the effect of income on child development this study presents estimates of the effect of parental income on children s cognitive social and emotional development the effect of current income is small especially when income is treated as endogenous the effect of permanent income is substantially larger but relatively small when compared to the magnitude of recent policy induced changes in income family background characteristics play a more important role than income in determining child outcomes policies that affect family income will have little direct impact on child development unless they result in very large and permanent changes in income

a uk carbon energy tax a carbon energy tax has been proposed by the european commission to start as us 3 per barrel oil equivalent in 1993 rising to us 10 in 2000 the effects of this tax on the uk economy can be assessed by using a large scale energy environment economy model in which energy demand is treated by means of aggregate equations for energy users and fuel share equations for electricity and each of the main fossil fuels the electricity supply industry is represented in the model by simulating the characteristics of each existing generating station and of a range of new station types and by allowing the model to choose the fuels used from relative fuel prices and prices of capital inputs this approach contrasts with the multimodel approach used in most studies of the effects of the tax the tax is introduced as a tax on imports and domestic output of fossil fuels in proportion to their carbon and energy content with the tax being passed on through the economic system depending on the use of the fuels thus the electricity industry is faced with higher prices for coal gas and fuel oil and chooses to burn the different fuels according to their relative prices four scenarios are developed which vary according to the way the tax revenues are recycled through reductions in vat or in income tax rates and whether the tax is introduced throughout the european community or throughout the oecd if the tax is european it is assumed that the energy intensive industries will be exempt the outcome is that the tax is sufficient to stabilize co2 emissions over the period 1990 2005 at 12 below base levels by the end of the period there is an overall saving of energy compared to base and a further switch to gas in electricity generation the effects on the macroeconomy are rather small and as the revenues are recycled rather than saved by the government gdp growth is likely to increase under the tax by some 0 2 above base this confirms other studies in which revenues are recycled but contradicts many results from studies in which revenue recycling is ignored or incomplete the effects on the energy intensive industries are expected to be small in all the scenarios but 14 of tax revenues are lost if the industries are exempt

the demand for physician services evidence from a natural experiment this study exploits a natural experiment in belgium to estimate the effect of copayment increases on the demand for physician services it shows how a differences in differences dd estimator of the price effects can be decomposed into effects induced by the common average proportional price increase income effects and by the change in relative prices substitution effects the price elasticity of a uniform proportional price increase is relatively small 0 13 for men and 0 03 for women substitution effects are large especially for women but imprecisely estimated despite the substantial price increases the efficiency gain of the reform if any is modest

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

the impact of parental income on early schooling transitions a re examination using data over three generations abstract this paper applies new semi parametric techniques to estimate the effects of parental income on the probability of being held back in elementary school in france we use information on grandparents past socioeconomic status and parents education level to separate the parental income effects from the effects of the unmeasured determinants of children s performance at school that are correlated with parental income when considering the probability of being held back in elementary school we find that the effects of parental poverty are much larger than the effects of a child s sex or age age within his her class or of the parents education level our findings suggest that policy decisions that increase income transfers to relatively poor families have a potentially very large impact on children s early performance at school

comparing frontier methods for economic environmental trade off analysis abstract this paper uses a mechanistic frontier approach as a reference to evaluate the ability of conventional parametric sfa and non parametric dea frontier approaches for analyzing economic environmental trade offs conventional frontier approaches are environmentally adjusted through incorporating the materials balance principle the analysis is worked out for the flemish pig finishing case which is both representative and didactic results show that on average sfa and dea yield adequate economic environmental trade offs both methods are good estimators for technical efficiency cost allocative and environmental allocative efficiency scores are less robust due to the well known methodological advantages and disadvantages of sfa and dea for particular firms sfa dea and the mechanistic approach may yield different economic environmental trade offs one has therefore to be careful when using conventional frontier approaches for firm specific decision support the mechanistic approach allows for optimizing performances per average present finisher which is the production unit in pig finishing conventional frontier methods do not allow for this optimization since the number of average present finishers varies along the production functions since the mechanistic production function is based on underlying growth feed uptake and mortality functions additional firm specific indicators can also be calculated at each point of the production function

scientific basis for the greenhouse effect the international community may reach agreement to limit carbon emissions as early as i 992 when brazil will host a negotiating convention on climate change europe and japan have already made commitments to place ceilings on future emissions at or below present rates because the cost of switching to alternative fuels could be high with profound implications for long term economic growth especially in developing countries policy action must be based on the view that the science of the greenhouse effect is compelling this essay considers the scientific logic and evidence for the effect from the viewpoint of an economist it draws heavily on the findings of the intergovernmental panel on climate change ipcc i will stress that both the science and the policy discussion so far including by ipcc have focused insufficiently on effects in the very long term on the order of 250 to 300 years

demand for education and labor market outcomes lessons from the abolition of compulsory conscription in france before 1997 education was a way for young french men to avoid military service in the army after the abolition of compulsory conscription in 1997 this incentive to stay on in education disappeared we show that the decrease in the benefit of pursuing education for men was followed by a fall in their educational achievement relative to women and by a decrease in their relative entry wages these results suggest that high school dropout rates could be reduced by policies increasing the immediate benefits of pursuing education and that it would yield a substantial improvement in early labor market outcomes

testing theories of consumption behavior using information on aggregate shocks income seasonality and rainfall in rural india we develop an integrated framework for testing theories of consumption behavior by examining how agricultural households in rural india respond to anticipated and unanticipated seasonal income fluctuations using information on village level rainfall surprises we estimate idiosyncratic unanticipated income shocks by allowing weather risk to impact households differently depending on observable characteristics in applying our methodology to unique panel data on consumption debt and intrahousehold gift exchanges we address a number of shortcomings in previous tests of theories of consumption behavior yet we find no evidence against the hypothesis that households smooth idiosyncratic fluctuations in their income our approach also uncovers several interesting features of rural credit and insurance markets

new evidence on the link between housing environment and children s educational attainments abstract there is extensive literature that posits the hypothesis that a better housing environment enhances a child s educational attainment however there is little causal evidence demonstrating the presence of this effect in this study we examine the effect of housing environment on a child s educational attainment using census files covering the entire population of taiwan because the taiwan census data contains unique address information for every household we try to control the neighborhood effect and unobserved family heterogeneity by comparing a child with his peers of the same age cohort in the same neighborhood after accounting for tens of thousand area dummies the chance of high school enrollment for teens aged 16 and 17 and college enrollment for young adults aged 19 and 20 is found to be positively correlated with an increase in floor space an increase in residential stability and with homeownership but negatively correlated to an increase in housing crowdedness and an increase in building age among these housing variables residential stability and homeownership are the ones generating the largest positive effects on the child s schooling

new evidence of the causal effect of family size on child quality in a developing country this paper presents new evidence of the causal effect of family size on child quality in a developing country context we estimate the impact of family size on child labor and educational outcomes among brazilian children and young adults by exploring the exogenous variation of family size driven by the presence of twins in the family using the brazilian census data for 1991 we find that the exogenous increase in family size is positively related to labor force participation for boys and girls and to household chores for young women we also find negative effects on educational outcomes for boys and girls and negative impacts on human capital formation for young female adults moreover we obtain suggestive evidence that credit and time constraints faced by poor families may explain the findings

a study on economic measures for co2 reduction in japan in this paper we investigate the costs and effectiveness of two co2 emission control policies a co2 tax and a subsidy for co2 reduction criepi s medium term economic forecasting system is used to analyse the co2 tax policy it is concluded that the national cost of co2 reduction by taxation is prohibitively high for the subsidy we used an integrated approach combining a bottom up model with criepi s model although we have shown the usefulness of the integrated approach for analysing the subsidy policy we need to gather more data to make the results more reliable

the impact of carbon taxation on the uk economy abstract the paper explores the likely macroeconomic impact of imposing a carbon tax at levels sufficient to reduce co 2 emissions significantly many studies have indicated the probablity of such a tax entailing substantial economic costs however such studies have not tended to take into account the possible positive effects of using carbon tax revenues to reduce distortionary taxes elsewhere in the economy or to offset competitiveness effects or of the possibility that a carbon tax will stimulate innovation and efficiency in the energy sector with positive economic results the paper concludes that when these factors are given due weight imposing a carbon tax is more likely to entail economic benefit than cost

the effect of sibling sex composition on women s education and earnings this paper documents the impact of siblings on the education of men and women born in the united states between 1920 and 1965 we examine the effect of the number and sex composition of a boy or girl s siblings on that child s educational attainment we find that throughout the century women s educational choices have been systematically affected by the sex composition of her siblings and that men s choices have not women raised only with brothers have received on average significantly more education than women raised with any sisters controlling for household size since sibling sex composition affects women s educational attainment and plausibly may be unrelated to other determinants of earnings it may provide a useful instrument for education in earnings functions for women our results suggest that standard estimates significantly underestimate the return to schooling for women

the economic consequences of unwed motherhood using twin births as a natural experiment social scientists have long concluded that premarital childbearing exacerbates problems of both poverty and family instability out of wedlock and adolescent childbearing may reduce a mothers educational attainment lower the probability of her eventual marriage increase her probability of welfare recipiency and decrease family income the authors use an exogenous fertility event the birth of twins to estimate the economic effects of unplanned births the approach compares the economic outcomes of women experiencing premarital twin first births to those experiencing premarital single first births in the attempt to identify the consequences of an unplanned birth upon womens future fertility and marital decisions education labor force participation labor earnings welfare receipt and poverty status 1970 and 1980 us census micro data are used to identify twin births to unmarried women analysis found large short term effects of unplanned births on labor force participation poverty and welfare recipiency among unwed mothers but not among married mothers furthermore most adverse economic effects of unplanned motherhood dissipate over time for whites but larger and more persistent negative effects weigh upon black unwed mothers

uk s climate change levy cost effectiveness competitiveness and environmental impacts this paper intends to examine the cost effectiveness of uk s climate change levy ccl its implications on competitiveness of firms and the environmental impact the paper briefly describes the levy and analyses it under the cannons of a good taxation policy the economic implications of the levy are discussed with theoretical and empirical perspectives change in net exports investment patterns and productivity and inclusion of compliance cost forms the basis for analysing the effect on competitiveness it discusses the options available to firms to safeguard their competitiveness if it is adversely affected by the ccl a description of the current scenario of the levy since its inception is also presented the paper argues the need for a comprehensive policy involving the use of standards emission trading as well as energy taxes to achieve emission and energy use reductions a focal point of this paper is to elucidate the pros and cons of the ccl energy tax with respect to an emission trading scheme

housing wealth and labor supply evidence from a regression discontinuity design abstract this paper uses the discontinuity in house size generated by chinese housing policies to identify the effect of housing wealth on labor supply the analysis finds a substantial deterrent effect of housing wealth on labor supply much of the housing wealth effect comes from the labor participation decision with the effect on employed workers being ambiguous females young generation and households with high repayment capacity are more responsive to gains in housing wealth

does parents money matter abstract this paper asks whether parents income per se has a positive impact on children s abilities previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations this does not prove that parents money matters however since income is presumably correlated with ability this paper estimates the impact of parents income by focusing on income variation due to factors union industry and job loss that arguably represent luck i find that changes in parents income due to luck have a negligible impact on children s human capital for most families although parents money does matter for families whose father has low education

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

income schooling and ability evidence from a new sample of identical twins we develop a model of optimal schooling investments and estimate it using new data on approximately 700 identical twins we estimate an average return to schooling of 9 percent for identical twins but estimated returns appear to be slightly higher for less able individuals simple cross section estimates are marginally upward biased these empirical results imply that abler individuals attain more schooling because they face lower marginal costs of schooling not because of higher marginal benefits

coordinated supply chain management abstract historically the three fundamental stages of the supply chain procurement production and distribution have been managed independently buffered by large inventories increasing competitive pressures and market globalization are forcing firms to develop supply chains that can quickly respond to customer needs to remain competitive these firms must reduce operating costs while continuously improving customer service with recent advances in communications and information technology as well as a rapidly growing array of logistics options firms have an opportunity to reduce operating costs by coordinating the planning of these stages in this paper we review the literature addressing coordinated planning between two or more stages of the supply chain placing particular emphasis on models that would lend themselves to a total supply chain model finally we suggest directions for future research

the impact of perceptions in averting decision models an application of the special regressor method to drinking water choices households monetary valuation of water quality is a prerequisite for efficient water resource management and the valuation of water quality protection policies individuals are commonly questioned about their perception of risk in valuation surveys based on stated preference methods and revealed preference methods such as averting behavior models these subjective and often discrete measures are commonly used to explain individuals actions to protect themselves against these risks perceptions appear as endogenous variables in traditional theoretical averting decision models but quite surprisingly endogeneity of perceived risk is not always controlled for in empirical studies in this article we argue that perceptions have to be treated as endogenous to averting decisions in order to produce accurate and reliable measures of households valuation of water quality improvements we present various binary averting decision models featuring an endogenous discrete variable such as risk perception in particular we compare the traditional bivariate probit model with the special regressor model which is less well known and relies on a different set of assumptions in the empirical illustration using household data from australia canada and france we study how the perceived health impacts of tap water affect a household s decision to drink water from the tap individuals perceptions are found to be endogenous and significant for all models but the estimated marginal effect is sensitive to the chosen model our empirical application also includes some tests of the special regressor estimator s sensitivity to underlying assumptions

assessing the role of us agriculture in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generating additional environmental benefits abstract this study measures the changes in greenhouse gas ghg emissions from us crop production under a scenario where farmers face higher energy prices with the implementation of the kyoto protocol the focus is on predicting the impact on direct and indirect energy resource use and measuring the changes in specific ghgs the study also assesses the potential for additional environmental benefits from the changes in agricultural resource use the analyses rely on the results from a calibrated mathematical programming model of regional us crop production the model accounts for input substitution when farmers are faced with external shocks the results suggest that when energy prices increase there is a relatively small decrease in total harvested acreage but a more significant drop in the use of energy intensive resources overall ghg emissions from us crop production decrease by 20 suggesting agriculture is more effective in abating ghg emissions than the other sectors of us economy there is also a good potential for additional positive environmental externalities from the decreases in resources used in crop production

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

early childhood nutrition schooling and sibling inequality in a dynamic context evidence from south africa abstract this article examines the effects of early childhood nutrition on schooling investments and outcomes to assess the dynamic nature of human capital production using panel data from south africa height for age z score is used as a measure of health and nutritional status in early childhood based on a comparison of siblings the empirical analysis shows that improving children s health significantly lowers the age when they start school increases grade attainment decreases grade repetition and improves learning performance in the early stage of schooling however the observed effect diminishes as a child ages which implies that i height at ages earlier than three better explains subsequent schooling outcomes and or ii the role of health capital changes from one schooling stage to another

property rights for the poor effects of land titling secure property rights are considered a key determinant of economic development the evaluation of the causal effects of property rights however is a difficult task as their allocation is typically endogenous to overcome this identification problem we exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles in 1981 squatters occupied a piece of land in a poor suburban area of buenos aires in 1984 a law was passed expropriating the former owners land to entitle the occupants some original owners accepted the government compensation while others disputed the compensation payment in the slow argentine courts these different decisions by the former owners generated an exogenous allocation of property rights across squatters using data from two surveys performed in 2003 and 2007 we find that entitled families substantially increased housing investment reduced household size and enhanced the education of their children relative to the control group these effects however did not take place through improvements in access to credit our results suggest that land titling can be an important tool for poverty reduction albeit not through the shortcut of credit access but through the slow channel of increased physical and human capital investment which should help to reduce poverty in future generations

using weather variability to estimate the response of savings to transitory income in thailand this paper measures the extent to which farmers are able to use savings and dissavings to smooth consumption in response to unexpected shocks to income time series information on regional rainfall is used to construct estimates of transitory income due to rainfall shocks the relationship between these measures of transitory income and savings indicates that farm households save a significantly higher fraction of transitory income than nontransitory income jel d91 016 the incomes of farm households in developing countries are notorious for being both low and uncertain policies that increase the incomes of farmers may well be different

smoothing consumption by smoothing income hours of work responses to idiosyncratic agricultural shocks in rural india while research has demonstrated that farm households in developing economies are able to protect consumption from idiosyncratic crop shocks little evidence shows how this is achieved this paper examines the extent to which labor markets allow households to shift labor from farm to off farm employment and the extent to which such a shift explains the observed lack of correlation between consumption and idiosyncratic crop shocks the empirical analysis uses a novel measure of the idiosyncratic crop income shock which utilizes information on start of season cropping choices to more accurately estimate household expectations of weather

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

green fiscal reform in sweden econometric assessment of the carbon and energy taxation scheme abstract empirical econometric assessment of environmental policy effectiveness is capable of demonstrating which tools have been helping to achieve the desired effect of reducing harmful emissions or stimulating technological change this paper employs an econometric approach to analyse the effectiveness of energy and carbon taxes in sweden the country which was one of the first to introduce a co2 tax as well as an extensive environmental tax reform the results showed that taken in isolation a co2 tax was not sufficient to result in a significant change in co2 emissions in sweden except in the case of petrol on the other hand energy taxes for coal and lpg have been statistically significantly effective it was also clear that a technological innovation in the form of development of nuclear and hydro energy played a significant role in reducing co2 emissions and higher oil price was also important in reducing national co2 emissions in sweden at the same time renewable energy excluding hydro a more recent innovation has not been a statistically significant driver of co2 emissions reduction perhaps due to the fact that wind and solar play a much lesser role in sweden at the moment the net electricity imports from other countries have contributed positively towards reducing co2 emissions in sweden while the use of coal and biomass tended to increase co2 emissions compared to the ex ante modelling results from the literature review the findings confirm the role of environmental taxation as a viable policy instrument effective in reducing co2 emissions in sweden although point towards a more nuanced picture the paper raises important policy questions focused on the effectiveness of environmental policy tools

what do twins studies reveal about the economic returns to education a comparison of australian and us findings conventional estimates of rates of return to education are constrained because they are unable to isolate the returns to schooling from the contribution of individual ability and the influence of family background potentially studies using a sample of twins may overcome these problems monozygotic twins are genetically identical and if they have been reared together share the same family background differences in income between identical twins can therefore be associated with differences in the amount of education they have undertaken in order to estimate the independent influence of education comparisons of such estimates with estimates made from a sample of dizygotic twins who are genetically similar but not identical and who are also reared together may permit evaluation of the biases associated with ability and family background in conventional estimates of the return to education in an important paper jere behrman et al 1977 analyzed data from a sample of male world war ii veteran twins and found that of the overall rate of return to schooling of 8 percent 2 7 percentage points could be attributed to schooling per se 3 2 percentage points could be attributed to genetic factors and 2 1 percentage points could be attributed to shared family environment in a recent paper however orley ashenfelter and alan krueger 1994 have estimated the economic returns to education using data on a new sample of twins which permitted them to adjust their estimate for omitted ability variables and measurement error on this basis they find that family and genetic effects make virtually no contribution to the returns to schooling measurement error however biases the estimated return to schooling downward the findings of ashenfelter and krueger 1994 are very different from previous work in this field and there is now some confusion as to what analysis of twins data really reveals about the economic returns to schooling ashenfelter and krueger s results are based on analysis of data for a sample of 298 individuals 149 pairs of identical twins who attended a twins festival in 1991 they remark at the end of their paper only additional data collection is likely to lead to better estimates of the returns to schooling p 1171

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

the role of birth order in child labour and schooling does when a child was born relative to his or her siblings affect whether the child attends school or participates in child labour we investigate this question by estimating the causal effect of birth order on the probabilities of school attendance and child labour participation to address the potential endogeneity of family size we use instrumental variable approach where the proportion of boys in the family is used to instrument family size using a longitudinal household survey data from ethiopia we estimate unobserved effects bivariate probit instrumental variable model of school attendance and child labour choices the results suggest that the probability of child labour participation decreases with birth order but we find no evidence that suggests birth order affects the probability of school attendance however among children who are going to school hours spent studying increases with birth order results from complementary time use analysis reveal that there is no birth order effect on hour

endowments and the allocation of schooling in the family and in the marriage market the twins experiment 03 we show how comparisons between the within twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 42 percent of the variance in log earnings obesity is due to variability in individual specific endowments allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments and individual specific earnings endowments of men and their wives schooling are negatively associated

the effect of overcrowded housing on children s performance at school this paper provides estimates of the causal effect of living in an overcrowded home on performance at school in france our identification strategy relies on the fact that the size and housing conditions of families vary with the sex composition of the siblings in particular large families in which the two youngest children are by descending age a boy and a girl tend to live less often in overcrowded housing than the other families french parents seem to be more reluctant about bringing up their children in the same room when they are not of the same sex especially when the youngest one is a girl we build on these results to develop several econometric analyses of the effect of overcrowding on schooling outcomes using variables describing the sex composition of the siblings as instrumental variables these different strategies reveal that the very strong statistical relationship between housing conditions and academic failure is plausibly one of cause and effect children in large families perform much less well than children in small families but our iv estimates suggest that this is mostly due to the fact that they live in more overcrowded homes

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

the integrated management of logistic chains in the white goods industry a field research in italy after having devoted many e orts and investments in improving their internal capacity to produce the right product at the right price at the right time companies are now starting to discover that much of the value they deliver to their customers depends not only on their own performance but also on the performance of all the other companies that belong to the same logistic chain thus the integrated management of logistic chains has gained a large attention in the latest years as one of the most e ective tools to achieve an overall improvement in the economic as well as in the logistic value that is embodied in each product this paper presents some results of a eld research focused on logistic chain management carried on by means of direct interviews on a sample of italian companies shops and nal customers belonging to the white goods industry questions highlight the main cost and logistic e ects that arise among di erent tiers of the chain when they interact here we illustrate the used methodology moreover we discuss some of the empirical results achieved with the aim of assessing the improvement potential that a tighter integration could achieve in particular it is shown that wide space for improving companies pro tability is available both by reducing costs and by increasing sales 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

market influence on the low carbon energy refurbishment of existing multi residential buildings abstract this paper explores the relationship between the energy market the political and regulatory context and energy design decisions for existing multi residential buildings to determine what form the energy market landscape would take if tailored to encourage low carbon solutions the links between market dynamics government strategies and building designs are mapped to understand the steps that achieve carbon reduction from building operation this is achieved using a model that takes financial and energy components with market and design variables to provide net present cost and annual carbon outputs the financial component applies discounted cash flow analysis over the building lifespan with discount rates reflecting contractual characteristics the carbon component uses standard assessment procedure sap 2005 a scenario approach is adopted to test alternative strategies selected to encourage low carbon solutions in two residential and two office designs the results show that the forward assumption of energy price escalation is the most influential factor on energy investment together with the expected differentiation between the escalation of gas and electricity prices using this and other influencing factors the research reveals trends and strategies that will achieve mainstream application of energy efficiency and microgeneration technologies and reduce carbon emissions in the existing multi residential sector

natural natural experiments in economics the recent literature exploiting natural events as natural experiment instruments is reviewed to assess to what extent it has advanced empirical knowledge a weakness of the studies that adopt this approach is that the necessary set of behavioral market and technological assumptions made by the authors in justifying their interpretations of the estimates is often absent the methodology and findings from twenty studies are summarized and simple economic models are used to elucidate the implicit assumptions made by the authors and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the interpretations of the findings to the relaxation of some of these assumptions