price determination in the eu ets market theory and econometric analysis with market fundamentals abstract we investigate the price determination of the european union emission allowance eua of the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets we postulate an uncertain permit price and risk averse firms which have the possibility to hedge in the forward market the firms produce final goods abate their emissions and trade permits in the permit market the dependence of the equilibrium permit price on exogenous variables is studied in a permit market model we test our theoretical findings with empirical data from 2005 to 2010 in the eu ets market we use daily forward prices of eua as our dependent variable we use several econometric models with multiple stationary time series to discover that there is a strong relationship between the fundamentals such as german electricity prices and gas and coal prices with the price of eua we find that the eua forward price depends on fundamentals especially on the price of electricity as well as on the gas coal difference in a statistically significant way

role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in price correlations and volatilities between carbon markets the present paper theoretically and empirically examines the role of carbon swap trading and energy prices in volatilities and price correlations between the eu and kyoto protocol emissions trading schemes a supply and demand based correlation model between eua and scer price returns is proposed in detail using inverse box cox type marginal abatement cost mac curves and simple emission reduction volume processes the model includes financial players eua scer swap transaction in boom periods of carbon prices using the logit model for eua and eua scer swap volume correlations and stronger energy price impacts on eua prices than scer prices using a mean reverting lognormal process for energy prices the empirical studies using eua and scer prices estimate the model parameters resulting in a positive eua volume impact on eua scer swap transactions and a positive energy price impact on eua prices it is shown that high eua scer price correlations during high eua price periods stemmed from eua scer swap transactions whereas high eua scer price correlations during the period of financial turmoil with low eua prices came from the drop in energy prices we also show that the leverage effects often observed in security markets exist in both the eua and scer markets according to the price volatility relation

accuracy of response in labor market surveys evidence and implications this paper examines the extent of response errors in labor market survey data and explores the implications of such errors for economic analysis explicitly examined are responses to questions on industry occupation union status hours worked and wages analyses are based on two sources 1 a special supplement to the january 1977 current population survey that obtained data from workers and their employers and 2 an exact match of workers and their employers interviewed in the employment opportunity pilot project survey the dual nature of these surveys provides a basis for analyzing the effect of response error on a variety of economic analyses including the trade off between wages and risk the wage impact of unionism and the sensitivity of wage determination models to alternative responses to earnings questions

revisiting the employment impact of offshoring abstract the productivity gains due to offshoring may in part accrue to workers this paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement a model based on the production task framework from grossman and rossi hansberg 2008 is used to demonstrate that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and ultimately impacts domestic employment through three channels a direct displacement effect which negatively impacts employment an output effect generated by the productivity gains from offshoring which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively and a substitution effect among factors and tasks which has an ambiguous effect using the model s structure as a roadmap and applying it to detailed u s manufacturing sector data over 2001 2007 results from gmm 3sls regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring in particular the economic magnitude of the productivity gains is found to have been important

estimating the value of a statistical life the importance of omitted variables and publication bias measures of public preferences toward risk are critical to evaluations of public policies on many safety environmental and health issues in this paper we provide a method for measuring the revealed preferences for safety risks from state level public choices about speed limits the idea is to measure the value of the time saved per incremental fatality that results from the voluntary adoption of an increased speed limit since adopters must have valued the time saved by greater speeds more than the fatalities created this ratio provides a convincing and credible upper bound on the value of a statistical life vsl

transactions in the european carbon market a bubble of compliance in a whirlpool of speculation the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets is supposed to help regulated installations to cover their co2 emissions by trading in allowances in practice the eu ets is mainly a financial market used for hedging and speculation this financial feature is regarded as a solution hedging and liquidity to a problem the price risk and volatility imposed on installations which the market has actually created itself this paper provides an estimation of the real underpinning of the scheme i e the needs of installations for allowances transfers to achieve compliance in the two first exchange periods this estimation which was singularly lacking in the literature shows that compliance transactions become more and more marginal as market activity grows and that they are drowned in a whirlpool of speculation this challenges the role of the carbon price whose financial and self referential evaluation can obviously not reveal installations marginal abatement costs the condition of cost effectiveness expected from carbon trading

what explains the short term dynamics of the prices of co2 emissions using the vector auto regression var and the vector error correction models vecm this paper analyzes the short term dynamics of the prices of co2 emissions in response to changes in the prices of oil coal natural gas electricity and carbon emission allowances the results show that i a positive shock to the crude oil prices has a negative effect on the co2 allowance prices ii an unexpected increase in the natural gas prices raises the price of co2 emissions iii a positive shock to the prices of the fuel of choice coal has virtually no significant impact on the co2 prices iv there is a clear positive effect of the coal prices on the co2 allowance prices when the electricity prices are excluded from the var system and v a positive shock to the electricity prices reduces the price of the co2 allowances we also find that the energy price shocks have a persistent impact on the co2 allowance prices with the largest effect occurring six months after a shock strikes the effect is particularly strong in the case of the natural gas price shocks additionally we estimate that it takes between 7 3 and 9 6 months to halve the gap between the actual and the equilibrium prices of the co2 allowances i e to erase any price over or undervaluations after a shock strikes finally the empirical findings suggest an important degree of substitution between the three primary sources of energy i e crude oil natural gas and coal particularly when electricity prices are excluded from the var system

roy model sorting and nonrandom selection in the valuation of a statistical life roy model sorting and the vsl wage hedonics is used to recover the value of a statistical life vsl by exploiting the fact that workers choosing riskier occupations are compensated with a higher wage roy oxford economic papers 3 1951 135 46 suggests that observed wage distributions will be distorted if individuals choose jobs according to idiosyncratic returns we describe how this type of sorting biases wage hedonic vsl estimates and implement two new estimation strategies that correct that bias using data from the current population surveys we recover vsl estimates that are three to four times larger than those based on the traditional techniques statistically significant and robust to a wide array of specifications

flexibility in the market for international carbon credits and price dynamics difference with european allowances the paris agreement establishes a mechanism to allow a party to benefit from greenhouse gases emissions reductions conducted in a host party to fulfil its nationally determined contribution in this context the objective of this paper is to improve the understanding of carbon offsets price dynamics in comparison with regular carbon markets allowances we combine a cointegration approach with risk premium considerations to compare the price dynamics of european union allowances eua and certified emission reductions cer in the second phase of the european carbon market by taking account of breaks identified in the series we find that while the eua and cer returns present comparable dynamics the long term relationships between the price of these two types of permits and their drivers differ significantly given the impact of energy prices positive for coal and negative for gas on the cer price we suggest the existence of a supply side effect for credits we find that the price elasticity of allowances with regard to the coal and gas prices is negative in time periods of low economic activity and positive in the rest of the time we explain the latter by the fact that the market is not tight and the former by the effect of the economic activity on the price of commodities and energy

robots and reshoring evidence from mexican local labor markets robots in advanced economies have the potential to reduce employment in offshoring countries by fueling reshoring using robots instead of humans for production may reduce the relative cost of domestic production and in turn lower demand for imports from offshoring countries i analyze the impact of robots on employment in an offshoring country using data from mexican local labor markets between 1990 and 2015 a recent literature shows that the effect of robots on local employment can be estimated by regressing the change in employment on exposure to domestic robots in local labor markets i similarly construct a measure of exposure to foreign robots assuming that the share of us robots competing with mexican labor is proportional to that industry s initial reliance on mexican imports using robot penetration in the rest of the world i e neither in mexico nor in the us as an instrument for domestic and foreign robotization i show that the use of robots in the us has a robust and sizable negative impact on employment in mexico by reducing exports to the us the effect is not driven by pre existing trends the automotive industry or migration patterns it is strongest for low skilled machine operators and technicians in highly robotized manufacturing industries as well as high skilled managers and professionals in the service industry

urban decline and durable housing urban decline is not the mirror image of growth and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different this paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model 1 city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline 2 urban decline is highly persistent 3 positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices 4 negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population 5 if housing prices are below construction costs then the city declines and 6 the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities

the market for tradable ghg permits under the kyoto protocol a survey of model studies abstract this paper gathers results from 25 models of the market for tradable greenhouse gas ghg emission permits under the kyoto protocol due to diverging projections of emissions growth and different modeling approaches the model results differ substantially the average market volume is approximately 17 and 33 billion usd under global trading and annex b trading respectively including non carbon ghg lowers compliance costs and permit prices in the absence of the us permit demand roughly equals hot air from the former soviet union these countries can increase their revenues from selling permits by restricting supply which raises the permit price

an econometric analysis of emission allowance prices knowledge of the statistical distribution of the prices of emission allowances and their forecastability are crucial in constructing among other things purchasing and risk management strategies in the emissions constrained markets this paper analyzes the two emission permits markets co2 in europe and so2 in the us and investigates a model for dealing with the unique stylized facts of this type of data its effectiveness in terms of model fit and out of sample value at risk forecasting as compared to models commonly used in risk forecasting contexts is demonstrated

manufacturing energy use in oecd countries decomposition of long term trends abstract in this paper we examine manufacturing energy use in 13 oecd countries over the period 1971 1995 we describe changes in aggregate energy intensity using the adaptive weighting divisia decomposition method we contrast the development in the periods after the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979 with the period of relatively stable energy prices after the oil price crash of 1986 the results show that manufacturing output grew in most countries pushing up energy use the share of electricity increased in almost every sector while there was a clear trend away from oil and coal towards natural gas changes in the structure of output drove up energy use between 1973 and 1994 in some countries and down in others changes in energy intensities had a profound and downward effect on manufacturing energy use in all countries however contrasting the period after oil prices fell in 1986 with earlier years we see that for most countries the rate of energy intensity decline slowed slightly but did not reverse with falling prices in a few countries efficiency improvements continued to have a strong effect this suggests that even without higher prices improvements of energy efficiency seems to take place

the importance of sample attrition in life cycle labor supply estimation we examine the importance of possible nonrandom attrition to an econometric model of life cycle labor supply using both a wald test comparing attriters to nonattriters and variable addition tests based on formal models of attrition estimates using the panel study of income dynamics show that nonrandom attrition is of little concern when estimating prime age male labor supply because the effect of attrition is absorbed into fixed effects in labor supply the wage measure and instrument set have much larger effects on the estimated labor supply function of prime age men than how one adjusts for panel attrition

contributions of weather and fuel mix to recent declines in us energy and carbon intensity a recent 1996 2000 acceleration of declines in energy andcarbon intensity in the u s remains largely unexplained this study usesdivisia decomposition and regression to test two candidate explanations fuel mix and weather the divisia method demonstrates that fuel mix doesnot explain the declines in carbon intensity the fuel mix both overalland for electricity generation became slightly more carbon intensiveover the study period though the slight trend reversed before the end ofthe period a regression based correction to the divisia indices accounting for variation in heating and cooling degree days indicatesthat warmer weather accounts for about 30 percent ofthe total declines this leaves declines of more than 2 percent per year and an accelerationof more than 1 percent over previous decade remaining to beexplained

the value of a statistical life evidence from panel data abstract we address long standing concerns in the literature on compensating wage differentials the econometric properties of the estimated value of statistical life vsl and the wide range of such estimates we confront prominent econometric issues using panel data a more accurate fatality risk measure and systematic application of panel data estimators controlling for measurement error endogeneity latent individual heterogeneity possibly correlated with regressors state dependence and sample composition yields vsl estimates of 4 million to 10 million the comparatively narrow range clarifies the cost effectiveness of regulatory decisions most important econometrically is controlling for latent heterogeneity less important is how one does it

modeling eu allowances and oil market interdependence implications for portfolio management abstract this paper examines the dependence structure between european union allowances euas and crude oil markets during the second commitment period of the european union emissions trading scheme and the implications for portfolio management using different copula models our findings suggest positive average dependence and extreme symmetric independence that is consistent with interdependence and no contagion effects between the eua and crude oil markets the implication of this result for eua oil portfolios points to the existence of diversification benefits hedging effectiveness and value at risk reductions the eua market is therefore an attractive market for investors in terms of diversifying market risk and reducing downside risk in crude oil markets

politics matters regulatory events as catalysts for price formation under cap and trade this paper investigates how the political process of making cap adjustments has shaped market outcomes in the world s largest cap and trade system the eu ets capitalizing on an event study method that incorporates an econometric technique designed to handle parameter instability and model uncertainty we assess the news implied price response to 29 hand collected announcements about the eu ets supply schedule our findings document a high market responsiveness to political events and reveal how market participants view the evolution of cap stringency in the light of a particular announcement we provide evidence that a sequence of strong event induced price drops evolve in the backloading decision process which is consistent with the interpretation that market participant s confidence in the political support for reform and probably the eu ets in general has been unsettled we also document positive price reactions to the 2020 and 2030 policy packages but not the 2050 roadmaps

dynamic linkages among carbon energy and financial markets a smooth transition approach this article explores how price linkages between carbon allowances and market fundamentals in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets vary over time i adopt a multivariate garch model that allows the conditional correlation between carbon energy and financial prices to change smoothly across regimes governed by functions of two transition variables that explain why price linkages vary i use i time as transition variable to allow for structural changes associated with institutional advances in the eu ets and ii implied volatility to account for heterogeneity in the behaviour of correlations in times of distress compared to calm periods the results point to a new pricing regime with much closer carbon energy price linkages in the second phase of the eu ets furthermore i find that correlations depend on market uncertainty conditions which exposes the link between carbon and financial markets due to common macroeconomic shocks during the current financial crisis

price drivers and structural breaks in european carbon prices 2005 2007 this article aims at characterizing the daily price fundamentals of european union allowances euas traded since 2005 as part of the emissions trading scheme ets the presence of two structural changes on april 2006 following the disclosure of 2005 verified emissions and on october 2006 following the european commission announcement of stricter phase ii allocation allows to isolate distinct fundamentals evolving overtime the results extend previous literature by showing that eua spot prices react not only to energy prices with forecast errors but also to unanticipated temperatures changes during colder events besides the sub period decomposition of the pilot phase gives a better grasp of institutional and market events that drive allowance price changes

estimating distributed lags in short panels with an application to the specification of depreciation patterns and capital stock constructs this paper considers the problem of estimating distributed lags in short panels though the n time series contained in a panel may allow for relatively precise estimates of identified lag coefficients identification requires restrictions on the contribution of the unobserved pre sample x s to the current values of y and the shortness of panels focuses attention on this matter we investigate two such restrictions the first constrains the relationship between the presample and insample x s while the second constrains the lag distribution itself an example which investigates empirically how to construct capital stocks for the analysis of rates of return closes the paper

carbon allowance auction design of china s emissions trading scheme a multi agent based approach in this paper a multi agent based ets simulation model is proposed for carbon allowance auction design in china in the proposed model two main agents i e the government the ets implementer and the firms in different sectors the ets targets are considered under the ets policy all agents make various decisions individually according to their own goals and interact with each other through three main markets the commodity market the primary carbon auction market and the secondary carbon trading market different popular auction designs are introduced into the ets formulation to offer helpful insights into china s ets design 1 generally the ets would lead to positive effects on china s carbon mitigation and energy structure improvement but a negative impact on economy 2 as for auction forms the uniform price design is relatively moderate while the discriminative price design is quite aggressive in both economic damage and emissions reduction 3 as for carbon price the uniform price auction might generate a slightly higher market clearing price than the discriminative price auction and the prices under two auction rules fluctuate about rmb 40 per metric ton 4 as for carbon cap the total allowances in the carbon auction market should be carefully set to well balance economic growth and mitigation effect

arch effects and cointegration is the foreign exchange market efficient abstract extensive empirical work has produced mixed evidence regarding the validity of the unbiased efficient expectations hypothesis in the foreign exchange market empirical analysis in this paper via cointegration techniques produces the same inconclusive results for three currency markets namely the ffr us the dm us and the yen us foreign exchange market however when modeling conditional heteroskedasticity of exchange rates through autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch models the results are fairly conclusive the presence of the efficient foreign exchange market hypothesis is found in all these three currency markets

modeling co2 emission allowance prices and derivatives evidence from the european trading scheme this paper studies the three main markets for emission allowances within the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets powernext nord pool and european climate exchange ecx the analysis suggests that the prohibition of banking of emission allowances between distinct phases of the eu ets has significant implications in terms of futures pricing motivated by these findings we develop an empirically and theoretically valid framework for the pricing and hedging of intra phase and inter phase futures and options on futures respectively

an emerging equilibrium in the eu emissions trading scheme abstract the european union s emissions trading scheme ets is the key policy instrument of the european commission s climate change program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to eight percent below 1990 levels by 2012 a critically important element of the eu ets is the establishment of a market determined price for eu allowances this article examines the extent to which several theoretically founded factors including economic growth energy prices and weather conditions determine the expected prices of the european union co 2 allowances during the 2005 through to the 2009 period the novel aspect of our study is that we examine heavily traded futures instruments that have an expiry date in phase 2 of the eu ets our study adopts both static and recursive versions of the johansen multivariate cointegration likelihood ratio test as well as a variation on this test with a view to controlling for time varying volatility effects our results are indicative of a new pricing regime emerging in phase 2 and point to a maturing market driven by the fundamentals these results are valuable both for traders of eu allowances and for those policy makers seeking to improve the design of the european union ets

what is the role of openness for china s aggregate industrial so2 emission a structural analysis based on the divisia decomposition method abstract having observed the weaknesses in previous structural analyses on the role of environmental kuznets curve ekc the author proposes a detailed analysis using a rich data set of provincial level production and so2 emission intensity of 13 industrial sectors the latter represent more than 98 of the total industrial production in each chinese province for the period 1991 2001 through the use of the log mean divisia index decomposition method the variations in province level industrial so2 emissions with regard to the 1990 baseline level are decomposed into the contribution from three components scale composition and technical effects the following analysis seeks to explain how trade openness affects aggregate industrial so2 emission through its impact on the structural determinants for these three components of region specific environmental variations

forecasting carbon futures volatility using garch models with energy volatilities abstract this article examines the volatility forecasting abilities of three approaches garch type model that uses carbon futures prices an implied volatility from carbon options prices and the k nearest neighbor model based on the results we document that garch type models perform better than an implied volatility and the k nearest neighbor model this result suggests that carbon options have little information about carbon futures due to their low trading volume we also investigate whether the volatilities of energy markets i e brent oil coal natural gas and electricity forecast following day s carbon futures volatility according to the results we suggest that brent oil coal and electricity may be used to forecast the volatility of carbon futures

multiple bubbles in the european union emission trading scheme abstract the european union emission trading scheme eu ets is the first large scale co 2 emission trading system in the world carbon allowances are financial assets potentially vulnerable to the behavior of traders and investors in fact the carbon price has been quite volatile since the inception of the market and it has recently hit very low values however to date no work exists to evaluate whether volatility and price spikes are due to episodes of speculation and price bubbles our paper fills this gap we use the recent approaches developed by phillips and yu 2010 phillips et al 2011 and phillips et al 2015a 2015b who propose a recursive right sided unit root approaches to detect and date stamp mildly explosive behaviors and carbon market exuberance we complement this methodology by using the wild bootstrap procedure by goncalves and kilian 2004 to control for the heteroschedasticity of carbon price data analyzing the eu ets front month contract price from 2005 to 2014 we find different episodes of price bubbles these episodes are not explained by similar behavior of the fundamentals but seem related to energy and environmental policy announcements our results can provide insightful policy implications in the context of the actual carbon market reform as well as the implementation of stricter financial regulations rules to co 2 trading

estimating and forecasting the real prices of crude oil a data rich model using a dynamic model averaging dma approach given that oil price fluctuations have been of great interest for macroeconomics in the recent years due to its important implications for future inflation economic growth and policy making the aim of this paper is to estimate and forecast west texas intermediate wti crude oil prices using a large monthly dataset that covers the period from march 1983 to december 2011 to achieve this aim forecasting with factor models offers a usual approach that utilizes large datasets however a forecasting model which simply includes all factors in state space equation and does not allow for time varying may be not suitable with a highly volatile market such as oil market to overcome these limitations an approach that accounts both for parameter and model uncertainty is employed in particular this study uses the dynamic model averaging dma approach suggested by koop and korobilis 2012 the key element of the dma approach is that it allows both for model and parameter to vary at each point of time by doing so the dma is robust to structural breaks empirical findings show that dma approach outperforms any other alternative model used in the forecasting exercise results also show that there is model but not parameter variation in this oil price forecasting exercise finally the findings suggest that the dma approach provides a better proxy of expected spot prices than future prices

influences from the european parliament on eu emissions prices abstract the decisions of the european parliament ep are shown to influence both eu emission allowance eua prices and volatility reductions in price and increases in volatility are observed when ep decisions are i not party political in origin ii made during times of low market sentiment or iii made during times of low market attention daily eua prices from 2007 to 2014 are used in the study with decisions analysed using an event study approach for price impact and a garch specification for volatility impact our findings suggest the need for policymakers to improve communication of long term strategies for the eua market this aims to reduce the evident ongoing uncertainty experienced by traders around each decision made by the ep the finding that sentiment and market attention at the time of an ep decision influences the market s reaction indicates a need to consider market dynamics in terms of decision timing so that market turbulence is not an unintended by product of an ep decision some form of medium term forward guidance may be called for

modeling the price dynamics of co2 emission allowances abstract in this paper we analyze the short term spot price behavior of carbon dioxide co 2 emission allowances of the new eu wide co 2 emissions trading system eu ets after reviewing the stylized facts of this new class of assets we investigate several approaches for modeling the returns of emission allowances due to different phases of price and volatility behavior in the returns we suggest the use of markov switching and ar garch models for stochastic modeling we examine the approaches by conducting an in sample and out of sample forecasting analysis and by comparing the results to alternative approaches our findings strongly support the adequacy of the models capturing characteristics like skewness excess kurtosis and in particular different phases of volatility behavior in the returns

how to explain carbon price using market micro behaviour abstractin this article we analyse the micro behaviours of the emitting companies and financial intermediaries in the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets and their influence on carbon prices based on the full sample community independent transaction log citl the micro behaviours can be observed in a closed system the micro behaviours of the emitting companies are divided into compliance trading and non compliance trading based on the emitting companies trading motivations the micro behaviours of the financial intermediaries are measured by their influence on the total supply and demand in the market then an ar garch model is established to examine the dynamic relationships between carbon prices and the micro behaviours of the emitting companies and financial intermediaries the estimation results suggest that the prices behaviours relationship is significant other important findings are as follows 1 the mean value of carbon prices positively depends on the compliance trading

is information assimilated at announcements in the european carbon market abstract we examine the high frequency new information impact on prices volatility trading volume and illiquidity at scheduled macroeconomic and verified emissions announcements for the european carbon futures market verified emissions united states non farm payroll and german new factory order macroeconomic announcements impact carbon prices swiftly within 5 min we show that a one standard deviation surprise increase in verified emission announcements is associated with an approximate ten percentage point 9 96 increase in carbon futures returns a wait and see stylized trading behavior is evident at announcements in volatility and trading volumes market illiquidity increases at announcements in relation to united states non farm payroll albeit there is no evidence of an increase in illiquidity prior to announcements the development of new information impact over time occurs mainly in the at announcement 5 minute time interval

causes of the eu ets price drop recession cdm renewable policies or a bit of everything new evidence the price of eu allowances euas in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets fell from almost 30 tco2 in mid 2008 to less than 5 tco2 in mid 2013 the sharp and persistent price decline has sparked intense debates both in academia and among policy makers about the decisive allowance price drivers in this paper we examine whether and to what extent the eua price drop can be justified by three commonly identified explanatory factors the economic recession renewable policies and the use of international credits capitalizing on marginal abatement cost theory and a broadly extended data set we find that only variations in economic activity and the growth of wind and solar electricity production are robustly explaining eua price dynamics contrary to simulation based analyses our results point to moderate interaction effects between the overlapping eu ets and renewable policies the bottom line however is that 90 of the variations of eua price changes remains unexplained by the abatement related fundamentals together our findings do not support the widely held view that negative demand shocks are the main cause of the weak carbon price signal in view of the new evidence we evaluate the eu ets reform options which are currently discussed

carbon price drivers phase i versus phase ii equilibrium abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the carbon price during the two phases of the european union emission trading scheme eu ets more specifically relying on daily eu allowance futures contracts we test whether the carbon price drivers identified for phase i still hold for phase ii and evolve toward a long run relationship using cointegration techniques and accounting for the 2006 structural break in the carbon market we show that while a cointegrating relationship exists for both phases of the eu ets the nature of this equilibrium relationship is different across the two subperiods with an increasing role of fundamentals in phase ii deriving equilibrium values we show that the carbon price tends to be undervalued since the end of 2009

robots and jobs evidence from us labor markets we study the effects of industrial robots on us labor markets we show theoretically that robots may reduce employment and wages and that their local impacts can be estimated using variation in exp

measuring the value of a statistical life problems and prospects tradeoffs between monetary wealth and fatal safety risks are summarized in the value of a statistical life vsl a measure that is widely used for the evaluation of public policies in medicine the environment and transportation safety this paper demonstrates the widespread use of this concept and summarizes the major issues both theoretical and empirical that must be confronted in order to provide a credible estimate of a vsl the paper concludes with an application of these issues to a particular study of speed limits and highway safety

computers productivity and input substitution i introduction the last two decades has been a puzzling time for many productivity analysts while computer prices fell at extraordinary rates and firms invested hundreds of billions of dollars in new computer equipment aggregate productivity growth remained sluggish this computer productivity paradox has generated a large literature that examines the economic impact of the computer revolution 1 this paper offers a simple solution to the computer productivity paradox by making careful distinction between computers as an output from one sector and an input to other sectors data for 35 manufacturing and service sectors for 1947 1991 show that sectoral differences are crucial in understanding the impact of computers aggregate analysis is inappropriate since it obscures basic distinctions between a shifting production function in the computer producing sector multi factor productivity growth and movements along production functions in the computer using sectors substitution and capital accumulation once these differences are isolated the growth impact of computers is readily observable the computer producing sector experienced fundamental technological progress and now produces cheaper better computers the sectoral data show this as rapid multi factor productivity mfp growth for 1973 1991 although aggregate mfp growth remains below historic averages the computer producing sector has clearly done its part mfp growth in this sector is many times the economy average and has contributed over one third of aggregate mfp growth for 19811991 the sectoral detail shows that the slowdown in aggregate productivity would have been much more severe were it not for such large mfp gains in the computer producing sector for the other sectors of the economy computers affect growth in a more traditional although less glamorous way when the price of real computing power fell so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s firms responded by substituting away from relatively expensive labor and non computer capital and investing heavily in cheap computers for these sectors the computer revolution affects output growth not by raising mfp but by inducing firms to accumulate computers at extraordinary rates real computer services for example grew in excess of 20 per year in 14 out of 35 sectors for 1973 1991 although virtually all sectors are rapidly accumulating computer equipment computers remain small in levels in 1991 for example computer investment was only 10 of private fixed investment so the growth contribution of computers remains small relative to sectoral aggregates of labor and non computer capital the rapid rates of accumulation however are clearly making computers a more important source of growth across sectors with this heavy investment also came the wide spread expectation that computers would fundamentally alter the way firms operate and lead to higher mfp the reality has been very different as the most computer intensive sectors show steep declines in mfp growth after 1973 with three quarters of all computers concentrated in three service sectors trade fire and other services however this finding must be interpreted with caution as griliches 1994 notes output in these sectors is largely unmeasurable and thus mfp growth will be understated nonetheless it is quite reasonable that even computer using sectors where output is easier to measure show no mfp gains computer investment creates a capital input that enters the production function like any other purchased input since constant quality deflators embody productivity improvements in investment the direct impact is seen through the rapid capital accumulation only if the adoption of computers leads to production externalities or spillovers would computer investment also increase mfp growth the data however show no evidence of this ii computers and growth the national statistics most clearly show the computer revolution in the investment data

a model of carbon price interactions with macroeconomic and energy dynamics abstract this paper develops a model of carbon pricing by considering two fundamental drivers of european union allowances economic activity and energy prices on the one hand economic activity is proxied by aggregated industrial production in the eu 27 as it provides the best performance in a preliminary forecasting exercise vs other indicators on the other hand brent natural gas and coal prices are selected as being the main carbon price drivers as highlighted by previous literature the interactions between the macroeconomic and energy spheres are captured in a markov switching var model with two states that is able to reproduce the boom bust business cycle hamilton 1989 first industrial production is found to impact positively negatively the carbon market during periods of economic expansion recession thereby confirming the existence of a link between the macroeconomy and the price of carbon second the brent price is confirmed to be the leader in price formation among energy markets bachmeier and griffin 2006 as it impacts other variables through the structure of the markov switching model taken together these results uncover new interactions between the recently created eu emissions market and the pre existing macroeconomic energy environment

the pricing of job characteristics when markets do not clear theory and policy implications this article examines nonsequential search when jobs vary with respect to nonpecuniary characteristics in the presence of frictions in the labor market the equilibrium job distribution need not show evidence of compensating wage differentials the model also generates several pervasive features of labor markets unemployment and vacancies apparent discrimination and market segmentation when workers are homogeneous restrictions on the range of job offers decrease welfare and cannot reduce unemployment however when workers have heterogeneous preferences such restrictions may lower unemployment and can even lead to a pareto improvement in welfare we consider the impact of policies banning discrimination and regulating working conditions

multivariate dependence and spillover effects across energy commodities and diversification potentials of carbon assets abstract in a first step we model the multivariate tail dependence structure and spillover effects across energy commodities such as crude oil natural gas ethanol heating oil coal and gasoline using canonical vine c vine copula and c vine conditional value at risk covar in the second step we formulate portfolio strategies based on different performance measures to analyze the risk reduction and diversification potential of carbon assets for energy commodities we identify greater exposure to losses arising from investments in heating oil and ethanol markets we also find evidence of carbon asset providing diversification benefits to energy commodity investments these findings motivate for regulatory adjustments in the trading and emission permits for the energy markets most strongly diversified by carbon assets

a cost benefit analysis of the eu 20 20 2020 package the european commission did not publish a cost benefit analysis for its 2020 climate package this paper fills that gap comparing the marginal costs and benefits of greenhouse gas emission reduction the uncertainty about the marginal costs of climate change is large and skewed and estimates partly reflect ethical choices e g the discount rate the 2010 carbon price in the eu emissions trading system can readily be justified by a cost benefit analysis emission reduction is not expensive provided that policy is well designed a condition not met by planned eu policy it is probably twice as expensive as needed costing one in ten years of economic growth the eu targets for 2020 are unlikely to meet the benefit cost test for a standard discount rate 3 pure rate of time preference the benefit cost ratio is rather poor 1 30 so that benefits need to be very much higher or costs very much lower than typically assumed to justify the 2020 targets only a very low discount rate 0 prtp would justify the 20 emission reduction target for 2020

linear and nonlinear granger causality investigation between carbon market and crude oil market a multi scale approach abstract this paper investigates the causality between carbon market and crude oil market using a multi scale analysis approach in which two main steps are involved multi scale analysis and causality testing in multi scale analysis bivariate empirical mode decomposition bemd is employed to decompose the two series of market returns at different time scales in causality testing a linear and nonlinear integrated granger test is formulated to investigate the relationship among each pair of matched components on a similar time scale with the european union emission allowance eua futures and brent futures as study samples some interesting findings can be obtained 1 at the original data level without multi scale decomposition this study finds evidence supporting a neutrality hypothesis i e no granger causality between the carbon and crude oil markets 2 on small time scale within one week excluding non work days the two markets might be uncorrelated and driven by their own respective supply demand disequilibriums 3 for medium time scale above one week but below one year there is a strong bi directional linear and nonlinear spillover effect between the two markets due to certain extra factors with medium term effects e g significant events and policy changes 4 for long time scale the long term trends of the two markets appear an obvious linear relationship

modeling and forecasting the volatility of carbon dioxide emission allowance prices a review and comparison of modern volatility models abstract the launch of the markets for carbon dioxide emission allowances was guided by the aim to use the supposedly efficient price formation mechanism of an organized exchange to optimally allocate a certain quantity of emissions among potential polluters while this introduction of a centralized trading arrangement should have helped to achieve required emission reductions with a minimum of economic losses from the viewpoint of market participants it has raised concerns about appropriate risk management provisions to cope with the fluctuations of time varying allowance prices the present review provides an overview over state of the art models for price volatility expanding the scope from relatively simple garch type models to models with long term dependence and regime switches including the relatively recent class of so called multifractal models we provide a comparative application of these models to carbon dioxide emission allowance prices from the european union emission trading scheme and evaluate their performance with up to date model comparison tests based on out of sample forecasts of future volatility and value at risk

using mandated speed limits to measure the value of a statistical life in 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads but not on their urban interstate roads from 55 mph to 65 mph since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred this institutional change provides an opportunity to estimate an upper bound on the public s willingness to trade off wealth for a change in the probability of death our estimates indicate that the adoption of the 65 mph limit increased speeds by approximately 4 percent or 2 5 mph and fatality rates by roughly 35 percent together the estimates suggest that about 125 000 hours were saved per lost life when the time saved is valued at the average hourly wage the estimates imply that adopting states were willing to accept risks that resulted in a savings of 1 54 million 1997 dollars per fatality with a sampling error roughly one third this value we set out a simple model of states decisions to adop

shift share designs theory and inference we study inference in shift share regression designs such as when a regional outcome is regressed on a weighted average of sectoral shocks using regional sector shares as weights we conduct a placebo exercise in which we estimate the effect of a shift share regressor constructed with randomly generated sectoral shocks on actual labor market outcomes across u s commuting zones tests based on commonly used standard errors with 5 nominal significance level reject the null of no effect in up to 55 of the placebo samples we use a stylized economic model to show that this overrejection problem arises because regression residuals are correlated across regions with similar sectoral shares independent of their geographic location we derive novel inference methods that are valid under arbitrary cross regional correlation in the regression residuals we show using popular applications of shift share designs that our methods may lead to substantially wider confidence intervals in practice

what is the optimal speed limit on freeways abstract when choosing his speed a driver faces a trade off between private benefits time savings and private costs fuel cost and own damage and injury driving faster also has external costs pollution adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers this paper uses large scale speed limit increases in the western united states in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions first do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social costs second do the private benefits of driving faster exceed the private costs third what is the optimal speed limit i find that a 10 mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3 4 mph increase in travel speed 9 15 more accidents 34 60 more fatal accidents and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14 24 carbon monoxide 8 15 nitrogen oxides 1 11 ozone and 9 higher fetal death rates around the affected freeways using these estimates i find that the social costs of speed limit increases are two to seven times larger than the social benefits in contrast many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefit from driving faster privately a value of a statistical life vsl of 6 0 million or less justifies driving faster but the social planner s vsl could be at most 0 9 2 0 million to justify higher speed limits i conclude that the optimal speed limit was lower but not much lower than 55 mph

changes in carbon intensity in china empirical findings from 1980 2003 china experienced sustainable rapid economic growth over the period 1980 2003 but at the same time energy related carbon intensity showed a downward trend it begs the question therefore what factors were driving this decline in carbon intensity and will this decline be maintained in future moreover what measures can be adopted to ensure a continual decline in carbon intensity these questions led to increased research in the factors governing co2 emission in china this paper quantifies the driving force behind china s primary energy related carbon intensity and measures the material production sectors final energy related carbon intensity our results show that the overwhelming contributor to the decline of energy related carbon intensity was the reduction in real energy intensity however policies that focus only on the decline in energy intensity are insufficient to further decrease carbon intensity the change of primary energy mix can improve the decline of carbon intensity this should focus on the material production sectors development strategies and final energy use greater emphasis should be given to secondary industry which needs national and regional governments policy support

are u s cities underpoliced theory and evidence we document the extent of measurement errors in the basic data set on police used in the literature on the effect of police on crime analyzing medium to large u s cities over 1960 to 2010 we obt

risk spillovers across the energy and carbon markets and hedging strategies for carbon risk this study examines the risk spillovers between energy futures prices and europe based carbon futures contracts we use a markov regime switching dynamic correlation generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity ms dcc garch model in order to capture the time variations and structural breaks in the spillovers we further evaluate the optimal weights hedging effectiveness and dynamic hedging strategies for the ms dcc garch model based on both the regime dependent and regime independent optimal hedge ratios we finally complement our analysis by examining the in and out of sample hedging performances for alternative strategies our results mainly show significant volatility and time varying risk transmission from energy markets to carbon market we also find that spot and futures segments of the emission markets exhibit time varying correlations and volatile hedging effectiveness the subsample estimates show significant changes in the hedge effectiveness over the different phases of the european carbon market these results have important investment and policy implications

the role of regulatory uncertainty in certificate markets a case study of the swedish norwegian market abstract price volatility in green certificate markets reflects uncertainty over future prices representing a major source of risk for renewable energy generators price risk is considered the principal deficiency of this market based policy since it causes investors to require higher returns moreover investors are exposed to regulatory risk namely the risk that a change in the regulation will materially impact the certificate price regulatory uncertainty is reflected in market volatility exacerbating certificate price risk using an econometric approach we investigate the role of regulatory changes on price volatility in the swedish certificate market the results of our analysis indicate that regulatory changes strongly affect certificate markets resulting in periods of higher volatility moreover we analyze whether certificate price volatility has changed after creating a joint swedish norwegian market results indicate that the ambivalence surrounding the creation of this bigger market led to a period of increased price volatility between 2010 and 2011 overall this article brings a better understanding of the role of regulatory uncertainty on certificate markets and gives evidence for its negative impact in terms of increased price volatility

subsidizing altruism in living organ donation the current supply of deceased donor organs is insucient to meet the growing demand for transplantable organs the median waiting time for a kidney from a deceased donor is over three years consequently candidates for kidney transplantation are strongly encouraged to nd a living donor however many potential donors have low incomes and donation related costs may discourage them from volunteering to be a donor in 2008 the department of health and human services began to reimburse donor s travel related expenses via the national living donor assistance center nldac using within transplant center variation in their applications for donor assistance we use a dierence in dier ence model to estimate the impact of the nldac on the number of living donor kidney transplants we nd that among participating transplant centers the program increased the number of living donor kidney transplants by approximately 14 the nldac program provides an eective subsidy for donor s altruism

worker investments in safety workplace accidents and compensating wage differentials the theory of compensating wage differentials cwds assumes that firms supply and workers demand workplace safety predicting a positive relationship between accident risk and wages this article allows for safety provision by workers which predicts a countervailing negative relationship between individual risk and wages firms pay higher wages for higher safety related productivity using national longitudinal survey of youth panel data and data on fatal and nonfatal accidents our precise cwds imply a value of a statistical injury of 45 4 thousand and a value of a statistical life of 6 3 million in line with our model individual risk and wages are negatively correlated

individual heterogeneity and interindustry wage differentials estimates of interindustry wage differentials are obtained using a fixed effects estimator on a long panel the national longitudinal survey of young men nls after controlling for observable worker characteristics 84 percent of the residual variance of log wages across industries is explained by individual fixedeffects only 16 percent of the residual variance is explained by industry dummies since no controls for specific job characteristics are used job characteristics that vary across industries could potentially explain this rather small residual across industry log wage variance that is not attributable to individual effects clearly then these data do not force us to resort to noncompetitive explanations of interindustry wage differentials such as efficiency wage theory furthermore efficiency wage theories predict that wages in efficiency wage paying or primary industries should be relatively rigid therefore industry wage differentials should widen in recessions however no such tendency is found in the data

factorial decomposition of co2 emissions a generalized divisia index approach abstract this paper introduces a novel approach to estimating the impact of the major factors driving co 2 emissions gdp energy consumption population their carbon intensities and other related indicators that may be chosen arbitrarily the suggested approach is based on the generalization of the divisia index to interconnected factors the approach also extends the kaya identity by explicitly including gross domestic product and energy consumption a computer program in r language aimed at automating the calculations is supplied factorial analysis of the united states and china s co 2 emissions is provided as an example of application

manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the impacts of changes in output industry structure and energy intensity this paper examines trends in manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the changes that occured between 1973 and 1987 into the effects of changes in aggregate manufacturing activity industry structure and energy intensities measured at the industry group level while manufacturing production grew in every country except the uk the rate of growth was variable from nation to nation structural change led to modest reductions in energy use in most countries although in norway structural change led to substantial growth in energy use the reduction in energy intensities was strikingly uniform across all nations ranging from 20 norway to 36 japan over the period of the analysis while other studies have used divisia decomposition techniques we use an alternative method based on laspeyres indices a comparison of the two techniques shows that they yield closely similar empirical results although the laspeyres approach is more easily interpreted while the interactions between changes in structure and intensity are arbitrarily assigned to the two factors by the divisia approach the lapeyres method yields interaction terms that explicitly account for such effects

what s to know puzzles in the literature on the value of statistical life notwithstanding the general acceptance of the value of statistical life vsl estimates for policy assessment purposes several important unresolved issues remain first the results from revealed preference studies are systematically higher than those from stated preference studies potentially limiting the usefulness of stated preference studies in generalizing the vsl estimates to different populations and kinds of risks second extrapolating the results of meta analyses to project the vsl for different population groups requires that such generalization be reflective of the underlying economic content of what average vsl estimates reflect third government agencies within and across countries place differing emphasis on types of vsl studies as well as differing reliance on individual studies versus meta analyses usually there is no justification provided for the chosen approach