energy consumption and economic growth relationship evidence from panel data for low and middle income countries abstract this paper uses the panel data of energy consumption ec and economic growth gdp for 51 countries from 1971 to 2005 these countries are divided into three groups low income group lower middle income group and upper middle income group countries firstly a relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is investigated by employing pedroni 1999 panel cointegration method secondly panel causality test is applied to investigate the way of causality between the energy consumption and economic growth finally we test whether there is a strong or weak relationship between these variables by using pedroni 2001 method the empirical results of this study are as follows i energy consumption and gdp are cointegrated for all three income group countries ii the panel causality test results reveal that there is long run granger causality running from gdp to ec for low income countries and there is bidirectional causality between ec and gdp for middle income countries iii the estimated cointegration factor is not close to 1 in other words no strong relation is found between energy consumption and economic growth for all income groups considered in this study the findings of this study have important policy implications and it shows that this issue still deserves further attention in future research

educational expenditure in urban china income effects family characteristics and the demand for domestic and overseas education analysing survey data from 32 selected cities across china in 2003 this article examines parents expenditure on their children s education from two aspects factors affecting domestic education expenditure and factors affecting expenditure on overseas education the main findings that emerge from this study are as follows first household income has significant effects on the magnitude of the domestic and overseas educational expenditures second households where mothers have senior secondary school or college education and fathers are working in professional occupations are likely to spend more on education for their children third being in the highest income category having a college educated father having a mother who is a cadre or middle professional and living in a coastal area significantly enhances the probabilities for the households sending their children overseas for education

energy consumption at business cycle horizons the case of the united states in this paper we propose a simple extension to a keynesian type macro model by augmenting it with energy consumption we show the relationship between energy consumption and output in a macroeconomic setting and ask the question do permanent shocks dominate changes in energy consumption and output at business cycle horizons for the united states to achieve the goal of this paper we undertake a variance decomposition analysis of shocks based on a common trend and common cycle framework within a vector error correction model our main finding is that permanent shocks explain the bulk of the variations in energy consumption and output at business cycle horizons for the united states

the effect of business risk on corporate capital structure theory and evidence under corporate and personal taxation we demonstrate that the relation between optimal debt level and business risk is roughly u shaped this result follows from the fact that the tax liability is an option portfolio that is long in the corporate tax option and short in the personal tax option therefore the net effect of a change in business risk on the optimal debt level depends upon the relative magnitudes of the resultant marginal changes in the values of these two options results of empirical tests offer support for the predicted u shaped relationship

the causality relationship between energy consumption and gdp in g 11 countries revisited abstract this paper explores whether energy conservation policies can be implemented in countries with the same level of development that is is restraining energy consumption without compromising economic growth feasible in all industrialized countries a new granger non causality testing procedure developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 journal of econometrics 66 225 250 is applied to re investigate the relationship if any between energy consumption and income in 11 major industrialized countries the results clearly do not support the view that energy consumption and income are neutral with respect to each other except in the case of the united kingdom germany and sweden where a neutral relationship is found bi directional causality in the united states and uni directional running from energy consumption to gdp in canada belgium the netherlands and switzerland are found this indicates that energy conservation may hinder economic growth in the latter five countries further the causality relationship appears to be uni directional but reversed for france italy and japan which implies that in these three countries energy conservation may be viable without being detrimental to economic growth

examining the cost efficiency of chinese hydroelectric companies using a finite mixture model this paper evaluates the operational activities of chinese hydroelectric power companies over the period 2000 2010 using a finite mixture model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity in so doing a stochastic frontier latent class model which allows for the existence of different technologies is adopted to estimate cost frontiers this procedure not only enables us to identify different groups among the hydro power companies analysed but also permits the analysis of their cost efficiency the main result is that three groups are identified in the sample each equipped with different technologies suggesting that distinct business strategies need to be adapted to the characteristics of china s hydro power companies some managerial implications are developed

bankruptcy risk and optimal capital structure this study finds shortcomings in empirical tests of the capital structure irrelevance hypothesis the alternative hypothesis is that firms choose value maximizing mixes of debt and equity on account of bankruptcy costs and the tax deductibility of interest payments based upon the cross sectional implications of the tax shelter bankruptcy cost hypothesis an alternative test of the irrelevance hypothesis is performed the test examines the relationship between failure rates and leverage ratios for 36 lines of business the results are inconsistent with the irrelevance hypothesis in their landmark paper modigliani and miller 26 demonstrate that under certain assumptions the market value of a firm is independent of its capital structure these assumptions include the absence of taxes transactions costs and bankruptcy costs recently miller 24 has argued that the introduction of corporate and personal taxes does not alter the capital structure irrelevance result in the absence of bankruptcy costs 1 the inclusion of bankruptcy costs generally considered in conjunction with the tax deductibility of interest payments has led others to conclude that capital structure will affect the value of the firm 2 in this case value maximizing firms may choose optimal capital structures consisting of both debt and equity there have been numerous attempts to discriminate empirically between the miller irrelevance mi hypothesis and the tax shelter bankruptcy cost ts bc hypothesis several are discussed in section i of this paper there it is argued that studies attempting to measure directly the effect of changes in capital structure on firm values are subject to serious complications and are unable to discriminate between the mi and ts bc hypotheses other studies focus on cross sectional implications of the mi and ts bc hypotheses the cross sectional tests are based on the assertion that bankruptcy costs may tend to induce firms with greater business risk to include less debt in their capital structures whereas the mi hypothesis does not predict such a relationship unfortunately the existence of positive bankruptcy costs is not sufficient to ensure that the ts bc hypothesis will predict the inverse relation

cost structure and productivity growth in european railway systems the purpose of this paper is threefold first to empirically investigate the coststructure of the railway systems in ten european countries belgium denmark france germany greece italy luxembourg the netherlands portugal and the united kingdom of the european union second to provide measures of economies diseconomies of scale and fully investigate the manner by which economies of scale have affected the cost structure of the system and have been affected by the growth in input prices and technology and third to measure economic efficiency and identify its sources in achieving this purpose the translog technology has been used and the translog model was estimated using time series data covering the period 1969 1993 zellner s iterative method was used in estimating the translog model

an examination of the equilibrium specification and structure of production for canadian telecommunications multiple output models of canadian telecommunications production are estimated under different production equilibria a specification test is conducted between the short and long run equilibrium models and the long run equilibrium is rejected in order to capture the nature of the disequilibrium a dynamic cost of adjustment model is estimated for bell canada there are significant adjustment costs and it is estimated that for 1 00 of marginal capital costs the carrier must incur an additional cost of 0 30 to install the new capital into the production process

are observed capital structures determined by equity market timing contrary to baker and wurgler 2002 i find that the importance of historical average market to book ratios in leverage regressions is not due to past equity market timing al though equity transactions may be timed to equity market conditions they do not have sig nificant long lasting effects on capital structure debt transactions exhibit timing patterns that are unlikely to induce a negative relation between market to book ratios and leverage i also find that historical average market to book ratios have significant effects on current financing and investment decisions implying that they contain information about growth opportunities not captured by current market to book ratios

poverty and growth impacts of high oil prices evidence from sri lanka the sharp rise in oil and food prices in 2007 and 2008 caused negative impacts on poverty and economic growth in many oil and food importing developing countries some analysts believe that these countries are under stress again due to a rise in crude oil prices to a two and a half year high in march 2011 which has also been partly responsible for higher food prices in recent months however there is a limited body of empirical evidence available from developing countries on the impact of high oil prices on growth in general and household poverty in particular in this study sri lanka is used as a case study and a computable general equilibrium cge approach is adopted as an analytical framework to explore the growth and poverty impacts of high oil prices the results suggest that urban low income households are the group most adversely affected by high global oil prices followed by low income rural households in contrast estate low income households are the least affected out of all low income households the energy intensive manufacturing sector and services sector are affected most compared to the agricultural sector

the economic environment and public enterprise behaviour belgian railroads 1950 86 the purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of variations in the economic environment on allocatively inefficient behaviour by public enterprises and to measure the implications of both allocative and technical inefficiency for the firm s costs and factor use empirical results for the belgian railroad company suggest the importance of unemployment and the pressure experienced by managers to reduce the deficit as explanatory variables of allocative inefficiency the implications of inefficiencies for factor use are found to be substantial although the associated costs are quite small

evidence on the impact of the agency costs of debt on corporate debt policy in the last several years there has been increased theoretical emphasis on the agent principal problem as it applies to corporate finance this paper is an attempt to empirically test for the presence of the agency costs and their relation to the debt policy of corporations we find that firms with higher insider ownership have greater debt ratios than firms with lower insider ownership which may be explained by the agency costs of debt and or the agency costs of equity other regression results tend to confirm the theoretically optimal relationships put forth by myers we find that high growth firms use less debt rather than more debt high operating risk firms use more debt rather than less debt and firm size appears to be uncorrelated to the level of debt

causality relationship between electricity consumption and gdp in bangladesh in this paper we examine the causal relationship between the per capita electricity consumption and the per capita gdp for bangladesh using cointegration and vector error correction model our results show that there is unidirectional causality from per capita gdp to per capita electricity consumption however the per capita electricity consumption does not cause per capita gdp in case of bangladesh the finding has significant implications from the point of view of energy conservation emission reduction and economic development

on the measurement of capacity utilization capacity utilization is usually defined as the ratio of actual output to the output corresponding to 1 the minimum point on the short run average total cost curve and 2 the point of tangency between the long run average total cost and short run average total cost curves in practice however capacity utilization is often measured as the ratio of actual to the maximum potential output consistent with a given capital stock this paper demonstrates how to estimate the theoretical measures of capacity utilization and examines the correlation between three measures of capacity utilization and the mcgraw hill estimates of capacity utilization using data from a sample of u s privately owned electric utilities for 1961 83 copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

the impact of deregulation on the production structure of the motor carrier industry empirical analysis of the motor carrier industry pre and post regulatory reform reveals that deregulation resulted in significant changes in firm production structure and lower real average costs translog cost functions for firms operating in 1977 and 1983 were estimated and compared for other specialized commodity carriers fitted average costs were computed from these functions the results indicate significant differences in the cost functions and real costs that cannot be attributed to technological changes but rather suggest efficiency gains the results also suggest that it is inappropriate to predict outcomes of deregulation using empirical analyses of firms in the regulated environment

cost structure and productivity growth of the taiwanese international tourist hotels abstract this study investigates the cost structure and economic implications of the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry a multi product translog cost function with three inputs and three outputs is estimated using seemingly unrelated regression estimation and three stage least squares a balanced panel dataset consisting of 47 international tourist hotels in taiwan over the period 1997 2001 was obtained from taiwanese tourism bureau and used to estimate the cost function the results show that both scale and scope economies exist in the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry in addition productivity growth is positive over the study period managerial and policy implications for the taiwanese international tourist hotel industry are also discussed

the effects of uncertainty on the leverage of nonfinancial firms this paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms short term leverage and macroeconomic and idiosyncratic sources of uncertainty we develop a structural model of a firm s value maximization problem that predicts a negative relationship between uncertainty and optimal levels of borrowing this proposition is tested using a panel of nonfinancial u s firms drawn from the compustat quarterly database covering the period 1993 2003 the estimates confirm that as either form of uncertainty increases firms decrease their levels of short term leverage this effect is stronger for macroeconomic uncertainty than for idiosyncratic uncertainty jel c23 d8 d92 g32

on the existence of an optimal capital structure theory and evidence one of the most contentious issues in the theory of finance during the past quarter century has been the theory of capital structure the geneses of this controversy were the seminal contributions by modigliani and miller 18 19 the general academic view by the mid 1970s although not a consensus was that the optimal capital structure involves balancing the tax advantage of debt against the present value of bankruptcy costs no sooner did this general view become prevalent in the profession than miller 16 presented a new challenge by showing that under certain conditions the tax advantage of debt financing at the firm level is exactly offset by the tax disadvantage of debt at the personal level since then there has developed a burgeoning theoretical literature attempting to reconcile miller s model with the balancing theory of optimal capital structure e g deangelo and masulis 5 kim 12 and modigliani 17 the general result of this work is that if there are significant leverage related costs such as bankruptcy costs agency costs of debt and loss of non debt tax shields and if the income from equity is untaxed then the marginal bondholder s tax rate will be less than the corporate rate and there will be a positive net tax advantage to corporate debt financing the firm s optimal capital structure will involve the trade off between the tax advantage of debt and various leverage related costs the upshot of these extensions of miller s model is the recognition that the existence of an optimal capital structure is essentially an empirical issue as to whether or not the various leverage related costs are economically significant enough to influence the costs of corporate borrowing the miller model and its theoretical extensions have inspired several timeseries studies which provide evidence on the existence of leverage related costs trczinka 28 reports that from examining differences in average yields between taxable corporate bonds and tax exempt municipal bonds one cannot reject the miller hypothesis that the marginal bondholder s tax rate is not different from the corporate tax rate however trczinka is careful to point out that this finding does not necessarily imply that there is no tax advantage of corporate debt if the personal tax rate on equity is positive indeed buser and hess 1 using a longer time series of data and more sophisticated econometric techniques estimate that the average effective personal tax rate on equity is statistically positive and is not of a trivial magnitude more importantly they document evidence that is consistent with the existence of significant leverage related costs in the economy

productivity change technical progress and relative efficiency change in the public accounting industry we present evidence on components of productivity change in the public accounting industry toward the end of the 20th century using revenue and human resource data from 64 of the 100 largest public accounting firms in the united states for the 1995 1999 period we analyze productivity change technical progress and relative efficiency change over time the average public accounting firm experienced a productivity growth of 9 5 between 1995 and 1999 we find support for the hypothesis that technical progress rather than an improvement in relative efficiency was the reason for this productivity growth firms that were early movers into management advisory services mas and those that emphasized growth in mas over growth in the traditional audit and tax services enjoyed significantly higher productivity growth than their peers these firms also contributed significantly more to the industry s technical progress

how welfare policies affect child and adolescent achievement recent research based on random assignment experiments has found that the effects of welfare and employment policies appear to vary by children s developmental stage programs that increase parents employment and income have been found to have either neutral or positive effects for preschool and early school age children in poverty depending on the policy approach utilized pamela morris et al 2001 at the same time negative effects have been observed for adolescent children lisa gennetian et al 2002 and the limited research on very young children has shown neutral effects morris and charles michalopoulos 2000 we pool data on over 30 000 achievement reports for children in families enrolled in 14 different random assignment welfare and work programs to examine how the impacts of policies aimed at increasing parents employment and their income vary across childhood our efforts extend past work by including more programs using longer run follow up data from some of the programs that had been included in prior studies and pooling micro level data rather than applying meta analytic techniques to study wide impact estimates both economic and psychological theories suggest that changes in parents economic and employment circumstances may affect children s development although each emphasizes a different pathway of influence gary s becker 1981 james s coleman 1988 vonnie mcloyd 1998 but children in differing developmental periods may respond differently to the same changes in employment on the part of their parents for example employment in the first year of a child s life may be associated with more negative child outcomes jeanne brooksgunn et al 2002 especially if it involves many hours of work elizabeth harvey 1999 or is associated with long hours in nonmaternal care michael lamb 1998 mcloyd 1998 after school arrangements are associated with positive outcomes for both pre adolescent and adolescent children keeping them in structured care and away from peers gregory s pettit et al 1999 jill k posner and deborah lowe vandell 1999 at the same time adolescents may have difficulties if left alone after school and into the evening hours as mothers take on off hour and shift work maternal employment has been found to be associated with reduced parental supervision and increased adolescent delinquency among low income families robert j sampson and john h laub 1994 finally adolescent children may also be asked to take on greater household responsibilities when their single mothers move into employment which may result in negative academic performance since some of the welfare programs in our pooled data provided financial incentives and boosted not only employment but also family income we are able to ascertain whether income augmenting programs benefit children more than programs that merely increase employment note however that none of our studies randomly allocated participants into either a financial incentive or a nonfinancial incentive program so our comparison of impacts between these two types of programs is nonexperimental experimental research to date suggests that programs that increase both parents employment and their income produce positive effects for preschool and early school age children clark kaufman and duncan institute for policy research northwestern university evanston il 60208 e mail beth clark northwestern edu greg duncan northwestern edu morris manpower demonstration research corporation 16 east 34th street new york ny 10016 email pamela morris mdrc org we are grateful for financial support from the family and child well being research network of the national institute of child health and human development u01 hd30947 06 for supporting duncan and clark kaufman this paper is part of next generation a project led by the manpower demonstration research corporation mdrc that examines the effects of welfare antipoverty and employment policies on children and families funding for this project was provided by the david and lucile packard foundation the william t grant foundation and the john d and catherine t macarthur foundation we thank the funders of these studies and partners in evaluating these programs for access to the data

parental investment in children s human capital in urban china the present study tests the extent of parental forgone consumption used instead to invest in children s human capital by use of intrahousehold resource allocation models using an unusual comprehensive data set for urban china there is more spending on boys aged 13 to 15 but more on girls aged 16 to 18 suggesting that standard human capital theories and traditional perceptions of gender bias do not completely explain educational expenditure decisions the evidence from urban china is consistent though with human capital models which consider parental intertemporal preferences also the findings suggest that the perceived bias in favour of sons exists weakly in contemporary urban china

regulation capital vintage and technical change in the electric utility industry this paper presents estimates of the rate of technical change in the electric power industry over the period 1951 78 the estimated model directly incorporates the effects of rate of return regulation and uses both a time trend and a vintage index to represent disembodied and embodied technical change respectively the results indicate that disembodied technical change was the primary source of cost reduction during 1951 70 and that tighter regulation as represented by a one point reduction in the rate of return would have reduced the rate of technical change by an average of 1 2 during 1951 78 34 references 18 footnotes 3 tables

a reexamination of returns to scale density and technical progress in u s airlines the logic of protecting u s airlines from competition was initially founded on the belief that substantial economies of scale existed in the industry and that consumers would benefit through among other things regulation of fares regulation of service network and restrictions on entry and exit from the industry however studies 1 7 8 12 have undermined the faith in economic regulation by showing that economies of scale were minimal and competition would promote efficiency in a recent study caves christensen and tretheway 5 estimated returns to scale rts and returns to density rtd for u s airlines based on a panel dataset for 1970 1981 containing trunk and local service airlines they estimated rtd and rts from a translog cost function for airline services like many other applied economists working with translog cost functions they found that the neoclassical curvature or regularity conditions on the cost function are not satisified in almost half of the observations 105 out of 208 in general concavity property is satisfied in the neighborhood of the sample mean if it is chosen as the point of approximation for the cost function but not at points further from the mean recently diewert and wales 6 suggested alternative flexible functional forms which are globally concave in input prices if the concavity property is satisfied at only one point thus if the concavity property is violated imposition of it at a single point will make the function globally concave without destroying flexibility use of such functional forms can avoid violation of regularity conditions of the cost function at extreme points the objective of this paper is to estimate a model of airline costs along the lines of caves christensen and tretheway 5 however we extend their results in several ways first we consider a modest generalization of the symmetric generalized mcfadden sgm cost function developed by diewert and wales by including network and control variables in the airline cost function the sgm cost function is flexible and globally concave in input prices thus our estimates of parameters and measures of rts rtd and technical progress are based on a cost function which is globally concave second we estimate the system of input demand functions instead of the cost function and while estimating these input demand functions derived from the cost minimizing behavior of the airlines we incorporate firm and input specific effects these effects capture possible differences in production technologies among airlines third we intro

target behavior and financing how conclusive is the evidence the notion that firms have a debt ratio target that is a primary determinant of financing behavior is influential in finance yet how definitive is the evidence we address this issue by generating samples where financing is unrelated to a firm s current debt ratio or a target we find that much of the available evidence in favor of target behavior based on leverage ratio changes can be reproduced for these samples taken together our findings suggest that a number of existing tests of target behavior have no power to reject alternatives

testing theories of capital structure and estimating the speed of adjustment this paper examines time series patterns of external financing decisions and shows that publicly traded u s firms fund a much larger proportion of their financing deficit with external equity when the cost of equity capital is low the historical values of the cost of equity capital have long lasting effects on firms capital structures through their influence on firms historical financing decisions we also introduce a new econometric technique to deal with biases in estimates of the speed of adjustment toward target leverage we find that firms adjust toward target leverage at a moderate speed with a half life of 3 7 years for book leverage even after controlling for the traditional determinants of capital structure and firm fixed effects

input substitution economies of scale and productivity growth in the us upholstered furniture industry cost factor demand and productivity growth are considered in the upholstered furniture industry over 1958 87 factors are divided into labour capital and materials it is found that all inputs are substitutes in production although substitution elasticities are small factor demand is price inelastic for all inputs the industry operates around minimum average cost productivity growth is small but significant the results indicate that labour will continue to be important in the industry however regional comparative advantage is not related to labour alone the results suggest that policies to attract or retain the industry must consider the low degree of factor substitution

the role of target leverage in security issues and repurchases the paper examines whether security issues and repurchases adjust the capital structure toward the target the time series patterns of debt ratios imply that only debt reductions are initiated to offset the accumulated deviation from target leverage the importance of target leverage in earlier debt equity choice studies is driven by the subsample of equity issues accompanied by debt reductions unlike debt issues and reductions equity issues and repurchases have no significant lasting effect on capital structure therefore even firms that have target debt ratios can engage in timing the equity market

risks and financing decisions in the energy sector an empirical investigation using firm level data using a sample of 102 uk energy firms over the period 1981 2009 this paper empirically examines the effects of uncertainty on firms leverage decisions the results indicate that both firms specific and macroeconomic uncertainty have negative sizeable and statistically significant impacts on the uk energy sector firms target leverage the results also indicate that the profitability of energy firms plays an important role in uncertainty leverage relationship by changing the total effect of uncertainty on leverage while more profitable firms appear to reduce their leverage by a relatively large amount in response to increased macroeconomic uncertainty they are less likely to be affected by firm specific uncertainty these results suggest that stability in macroeconomic conditions and business activity is important to the stability of the capital structure of firms in the energy sector which would in turn be conducive to stability in their investments and production

a general index of technical change this paper outlines a procedure for estimating a general index of technical change within the context of a quite general production technology specifically when panel data are available for firms in an industry time specific dummies can be combined in a nonlinear estimation procedure to yield a general index of technical change that may be both nonneutral and scale augmenting this approach offers numerous advantages over the traditional time trend representation of technical change for example the general index can serve as the basis for analysis of the determinants of technical change results for a sample of 30 electric utilities over the period 1951 78 show that the productivity decline of the 1970s can be attributed primarily to sulphur oxide restrictions and secularly declining capacity utilization due to rapidly increasing peak load demands

estimating the impact of incidents on urban controlled access highways an empirical analysis abstractan empirical analysis is developed that quantifies the impact of different types of traffic incidents on the speed and maximum flow averages of vehicles on a controlled access highway the incident types considered include damage to highway infrastructure vehicle rollover crashes into stationary objects collisions with moving vehicles rain fog vehicle breakdowns pedestrians on roadway etc using real world data from chile s most heavily used urban motorway freeway estimates of incident impacts on speed are generated using a multiple linear regression model incorporating instrumental variables to correct for endogeneity flow results are then generated using the fundamental traffic equation relating speed flow and density a ranking of the impacts on highway traffic of the different incident types based on incident frequency as well as impact size demonstrates that for the real case studied the incidents with the greatest cumulative effect are in order of magnitude vehicle breakdow

a goal programming constrained regression review of the bell system breakup the recently implemented court decision to break up bell american telephone telegraph co to accord with u s anti trust laws represents a highly significant policy decision which is proving to be influential in other countries as well as the u s the telecommunication industry is of such size and importance that even relatively small economies that might be lost with bell s breakup as a natural monopoly could involve substantial welfare losses to consumers and producers studies commissioned by the u s justice department that approached this topic by econometric methods reported that the evidence failed to support the contention that bell was a natural monopoly here a goal programming constrained regression as developed in the management science literature uses the same functional form and the same data but nevertheless reverses the main findings of the econometric studies in every one of the 20 years covered this kind of difference in results obtained by two different methods of analysis poi

price cost margins exports and productivity growth with an application to canadian industries a model is estimated for oligopolistic industries producing multiple outputs in short run equilibrium outputs are sold domestically and exported while capital is treated as a quasi fixed factor the model is applied to the canadian non electrical machinery electrical products and chemical products industries the results show that there is significant oligopoly power in each of the industries and that the degree of this power differs between the domestic and export markets total factor productivity is decomposed price cost margins exert little influence but the rate of technological change returns to scale and the rate of capital adjustment determine productivity growth

cost structure and capacity in the norwegian pelagic fisheries the parameters of the short run cost function are estimated for three vessel types taking part in the norwegian pelagic fisheries purse seine vessels trawlers and coastal vessels the generalized translog functional form is used estimates of returns to scale are calculated and the results indicate that there are substantial economies of scale in all vessel classes it is further investigated whether excess capacity varies with vessel size and age the analysis suggests increased quotas per vessel to avoid rent dissipation with the total allowable catch given the number of participating vessels must be reduced

productivity scale economies and technical change in ontario hydro the growing importance of electric utilities in the canadian economy is reflected in the fact that the share of real domestic product attributable to this sector has increased from 2 1 in 1971 to 2 6 in 1979 with ontario hydro accounting for about one third of the output an empirical analysis of the production structure of ontario hydro reveals the degree of substitution between factor inputs and the contribution to total factor productivity growth of economies of scale capacity utilization and technical change the analysis confirms that there is a legitimate rationale to over capitalize and add more capacity in order to encourage the substitution of electricity for non renewable sources the analysis also suggests a number of steps that would improve ontario hydro s performance with both the federal and provincial governments playing a role 22 references 6 tables

substitution possibilities for unpriced natural resources restricted cost functions for the canadian metal mining industry a bstract the effects of resource depletion on economic growth depend critically on the elasticities of substitution between non renewable natural resources and reproducible inputs estimation of the elasticities of substitution for natural resources has been hindered by the absence of data on their prices which results from the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries in this paper we use the theory of restricted cost functions to develop a general procedure for estimating substitution possibilities for unpriced inputs estimation of the model with data for the canadian metal mining industry indicates that the elasticities of substitution for the natural resource metallic ore are equal to unity

family decision making for educational expenditure new evidence from survey data for nigeria this study examines the determinants of educational expenditures by households in nigeria data from the nigerian general household survey panel 2012 2013 wave 2 was used and a double hurdle mode

an exogeneity test for a simultaneous equation tobit model with an application to labor supply a test of weak exogeneity in the simultaneous equation tobit model is proposed and illustrated using a female labour supply model estimated using cross section data the test statistic can be simply output from any standard tobit maximum likelihood package and is asymptotically efficient the procedure provides consistent estimators for the simultaneous tobit model whose asymptotic covariance matrix is a simple extension of the usual tobit formula we also provide the lagrange multiplier test of weak exogeneity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

growth accounting when technical change is embodied in capital this paper revisits the hypothesis that technical change is embodied in capital it extends old results to make them more relevant to the contemporary debates about the adjustment of investment goods for quality change and about the role of embodied technical change as a source of economic growth it is shown that the failure to adjust capital for quality change has the effect of suppressing the quality effects into the conventional total factor productivity residual and it is found that approximately 20 percent of the residual growth of quality adjusted output could be attributed to embodied technical change copyright 1992 by american economic association

the impact of environmental regulations on industry productivity direct and indirect effects abstract the paper develops an approach to measuring the impact of environmental regulations on total factor productivity growth which is less restrictive than a simple growth accounting approach environmental regulations have a direct impact on productivity growth due to the diversion of resources toward required abatement capital there can be a further indirect effect however as conventional inputs and production processes are changed in response to requirements to purchase abatement capital we estimate this indirect effect using a flexible functional form cost function total factor productivity and the direct and indirect productivity effects of environmental regulations are presented for five polluting industries we find that the indirect effect can be either positive or negative and in all industries is energy using the net impact of environmental regulations on total factor productivity growth is fairly small given that these are the most polluting industries they account for about 10 30 of the productivity decline of the 1970s in these industries

how does industry affect firm financial structure we examine the importance of industry to firm level financial and real decisions we find that in addition to standard industry fixed effects financial structure also depends on a firm s position within its industry in competitive industries a firm s financial leverage depends on its natural hedge its proximity to the median industry capital labor ratio the actions of other firms in the industry and its status as entrant incumbent or exiting firm financial leverage is higher and less dispersed in concentrated industries where strategic debt interactions are also stronger but a firm s natural hedge is not significant our results show that financial structure technology and risk are jointly determined within industries these findings are consistent with recent industry equilibrium models of financial structure copyright 2005 oxford university press