understanding bank runs the importance of depositor bank relationships and networks we use a unique new database to examine micro depositor level data for a bank that faced a run we use minute by minute depositor withdrawal data to understand the effectiveness of deposit insurance the role of social networks and the importance of bank depositor relationships in influencing depositor propensity to run we employ methods from the epidemiology literature which examine how diseases spread to estimate transmission probabilities of depositors running and the significant underlying factors we find that deposit insurance is only partially effective in preventing bank runs further our results suggest that social network effects are important but are mitigated by other factors in particular the length and depth of the bank depositor relationship depositors with longer relationships and those who have availed of loans from a bank are less likely to run during a crisis suggesting that cross selling acts not just as a revenue generator but also as a complementary insurance mechanism for the bank finally we find there are long term effects of a solvent bank run in that depositors who run do not return back to the bank our results help understand the underlying dynamics of bank runs and hold important policy implications

does one soros make a difference a theory of currency crises with large and small traders do large investors increase the vulnerability of a country to speculative attacks in the foreign exchange markets to address this issue we build a model of currency crises where a single large investor and a continuum of small investors independently decide whether to attack a currency based on their private information about fundamentals even abstracting from signaling the presence of the large investor does make all other traders more aggressive in their selling relative to the case in which there is no large investors small investors attach the currency when fundamentals are stronger yet the difference can be small or null depending on the relative precision of private information of the small and large investors adding signaling makes the influence of the large trader on small traders behaviour much stronger

testing the validity of contingent behavior trip responses while a number of validity tests exist for contingent valuation data to date there are very few literature examples for contingent behavior cb data the objective of this study is to test the validity of cb trip data for different levels of rock climbing access using data from surveys implemented before and after a policy restricting recreational access was imposed results from generalized negative binomial and seemingly unrelated poisson regression models show significant sensitivity to scope and suggest that cb data may be a valuable supplement to revealed preference data when policy proposals are outside the range of historical conditions copyright 2002 oxford university press

a panel travel cost model accounting for endogenous stratification and truncation a latent class approach in this paper we develop a panel data negative binomial count model that corrects for endogenous stratification and truncation we also incorporate a latent class structure into our panel specification which assumes that the observations are drawn from a finite number of segments where the distributions differ in the intercept and the coefficients of the explanatory variables the paper argues that count data panel models corrected for on site sampling may still be inadequate and potentially misleading if the population of interest is heterogeneous with respect to the impact of the chosen explanatory variables jel q51 q57

possibilities for including the opportunity cost of time in recreation demand systems recreation demand modelers have attempted to identify and incorporate the opportunity cost of an individual s time in travel and on site in the model larson 1993b focused on the value of leisure time in a model where individuals face a fixed work week in this paper we examine the connection between labor supply and recreation demands and focus on conditional demand systems we illustrate that corner solution models are not needed to explain several interesting time related recreation issues

estimating the cost of leisure time for recreation demand models abstract in this paper we propose a method of determining the opportunity cost of leisure time with an empirical recreation demand application typically the opportunity cost of leisure time is assumed to be some fraction of the wage rate this practice has limitations first it assumes that individuals can trade time for money at their wage second it offers no guidance about how to value the time of an individual who is not in the labor force this paper proposes a method of determining this cost that does not suffer from these drawbacks an empirical example is provided which demonstrates the proposed approach and contrasts it with commonly applied approaches

the diffusion of energy efficiency in building awareness of global warming and the extent of greenhouse gas emissions has focused more attention upon energy efficiency in building moreover the inventory of green office space in the u s has increased dramatically since the introduction of rating schemes that attest to the energy efficiency or sustainability of commercial buildings in some metropolitan areas the supply of certified office buildings has more than doubled in the last decade and there are a few metropolitan areas where green office space now accounts for more than a quarter of the total office stock in this paper we analyze the diffusion of buildings certified for energy efficiency across us property markets using a panel of 48 metropolitan areas msas observed over the last 15 years we trace the diffusion of green building practices across the country we then model the geographic patterns and dynamics of building certification relating industry composition changes in economic conditions characteristics of the local commercial property market and the presence of human capital to the crosssectional variation in energy efficient building technologies and the diffusion of those technologies over time understanding the determinants and the rate at which energyefficient building practices diffuse over space and time is important for designing policies to affect resource consumption in the built environment

the individual travel cost method with consumer specific values of travel time savings the treatment of the opportunity cost of travel time in travel cost models has been an area of research interest for many decades our analysis develops a methodology to combine the travel distance and travel time data with respondent specific estimates of the value of travel time savings vtts the individual vtts are elicited with the use of discrete choice stated preference methods the travel time valuation procedure is integrated into the travel cost valuation exercise to create a two equation structural model of site valuation since the travel time equation of the structural model incorporates individual preference heterogeneity the full structure model provides a travel cost site demand model based upon individualized values of time the methodology is illustrated in a study of recreational birdwatching more specifically visits to a stork village in poland we show that the usual practice of basing respondents vtts on 1 3 of their wage rate is largely unfounded and propose alternatives including a separate component of the travel cost survey aimed at valuation of respondents vtts or as a second best asking if they wish if their journey was shorter and for those who do use full hourly wage as an indicator of their vtts

residential energy use and conservation economics and demographics energy consumption in the residential sector offers an important opportunity for conserving resources however much of the current debate regarding energy efficiency in the housing market focuses on the physical and technical determinants of energy consumption neglecting the role of the economic behavior of resident households in this paper we analyze the extent to which the use of gas and electricity is determined by the technical specifications of the dwelling as compared to the demographic characteristics of the residents our analysis is based on a sample of more than 300 000 dutch homes and their occupants the results indicate that residential gas consumption is determined principally by structural dwelling characteristics such as the vintage building type and characteristics of the dwelling while electricity consumption varies more directly with household composition in particular income and family composition combining these results with projections on future economic and demographic trends we find that even absent price increases for residential energy the aging of the population and their increasing wealth will roughly offset improvements in the energy efficiency of the building stock resulting from policy interventions and natural revitalization

bayesian persuasion in coordination games regime change games have been studied widely in the economic literature in the contexts of bank runs currency attacks political revolutions and others usually agents need to coordinate an attack against the status quo once sufficiently many agents attack the regime changes and agents who were attacking benefit from their attack otherwise the regime stays and agents who were attacking it have to bear a cost an important angle of coordination games is the transmission of information from the policymaker or the defender of the status quo to the agents who have to make a decision whether to attack the regime the policymaker can attempt to change the information available to agents to increase the likelihood of the survival of the regime in this paper we present a model where the policymaker attempts to transmit information in this spirit specifically we study a model where the policymaker can commit to abandon the regime automatically before agents choose whether to attack or not if the fundamentals determining the strength of the regime are below a certain threshold the benefit of committing to abandon the regime more often is that conditional on the regime not being automatically abandoned agents update their information to account for the fact that the fundamentals are above the threshold and so their inclination to attack decreases the disadvantage is that it directly increases the likelihood that the regime will not survive since it is automatically abandoned analyzing this problem we show that the policymaker finds it optimal to commit to abandon the regime often enough such that when agents see that the policymaker did not abandon it they choose not to attack hence the policymaker chooses to maximize the benefit out of the infor mational transmission channel from the committed policy at the same time the policymaker has no additional benefit in committing to abandon the regime beyond that point as it will cause too frequent abandonment without additional information benefits the commitment ability of the policymaker is key here we show that without commitment ability the policymaker ends up abandoning automatically less often

the demand for site specific recreational activities a characteristics approach abstract a model of constrained utility maximizing behavior is developed to explain how a representative individual allocates his ski days among alternative sites the physical characteristics of the ski areas and the individual s skiing ability are explicit arguments in the utility function the budget allocation is given along with the parametric costs to ski including travel costs entrance fees equipment costs and the opportunity cost of his time shares a site s share being the proportion of ski days that the individual spends at that site are derived and assumed multinomially distributed a stochastic specification which maintains the inherent properties of the shares maximum likelihood estimation confirms the basic hypothesis that costs ability and characteristics all are important determinants of the sites shares the model explains a large proportion of the skier s allocation of ski days a multinomial logit model of skier behavior is also developed and maximum likelihood estimates of its parameters are obtained examination of the summary statistics from my model and the logit model indicates that my model predicts the skier s choice of sites better than the logit model

dynamic global games of regime change learning multiplicity and the timing of attacks global games of regime change coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attack it have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks bank runs debt crises and political change we extend the static benchmark examined in the literature by allowing agents to take actions in many periods and to learn about the underlying fundamentals over time we first provide a simple recursive algorithm for the characterization of monotone equilibria we then show how the interaction of the knowledge that the regime survived past attacks with the arrival of information over time or with changes in fundamentals leads to interesting equilibrium properties first multiplicity may obtain under the same conditions on exogenous information that guarantee uniqueness in the static benchmark second fundamentals may predict the eventual fate of the regime but not the timing or the number of attacks finally equilibrium dynamics can alternate between phases of tranquility where no attack is possible and phases of distress where a large attack can occur even without changes in fundamentals

review of us esco industry market trends an empirical analysis of project data abstract this comprehensive empirical analysis of us energy service company esco industry trends and performance employs two parallel analytical approaches a survey of firms to estimate total industry size and a database of 1500 esco projects from which we report target markets and typical project characteristics energy savings and customer economics we estimate that industry investment for energy efficiency related services reached us 2 billion in 2000 following a decade of strong growth esco activity is concentrated in states with high economic activity and strong policy support typical projects save 150 200 mj m2 year and are cost effective with median benefit cost ratios of 1 6 and 2 1 for institutional and private sector projects the median simple payback time spt is 7 years among institutional customers 3 years is typical in the private sector reliance on dsm incentives has decreased since 1995 preliminary evidence suggests that state enabling policies have boosted the industry in medium sized states escos have proven resilient in the face of restructuring and will probably shift toward selling energy solutions with energy efficiency part of a package we conclude that appropriate policy support both financial and non financial can jump start a viable private sector energy efficiency services industry that targets large institutional and commercial industrial customers

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

a structural equations approach to modeling consumptive recreation demand abstract in this analysis we develop a two equation structural model of a count travel cost model of recreational angling demand and angling success by modeling the two equations jointly we avoid the difficulties associated with the usual approach which estimates the demand for recreational fishing sites assuming the existence of an exogenous measure of fishing quality our analysis explicitly develops the joint log likelihood function that combines the two processes we estimate our model using full information maximum likelihood methods

who matters in coordination problems we consider a common investment project that is vulnerable to a self fullling coordination failure and hence is strategically risky based on their private information agents who have heterogeneous investment incentives form expectations or sentiments about the project s outcome we nd that the sum of these sentiments is constant across dierent strategy proles and it is independent of the distribution of incentives as a result we can think of sentiment as a scarce resource divided up among the dierent payo types applying this nding we show that agents who benet little from the project s success have a large impact on the coordination process the agents with small benets invest only if their sentiment towards the project is large per unit investment cost as the average sentiment is constant a subsidy decreasing the investment costs of these agents will free up a large amount of sentiment provoking a large impact on the whole economy intuitively these agents insensitive to the project s outcome and hence to the actions of others are inuential because they modify their

is energy efficiency capitalized into home prices evidence from three u s cities abstract we test for evidence that energy efficiency features are capitalized into home prices in three u s metropolitan areas using hedonic regressions and multiple matching procedures we find that energy star certification is associated with higher sales prices in two of the markets the research triangle region of north carolina and portland oregon we find that local green certifications in portland and in austin texas are also associated with higher prices and that the estimated price impacts are larger than those from energy star matching on observables proves to be important in some cases reducing the estimated impacts compared with models without matching we calculate the implied energy savings from the estimated premiums and find that in the research triangle market the energy star premiums approximately equal the savings that program is designed to achieve but in portland the premiums are slightly greater than the program s savings due to low energy costs in the region

valuing cultural world heritage sites an application of the travel cost method to mont saint michel abstractthis article using the zonal version of the travel cost method ztcm provides the first economic valuation of recreational trips to mont saint michel msm the msm was designated as united nations educational scientific and cultural organization world heritage site in 1979 and is the most visited coastal site in france the potential effects on consumer surplus cs estimates of some aspects of the ztcm are considered namely the treatment of the multiple purpose destination mp d trips the inclusion of the opportunity cost of time oct in the recreation demand model and the heterogeneity in the preferences the heterogeneity in the preferences is examined through a random parameters poisson model rppm the rppm generalizes the standard poisson model spm by allowing coefficients of explanatory variables to vary randomly across geographical units rather than being fixed our results show that 1 substantial cs values are associated with the msm 2 excluding ignoring mp d trips resul

a theory of rational addiction we develop a theory of rational addiction in which rationality means a consistent plan to maximize utility over time strong addiction to a good requires a big effect of past consumption of the good on current consumption such powerful complementarities cause some steady states to be unstable they are an important part of our analysis because even small deviations from the consumption at an unstable steady state can lead to large cumulative rises over time in addictive consumption or to rapid falls in consumption to abstention our theory also implies that cold turkey is used to end strong addictions that addicts often go on binges that addicts respond more to permanent than to temporary changes in prices of addictive goods and that anxiety and tensions can precipitate an addiction

information inefficiency and willingness to pay for energy efficient technology a stated preference approach for china energy label abstract the paper examines the extent to which consumers willingness to pay for energy efficient room air conditioners may be altered by correcting the information inefficiency on the china energy label the data are collected from a discrete choice experiment with two alternatives variable speed and constant speed room air conditioners characterized by attributes of brand purchase price and energy grade three versions of the questionnaires with choice sets differing only in energy consumption indicators were distributed randomly to 1602 potential consumers in nanjing china and a sample of 1569 was obtained after dropping missing data the analysis with multinomial and mixed logit models reveal that the price premium that consumers are willing to pay for a variable speed room ac over a constant speed room ac increases significantly when energy consumption information becomes comparable and additional energy related information is provided furthermore the impact of information on wtp varies under different energy saving scenarios it is suggested that china energy label should correct information inefficiency by adopting same energy indicators for room acs with different technologies and providing energy consumption information based on different climate zones

energy performance certificates and investments in building energy efficiency a theoretical analysis abstract in the european union energy performance certificates epcs provide potential buyers or tenants with information on a property s energy performance by mitigating informational asymmetries on real estate markets the conventional wisdom is that they will reduce energy use increase energy efficiency investments and improve social welfare we develop a model that partly contradicts these predictions although epcs always improve social welfare in the absence of market failures other than asymmetric information their impact on energy use and investments is ambiguous and depends both on the time horizon considered and the distribution of energy needs in the population this implies that in a second best world where energy externalities are under priced epcs can damage social welfare

the value of domestic building energy efficiency evidence from ireland abstract following the transposition of the eu energy performance of buildings directive into irish law all properties offered for sale or to let in ireland are obliged to have an energy efficiency rating this paper analyses the effect of energy efficiency ratings on the sale and rental prices of properties in the republic of ireland using the heckman selection technique we model the decision to advertise the energy efficiency rating of a property and the effect of energy efficiency ratings on property values our results show that energy efficiency has a positive effect on both the sales and rental prices of properties and that the effect is significantly stronger in the sales segment of the property market we also analyse the effect of energy efficiency across different market conditions and we find that the effect of the energy rating is generally stronger where market conditions are worse

up the proverbial creek without a paddle accounting for variable participant skill levels in recreational demand modelling we adapt the standard random utility model to take account of the heterogeneity of recreational preferences by using what we call a skilled based conditional logit framework by separating out our sample of whitewater kayakers into two exogenously identifiable groups based on their skill level and running separate conditional logits for each group we are able to take account of the fact that kayakers of different skill levels are looking for different characteristics from the whitewater site they choose to visit we find that not taking into account the differences in the skill of the kayakers and the grade of the river will result in an overestimation of the welfare estimates associated with improvements to lower grade whitewater sites which are frequented by basic intermediated proficiency level kayakers and underestimating welfare estimates associated with changes in the attributes of higher grade whitewater sites which are frequented by advanced proficiency level kayakers

valuing the benefits of coastal water quality improvements using contingent and real behaviour recent moves in the european union have beenmade towards a toughening of legislation onbathing water quality this has focussedpolicy makers thoughts on the welfare benefitsresulting from such improvements especiallygiven their cost our paper uses a combinedstated and revealed preference approach tovalue coastal water quality improvements focussing on an area of scotland which hasconsistently failed to meet standards under thebathing waters directive we combine data onreal behaviour with data on contingentbehaviour using a random effects negativebinomial panel model this allows us to predictboth the change in participation trips shouldwater quality be improved and the welfareincrease per trip our model includes allowancefor the existence of substitute sites and forchanges in recreational behaviour during abeach visit

doing well by doing good green office buildings this paper provides the first credible evidence on the economic value of the certification of green buildings in the commercial sector value derived from impersonal market transactions rather than engineering estimates we match publicly available information on the addresses of energy star and leed rated office buildings to a commercial data source detailing the characteristics of u s office buildings and their rental rates we analyze the micro data on 694 certified green buildings and on 7489 other office buildings located within a quarter mile of the certified buildings we find systematic evidence that rents for green offices are about two percent higher than rents for comparable buildings located nearby effective rents i e rents adjusted for the occupancy levels in office buildings are about six percent higher in green buildings than in comparable office buildings nearby at prevailing capitalization rates conversion of the average non green building to an equivalent green building would add more than 5 million in market value these results are robust to the statistical models employed

the determinants of attitudes towards strategic default on mortgages we use survey data to measure households propensity to default on mortgages even if they can afford to pay them strategic default when the value of the mortgage exceeds the value of the house the willingness to default increases in both the absolute and the relative size of the home equity shortfall our evidence suggests that this willingness is affected by both pecuniary and non pecuniary factors such as views about fairness and morality we also find that exposure to other people who strategically defaulted increases the propensity to default strategically because it conveys information about the probability of being sued

perceptions versus objective measures of environmental quality in combined revealed and stated preference models of environmental valuation abstract this study examines perceptions and objective attribute measures in discrete choice models of recreation site choice behavior these forms of attribute measurement are examined in individual and combined revealed preference stated preference models our results suggest that the model based on perceptions slightly outperforms the models based on objective attribute measures however issues such as the definition of the choice set and the measurement of welfare present significant challenges when using perceptions data

augmenting travel cost models with contingent behavior data this paper proposes contingent behavior survey questions as a valuable supplement to observed data in travel cost models of non market demand for recreational resources a set of observed and contingent behavior results for each survey respondent allows the researcher to control for individual heterogeneity by taking advantage of panel data methods when exploring the nature of respondent demands the contingent scenarios also provide opportunities to a test for differences between observed and contingent preferences and or b assess likely demands under conditionsbeyond the domain of observed variation in costs or resource attributes most importantly contingent scenarios allow the researcher to imposeexogenously varying travel costs exogenous imposition of travel costs together with panel methods reduces the omitted variables bias that plagues observed data travel cost models of recreational demand using a convenience sample of data for illustrative purposes we show how to estimate the demand for recreational angling by combining observed and contingent behavior data we begin with simple naive pooled poisson models and progress to more theoretically appropriate fixed effects panel poisson specifications

combining revealed and stated preference data to estimate the nonmarket value of ecological services an assessment of the state of the science this paper reviews the marketing transportation and environmental economics literature on the joint estimation of revealed preference rp and stated preference sp data the rp and sp approaches are first described with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of each recognizing these strengths and weaknesses the potential gains from combining data are described a classification system for combined data that emphasizes the type of data combination and the econometric models used is proposed a methodological review of the literature is pursued based on this classification system examples from the environmental economics literature are highlighted a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each type of jointly estimated model is then presented suggestions for future research in particular opportunities for application of these models to environmental quality valuation are presented

building energy efficiency a research branch made of paradoxes abstract the literature dealing with building energy efficiency has long since debated about the possible occurrence of the so called jevons paradox in a nutshell benefiting from energy savings due to transition to high performance buildings may the same savings cause a kind of rebound effect by acting as an incentive to increase consumptions on closer inspection this is not the only paradox affecting the research branch that focuses on the energy used by the buildings and the building industry a second paradox is that investments in energy efficient solutions may contribute to energy price control which in turn lends itself to make the same investments not profitable a third paradox lies in the need to adopt energy intensive materials in order to achieve substantial energy savings in operation hence sometimes we just substitute a certain amount of operating energy with a more or less commensurate amount of embodied energy here we argue that the joint consideration of the paradoxes mentioned above should not be neglected since it brings with itself several implications needing to be disentangled whether we aim to get further enhancements in this disciplinary field

information based contagion and the implications for financial fragility abstract this paper explores a global game model of information based financial contagion by revealing information on a common fundamental factor and thereby affecting the behavior of creditors the failure of a single firm can trigger the failure of another firm the model provides a unique equilibrium framework to assess the consequences of contagion and yields some hitherto unnoticed insights while contagion increases the correlation among the financial failures of different firms its impact on the incidence of failure is ambiguous i consider an analytically tractable version of the model in which the effect on the ex ante failure probabilities is exactly zero moreover the impact of contagion increases with the relevance of a common underlying fundamental but is limited to firms near the brink of success or failure

dynamic interventions and informational linkages abstract we model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and study how endogenous government interventions mitigate coordination failures we establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness and we show that one intervention can affect another through altering the public information structure a stronger initial intervention helps subsequent interventions through increasing the likelihood of positive news but also leads to negative conditional updates our results suggest optimal policy should emphasize initial interventions when coordination outcomes tend to correlate neglecting informational externalities of initial interventions results in over or under interventions moreover saving smaller funds disproportionally more can generate greater informational benefits at smaller costs

valuing water level changes in reservoirs using two stated preference approaches an exploration of validity the combination of travel cost tcm and contingent behaviour cb methods is a relatively new research avenue in the recreational valuation community contrary to simple tcm applications tcm cb facilitates the ex ante valuation of marginal welfare effects resulting from environmental quality or quantity changes similar to the contingent valuation method cv even though tcm cb is highly policy relevant i e to inform changes in management regimes at recreational sites the validity of estimates has hardly received any attention and little is known about the performance of tcm cb compared to cv in this paper tcm cb and cv are explored with respect to several validity tests in a case study on the recreational effects of water level changes in a reservoir overall the findings reveal that tcm cb and cv perform equally well in terms of theoretical validity but that the marginal recreational value varies significantly between the two methods we also observe that both methods face similar internal difficulties with respect to the stability of values when the order of a set of valuation questions is changed

signaling in a global game coordination and policy traps this paper introduces signaling in a global game so as to examine the informational role of policy in coordination environments such as currency crises and bank runs while exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium we show that the endogenous information generated by policy interventions leads to multiple equilibria the policy maker is thus trapped into a position in which self fulfilling expectations dictate not only the coordination outcome but also the optimal policy this result does not rely on the freedom to choose out of equilibrium beliefs nor on the policy being a public signal it may obtain even if the policy is observed with idiosyncratic noise

legal political and institutional constraints on the financial crisis policy response as the financial crisis manifested itself and peaked in 2007 and 2008 the response of us policymakers and regulators was shaped in important ways by legal and political constraints policymakers lacked certain legal authorities that would have been useful for addressing the crisis notably to use public capital to stabilize the banking sector or to deal with the failure of large financial firms such as insurance companies and investment banks that were outside the scope of bank regulators authority to resolve deposit taking commercial banks legal constraints were keenly felt at the us department of the treasury where i served as a senior official from december 2006 to january 2009 treasury had virtually no emergency economic authority at the onset of the crisis in 2007 with the exception of the treasury s exchange stabilization fund which was intended for use in exchange rate interventions as the systemic risks of the financial crisis became apparent the initial policy response largely fell to the federal reserve which had the authority to act under emergency circumstances there will inevitably be another financial crisis and the response will be shaped by both the lessons learned from recent history and the statutory and political changes in the wake of the crisis the paper thus concludes by discussing changes in constraints since the crisis with a focus on two developments 1 the political reality that there will not in the near future be another wide ranging grant of fiscal authority as was given with the troubled asset relief program and 2 the new legal authorities provided in the wall street reform and consumer protection act of 2010 commonly known as the dodd frank law

the economics of green building we analyze the economics of green building finding that recent increases in the supply of green buildings and the volatility in prop erty markets have not affected the returns to green buildings we then analyze a large cross section of office buildings demonstrating that eco nomic returns to energy efficient buildings are substantial finally we relate the economic premiums for green buildings to their relative effi ciency in energy use the attributes rated for thermal efficiency as well as sustainability contribute to premiums in rents and asset values among green buildings increased energy efficiency is fully capitalized into rents and asset values

forced sales and house prices the market for housing differs in several important ways from the textbook model of a liquid asset market with exogenous fundamentals this implies that the price at which a house is sold can be influenced not only by general supply and demand conditions but also by idiosyncratic factors including the urgency of the sale and the effects of the ownership transfer on the physical quality of the house first houses are productive only when people are living in them owning an empty house is equivalent to throwing away the dividend on a financial asset second houses are fragile assets that need maintenance and are vulnerable to van dalism unoccupied houses are particularly vulnerable and expensive to protect third short term rental contracts involve high transactions costs resulting from the moving costs of renters and the need of homeowners to protect their property against damage fourth houses are expensive indivisible and heterogeneous assets each house has certain unique characteristics which are likely to appeal to certain poten tial buyers and not to others so selling a house requires matching it with an appro priate buyer because of the high costs of intermediation in housing this task is normally undertaken by a real estate broker rather than a dealer fifth most home owners must finance their purchases using mortgages collateralized debt contracts that transfer home ownership to the mortgage lender through a foreclosure process if the homeowner defaults the expansion of mortgage credit in the early 2000s and the recent decline in house prices have led to an unprecedented increase in foreclosures since 2006 foreclosures transfer houses to financial institutions which must maintain and pro tect them until they can be sold foreclosed houses are likely to sell at low prices both because they may have been physically damaged during the foreclosure pro cess and because financial institutions have an incentive to sell them quickly in a liquid market an asset can be sold rapidly with a minimal impact on its price but

fear of fire sales illiquidity seeking and credit freezes is there any need to clean up a banking system in the midst of a crisis for instance by closing some weak banks and forcing others to sell bad assets or can one wait till the crisis is over we argue that an overhang of impaired banks that may be forced to sell assets in the future can increase the private returns to holding illiquid assets sufficiently that weak banks have no interest in selling them anticipating a potential future fire sale cash rich buyers have high expected returns to holding cash which also reduces their incentive to lock up money in term loans the potential for a worse fire sale than necessary as well as the associated decline in credit origination could make the crisis worse which is one reason it may make sense to clean up the system even in the midst of the crisis we discuss alternative ways of cleaning up the system and the associated costs and benefits

supply demand and the value of green buildings attention to sustainability and energy efficiency rating schemes in the commercial property sector has increased rapidly during the past decade in the uk commercial properties have been certified under the breeam rating scheme since 1999 offering fertile ground to investigate the economic dynamics of green certification in the commercial property market this paper documents that over the 2000 09 period the expanding supply of green buildings within a given london neighbourhood had a positive impact on average rents and prices but reduced rents and prices for environmentally certified real estate the results suggest that there is a gentrification effect from green buildings however each additional green building decreases the marginal effect of certification in the rental and transaction markets by 2 per cent and 5 per cent respectively in addition controlling for lease contract features like contract length and the rent free period modifies the impact of environmental certification on

heterogeneity and stability bolster the strong not the weak we first study a stylized model of self fulfilling panic among agents with differing fragilities to strategic risk and show that depending on the severity of coordination problems the panic trigger threshold can depend only on one type s fragility we then present a model of systemic panic among financial institutions with heterogeneous fragilities to financial spillovers concerns about potential spillovers generate strategic interaction triggering a pre emption game in which one tries to exit the market before others to avoid spillovers although financial contagion originates in weaker institutions systemic risk can critically depend on financial health of stronger in the contagion chain in this case bolstering the strong rather than the weak more effectively enhances systemic stability

does accounting for preference heterogeneity improve the forecasting of a random utility model a case study abstract this paper examines the out of sample forecasting performance of several random utility models of recreation behavior the application is salmon fishing on lake michigan in 1996 and 1997 with the quality of fishing as measured by catch rates better in 1997 than in 1996 the models examined are a logit model two random parameters logit rpl models and a latent class logit lcl model results indicate that the rpl and lcl models forecast equally well and by at least one measure the logit model outperforms them both results also raise the possibility that recreational fishing decisions have a dynamic component

the impact of energy labels and accessibility on office rents abstract energy consumption in the commercial property sector offers an important opportunity for conserving resources in this study we evaluate the financial implications of two elements of sustainability energy efficiency and accessibility in the market for commercial real estate an empirical analysis of some 1100 leasing transactions in the netherlands over the 2005 2010 period shows that buildings designated as inefficient with an eu energy performance certificate d or worse command rental levels that are some 6 5 percent lower as compared to energy efficient but otherwise similar buildings labeled a b or c furthermore this study shows that office buildings in multi functional areas with access to public transport and facilities achieve rental premiums over mono functional office districts for policymakers the results documented in this paper provide an indication on the effectiveness of the eu energy performance certificate as a market signal in the commercial property sector the findings documented here are also relevant for investors in european office markets as the importance of energy efficiency and locational diversification is bound to increase following stricter environmental regulation and changing tenant preferences

the price premium for green labelled housing evidence from china the chinese central government introduced the chinese green building label in 2008 which makes china one of the few developing countries with an official rating system of buildings performance in sustainability this paper investigates the existence and magnitude of the price premium associated with this official green label in the residential sector based on a unique data set of green labelled newly built housing projects and their non labelled counterparts from around the country in 2013 an empirical analysis suggests that the labelled housing projects attract a price premium of 6 9 compared with their non labelled counterparts further analysis suggests that this official green label is more effective as a reliable signal of buildings energy efficiency in the chinese context compared with developers self advertised greenness these results provide preliminary evidence that with this official rating system the investment in buildings energy efficiency could be potentially profitable for ho

spite and development in a wide variety of settings spiteful preferences would constitute an obstacle to cooperation trade and thus economic development this paper shows that spiteful preferences the desire to reduce another s material payoff for the mere purpose of increasing one s relative payoff are surprisingly widespread in experiments conducted in one of the least developed regions in india uttar pradesh in a one shot trust game the authors find that a large majority of subjects punish cooperative behavior although such punishment clearly increases inequality and decreases the payoffs of both subjects in experiments to study coordination and to measure social preferences the findings reveal empirical patterns suggesting that the willingness to reduce another s material payoff either for the sake of achieving more equality or for the sake of being ahead is stronger among individuals belonging to high castes than among those belonging to low castes because extreme social hierarchies are typically accompanied by a culture that stresses status seeking it is plausible that the observed social preference patterns are at least partly shaped by this culture thus an exciting question for future research is the extent to which different institutions and cultures produce preferences that are conducive or detrimental to economic development

does energy efficiency matter to home buyers an investigation of epc ratings and transaction prices in england abstract this paper investigates whether energy performance ratings as measured by mandatory energy performance certificates epcs are reflected in the sale prices of residential properties this is the first large scale empirical study of this topic in england involving 333 095 dwellings sold at least twice in the period from 1995 to 2012 applying hedonic regression and an augmented repeat sales regression we find a positive relationship between the energy efficiency rating of a dwelling and the transaction price per square metre the price effects of superior energy performance tend to be higher for terraced dwellings and flats compared to detached and semi detached dwellings the evidence is less clear cut for rates of house price growth but remains supportive of a positive association overall the results of this study suggest that energy efficiency labels have a measurable and significant impact on house prices in england

the impacts of energy efficiency policies meta analysis abstract this paper attempts to quantitatively summarize the existing empirical evidence on the effects of energy efficiency policies on energy demand and on the price of associated durable goods as well as to identify the main factors that systematically affect the estimated impacts to this end a meta regression analysis of the effects of energy efficiency policies is carried out on the basis of an extensive review of the existing literature selecting those studies that analyze the impact of energy efficiency policies with respect to a business as usual setting taking into account the econometric problems associated with this type of analysis intra class correlation cross sectional dependence publication bias in pursuit of robust outcomes the results show that the studies analyzing the effects of energy efficiency policies estimate a significant impact of these policies on energy demand 10 5 8 8 and the price of related durable goods 7 9 6 the main factors that influence results are the policy instrument the targeted sector the type of country the analyzed period the consideration of free riders and the type of analysis data and publication energy demand and the sector and analyzed period price of durables