regulation profitability and diffusion of photovoltaic grid connected systems a comparative analysis of germany and spain abstract although both germany and spain were pioneers in the support and adoption of photovoltaics pv through feed in tariffs fits germany is the world s leading country in terms of installed pv capacity per capita and remains on a path of pv growth while the spanish pv market is virtually paralysed we analyse the divergent performance in both countries by reviewing the evolution of fits and by analysing the profitability of different types of installations for the period 2004 2014 while in germany the policies profitability and diffusion of pv were relatively stable over time in spain erratic policy changes and the distortionary effect of the solar orchard ownership structure caused a diffusion bubble june 2007 september 2008 and a subsequent profitability bubble 2009 2011 these bubbles led to the collapse of the support system in 2012 revealing the difficulty inherent in designing innovation and diffusion policies in the context of high uncertainty and rapid technological change

delta hedging strategies comparison abstract in this paper we implement dynamic delta hedging strategies based on several option pricing models we analyze different subordinated option pricing models and we examine delta hedging costs using ex post daily prices of s p 500 furthermore we compare the performance of each subordinated model with the black scholes model

pricing frills and customer ratings this paper explores whether and how a firm should adapt its strategy in view of consumer use of prior customer ratings specifically we consider optimal pricing and whether the firm should offer an unexpected frill to early customers to enhance their product experiences we show that if price history is unobserved by consumers a forward looking firm should always modify its strategy from single period optimal one but it may be optimal to do so by lowering price by lowering price and offering frills or by raising price and offering frills depending on the market growth rate specifically the last strategy becomes optimal when market growth rate is high enough the results are similar when the price history is observed by consumers except that no deviation from single period profit maximization choices is optimal when market growth is low enough we also analyze whether the firm should prefer that the price information be stated in or left out of consumer reviews in addition in considering the effects of consumer heterogeneity we conclude that the optimal firm s effort to affect ratings is higher when the idiosyncratic part of consumer uncertainty is larger

tax adjusted discount rates this paper develops models for discount rates that are adjusted for the interest tax shields of an infra marginal firm in a general tax equilibrium where there is cross sectional variation in corporate tax rates under the assumption that the firm optimally maintains a predetermined debt ratio a tax adjusted riskless discount rate model is given for valuing certainty equivalents and a tax and risk adjusted discount rate model is given for valuing expected cash flows for the latter case the asset equity debt and tax shield betas are derived and a weighted average cost of capital interpretation is given the tax adjusted capm apt security market lines for expected returns in stock and bond markets both have the same slope but different intercepts a formula is also provided for the present value of the interest tax shield when the firm optimally maintains a predetermined debt level the analysis here also differs from the existing literature in the following respects it allows for cross sectional variation in corporate tax rates and personal tax rates it shows that the market values of risky and riskless interest tax shields differ only to the extent that tax laws provide for nonlinear taxation of gains and losses it also shows that interest tax shields should be discounted at a tax adjusted discount rate that reflects the fact that they accrue to equity investors rather than debt investors continuous time simplifications of the formulas in this paper and the previous literature are also given

martingales and arbitrage in securities markets with transaction costs abstract we derive the implications from the absence of arbitrage in dynamic securities markets with bid ask spreads the absence of arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of at least an equivalent probability measure that transforms some process between the bid and the ask price processes of traded securities into a martingale the martingale measures can be interpreted as possible linear pricing rules and can be used to determine the investment opportunities available in such an economy the minimum cost at which a contingent claim can be obtained through securities trading is its largest expected value with respect to the martingale measures journal of economic literature classification numbers g11 g12 g13 d52 and d90

dynamic investment and financing under personal taxation this paper examines the effects of capital gains taxation on firms investment and financing decisions we develop a real options model in which the timing of investment the decision to default and the firm s capital structure are endogenously and jointly determined our analysis demonstrates that the asymmetric taxation of capital gains and losses fosters investment by eroding the option value of waiting it also shows that firms controlled by taxable investors employ more equity financing the higher the firm s stock price and the worse the firm s historical performance using a large sample of u s industrial firms that are owned by taxable investors between 1970 and 2008 we present new evidence on corporate investment and financing policies which is supportive of the model s predictions

dynamic pricing in the presence of social learning and strategic consumers when a product of uncertain quality is first introduced consumers may choose to strategically delay their purchasing decisions in anticipation of the product reviews of their peers this paper investigates how the presence of social learning affects the strategic interaction between a dynamic pricing monopolist and a forward looking consumer population within a simple two period model our analysis yields three main insights first we find that the presence of social learning has significant structural implications for optimal pricing policies in the absence of social learning decreasing price plans are always preferred by the firm by contrast in the presence of social learning we find that i if the firm commits to a price path ex ante preannounced pricing an increasing price plan is typically announced whereas ii if the firm adjusts price dynamically responsive pricing prices are initially low and may either rise or decline over time second we establish that under both preannounced an

general equilibrium with endogenously incomplete financial markets abstract the present paper studies a class of general equilibrium economies with imperfectly competitive financial intermediaries and price taking consumers intermediaries optimally choose the securities they issue and the bid ask spread they charge financial intermediation is costly and hence markets are endogenously incomplete an appropriate equilibrium concept is developed and existence is proved competitive equilibria for this class of economies display full indexation of securities payoffs and monetary neutrality even if intermediaries are restricted to issue nominal securities and financial markets turn out to be incomplete this is in sharp contrast with the indeterminacy and non neutrality results established in the literature for incomplete markets economies with exogenously given nominal securities journal of economic literaturclassification numbers d52 g20

the capital gain lock in effect and perfect substitutes abstract this paper analyses the effect of investors accrued capital gains on optimal portfolio composition and equilibrium returns under the assumption that investors are able to re balance with perfect substitute securities no dominance arguments are used to show that pricing differences because of accrued capital gains do not arise among securities which are perfect substitutes these arguments are insufficient however to prevent pricing differences because of accrued capital gains among securities which are not perfect substitutes trading rules are developed which outline the conditions necessary for the realisation of accrued capital gains and the deferral of capital losses these trading rules also provide guidance on which securities investors should sell given their tax basis when re balancing their portfolios

risk returns and values in the presence of differential taxation abstract we show that there exist separate security market lines smls for debt and equity securities in an equilibrium with differential taxation of debt and equity we characterize the conditions under which these smls have the same price of risk with different intercepts and the conditions under which the tax effect of leverage is linear in debt value as in the adjusted present value method we explore the implications of our results for cost of capital calculations how to calculate the cost of capital for debt and equity and how to unlever betas correctly accounting for differential taxation

optimal security design how should new securities be designed traditional theories have little to say on this the literature on capital structure and general equilibrium theories with incomplete markets take the securities firms issue as exogenous this paper explicitly incorporates the transaction costs of issuing securities and develops a model where the instruments that are traded are chosen optimally and the economy s market structure is endogenous among other things it is shown that the firm s income stream should be split so that in every state all payoffs are allocated to the security held by the group that values them most this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

taxable and tax deferred investing a tax arbitrage approach we analyze an intertemporal portfolio problem with both taxable and tax deferred retirement accounts using a tax arbitrage argument we identify conditions under which the optimal location decision where to place an asset is separable from the allocation decision how much to allocate to each asset investors place highly taxed assets in the tax deferred account to maximize the tax benefit and adjust their taxable portfolios to achieve the optimal risk exposure we show that the two account problem can be reduced to a taxable account only problem the results are robust to capital gains tax deferrals consumption and contribution decisions and stochastic tax rates

welfare economics of review information implications for the online selling platform owner abstract the review system is a core component of the online market as it provides user generated content to support consumer purchase decisions we investigate the welfare based effects of review information features i e the amounts of quality information and match information and the accuracy of quality information on the sellers and consumers and discuss their implications for the online selling platform owner we find that the amount of review information positively influences social welfare but quality information and match information play different roles in the process of welfare enhancement quality information reduces the sellers profits but significantly increases consumer welfare while match information benefits the sellers more than it hurts the consumers the inaccuracy of quality information negatively affects the welfare enhancement function of review information considering the sellers quality information manipulation we derive the conditions of inaccuracy information controlling and find that a higher manipulation cost coefficient eases the prisoner s dilemma for the sellers and increases consumer welfare we discuss the implications and also note some counterintuitive insights for review system management

using tucker s theorem of the alternative to simplify review and expand discrete arbitrage theory abstract for valuing derivatives and other assets in securities and commodities markets arbitrage pricing theory has been a major approach for decades this paper derives fundamental arbitrage pricing results in finite dimensions in a simple unified framework using tucker s theorem of the alternative frictionless results that is perfect market results plus imperfect market results such as those with dividends periodic interest payments transaction costs different interest rates for lending and borrowing shorting costs and constrained short selling are presented while the results are mostly known and appear in various places our contribution is to present them in a coherent and comprehensive fashion with very simple proofs the analysis yields a simple procedure to prove new results and some are presented for cases with imperfect market frictions

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

the option value of returns theory and empirical evidence when a firm allows the return of previously purchased merchandise it provides customers with an option that has measurable value whereas the option to return merchandise leads to an increase in gross revenue it also creates additional costs selecting an optimal return policy requires balancing both demand and cost implications in this paper we develop a structural model of a consumer s decision to purchase and return an item that nests extant choice models as a special case the model enables a firm to both measure the value to consumers of the return option and balance the costs and benefits of different return policies we apply the model to a sample of data provided by a mail order catalog company we find considerable variation in the value of returns across customers and categories when the option value is large there are large increases in demand for example the option to return women s footwear is worth an average of more than 15 per purchase to customers and increases average purchase rates by more than 50 we illustrate how the model can be used by a retailer to optimize his return policies across categories and customers

extending pricing rules with general risk functions the paper addresses pricing issues in imperfect and or incomplete markets if the risk level of the hedging strategy is measured by a general risk function convex optimization theory is used in order to extend pricing rules for a wide family of risk functions including deviation measures expectation bounded risk measures and coherent measures of risk necessary and sufficient optimality conditions are provided in a very general setting for imperfect markets the extended pricing rules reduce the bid ask spread the findings are particularized so as to study with more detail some concrete examples including the conditional value at risk and some properties of the standard deviation applications dealing with the valuation of volatility linked derivatives are discussed

arbitrage and martingales with taxation this paper extends the martingale analysis of no arbitrage pricing to worlds with taxation the absence of arbitrage is shown to imply the existence of different shadow prices for income streams that are subject to differing tax treatments for example no arbitrage implies the existence of different martingale measures for capita l gains and for ordinary income when they are differentially taxed andfor item s such as depreciation expenses that influence only after tax cash flows the analysis is applied to several topics in finance including the debt equity decision tax options and the taxation of dividends and pensions copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

less than 2 c an economic environmental evaluation of the paris agreement abstract the literature dedicated to the analysis of the different climate agreements has usually focused on the effectiveness of the aims for emissions in the light of the advance in climate change this article quantifies the variation in emissions that the intended nationally determined contributions indcs will entail and their financial allocation and policies country by country and regionally the objective is evaluating the paris agreement feasibility regarding the indcs and its economic and environmental constraints the criteria through which the 161 indcs are analysed are as follows i socio economic impact of the transition ii focus on energy management iii substitution of non renewable sources iv the role of technology v equality of the transition vi compliance with emission reductions the results obtained show that the paris agreement excessively relies on external financial support 41 4 moreover its unilateralist approach the socio economic and biophysical constraints could be the underlying cause of the ineffectiveness of the 2 c objective this way each country would emit an average of 37 8 more than in the years 2005 2015 when this is weighted the figure would be a 19 3 increase due mainly to the increases in china and india these figures would lead the temperatures up to 3 4 c

term structure multiplicity and clientele in markets with transactions costs and taxes the authors investigate term structure with realistic transactions costs and taxes its properties are derived from a certain no arbitrage condition via duality theory in convex programming transactions costs imply an infinite multiplicity of term structures a simple example with realistic transactions costs shows that this multiplicity can induce a valuation range of over 277 basis points transactions costs also allow equilibrium without short sale restrictions the authors find the minimum transactions costs that prevent arbitrage in addition the exact conditions for weak clientele in which investors will not buy some bonds and may not sell any that they already hold are established most research on the pricing of riskless bonds hereafter bonds uses a noarbitrage model equilibrium pricing is based on the assumption that there is no buy and hold investment strategy that provides riskless arbitrage profit however most of these studies ignore transactions costs 2 the clientele model hereafter ss developed by stephen schaefer 19 adopts a no arbitrage assumption na equivalent to the existence of a valuation operator this operator is a vector of discount factors known as the term structure ss shows that na implies the existence of a tax bracket specific term structure that ensures that the bonds after tax present values do not exceed their prices ss also shows that in markets with spanning positive term structures consistent with na will not exist for some brackets see his example in subsection iva below investors in such brackets would have arbitrage opportunities to resolve this na violation and make equilibrium feasible ss assumes a prohibition on shorting this implies clientele effects in the usual sense i e investors in some brackets hold some but not all bonds there may be however a bracket in which investors hold positive amounts of all bonds this would be a

a portfolio of nobel laureates markowitz miller and sharpe three pioneers of quantitative finance have now been justly honored harry markowitz merton miller and william sharpe received the nobel prize in economic science in 1990 from today s perspective it is hard to understand what finance was like before portfolio theory here i attempt to provide a very brief history of the quantitative revolution in finance drawing upon p bernstein s capital ideas 1992 and accounts of the three nobel laureates

financial risk reduction in photovoltaic projects through ocean atmospheric oscillations modeling abstract the impact of climate change on society has increased the interest to deploy renewable energies and to understand climate climate variability is partly predictable and is a fundamental factor in explaining financial risk in renewable energy projects current methodologies used for risk assessment do not appropriately account for climate predictability we found limited literature on risk reduction on pv projects through the modeling of predictable components of solar radiation and ocean atmospheric oscillations allowing us to present original proposals to fill these voids a new profit model for pv plants was developed capturing this predictable climate information the proposed methodology is potentially applicable to hydro wind and other renewable resources and allows leaving aside predictable climate components from the project s risk calculation the model was tailored for the risk assessment of pv investments and is applied over 10 geographical areas across chile the largest pv market in latin america where climate is strongly affected by 3 ocean atmospheric oscillations el nino southern oscillation southern annular mode and indian ocean dipole using the model in these regions allows reducing the monthly financial the risk to reduce by 60 81 compared to traditional methodology for a 100 mw pv project located in those areas this means reducing annualized risk from 4 93 to 7 88 mm usd year traditional model to 1 11 2 38 mm usd year proposed model modeling of ocean atmospheric oscillations allows achieving the greatest risk reduction between the cities of copiapo and coquimbo north central regions decreasing their influence towards the extreme latitudes their risk reduction will depend on the quality of the model and may have strong implications for both investors and financial institutions it could also impact competition in the energy sector due to possible asymmetries of information to facilitate extending the use of the model elsewhere the incorporation of subsidies is discussed

institutional challenges caused by the integration of renewable energy sources in the european electricity sector the integration of large amounts of variable renewable energy poses fundamental challenges to the operation and governance of the energy system in this article we address the main institutional challenges that are caused by the integration of variable renewable energy sources like solar and wind energy in the european power system we first address how the variable and unpredictable nature of wind and solar energy increases the demand for flexible resources and we discuss potential sources of flexibility next we elaborate on how the need for more flexibility challenges the prevailing market design of todays liberalized power systems furthermore we discuss the key areas where there is a need for a more integrated approach to research and policy making the need for a more integrated approach is motivated by exposing a number of critical interdependencies between technical and institutional sub systems

existence of equivalent martingale measures in finite dimensional securities markets abstract given the information structure and the number of securities we characterize the set of all price dividend systems for which there exist a dynamic portfolio with strictly positive value through time and a strictly positive probability q such that expressing prices and dividends in units of such portfolio every gain process is a q martingale we also weaken our characterization by showing that the existence of a trading strategy with strictly positive terminal payoffs only is generically sufficient for the existence of an equivalent martingale measure finally an example shows that our results robustely extend the current literature on the topic journal of economic literature classification numbers d52 g10 g12

arbitrage with fixed costs and interest rate models in this paper we study securities market models with fixed costs we characterize the absence of arbitrage opportunities and we provide fair pricing rules we then apply these results to extend some popular interest rate and option pricing models which present arbitrage opportunities in the absence of fixed costs in particular we prove that the quite striking result obtained by dybvig ingersoll and ross 1996 which asserts that under the assumption of absence of arbitrage long zero coupon rates can never fall is no longer true in models with fixed costs even arbitrarily small ones for instance models where the long term rate follows a diffusion process are arbitrage free in the presence of fixed costs including arbitrarily small ones we also rationalize models with partially absorbing or reflecting barriers on the price processes in particular we propose a version of the cox ingersoll and ross 1985 model which as in longstaff 1992 produces yield curves with realistic humps but does not assume an absorbing barrier for the short term rate this is made possible by the presence of even arbitrarily small fixed costs

technological learning in energy environment economy modelling a survey abstract this paper aims at providing an overview and a critical analysis of the technological learning concept and its incorporation in energy environment economy models a special emphasis is put on surveying and discussing through the so called learning curve both studies estimating learning rates in the energy field and studies incorporating endogenous technological learning in bottom up and top down models the survey of learning rate estimations gives special attention to interpreting and explaining the sources of variability of estimated rates which is shown to be mainly inherent in r d expenditures the problem of omitted variable bias the endogeneity relationship and the role of spillovers large scale models survey show that despite some methodological and computational complexity related to the non linearity and the non convexity associated with the learning curve incorporation results of the numerous modelling experiments give several new insights with regard to the analysis of the prospects of specific technological options and their cost decrease potential bottom up models and with regard to the analysis of strategic considerations especially inherent in the innovation and energy diffusion process in particular the energy sector s endogenous responses to environment policy instruments top down models

photovoltaics and wind status in the european union after the paris agreement abstract over the last decade the utilisation of renewable energy in the electricity sector especially from solar and wind sources is growing at a much faster pace than the rest of the economy in europe and world wide the significant cost reduction of solar pv and wind power during this time and their zero fuel cost volatility have increased their attractiveness between 2005 and 2015 the installed solar pv power in europe as increased 50 fold to reach 95 gw and wind power has increased three and a half times to 142 gw at the end of 2015 the fact that the paris agreement went into force on 4 november 2016 will be another accelerating factor for the use of electricity from renewable energy sources this paper shows the deployment of photovoltaics and wind power in the european union and the policy drivers behind this development so far the european union is the largest economy with a legally binding target to reach 27 of its energy consumption from renewable energy sources by 2030 the data used for this publication are collected on a regular basis from statistical offices stock exchange filings press releases public and commercial studies the results are cross checked with personal communications and on site visits as well as meetings with government officials and policymakers in order to provide a timely coverage of the dynamic increase of solar and wind power this use of grey data is necessary in 2016 slightly more than 12 of the union s electricity demand was covered by solar and wind but in order to reach the 2030 target a tripling of this contribution is needed

strategic waiting for consumer generated quality information dynamic pricing of new experience goods in this paper we study the impact of consumer generated quality information e g consumer reviews on a firm s dynamic pricing strategy in the presence of strategic consumers such information is useful not only to the consumers that have not yet purchased the product but also to the firm the informativeness of the consumer generated quality information depends however on the volume of consumers who share their opinions and thus depends on the initial sales volume hence via its initial price the firm not only influences its revenue but also controls the quality information flow over time the firm may either enhance or dampen the quality information flow via increasing or decreasing initial sales the corresponding pricing strategy to steer the quality information flow is not always intuitive compared to the case without consumer generated quality information the firm may reduce the initial sales and lower the initial price interestingly the firm may get strictly worse off due to the consu

expected gain loss pricing and hedging of contingent claims in incomplete markets by linear programming abstract we analyze the problem of pricing and hedging contingent claims in the multi period discrete time discrete state case using the concept of a gain loss ratio opportunity pricing results somewhat different from but reminiscent of the arbitrage pricing theorems of mathematical finance are obtained our analysis provides tighter price bounds on the contingent claim in an incomplete market which may converge to a unique price for a specific value of a gain loss preference parameter imposed by the market while the hedging policies may be different for different sides of the same trade the results are obtained in the simpler framework of stochastic linear programming in a multi period setting and have the appealing feature of being very simple to derive and to articulate even for the non specialist they also extend to markets with transaction costs

municipal debt and marginal tax rates is there a tax premium in asset prices we study the marginal tax rate incorporated into short term municipal rates using municipal swap market data using an affine model we identify the marginal tax rate and the credit liquidity spread in 1 week tax exempt rates as well as their associated risk premia the marginal tax rate averages 38 0 and is related to stock bond and commodity returns the tax risk premium is negative consistent with the strong countercyclical nature of after tax fixed income cash flows these results demonstrate that tax risk is a systematic asset pricing factor and help resolve the muni bond puzzle

incomplete preferences and equilibrium in contingent markets this paper shows that betting or speculative trading between agents with incomplete preferences is likely to occur if agents have access to convex choice sets this contrasts sharply with endowment economy models where preference incompleteness often hinders betting speculative trading or mutually beneficial insurance arrangements our results imply that decision makers with identical tastes and identical feasible sets will potentially gain from speculative trade for generic status quo allocations we also develop a framework for endogenizing the status quo allocations of decision makers that are treated exogenously in the existing literature finally we provide a tractable differential representation of status quo allocations equilibria and conditions where speculative trade may or may not emerge

a note on capital asset pricing and heterogeneous taxes abstract in this paper we present a stylized model where we show how asset prices i e required expected rates of returns may be characterized in a world with heterogeneous asset taxes within a simple capm like framework we derive an after tax beta equal to the pre tax beta multiplied by a non obvious asset specific tax adjustment we further show in what sense the security market line here can be replaced by a security market fan well known capm relations are obtained as special cases and policy implications are analyzed

when good news about your rival is good for you the effect of third party information on the division of channel profits the internet has led to a large number of third party sources that offer high quality information about firms s products at little or no cost to consumers as a result many of these sources have grown in popularity extending well beyond the usual reach of traditional third parties such asconsumer reports andkelly s blue book for example the online version ofedmunds offers at no cost to consumers information about new products existing products long term tests and buyers guides all relating to the automotive industry avweb com delivers weekly aviation news and new product reviews to its readers and a large number of websites follow developments on computer platforms such as the apple macintosh in this paper we analyze how the provision of third party information affects the division of profits in a multiproduct distribution channel to illustrate consider the competition between microsoft and apple in the operating systems os market and their channel relationship to compusa a retailer that sells both macs and windows based pcs consider two pieces of thirdparty information first suppose that cnet an internet technology site reviews the newest upgrade of the macos and writes that the new user interface is even easier to use than previously second suppose that an article in the technology section of thewall street journal notes that changes in apple s networking support now enable macs to be better integrated into pc networks these two pieces of information are similar in the sense that they both express good news about the macos and thus they both can be expected to benefit apple by increasing consumer demand for macs one might also expect that in both cases compusa will capture some of the gains that come from the increased demand for macs and that microsoft will lose because the good news about the macos will induce some consumers to choose macs over windows based pcs however we will show that this intuition is incorrect the two reviews can have surprisingly different implications for the profits of microsoft and compusa the reason is that the two reviews differ on one crucial dimension the group of customers for whom they are primarily relevant the cnet review talks about improvements in the customer interface precisely what apple score consumers care about thewall street journal review talks about compatibility with prevailing pc standards important to consumers who care relatively more about compatibility and who are thus more likely to prefer windows apple snoncore consumers we show that good news about the macos that is more relevant to apple s core consumers the cnet review benefits microsoft but harms compusa while good news about the macos that is more relevant to apple s noncore consumers thewall street journal review has the opposite effect it harms microsoft but benefits compusa stated more generally our main result is that when third party information affects consumers product valuations the type of information that induces the change is critical to understanding which firms gain and which firms lose in particular depending on the type of third party information we find that 1 a retailer can be harmed by good news about a product that it carries 2 a manufacturer can gain from good news about a rival s product and 3 good news about a product category need not benefit all the manufacturers in that category there are three novel features of the analysis first we derive the equilibrium division of profit among firms when a retailer sells the products of competing manufacturers and we have done so while placing few restrictions on the feasible set of contracts second we show how this equilibrium division of profit lends itself to a simple graphical interpretation that depicts which firms gain and which firms lose from third party information third we provide a taxonomy of information types and identify the key features of each type that cause profit incentives to vary in particular we conceptualize information as having three components namely 1 the products to which the information pertains 2 whether the information is positive or negative and 3 the consumers to whom the information is relevant we show that all three information components play a role in determining the change in each firm s profit our framework can also be used to analyze a variety of other settings of interest for example it can be used to analyze profit incentives when the retailer has bargaining power when there is downstream competition and when there are non information based changes in consumers valuations in addition our framework may be used both to analyze the effects on profits of persuasive advertising and to predict advertising content

tax arbitrage and the existence of equilibrium prices for financial assets in models where both investors and securities are subject to differential taxation there may be no set of prices that rule out infinite gains to trade or tax arbitrage this paper characterizes the joint restrictions on financial asset returns and investors tax schedules that preclude tax arbitrage in the absence of short sale constraints the authors show that if there exists any configuration of marginal tax rates on investors tax schedules that rule out infinite gains to trade then no tax arbitrage prices will exist they also show that the existence of no tax arbitrage prices ensures the existence of equilibrium prices the effects of differential taxation on the equilibrium prices of financial assets have attracted much attention from financial economists in recent years otherwise identical securities that contribute to taxable income to different degrees will in general be valued differently by taxable investors as a result tax considerations have been useful in helping explain the effect of dividend yield on stock returns the effect of coupon levels and term to maturity on bond prices 2 the timing of investors portfolio transactions 3 and the observed capital structures of firms 4 while a rich set of observed behaviors can be better understood by reference to differential taxation there are well known difflculties in dealing with taxes in a general equilibrium setting to clear markets relative prices must reflect the marginal rates of substitution of all agents simultaneously when tax rates differ across investors however this condition can be impossible to achieve to illustrate consider a world of perfect certainty with two assets a tax exempt municipal bond and a taxable government bond to equate marginal rates of substitution the rate of return on the government bond rg must equal that on the municipal rm grossed up by one minus the investor s marginal tax rate ti that is rg rm 1 ti if there are investors in more than one tax bracket this condition will obviously be impossible to satisfy for all of them simultaneously both authors from graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university we wish to thank scott richard steven spear and an anonymous referee for helping us sort through the issues considered here seminar participants at columbia wharton the johnson symposium on asset pricing at the university of wisconsin madison and the 1986 western finance association meeting also provided valuable comments we are also grateful for the financial support provided by the center for public policy research carnegie mellon university all errors are our own responsibility

analysis and forecasting of demand during promotions for perishable items this study examines promotions for perishable products in a retail environment we analyze the impact of relative price discounts on product sales during a promotion and shed light on how to build models to forecast promotional demand for perishable products preliminary analyses based on regression models and a large dataset from a retailer do not reveal conclusive evidence for the presence of threshold and or saturation levels for price discounts for perishable products a potential explanation comes from the observation that although products like desserts on average allow 1 5 weeks time to consume their sales during promotions on average are equal to 14 weeks of regular sales this suggests that the success of a promotion is not so much determined by the restriction to stockpile due to the short time to consume but by the emergence of substitution effects consumers switching between different products of the same category we develop and test different models to forecast the demand during a promotion including a moving average forecast and several regression models within the class of regression models we find that modeling threshold and saturation effects leads to worse forecasting performance than modeling price reductions linearly or quadratically the largest improvements in forecast accuracy are gained by distinguishing between routine and non routine product categories routine categories with routine demand processes and a large number of observations perform best when applying a regression based on direct observations of the product category whilst non routine categories benefit from a regression which also uses observations from other product categories

the dynamic properties of financial market equilibrium with trading fees we incorporate trading fees in a long horizon dynamic general equilibrium model in which traders optimally and endogenously decide when and how much to trade a full characterization of equilibrium is provided which allows us to study the dynamics of equilibrium trades equilibrium asset prices and rates of return in the presence of trading fees we exhibit the effect of trading fees on deviations from the consumption capm and analyze the pricing of endogenous liquidity risk we compare for the same shocks the impulse responses of this model to those of a model in which trading is infrequent because of trader inattention the current version reflects material that was previously in two papers w21421 and w19155

renewable electricity in europe abstract renewable energy use is growing at a much faster pace than the rest of the economy in europe and world wide this and the dramatic oil price increases in 2005 have lead to a remarkable re evaluation of the renewable energy sector by politics and financing institutions despite the fact that there are still discrepancies between the european union and the usa how to deal with climate change renewable energies will play an important role for the implementation of the kyoto protocol and the world wide introduction of tradable green certificates apart from the electricity sector renewable energy sources for the generation of heat and the use of environmental friendly bio fuels for the transport sector will become more and more important in the future

empty promises and arbitrage analysis of absence of arbitrage normally ignores payoffs in states to which the agent assigns zero probability we extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to the case of no empty promises in which the agent cannot promise arbitrarily large payments in some states there is a superpositive pricing rule that can assign positive price to claims in zero probability states important to the market as well as assigning positive prices to claims in the states of positive probability with continuous information arrival no empty promises can be enforced by shutting down the agent s subsequent investments once wealth hits zero dogmatic disagreements create arbitrage opportunities in competitive markets that are sufficiently complete there may be someone in the economy who is certain correctly or not on objective grounds that gold prices will go up and someone else who believes there is a positive probability that gold prices will go down the first person will have an arbitrage opportunity if at the money put options on gold have a positive price while the second person will have an arbitrage opportunity if at the money put options on gold have a zero or negative price similarly if some people are sure their favorite sport teams or horses will win but others are not so sure any odds posted by a competitive bookmaker will imply arbitrage for one group or the other 1 in practice however dogmatic differences in beliefs do not imply actual arbitrage that can be used to generate arbitrarily large profits because people have limited resources and cannot make empty promises of payments that exceed their own ability to pay in states the market cares about even if those are states they personally believe to be impossible the purpose of this article is to extend the study of the absence of arbitrage to situations in which no empty promises are permitted

efficient trading strategies in the presence of market frictions we provide a price characterization of efficient contingent claims that is chosen by at least a rational agent in multiperiod economies with market frictions frictions include market incompleteness transaction costs short selling and borrowing costs we characterize the inefficiency cost of a trading strategy its required investment minus the largest amount necessary to obtain the same utility level and we propose a measure of portfolio performance we show that arbitrage bounds cannot be tightened based on efficiency without restricting preferences or endowments we observe common investment strategies becoming inefficient with market frictions and others rationalized by them in this article we characterize efficient contingent claims to future consumption consumption bundles in multiperiod economies with uncertainty taking a wide range of market frictions into account 1 such as dynamic market

put call parity and market frictions abstract we extend the fundamental theorem of finance and the pricing rule representation theorem to the case in which market frictions are taken into account but the put call parity is still assumed to hold in turn we obtain a representation of the pricing rule as a discounted expectation with respect to a nonadditive risk neutral probability

risk adjusted financial costs of photovoltaics recent research shows significant differences in the levelised photovoltaics pv electricity cost calculations the present paper points out that no unique or absolute cost figure can be justified the correct solution is to use a range of cost figures that is determined in a dynamic power portfolio interaction within the financial scheme support mechanism and industry cost reduction the paper draws attention to the increasing role of financial investors in the pv segment of the renewable energy market and the importance they attribute to the risks of all options in the power generation portfolio based on these trends a former version of a financing model is adapted to project the energy mix changes in the eu electricity market due to investors behaviour with different risk tolerance aversion the dynamic process of translating these risks into the return expectation in the financial appraisal and investment decision making is also introduced by doing so the paper sets up a potential electricity market trend with the associated risk perception and classification the necessary risk mitigation tasks for all stakeholders in the pv market are summarised which aims to avoid the burden of excessive risk premiums in this market segment

economic analysis of pv systems on buildings in sicilian farms abstract the photovoltaic sector in italy in recent years has experienced a rapid growth also in the primary sector thanks to substantial incentives guaranteed by energy policies simultaneous reduction of investment costs and tax benefits in order to better understand the growth of the pv industry in italian primary sector the aim of this paper has been to evaluate the economic convenience of four pv systems on farm buildings located in four different farms of the north western coast of sicily and realized during the second and fourth italian feed in schemes for each feed in scheme it has been considered a pv plant that sells the electricity to the grid and another in which the energy generated is consumed entirely by the farm the results show a clear convenience to the realization of investments both with the current market conditions and at the variation of the feed in tariff or the investment costs

financial market structures revealed by pricing rules efficient complete markets are prevalent abstract it is well known that when an arbitrage free financial market is incomplete or has tradable financial assets with frictions there must be multiple risk neutral probability measures the main motivation for the present study is to elucidate what type of market structure usually emerges from pricing rules first we obtain that finitely generated pricing rules characterized by polytopes of probabilities capture the class of all finite arbitrage free financial markets that are potentially incomplete or subject to frictions affecting tradable assets next we provide a novel characterization of efficient securities and introduce related notions of market completeness that underlies pricing rules our main result shows that the class of efficient complete markets with bid ask spreads is the prevalent case revealed by finitely generated pricing rules

on the strategic behavior of large investors a mean variance portfolio approach abstract one key assumption of markowitz s model is that all traders act as price takers in this paper we extend this mean variance approach in a setting where large investors can move prices instead of having an individual optimization problem we find the investors nash equilibrium and redefine the efficient frontier in this new framework we also develop a simplified application of the general model with two assets and two investors to shed light on the potential strategic behavior of large and atomic investors our findings validate the claim that large investors enhance their portfolio performance in relation to perfect market conditions besides we show under which conditions atomic investors can benefit in relation to the standard setting even if they have not total influence on their eventual performance the two investors two assets setting allows us to quantify performance and do sensitivity analysis regarding investors market power risk tolerance and price elasticity of demand finally for a group of well known etfs we empirically show how price variations change depending on the volume traded we also explain how to set up and use our model with real market data

effective securities in arbitrage free markets with bid ask spreads at liquidation a linear programming characterization abstract we consider a securities market with bid ask spreads at any period including liquidation although the minimum cost super replication problem is non linear we introduce an auxiliary problem that allows us to characterize no arbitrage via linear programming techniques we introduce the notion of effective new security and show that effectiveness restricts the no arbitrage bid and ask prices of a new security to the interval defined by the minimum cost problem we discuss in detail the cases in which the boundaries of this interval can be reached without violating no arbitrage

valuation of risky assets in arbitrage free economies with frictions this paper derives a framework for arbitrage models in markets with frictions it generalizes the existence of a valuation operator to such markets as in perfect markets the valuation operator is a linear operator and its existence is implied by the no arbitrage condition in imperfect markets the valuation operator is individual specific and depends on the agent s position in the market the methodology employed in the paper is duality in convex programming

on the relation between option and stock prices a convex optimization approach the idea of investigating the relation of option and stock prices based just on the no arbitrage assumption but without assuming any model for the underlying price dynamics has a long history in the financial economics literature we introduce convex and in particular semidefinite optimization methods duality and complexity theory to shed new light on this relation for the single stock problem given moments of the prices of the underlying assets we show that we can find best possible bounds on option prices with general payoff functions efficiently either algorithmically solving a semidefinite optimization problem or in closed form conversely given observable option prices we provide best possible bounds on moments of the prices of the underlying assets as well as on the prices of other options on the same asset by solving linear optimization problems for options that are affected by multiple stocks either directly the payoff of the option depends on multiple stocks or indirectly we have information on correlations between stock prices we find nonoptimal bounds using convex optimization methods however we show that it is np hard to find best possible bounds in multiple dimensions we extend our results to incorporate transactions costs

term structure of interest rates and implied market frictions the min max approach it is often assumed that financial markets are frictionless bond markets are illiquid and bond prices are observed with errors the magnitude of these errors leads to violation of no arbitrage conditions and consequently prevents researchers from obtaining an estimate of the term structure ts of interest rates researchers have had to settle for a second best estimate of the ts e g obtained via regression at a cost of an economically unrealistic assumption of symmetric market frictions the true shape of market frictions however is not known and generally is a highly complex issue a no arbitrage based methodology that avoids making detrimental assumptions is developed here it facilitates empirical investigation of the shape of the market frictions and of the ts that are simultaneously imputed from market data assuming efficient market frictions that minimize the maximum net arbitrage the empirical investigation performed in the canadian and u s markets shows that in both markets the frictions are asymmetric and the estimates of the ts produced via regression and our methodology significantly differ