new parties and policy outcomes evidence from colombian local governments abstract in many democracies increasing political competition has changed the traditional party system and brought new parties into the political arena this study examines whether the presence of politicians from new parties affects the size of government measured by public spending and tax revenue the study focuses on colombian municipalities where new parties have been numerous and successful in recent years regression discontinuity estimates show that public spending and tax revenues are significantly higher in municipalities governed by a mayor from a new party using information about local politics and the features of the new parties i argue that this result is not associated with new party ideology but instead relates to new parties having lower probability of reelection which raises the incentives to increase short term rent seeking

stochastic modelling of renewable energy sources from operators point of view a survey abstract high penetration of renewable energy sources especially weather dependent sources has increased the power systems uncertainties for any analysis in power systems such as planning and operation it is essential to confront the stochastic nature of these sources in order to get much more precise results since operators need proper strategies and methods to decline negative effects of the stochastic behaviour of renewable power generators such as total operation cost growth this paper provides a review of different state of the art approaches from the operator s viewpoint for handling the stochastic behaviour of renewable sources hence in this paper three different strategies are categorized for stochastic analysis of these sources the first strategy is mathematical modelling including stochastic dependency and independency multi dimensional dependence forecast and scenarios afterwards demand side management which is one of the other approaches for dealing with these uncertainties is investigated and different demand response programs and some methods to model them are presented finally the effect of different electricity market schemes and relevant optimization methods to mitigate the variations of renewable energy sources are discussed the study demonstrates that an operator should choose one or a combination of these three approaches based on its requirements

demand response with locational dynamic pricing to support the integration of renewables abstract electricity production from centralised and decentralised renewable energy resources in europe is gaining significance resulting in operational challenges in the electricity system although these challenges add to the locational and time dependency of the underlying cost of operating the system this variability in time and location is not reflected in residential tariff schemes consequently residential users are not incentivised to react to varying system conditions and to help the integration of renewable energy resources therefore this paper provides a theoretical framework for designing a locational dynamic pricing scheme this can be used to assess existing tariff structures for consumption and injection and can serve as a theoretical background for developing new tariff schemes starting from the underlying costs this paper shows that the potential for locational dynamic pricing depends on the locational and time dependency of its cost drivers when converting costs into tariffs the tariff design should be determined this includes the advance notice of sending tariffs to users and the length of price blocks and price patterns this tariff design should find a balance between tariff principles related to costs practicality and social acceptability on the one hand and the resulting demand response incentive on the other

how do budget deficits and economic growth affect reelection prospects evidence from a large panel of countries conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected but this has not been tested in a large cross section of countries we test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960 2003 we find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group of countries developed and less developed new and old democracies countries with different government or electoral systems and countries with different levels of democracy in developed countries and in old democracies election year deficits actually reduce the probability that a leader is reelected with similar although smaller negative electoral effects of deficits in the earlier years of an incumbent s term in office higher growth rates of real gdp per capita raise the probability of reelection only in the less developed countries and in new democracies but voters are affected by growth over the leader s term in office rather than in the election year itself and apparently only by growth not attributed to global growth low inflation is rewarded by voters only in the developed countries the effects we find are not only statistically significant but also quite substantial quantitatively we also suggest how the absence of a positive electoral effect of deficits can be consistent with the political deficit cycle found in new democracies

risk neutral and risk averse approaches to multistage renewable investment planning under uncertainty abstract strategies for investing in renewable energy projects present high risks associated with generation and price volatility and dynamics existing approaches for determining optimal strategies are based on real options theory that often simplify the uncertainty process or on stochastic programming approaches that simplify the dynamic aspects in this paper we bridge the gap between these approaches by developing a multistage stochastic programming approach that includes real options such as postponing hedging with fixed forward contracts and combination with other sources the proposed model is solved by a procedure based on the stochastic dual dynamic programming sddp method the framework is extended to the risk averse setting a specific case study in investment in hydro and wind projects in the brazilian market is used to illustrate that the investment strategies generated by the proposed approach are efficient

political representation and public contracting evidence from municipal legislatures abstract this study examines how partisan representation in multiparty legislatures affects direct expenditures contract allocation design and selection of politically connected firms as suppliers in public procurement for identification i exploit quasi random variation in partisan electoral outcomes near the effective representation thresholds in czech proportional municipal elections my regression discontinuity estimates suggest that partisan representation matters for public procurement for instance if local level political parties barely enter legislatures at the expense of the national parties municipalities decrease their direct procurement spending and allocate fewer contracts to the corporate donors of the national parties fewer contracts are awarded especially in pre election years and in auctions restricting competition among procurement suppliers the results are not associated with higher government fragmentation or selection of more competent candidates but rather with reduced political power of the national parties

the effect of fiscal performance on local government election results in israel 1989 1998 abstract we discuss the circumstances under which voters in local elections will reward fiscal responsibility and suggest that such circumstances evolved in israel in the mid 1990s we present empirical evidence that indeed fiscal performance of mayors substantially affected their reelection probability in the 1998 campaign but not in the 1989 and 1993 campaigns changes in the political environment enforcement of audit and financial reporting requirements tougher imposition of hard budget constraints and the development of local media are proposed as explanations the hypotheses that the fiscal variables reflect the income level at the locality or the mayor s success in extracting resources from the central government are tested and rejected

elections coalitions and legislative outcomes predictions of electoral behavior in a multiparty setting should be a function of the voters beliefs about how parties will perform following an election similarly party behavior in a legislature should be a function of electoral promises and rewards we develop a multistage game theoretic model of three party competition under proportional representation the final policy outcome of the game is generated by a noncooperative bargaining game between the parties in the elected legislature this game is essentially defined by the vote shares each party receives in the general election and the parties electoral policy positions at the electoral stage parties and voters are strategic in that they take account of the legislative implications of any electoral outcome we solve for equilibrium electoral positions by the parties and final policy outcomes

bringing wind energy to market wind energy is a rapidly growing source of renewable energy generation however the current extra market approach to its assimilation into the electric grid will not scale at deep penetration levels in this paper we investigate how an independent wind power producer might optimally offer its variable power into a competitive electricity market for energy starting with a stochastic model for wind power production and a model for a perfectly competitive two settlement market we derive explicit formulae for optimal contract offerings and the corresponding optimal expected profit as wind is an inherently variable source of energy we explore the sensitivity of optimal expected profit to uncertainty in the underlying wind process we also examine the role of forecast information and recourse markets in this setting we quantify the role of reserves in increasing reliability of offered contracts and obtain analytical expressions for marginal profits resulting from investments in improved forecasting and local auxiliary generation the formulae make explicit the relationship between price signals and the value of such firming strategies

benefits and challenges of electrical demand response a critical review advances in it control and forecasting capabilities have made demand response a viable and potentially attractive option to increase power system flexibility this paper presents a critical review of the literature in the field of demand response providing an overview of the benefits and challenges of demand response these benefits include the ability to balance fluctuations in renewable generation and consequently facilitate higher penetrations of renewable resources on the power system an increase in economic efficiency through the implementation of real time pricing and a reduction in generation capacity requirements nevertheless demand response is not without its challenges the key challenges for demand response centre around establishing reliable control strategies and market frameworks so that the demand response resource can be used optimally one of the greatest challenges for demand response is the lack of experience and the consequent need to employ extensive assumptions when modelling and evaluating this resource this paper concludes with an examination of these assumptions which range from assuming a fixed linear price demand relationship for price responsive demand to modelling the highly diverse distributed and uncertain demand response resource as a single centralised negative generator adopting fixed characteristics and constraints

do political parties matter evidence from u s cities are cities as politically polarized as states and countries no is the answer from our regression discontinuity design analysis which shows that whether the mayor is a democrat or a republican does not affect the size of city government the allocation of local public spending or crime rates however there is a substantial incumbent effect for mayors we investigate three mechanisms that could account for the striking lack of partisan impact at the local level and find the most support for tiebout competition among localities within metropolitan areas

legislative bargaining under weighted voting organizations often distribute resources through weighted voting we analyze this setting using a non cooperative bargaining game based on the baron ferejohn 1989 model unlike analyses derived from cooperative game theory we find that each voter s expected payoff is proportional to her voting weight an exception occurs when many high weight voters exist as low weight voters may expect disproportionately high payoffs due to proposal power the model also predicts that ex post the coalition formateur the party chosen to form a coalition will receive a disproportionately high payoff using data from coalition governments from 1946 to 2001 we find strong evidence ofsuch formateur effects

the value of intra day markets in power systems with high wind power penetration in this paper the value of intra day markets in managing wind power uncertainty in competitive electricity markets is analyzed a competitive electricity market model consisting of a day ahead market and a number of intra day markets is considered real time operation adjustment is also taken into account stochastic programming is used to model decision making under wind power uncertainty numerical simulations based on two test systems are presented

arbitraging intraday wholesale energy market prices with aggregations of thermostatic loads we investigate the potential for aggregations of residential thermostatically controlled loads tcls such as air conditioners to arbitrage intraday wholesale electricity market prices via non disruptive load control we present two arbitrage approaches 1 a benchmark that gives us an optimal policy but requires local computation or real time communication and 2 an alternative based on a thermal energy storage model which relies on less computation communication infrastructure but is suboptimal we find that the alternative approach achieves around 60 80 of the optimal wholesale energy cost savings we use this approach to compute practical upper bounds for savings via arbitrage with air conditioners in california s intraday energy market we investigate six sites over four years and find that the savings range from 2 37 per tcl per year and depend upon outdoor temperature statistics and price volatility

walrasian market clearing for demand response exchange this paper presents the design and evaluation of an effective market clearing scheme for trading demand response dr in a deregulated power system the proposed scheme is called demand response exchange drx in which dr is treated as a public good to be exchanged between two groups of participating agents namely dr buyers and dr sellers while buyers require dr and are willing to pay for it sellers have the capacity to curtail customer loads to supply dr on request the drx market clearing scheme uses walrasian auctions where agents update their dr quantity bids in response to prices adjusted by the market operator this auction is repeated iteratively until market equilibrium is obtained at the point where the market outcome is proven to be pareto optimal the proposed scheme is tested on a small power system and its effectiveness substantiated

management practices relational contracts and the decline of general motors abstract general motors was once regarded as the best managed and most successful firm in the world however between 1980 and 2009 gm s us market share fell from 46 to 20 percent and in 2009 the firm went bankrupt we argue that the conventional explanation for this decline namely high legacy labor and healthcare costs is seriously incomplete and that gm s share collapsed for many of the same reasons that many highly successful american firms of the 1960s were forced from the market including a failure to understand the nature of the competition they faced and an inability to respond effectively once they did we focus particularly on the problems gm encountered in developing the relational contracts essential to modern design and manufacturing and we discuss a number of possible causes for these difficulties we suggest that gm s experience may have important implications for our understanding of the role of management in the modern knowledge based firm and for the potential revival of manufacturi

construction corrupts empirical evidence from a panel of 42 countries the construction sector whether privately or publicly financed is characterized by potentially large rents and government intervention making it vulnerable to corruption consistent with this both case study and survey evidence has been provided highlighting the problem of malfeasance in this sector in this article we test the proposition that a bigger construction sector is likely to be inimical to clean government based on a panel of 42 countries over the period 1995 2011 we control for a range of potentially confounding variables and the expectation that corrupt public officials may favor the development of this sector because it increases the volume of rents available to them our empirical evidence shows that a larger construction sector will tend to increase perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain

do voters affect or elect policies evidence from the u s house there are two fundamentally different views of the role of elections in policy formation in one view voters can affect candidates policy choices competition for votes induces politicians to move toward the center in this view elections have the effect of bringing about some degree of policy compromise in the alternative view voters merely elect policies politicians cannot make credible promises to moderate their policies and elections are merely a means to decide which one of two opposing policy views will be implemented we assess which of these contrasting perspectives is more empirically relevant for the u s house focusing on elections decided by a narrow margin allows us to generate quasi experimental estimates of the impact of a randomized change in electoral strength on subsequent representatives roll call voting records we find that voters merely elect policies the degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator s voting behavior for example a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties nominees to the left politicians inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition induced convergence in policy

local favoritism in at large proportional representation systems abstract pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system we estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown using data from norwegian regional governments we still find a hometown bias we document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the regional governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments citizens also tend to vote more often for parties whose gubernatorial candidate is from their own hometown consistent with expectations of particularistic benefits a possible explanation is that regional council members are often recruited from local politics and remain loyal to their roots we find no evidence that regional council experience affects politicians future career prospects at the local level

demand response in smart electricity grids equipped with renewable energy sources a review abstract dealing with renewable energy resources rers requires sophisticated planning and operation scheduling along with state of art technologies among many possible ways for handling rers demand response dr is investigated in the current review because of every other year modifications in dr definition and classification announced by federal energy regulatory commission ferc the latest dr definition and classification are scrutinized in the present work moreover a complete benefit and cost assessment of dr is added in the paper measurement and evolution methods along with the effects of dr in electricity prices are discussed next comes dr literature review of the recent papers majorly published after 2008 eventually successful dr implementations around the world are analyzed

multi stage robust unit commitment considering wind and demand response uncertainties with the increasing penetration of wind power into the power grid maintaining system reliability has been a challenging issue for isos rtos due to the intermittent nature of wind power in addition to the traditional reserves provided by thermal hydro and gas generators demand response dr programs have gained much attention recently as another reserve resource to mitigate wind power output uncertainty however the price elastic demand curve is not exactly known in advance which provides another dimension of uncertainty to accommodate the combined uncertainties from wind power and dr we allow the wind power output to vary within a given interval with the price elastic demand curve also varying in this paper we develop a robust optimization approach to derive an optimal unit commitment decision for the reliability unit commitment runs by isos rtos with the objective of maximizing total social welfare under the joint worst case wind power output and demand response scenario the problem is formulated as a multi stage robust mixed integer programming problem an exact solution approach leveraging benders decomposition is developed to obtain the optimal robust unit commitment schedule for the problem additional variables are introduced to parameterize the conservatism of our model and avoid over protection finally we test the performance of the proposed approach using a case study based on the ieee 118 bus system the results verify that our proposed approach can accommodate both wind power and demand response uncertainties and demand response can help accommodate wind power output uncertainty by lowering the unit load cost

on the regional labour market determinants of female university enrolment in europe casarico a profeta p and pronzato c d on the regional labour market determinants of female university enrolment in europe regional studies this paper empirically investigates how young women s decisions of investing in post secondary education are affected by labour market outcomes of older women living in the same region eu silc data on educational decisions of women who completed secondary schooling are used and indicators of the regional labour market are constructed exploiting regional and time variability it is found that the share of working women with young children of women with managerial positions and the self employed positively affect the probability to enrol significant effects of these variables for men are not found

large scale integration of deferrable demand and renewable energy sources we present a stochastic unit commitment model for assessing the impacts of the large scale integration of renewable energy sources and deferrable demand in power systems in terms of reserve requirements we analyze three demand response paradigms for assessing the benefits of demand flexibility the centralized co optimization of generation and demand by the system operator demand bids and the coupling of renewable resources with deferrable loads we motivate coupling as an alternative for overcoming the drawbacks of the two alternative demand response options and we present a dynamic programming algorithm for coordinating deferrable demand with renewable supply we present simulation results for a model of the western electricity coordinating council

iso s optimal strategies for scheduling the hourly demand response in day ahead markets this paper presents a hierarchical demand response dr bidding framework in the day ahead energy markets which integrates customer dr preferences and characteristics in the iso s market clearing process in the proposed framework load aggregators submit aggregated dr offers to the iso which would centrally optimize final decisions on aggregators dr contributions in wholesale markets the hourly load reduction strategies include load shifting and curtailment and the use of onsite generation and energy storage systems the iso applies mixed integer linear programming milp to the solution of the proposed dr model in the day ahead market clearing problem the proposed model is implemented using a 6 bus system and the ieee rts and several studies are conducted to demonstrate the merits of the proposed dr model

a robust optimization approach to energy and reserve dispatch in electricity markets abstract to a large extent electricity markets worldwide still rely on deterministic procedures for clearing energy and reserve auctions however increasing shares of the production mix consist of renewable sources whose nature is stochastic and non dispatchable as their output is uncertain and cannot be controlled by the operators of the production units stochastic programming models allow the joint determination of the day ahead energy and reserve dispatch accounting for the uncertainty in the output from these sources however the size of these models gets quickly out of hand as a large number of scenarios are needed to properly represent the uncertainty in this work we take an alternative approach and cast the problem as an adaptive robust optimization problem the resulting day ahead energy and reserve schedules yield the minimum system cost accounting for the cost of the redispatch decisions at the balancing real time stage in the worst case realization of the stochastic production within a specified uncertainty set we propose a novel reformulation of the problem that allows considering general polyhedral uncertainty sets in a case study we show that in comparison to a risk averse stochastic programming model the robust optimization approach progressively trades off optimality in expectation with improved performance in terms of risk these differences however gradually taper off as the level of risk aversion increases for the stochastic programming approach computational studies show that the robust optimization model scales well with the size of the power system which is promising in view of real world applications of this approach

evaluating the impacts of real time pricing on the cost and value of wind generation one of the costs associated with integrating wind generation into a power system is the cost of redispatching the system in real time due to day ahead wind resource forecast errors one possible way of reducing these redispatch costs is to introduce demand response in the form of real time pricing rtp which could allow electricity demand to respond to actual real time wind resource availability using price signals a day ahead unit commitment model with day ahead wind forecasts and a real time dispatch model with actual wind resource availability is used to estimate system operations in a high wind penetration scenario system operations are compared to a perfect foresight benchmark in which actual wind resource availability is known day ahead the results show that wind integration costs with fixed demands can be high both due to real time redispatch costs and lost load it is demonstrated that introducing rtp can reduce redispatch costs and eliminate loss of load events finally social surplus with wind generation and rtp is compared to a system with neither and the results demonstrate that introducing wind and rtp into a market can result in superadditive surplus gains

auctions versus negotiations which is the more profitable way to sell a company an auction with no reserve price or an optimally structured negotiation with one less bidder we show under reasonable assumptions that the auction is always preferable when bidders signals are independent for affiliated signals the result holds under certain restrictions on the seller s choice of negotiating mechanism the result suggests that the value of negotiating skill is small relative to the value of additional competition the paper also shows how the analogies between monopoly theory and auction theory can help derive new results in auction theory jel d44 g34 there are close analogies between standard price theory and the theory of auctions in an absolute english auction in which the price rises continuously until only one bidder remains and the seller is required to accept the final bid the sale price equals the lowest competitive price at which supply equals demand in the theory of optimal auctions the seller is treated as a monopolist who can choose any

shades of brown and green party effects in proportional election systems small parties play an important role in proportional election systems for exam ple the emergence and electoral success of environmental and anti immigration parties have constituted one of the central changes in the political landscape in europe over the last three decades but we do not know if this has actually had any implications for policy since no methods exist for credibly estimating the eect of legislative represen tation in proportional election systems because party representation is not randomly assigned both observable and unobservable factors in uence policy outcomes as well as party representation using a part of the legislative seat allocation that is as good as random i estimate the causal eect of party representation on immigration policy environmental policy and tax policy i use data swedish municipalities where key poli cies for each policy area are under direct jurisdiction of the municipal councils the results show that party representation has a large eect on the rst two policies but not on the tax policy

political alignment and intergovernmental transfers in parliamentary systems evidence from germany combining local council election data with fiscal data on grant allocations in a german state we study partisan favoritism in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers within a quasi experimental framework we hypothesize that state governments pursue two distinct goals when allocating grants to local governments 1 helping aligned local parties win the next election and 2 buying off unaligned municipalities that may obstruct the state government s policy agenda we argue furthermore that the relative importance of these two goals depends on local political conditions in line with this argument we show empirically that the effect of political alignment on grant receipts varies depending on the degree of local support for the state government while previous contributions find that aligned local governments always tend to receive larger transfers our results imply that the political economy of intergovernmental transfers is more intricate