estimating residential demand for electricity in greece abstract this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in greece the issues of structural stability price and income sensitivity of both long and short run residential demand for electricity in greece were examined employing monthly data over the period 1986 1999 the long run residential demand for electricity is estimated taking into account changes in weather conditions weighted by the size of the population employing multivariate framework analysis a long run residential demand function for electricity sensitive to real income price level and weather conditions is found to exist and the importance of short run deviations is presented using vector error correction model vecm estimation the empirical evidence suggests the presence of a stable residential demand for electricity in greece both in the long and short run periods and the policy implications of such a relationship are presented

analysis of energy intensity in japan this study discusses the causes of the increase in japan s energy intensity defined as energy consumption divided by gdp since the early 1990s the significant reduction in japan s energy intensity ceased in the early 1980s and has even slightly increased since the early 1990s indicating that japan seemingly stopped taking aggressive action to improve energy use however further analysis at prefecture level and sector level provides additional insight on energy intensity trends to analyze the causes of the increase in japan s energy intensity energy intensity is decomposed into energy efficiency improvements in energy efficiency and energy activity structural changes from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector of the economy our result indicates that the non uniform energy intensity trends between prefectures are attributed to a high variability in energy efficiency at sector level we estimate the income elasticity of energy consumption in each sector and find that a structural change in energy consumption behaviors occurred in all sectors at different time points the industrial sector and commercial sector became less energy efficient after 1981 and 1988 respectively which is presumably responsible for the deterioration of japan s energy intensity since the early 1990s

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

growth forecasts belief manipulation and capital markets abstract we analyze how a benevolent privately informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy s growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs we model two types of agent conforming and dissenting the former has a prior that is identical to that of the government agency whereas the latter has a prior that differs from that of the government agency we identify both informative and uninformative equilibria informative equilibria are equilibria in which the government agency s equilibrium signal leads to a revision of beliefs we demonstrate that the uninformative equilibria can in fact dominate the informative ones in terms of ex post social welfare

transparency and economic policy we provide a two period model of political competition in which voters imperfectly observe the electoral promises made to other voters imperfect observability generates an incentive for candidates to offer excessive transfers even if voters are homogeneous and taxation is distortionary government spending is larger than in a world of perfect observability transfers are partly financed through government debt and the size of the debt is higher in less transparent political systems the model provides an explanation of fiscal churning it also predicts that groups whose transfers are less visible to others receive higher transfers and that imperfect transparency of transfers may lead to underprovision of public goods from the policy perspective the main novelty of our analysis is a separate evaluation of the transparency of spending and the transparency of revenues we show that the transparency of the political system does not unambiguously improve efficiency transparency of spending is beneficial but transparency of revenues can be counterproductive because it endogenously leads to increased wasteful spending

meaning and credibility in cheap talk games i define neologism proofness a refinement of perfect bayesian equilibrium in cheap talk games it applies when players have a preexisting common language so that an unexpected message s literal meaning is clear and only credibility restricts communication i show that certain implausible equilibria are not neologism proof in some games no equilibrium is journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 d82 c73

the demand for residential electricity in south africa abstract this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in south africa as a function of real gross domestic product per capita and the price of electricity during the period 1978 2005 we make use of the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed framework suggested by pesaran et al 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 16 3 289 326 following the literature we use a linear double logarithmic form using income and price as independent variables in the empirical analysis in the long run we find that income is the main determinant of electricity demand while electricity price is insignificant

the family and the state the immaturity of children sometimes precludes efficient arrangements between children and parents or others responsible for child care the difficulty in establishing efficient relations within families provides the point of departure for our interpretation of the heavy state involvement in the family the authors believe that a surprising number of state interventions mimic the agreements that would occur if children were capable of arranging for their care many regulations of the family improve the efficiency of family activities these interventions include subsidies to education and training social security and other old age support subsidies to births laws that limit access to divorce and the sale of children and laws that require parents permission for early marriage and other choices of children families that leave bequests can force children to repay parents for investments in human capital by reducing bequests therefore these families do not underinvest in childrens human capital by contrast families that do not leave bequests often poorer families do underinvest in children the state may subsidize schools and other training facilities to raise investments in children by poorer families to efficient levels authors modified

household energy consumption versus income and relative standard of living a panel approach our fundamental premise is that energy consumption at the household level is a key indicator of standard of living we employ state of the art panel cointegration techniques to evaluate the nature of the relationship between income measures and energy consumption measures for seven east indian ocean countries the general finding is that income and household electricity consumption are not cointegrated given this finding we conclude that standard of living measures that rely on income measures and do not include household level energy consumption information will necessarily miss important indications of both levels and changes of standard of living

capital income taxation and long run growth new perspectives abstract we study the effects of capital income taxation on long run growth in an endogenous growth framework with two distinguishing features endogenous population and international capital mobility endogenizing population growth introduces a new channel for taxes to affect economic growth and enables us to discriminate the effects of taxes on total versus per capita income growth allowing for capital mobility in the open economy we show how the effects of taxes on population growth and income growth across countries will vary in specific ways depending on the international income tax regimes and the relative preference bias of people towards the quantity and quality of their children the numerical results based on our calibrated model for the g 7 nations also indicate that although the effects of liberalizing capital flows on long run growth may not be very sizable the growth effects of changes in capital income tax rates can be tremendously magnified by cross border capital flows and cross border spillovers of policy effects

short and long run elasticities in energy demand a cointegration approach abstract short and long run energy demand elasticities are estimated on danish annual data for 1948 1990 energy consumption the real price of energy and real gdp appear to be non stationary variables cointegration and error correction methods are therefore applied all estimated parameters have the expected signs and magnitudes and no evidence is found of a structural break in energy demand caused by the increases in real energy prices since 1973 74

learning from prices public communication and welfare we study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks using a micro founded macroeconomic model in which agents learn from the distribution of nominal prices while a public release has the direct beneficial effect of providing new information it also has the indirect adverse effect of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system we show that the negative indirect effect can dominate thus the public information release may increase uncertainty about the monetary shock and reduce welfare we find that the optimal communication policy is always to release either all or none of the information

is everything neutral in his well known analysis of the national debt robert barro introduced the notion of a dynastic family this notion has since become a standard research tool particularly in the areas of public finance and macroeconomics in this paper we critique the assumptions on which the dynastic model is predicated and argue that this framework is not a suitable abstraction in contexts in which the objective is to analyze the effects of public policies we reach this conclusion by formally considering a world in which each generation consists of a large number of distinct individuals as opposed to one representative individual we point out that family linkages form complex networks in which each individual may belong to many dynastic groupings the resulting proliferation of linkages between families gives rise to a host of neutrality results including the irrelevance of all public redistributions distortionary taxes and prices since these results are not at all descriptive of the real world we conclude

a theory of ambiguity credibility and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information this paper develops a positive theory of credibility ambiguity and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information the monetary policymaker maximizes his own politically motivated objective function that is positively related to economic stimulation through monetary surprises and negatively related to monetary growth the relative importance he assigns to each target shifts stochastically through time his current preference trade off is known to him but not to the public when choosing the state contingent path of money growth for the present and the future the policymaker compares the benefits from current stimulation with the costs associated with higher future inflation expectations current monetary growth conveys information to the public about future money growth because there is persistence in the policymaker s objectives although expectations are rational information is imperfect because monetary control procedures are imprecise as a result the public cannot correctly distinguish persistent changes of emphasis on different policy objectives from transitory monetary control errors the public becomes aware of changes gradually by observing past monetary growth credibility is defined in terms of the speed with which the public recognizes changes in the objectives of the policymaker credibility is lower the noisier monetary control and the more stable the objectives of the policymaker looser monetary control and a higher degree of time preference on the part of the policymaker induce him to produce higher and more variable monetary growth when the policymaker is free to determine the accuracy of monetary control he does not always choose the most effective control available in spite of the fact that monetary surprises always have an expected value of zero the reason is that ambiguous control procedures enable the policymaker to generate positive surprises when he cares more than on average about economic stimulation he leaves the inevitable negative surprises for periods in which he cares more about inflation prevention this result provides an explanation for the fed s preference for ambiguity recently documented by goodfriend 1986 the policymaker is more likely to pick more ambiguous control procedures the more uncertain his objectives and the higher his time preference the paper also provides a theoretical underpinning for the well documented crosscountry positive correlation between the level and the variability of inflation

stoking the fires co2 emissions and economic growth abstract we examine the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide emissions a greenhouse gas central to global warming predictions estimates derived from global panel data suggest a diminishing marginal propensity to emit mpe carbon dioxide as gdp per capita rises despite this global carbon dioxide emissions growth will continue at 1 8 percent per annum for the foreseeable future a result that is not sensitive to average output growth instead emissions growth continues because output and population will grow most rapidly in lower income nations with high mpes this latter feature emphasizes the distributional consequences of policies to reduce emissions

residential electricity demand dynamics in turkey abstract this article provides fresh empirical evidences for the income and price elasticies of the residential energy demand both in the short run and long run for turkey over the period 1968 2005 using the bounds testing procedure to cointegration the computed elasticities of income and price are consistent with the previous studies and as expected the long run elasticities are greater than the short run elasticities an augmented form of granger causality analysis is implemented among residential electricity income price and urbanization in the long run causality runs interactively through the error correction term from income price and urbanization to residential energy but the short run causality tests are inconclusive the parameter stability of the short run as well as long run coefficients in the residential energy demand function are tested the results of these tests display a stable pattern

optimal policy intervention and the social value of public information svensson 2006 argues that morris and shin s 2002 analysis is contrary to what is claimed actually pro transparency this paper re examines the issue but with an important modification to the original morris and shin framework recognizing that central banks impact on the economy not only indirectly via their public announcements but also directly through their policy actions we consider the social value of public information in the presence of active policy intervention our results strengthen morris and shin s conclusions considerably in particular we find that public disclosure of the central bank s information is always undesirable

estimating energy elasticity with structural changes in japan abstract the purpose of this paper is to estimate energy elasticity in japan taking into account structural changes we employ a residual based cointegration model developed by gregory and hansen gregory allan w hansen bruce e 1996 residual based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts journal of econometrics 70 99 126 the empirical results show that the three variables have a stable relationship in the long term when considering structural changes in the second quarter of 1993 as compared with the values obtained in previous studies the income elasticity is higher and the price elasticity is lower from our analysis we can confirm whether a carbon tax will meet the objective of the kyoto protocol in conclusion the tax rate required in the case without structural changes is lower than that in the case with structural changes

from mill town to board room the rise of women s paid labor the widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago this paper documents this dramatic change in women s social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics expectations and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women history suggests that change in women s labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women and also of men into the labor market

energy intensity trend explained for sao paulo state abstract a sectorial analysis and a logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi technique are used in this paper to decompose the energy intensity of the state of sao paulo from 1995 to 2012 into the economic activity effect and the energy efficiency effect this study contributes the following observations 1 the world energy intensity has decreased steadily but the energy intensity of the sao paulo state has been volatile and has declined 2 3 since 1995 2 in the period of study declining energy intensity of the primary and tertiary sectors was observed in contrast the energy intensity of the secondary sector has been gradually increasing 3 the energy efficiency effect was the primary driver of energy intensity change through 2007 and the economic activity effect subsequently had an increasingly more important role in the change 4 the economic structure remained constant until 2004 when the services sector shift became more significant it is hypothesized that the increasing energy intensity from 2005 to 2009 was caused by the growth of inefficient sugarcane bagasse consumption

social security in a non altruistic model with uncertainty and endogenous fertility abstract the effect of social security on fertility and saving is analyzed within a nonaltruistic model of intergenerational transfers both in the absence and in the presence of a perfect capital market fertility is reduced by a budget balanced increase in social security if the individuals have a high degree of risk aversion savings are unambiguously increased by an expansion of social security while the effect of a deficit financed expansion of the social security system on saving and fertility depends on the characteristics of the policy package considered

bequest behavior and the effect of heirs earnings testing the altruistic model of bequests that parents transfer resources to children because of altruistic concern is a reasonable a priori assumption however economic theories of altruistic transfers have produced many counterintuitive conclusions and consequently much debate when applied to bequests these theories predict that inheritances will compensate for earnings differences between siblings as well as between parents and children this paper tests these implications using a new data set centered on federal estate tax returns little support can be found for an altruistic theory of bequests this finding has implications for macroeconomic policy government transfer programs and inequality copyright 1996 by american economic association

the effects of compulsory schooling on growth income distribution and welfare abstract in this paper we consider an olg model with productive capital and human capital affecting the quality of labor in each generation parents invest in their children s education but disregard its external effect on the aggregate production function government intervention in providing compulsory schooling increases economic growth along the equilibrium path while the intragenerational income distribution becomes more equal also in the long run the majority of individuals in each generation are better off due to compulsory schooling

matriculation in u s economics ph d programs how many accepted americans do not enroll using a sample of 26 u s economics ph d programs in fall 2003 we estimate that only about 12 percent of the u s and canadian students accepted for doctoral study did not enroll in any u s economics ph d program in fall 2003 or fall 2004 it is not possible to increase the supply of new ph d economists substantially by closing the sale on accepted applicants additional qualified applicants are needed nonmatriculants are remarkably similar to enrollees in demographics prior education test scores and fields of special interest but express less interest in economic research and are less likely to have been offered financial aid an expected financial aid deficiency was also the most cited reason for deciding not to matriculate followed by how long it takes to earn an economics ph d and the expectation of higher lifetime earnings in a career other than economics most who decided against an economics ph d enrolled in an alternative graduate program this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

cheap talk with two audiences these problems have in common a simple structure an informed sender says something to two interested but uninformed receivers who then take actions based on their beliefs these actions affect the sender as well as the receivers in this paper we study how costless nonverifiable claims cheap talk can affect these beliefs and hence the actions and how the incentives for truthful revelation to one receiver are affected by the presence of the other we then ask how welfare is affected by whether claims are made in public or in private as some of the above examples suggest public messages may be more credible than private messages addressed to either audience one possibility is that the presence of one audience can discipline the sender s relationship with the other we call this one sided

a bequest constrained economy welfare analysis bequest constraints have played a major role in discussions of debt neutrality but their welfare implications were not sufficiently dealt with in the literature in this paper we focus on the welfare implications of bequest constraints we found that when institutional constraints to the transfer of resources from children to their parents exists the welfare of the parents generation may be improved by an old age security scheme such a scheme is justified not by income redistribution consideration as is typically the case but rather on pure efficiency grounds due to its intergenerational transfer role the social security scheme is pareto improving with altruistic parents if in addition the real income effect which tends to raise children consumption is relatively strong this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

central bank communication and monetary policy a survey of theory and evidence over the last two decades communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy these real world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication mostly empirical and almost all of it written in this decade we survey this ever growing literature the evidence suggests that communication can be an important and powerful part of the central bank s toolkit since it has the ability to move financial markets to enhance the predictability of monetary policy decisions and potentially to help achieve central banks macroeconomic objectives however the large variation in communication strategies across central banks suggests that a consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes an optimal communication strategy

federal reserve information and the behavior of interest rates this paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public by examining federal reserve and commercial inflation forecasts it demonstrates that the federal reserve has considerable information about inflation beyond what is known to commercial forecasters it also shows that monetary policy actions provide signals of the federal reserve s information and that commercial forecasters modify their forecasts in response to those signals these findings may explain why long term interest rates typically rise in response to shifts to tighter monetary policy jel e52 e43 d82 asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public is a phenomenon that is often posited but rarely tested numerous models of central bank behavior for example show that the existence of asymmetric information has important implications for the effectiveness of policy and the consequences of dynamic inconsistency yet there

the effect of gnp announcements on fluctuations of gnp growth abstract this paper is an empirical study of the degree in which perceptions affect the evolution of the economy we study the effects of the announcements that the government makes on gnp growth these announcements are subject to a substantial degree of noise and its accuracy improves with time a revised number is published several years after the first announcement was made public we consider that the final revision is the true value of gnp growth we show that once announcements are taken into account the true value of gnp growth at time t has no predictive power in determining growth at any future time all the predictive power lies in the announcements and not in the true level of growth actually we show that the variable that determines future growth is the unexpected part of the announcements we also show that announcements affect growth via aggregate investment

energy consumption and economic activity in industrialized economies a note abstract in industrialized countries the income elasticity of primary energy demand is not far off unity furthermore it can be argued that there is little use in distinguishing between short and long term income elasticities a long term income elasticity does not have a direct impact on energy demand and hence it is of doubtful use in energy demand projections via an aggregate oecd model it was estimated that the short term impact of prices on primary energy demand is about 0 15 while the long term impact is 0 43 but increasing over time

communication and monetary policy recent trends toward greater central bank independence and the adoption of formal inflation targeting by several countries have served to emphasize the importance of communication policy in this paper we explore some of the economic effects of public information that arise whenever public information serves the dual role of conveying fundamental information as well as serving as a focal point for better coordination more precise public information is a double edged tool while it is very effective in influencing actions through coordination sometimes it can be too effective and coordinate actions away from fundamentals copyright 2002 oxford university press

electricity consumption in g7 countries a panel cointegration analysis of residential demand elasticities this article applies recently developed panel unit root and panel cointegration techniques to estimate the long run and short run income and price elasticities for residential demand for electricity in g7 countries the panel results indicate that in the long run residential demand for electricity is price elastic and income inelastic the study concludes that from an environmental perspective there is potential to use pricing policies in the g7 countries to curtail residential electricity demand and thus curb carbon emissions in the long run

cheap talk and the fed a theory of imprecise policy announcments this paper examines the problem faced by the federal reserve in announcing its private information about its future policies because it would like to manipulate expectations and pursue a time inconsistent policy the fed cannot reveal its policy objectives precisely and credibly it can however communicate some information about its goals through the cheap talk mechanism of vincent crawford and joel sobel making announcements that are imprecise and only giving ranges within which these goals may lie copyright 1989 by american economic association

market distortions and government transparency in this paper we investigate how government transparency depends on economic distortions we first consider an abstract class of economies in which a benevolent policy maker is privately informed about the exogenous state of the economy and contemplates whether to release this information our key result is that distortions limit communication even if transparency is ex ante pareto superior to opaqueness it cannot constitute an equilibrium when distortions are sufficiently high we next confirm this broad insight in two applied contexts in which monopoly power and income taxes are the specific sources of distortions jel d82 e61

regional energy efficiency evaluation in china a super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs abstract with the rapid development of global economy the demand for energy has increased significantly therefore energy efficiency improvement is essential for global energy and economic transformation in the chinese context study on the energy efficiency of various provinces can contribute to better understand china s energy utilization status and provide policy implications for improving china s energy utilization efficiency in this study based on the super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs the energy efficiency of china s 30 provinces in 2013 and 2014 was investigated then the energy efficiency of the eastern central and western china was compared and further discussed finally according to the results the relevant policy implications were put forward the results showed that china s overall energy efficiency had decreased while taking the undesirable outputs into consideration in addition eastern china had the highest energy efficiency and the energy efficiency of western china was relatively low the energy efficiency gap among china s provinces was still large therefore it was necessary to improve china s overall energy efficiency by developing targeted policies considering regional conditions

does the new economy measure up to the great inventions of the past abstract during the four years 1995 99 u s productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age of 1913 72 accordingly many observers have declared the new economy to be an industrial revolution even more important than the second industrial revolution of 1860 1900 which made the golden age of productivity growth possible this paper dissects the recent productivity revival subtracts out a cyclical component and concludes that there is no revival of the productivity growth trend in the 88 percent of the private economy lying outside of the durables manufacturing sector the paper explains this surprising finding by pointing to limitations in computers and the internet in comparison with the great inventions of the past

social security and endogenous growth abstract this paper examines the effects of social security on the steady state growth of per capita income in an endogenous growth model in which agents care about their own consumption the number of children and the welfare of each child it shows that an unfunded program may simulate growth by reducing fertility and increasing the ratio of human capital investment per child to per family income when bequests are positive also it may cause faster growth than funded programs especially when receipts from funded programs are independent of contributions when voluntary saving is positive funded social security is neutral if receipts are linked to contributions and most likely depresses growth if receipts are independent of contributions

efficient use of information and social value of information this paper analyzes equilibrium and welfare for a tractable class of economies games that have externalities strategic complementarity or substitutability and heterogeneous information first we characterize the equilibrium use of information complementarity heightens the sensitivity of equilibrium actions to public information raising aggregate volatility whereas substitutability heightens the sensitivity to private information raising cross sectional dispersion next we define and characterize an efficiency benchmark designed to address whether the equilibrium use of information is optimal from a social perspective the efficient use of information reflects the social value of aligning choices across agents finally we examine the comparative statics of equilibrium welfare with respect to the information structure the social value of information is best understood by classifying economies according to the inefficiency if any in the equilibrium use of information we conclude with a few applications including production externalities beauty contests business cycles and large cournot and bertrand games

residential electricity demand in taiwan this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in taiwan as a function of household disposable income population growth the price of electricity and the degree of urbanization short and long term effects are separated through the use of an error correction model in the long run the income elasticity is unit elastic the own price effect is negative and inelastic in an error correction framework the short run income and price effects are small and less than the long run effects cooling degree day effects have a positive impact on short run consumption we have used a proxy variable urbanization to capture economic development characteristics and changes in electricity using capital stocks not explained by income the variable provides significant explanatory power to the model both in the short and long run we interpret it as controlling for economic development factors not captured by the pure income effect and we think it holds promise for explaining residential electricity consumption in other developing countries

structural breaks energy consumption and economic growth revisited evidence from taiwan abstract this paper studies the stability between energy consumption and gdp for taiwan during 1954 2003 we use aggregate as well as various disaggregate data of energy consumption including coal oil gas and electricity to employ the unit root tests and the cointegration tests allowing for structural breaks our main findings are first though gas consumption seems to have structural breaks in the 1960s after considering the structural breaks the series is a stationary variable when taiwan adopted its expansionary export trade policy second we find that different directions of causality exist between gdp and various kinds of energy consumption the empirical result shows unanimously in the long run that energy acts as an engine of economic growth and that energy conservation may harm economic growth third the cointegration between energy consumption and gdp is unstable and some economic events may affect the stability overall we do find the structural breakpoints and they look to match clearly with the corresponding critical economic incidents

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

demand elasticities in oecd dynamical aspects abstract four models with different lag structures are used to express final energy demand in oecd from 1960 1982 as a function of real gdp and average energy price the income and long run price elasticities are not significantly dependent on the model specification but the koyck lag scheme estimated in its distributed lag form is found to give the most satisfactory results the statistical properties of the data together with evidence of trends in the elasticities both suggest that the period of falling real prices prior to 1971 is not comparable to the present period for the period after 1971 an income elsticity of 1 02 and a long run price elasticity of 0 37 are obtained

energy consumption and economic activity in industrialized countries the dynamic aggregate time series relationship abstract most econometric studies suggest that the income elasticity of demand for energy is approximately unity for the developed market economies it is shown that over the period 1950 1978 the long run income elasticity is substantially higher than unity in terms of a ces energy demand function this result reflects the application of a generalized dynamic estimation methodology where serial correlation is regarded as a diagnostic guide to distributed lag fitting price elasticities are also estimated but these are in line with conventional estimates

the macroeconomic effects of false announcements suppose that the government were to announce the economy will be booming in six months and this announcement is based on false data what effect would such an announcement have on future aggregate activity this paper employs revisions of the series of leading economic indicators to test the hypothesis that such an announcement would have a positive effect on future activity we find that the evidence is generally consistent with the hypothesis and that for the time period 1976 1988 the expectational shocks measured by these revisions explain over 20 percent of the fluctuation in the quarterly growth rate of industrial production

social value of public information comment morris and shin 2002 is actually pro transparency not con the main result of morris and shin 2002 restated in papers by amato morris and shin 2002 and amato and shin 2003 and commented upon by the economist 2004 has been presented and interpreted as an anti transparency result more public information can be bad however some scrutiny of the result shows that it is actually pro transparency except in very special circumstances more public information is good furthermore for a conservative benchmark of equal precision in public and privateinformation social welfare is higher than in as ituation without public information

ageing fertility and growth this paper analyses the interaction between human capital accumulation fertility and labour participation of families in the presence of technology shocks altruistic families spend time on the education of their children to increase their level of human capital compensating transfers through negative bequests are blocked by an active bequest constraint productivity shocks increase the opportunity costs of children and may cause a drop in fertility which results in population ageing we investigate the effects of ageing on allocation and welfare in the presence of a pay as you go payg pension system

is the extended family altruistically linked direct tests using micro data this paper uses panel study of income dynamics data on parents and their adult children to test the standard altruism model this model predicts that within the extended family the distribution of consumption is independent of the distribution of resources the authors findings strongly reject this prediction copyright 1992 by american economic association