado utilities we investigated the price specification controversy marginal price versus average revenue when estimating residential water demand the improved statistical fit using average

welfare and distribution effects of water pricing policies in this paper distribution and welfare effects of changes in block price systems are evaluated a method is discussed to determine for a marshallian demand function equivalent variation in case of a block price system the method is applied to compare for the metropolitan region of sao paulo alternative pricing policies on the basis of their demand welfare and distribution effects of changing water prices results show that there is a trade off between average welfare and income distribution a pro poor price system may result in lower average welfare than a flat price system but in higher individual welfare for the poor moreover there is a trade off between revenues for the water company and income distribution even though pro poor price systems may not be as good for average welfare as flat price systems their direct effects on poverty are important introducing pro poor price systems however may have financial consequences for the water companies

reference functions and balanced concessions in bargaining in bargaining agents expect their concessions to be reciprocated using the reference function concept of thomson 1981 this paper constructs a class of solutions the outcomes of which lead to balanced concessions by agents as prescribed by the reference function adopted the kalai smorodinsky solution arises as a special case another solution in this class which depends on the entire feasible set is generated by using the centre of gravity as the reference function

perception of price when price information is costly evidence from residential electricity demand a bstract residential electricity consumption is an example of a good for which it is costly to determine marginal price since price changes with the quantity purchased according to multistep block rate schedules this paper investigates the effect of the price information problem on consumers price perceptions an alternative hypothesis of average price perception is tested against the marginal price postulate which assumes wellinformed consumers the model which includes a price perception variable allows the estimation of the price to which consumers actually respond the empirical results support the hypothesis that consumers respond to average price perceived from the electricity bill

ethnic discrimination and the income of majority group workers neo classical economics suggest that workers belonging to a superordinate ethnic group gain from economic discrimination against members of a subordinate ethnic group the marxist perspective disagrees contending that superordinate workers actually lose when income differentials between jews and arabs across local labor markets in israel are decomposed into legitimate and discriminatory components the data lend support for the neoclassical perspective however the relationship between market discrimination and the income of superordinates is more complex than perceived by previous work on the topic on the average jewish workers gain from economic discrimination against arabs but they do not gain equally such discrimination results in increased income inequality among jewish workers increasing the income share received by jewish workers at the upper tail of the income distribution and decreasing the income share received by workers at the lower tail

modeling earnings dynamics in this paper we use indirect inference to estimate a joint model of earnings employment job changes wage rates and work hours over a career we use the model to address a number of important questions in labor economics including the source of the experience profile of wages the response of job changes to outside wage offers and the effects of seniority on job changes we also study the dynamic response of wage rates hours and earnings to various shocks and measure the relative contributions of the shocks to the variance of earnings in a given year and over a lifetime we find that human capital accounts for most of the growth of earnings over a career although job seniority and job mobility also play significant roles unemployment shocks have a large impact on earnings in the short run as well as a substantial long term effect that operates through the wage rate shocks associated with job changes and unemployment make a large contribution to the variance of career earnings and operate mostly through the job specific error components of wages and hours

emission taxes versus other environmental policies in the environmental policy of most countries various forms of quotas and direct regulation are more important than environmental taxes this paper addresses four arguments which are often given against the use of emission taxes the three arguments related to information asymmetries and non convexities are valid in the sense that they point to complications in the use of environmental taxes the fourth argument is related to the employment effects of different types of environmental policies in economies with unemployment although this argument is frequently used by politicians the analysis provides no justification for it on the contrary in the model used employment is higher with environmental taxes than with nonrevenue raising environmental policies

residential demand for electricity under inverted block rates evidence from a controlled experiment block rate structures are used extensively in public utility pricing including residential electricity estimating price elasticities in this context is complicated by the resulting nonlinearity of the consumer s budget constraint this article estimates the demand for electricity under inverted block rates using data from a residential rate experiment the study provides an opportunity to obtain short run price elasticities in an experimental setting and to compare alternative estimators developed for nonlinear budget constraints elasticities of demand with respect to individual components of the block rate are developed using a modification of the structural maximum likelihood estimator

the separability axiom and equal sharing methods a quasi linear social choice problem is defined as selecting one among finitely many indivisible public decision and a vector of monetary transfers among agents to cover the cost of this decision this decision is based upon individual preferences which are assumed to be additively separable and linear in money the separability axiom is a consistency property for choice methods on societies with variable size the decision is not affected if we remove an arbitrary agent under the condition that he be guaranteed his original utility level and the cost to the remaining agents is modified accordingly thus the utility level assigned by the social choice function to agent i is the price at which the other agents are unanimously willing to buy agent is share of the decision power a general characterization of choice methods satisfying this axiom is provided three subclasses of particular interest are characterized by additional milder axioms those are i equal sharing of the surplus left over some reference utility e g the utility at a status quo decision ii utilitarian methods that merely select the efficient public decision and perform no monetary transfers and iii equal allocation of nonseparable costs which divides equally the surplus left over from the utility derived from the pivotal mechanism also known as the vickrey clarke groves mechanism

regulating an externality generating public utility a multi dimensional screening approach abstract in this paper i present a monopoly screening model in which a firm holds private information on fixed abatement costs because of the nature of the optimal contracts bunching is never optimal even with n distinct types a characterization of full and limited information solutions is offered and it is shown that the design standards alone determine the value of an information rent the variable charge is completely free of any marginal information costs this allows the variable charge to track marginal damages and thereby ensures that marginal social costs are covered a fixed charge implements the optimal solution

an analysis of workers choice between employment in the public and private sectors this paper estimates the extent to which workers with different personal characteristics are likely to be employed in the public versus the private sector the author develops a reduced form two wa

on multiple discount rates we propose a theory of intertemporal choice that is robust to specific assumptions on the discount rate one class of models requires that one utility stream be chosen over another if and only if its discounted value is higher for all discount factors in a set another model focuses on an average discount factor yet another model is pessimistic and evaluates a flow by the lowest available discounted value

price and income elasticities of residential water demand a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of variations in price and income elasticities of residential water demand meta analysis constitutes an adequate tool to synthesize research results by means of an analysis of the variation in empirical estimates reported in the literature we link the variation in estimated elasticities to differences in theoretical microeconomic choice approaches differences in spatial and temporal dynamics as well as differences in research design of the underlying studies the occurrence of increasing or decreasing block rate systems turns out to be important with respect to price elasticities the use of the discrete continuous choice approach is relevant in explaining observed differences

no envy and consistency in economies with indivisible goods we consider the problem of fair allocation in economies with indivisible goods our main objective is to identify appealing subsolutions of the no envy solution we formulate desirable properties of solutions and look for solutions satisfying them given an allocation chosen by a solution for some economy and given a subgroup of the agents consider the problem of fairly distributing among its members the resources that this group has collectively received the solution is consistent if it recommends that the same bundle be attributed to each of these agents as initially we show that there is no proper subsolution of the no envy solution that satisfies consistency however many subsolutions satisfy bilateral consistency or the converse of consistency but again there is no proper subsolution satisfying these two properties together

axiomatic bargaining theory on economic environments abstract axiomatic bargaining theory is reexamined by focusing upon the economic exhange environment instead of the traditional utility possibility set it is argued that the axioms of the traditional theory impose stronger restrictions than can be supported by their motivating economic intuitions weaker alternative axioms making explicit use of economic information are used to characterize the standard bargaining solutions a key idea is to impose consistency of the solution with respect to changes in the dimension of the commodity space even these weaker economic axioms however may be unrealistic restrictions to impose on the bargaining solution in the context of many economic bargaining problems

household responses to increased water rates during the california drought this paper explores the use of fixed effects and maximum likelihood techniques to es timate household responses to water price in creases during the california drought estimates are based on bimonthly meter readings from 599 single family households in the alameda county water district over the period 1982 1992 before and after the introduction of a steeply increasing block rate price structure i find that household and monthly fixed effects models are not success ful in modeling water demand with these data however maximum likelihood models that ex plicitly consider the household s response to the rate structure result in plausible estimates of wa ter demand jel q25

appeals immune bargaining solution with variable alternative sets a bargaining solution based on the rubinstein safra thomson ordinal nash outcome is investigated in the peters wakker revealed group preferences framework assuming non expected utility preferences necessary and sufficient conditions are stated on preference pairs in order for the solution to be well defined and axiomatized uniquely

protecting the environment when costs and benefits are privately known in this survey i analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction the presence of asymmetric information calls for some important departures from the textbook prescriptions of marketable permits and emission taxes for controlling pollution for instance it may no longer be optimal to equate the social marginal benefits to the marginal cost of cleanup in determining appropriate abatement levels i conclude this review with some suggestions for future research in this area

monotonic solutions to general cooperative games etude de jeux cooperatifs qui sont des jeux a plusieurs joueurs mis sous la forme de coalition dans lesquels l utilite n est pas supposee etre transferable

evidence on the specification of price in the study of domestic water demand the development of lakefront property in northern wisconsin has prompted in several towns minimum frontage zoning stricter than the state standard such zoning generates an economic loss by constraining development development effect and an economic

regulating an externality generating utility environmental taxes under limited information global warming is currently an important item on most nationalenvironmental agendas in many countries coal fired electricity generatingstations represent an important source of greenhouse gases we examinehow regulations to curb emissions affect public utility pricing regulationwhen regulators act non cooperatively we show that when there is limitedinformation on fixed abatement costs an environmental regulator prefersan emission tax over an output tax or a lump sum environmental tax thepublic utility regulator prefers the lump sum tax regime

residential water demand in the northwest of spain a panel of monthly aggregate data from the northwest of spain is used to estimate domestic water demand functions under linear and non linear tariffs price billing climatic and sociodemographic variables are used as explanatory variables the use of intraannual data constitutes a relevant contribution in the european context overall marginal price elasticity estimates lie between 0 12 and 0 17 summer only elasticities and elasticities associated with uses beyond the effectively free allowances seem significantly higher climatic variables significantly affect monthly use although probably less than in other wealthier and drier areas domestic water use appears to be a normal good

shifting chinese organizational responses to evolving greening pressures organizations are facing various evolving pressures to green their practices these pressures range from obligatory forces to voluntary measures environmental pressures traditionally influenced organizations to seek reactive and internal practices the adopted environmental management em practices have evolved to be more proactive and external as the focus has shifted to supply chains this paper aims to further understand the driving mechanisms for em practices under various external pressures to meet this research goal this study extends the theory of dynamic incentives of environmental policies and institutional theory to develop environmental pressures using an empirical study of 422 chinese manufacturers covering all 31 provinces and provincial cities an exploratory factor analysis reveals four em practices factors and four pressures drivers factors results of a hierarchical regression analysis show that coercive pressures positively relate to more reactive internal em practices less coercive pressures positively relate to more proactive external and green supply chain management practices the empirical findings provide further support that voluntary regulatory measures can help motivate companies in extending their em efforts to supply chains the work also provides insights into how organizations may respond to evolving regulatory regimes dynamic incentives of environmental regulatory policy and various institutional pressures