managing without growth abstract there are three main arguments why developed countries should consider managing without growth 1 continued economic growth worldwide is not an option owing to environmental and resource constraints and so developed countries should leave room for growth in developing countries where the benefits of growth are evident 2 in developed countries growth has become uneconomic in the sense that it detracts more from well being than it adds and 3 economic growth in developed countries is neither necessary nor sufficient for meeting specific policy objectives such as full employment no poverty and protection of the environment this paper explores various growth scenarios for canada over the medium range to 2020 using lowgrow a dynamic simulation model after describing lowgrow a scenario is presented that shows conditions under which the rate of unemployment in canada could be reduced to historically low levels poverty eliminated and greenhouse gas emissions reduced to comply with canada s commitment under the kyoto protocol without relying on economic growth this is not to say that zero growth should itself become a policy objective rather that the dependence on and defence of economic growth should not be an obstacle to fulfilling more specific welfare enhancing objectives of full employment eliminating poverty and protecting the environment the paper concludes with some policy implications for managing without growth followed by an annex which provides a technical description of lowgrow

crisis or opportunity economic degrowth for social equity and ecological sustainability introduction to this special issue abstract this article reviews the burgeoning emerging literature on sustainable degrowth this is defined as an equitable downscaling of production and consumption that increases human well being and enhances ecological conditions at the local and global level in the short and long term the paradigmatic propositions of degrowth are that economic growth is not sustainable and that human progress without economic growth is possible degrowth proponents come from diverse origins some are critics of market globalization new technologies or the imposition of western models of development in the rest of the world all criticize gdp accounting though they propose often different social and ecological indicators degrowth theorists and practitioners support an extension of human relations instead of market relations demand a deepening of democracy defend ecosystems and propose a more equal distribution of wealth we distinguish between depression i e unplanned degrowth within a growth regime and sustainable degrowth a voluntary smooth and equitable transition to a regime of lower production and consumption the question we ask is how positive would degrowth be if instead of being imposed by an economic crisis it would actually be a democratic collective decision a project with the ambition of getting closer to ecological sustainability and socio environmental justice worldwide most articles in this issue were originally presented at the april 2008 conference in paris on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity this conference brought the word degrowth and the concepts around it into an international academic setting articles of this special issue are summarized in this introductory article hueting d alessandro and colleagues van den bergh kerschner spangenberg and alcott discuss whether current growth patterns are un sustainable and offer different perspectives on what degrowth might mean and whether and under what conditions it might be desirable matthey and hamilton focus on social dynamics and the obstacles and opportunities for voluntary social action towards degrowth lietaert and cattaneo with gavalda offer a down to earth empirical discussion of two practical living experiments cohousing and squats highlighting the obstacles for scaling up such alternatives finally van griethuysen explains why growth is an imperative in modern market economies raising also the question whether degrowth is possible without radical institutional changes

revenue comparison in common value auctions two examples abstract when players affiliated values are symmetrically distributed expected revenue in the second price auction equals or exceeds that in the first price auction milgrom and weber 1982 we provide two common value examples where this ranking fails when players are asymmetrically informed

an asymmetric common value auction model this article develops a model allowing asymmetric information between two bidders in an auction for a common value object it supposes that there is a common prior distribution on the object s value and that each bidder receives a private signal conditional on the object s unknown true value asymmetry comes about through a difference in the precision of the bidder s signals placing a restriction on the nature of this difference i determine the equilibrium bidding strategies for the first price and second price auctions the strategies are symmetric and the second price auction generates a higher seller s expected revenue a result that extends the well known revenue ordering result of symmetric information auctions i do however provide an example to show that this ordering is not necessarily maintained in a less restricted asymmetric setting finally another example illustrates that the seller may prefer that bidders be asymmetrically informed to releasing information that would reduce the asymmetry

a note on the malmquist productivity index in recent years the malmquist index has gained in popularity as a measure of productivity change we demonstrate that in the presence of non constant returns to scale the malmquist productivity index does not accurately measure productivity change the bias is systematic and depends on the magnitude of scale economies

productivity growth and biased technological change in hydroelectric dams abstract this paper analyses productivity growth and the nature of technical change in a sample of portuguese hydroelectric generating plants over the period 2001 to 2008 in a first step we employ the luenberger productivity indicator to estimate and decompose productivity change a malmquist productivity index is also used for a comparative purpose the results paint a picture of mixed productivity performance in the portuguese energy sector the first decomposition underlines that in average the productivity variation is explained by the technological change then in a second step we analyse the nature of this technical change by using the recent concept of parallel neutrality briec et al 2006 we observe a global shift in the best practice frontier as well as in the evidence of input bias in technical change

asymmetric private values auctions with application to joint bidding and mergers abstract much of the theoretical auction literature assumes that there are no observable differences between the bidders of an auction in this paper i present an asymmetric auction model where the distribution of a bidder s value depends on some commonly observed characteristics the model is applied to joint bidding and mergers in auction markets the results provide additional evidence that first price auctions are less susceptible to the acquisition and exercise of market power than open auctions

attitudes towards climate policies in a macrodynamic model of the economy abstract in a recent article published in this journal guarini and porcile 2016 expanded the balance of payments constraint bopc growth model suggesting a way to make it possible to address some of the challenges posed by greenhouse gas emissions building on their set up we formalise into the model a mechanism that explains how people with different environmental attitudes or sentiments influence each other and contribute to the design of environmental policies we detail the concept of transition probabilities for the agent s switching from pro to anti environmental positions and vice versa and discuss the macroeconomic results that follow numerical simulations allow us to investigate in more detail the implications of the validity of porter s hypothesis as well as to discuss the feasibility of decoupling conditions a policy implication of our analysis is that we should encourage the dissemination of pro environmental attitudes among the public because this could lead to a more desirable equilibrium as important as enhancing public knowledge of climate change is to keep alive the debate at the collective level so as to influence the probability of switching sides

ecological macroeconomic models assessing current developments our society faces a dilemma while continued economic growth is ecologically unsustainable low or negative rates of economic growth are accompanied by adverse social impacts hence there is a need for macroeconomic tools that can help identify socially sustainable post growth pathways the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics aims to address this need and features a number of new macroeconomic modelling approaches this article provides 1 a review of modelling developments in ecological macroeconomics based on the literature and interviews with researchers and 2 an analysis of how the different models incorporate policy themes from the post growth literature twenty two ecological macroeconomic models were analysed and compared to eight policy themes it was found that environmental interactions and the monetary system were treated most comprehensively themes of income inequality work patterns indicators of well being and disaggregated production were addressed with less detail while alternative business models and cross scale interactions were hardly addressed overall the combination of input output analysis with stock flow consistent modelling was identified as a promising avenue for developing macroeconomic models for a post growth economy however due to the wide interpretation of what the economy entails future research will benefit from employing a range of approaches

total factor spillovers similarities and competitions in the petroleum industry this chapter investigates multi dimensional spillovers similarities and competitions in the petroleum industry spatial techniques are applied first in production function in order to observe the cross sectional dependence in each of the four dimensions product technology segment and region wide these four single dimensional spatial models are then aggregated by a model averaging method that assigns weights to different models based on their ability to explain data taking all dependences into consideration this chapter estimates the total factor spillovers similarities and competitions in the spirit of total factor productivity negative spillover effects are observed in all the four dimensions moreover segment wide competition has negative effect on productivity some policy implications concerning human capital globalization and development strategies are also discussed

capitalist diversity and de growth trajectories to steady state economies abstract growth critical scholarship has done much to both expose the environmentally unsustainable nature of the capitalist growth economies of the overdeveloped part of the world and to develop an alternative vision of a de growth transition leading to a steady state economy however this scholarship fails to adequately take into consideration that if planned de growth actually materialised it would do so in societies that differ considerably from one another and that this would have implications both for the transition processes and the nature of their outcomes in other words not enough importance is ascribed to capitalist diversity and the nature of institutional change in the growth critical literature against this background the purpose of the present article is to make the concrete utopia of de growth scholars and steady state economists more specific by utilising insights from scholarship on capitalist diversity and institutional change on the basis of a typology of different models of capitalism the article suggests that if de growth transitions took place they would take different forms and lead to a variety of types of steady state economies sses to illustrate this point three ideal typical sses are delineated

interaction between output efficiency and environmental efficiency evidence from the textile industry in jiangsu province china environmental efficiency improvement has played a crucial role in the theory and practice of stimulating clean production this paper analyzes the interaction between environmental efficiency and output efficiency particularly whether they reinforce each other or compete with each other on the basis of a data set of 137 firms in the textile industry in china s jiangsu province in the first stage generalized data envelopment analysis is applied to calculate efficiency measures of energy waste water waste gas soot and output efficiency taking capital labor water and energy as inputs industrial output value as desirable output and waste water discharges waste gas and soot emissions as undesirable outputs in the second stage analysis a structural equation model with latent variables is applied to analyze the interaction between the latent variable environmental efficiency measured by the four observed environmental indicators and output efficiency taking also into account the endogenous variable profit the main outcomes of the structural equation model are the following firstly environmental efficiency negatively impacts on profit while profit positively impacts on environmental efficiency in a similar vein output efficiency is found to depress profit while profit increases output efficiency thirdly environmental efficiency has a positive impact on output efficiency while there is no effect of output efficiency on environmental efficiency fourthly taxes impair a firm s output efficiency from the findings it follows that a swap of general taxes for an energy tax is likely to improve both output efficiency and energy efficiency the latter outcome implies a win win situation which will facilitate the further implementation and adoption of environmental policy finally the paper illustrates the applicability of structural equation modeling in efficiency analysis

common value auctions with asymmetric bidder information abstract we study a first price auction with two asymmetric bidders a unique generically asymmetric equilibrium exists under some conditions aggressive bidding is not necessarily associated with inferiority of information reduction in asymmetry can have an ambiguous effect on revenue

returns to scale and damages to scale on u s fossil fuel power plants radial and non radial approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment paying attention to a methodological bias i e different methods produce different results dea is analytically classified into radial and non radial approaches the radial approach determines the level of unified operational and environmental efficiency by measuring an inefficiency score the score indicates the distance of a projection from an observed performance to an efficiency frontier in contrast the non radial approach determines the level of unified efficiency by measuring a total amount of slacks because each slack indicates inefficiency to avoid the methodological bias this study considers the use of radial and non radial approaches in this study we consider a production process where all organizations produce not only desirable good but also undesirable bad outputs as a result of their business operations to unify the two types of outputs this study discusses the concept of disposability which is separated into natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified efficiency by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change under the two disposability concepts this study discusses how to measure rts returns to scale under natural disposability and dts damages to scale corresponding to rts on undesirable outputs under managerial disposability the two scale measures are analytically discussed by the proposed radial and non radial approaches with scscs or without scscs where scscs indicate strong complementary slackness conditions an illustrative example on u s fossil fuel power plants indicates a policy implication that they need to introduce new technology for environmental protection this study also discusses a necessity of examining a methodological bias in energy studies empirical findings identified in this study document the practicality of the proposed approaches to measure rts dts

the effects of electricity reforms on productivity and efficiency of china s fossil fired power plants an empirical analysis abstract this paper investigates the effects of electricity reforms on productivity and efficiency of china s generation plants based on the third industrial census data and the first economic census data partial factor productivity pfp analysis indicates that the productivity improvements in labor and capital inputs associated with the reforms are approximately 26 and 45 respectively the effect of the reforms on fuel expense is weakly significant but there is evidence of significant productivity improvement in fuel usage further total factor productivity tfp analysis shows that the efficiency gain from the reforms is still significant when the substitution effect of labor and capital inputs are considered though the magnitude is much lower than that of the pfp analysis the effect of the reforms on technical efficiency becomes weakly significant when fuel expense is further included in tfp analysis but a significant positive effect is expected if fuel input is measured in physical quantity

deceleration of economic growth the main course seeking sustainability in developed countries abstract deceleration of economic growth is a characteristic feature of developed countries percentage gross domestic product gdp growth rate in the old organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries has decreased approximately 2 3 times over the last 50 years and countries have managed successfully to adopt this trend the largest reduction of gdp growth rate was observed in countries such as japan where the biocapacity exceedance was the largest in addition the analysis of long term changes of gdp and self reported life satisfaction in developed countries supports easterlin s paradox indicating that richer people do not feel more satisfied with their lives however people from countries with higher per capita gdp feel more satisfied at the same time a statistically insignificant correlation was detected between gdp growth rate and life satisfaction supporting a conclusion that in the developed countries further economic growth does not increase people s well being this suggests that decelerating the rate of economic growth gradually approaching the zero growth steady state phase is the natural way towards sustainability and it does not contradict the well being objective in developed countries especially ones with high biocapacity exceedance

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

steady state of energy feedbacks and leverages for promoting or preventing sustainable energy system development abstract while energy demand has been growing over the last few decades and is projected to keep expanding the current energy system is pushing biophysical source and sink limits at the same time growing demand for energy globally is associated with an expansion of welfare to avoid undesired environmental and social implications of energy developments in the long run a systemic understanding of the dynamics promoting or preventing sustainable energy development is needed departing from daly s steady state economics theory this study conceptualizes a sustainable energy system using a systems thinking approach efficiency increase the central element of daly s theory defined as the service throughput ratio is put in the center of a conceptual analysis of a sustainable energy system and is carefully scrutinized meadows leverage points concept is used to facilitate an analysis of different policies that aim at promoting sustainable energy system development this study concludes that energy policies always need to be explored as part of the broader causality structure into which they are embedded otherwise their impacts on other variables in the system may be overlooked such as in the case of efficiency increase which is shown to have undesired side effects for the development of a sustainable energy system

efficiency evaluation of china s provincial power systems based on the dynamic network slacks based measure model abstract a power system contains generation transmission and distribution divisions policy reforms and management mechanisms may affect the environmental efficiency of certain divisions or the integrated power system this study applied the dynamic network slacks based measure dnsbm model to analyze the environmental efficiency of both the power systems and their divisions of provincial administrative areas in china and investigated the effects of the external environmental factors it employed scenario analysis to further explore the feasibility of separating the distribution from the transmission division the results indicate that 1 the dnsbm model takes the internal structure of the power system into account and provides a new perspective to seek the sources of the system and division efficiencies 2 customer density and energy consumption intensity have significant impacts on the system and division efficiencies while the power generation structure only affects the environmental efficiency of the generation division 3 the scenario analysis shows that the policy of separating power plants from grids improved the system efficiency to which the improvement in generation division is the main contributor and separating distribution from transmission may have great potential for enhancing the efficiencies of power systems

operational synergy in the us electric utility industry under an influence of deregulation policy a linkage to financial performance and corporate value abstract sueyoshi et al 2009 have examined a synergy effect between electricity and gas services in the us electric utility industry they have compared electricity specialized firms with diversified utility firms in their financial performance and corporate value a problem of their study is that it has not empirically measured the operational performance of the electric utility firms as an extension of the preceding study this research investigates the operational performance of 104 us electric utility firms 1990 2004 by fully utilizing dea data envelopment analysis this study finds the three new policy implications first the synergy effect has not existed in the operational performance of diversified utility firms before and after the deregulation on the us electricity markets thus core business concentration is more effective for electric utility firms than corporate diversification to enhance their operational performance under the current us deregulation policy second the operational performance has had an increasing trend until 1996 and a decreasing trend after 1996 thus the us deregulation policy has been influential on their operational performance third the enhancement in operational performance of electric utility firms has improved their financial performance the improvement in financial performance has increased their corporate value thus this study finds the business causality among operational performance financial performance and corporate value in the us electric utility industry

the economics of climate change impacts a la stern novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted abstract the stern report conducts an estimation of greenhouse gas control costs weighed against the benefits of avoiding damages at the global scale as i show stern and colleagues are aware of the limits to cba although they chose to ignore the considerable literature on the subject the many contributions by ecological economists and especially work specific to the enhanced greenhouse effect various problems are raised or mentioned in the report including strong uncertainty incommensurability plural values non utilitarian ethics rights distributional inequity poverty and treatment of future generations how then can this report acknowledging so many of those aspects of climate change that render cba an unsuitable tool for generating policy recommendations go ahead to conduct a global cba and make policy recommendations i explain how issues are suppressed and sidelined in a careful and methodical manner with the pretence they have been addressed by state of the art solutions meanwhile the authors maintain allegiance to an economic orthodoxy which perpetuates the dominant political myth that traditional economic growth can be both sustained and answer all our problems besides perpetuating myths this diverts attention away from alternative approaches away from ethical debates over harming the innocent the poor and future generations and away from the fundamental changes needed to tackle the very real and serious problems current economic systems pose for environmental systems

emergence of new economics energy transition models a review abstract well known academic and non academic institutions call for a new approach in economics able to capture features of modern economies including but not limited to complexity non equilibrium and uncertainty in this paper we provide a systematic review of ecological macroeconomic models that are suitable for the investigation of low carbon energy transitions and assess them based on the features considered desirable for a new approach in economics we draw two main conclusions firstly the knowledge base and structure of these existing ecological macroeconomic models are relevant alongside other types of models for the creation of a new approach in economics secondly the reviewed models are policy relevant especially in the context of the complexity and urgency of rapid energy transitions where increasingly policymakers require economic models able to capture real world characteristics however further improvements are needed to these models and future research should focus on i assuring comparability of models results and their policy insights ii incorporation of the relationships between macroeconomics finance and sustainability and iii the institutionalization of a new approach in economics

evaluation of china s electric energy efficiency under environmental constraints a dea cross efficiency model based on game relationship abstract the traditional data envelopment analysis dea model ignores the cooperation relationship among decision making units dmus so it is difficult to evaluate the dmus efficiency reasonably in this study we use a cross efficiency model considering the game relationship of dmus to evaluate and analyze the provincial electric energy efficiency of china the power industry panel data of china s 30 provinces from 2005 to 2014 are used to evaluate the energy efficiency of china s provincial power industry under environmental constraints in addition based on the obtained values of electric energy efficiency clustering analysis is implemented and the regional similarity in electric energy efficiency is analyzed the results indicate that in the past decade china s provincial electric energy efficiency has not significantly improved and efficiency values have a certain degree of volatility especially in western china in general the electric energy efficiency of eastern china is significantly higher than central and western china the clustering analysis further demonstrates that there is no polarization phenomenon in china s electric energy efficiency in recent years the electric energy efficiency of western china has been greatly improved with significant volatility it reveals that the electric energy efficiency of western china is sensitive to the environment the implementation of energy policies should be adapted to local conditions in the process of formulating policies for improving electric energy efficiency the provincial government should improve the regional opening up layout and establish effective coordination mechanisms among different regions

spatial analysis of change trend and influencing factors of total factor productivity in china s regional construction industry total factor productivity tfp is a measure of long term economic growth and a comprehensive industry level productivity measure there are large gaps in china s regional construction industry dev

the effect of regulatory governance on efficiency of thermal power generation in india a stochastic frontier analysis abstract this paper investigates the impact of institutional quality typified as regulatory governance on the performance of thermal power plants in india the indian power sector was reformed in the early 1990s however reforms are effective only as much as the regulators are committed in ensuring that they are implemented we hypothesize that higher the quality of regulation in a federal indian state higher is the efficiency of electric generation utilities a translog stochastic frontier model is estimated using index of state level independent regulation as one of the determinants of inefficiency the dataset comprises a panel of 77 coal based thermal power plants during the reform period covering over 70 of installed electricity generation capacity the mean technical efficiency of 76 7 indicates there is wide scope for efficiency improvement in the sector results are robust to various model specifications and show that state level regulators have positively impacted plant performance technical efficiency is sensitive to both unbundling of state utilities and regulatory experience the policy implication is that further reforms which empower independent regulators will have far reaching impacts on power sector performance

working time reduction policy in a sustainable economy criteria and options for its design abstract reducing per capita consumption particularly amongst high income groups is often deemed necessary to reduce the environmental impacts of the global economy far from implying a necessary reduction in wellbeing some research suggests this could actually improve it as reduced expenditure means a reduced need for income and hence paid work then there is the possibility for average working hours to fall providing increased leisure time in which to pursue happiness through less consumption intensive but more time consuming ways to date however there has been little critical discussion of the details of what policy might need to cover to allow and encourage substantial working time reduction in a way that successfully reconciles these environmental and wellbeing goals this article addresses this gap in the literature it begins by reviewing the conditions under which working time reduction could bring environmental and wellbeing benefits it then presents examples of innovative voluntary working time policies from the netherlands and belgium drawing these elements together the article presents a new green life course approach for working time policy design it argues that as a complement to more conventional working time policies this could be a valuable tool to combine environmental and wellbeing goals

the economics of degrowth economic degrowth is ecologically desirable and possibly inevitable but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable how can we have full employment and economic stability without growth what will happen to public spending and to public debt how would production be organised in a degrowing economy and under what plausible socio political conditions could such grand changes happen standard economic theories and models ignore these questions for them economic growth is an axiomatic necessity this article reviews recent contributions in the economics of degrowth and identifies research avenues for ecological economists

allocating ecological footprints to final consumption categories with input output analysis we present and discuss a method that allows the disaggregation of national ecological footprints by economic sector detailed final demand category sub national area or socio economic group this is done by combining existing national footprint accounts with input output analysis calculations in the empirical part are carried out by using supply and use tables for the united kingdom covering the reporting period 2000 ecological footprints are allocated to detailed household consumption activities following the coicop classification system and to a detailed breakdown of capital investment the method presented enables the calculation of comparable ecological footprints on all sub national levels and for different socio economic groups the novelty of the approach lies in the use of input output analysis to re allocate existing footprint accounts in the detail of disaggregation by consumption category and in the expanded use of household expenditure data this extends the potential for applications of the ecological footprint concept and helps to inform scenarios policies and strategies on sustainable consumption the method described in this paper can be applied to every country for which a national footprint account exists and where appropriate economic and environmental accounts are available the approach helps to save time in data collection and improves the consistency between ecological footprint estimates for a particular human society from different researchers for these reasons the suggested methodology includes crucial steps on the way towards a standardisation of ecological footprint accounts

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

the productivity and efficiency of the australian electricity supply industry australia s electricity supply industry has been through a period of reform over the last 10 years the purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes that have occurred to the australian electricity supply industry over the past 30 years in order to evaluate to what degree these reforms have improved the productivity and efficiency performance of the industry

optimal versus sustainable degrowth policies abstract this paper introduces a natural resource and pollution in a ramsey growth model which relies on the postulates of ecological economics it studies the impact of voluntary degrowth policies on production and welfare the instrument of these policies is a tax on the natural resource these public policies are implemented after the downturn of the households welfare following from the increased pollution two kinds of policies are considered and rely either on an optimality criterion or on an intergenerational equity criterion with respect to the laissez faire case they decrease both production and pollution but increase welfare classes of sustainable degrowth paths characterized by time constant or time increasing tax rates are determined

a study of degrowth paths based on the von neumann equilibrium model abstract this paper revisits the von neumann equilibrium model from a degrowth perspective degrowth can be either planned or autonomous based on voluntary simplicity vs characterized by voluntary constraints on the private consumptions any share of the working population is allowed to limit their private consumptions or ecological footprint degrowth means a lower economic growth rate as well as reductions in the usage of materials and fossil energy however when the economy cannot fit within the biophysical boundary despite such reductions degrowth can also mean a deliberate transition towards lesser and cleaner production of a smaller number of goods taking ecological boundaries into consideration may thus switch the direction of an economy from growth to degrowth degrowth is consistent with economic equilibrium in the dynamic input output model degrowth equilibrium results when a critical mass of the population prioritizes diminishing the ecological deficit over increasing the output levels green growth can take place during degrowth while the economy gradually shrinks the interest profit rate in macroeconomic equilibrium is negative due to the conservation target excessive consumption has negative value to vs type agents degrowing private consumptions implies less work more leisure and better quality of the environment improving social welfare degrowth can be advanced by adopting a more cooperative production system or by imposing high ecological taxes the equilibrium model yields an argument for basic income as a means of supporting welfare during degrowth and of compensating for unpaid work the open economy version of the model shows reduced scope for intra industry trade between similar countries

the effects of competition on publicly owned firms evidence from the municipal electric industry in the u s abstract previous studies have examined the effects of competition on privately owned firms this study examines the impact of competition on a sample of publicly owned electric utilities operating in the u s during 1961 1980 estimates from a translog variable cost function indicate that competitive firms had higher generating costs than monopolists ceteris paribus in addition it appears that operating costs would fall significantly if a single monopolist were to replace two competitors in a given market

performance of wholesale electricity markets with high wind penetration abstract this paper examines the impact of progressively deeper levels of wind generation and or abatement on the performance of a wholesale market and its incumbent thermal generators with non convex unit commitment constraints comparison is made to the result that marginal cost pricing should induce investors to build the least cost capacity mix since it is not clear that this will hold in renewable rich systems it is first found that unit commitment and forecast uncertainty do not cause significant departure from this result when the generator fleet is optimal optimality in this sense is determined in a capacity expansion problem that does not feature unit commitment and which allows thermal generators to be built or retired as greater renewable generation or abatement is mandated in contrast the wholesale market with no retirement of thermal generation experiences progressively greater disparity between total system prices and costs and lower returns to generators simply due to over capacity rather than any form of variability related market failure a carbon price is observed to be far superior to a renewable portfolio standard when the existing set of thermal generators do not retire but this difference is less stark when the generation mix is optimal the implications of these results for market design and system planning are then discussed

degrowth taking stock and reviewing an emerging academic paradigm degrowth has evolved within a decade from an activist movement into a multi disciplinary academic paradigm however an overview taking stock of the peer refereed degrowth literature is yet missing here we review 91 articles that were published between 2006 and 2015 we find that the academic degrowth discourse occupies a small but expanding niche at the intersection of social and applied environmental sciences the discourse is shaped by authors from high income mainly mediterranean countries until 2012 articles largely constitute conceptual essays endorsed by normative claims more recently degrowth has branched out into modelling empirical assessments and the study of concrete implementations authors tend to agree in that economic growth cannot be sustained ad infinitum on a resource constraint planet and that degrowth requires far reaching societal change whether degrowth should be considered as a collectively consented choice or an environmentally imposed inevitability constitutes a major debate among degrowth thinkers we argue that the academic discourse could benefit from rigid hypotheses testing through input output modelling material flow analysis life cycle assessments or social surveys by analyzing the potentials for non market value creation and identifying concrete well being benefits the degrowth discourse could receive wider public support and contribute to a paradigmatic change in the social sciences

commentary bidders experience and learning in online auctions issues and implications this study explores the implications of rejecting the sealed bid abstraction proposed by zeithammer and adams zeithammer r c adams 2010 the sealed bid abstraction in online auctions marketing sci 29 6 964 987 using a conditional order statistic model that relies on the joint distribution of the top two proxy bids of an auction zeithammer and adams show that inexperienced bidders reactive bidding is the main cause of the rejection of the sealed bid abstraction their empirical study suggests that a large percentage of bidders reactively bid and there is weak evolutionary pressure for bidders to converge to sealed bidding we discuss theoretical implications of this rejection and the role of bidder experience as well as inferences about bidder learning tracking an inexperienced bidder s bidding behavior over time we show that bidders learn and their bidding strategy gravitates toward rational bidding potential biases in bidder experience measurement and bidder learning can be assessed using a cross sectional time series data set that tracks a random sample of new ebay bidders learning speed is faster with their complete bidding history rather than feedback ratings or winning observations only we highlight the importance of proper measures of bidder experience and its effect on bidding strategy evolutions both of which play important roles in clarifying bidding behavior in online auctions

decomposition of the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier with undesirable output abstract in this paper we present an alternative analysis framework to evaluate the effects of technology heterogeneities and undesirable output on environmental efficiency measurement the proposed framework combines the directional distance function and a meta frontier analysis it can be used to measure efficiency improvements brought about by enhanced technical management and technological advances for demonstration purposes we used the framework to measure the environmental efficiency in 90 countries worldwide for the 2003 2007 period the results showed that when the meta technology set is used as the evaluation basis the average environmental efficiency of high competitiveness countries is greater than that of lower middle low and upper middle competitiveness countries the upper middle competitiveness countries perform worse than the lower middle and low competitiveness countries because of the excessive labor force usage and carbon dioxide emissions in these countries we also found that the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier for high competitiveness countries can be attributed to managerial failure in the production process whereas that for upper middle lower middle and low competitiveness countries can be attributed to technological differences

the impact of electricity market liberalization in turkey free consumer and distributional monopoly cases abstract electricity sector has grown substantially in turkey since the early 1960s as a result of rapid industrialization and urbanization the vertically integrated state owned company had a legally established monopoly on the generation transmission and distribution of electricity in turkey with the support and encouragement of international organizations like the world bank turkey has initiated a comprehensive program to liberalize and privatize the electricity market in 2001 the liberalization of the electricity market in turkey started in the distribution side of the market the distribution network was divided into 21 distribution regions and in each of these separate initially state owned distribution companies have been authorized to distribute and sell electricity the plan envisaged to complete privatization of all distribution companies until the end of 2006 this study compares the welfare implication of privatization of the distribution networks by comparing two extreme cases a pure regional distributional monopoly case and a representative pure free consumer case with a benchmark case of administered price regulation for this purpose we develop a simulation model of the turkish electricity system and use the data on generation and distribution costs our simulation analysis shows that substantial welfare losses occur if the distributional companies behave as regional monopolists our findings reiterate the importance of regulation and market design

can degrowth overcome the leakage problem of unilateral climate policy abstract unilateral climate policy suffers from carbon leakage i e the partial offset of the initial emission reduction by increases in other countries different than most typically discussed climate policies degrowth not only aims at reducing the fossil fuel use in an economy but rather besides other social and political goals at a reduction of all factor inputs which may lead to different leakage implications we conduct the first investigation of degrowth in a multi country setting in order to i compare the leakage effects of national pure emission reduction policies to degrowth scenarios ii identify underlying channels by decomposing the implied emission changes into scale composition and technique effects and iii investigate which country characteristics determine degrowth s relative effectiveness to overcome the leakage problem using a structural gravity model we find that degrowth indeed significantly reduces leakage by keeping the sectoral composition of the country more stable and reducing uncommitted countries incentives to shift towards more energy intensive production techniques the higher effectiveness of degrowth in reducing carbon emissions is most pronounced for small and trade open economies with comparatively clean production technologies

efficiency based rank assessment for electric power industry a combined use of data envelopment analysis dea and dea discriminant analysis da abstract this study discusses a combined use of dea data environment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis to determine the efficiency based rank of energy firms this type of performance evaluation is important because we often have a difficulty in accessing a large sample on energy firms to derive reliable empirical results the proposed approach is useful in dealing with such a limited number of energy firms often found in previous dea studies on energy industries in the world the proposed approach uses dea to classify energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups based upon their efficiency scores then it utilizes dea da to assess their efficiency scores and ranks in this stage we can find an adjusted efficiency score for each energy firm the proposed approach provides us with the following analytical capabilities all of which cannot be found in a conventional use of dea in assessing energy firms first the proposed dea approach can avoid zero in all multipliers on efficient energy firms by incorporating scsc strong complementary slackness condition so that it can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections the dea result classifies all energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups second dea da applied to the two groups evaluates all energy firms by an industry wide evaluation not depending upon a limited number of efficient energy firms in a reference set as found in a conventional use of dea the analytical capability can reduce the number of efficient energy firms third the proposed approach can provide their efficiency based ranking scores finally we can conduct a rank sum test based upon their ranking scores to obtain a statistical inference as an application this study uses the proposed approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power industry we find two economic implications one of the two implications is that no major change has occurred in the operational performance of japanese electric power industry because of japanese sluggish economy from 2005 to 2009 the other implication indicates that there are strategic differences in the operation of japanese electric power firms after the liberalization

a stock flow fund ecological macroeconomic model this paper develops a stock flow fund ecological macroeconomic model that combines the stock flow consistent approach of godley and lavoie with the flow fund model of georgescu roegen the model has the following key features first monetary and physical stocks and flows are explicitly formalised taking into account the accounting principles and the laws of thermodynamics second georgescu roegen s distinction between stock flow and fund service resources is adopted third output is demand determined but supply constraints might arise either due to environmental damages or due to the exhaustion of natural resources fourth climate change influences directly the components of aggregate demand fifth finance affects macroeconomic activity and the materialisation of investment plans that determine ecological efficiency the model is calibrated using global data simulations are conducted to investigate the trajectories of key environmental macroeconomic and financial variables under i different assumptions about the sensitivity of economic activity to the leverage ratio of firms and ii different types of green finance policies

heterogeneous effects of regulation on the efficiency of the electricity industry across european union countries abstract this paper focuses on the relationship between the stringency of regulation oecd indicators and total factor productivity tfp growth in the electricity sectors of 19 european union countries for the period 1994 2007 both the oecd regulatory indicator and the tfp growth index have been decomposed in order to bring to light a complex picture of interrelations in which the negative impact of the overall regulation on productivity is the result of opposite forces estimation results tell us that only the stringency of entry regulation significantly reduces technological change whereas vertical integration exhibits a negative and significant impact only on the catching up process pure efficiency change lastly we found an interesting result concerning the explanatory variables of the scale efficiency change in this case only public ownership matters in other terms high levels of public in the structure ownership of electric companies guarantee improvements in reaching the optimal scale of production these heterogeneous effects are also confirmed when we use a different measure of efficiency that is the distance of the actual from the optimal reserve margin

sustainability of catch up growth in the extended european union abstract this paper analyses the compatibility of growth and sustainability in the european union eu including a new eu member states from the former soviet bloc eu 10 the extension of eu borders financial and technological support stimulated rapid convergence and decreased the socio economic differences between the old eu 15 and newly accepted eu member states the transition from a command to a market economy resulted in the remarkable increase in resource efficiency and other positive aspects of sustainability along with 1 5 times increased gdp final energy consumption decreased by 20 greenhouse gases emissions by 25 and the emissions of acidifying compounds were halved during the period from the collapse of former soviet bloc to the recent economic crisis however the per capita production and consumption in eu 10 is still approximately half that of eu 15 and further catch up growth should be expected ensuring that economic and social cohesion is not achieved at the expense of increased environmental impact decelerated economic growth is a feature characteristic of mature economies and the gdp growth rate in eu 15 states decreased almost 2 5 times during the last 50 year similar trends are characteristic of other developed countries and market economies have adapted to this trend even with a decelerated growth rate the ecological footprint in developed countries currently exceeds three and more times the allowable limits and almost two thirds of the ecological footprint relates to traditional energy de fossilisation by a greater increase in energy efficiency use of renewable energy and more intense material recovery is the most promising option for reducing the ecological footprint of these countries deceleration of the economic growth rate supplemented by the aforementioned options is a hard but realistic track leading to the reduction of ecological footprint in developed countries to allowable limits without radical de growth in consumption and production that can result in unpredictable and unacceptable consequences

market structure and incomplete information price formation in a real world repeated english auction abstract this paper examines the effect of buyer size on price formation in an english auction of used state police cars while open auctions generally favor competitive pricing bikhchandani 1988 develops a model of a second price common value auction in which bidders can use strategic behavior based on repeated sales to develop an aggressive reputation and as a result pay lower prices in equilibrium the paper tests this hypothesis by examining sales of 340 used automobiles sold at 13 public auctions conditional on the volume of purchases made by the three largest buyers at the auctions the empirical results show that the number of buyers plays a stronger role in price formation than does buyer size

a clear path towards sustainable mass tourism rejoinder to the paper organic incremental and induced paths to sustainable mass tourism convergence by david b weaver abstract the paper forms a rejoinder to the paper by david weaver organic incremental and induced paths to sustainable mass tourism convergence it fully agrees with david weaver that a sustainable development of tourism should focus on sustainable mass tourism development and not as is currently the case so much on niche products labelled sustainable however it critiques weaver s operationalization of sustainability his assumption that sustainable mass tourism smt will be the emergent norm due to external factors and his destination development theory showing different paths that however all end in smt finally it is shown that the path development idea might be at odds with systems thinking

does decreasing working time reduce environmental pressures new evidence based on dynamic panel approach abstract there is a growing interest in the correlation between working time and environmental pressures but prior empirical studies were mostly focused on static methods within limited country groups to fill the gap this study aims to stimulate the discussion by distinguishing between different time periods for developed and developing country groups respectively in particular we contribute to a further understanding of the environmental effects of working time reduction policies by comparing the differences under the dynamic framework of system generalized method of moments we applied this dynamic panel regression approach for 55 countries worldwide over the period 1980 2010 and employing carbon emissions per capita as the environmental indicator in general results confirmed the significant relationship between hours of work and environmental impacts in developed economies although this is not the case for the developing counterparts interestingly the significant correlations for the developed country group turned from positive during the first sub period 1980 2000 to negative during the second sub period 2001 2010 connecting these results with previous literature we proposed the reasons of rebound energy use derived from certain leisure activities which were more energy intensive if excessive non working time provided

the economic effects of climate change greenhouse gas emissions are fundamental both to the world s energy system and to its food production the production of co2 the predominant gas implicated in climate change is intrinsic to fossil fuel combustion specifically thermal energy is generated by breaking the chemical bonds in the carbohydrates oil coal and natural gas and oxidizing the components to co2 and h2o one cannot have cheap energy without carbon dioxide emissions similarly methane ch4 emissions an important greenhouse gas in its own right are necessary to prevent the build up of hydrogen in anaerobic digestion and decomposition one cannot have beef mutton dairy or rice without methane emissions climate change is the mother of all externalities larger more complex and more uncertain than any other environmental problem the sources of greenhouse gas emissions are more diffuse than any other environmental problem every company every farm every household emits some greenhouse gases the effects are similarly pervasive weather affects agriculture energy use health and many aspects of nature which in turn affects everything and everyone the causes and consequences of climate change are very diverse and those in low income countries who contribute least to climate change are most vulnerable to its effects climate change is also a long term problem some greenhouse gases have an atmospheric life time measured in tens of thousands of years the quantities of emissions involved are enormous in 2000 carbon dioxide emissions alone and excluding land use change were 24 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide tco2

sustainability in a post keynesian growth model for an open economy the paper expands the bop constraint growth model and kaldorian regimes productivity and demand regimes in order to include some of the concerns raised by ecological economics in post keynesian models for open economies the demand regime is modified by taking into account porter s hypothesis which suggests that environmental innovations spurred by environmental policies can foster competitiveness as a result the equilibrium bop constrained rate of growth increases leading to a different version of thirlwall s law which opens room for analyzing the impact of environmental innovations on convergence between developing and developed economies the productivity regime in turn considers the growth and employment implications of innovations in labor productivity standard innovations and environmental efficiency environmental innovations it is argued that the fiscal policy and composition of public expenditure matter for long run growth employment and sustainability

ecological macroeconomics an application to climate change ecological economics has not paid sufficient attention to the macroeconomic level both in terms of theory and modeling yet key topics debated in the field of ecological economics such as sustainable consumption reduction in working time the degrowth debate the energy exergy link and the rebound effect require a holistic and macro perspective while this deficiency has been identified before and keynesian economics has been generally suggested as a potent vehicle to establish economic system s thinking very little concrete theorizing and practical suggestions have been put forward we give further credence to this suggestion and demonstrate the value of tackling key concerns of ecological economics within a keynesian growth framework contextualized by an application to climate change we suggest that policy relevant recommendations need to be based on a consistent view of the macroeconomy we end with laying out key building blocks for a keynesian model framework for an ecological macroeconomics authors abstract

firm and interruptible pricing patterns public versus private gas distribution utilities this study presents a model of the determination of firm and interruptible gas pricing patterns for a sample of municipal and private natural gas distribution utilities firm and interruptible gas pricing is widely used by gas distributors as an alternative to peak and off peak pricing how enterprise form affects these pricing patterns is the focus of this study although state regulated municipals are included in the analysis the focus of the investigation is on the difference between state regulated privates and locally regulated unregulated municipals since these are the major options from a public policy perspective the natural gas distribution industry is chosen for study since this industry is largely ignored in the empirical literature the few gas distribution pricing studies that exist are generally quite limited in scope examine the economic efficiency of private gas distributors from a cost and profit perspective or focus upon state regulatory effects on service contracts or private distributors pricing

an equilibrium framework for the analysis of a degrowth society with asymmetric agents sharing and basic income abstract this paper presents a novel equilibrium framework allowing for asymmetries in the initial wealth allocations labour supplies as well as in the preferences of optimizing agents the framework is applied to study a degrowth society where a subset of agents voluntarily limit their material consumption thereby complying with voluntary simplicity vs at micro level the utility maximization problems of asymmetric agents are formulated and solved for optimal labour supplies new macro level equilibrium solutions accounting for wealth inequality are presented based on different labour supply models the equilibrium welfare is measured using a bernoully nash aggregate an increase in the share of the vs type agents implies a degrowth transition to a lower level of average consumption analysis of the equilibrium framework shows that degrowth whereby average market based consumption falls improves the equilibrium welfare assuming the vs type agents have sufficient resources enabling a reduction in labour supplies sharing collaborative consumption and basic income support welfare increasing degrowth any growing economy can eventually reach the size at which degrowth would improve the welfare simulations suggest that degrowth can also yield a pareto improvement in welfare

low climate stabilisation under diverse growth and convergence scenarios abstract in the last decade a number of papers have analysed the consequences of achieving the greenhouse gas concentration levels necessary to maintain global temperature increases below 2 c above preindustrial levels most models and scenarios assume that future trends in global gdp will be similar to the growth experienced in the past century which would imply multiplying current output by about 19 times in the 21st century however natural resource and environmental constraints suggest that future global economic growth may not be so high furthermore the environmental implications of such growth depend on how it is distributed across countries this paper studies the implications on ghg abatement policies of low global gdp growth and high convergence levels in gdp per capita across countries a partial equilibrium model poles of the world s energy system is used to provide detailed projections up to 2050 for the different regions of the world the results suggest that while low stabilisation could be technically feasible and economically viable for the world in all the scenarios considered it is more likely to occur with more modest global growth however that will imply higher global abatement costs relative to gdp convergence in living standards on the other hand places greater pressures in terms of the required reduction in emissions in general we find that there are major differences between regions in terms of the size and the timing of abatement costs and economic impact

economic efficiency and frontier techniques abstract most of the literature related to the measurement of economic efficiency has based its analysis either on parametric or on non parametric frontier methods the choice of estimation method has been an issue of debate with some researchers preferring the parametric and others the non parametric approach the aim of this paper is to provide a critical and detailed review of both core frontier methods in our opinion no approach is strictly preferable to any other moreover a careful consideration of their main advantages and disadvantages of the data set utilized and of the intrinsic characteristics of the framework under analysis will help us in the correct implementation of these techniques recent developments in frontier techniques and economic efficiency measurement such as bayesian techniques bootstrapping duality theory and the analysis of sampling asymptotic properties are also considered in this paper

a meta analysis investigation of the direction of the energy gdp causal relationship implications for the growth degrowth dialogue abstract the complex relation between energy use and the economic process has long attracted attention issues such as the scarcity of energy resources energy theory of value degrowth and a growth approaches are closely related to the relationship between energy and development the present study traces the implications of the energy gdp causality dialogue for the context of the growth degrowth debate where the energy development link plays a decisive role in that context the present research investigates the possible existence of a fundamental macro direction of causality between energy use and economic growth that is not influenced by study specific characteristics and events towards this objective we perform a meta analysis that takes into account 158 studies on causality between energy and gdp covering the period 1978 2011 this is the first time to our knowledge that meta analysis has been applied to investigate the direction of the energy and gdp causal relationship the meta analysis results neither support the existence of a fundamental macro direction nor the so called neutrality hypothesis e gdp in the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth

the relative efficiency of public and private firms in a regulated environment the case of u s electric utilities abstract the relative efficiency of privately owned and publicly owned electric utilities is investigated using theoretical and econometric models that allow for the effects of both ownership type and regulation the estimation results indicate that the two types of firms are equally cost inefficient in the united states the average effect of inefficiency is to increase the cost of production by 2 4 percent holding output constant inefficiency increases the average quantities demanded of capital and labor and decreases the average quantity demanded of fuel

growth degrowth and climate change a scenario analysis article i nfo article history the paper proceeds with a discussion of the interplay of scale and intensity in determining greenhouse gas emissions this is followed by the presentation of several macroeconomic scenarios using lowgrow a simulation model of the canadian economy the scenarios considered are business as usual which is a projection into the future of past trends selective growth in which differential growth rates are applied to parts of the economy according to their direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions and degrowth where the average gdp capita of canadians is reduced towards a level more consistent with a world economy the size of which respects global environmental limits the paper ends with a comparison of the scenarios 2011 published by elsevier b v

productivity growth technical change and economies of scale of korean fossil fuel generation companies 2001 2012 a dual approach abstract this paper examines total factor productivity tfp growth technical change and economies of scale measure of korean fossil fuel power generation companies gencos between 2001 and 2012 for the empirical investigation we estimated the cost function along with specification tests in order to find the most appropriate empirical model empirical results show tfp deterioration technical regress and economies of scale for the study period the optimal size of the korean gencos was also found which is employed in developing policies regarding tfp growth and technical advance

the determinants of the cost efficiency of electric generating plants a stochastic frontier approach this article provides a detailed analysis of generation plant operating cost efficiency over the period 1988 1997 i estimate a stochastic frontier cost function together with a model of plant inefficiencies to measure the operating efficiencies of individual plants and identify factors that are associated with variations in plant efficiencies i find evidence that plant efficiencies are associated with capacity utilization of the plant the number of plants under utility management and ownership form i also find that regulatory restructuring activity in certain states is associated with improvements in plant operating performance the purpose of this article is to provide a detailed analysis of the operating cost efficiencies of electricity generating plants over the period 1988 1997 i estimate the operating efficiencies of fossil fueled steam generating plants and examine factors that influence plant operating performance i use the estimation procedure of battese and coelli 1995 to simultaneously estimate a stochastic frontier cost function and a function relating plant efficiency levels to plant specific factors and other explanatory variables a comprehensive data set allows me to investigate the influence of capacity utilization ownership form and utility experience on plant efficiency levels since significant regulatory change in the electricity industry had begun during this time period i also investigate the impact of state level regulatory change on plant operating efficiency a number of authors have analyzed the efficiencies of electricity generating plants relative to a best practice frontier including kopp and smith 1980 schmidt and lovell 1979 stevenson 1980 cote 1989 reifschneider and stevenson 1991 hammond 1992 pollitt 1995 and fire grosskopf and logan 1983 1985 these studies find considerable evidence of inefficiency in electricity generation during the 1960s and 1970s the present study provides more recent information regarding generating plant efficiencies during a period of significant regulatory and structural change studies investigating the determinants of power plant departures from the frontier have focused primarily on the effects of ownership mode pollitt 1995 provides a comprehensive review of these studies reifschneider and stevenson 1991 examine the impact on cost efficiency of a number of variables including the capacity utilization of the firm s generating facilities more recently knittel 2001 examines the impact of incentive regulation on plant efficiency levels steiner

naturally occurring markets and exogenous laboratory experiments a case study of the winner s curse we examine the relevance of experimental findings from laboratory settings that abstract from the field context of the task that theory purports to explain using common value auction theory as our guide we identify naturally occurring settings in which one can test the theory experienced agents bidding in familiar roles do not fall prey to the winner s curse yet experienced agents fall prey to the winner s curse when bidding in an unfamiliar role we conclude that the theory predicts field behaviour well when one is able to identify naturally occurring field counterparts to the key theoretical conditions

more leisure or higher pay a mixed methods study on reducing working time in austria working time reduction has become a central topic in the debate on social ecological transformation as it has the potential to mitigate unemployment improve well being and reduce environmental pressures this article analyses which groups of employees want to reduce their working time and for which reasons a novel working time policy in austria the leisure option provides a unique possibility to examine this question this policy enables employees to choose between a wage increase and more leisure time we use a mixed methods approach to analyse employees preferences and the decision to reduce working time with two empirical parts run in parallel a binary logit regression based on austrian microcensus 2012 data investigates factors associated with a preference for reduced working time qualitative interviews are conducted among employees at a firm in the electronics industry that offers the leisure option our results suggest that working time preferences are to a large extent shaped by social norms such as the full time working norm and gender roles we also find that the desire to work less is strongly moulded by personal values placed either on leisure and family time or on financial security

the economic and financial dimensions of degrowth abstract we respond to the call for future research on degrowth and specifically analyze the implications of economic degrowth on the monetary and financial system we argue that any early indications of degrowth would cause the stock market to crash which would trigger further deleveraging contagion and a deflation as a result the economy would implode which would eventually allow for a new rapid growth cycle given the likely extraordinary fiscal and monetary policy response during the implosion thus in our view degrowth as an explicit strategy option is economically unsustainable and unfeasible as a limitation our analysis centers on the examples of unplanned crisis leading to an economic implosion which imperfectly represent the idea of planned voluntary degrowth

explaining differences in productive efficiency an application to belgian municipalities the purpose of this paper is to measure and explain variations in productive efficiency of municipal governments in belgium technical efficiency is evaluated using a non parametric method based on the free disposal hull fdh reference technology we first calculate input output and graph farrell efficiency measures for a cross section of all 589 belgian municipalities in a second stage of the analysis we explain the calculated differences in efficiency in terms of variables related to the structural characteristics of municipalities and to the institutional environment

an examination of the effect of ownership on the relative efficiency of public and private water utilities the behavior of privately and publicly owned water utilities is examined by estimating a generalized variable cost function containing the regular characteristics of the neoclassical cost function without requiring that cost minimization subject to market prices be imposed as a maintained hypothesis assuming that unobserved shadow prices reflect the regulatory environment of the water industry tests for cost minimization are obtained by deriving shadow prices as functions of market prices the empirical results provide evidence that public water utilities are more efficient than private utilities on average but are more widely dispersed between best and worst practice

the evolution and main determinants of productivity in brazilian electricity distribution 1998 2005 an empirical analysis abstract this paper estimates changes in the productivity of the brazilian electricity distribution sector using data envelopment analysis dea on a panel of 18 firms from 1998 to 2005 the study decomposes the productivity change of these distribution firms in terms of technical efficiency scale efficiency and technical progress this exercise aims to help the understanding of the main determinants of the evolution of productivity focusing its relationship with the restructuring process implemented in the 1990s tfp index records a yearly positive growth rate of 1 3 in the whole period under analysis for all firms technical change was the main component behind this evolution with an average growth of 2 1 per year while technical efficiency presented a yearly negative performance of 0 8 the results prove that in general terms the incentives generated in the reform process do not seem to have led the firms to behave in a more efficient manner

on modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change with climate change as prototype example this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low probability high impact catastrophes even when updated by bayesian learning uncertain structural parameters induce a critical tail fattening of posterior predictive distributions such fattened tails have strong im plications for situations like climate change where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages this paper shows that the economic consequences of fat tailed structural uncertainty along with unsureness about high temperature damages can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate change policy analysis

dynamics of productivity change in the australian electricity industry assessing the impacts of electricity reform the australian electricity industry has undergone a significant reform since the mid 1990s key changes comprised functional unbundling market restructuring regulatory reform public corporatisation and privatisation technological development has been another indisputable constituent of these changes in the wake of ict revolution the principle rationale behind these changes has been that they would improve productivity of the industry and social well being of people this paper examines the dynamics of productivity changes in the australian electricity industry and conducts several hypotheses testings to identify whether industry s efficiency measures are truly improved as a result of the reform driven changes malmquist total factor productivity index approach and anova are used for this purpose the results reveal that the productivity gains in the industry have been largely driven by technological improvements and to a lesser extent by reform induced comparative efficiency gains on average at national level and for the entire industry there are efficiency gains that to large extents can be attributed to functional unbundling and public corporatisation and to a lesser extent to market restructuring and privatisation the results however reveal that the reform driven changes have made insignificant contribution to comparative efficiency at the level of thermal generation

dea approach for unified efficiency measurement assessment of japanese fossil fuel power generation this study discusses a new dea data envelopment analysis approach to measure the unified operational and environmental efficiency of energy firms it is widely known that they produce not only desirable good outputs e g electricity but also undesirable bad outputs e g co2 as a result of their plant operations the proposed approach incorporates an output separation desirable and undesirable outputs for the performance evaluation of energy firms in addition to the output separation this study separates inputs into energy and non energy inputs consequently the proposed approach incorporates not only the output separation but also the input separation within a computational framework of dea non radial measurement this study compares the proposed approach with other previous dea approaches used for the performance evaluation of energy firms after the methodological comparison this study applies the proposed approach for measuring the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation this empirical study confirms that the implementation of kyoto protocol 2005 has not been effective on the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation during the observed period 2004 2008 although the empirical result is inconsistent with the current japanese environmental policy under kyoto protocol it contains policy implications for guiding the future direction of japanese environmental policy on the electric power industry

incomplete information high low bidding and public information in first price auctions high low bidding refers to auctions of a series of objects where for a subset of the auctioned objects one of two buyers bids high on some objects and low on others while the other buyer does the reverse this paper shows that high low bidding does not imply collusive behavior among buyers in particular through a formal modeling of a noncooperative game of information acquisition and bidding decisions it shows that high low bidding can be obtained the paper also demonstrates that if the cost of information to a seller is less than the equilibrium joint expected information cost of the buyers then it pays the seller to provide public information finally if the provision of public information is not feasible but a seller can know whether buyers have acquired information then it pays the seller to make known to the buyers and to pursue a policy that just prior to the start of an auction the seller will announce which buyer has acquired information