household electricity demand revisited respond to price changes this paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use the model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity and consumption aggregation over appliances and time we estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 california households the results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response we then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing this interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets and policy makers concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers how new pricing mechanisms would affect households consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty however this uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena hampering market reforms using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges these include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances and the interdependence of energy use with longer term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics the first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption the third issue imposes high data requirements information on household specific appliance holdings and residence features and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods when the researcher s objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff s consumption and revenue consequences in this paper we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used

induced innovation in american agiculture a reconsideration this paper investigates the role of induced innovation in the development of american agriculture from 1880 to 1980 the induced innovation hypothesis most closely associated with the work of hayami and ruttan argues that successful economies develop technologies in accordance with market price signals to loosen constraints on growth imposed by factor scarcities our analysis employing new state and regional level data fails to find support for hayami and ruttan s hypothesis this paper suggests that many of the fundamental generalizations about american agricultural development need to be reconsidered and redirects attention to the role of settlement changing crop patterns and biological investments in explaining changes in factor utilization in american agriculture

evolution of population resource dynamics models abstract this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of brander and taylor s 1998 model and its descendants from the following perspectives population growth substitutability innovation capital accumulation property rights and institutional designs and modeling approach this survey aims to contribute to a better understanding of population and resource dynamics models in general and facilitate further application of the model framework to relevant circumstances although often treated as exogenous in optimal growth models making population growth an endogenous function allows us to analyze broader effects of economic activities on population the issues of substitutability innovation and capital accumulation are intertwined allowing a model to address the effect of an endogenous technological change on substitutability between natural and man made capital facilitates our analyses of sustainability issues to address internalizing inter generational externalities in resource use incorporating property right changes and institutional designs to this type of model is a useful exercise but careful attention is needed for the consistency between such an arrangement and the mathematical representation of the depicted economy finally although the common criticism regarding convenient mathematical assumptions applies to the existing bt type models the use of computer simulation can relax such assumptions to better represent the intended relationships between the relevant variables

green revolution land reform and household income distribution in the philippines income of agricultural households consists of returns to labor capital and land from farming supplemented mainly by labor earnings from nonfarm sources agricultural technology affects farmers income through its effect on factor demands and factor prices which in turn induce changes in the allocation of farmers own resources to different uses income from farming is also affected by village institutions such as land tenure which governs the distribution of income between landlords and tenants as well as resource allocations

renewable electricity policies heterogeneity and cost effectiveness abstract renewable electricity policies promote investment in renewable electricity generators and have become increasingly common around the world because of intermittency and the composition of other generators in the power system the value of certain renewable particularly wind and solar varies across locations and technologies this paper investigates the implications of this heterogeneity for the cost effectiveness of renewable electricity policies a simple model of the power system shows that renewable electricity policies cause different investment mixes policies also differ according to their effect on electricity prices and both factors cause the cost effectiveness to vary across policies we use a detailed long run planning model that accounts for intermittency on an hourly basis to compare the cost effectiveness for a range of policies and alternative parameter assumptions the differences in cost effectiveness are economically significant where broader policies such as an emissions price outperform renewable electricity policies

an error correction model of induced innovation in uk agriculture cointegration techniques are applied to a model of induced innovation based on the two stage constant elasticity of substitution ces production function this approach results in direct tests of the inducement hypothesis which are applied to agricultural data for the united kingdom from 1953 to 2000 the time series properties of the variables are checked cointegration is established and an error correction model ecm constructed which attempts to separate factor substitution from technological change finally the ecm formulation is subjected to causality tests which show that the factor price ratio for chemicals and land is granger prior to the factor saving bias of technological change however long run relative prices are not causally prior to the machinery labour ratio this results from perturbations in the user cost of machinery caused by oil price shocks thus the induced innovation hypothesis iih may explain long run transformations like the mechanical and fertilizer revolutions that

serial supply chains with economies of scale bounds and approximations we consider two models of stochastic serial inventory systems with economies of scale for which the forms of optimal policies are known in the first model each stage has a fixed order quantity while in the second model there is a fixed order cost for external supplies for each model we show that the optimal policy parameters can be bounded and approximated by a series of independent single stage optimal policy parameters we further construct closed form bounds and approximations for the single stage solutions and apply them to the serial systems these results provide simple and effective solutions that will help to facilitate implementations in practice they also allow us to see the connections between the serial and single stage systems and sharpen our intuition on optimal policy parameters and system behavior

a new look at residential electricity demand using household expenditure data the recent push for a federal energy policy that could substantially change electricity prices in the u s highlights the need to obtain accurate residential electricity demand estimates many electricity demand estimates have been obtained based on the assumption that consumers optimize with respect to known marginal prices but increasing empirical evidence suggests that consumers are more likely to respond to average prices under this assumption this paper develops a new strategy based on gmm to estimate household electricity demand our approach allows a national level demand estimation from publicly available expenditure data and utility level consumption data complementing studies that use individual billing data which are richer yet often proprietary we estimate the price elasticity near 1 which is at the upper end in magnitude among the estimates from previous studies we apply our elasticity estimates in a u s climate policy simulation to determine how these elasticity estimates alter consumption and price outcomes compared to the more conservative elasticity estimates commonly used in policy analysis

induced innovations and farm mechanization cal change in agriculture then they come mainly from the public agent of farm technology the agricultural research system the research system should be held responsible for the social consequences of farm mechanization and it should be budgeted and directed accordingly on the other hand if mechanization and exit from farming are caused mostly by external price and wage changes the responsibility of the research system is limited principally to technology improvement in this note we discuss the newly emerging tradition of induced innovation and its relation to the alternative explanations of machine labor substitution in agriculture we first clarify the conceptual basis of the induced innovation hypothesis and the related innovation possibility function second we call into question the validity of some of the empirical applications we argue that an incomplete conceptualization of the induced innovation idea has led to invalid empirical tests and to inappropriate implications on the causes of american farm mechanization

residential consumption of gas and electricity in the u s the role of prices and income abstract we study the residential demand for electricity and gas working with nationwide household level data that cover recent years namely 1997 2007 our dataset is a mixed panel multi year cross sections of dwellings households in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the united states as of 2008 we estimate static and dynamic models of electricity and gas demand we find strong household response to energy prices both in the short and long term from the static models we get estimates of the own price elasticity of electricity demand in the 0 860 to 0 667 range while the own price elasticity of gas demand is 0 693 to 0 566 these results are robust to a variety of checks contrary to earlier literature metcalf and hassett 1999 reiss and white 2005 we find no evidence of significantly different elasticities across households with electric and gas heat the price elasticity of electricity demand declines with income but the magnitude of this effect is small these results are in sharp contrast to much of the literature on residential energy consumption in the united states and with the figures used in current government agency practice our results suggest that there might be greater potential for policies which affect energy price than may have been previously appreciated

optimal policies and approximations for a serial multiechelon inventory system with time correlated demand since clark and scarf s pioneering work most advances in multiechelon inventory systems have been based on demand processes that are time independent this paper revisits the serial multiechelon inventory system of clark and scarf and develops three key results first we provide a simple lower bound approximation to the optimal echelon inventory levels and an upper bound to the total system cost for the basic model of clark and scarf second we show that the structure of the optimal stocking policy of clark and scarf holds under time correlated demand processes using a martingale model of forecast evolution third we extend the approximation to the time correlated demand process and study in particular for an autoregressive demand model the impact of lead times and autocorrelation on the performance of the serial inventory system

measuring the energy savings from home improvement investments evidence from monthly billing data an important factor driving energy policy over the past two decades has been the energy paradox the perception that consumers apply unreasonably high hurdle rates to energy saving investments we explore one possible explanation for this apparent puzzle that realized returns fall short of the returns promised by engineers and product manufacturers using a unique data set we find that the realized return to attic insulation is statistically significant but the median estimate 9 7 is almost identical to a discount rate for this investment implied by a capm analysis we conclude that the case for the energy paradox is weaker than has previously been believed

experimental evidence of a sunk cost paradox a study of pricing behavior in bertrand edgeworth duopoly a well known implication of microeconomic theory is that sunk costs should have no effect on decision making we test this hypothesis with a human subjects experiment students recruited from graduate business courses with an average of over six years of work experience played the role of firms in a repeated price setting duopoly game in which both firms had identical capacity constraints and costs including a sunk cost that varied across experimental sessions over six different values we find contrary to the prediction of microeconomic theory that subjects pricing decisions show sizable differences across treatments the effect of the sunk cost is non monotonic as it increases from low to medium levels average prices decrease but as it increases from medium to high levels average prices increase these effects are not apparent initially but develop quickly and persist throughout the game cachon and camerer s 1996 loss avoidance is consistent with both effects while cost based pricing predicts only the latter effect and is inconsistent with the former

the relevance of p star analysis to uk monetary policy recent articles have attempted to restore the use of a simple measure of the money supply as an indicator of future price levels p star and to reestablish a causal link from money to prices in this paper we argue that the p star approach is flawed it is certainly more complex than traditional monetarist approaches but the fundamental questions of causality are in no way either affected or resolved we argue that the p star relationship does not have a causal link with prices but rather the causality runs from prices to money we also find that there is some causality running from money to real income so that monetary conditions do seem to have some predictive power for future levels of activity copyright 1994 by royal economic society

determinants of productivity change using a profit function smallholder agriculture in zimbabwe the concept of total factor productivity tfp the ratio of quality adjusted output to input is straightforward yet explaining pro ductivity change and attributing residual out put growth to its appropriate sources raises numerous problems it has long been argued that technical change policy reform and insti tutional innovation are complements and are all required to achieve sustained productivity growth johnson lipton evenson and kramer binswanger and pingali however in explain ing productivity growth the emphasis usually is put on weather and on investments that gen erate new technology which farmers must be educated to use usually public sector research and development expenditures extension farmer education while these are un doubtedly important the conventional approach see for a survey has often ne glected the role of policies and investments at other stages of the agricultural system affecting farm technology adoption 1the danger of the conventional approach is that it may not adequately measure policy ef fects on productivity through their influence on input and output prices the conventional ap proach may therefore provide misleading impli cations for promoting productivity growth weak infrastructure and institution can prevent

building vintage and electricity use old homes use less electricity in hot weather abstract this paper studies whether electricity use in newer or older residential buildings rises more in response to high temperature in a region of southern california peak electricity demand occurs at the highest temperatures which are predicted to increase due to climate change understanding how newer buildings differ from older buildings improves forecasts of how peak electricity use will grow over time newer buildings are subject to stricter building energy codes but are larger and more likely to have air conditioning hence the cumulative effect is ambiguous this paper combines four large datasets of building and household characteristics weather data and utility data to estimate the electricity temperature response of different building vintages estimation results show that new buildings 1970 2000 have a statistically significantly higher temperature response i e use more electricity than old buildings pre1970 auxiliary regressions with controls for tiered electricity prices number of bedrooms income square footage central air conditioning ownership and type of residential structure partially decompose the effect though california has had extensive energy efficiency building standards that by themselves would lower temperature response for new buildings the cumulative effect of new buildings is an increase in temperature response as new buildings are added aggregate temperature response is predicted to increase

the hourly income elasticity of electricity using a detailed data set on appliance level electricity consumption at the hourly level we provide the first estimates of hourly and end use specific income elasticities for electricity such est

new evidence on the impact of structural reforms on electricity sector performance abstract the evolution of electricity industry over the last decades has shown substantial differences between oecd countries this paper empirically investigates to what extent different structural forms of regulation competition and privatisation explain these international differences it distinguishes three modes of electricity performance a net generation per capita b installed capacity and c labour productivity the empirical model spans the period 1975 2011 and uses panel data econometric techniques our analysis reveals that there is a strongly significant interaction impact on the level of electricity performance between regulation and competition the empirical findings do confirm that a robust independent regulatory scheme must be implemented in order to achieve a competitive electricity market

estimation of short run and long run elasticities of energy demand from panel data using shrinkage estimators this article discusses the problem of obtaining short run and long run elasticities of energy demand for each of 49 states in the united states using data for 21 years estimation using the time series data by each state gave several wrong signs for the coefficients estimation using pooled data was not valid because the hypothesis of homogeneity of the coefficients was rejected shrinkage estimators gave more reasonable results the article presents in a unified framework the classical empirical bayes and bayes approaches for deriving these estimators

geographic aggregation and induced innovation in american agriculture the induced innovation hypothesis is tested for the usa and western regions using cointegration procedures an error correction model separates short run and long run effects of relative price changes a significant difference in the elasticities of factor substitution along the isoquant and the innovation possibility curve implies induced innovation the estimated results support the hypothesis for washington the pacific northwest and the western region but not for the nation corroborative tests of weak exogeneity fail to support the hypothesis in any of the geographic units changes in output level and research investment do not significantly bias agricultural technology in the usa

price and income elasticities of residential and industrial electricity demand in the european union this study examines the short and long run price and income elasticities of residential and industrial electricity demand in the european union between 1996 and 2016 instrumental variable models using the between estimator as well as dynamic panel models are employed to present robust estimates and to assess the impact of different methodologies on the reported elasticities the long run price elasticity of residential electricity consumption is estimated between 0 53 and 0 56 these elasticities are more inelastic than that of industrial electricity use which is reported between 0 75 and 1 01 the choice of different econometric methodologies has only moderate impact on the estimates while long run residential income elasticity estimates are moderately inelastic and estimated around 0 61 industrial electricity use tends to be closely tied to income with elasticities between 0 76 and 1 08 electricity demand in all sectors is highly price and income inelastic in the short run additionally population density temperatures and policy measures also influence sectoral electricity use the above estimates can aid the design of european energy and environmental policy

lower bounds for multi echelon stochastic inventory systems we establish lower bounds on the minimum cost of managing certain production distribution networks with setup costs at all stages and stochastic demands these networks include serial assembly and one warehouse multi retailer systems we obtain the bounds through novel cost allocation schemes we evaluate the bounds performance for one warehouse multi retailer systems by comparing them with simple heuristic policies the bounds are quite tight for systems with a small number of retailers we also present simplified proof of known optimality results for serial and assembly systems

one price doesn t fit all an examination of heterogeneity in price elasticity of residential electricity in india abstract although well designed consumer electricity pricing can improve access contribute to higher metering increase penetration of energy efficient technologies limit extent of the rebound effect and influence viability of electricity distribution utilities in india there has been no comprehensive policy relevant assessment of price elasticities of electricity demand in the country the objective of this study is to estimate price elasticity of residential electricity consumption and disaggregate it by state rural and urban residence and income categories to provide evidence for electricity tariff setting in india we combine survey data from five rounds of nationally representative household consumption expenditure surveys covering the period 2005 2012 with administrative data on electricity deficit and improve on methods applied in previous studies by estimating price elasticities using a quadratic form to account for constraints in electricity supply we find that while the average price elasticity at the national level is 0 39 95 confidence interval 0 46 0 31 it varies significantly by state rural and urban residence and income categories our results indicate that a one price fits all policy may not be an effective approach to electricity tariff setting in india and a data driven understanding of heterogeneities in price elasticities can better inform residential electricity tariff design in the country

on error correction models specification interpretation estimation abstract error correction models ecms have proved a popular organising principle in applied econometrics despite the lack of consensus as to exactly what constitutes their defining characteristic and the rather limited role that has been given to economic theory by their proponents this paper uses a historical survey of the evolution of ecms to explain the alternative specifications and interpretations and proceeds to examine their implications for estimation the various approaches are illustrated for wage equations by application to uk labour market data 1855 1987 we demonstrate that error correction models impose strong and testable non linear restrictions on dynamic econometric equations and that they do not obviate the need for modelling the process of expectations formation with the exception of a few special cases both the non linear restrictions and the modelling of expectations have been ignored by those who have treated ecms as merely reparameterisations of dynamic linear regression models or vector autoregressions

heterogeneity in german residential electricity consumption a quantile regression approach abstract in the absence of sufficient coverage of metering data on the electricity consumption of individual devices this paper estimates the contribution of individual appliances to overall household electricity consumption drawing on the most recent wave of the german residential energy consumption survey grecs moving beyond the standard focus of estimating mean effects we combine the conditional demand approach with quantile regression methods to capture the heterogeneity in electricity consumption rates of individual appliances our results indicate substantial differences in these rates as well as the end use shares across households originating from the opposite tails of the electricity consumption distribution this outcome highlights the added value of applying quantile regression methods in estimating consumption rates of electric appliances and indicates some scope for realizing conservation potentials

competitive and cooperative inventory policies in a two stage supply chain we investigate a two stage serial supply chain with stationary stochastic demand and fixed transportation times inventory holding costs are charged at each stage and each stage may incur a consumer backorder penalty cost e g the upper stage the supplier may dislike backorders at the lower stage the retailer we consider two games in both the stages independently choose base stock policies to minimize their costs the games differ in how the firms track their inventory levels in one the firms are committed to tracking echelon inventory in the other they track local inventory we compare the policies chosen under this competitive regime to those selected to minimize total supply chain costs i e the optimal solution we show that the games nearly always have a unique nash equilibrium and it differs from the optimal solution hence competition reduces efficiency furthermore the two games equilibria are different so the tracking method influences strategic behavior we show that the system optimal solution can be achieved as a nash equilibrium using simple linear transfer payments the value of cooperation is context specific in some settings competition increases total cost by only a fraction of a percent whereas in other settings the cost increase is enormous we also discuss stackelberg equilibria

modeling the length and shape of the r d lag an application to uk agricultural productivity this article updates total factor productivity tfp growth in uk agriculture from 1953 2005 and shows that public and private research and returns to scale explain tfp cointegration and causality tests are used to investigate the validity of attempts to explain uk agricultural productivity with r d and related technology variables then the length and shape of the lag structures are modeled and compared with the structures that are commonly imposed on the data the rates of return ror to r d using the data determined lags differ considerably from those obtained by imposing lag shapes these comparisons show that the ror to public r d are sensitive to the lag shape as well as its length and that the omission of other technology variables such as mechanical and chemical patents pertaining to agriculture and farm size can bias the ror

newsvendor bounds and heuristic for optimal policies in serial supply chains we consider the classicn stage serial supply systems with linear costs and stationary random demands there are deterministic transportation leadtimes between stages and unsatisfied demands are backlogged the optimal inventory policy for this system is known to be an echelon base stock policy which can be computed through minimizingn nested convex functions recursively to identify the key determinants of the optimal policy we develop a simple and surprisingly good heuristic this method minimizes 2 n separate newsvendor type cost functions each of which uses the original problem data only these functions are lower and upper bounds for the echelon cost functions their minimizers form bounds for the optimal echelon base stock levels the heuristic is the simple average of the solution bounds in extensive numerical experiments the average relative error of the heuristic is 0 24 with the maximum error less than 1 5 the bounds and the heuristic which can be easily obtained by simple spreadsheet calculations enhance the accessibility and implementability of the multiechelon inventory theory more importantly the closed form expressions provide an analytical tool for us to gain insights into issues such as system bottlenecks effects of system parameters and coordination mechanisms in decentralized systems

towards understanding the role of price in residential electricity choices evidence from a natural experiment abstract we examine a choice setting in which residential electricity consumers may respond to non financial incentives in addition to prices using data from a natural field experiment that exposed some households to a change in their electricity rates we find that households reduced electricity usage in response to a contemporaneous decrease in electricity prices this provides clear evidence that other factors potentially encompassing non monetary and dynamic considerations can influence consumer choice and even dominate the static price response in some cases a comprehensive understanding of household behavior in energy markets is essential for the effective implementation of market based energy and environmental policies the documentation of our result and others like it is a necessary step in achieving such an understanding

joint inventory and cash management for multidivisional supply chains this paper develops a centralized supply chain model that integrates material flows with cash flows the supply chain is owned by a single firm with two divisions the downstream division headquarters facing random customer demand replenishes materials from the upstream division the firm installs a financial services platform that pools the divisions cash into a master account managed by the headquarters in each period cash is received from customers and paid to the outside vendor after materials are delivered the headquarters determines how much cash to retain for inventory replenishment the objective is to determine an optimal joint inventory replenishment and cash retention policy for the entire supply chain we prove that the optimal policy has a surprisingly simple structure both divisions implement a base stock policy for inventory replenishment the headquarters monitors the corporate working capital and implements a two threshold policy for cash retention this result is obtained by exte

the short run residential demand for electricity the model of short run residential demand for electricity combines price schedule information obtained from the federal energy regulatory commission with household specific data from the 1972 73 consumer expenditure survey to determine the household s level of electricity consumption and relate it to the household s demographic profile and appliance stock the overall short run price elasticity estimate of 0 550 supports existing findings that short run residential electricity demand is price inelastic however the variation in elasticities across end use categories suggests that the overall response is made up of a complex set of responses that vary substantially and significantly across appliances this implies that it may be more efficient to tailor conservation policies to the stock configuration of the population 17 references 6 tables

modified echelon r q policies with guaranteed performance bounds for stochastic serial inventory systems we consider the classic continuous review nstage serial inventory system with a homogeneous poisson demand arrival process at the most downstream stage stage 1 any shipment to each stage regardless of its size incurs a positive fixed setup cost and takes a positive constant lead time the optimal policy for this system under the long run average cost criterion is unknown finding a good worst case performance guarantee remains an open problem we tackle this problem by introducing a class of modified echelon r q policies that do not require qi 1 qi to be a positive integer stage i 1 ships to stage i based on its observation of the echelon inventory position at stage i if it is at or below ri and stage i 1 has positive on hand inventory then a shipment is sent to stage i to raise its echelon inventory position to ri qias close as possible we construct a heuristic policy within this class of policies which has the following features first it has provably primitive dependent performance bounds in a two stage system the performance of the heuristic policy is guaranteed to be within 1 k1 k2 times the optimal cost where k1 is the downstream fixed cost and k2 is the upstream fixed cost we also provide an alternative performance bound which depends on efficiently computable optimal r q solutions to n single stage systems but tends to be tighter second the heuristic is simple it is efficiently computable and it performs well numerically it is even likely to outperform the optimal integer ratio echelon r q policies when k1 is dominated by k2 third the heuristic is asymptotically optimal when we take some dominant relationships between the setup or holding cost primitives at an upstream stage and its immediate downstream stage to the extreme for example when h2 h1 0 where h1 is the downstream holding cost parameter and h2 is the upstream holding cost parameter

specification of production functions for analyzing technical change and factor inputs in agricultural development abstract this paper focuses on some vital issues involed in specifying the number of variables to be included in agriculture s production function and on the functional form that the agricultural production function should assume in the context of a computable general equilibrium model when land and intermediate inputs seeds and fertilizers as well as capital and labor are included modeling the agricultural sector can best be done in a more disaggregated format than simple cobb douglas or ces specifications after examining the transcendental logarithmic production function the paper proposes to adopt nested ces specifications on the basis of empirically observed elasticities of substitution

perception of price when price information is costly evidence from residential electricity demand a bstract residential electricity consumption is an example of a good for which it is costly to determine marginal price since price changes with the quantity purchased according to multistep block rate schedules this paper investigates the effect of the price information problem on consumers price perceptions an alternative hypothesis of average price perception is tested against the marginal price postulate which assumes wellinformed consumers the model which includes a price perception variable allows the estimation of the price to which consumers actually respond the empirical results support the hypothesis that consumers respond to average price perceived from the electricity bill

emissions reductions or green booms general equilibrium effects of a renewable portfolio standard renewable portfolio standards rps are commonly promoted as a policy tool to reduce emissions associated with fossil generation while also stimulating development of local renewable resource endowments we develop a general equilibrium model of an rps policy that captures key features such as a fixed factor renewable endowment substitution across sectors of the economy and endogenous price responses we analytically decompose the effects of an rps into a a substitution effect b an output tax effect and c an output effect we show that an increase in the rps can either deliver large resource booms or large emissions savings but not both our framework can translate different renewable resource endowments and pre existing standards across states into economic and environmental impacts to inform current renewable energy and climate policies

residential demand for electricity under inverted block rates evidence from a controlled experiment block rate structures are used extensively in public utility pricing including residential electricity estimating price elasticities in this context is complicated by the resulting nonlinearity of the consumer s budget constraint this article estimates the demand for electricity under inverted block rates using data from a residential rate experiment the study provides an opportunity to obtain short run price elasticities in an experimental setting and to compare alternative estimators developed for nonlinear budget constraints elasticities of demand with respect to individual components of the block rate are developed using a modification of the structural maximum likelihood estimator

testing the induced innovation hypothesis an error correction model of south african agriculture abstract this paper applies cointegration techniques to a model of induced innovation based on the two stage constant elasticity of substitution ces production function this approach results in direct tests of the inducement hypothesis which are applied to data for south african commercial agriculture for the period 1947 1991 south african data is used because the policy changes have been substantial enough that the factor and price ratios have turning points rather than being monotonic the time series properties of the variables are checked cointegration is established and an error correction model ecm constructed allowing factor substitution to be separated from technological change finally the ecm formulation is subjected to causality tests which show that both the factor price ratios and r d and extension expenditures are granger prior to the factor saving biases of technological change thus each stage of the analysis corroborates the inducement hypothesis however straightforward price inducement is only part of the explanation of changes in factor ratios policy induced innovation in response to tax concessions and subsidised credit is also present

sensitivity of price elasticity of demand to aggregation unobserved heterogeneity price trends and price endogeneity evidence from u s data abstract price elasticity estimates of residential electricity demand vary widely across the energy economics and policy literature in this paper we seek to explain these findings using three nationwide datasets from the u s the american housing survey forms eia 861 and the residential energy consumption survey we examine the role of the sample period level of aggregation use of panel data use of instrumental variables and inclusion of housing characteristics and capital stock our findings suggest that price elasticities have remained relatively constant over time upon splitting our panel datasets into annual cross sections we do observe a negative relationship between price elasticities and the average price whether prices are rising or falling appears to have little effect on our estimates we also find that aggregating our data can result in both higher and lower price elasticity estimates depending on the dataset used and that controlling for unit level fixed effects with panel data generally results in more inelastic demand functions addressing the endogeneity of price and or measurement error in price with instrumental variables has a small but noticeable effect on the price elasticities finally controlling for housing characteristics and capital stock produces a lower price elasticity

impact of cap and trade policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions on u s households abstract proposals being considered by the u s congress would establish a cap and trade system to cut greenhouse gas ghg emissions approximately 2 annually through 2050 past cap and trade policies for other pollutants have distributed allowances free to the regulated companies leaving consumers uncompensated for passed through costs needed to achieve the required reductions social equity concerns were not a major issue because the total costs were relatively small however americans currently spend about 1 trillion year on energy directly and indirectly via the goods and services they consume if a cap on carbon emissions results in significant increases in energy prices social equity concerns could quickly dominate the debate over climate policy this paper confirms earlier studies that a traditional cap and trade policy is regressive and would cause the cost of reducing ghg emissions to fall disproportionately on low income households this paper explores ways to ameliorate those effects using highly disaggregated data available on consumer expenditures and energy input output analyses of the u s economy emissions are estimated based on direct and embodied energy use at the household level social equity concerns are taken into account and the consequences of cap and trade policies are assessed by quantifying the extent to which the expenditure patterns of the poor are significantly more energy intensive than those of the rich

ordering and pricing decisions in a two echelon supply chain with asymmetric demand information abstract this article examines coordinated decisions in a decentralized supply chain that consists of one supplier and one retailer and faces random demand of a single product with a short life cycle we consider a setting where the retailer has accurate demand information while the supplier does not such a problem with asymmetric demand information can be viewed as an extension of the newsboy problem in which both the supplier and the retailer possess the same demand information combining the mechanism of sharing demand information and that of quantity discount and return policy enables us to develop three coordinated models in contrast with the basic and uncoordinated model we are able to show the ordinal relationship among the retailer s optimal order quantities in these four models under a general form of random demand and compare the supply chain profits and conduct sensitivity analysis analytically in four models under uniform random demand we also provide numerical results under normal random demand that bear a resemblance to those under uniform random demand

the effect of leadtime uncertainty in a simple stochastic inventory model we study a basic continuous time single item inventory model where demands form a compound poisson process and leadtimes are stochastic the performance measure of interest is the long run average cost order costs are linear so a base stock policy is optimal we focus on the behavior of the optimal base stock level in response to stochastically larger or more variable leadtimes we also investigate the behavior of the corresponding long run average costs we show that a stochastically larger leadtime requires a higher optimal base stock level however a stochastically larger leadtime may not necessarily result in a higher optimal average cost because sometimes the variability effects may dominate on the other hand a more variable leadtime always leads to a higher optimal average cost the effect of leadtime variability on optimal policies depends on the inventory cost structure a more variable leadtime requires a higher optimal base stock level if and only if the unit penalty holding cost rate is high low similar results regarding the effect of leadtime demand are also discussed in this latter case the compound poisson assumption is not necessary

determining near optimal base stock levels in two stage general inventory systems abstract this paper proposes an easily implementable scalable decomposition heuristic for determining near optimal base stocks in two level general inventory systems in this heuristic the general system is decomposed into assembly systems one for each end product for these assembly systems the base stock levels are calculated separately taking into account risk pooling effects for the common components our numerical analyses yield two main insights first the base stock levels determined by the heuristic are close to optimal second considerable improvements can be obtained compared to common sense heuristics

induced bias of technical change in agriculture the united states and japan 1880 1980 because of extreme differences in factor endowments and price ratios among factors between the united states and japan both countries have experienced sharply different patterns of factor use and productivity growth in agriculture for the past 100 years of modern economic growth in this study the method of testing the hicksian hypothesis of induced innovation was developed using the two level ces production function the model was applied to the historical data of u s and japanese agricultural development for 1880 1980 the results were consistent with the hypothesis that different patterns of technical change in the two countries were induced by differences in the levels and the movements in relative factor prices

the long run performance of increasing block pricing in taiwan s residential electricity sector abstract this article examines the performance regarding efficiency and equity of increasing block pricing ibp in taiwan s residential electricity sector by using long term nationwide household data 1999 2014 actual variations in ibp rate structure are explored empirical results show that cross subsidization under ibp have resulted in inefficient over consumption by the poor and inefficient under consumption by the rich in addition the financial burden increased with decreases of household s income levels and a relatively high percentage of subsidies mistakenly went to non poor households the upward price adjustments and broadened first block in recent years have increased the household s financial burden and the rates of wrongly excluding the poor and wrongly including the rich to enjoy the subsidy being unable to take family size into consideration and send correct price signals to all users are two serious problems for ibp which may hinder the achievement of equity and efficiency in electricity use

expected value of distribution information for the newsvendor problem this paper extends previous work on the distribution free newsvendor problem where only partial information about the demand distribution is available more specifically the analysis assumes that the demand distribution f belongs to a class of probability distribution functions pdf f with mean and standard deviation while previous work has examined the expected value of distribution information evdi for a particular order quantity and a particular pdf f this paper aims at computing the maximum evdi over all f f for any order quantity in addition an optimization procedure is provided to calculate the order quantity that minimizes the maximum evdi

induced innovation in u s agriculture time series direct econometric and nonparametric tests the hypothesis of induced innovation is tested for u s agriculture using a high quality state level panel data set and three disparate testing techniques time series direct econometric and nonparametric we find little support for the hypothesis that conclusion is robust across testing techniques however as with all empirical tests of this hypothesis conducted to date ours focus only on the demand side of the hypothesis the hypothesis could have been rejected simply because the marginal cost of developing and implementing input saving technologies for the relatively expensive inputs is greater than for the relatively cheap inputs copyright 2009 oxford university press

an analysis of the source and nature of technical change the case of u s agriculture this paper proposes a methodology to investigate the process of technical change with a focus on the dynamic effects of r d investments on productivity and on the induced innovation hypothesis for both inputs and outputs the approach builds on a nonparametric representation of the underlying technology an application to u s agriculture is presented by distinguishing between private and public r d investments the analysis provides useful insights into the source and the dynamic nature of technical progress