nonrenewable resources with switching costs abstract this paper considers a firm s decision to commence or to suspend extraction of a nonrenewable resource when there are start up or shut down costs for a given level of reserves the critical price that would cause an inactive mine to be opened exceeds the price that would induce an active mine to be closed as one would expect greater switching costs cause firms to be less inclined to change status this impact can be substantial even for modest switching costs possible implications of switching costs are considered including the potential for firms to abandon mines with economically valuable remaining reserves

irreversible investment with regime shifts under the real options approach to investment under uncertainty agents formulate optimal policies under the assumption that firms growth prospects do not vary over time this paper proposes and solves a model of investment decisions in which the growth rate and volatility of the decision variable shift between different states at random times a value maximizing investment policy is derived such that in each regime the firm s investment policy is optimal and recognizes the possibility of a regime shift under this policy investment is intermittent and increases with marginal q moreover investment typically is very small but in some states the capital stock jumps implications for marginal q and the user cost of capital are also examined

stability in a discrete time model of the walrasian tatonnement abstract almost all of the extensive literature on the stability of the walrasian t tonnement models the process in continuous rather than discrete time since the motivation for the use of continuous time is primarily mathematical not economic and since stability for a continuous time model does not imply the stability of its discrete time analogue it is of interest to investigate the stability of the walrasian t tonnement modeled in discrete time the question is of particular importance since much of the recent literature on topics such as expectations disequilibrium trading and temporary equilibrium utilizes discrete time this paper demonstrates that for a certain class of models conditions known to be sufficient for stability in continuous time are also sufficient in a discrete time formulation of the price adjustment mechanism excess demand functions having the properties of gross substitution dominant diagonals and the morishima system of complementary commodities are analyzed

projection of energy intensive material production for bottom up scenario building abstract the production growth of energy intensive commodities in physical terms is an important component of bottom up emission scenarios and a relevant national circumstance to be incorporated in schemes for differentiating greenhouse gas emission allowances in this study average future growth rates of physical production are estimated for various branches of the energy intensive industry in a wide range of countries to this end historic patterns of growth were analysed on a per capita basis from the 1980s onwards per capita production levels of steel cement and refinery products tend to level off for all countries as per capita income increases these stabilisation levels however differ by a factor of 10 from country to country petrochemical and total paper and board production per capita on the contrary keeps on increasing with increasing income and per capita aluminium production shows a rather weak relationship to income aggregated annual growth of physical production of energy intensive commodities in this time period amounted to 5 9 in low 1 1 in middle and 0 8 in high income countries assuming that a country experiences declining growth rates of physical production as its income increases these aggregated figures may be used to estimate future growth rates projections thus based on recent growth trends suggest that earlier estimates may be improved

on the indeterminacy of capital accumulation paths abstract in neoclassical optimal growth models the stability of the accumulation paths depends on the discount parameter we prove that for discount factors small enough the policy function which describes an optimal path can be of any type the result is achieved using the notion of concavity we adopt a constructive approach given any twice differentiable map we show how to construct an optimal growth problem which produces that map as the optimal policy function a consequence is that chaos can appear in these models we also provide bounds on the values of the discount parameter for which indeterminacy is possible

a characterization of erratic dynamics in the overlapping generations model abstract in this paper we characterize and give examples o wide classes of utility functions which generate erratic dynamics in the standard deterministic overlapping generations model erratic dynamics refers to feasible trajectories which are bounded but which do not converge to stationary points or periodic orbits we show that such trajectories are pareto efficient we introduce credit into the model and show how a constant credit expansion rate can result in erratic trajectories in prices and the real value of credit finally we briefly discuss certain technical aspects of the mathematics used and the statistical nature of the dynamics that can arise from deterministic dynamical systems

a wage price regime switching model abstract the model we discuss in this paper combines an employment function which is based on a kaldor type consumption function and a simple production function with a wage price subsystem whose parameters switch when a critical level of employment is reached depending on the way in which exogenous variables are specified and on parameter values the model is capable of generating a wide variety of behavior in both real and nominal wages and prices

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

rescaling contraction with a lower cost technology when revenue declines abstract a mature oil field rescaled contraction describes a switch to a technological alternative more appropriate for the depleted state of an underlying resource off shore oil rigs are an illustration since the original technological scale designed for very large output flows becomes inappropriate as the operational efficiency declines later in life and facing a dwindling output flow so a more appropriate extraction technology becomes economic a real option representation is formulated on a stochastic oil price and deteriorating output volume we consider investment divestment decisions both separately and jointly which have different implications for government policies and also option values the resulting model yields analytical or semi analytical results indicating that immediate switching to the lower cost technology could sometimes be hastened as the price volatility increases depending on the current revenue if divestment and switching are considered jointly however greater volatility could also promote hysteresis

side effects of nonlinear profit taxes in an evolutionary market entry model abrupt changes coexisting attractors and hysteresis problems in order to demonstrate that nonlinear tax systems may have surprising and potentially undesirable side effects we develop an evolutionary market entry model in which firms decide on the basis of past profit opportunities whether or not to enter a competitive market our main focus is on the case of a proportional tax on positive profits such a piecewise linear tax scheme induces a kink in the firms profit functions and may lead to abrupt changes in a market s dynamics coexisting attractors and hysteresis problems since these phenomena can also be observed in more general models a proper understanding of their basic mechanism may be helpful to explain the intricate behavior of many economic systems

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

sustainable homeservices toward household services that enhance ecological social and economic sustainability abstract the idea of services replacing products is increasingly offered as a solution to making the production and consumption patterns of the affluent consumers more sustainable however the discussion about sustainable services or sustainable product service systems tends to emphasize the eco efficiency perspective rather than explicitly capture all sustainability aspects social or socioeconomic considerations are often forgotten or by passed without scrutiny this paper argues that there is the need for a concept of sustainable services in which the social sustainability aspect is also recognized with equal attention since a major part of private consumption occurs in the household context living at home and moving to and from it this paper will put forth the concept of sustainable homeservices and will suggest a way to assess sustainability of services directed to households for assessing the sustainability of services directed to households a set of indicators relating to the ecological social and economic dimensions of sustainability is proposed with the aim of giving an idea of how to assess homeservices in practical terms the paper will also exemplify how one could operationalize these indicators on an ordinal rating scale the conclusion is that it is possible to assess the sustainability of a homeservice in a relative fashion using no service or the product alternative as the point of comparison households alone have a limited capacity to influence their consumption choices because other actors set the frame for this reason institutional arrangements for making services easily available to households are outlined it appears that housing organizations have a central role in the alternative option for organizing the supply of service provision they are involved in five of the seven alternative ways of supplying services that could be identified the role of the housing organization can vary from direct supply to lighter forms such as cooperative arrangements with external service providers or resident involvement

valuing managerial flexibility an application of real option theory to mining investments abstract the value of managerial flexibility is assessed using data on prices costs grades reserves ore extraction and metal output for a panel of canadian copper mines a real option model is estimated and solved for project and option values most empirical researchers i consider the initial investment decision but neglect flexible operation thereafter ii assume that price is stochastic but ignore cost and reserve uncertainty and iii model price as a nonstationary stochastic process the evolution of three state variables price cost and reserves is assessed here differences in assumptions compared to others are found to lead to large differences in estimated project and option values

competitive business cycles in an overlapping generations economy with productive investment abstract this paper examines the emergence of long run competitive periodic equilibria in a two period overlapping generations model with capital accumulation the existence of periodic equilibria is a consequence of the existence of an aggregate bubble money and of a non linear behaviour of aggregate savings the technique used is to show that the problem can be reduced to the study of a dynamical map from an interval into itself although it is originally two dimensional this will allow us to study the occurrence of cycles from a global point of view

economic growth and emissions reconsidering the empirical basis of environmental kuznets curves abstract recent empirical research indicates that certain types of emissions follow an inverted u or environmental kuznets curve ekc as income grows this regularity has been interpreted as a possible de linking of economic growth and patterns of certain pollutants for developed economies in this paper the empirical basis of this result is investigated by considering some statistical particularities of the various ekc studies performed it is argued that the inverted u relationship between income and emissions estimated from panel data need not hold for specific individual countries over time based on insights from intensity of use analysis in resource economics an alternative growth model is specified and estimated for three types of emissions co2 nox and so2 in four countries netherlands uk usa and western germany it is found that the time patterns of these emissions correlate positively with economic growth and that emission reductions may have been achieved as a result of structural and technological changes in the economy sustainable growth is defined as the rate of economic growth that does not lead to growth in emissions its rate is calculated for each type of emission and country based on estimated parameter values the resulting indicators reflect a balance between the positive influence of growth and negative influence of structural change and technological progress on emission levels

caution implies profit abstract the paper illustrates by simple cobweb models that under certain circumstances fluctuations in perpetual disequilibrium may not only be viable but also preferable to a competitive equilibrium from the long run perspective

developments in the throughput income relationship theoretical and empirical observations abstract it has been suggested that the relationship between income and the associated environmental pressure in terms of derived materials inputs and pollution levels may take an inverted u shape indicating a delinking of environmental pressure from economic growth in relation to rising per capita incomes the likelihood of such a relationship being persistent is discussed in the context of a simple macro model of industrial metabolism and the possibility of relinking clearly emerges data on specific indicators of environmental pressure i e the throughput of materials energy and the volume of transport in 19 countries have been used to investigate patterns of delinking the results suggest that delinking may not be persistent already some advanced economies may be entering a new period of relinking the relationships between environmental pressure and welfare in the medium long term may be n shaped rather than inverted u shaped

chaotic price behavior in a non linear cobweb model abstract the cobweb model for the evolution of prices is considered with backward bending supply curves and multi valued demand curves these deterministic non linear dynamical systems are shown to exhibit a broad spectrum of complex time behavior including stable periodic cycles of arbitrary order and chaos

the emergence of chaos from classical economic growth this paper shows how fluctuations of an erratic and unstable nature can emerge from the classical deterministic economic growth process implications of the analysis would appear to be at least two first pronounced changes in the way an economy behaves need not cause us to reject our understanding of how it works second we need not seek in exogenous forces an explanation as to why behavioral patterns change and why it may be so difficult to anticipate future events from the profile of past experience

equilibrium models displaying endogenous fluctuations and chaos abstract this paper surveys current developments in dynamic general equilibrium theory concerned with conditions under which endogenous fluctuations are possible existing contributions are divided into two classes the larger one consists of models with a unique perfect foresight equilibrium while the second includes models where equilibrium is indeterminate and the set of equilibria involving endogenous fluctuations includes sunspots equilibria while the two classes of models involve oscillations of different natures and with different policy implications we show that both are consistent with optimizing behavior and competitive equilibrium

the role of capital depreciation in multi sectoral models abstract this study investigates the role of capital depreciation in economic fluctuations that may appear in multi sectoral models of optimal growth in the standard literature on non linear optimal dynamics it has been assumed that capital depreciates completely within a period this study in contrast deals with the case in which capital depreciates slowly more precisely only by a certain percentage we adopt the standard two sector model with cobb douglas production functions and characterize the dynamics around the stationary state we derive explicit conditions on parameter values under which cyclical optimal paths appear these conditions reveal the complexity that slow depreciation adds to multi sectoral optimal dynamics the economic interpretation of slow depreciation in multi sectoral models is also discussed

irregular growth cycles this paper uses the familiar neoclassical theory of capital accumulation to show how complex behavior can emerge from quite simple economic structures indeed when sufficient nonlinearities and a production lag are present the interaction alone of the propensity to save and the productivity of capital can lead to growth cycles that exhibit a wandering sawtooth pattern not unlike those observed in reality these fluctuations need not converge to a cycle of any regular periodicity so they are not quasi periodic because such chaotic trajectories are unstable errors of estimation in parameters or initial conditions however tiny will accumulate rapidly into substantial errors of forecast moreover periods of erratic cycling can be interspersed with periods of more or less stable growth evidently the future behavior of a model solution cannot be anticipated from its patterns in the past a situation that seems to mimic experience apparent structural change and unpredictability is explained in the present theory by a deterministic single equation model random shocks play no role so the reader can visualize just what it is we are are talking about a noteworthy simulation is presented in figure 1 for gnp in a growth model that is described below in section iii a period of relatively rapid growth is followed by a period of cycles then remarkably for a considerable time about twenty periods apparently steady state growth occurs wandering cycles however emerge another brief period close to the steady state appears again toward the end of the series i establish conditions of savings and productivity that lead to results of this kind this analysis makes use of the mathematical theory of chaos which in the form exploited here originated in the work of edward lorenz a formal definition of chaos and sufficient conditions for chaotic trajectories were provided in a seminal paper by t y li and james yorke a survey of these related contributions is found in yorke and evelyn yorke this theory was introduced into economics by jess benhabib and myself 1981 where we showed that sequences of rational choices can be erratic when preferences depend on experience in a certain way by michael stutzer who provides a detailed analysis of trygve haavelmo s growth model by benhabib and myself 1980 in an application of the overlapping generations model and in my forthcoming study of the classical growth model

a dynamic model of cleanup estimating sunk costs in oil and gas production the environmental remediation required to permanently decommission most industrial projects is an expensive irreversible investment real options literature shows that temporary closure has value under uncertainty however even if there is no intention to restart operations there is an incentive to label a closure as temporary to avoid having to remediate ongoing or future environmental externalities i estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of closure under price and quantity uncertainty to evaluate the likelihood of reactivation the model reveals that the option to temporarily close is being widely used to avoid environmental remediation of oil and gas wells in canada

a real options model to evaluate the effect of environmental policies on the oil sands rate of expansion abstract canadian oil sands hold the third largest recognized oil deposit in the world while the rapidly expanding oil sands industry in western canada has driven economic growth the extraction of the oil comes at a significant environmental cost it is believed that the government policies have failed to keep up with the rapid oil sands expansion creating serious challenges in managing the environmental impacts this paper presents a practical yet financially sound real options model to evaluate the rate of oil sands expansion under different environmental cost scenarios resulting from governmental policies while accounting for oil price uncertainty and managerial flexibilities our model considers a multi plant multi agent setting in which labor costs increase for all agents and impact their optimal strategies as new plants come online our results show that a stricter environmental cost scenario delays investment but leads to a higher rate of expansion once investment begins once constructed a plant is highly unlikely to shut down our model can be used by government policy makers to gauge the impact of policy strategies on the oil sands expansion rate and by oil companies to evaluate expansion strategies based on assumptions regarding market and taxation costs

poverty equilibrium an introductory systemic analysis abstract this paper represents an attempt to clarify the field of the studies concerning the poor stagnant economy using systemic analysis the original theories are reformulated in such a way as to highlight their similarities and dynamic structure the works of ragnar nurkse gunnar myrdal john k galbraith and harvey leibenstein are presented as components of a general theory of stagnation at low incomes the paper ends with an attempt to formulate a modern version of the theory using the chaotic dynamics approach to depict the situation the main purpose of this paper is to formulate the concept or in other words to clarify mathematically the hypothesis in order to test it the building of the empirical tests and of economic models to explain it is treated in other papers

long term trends in direct and indirect household energy intensities a factor in dematerialisation abstract dematerialisation is assumed to contribute significantly to the alleviation of environmental problems one of the possible causes of dematerialisation is a change in the consumption patterns of households the aim of this article is to analyse changes consumption patterns of dutch households in the period between 1948 to 1996 in order to discover whether these changes haven influenced the energy intensity of society due to the rise in consumption the total household energy requirement per capita grew on average by 2 4 per year over a period of 48 years this figure ignores efficiency changes in the supplying sectors in the same period the total energy intensity of households fluctuated but on average changed from 5 6 to 6 3 mj nlg an increase of 0 25 per year if we exclude the direct energy consumption we find a slight decline in the indirect energy intensity namely from 3 8 to 3 6 mj nlg 0 14 per year no significant trends to a lower energy intensity are found and there is no indication of dematerialisation of the consumption patterns if governments pursue a policy of sustainable development they have to take into account the fact that dematerialisation of the consumption pattern does not seem to be an autonomous process

an empirical comparison of alternate regime switching models for electricity spot prices one of the most profound features of electricity spot prices are the price spikes markov regime switching mrs models seem to be a natural candidate for modeling this spiky behavior however in the studies published so far the goodness of fit of the proposed models has not been a major focus while most of the models were elegant their fit to empirical data has either been not examined thoroughly or the signs of a bad fit ignored with this paper we want to fill the gap we calibrate and test a range of mrs models in an attempt to find parsimonious specifications that not only address the main characteristics of electricity prices but are statistically sound as well we find that the most universal and robust structure is that of an independent spike 3 regime model with heteroscedastic diffusion type base regime dynamics and shifted spike regime distributions

perfectly competitive models of endogenous business fluctuations the endogenous hypothesis is not new at a pre analytic level it is based on the simple intuition that market mechanisms are inherently dynamically unstable at least around their stationary positions in this note i want to stress the theoretical point that there is nothing in the working of a perfectly competitive market system that prevents it from displaying persistent and endogenous fluctuations and that moreover such fluctuations may have their origins in market fundamentals such as factor intensities factor substitutability degree of impatience and so forth nevertheless macroeconomic models of endogenous fluctuations still have to prove that apart from being very beautiful they can also be useful to understand the so called heal world hit sunt leones this article is not intended to be a survey of all that has been written in this area in the last decade i have no title whatsoever to talk about empirical studies chera sayers contribution in this same volume addresses that guestion scheinkman 1990 is a readily available survey of nonlinear statistical methods that are relevant to this debate as for the theory incompetence recommends that i avoid touching on sunspot equilibria olg models and more generally expectations driven cycles they are instead discussed in jean michel grandmont s article finally marketing awareness implies recommending boldrin and woodford 1990 as a reasonably complete survey of what the endogenous cycle research program has recently produced at a theoretical level

on endogenous competitive business cycles the belief that the long run equilibrium of a competitive monetary economy that does not experience any exogeneous shocks whether originating from the external environment or from policy should be modelled as a state that is stationary or perhaps growing at a constant rate seems to be deeply rooted in the mind of some economists

regime switching in stochastic models of commodity prices an application to an optimal tree harvesting problem abstract this paper investigates whether a regime switching model of stochastic lumber prices is better for the analysis of optimal harvesting problems in forestry than a more traditional single regime model prices of lumber derivatives are used to calibrate a regime switching model with each of two regimes characterized by a different mean reverting process a single regime mean reverting process is also calibrated the value of a representative stand of trees and optimal harvesting prices are determined by specifying a hamilton jacobi bellman variational inequality which is solved for both pricing models using a implicit finite difference approach the regime switching model is found to more closely match the behavior of futures prices than the single regime model in addition analysis of a tree harvesting problem indicates significant differences in terms of land value and optimal harvest thresholds between the regime switching and single regime models

commodity price fluctuations price dependent delays and nonlinearities as explanatory factors this paper develops a price adjustment model for a single commodity market with state dependent production and storage delays conditions for the equilibrium price to be stable are derived in terms of a variety of economic parameters when stability of the equilibrium price is lost a hopf bifurcation occurs giving rise to an oscillatory commodity price with a period between two and four times the equilibrium production storage delay

rational choice and erratic behaviour in this paper we show that rational choice in a stationary environment can lead to erratic behaviour when preferences depend on experience we mean by erratic behaviour choice sequences that do not converge to a long run stationary value or to any periodic pattern early investigations of the effects of experience on choice goes back to pareto see also benhabib 1979 some keynesian theories of the consumption function incorporate the effects of experience and habit formation on current levels of consumption duesenberry 1949 modigliani 1949 and brown 1952 a general model of experience dependent choice was described in day 1970 and investigated in day and kennedy 1971 while the specific issue of the existence of stable representable long run consumer demand when tastes vary endogenously has been treated by gorman 1967 pollak 1970 1976 weizsaicker 1971 mccarthy 1974 and hammond 1976 pollak gave conditions for the representability of long run choice when the equations of preference dependence are linear and utility additive hammond in a generalization of these findings provides conditions for stable representable long run choice when preferences are acyclic a condition which in essence assures convergence to a long run choice

the use of physical indicators for industrial energy demand scenarios abstract scientific information on the size and nature of the threat of climate change is needed by politicians in order to weight their decisions computerised models are extremely useful tools to quantify the long term effects of current policies this paper describes a new modelling approach that allows formulation of industrial energy demand projections consistent with the assumptions for scenario drivers such as gdp and population in the model a level of industrial production is used as a key variable and we define it in physical units rather than in monetary units the aim of this research is to increase insights that come with long term energy demand scenarios this research clearly shows that physical indicators provide additional insights in scenario analysis the use of physical indicators instead of monetary indicators seems to affect the energy scenarios significantly the differences with monetary indicators are larger in developing regions than in oecd regions we conclude that an integrated energy and materials approach reveals developments that are hardly visible using a monetary approach moreover this research shows the potential and benefits of the use of physical indicators for scenario development

competitive equilibrium cycles recently there has been a surge of interest in endogenous business cycles that arise in competitive laissez faire economies in the context of standard overlapping generations economies conditions for the existence of equilibrium cycles have been given by grandmont 1983 and by benhabib and day 1982 models of the economy with extrinsic uncertainty or sunspots that have been developed by shell 1977 and by cass and shell 1983 see also balasko 1983 can also lead to equilibrium cycles

chaotic dynamics in credit constrained emerging economies abstract this paper analyzes the role of financial development as a source of endogenous instability in small open economies by assuming that firms face credit constraints our model displays a complex dynamic behavior with high period cycles or even chaotic dynamic patterns for intermediate values of the parameter representing the level of financial development of the economy we derive sufficient conditions for global stability and we prove that chaos appears via a border collision bifurcation the basic implication of our model is that economies experiencing a process of financial development are more unstable than both very underdeveloped and very developed economies

an options pricing approach to ramping rate restrictions at hydro power plants this paper investigates the impact of ramping rate restrictions imposed on hydro operations to protect aquatic ecosystems the optimal ramping decision is specified as an optimal control problem which results in a hamilton jacobi bellman hjb equation electricity prices are modelled as a regime switching stochastic process the optimal control is determined by solving the hjb equation numerically using a fully implicit finite difference approach with semi lagrangian time stepping the paper focuses on the effect of ramping restrictions on a hydro plant s value and optimal operations and provides an analysis of which factors cause ramping restrictions to have a greater or lesser impact on profitability it is shown that hydro plant value is negatively affected by ramping restrictions but the extent of the impact depends on key parameters which determine the desirability of frequent changes in water release rates interestingly for the case considered value is not sensitive to ramping restrictions over a large range of restrictions the results point to the importance of accurately modelling electricity prices in gauging the trade offs involved in imposing restrictions on hydro operators which may hinder their ability to respond to volatile electricity prices and meet peak demands

resource extraction with a carbon tax and regime switching prices exercising your options this paper develops a model of a profit maximizing firm with the option to exploit a non renewable resource choosing the timing and pace of development the resource price is modelled as a regime switching process which is calibrated to oil futures prices a hamilton jacobi bellman equation is specified that describes the profit maximization decision of the firm the model is applied to a problem of optimal investment in a typical oils sands in situ operation and solved for critical levels of oil prices that would motivate a firm to make the large scale investment needed for oil sands extraction as well as to operate mothball or abandon the facility regime shifts can have an important effect on the optimal timing of investment and extraction the paper examines the effect of several carbon tax schemes on optimal timing of construction production and abandonment a form of green paradox is identified

on the complicated price dynamics of a simple one dimensional discontinuous financial market model with heterogeneous interacting traders abstract we develop a financial market model with heterogeneous interacting agents market makers adjust prices with respect to excess demand chartists believe in the persistence of bull and bear markets and fundamentalists bet on mean reversion moreover speculators trade asymmetrically in over and undervalued markets and while some of them determine the size of their orders via linear trading rules others always trade the same amount of assets the dynamics of our model is driven by a one dimensional discontinuous map despite the simplicity of our model analytical graphical and numerical analysis reveals a surprisingly rich set of interesting dynamical behaviors

the emergence of equilibrium cycles in a monetary economy with a separable utility function abstract this paper analyzes the dynamic properties of the monetary economy when money held during the period induces some utility it is shown that the price level and real money balances may have chaotic dynamic paths even if the utility function is separable in real money balances and consumption a crucial point is that a constraint on the utility of money yields the wealth effect that inflation will reduce the real value of assets hence as in the overlapping generations model the conflict between substitution and wealth effects may cause globally stable periodic orbits as well as the complicated dynamics

energy intensity in the iron and steel industry a comparison of physical and economic indicators abstract energy consumption of the iron and steel industry is examined in seven countries brazil china france germany japan poland and the united states for the period 1980 1991 using a decomposition analysis based on physical indicators for process type and product mix we decompose intra sectoral structural changes and efficiency improvements specific energy consumption decreased in all countries except poland efficiency improvement played a key role in brazil china germany and the us while structural changes were the main driver for energy savings in france and japan we also compare the use of various economic indicators to physical indicators and find that they do not track physical developments well in poland or the developing countries we studied in the industrialized countries value added based energy intensity indicators generally reflect the specific energy consumption better than other economic indicators although large differences occur in individual years we found a smaller correlation between other economic indicators gross output and value of shipments and specific energy consumption we conclude that use of physical energy intensity indicators improves comparability between countries provides greater information for policy makers regarding intra sectoral structural changes and provides detailed explanations for observed changes in energy intensity

statistical dynamics and economics abstract it is shown in this paper how complex economic dynamics can be characterized using the statistical or distributional theory of dynamical systems the basic concepts of the latter are summarized then applications to supply and demand adjustments in competitive markets aggregate business fluctuations and economic growth in the very long run are briefly reviewed

the hamilton model with a general autoregressive component estimation and comparison with other models of economic time series abstract this paper generalizes the hamilton model to the important case in which the autoregressive component need not contain a unit root using u s quarterly real gnp data the model is estimated and the results are compared to those of hamilton some monte carlo evidence for the model is presented and its in sample forecasting performance is discussed and compared to the original hamilton model the arima model and the deterministic time trend model

durable capital and chaos in competitive business cycles abstract this study constructs an example of chaotic optimal accumulation that results from the existence of the limitation of capital depreciation an example is an extension of the model developed by weitzman

differential savings factor shares and endogenous growth cycles abstract the paper analyzes the dynamic properties of the neoclassical one sector growth model with differential savings in the sense of kaldor pasinetti the economy exhibits unstable steady states and fluctuations if the income distribution varies sufficiently and if shareholders save more than workers the paper analyzes in detail the dynamics for the case with a fixed proportions technology as well as with a smooth approximation if the savings propensities differ by an arbitrarily small amount the system exhibits topological chaos in the sense of li and yorke for an open set of production functions the analytical results are supplemented by numerical experiments

jumps and stochastic volatility in oil prices time series evidence abstract in this paper we examine the empirical performance of affine jump diffusion models with stochastic volatility in a time series study of crude oil prices we compare four different models and estimate them using the markov chain monte carlo method the support for a stochastic volatility model including jumps in both prices and volatility is strong and the model clearly outperforms the others in terms of a superior fit to data our estimation method allows us to obtain a detailed study of oil prices during two periods of extreme market stress included in our sample the gulf war and the recent financial crisis we also address the economic significance of model choice in two option pricing applications the implied volatilities generated by the different estimated models are compared and we price a real option to develop an oil field our findings indicate that model choice can have a material effect on the option values

on the market consistent valuation of fish farms using the real option approach and salmon futures we consider the optimal harvesting problem for a fish farmer in a model which accounts for stochastic prices featuring schwartz 1997 two factor price dynamics unlike any other literature in this context we take account of the existence of a newly established market in salmon futures which determines risk premia and other relevant variables that influence risk averse fish farmers in their harvesting decision we consider the cases of single and infinite rotations the value function of the harvesting problem determined in our arbitrage free setup constitutes the fair values of lease and ownership of the fish farm when correctly accounting for price risk the data set used for this analysis contains a large set of futures contracts with different maturities traded at the fish pool market between 12 06 2006 and 22 03 2012 we assess the optimal strategy harvesting time and value against two alternative setups the first alternative involves simple strategies which lack managerial flexibility the second alternative allows for managerial flexibility and risk aversion as modeled by a constant relative risk aversion utility function but without access to the salmon futures market in both cases the loss in project value can be very significant and in the second case is only negligible for extremely low levels of risk aversion in consequence for a risk averse fish farmer the presence of a salmon futures market as well as managerial flexibility are highly important

sources of complex dynamics in two sector growth models this paper develops a tractable multisectoral dynamic equilibrium model and provides a fairly complete analysis of the dynamics that may arise along the intertemporal competitive equilibrium path despite the fact that the environment displays neither random nor deterministic variability the model may produce oscillations in aggregate variables such as output consumption and investment we show that these oscillations can be exactly periodic of any finite period i and even totally aperiodic chaotic we characterize the parameter values for which each of these cases occur but also provide some strong global asymptotic stability results

filtering and forecasting commodity futures prices under an hmm framework abstract we propose a model for the evolution of arbitrage free futures prices under a regime switching framework the estimation of model parameters is carried out using the hidden markov filtering algorithms comprehensive numerical experiments on real financial market data are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in particular the model is calibrated with data from heating oil futures and its forecasting performance as well as statistical validity is investigated the proposed model is parsimonious self calibrating and can be very useful in predicting futures prices

endogenous cycles in a stiglitz weiss economy the literature on financial imperfections and business cycles has focused onpropagation mechanisms in this paper we model a purereversion mechanism such that the economy may converge to a two period equilibrium cycle this mechanism confirms that financial imperfections may have a dramatic amplification effect unlike in some related models contracts are complete indexation is not assumed away the welfare properties of a possible stabilizing policy are analyzed the model itself is a dynamic extension of the well known stiglitz weiss model of lending under moral hazard although stylized the model still captures some important features of credit cycles

on solving the multirotational timber harvesting problem with stochastic prices a linear complementarity formulation this article develops a two factor real options model of the harvesting decision over infinite rotations assuming a known stochastic price process and using a rigorous hamilton jacobi bellman methodology the harvesting problem is formulated as a linear complementarity problem that is solved numerically using a fully implicit finite difference method this approach is contrasted with the markov decision process models commonly used in the literature the model is used to estimate the value of a representative stand in ontario s boreal forest both when there is complete flexibility regarding harvesting time and when regulations dictate the harvesting date