innovation in the energy sector lessons learnt from r d expenditures and patents in selected iea countries abstract long time series of the iea and international patent offices offer a huge potential for scientific investigations of the energy innovation process thus this paper deals with a broad literature review on innovation drivers and barriers and an analysis of the knowledge induced by public research and development expenditures r d and patents in the energy sector the cumulative knowledge stock induced by public r d expenditures in 14 investigated iea countries is 102 3 bn eur in 2013 nuclear energy has the largest share of 43 9 bn eur followed by energy efficiency accounting for 14 9 bn eur fossil fuels with 13 5 bn eur and renewable energy with 12 1 bn eur a regression analysis indicates a linear relation between the gdp and the cumulative knowledge with each billion eur of gdp leading to an additional knowledge of 3 1 mil eur however linearity is not given for single energy technologies further the results show that appropriate public r d funding for research and development associated with a subsequent promotion of the market diffusion of a niche technology may lead to a breakthrough of the respective technology

the credibility of policy announcements greek evidence this paper by using error correction ec methodology along with chow stability tests examines whether three cases of policy announcements in greece over the 1975 1995 period have been considered credible or not by the public focusing on the phillips curve trade off the empirical findings reveal that two out of three policy announcements are characterized as credible by private agents

assessment of the economic impacts of continuous energy intensity target constraint in china based on an analytical general equilibrium model abstract based on the framework of analytical general equilibrium model this study builds an energy intensity target eit constraint model and simulates the impacts of continuous eit constraint policy on the fossil fuel production ffp sector non fossil fuel production nffp sector household sector and price system in china the main findings of this paper are firstly the eit constraint can change the marginal products and the cross price elasticities of input factors secondly stricter eit constraint can transfer capital and labor inputs from the ffp sector to the nffp sector and lead to a contractionary effect in the ffp sector shown as declining inputs and output the contractionary effect will decline gradually or even fade away if the eit constraint is gradually reduced thirdly if the total capital and labor inputs in the whole economy continue to grow at certain rates along with the weakening of the eit constraint the reduction in energy input and the growth of capital and labor inputs in the nffp sector will slow down however the growth rates of output and intermediate input will increase continuously fourthly the eit constraint has negative impacts on the nffp sector price system and household consumption but these impacts are affordable to the whole economy if the eit constraint is loosened under a certain level it may not curb the growth of fossil fuel consumption anymore therefore other supporting policies for energy conservation must be in place

does decentralization contribute to efficiency evidence from oecd countries abstractthis article provides evidence on the relationship between fiscal decentralization and technical efficiency we begin the first stage of this study with a data envelopment analysis to obtain technical efficiency estimates for a sample of 23 oecd countries over the period 1992 2009 in a second stage we explore the effects of fiscal decentralization and other control variables on technical efficiency the results including all the control variables reveal a statistically significant negative relationship between fiscal decentralization of public expenditure and technical efficiency

the fundamental determinants of interest rate differentials in the erm the paper analyses the sources of persistent interest rate differentials vis a vis germany that have existed in belgium denmark france ireland italy and the netherlands in a target zone system like the erm interest rate differentials mainly reflect devaluation expectations which are measured here by raw 1 month euromarket interest rate differentials drift adjusted 1 month differentials and differentials in long term government bond yields the role of a large set of fundamental macroeconomic variables that may have affected these devaluation expectations is investigated within a vector autoregressive var setting by means of granger causality tests impulse response functions and variance decompositions we find no evidence that fundamentals are more relevant to drift adjusted devaluation risk than for unadjusted interest rate differentials a significant impact of inflation budget deficits and unemployment becomes evident for almost all erm participants

ceo compensation and bank efficiency an application of conditional nonparametric frontiers the paper investigates in a dynamic context the effect of chief executive officer ceo bonus and salary payments on banks technical efficiency levels our methodological framework incorporates the latest developments on the probabilistic approach of efficiency measurement as introduced by b din et al 2012 we apply time dependent conditional efficiency estimates to analyse a sample of 37 us banks for the period from 2003 to 2012 the empirical evidence reveals a non linear relationship between ceo bonus and salary payments and banks efficiency levels more specifically it is reported that salary and bonus payments affect differently banks technological change and technological catch up levels finally the empirical evidence suggests that higher salary and bonus payments are not always aligned with higher technical efficiency levels

statistical inference for aggregates of farrell type efficiencies in this study we merge results of two recent directions in efficiency analysis research aggregation and bootstrap applied as an example to one of the most popular point estimators of individual efficiency the data envelopment analysis dea estimator a natural context of the methodology developed here is a study of efficiency of a particular economic system e g an industry as a whole or a comparison of efficiencies of distinct groups within such a system e g regulated vs non regulated firms or private vs public firms our methodology is justified by the neoclassical economic theory and is supported by carefully adapted statistical methods copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

testing mean reversion in target zone exchange rates the aim of the paper is to assess to what extent european monetary system ems target zone exchange rates have been characterized by mean reverting behaviour to this purpose a new class of mean reversion tests is introduced with respect to standard approaches the proposed tests which are based on the sample excursion of the exchange rate within the band have a better ability to detect target zone mean reverting dynamics the empirical analysis of the exchange rates among the main ems currencies shows that the degree of mean reversion is much higher than what has been reported in the literature both before and after the target zone widening of 1993 finally the proposed tests have a wider range of applications since they originate a new approach to unit root testing

threshold cointegration between inflation and us capacity utilization abstractan analogue to the phillips curve shows a positive relationship between inflation and capacity utilization some recent empirical work has shown that this relationship has broken down when using data after the mid 1980s we empirically investigate this issue using several threshold error correction models we find in the long run a 1 increase in the rate of inflation leads to approximately a 0 0046 increase in capacity utilization the asymmetric error correction structure shows that changes in capacity utilization show significant corrective measures only during booms while changes in inflation correct during both phases of the business cycle with the corrections being stronger during recessions we also find that in the short run changes in the inflation rate do granger cause capacity utilization while changes in capacity utilization do not granger cause inflation the granger causality from inflation to capacity utilization can be interpreted as supporting recent calls made in the popular

economic fundamentals and self fulfilling crises further evidence from mexico abstract this paper considers a model of debt stabilization under a fixed exchange rate in which a currency crisis can develop as the result of self fulfilling speculation following a bifurcation in the behavior of economic fundamentals based on this theoretical framework and by exploiting the test developed by jeanne 1997 this paper provides evidence that self fulfilling speculation was at work in the 1994 mexican crisis in terms of fundamentals we show that the critical variables in generating the mexican crisis were the fast rise in us denominated public debt tesebonos the appreciated real exchange rate and the small rises in unemployment and primary deficit

currency crises sunspots and markov switching regimes abstract this paper investigates the theoretical properties of a class of escape clause models of currency crises as well as their applicability to empirical work we show that under some conditions these models give rise to an arbitrarily large number of equilibria as well as cyclic or chaotic dynamics for the devaluation expectations we then propose an econometric technique based on the markov switching regimes framework by which these models can be brought to the data we illustrate this empirical approach by studying the experience of the french franc between 1987 and 1993 and find that the model performs significantly better when it allows the devaluation expectations to be influenced by sunspots

using option prices to estimate realignment probabilities in the european monetary system the case of sterling mark abstract this paper describes a procedure for estimating the market s perceived probability distribution of future exchange rates from the prices of risk reversals strangles and other currency options and uses the procedure to estimate the risk neutral ex ante probability of a realignment of the pound sterling the procedure for estimating the realignment probabilities relies on the jump diffusion model of exchange rate behavior and the resulting option pricing formula by fitting this model to market option price data i retrieve the unobserved parameters of the jump diffusion process i then use these parameter estimates to estimate the ex ante probability distribution of exchange rates and thus the realignment probabilities

the target zone model non linearity and mean reversion is the honeymoon really over we estimate a target zone model for three erm exchange rates for 1983 6 and 1987 91 by the method of simulated moments taking account of the continuous time specification by using daily data with the interruptions of holidays and weekends specification tests are unable to reject the model the estimates imply however an essentially linear relationship between the exchange rate and the fundamentals with a very limited honeymoon effect using monte carlo simulations calibrated on the estimates we find that standard tests for mean reversion of the exchange rate would largely reject the target zone model when in fact it held

determinants of the implied shadow exchange rates from a target zone abstract the paper provides a continuous time model of the dynamic behavior of exchange rates and interest rates when exchange rates are managed within a target zone with the possibility of realignments in the case of a realignment the exchange rate jumps to a shadow exchange rate the timing of realignments is modelled by a cox process with an intensity that depends on the location of the exchange rate in the target zone band as well as the distance to the shadow exchange rate we set up an approximate maximum likelihood estimation approach and provide parameter estimates for six erm target zones moreover in the empirical analysis we filter out the shadow exchange rates and investigate which fundamental macroeconomic factors are able to explain the short run and long run behavior of the filtered shadow exchange rates

aggregation of economic growth rates and of its sources abstract in this paper we consider the question of measuring aggregate economic growth and its sources we derive a theoretically justified solution for aggregating across firms industries countries etc growth rates and their sources within the framework of solow s 1957 growth accounting method the resulting aggregation scheme turns out to be quite intuitive and in fact the one that is sometimes used in practice but with theoretical justification missing and so the main value of our work is that our formal derivations show under what conditions this scheme has economic theory justification we also provide a small empirical illustration of our method on the real data set and show how different the conclusions can be depending on the aggregation scheme used

emission reduction and energy intensity enhancement the expected and unexpected consequences of china s coal consumption constraint policy abstract in order to improve air quality and end over reliance on coal china introduced the coal consumption constraint policy cccp in 2011 however after nearly a decade of implementation it is still unclear whether this policy legitimately has the effects of energy saving and emission reduction the present study aims to estimate the nationwide effects of cccp at city level which has not been fully studied in the past for this purpose a combined propensity score matching and difference in differences psm did model is adopted to investigate policy effect and its heterogeneity in terms of energy structure so2 emissions and energy intensity in addition the superposition effect and the marginal effect of energy saving and emission reduction policies for electricity industry esere are investigated for the first time the simulation results of psm did model reveal that the implementation of cccp heightens the share of electricity consumption in pilot cities by 4 898 furthermore cccp and esere have a negative synergistic effect on so2 emissions thanks to the further decline of emission intensity in the electricity industry however either cccp only or its combination with esere fails to reduce the energy intensity nationwide as anticipated

credibility and disinflation in the european monetary system analysis of interest differentials in the european monetary system has suggested a widespread lack of credibility of the exchange rate mechanism in the sense that in most countries the implicit expected rate of devaluation was significant and not far short of inflation differentials vis a vis the deutschmark we present and test a model in which prices reflect expectations of exchange rate behaviour the results provide mixed evidence that price setting in countries which participated in the erm was influenced by the exchange rate discipline

assessing the credibility of a target zone evidence from the ems this paper provides some new evidence on the credibility of the exchange rate mechanism erm of the european monetary system ems the study differs from previous research in the literature in three main respects first the main contribution is the use of several credibility indicators some of which have never been applied before to all of the currencies under study this allows one to strengthen the results obtained in this paper second a longer period than that of previous studies is analysed covering the complete ems history third a comparison has been made of the prediction qualities of the different indicators in order to explore their ability to capture the main erm events realignments changes in the fluctuations bands and speculative pressures fourth the indicators are applied to the experience of the new modified erm linking the currencies of non euro area member states to the euro showing the relevance of this approach in the near future with the enlargement of the european union

are currency crises self fulfilling abstract this paper studies the respective roles of the fundamentals and self fulfilling speculation in currency crises we first present a model of a fixed exchange rate system in which self fulfilling speculation can arise following a bifurcation in the fundamentals we then estimate the model in the case of the 1992 3 crisis of the french franc and find some evidence that self fulfilling speculation was at work

an interpretation of recent research on exchange rate target zones how do exchange rate bands work compared to completely fixed rates between realignments or more precisely what are the dynamics of exchange rates interest rates and central bank interventions within exchange rate bands does the difference between bands and completely fixed exchange rates matter and if so which of the two arrangements is best or more precisely what are the tradeoffs that determine the optimal bandwidth this article will present an interpretation of some selected recent theoretical and empirical research on exchange rate target zones with emphasis on main ideas and results and without technical detail

a note on estimating realignment probabilities a first passage time approach abstract this paper proposes a path dependent approach for estimating realignment probabilities of targeted exchange rates based on first passage time distributions instead of the commonly used path independent approach we consider that path dependency is an intrinsic characteristic of realignment risk because a realignment of an exchange rate can occur whenever a committed band by a central bank is breached a mean reverting lognormal process is considered in the first passage time approach based on market data of the british pound and mark during the erm crisis of 1992 the realignment probabilities of the pound estimated under the proposed approach show that path dependency is quantitatively significant compared with the path independent approach

electricity consumption and economic growth a time series experience for 17 african countries abstract while the availability of electricity by itself is not a panacea for the economic and social problems facing africa the supply of electricity is nevertheless believed to be a necessary requirement for africa s economic and social development this paper tests the long run and causal relationship between electricity consumption per capita and real gross domestic product gdp per capita for 17 african countries for the period 1971 2001 using a newly developed cointegration test proposed by pesaran et al 2001 and using a modified version of the granger causality test due to toda and yamamoto 1995 the advantage of using these two approaches is that they both avoid the pre testing bias associated with conventional unit root and cointegration tests the empirical evidence shows that there was a long run relationship between electricity consumption per capita and real gdp per capita for only 9 countries and granger causality for only 12 countries for 6 countries there was a positive uni directional causality running from real gdp per capita to electricity consumption per capita an opposite causality for 3 countries and bi directional causality for the remaining 3 countries the result should however be interpreted with care as electricity consumption accounts for less than 4 of total energy consumption in africa and only grid supplied electricity is taken into account

target zones and the distribution of exchange rates abstract we develop a parsimonious parameterization of exchange rate density function under target zones that enables us to estimate the approximate shapes of density curves from the exchange rate data we find that the distributions of exchange rates can take several different shapes which may correspond to possibly widely different monetary and exchange rate intervention policies including the marginal and intramarginal intervention policies discussed in previous theoretical models

technological change technological catch up and capital deepening relative contributions to growth and convergence we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to 1 technological change shifts in the world production frontier 2 technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and 3 capital accumulation movement along the frontier the world production frontier is constructed using deterministic methods requiring no specification of functional form for the technology nor any assumption about market structure or the absence of market imperfections we analyze the evolution of the cross country distribution of labor productivity in terms of the tripartite decomposition finding that technological change is decidedly nonneutral and that both growth and bipolar international divergence are driven primarily by capital deepening jel o30 o47 d24

erm realignment risk and its economic determinants as reflected in cross rate options this paper uses data on over the counter options between the mark and the pound lira french franc and peseta to investigate the credibility of exchange rate target zones within the erm we compare empirical implications for the relation between option prices and the spot s position within the band for three classes of target zone models those with full credibility those with exogenous realignment risk and those with endogenous realignment risk empirically implied volatility from these options attains a maximum near the edges of an exchange rate band rather than its centre even three to six months prior to realignment

multiple comparisons with the best with economic applications in this paper we discuss a statistical method called multiple comparisons with the best or mcb this paper is meant to introduce mcb to economists we discuss possible uses of mcb in economics the application that we treat in most detail is the construction of confidence intervals for inefficiency measures from stochastic frontier models with panel data we also consider an application to the analysis of labour market wage gaps copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

fiscal policy debt management and exchange rate credibility lessons from the recent italian experience abstract this paper explores some potential determinants of exchange rate credibility with reference to the italian experience of the 1990s the analysis relies on a nonlinear framework emphasizing shifts between credible and non credible states and assuming a significant degree of persistence in the above regimes almost all fiscal and debt management indicators display significant effects on devaluation expectations the main policy implications of the paper are that a restrictive fiscal stance a lengthening of average debt maturity and an increase in the share of foreign denominated debt are crucial to stabilize the lira exchange rate and to qualify italy in the former group of countries which will join emu

deregulation vertical unbundling and the performance of china s large coal fired power plants article i nfo in 2003 china s integrated electricity utility the state power corporation spc was unbundled and dism antled into five generation groups and two grid companies in an effort to increase competition and improve ef ficiency in this paper we study the impact of this deregulation reform on the operational efficiency for a balanced panel of 34 large power plants for the period 1997 2010 we find that on average these power plants have converged to the technological frontier over the sample period controlling for substantial heterogeneity in the technical profile we also find that the unbundling reform has boosted productivity of china s large thermal power plants however the presumably differential impacts of the reform on the previously spc managed power plants and the independent power producers in our sample are insignificant

anomalies foreign exchange most all behavior can be explained by assuming that agents have stable well defined preferences and make rational choices consistent with those preferences in markets that eventually clear an empirical result qualifies as an anomaly if it is difficult to rationalize or if implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the paradigm this column will present a series of such anomalies readers are invited to suggest topics for future columns by sending a note with some reference to or better yet copies of the relevant research comments on anomalies printed here are also welcome the address

the width of the band and exchange rate mean reversion some further erm based results one key prediction of the target zone model is that the exchange rate should be mean reverting within the band in this paper we investigate this prediction by examining the time series characteristics of seven currencies participating in the exchange rate mechanism erm of the european monetary system both immediately before and after the introduction of wide exchange rate bands in 1993 using standard univariate unit root tests we find some evidence of mean reversion and this is much more pronounced using variance ratio test statistics it turns out that such mean reversion is as strong for the wide band erm as for the narrow band erm

the credibility of hong kong s link from the perspective of modern financial theory hong kong s linked exchange rate system lers has been in operation since 1983 during which time many other fixed exchange rate systems have succumbed to shocks and or speculative attacks this paper investigates how market participants assessed changes made to the lers by using the tools of modern finance to extract information from financial asset prices about market expectations these changes have been characterized as making the system less discretionary over time we find that decreasing the discretionary element of the lers led to an increase in credibility of the arrangement

target zones and realignments recent contributions emphasize that the presence of exchange rate target zones has important effects on the within band behavior of exchange rates when agents are forward looking the authors find that the implications of available models are inconsistent with european exchange rate data and they suggest that the frequent realignments occurring in the period they consider may be responsible for this they construct a model in which the likelihood of a realignment in the near future increases as the exchange rate approaches the limits of its fluctuation band and show that its implications are broadly consistent with the evidence copyright 1992 by american economic association

reputation and credibility in the european monetary system ems credibility axel weber this article provides a quantitative assessment of the credibility of the european monetary system during the disinflation period of the 1980s the results contradict the widely held view that the ems has operated as a dm zone it is shown that after a brief early phase the ems has functioned as a bipolar system with a hard currency option supplied by the german bundesbank and a soft currency option offered by the banque de france whilst from the onset the netherlands have chosen the hard currency option at least in a first stage the remaining smaller economies belgium denmark and ireland adopted the soft currency alternative at a later stage of the ems however the soft currency block has disintegrated and some countries most noticeably ireland and to a lesser extent france have shifted towards the hard currency standard it is argued that this increased tightening of the ems provides a favourable starting condition for the transition to economic and monetary union

stochastic trends and jumps in ems exchange rates abstract in this paper we study the statistical properties of ems exchange rate returns our findings show that jumps time varying parameters and conditional leptokurtosis are pertinent features in the empirical distributions of ems exchange rate returns allowance for fat tails however tends to reduce the measured frequency of jumps in the distributions to more realistic proportions most successful in capturing the relevant features of ems exchange rate returns is a combined jump garch model with conditionally t distributed innovations jel f31

school quality and returns to education of u s immigrants using the u s labor market as a common point of reference this article investigates the influence of source country school quality on the returns to education of immigrants based on 1980 and 1990 census data we first estimate country of origin specific returns to education results reveal that immigrants from japan and northern europe receive high returns and immigrants from central america receive low returns next we examine the relationship between school quality measures and these returns holding per capita gdp and other factors constant immigrants from countries with lower pupil teacher ratios and greater expenditures per pupil earn higher returns to education

testing for efficiency catching up we used advances in data envelopment analysis dea techniques to examine efficiency scores and investigate the issue of convergence and divergence in a cross country analysis specifically we used bootstrapping techniques to examine a data set of 52 developed and developing countries we found that when using the standard dea model some of the results were not robust further we broke the sample into groups to examine club convergence we found that efficiency scores were significantly different between groups and that there was some evidence of convergence of efficiency scores within each group

credibility and changes in policy regime this paper addresses the issue of credibility from an econometric perspective it develops a rational expectations model of inflation in which the dynamics are driven by the level of government spending and by the effect of past inflation rates on the value of real taxes government expenditure is modeled as an exogenous autoregressive process subject to discrete changes in regime the regimes are defined by whether the level of spending is or is not consistent with the rate of inflation targeted by the government as part of a stabilization program in making their money demand decision the agents need to construct probability inferences regarding the state of the expenditure process credibility is quantified by the agents inferred probability that the joint observation of inflation the nominal interest rate and government spending is generated by the reformed expenditure regime in an application to israel results indicate that the failed stabilization program of november 1984 was less than fully c

stochastic devaluation risk and the empirical fit of target zone models in the model of this paper an exchange rate fluctuates between given boundaries for random lengths of time and jumps discretely when devaluation occur we provide explicit solutions for the stochastic processes followed by the exchange rate and by the expected rate of depreciation when the likelihood and the size of devaluations vary stochastically over time the model produces realistic patterns of covariation between exchange rates and interest rate differentials and provides interesting interpretations of available empirical evidence we also specify how to infer devaluation risk from target zone data

sterling s erm credibility abstract this paper examines the recent credibility of the currencies participating in the erm since 1987 focusing on sterling in 1992 it shows that there is little market evidence that sterling s credibility was in serious doubt until mid september 1992

exchange rates under ems target zones an econometric investigation this study tests krugman s model on exchange rate target zones using four old ems exchange rates those of the currencies of belgium france italy and the netherlands against the deutsche mark vast theoretical literature is available but there are very few empirical studies testing the main results of krugman s model namely the honeymoon effect smooth pasting and the overall s curved relationship between fundamental and exchange rate the present study supports the honeymoon effect but does not find any evidence in support of smooth pasting or of an s curved relationship between the exchange rate and fundamentals for the belgian franc french franc and italian lira against the deutsche mark the dutch guilder very closely follows movements in the german mark throughout the period 1981 90 end of month exchange rates and euro currency interest rates data are used

explaining forward exchange bias intraday intraday interest rates are zero consequently a foreign exchange dealer can short a vulnerable currency in the morning close this position in the afternoon and never face an interest cost this tactic might seem especially attractive in times of fixedrate crisis since it suggests an immunity to the central bank s interest rate defense in equilibrium however buyers of the vulnerable currency must be compensated on average with an intraday capital gain as long as no devaluation occurs that is currencies under attack should typically appreciate intraday using data on intraday exchange rate changes within the european monetary system we find this prediction is borne out this article examines implications of the fact that interest rates are zero intraday in particular we focus on the foreign exchange fx market and ask whether trading strategies might be affected the answer to this question is of greater import than might first appear for example in times of fixed rate crisis central banks typically employ an interest rate defense raising domestic rates to attract a capital inflow and punish short sellers but if dealers are immune to this defense at least on an intraday basis then perhaps the viability of fixed rate regimes is undermined goldstein et al 1993 provide an overview of how central banks defended their currencies during the 1992 currency crisis a simple example helps with intraday interest rates of zero a dealer can short a high interest rate currency in the morning close her position in the afternoon and never face an interest cost if there is any likelihood of an intraday devaluation this appears to be an attractive strategy other things equal since the dealer is immune to the interest cost of an overnight short position other things should not be equal in equilibrium however buyers of the vulnerable currency must be compensated on average with an intraday capital gain as long as no devaluation occurs that is devaluation risk is offset by systematic appreciation further the greater the probability and size of the devaluation the greater the implied appreciation thus the absence of a role

human capital and convergence a production frontier approach using nonparametric production frontier methods we decompose labor productivity growth into components attributable to technological change shifts in the world production frontier technological catch up movements toward or away from the frontier and physical and human capital accumulation movements along the frontier we find that 1 technological change is decidedly nonneutral 2 productivity growth is driven primarily by physical and human capital accumulation 3 the increased international dispersion of productivity is explained primarily by physical capital accumulation and 4 international polarization the shift from a unimodal to a bimodal distribution is brought about primarily by efficiency changes technological catch up

quantitative modelling of the eur chf exchange rate during the target zone regime of september 2011 to january 2015 krugman 1991 s target zone model for exchange rate dynamics has become the reference of a large part of this literature despite its simplicity and elegance empirical evidence has been lacking not least because it is difficult to capture the predicted non linear relationship between the observable exchange rate and the non observable fundamental value this is why we propose a different approach by inverting locally the relation between exchange rate and fundamental value we derive analytical expressions for the conditional volatility and the probability density as a function of the exchange rate this allows us to examine krugman s prediction directly from historical data and furthermore enables us to test the smooth pasting condition which is intimately related to the no arbitrage condition concretely we study the performance of the euro swiss franc exchange rate in the extraordinary period from september 6 2011 to january 15 2015 when the swiss national bank enforced a minimum exchange rate of 1 20 swiss francs per euro we show that the data are well explained by the theory and conclude that krugman s target zone model holds after all but apparently only under extreme and sustained pressure that pushes continuously the exchange rate very close to the boundary of the target zone

how important is human capital for development evidence from immigrant earnings this paper offers new evidence on the sources of cross country income differences it exploits the idea that observing immigrant workers from different countries in the same labor market provides an opportunity to estimate their human capital endowments these estimates suggest that human and physical capital account for only a fraction of cross country income differences for countries below 40 of the us output per worker less than half of the output gap relative to the us is attributed to human and physical capital

mean reversion in target zones a re examination of some erm exchange rates the theoretical literature on exchange rate behaviour in target zones predicts that the exchange rate would be mean reverting this article empirically investigates this theoretical prediction in the case of the german mark bilateral exchange rates using a recently developed unit root test this article provides evidence that is generally negative to the idea of mean reversion it shows that all bilateral exchange rates under investigation appear to be unit root processes with the exception of the dutch guilder german mark rate

relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach enflo k and hjertstrand p relative sources of european regional productivity convergence a bootstrap frontier approach regional studies this paper addresses the issue of western european regional productivity growth and convergence by means of data envelopment analysis dea decomposing labour productivity into efficiency change technical change and capital accumulation the decomposition shows that most regions have fallen behind the production frontier in efficiency and that capital accumulation has had a diverging effect on the labour productivity distribution using bootstrapping methods the paper also accounts for the inherent bias and the stochastic elements in the efficiency estimation it is found that the relative ranking of the efficiency scores remains stable after the bias correction even after controlling for spatially correlated measurement errors and that the dea successfully identifies the regions on the production frontier as significantly more efficient than other regions enfl

new techniques to extract market expectations from financial instruments this paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes traditionally interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates exchange rates and inflation more recently these methods have been refined to rely on implied forward interest rates so as to extract expected future time paths very recently methods have been designed to extract not only the means but the whole risk neutral probability distribution from a set of option prices

the relationship between electricity consumption electricity prices and gdp in pakistan abstract this study analyzes the relationship among electricity consumption its price and real gdp at the aggregate and sectoral level in pakistan using annual data for the period 1960 2008 the study finds the presence of unidirectional causality from real economic activity to electricity consumption in particular growth in output in commercial manufacturing and agricultural sectors tend to increase electricity consumption while in residential sector growth in private expenditures is the cause of rising electricity consumption the study concludes that electricity production and management needs to be better integrated with overall economic planning exercises this is essential to avoid electricity shortfalls and unplanned load shedding

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

on the mean reverting properties of target zone exchange rates one key prediction of the target zone model is that the exchange rate should be mean reverting within the band although this property is widely referred to in the target zone literature little work has been done to test it in this paper we seek to remedy this important lacuna in the literature by examining the time series properties of the seven currencies participating in the exchange rate mechanism erm of the european monetary system for the period 13 march 1979 to 9 april 1992 using standard univariate unit root tests we find little evidence of mean reversion however using variance ratio test statistics which control for heterogeneity in the distribution of exchange rate behaviour we find much more evidence of mean reversion another part of our work includes implementing a panel unit root test

analysis of exchange rate target zones using a limited dependent rational expectations model with jumps this article examines the exchange rate determination in a target zone regime when the bounds can be fixed for an extended period but are subject to occasional jumps in this case the behavior of the endogenous variable is affected by the agents expectations about both the occurrence and the size of the jump empirical results using data for the franc mark exchange rate provide support for the nonlinear model with time varying realignment probability and indicate that the agents correctly anticipated most of the observed changes in the central parity

what cause the decline of energy intensity in china s cities a comprehensive panel data analysis abstract china s progress in energy efficiency has contributed significantly to the reduction in global energy intensity ei but the descending speed of per unit gdp energy consumption in china has been decreasing during recent years the present study aims to investigate the core driving forces of ei from 2005 to 2016 in 289 chinese cities based on granger casualty test and regression analysis for this purpose the study employs panel data analysis with both fixed coefficient and time varying coefficient which are suitable for examining the effects of influence factors on ei and their change trend the granger casualty test investigates that there supposed to be a bidirectional causality between air pollutant emission and energy consumption in china however due to china s weak environmental regulations the negative effect of emission on ei is not significant further regression analysis shows that a percentage increase in electricity price decreases ei by 0 722 in long term but this adjustment takes time furthermore analysis of short term relationship reveals that optimizing energy structure may be the best way for china to reduce ei in short run finally the time varying coefficients of panel data model indicate that inhibitory effect of promoting electricity consumption on ei will keep improving with expansion of electricity use

the term structure of interest rate differentials in a target zone theory and swedish data abstract the term structure of interest rate differentials is derived in a model of a small open economy with a target zone exchange rate regime for given time to maturity the interest rate differential is decreasing in the exchange rate and for given exchange rate the interest rate differential s absolute value and its instantaneous variability are both decreasing in the time to maturity devaluation realignment risks are incorporated and imply upward shifts of the interest rate differentials several implications of the theory are found to be broadly consistent with data on swedish exchange rates and interest differentials for the period 1986 1989

empirical features of the second generation target zone models mean reverting fundamentals and endogenous devaluation risk we show that within bertola and svensson s second generation target zone model mean reverting interventions and endogenous devaluation risk are closely interrelated over the period 1983 93 we analyze the degree of mean reversion in the underlying fundamental process as well as the term structure of interest rate differentials vis a vis germany for six exchange rate mechanism currencies for austria denmark and the netherlands and for belgium after 1990 our estimates are broadly in line with the first generation target zone model whereas those for france and italy are in accordance with the model that allows for endogenous devaluation risk jel f31 e43

the foreign exchange risk premium in a target zone with devaluation risk abstract the foreign exchange risk premium in an exchange rate target zone is derived when the exchange rate is heteroskedastic within the band and there is a separate devaluation risk the risk premium is then the sum of two separate risk premia arising from uncertainty about exchange rate movements within the band and from uncertainty about devaluations both real and nominal risk premia are considered real and nominal risk premia from movements within the band are very small real and nominal risk premia from devaluations are larger but still relatively small proportions of the interest rate differential

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded