renewable energy investment and job creation a cross sectoral assessment for the czech republic with reference to eu benchmarks the development of renewable energy sources has been primarily justified on the ground of environmental policies and energy security but new jobs opportunities and establishment of new economy sectors may be equally important co benefits from investments in this sector the main goal of this paper is to assess the employment benefits of investments in renewable energy in the czech republic we examine the level and rate of the development of the renewable energy sector in the czech republic in terms of green job creation for the period 2008 2013 in comparison to data from other eu countries including germany as a leading early investor in renewables whilst the deployment of renewable energy in the czech republic has succeeded to create a significant number of jobs more than 20 000 employees in 2010 our analysis illustrates a strong dependency of job creation on the continuation of financial incentives we also find that biomass and waste energy processing offer the highest employment per mwh which benefits employment in economically fragile rural areas we discuss the question of competitiveness of a country that was not amongst the early adopters of renewables arguing that the technical skills of the labour force in the czech republic provide a potential for more sustained investments in the sector

why do farmers have so little interest in futures markets a farm financial model with leverage and investment in two farm enterprises is specified the model is extended to incorporate futures hedging and the separation theorem is used to show that optimal hedging is zero the assumption of a risk free asset is relaxed and while this leads to a violation of the separation theorem the result that optimal hedging is zero is maintained providing that futures markets are efficient it is concluded that if capital markets are efficient then farmers will have little interest in futures markets except to speculate

using portfolio theory to improve resource efficiency of invested capital limited literature provides concrete theory based methods for quantifying the effects of sharing capital this paper describes the potential contribution of portfolio theory to quantify the effects and optimize the employment of capital human tangible financial and service employing capital in a theoretical and quantitative manner in the context of sustainability insights illustrate how portfolio principles can yield benefits including the fulfillment of needs using fewer resources consistent with sustainability in particular pooling assets to meet uncertain demands from different users of an asset pool may yield benefit from diversification effects suggests future research avenues such as the management of high value critical value and expiring resources to support sustainability

energy investment economic growth and carbon emissions in china empirical analysis based on spatial durbin model abstract the international community has reached a consensus on preventing the global climate from deterioration by stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere energy industry is a key field for greenhouse gas emission and investment in the energy industry plays a crucial part in promoting the low carbon development of china s energy industry energy investment can effectively break the high carbon lock in effect of energy industry and achieve the low carbon development of energy industry by guiding regulating and gathering social funds into the field of cleaner production and the field of low carbon technology based on the unified framework of energy economy and environment this article takes 30 provinces in china as the research object and constructs a spatial econometric model to investigate the impact of energy investment and economic growth on carbon emission reduction the results indicate that both energy investment and economic growth are responsible for the increase of china s provincial co2 emissions but their driving mechanisms are significantly different furthermore the increase of carbon emissions in adjacent provinces will bring about the increase of local carbon emissions through spatial spillover effects based on these findings the corresponding countermeasures and policy suggestions are put forward

environmental kuznets curves new evidence on both panel and country level co2 emissions using data on per capita co2 emissions and per capita real gdp from fifteen countries spanning the period 1960 2013 this paper tests the validity of the environmental kuznets curve ekc using both panel based and time series based methodological approaches of cointegration given that the ekc hypothesis postulates an inverted u shaped relationship between emissions and output the study tests for cointegration between per capita co2 emissions per capita real gdp and the squared values of per capita real gdp the evidence from panel cointegration methodologies is mixed this result might arise due to time dependence of cointegrating coefficients the time varying cointegration approaches provide strong evidence in favor of time varying cointegration parameters furthermore based on the quantile cointegration approach the results indicate that the ekc hypothesis holds in 12 out of the 15 countries however even for these three countries the ekc hypothesis seems to hold at certain quantiles

an econometric study of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in turkey abstract this study attempts to empirically examine the dynamic causal relationships between carbon emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of turkey using the time series data for the period 1960 2005 this research tests the interrelationship between the variables using the bounds testing to cointegration procedure the bounds test results indicate that there exist two forms of long run relationships between the variables in the case of first form of long run relationship carbon emissions are determined by energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of second long run relationship income is determined by carbon emissions energy consumption and foreign trade an augmented form of granger causality analysis is conducted amongst the variables the long run relationship of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade equation is also checked for the parameter stability the empirical results suggest that income is the most significant variable in explaining the carbon emissions in turkey which is followed by energy consumption and foreign trade moreover there exists a stable carbon emissions function the results also provide important policy recommendations

the rationale of the mean standard deviation analysis skewness preference and the demand for money publisher summary this chapter discusses the rationale of the mean standard deviation analysis skewness preference and the demand for money in january 1969 issue of the review of economic studies karl borch and martin feldstein separately criticized the widely used mean variance analysis of portfolio selection borch contended that any system of upward sloping mean standard deviation e s indifference curves can be shown to be inconsistent with the basic axiom of choice under uncertainty he pointed out that one can always pick any two points on an upward sloping indifference curve to represent two bernoulli distributions with probability 1 p of gaining the same amount x in both the cases and probability p of gaining y1 in the case of one distribution and y2 in the case of the second distribution with y2 y1 if the second distribution represents the point to the northeast of the other point then by the dominance axiom the second distribution must be preferred to the first which contradicts the basic meaning of indifference curves feldstein by using a log utility function and a lognormal distribution for investment outcome showed that e s indifference curves for a risk averter need not be convex downwards though upward sloping they would change from convex to concave once the standard deviation of the outcome exceeds the mean multiplied by on the face of it this seems to suggest that risk aversion might decrease as risk is increased beyond a certain extent

optimal market pools for agricultural cooperatives most agricultural marketing cooperatives distribute members net revenues on a pool basis the present paper outlines various pool options and provides a framework for identifying privately and collectively optimal pooling rules individual members pool choices are found to vary according to farm enterprise and risk aversion level a collectively optimal rule depends generally on risk aversion and on the method used to aggregate individuals expressed preferences in the instance examined here however the collective optimum is somewhat insensitive to assumed risk aversion

access based consumption the case of car sharing access based consumption defined as transactions that can be market mediated but where no transfer of ownership takes place is becoming increasingly popular yet it is not well theorized this study examines the nature of access as it contrasts to ownership and sharing specifically the consumer object consumer consumer and consumer marketer relationships six dimensions are identified to distinguish among the range of access based consumptionscapes temporality anonymity market mediation consumer involvement the type of accessed object and political consumerism access based consumption is examined in the context of car sharing via an interpretive study of zipcar consumers four outcomes of these dimensions in the context of car sharing are identified lack of identification varying significance of use and sign value negative reciprocity resulting in a big brother model of governance and a deterrence of brand community the implications of our findings for understanding the nature of exchange consumption and brand community are discussed

decoupling co2 emissions and industrial growth in china over 1993 2013 the role of investment abstract since industrial sector is a leading energy consumer and co 2 emitter in china the degree of the decoupling of co 2 emissions and industrial growth plays a critical role in realizing the energy conservation and emission reduction goals of china this is the first study to present a specific investigation on the decoupling of co 2 emissions and industrial growth in china from 1993 to 2013 using an extended logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi model focusing on both energy related and process related co 2 emissions and introducing three novel investment factors i e investment scale investment share and investment efficiency we highlight and explore the remarkable role of investment in the mitigation and decoupling of co 2 emissions with industrial growth the results show that china s industrial sector experienced the weak decoupling during 1993 2013 the investment scale is the most important factor responsible for the increase in co 2 emissions and the inhibition of the decoupling the investment efficiency effect has a volatile trend and overall it plays the most significant role in reducing co 2 emissions followed by the energy intensity effect and process carbon intensity effect whereas the energy mix carbon coefficient and investment share have marginal effects among 36 industrial sub sectors the seven factors of rcmcp raw chemical materials and chemical products nmp nonmetal mineral products and spfm smelting and pressing of ferrous metals have significant effects on the decoupling thus the three sub sectors should be among the top concerns for abating co 2 emissions finally we provide policy recommendations considering both conventional and investment factors for china s industrial sector to realize emission reduction targets

consuming use orientated product service systems a consumer culture theory perspective abstracts research suggests that product service systems pss may usefully form part of the mix of innovations necessary to move society toward more sustainable futures however pss implementation rates are disappointingly low and an implementation gap has emerged drawing on consumer culture theory cct this paper provides insights to help resolve this issue in business to consumer markets since consumption of use orientated pss is analogous to access based consumption six dimensions of access are set out to analyse a case study of infant car seat provision five outcomes are derived from the analysis and these include partial identification with accessed product and interplay of use and symbolic value this analysis questions the view that pss do not create sufficient value to overcome a preference for ownership in western societies rather pss consumption is likely to arise when both functional and symbolic value are extracted by consumers and when pss are promoted to appropriate consumer groups such as nomads further research is needed to explore these phenomena and address the issues they raise in pss design processes

does mean variance portfoliomanagement deserve expected utility s approximative affirmation abstract this article is a comment on the paper by harry markowitz on mean variance approximations to expected utility european journal of operational research 234 2014 436 355 this comment is followed by the reply of harry markowitz

the impact of economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan abstract this paper investigates the relationship between the economic growth and co2 emissions in azerbaijan a cointegration analysis is conducted over the period 1992 2013 for getting more robust results johansen ardlbt dols fmols and ccr methods are employed to explore cointegration and estimate long run coefficients we use cubic quadratic and linear specifications and conclude that the last one is an adequate representation for the impact of the economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan the results from the different cointegration methods are consistent with each other and show that the economic growth has a positive and statistically significant impact on the emissions in the long run implying that the ekc hypothesis does not hold for azerbaijan the income elasticity of co2 emissions using different methods is found to be between 0 7 and 0 8 moreover we find that any short run imbalance can be adjusted towards the long run equilibrium path within less than one year the paper concludes that measures to increase energy efficiency carbon pricing instruments in production and international domestic trade activities and nationwide social awareness programs to instruct about the negative consequences of pollution can be considered as relevant environmental policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions

skewness preference risk aversion and the precedence relations on stochastic changes this paper provides a general choice theoretic characterization of the trade off between risk and skewness whose importance in understanding risk taking behavior is well documented in empirical studies the condition under which the prudence measure kimball 1990 characterizes the strength of an individual s downside risk aversion against his own risk aversion is identified and interpreted in a unifying framework based on the concept of one stochastic dominant change preceding another and that of the desirability of a stochastic change the framework is also shown to be useful for a better understanding of the arrow pratt measure the stronger ross measure and the coincidence of the characterizations of downside risk aversion and prudence as well as the relationship between stochastic dominances of different degrees

simplified risk analysis in agricultural extension abstract attention is given to the major methods of assessing risk in order to make choices the literature frequently reports studies on mean variance e v analysis and stochastic dominance rules both of these methods are compared in an agricultural application with the approach outlined by hanoch and levy the empirical results suggests that hanoch and levy s criterion appear to reduce the size of the risk efficient set and that the sets of recommendations from the methods under comparison were consistent the two recommendations generated by hanoch and levy s rule were found to be reasonable for this particular decision process

risk efficient irrigation strategies for wheat abstract agricultural production is risky when farmers are risk averse they are likely to put a premium on production methods that reduce perceived risks irrigation is generally believed to be a risk reducing input by using the concept of stochastic dominance risk efficient irrigation policies for wheat grown in central india are identified and quantitative estimates of benefits due to risk reduction are obtained such benefits were found to be of a large order of magnitude the more common methods such as mean variance analysis tended to over estimate the benefits

the impact of clean energy investments on the greek economy an input output analysis 2010 2020 the aim of this paper is twofold first to calculate the green energy investments by industrial sector that greece would need in order to satisfy a number of energy and environmental targets adopted in the context of the european commission s energy and climate change package and second to calculate the macro economic impacts of these green investments on production and employment in the greek economy to this end the input output analysis has been exploited for estimating the direct indirect and induced macroeconomic effects associated with the implementation of selected energy conservation measures the promotion of renewable energy technologies etc our findings show that the required investments would reach the amount of 47 9 billion over the period 2010 2020 these investments will result in an average annual increase of the national product by 9 4 billion creating simultaneously 108 000 full time equivalent jobs for the entire period under consideration the employment generated per 1 million investment is relatively higher in energy saving projects in buildings and transport in comparison with the development of res in power generation sector

approximation methods for ranking risky investment alternatives abstract the paper develops and illustrates the application of criteria for ranking risky investment alternatives that are based on their certainly equivalent ce outcomes and determines expressions for approximating the ce outcomes by means of the central moments of their distribution the paper develops criteria on the basis of the ce outcomes for determining a complete ranking of risky investment alternatives that can represent the choice of many though not all risk averse agents

on the proportionality and homogeneity of consumption and income in its certainty equivalence form consumption is proportional to the sum of human and non human wealth with labour income uncertainty the proportionality takes the form of homogeneity of consumption with respect to the components of wealth in this paper we analyse the stochastic properties of labour income that yield the homogeneity property

portfolio selection under strict uncertainty a multi criteria methodology and its application to the frankfurt and vienna stock exchanges abstract in modern portfolio theory it is common practice to first compute the risk reward efficient frontier and then to support an individual investor in selecting a portfolio that meets his her preferences for profitability and risk potential flaws include a the assumption that past data provide sufficient evidence for predicting the future performances of the securities under consideration and b the necessity to mathematically determine or approximate the investor s utility function in this paper we propose a methodology whose initial phase filters portfolios that are inefficient from a historical perspective while this is consistent with traditional approaches the second phase differs from the standard approach as it uses a decision table constructed by considering multiple scenarios assuming strict uncertainty the table cells measure consequences by a multi criteria linear performance index of simulated future returns which avoids difficulties with performance ratios the real world applicability is illustrated through two studies based on data from the stock exchanges in frankfurt and vienna

energy investment and economic growth a simplified approach abstract a model is developed to investigate the effect of energy investment on economic growth under a set of simplifying assumptions the economy is treated as a two sector aggregate the energy sector and the rest of the economy whereas the model describing the energy economy interaction is linear to the differential changes of the variables adaptable to structural evolution and requires a modest amount of data for initialization it can be used in a single stage or an iterative mode to produce outcomes for the short and medium run the analysis reveals that energy productive investment has had an impact on the rate of formation of the non energy capital stock and subsequently on economic growth these effects appear amplified under a regime of increasing energy price

role of renewable energy investment in india an alternative to co2 mitigation abstract this paper discusses the potential of renewable energy investment and co2 mitigation by renewable energy technologies currently india s per capita emissions are around one tonne of co2 year the present energy scene offers india a window of opportunity to invest in renewable energy the annual turnover of renewable energy industry has reached 12 3 billion in 2011 which is 36 higher than 2010 investment of 7 5 billion increasing the share of renewable energy in overall energy mix is an effective option to mitigate co2 emission presently the share of renewable energy is around 12 in the energy mix the present study estimated co2 mitigation potential of indian renewable energy sector about 203 million tonnes with an installed capacity of 24 gw in 2012 however enormous potential identified in renewable energy sector with favorable co2 mitigation the government is compromising with limited financial resources however policy efforts need to be strengthened to encourage a massive scale up of renewable technologies to build sustained low carbon economy

understanding the diffusion of sustainable product service systems insights from the sociology of consumption and practice theory the sustainable product service system spss concept highlights that achieving sustainability requires changes in both production and consumption nevertheless attention has focused mainly on production this paper enriches the spss approach with insights from the sociology of consumption and practice theory to provide a deeper understanding of the use of products and services in daily life contexts the paper advances three key insights related to a the internal dynamics of user practices b the strength of linkages of practice elements loose and tight coupling c external linkages to other practices these insights are mobilised to provide a deeper understanding of the uptake and diffusion of innovations such as spss the insights are illustrated with two cases in which interventions designed to stimulate diffusion have had differential success energy efficient light bulbs and low temperature laundry implications for understanding the diffusion of spss are discussed

optimal procurement strategies for online spot markets abstract spot markets have emerged for a broad range of commodities and companies have started to use them in addition to their traditional long term procurement contracts forward contracts in comparison to forward contracts spot markets offer products at essentially negligible lead time but typically command a higher expected price for this added flexibility while also exhibiting substantial price uncertainty in our research we analyze the resulting procurement challenge and quantify the benefits of using spot markets from a supply chain perspective we develop and solve mathematical models that determine the optimal order quantity to purchase via forward contracts and the optimal quantity to purchase via spot markets we analyze the most general situation where commodities can be both bought and sold via a spot market and derive closed form results for this case we compare the obtained results to the reference scenario of pure contract sourcing and we include results for situations where the use of spot markets is restricted to either buying or selling only our approaches can be used by decision makers to determine optimal procurement strategies based on key parameters such as demand and spot price volatilities correlation between demand and spot prices and risk aversion the results of our analysis demonstrate that significant profit improvements can be achieved if a moderate fraction of the commodity demand is procured via spot markets the results also show that companies who use spot markets can offer a higher expected service level but that they might experience a higher variability in profits than companies who do not use spot markets we illustrate our analytical results with numerical examples throughout the paper

labor income uncertainty skewness and homeownership a panel data study for germany and spain abstract in this paper we empirically investigate the effect of labor income uncertainty on the probability of homeownership in germany and spain this study is motivated by two facts firstly theoretical models tend to provide ambiguous results on this issue secondly previous empirical evidence focuses exclusively on the us housing market to carry out our analysis we propose more precise income uncertainty measures based on panel data labor income equations we observe that households facing high levels of income uncertainty display a preference for renting while those located in more positively skewed income distributions show a greater propensity for homeownership

compensating wage differentials for schooling risk in denmark in this paper we analyse the association between wage differentials and risk using detailed information on length and type of education as seen in danish administrative registers our contribution to the literature is that we distinguish between transitory time series and permanent cross sectional income shocks and estimate the compensation for both sorts of risk we find that wage risk in a given education cell is associated with higher wages while skewness is associated with lower wages as a robustness check we see that ad hoc risk measures based on earnings mobility indicators confirm these findings

the transfer and application of product service systems from academia to uk manufacturing firms the servicisation of many advanced economies is thought by many commentators to provide opportunities to move society away from unsustainable patterns of production and consumption the concept of the product service system pss has been conceptualised in academic circles to assist in the attainment of such desirable futures this paper reports the findings of research conducted as part of the solid project which considered the transfer and application of the pss concept from academia to industry in the united kingdom it draws upon theories from evolutionary economics to provide a rationale for the transfer of the pss concept and the role of this in achieving desirable technological change the paper also identifies an appropriate methodology to transfer the pss concept from uk academic circles to industry and the factors which impact upon and importantly lead to the successful completion of this process the combination of theoretical insight with case study research is used to develop a framework that could help uk based intermediaries to complete the transfer of the pss concept this is seen as an integral part of public policies aimed at stimulating sustainable patterns of production and consumption

land allocation under uncertainty for alternative specifications of return distributions using the expected utility moment generating function approach a land allocation rule is derived which is both independent of the nature of the underlying distribution of each element in the choice set and accounts for all moments of that distribution this decision rule is applied to the choice between cotton and corn in the mississippi delta to demonstrate that consideration of just the first two moments of the distribution can often be unjustified and damaging empirically theoretically and in terms of the utility of the decision maker

hedging with commodity options when price distributions are skewed lapan moschini and hanson have demonstrated that commodity options can be useful for hedgers who face a symmetric price distribution and who wish to maintain a net open market position this is because options skew the distribution of profits to the right and such skewness typically increases expected utility in this paper i use standard comparative statics to show that options are relatively more valuable for reducing the skewness of a nonsymmetric price distribution depending on the direction of the skewness and the underlying price expectations hedgers may write options as well as purchase them

social welfare of alternative controlled price policies recent developments in social welfare analysis provide insights into the selection of price policies in the presen t paper a ces social welfare function and a weighted average of utilitarian and leximin rules are used to identify optimal producer prices in an economy where government is the price setter and agents are risk averse the analysis distinguishes between the interests of commercial producers peasant producers consumers and taxpayers a n application to zimbabwe indicates that a maize producer price in the low medium to medium portion of the historical range would be social ly optimal if egalitarian preferences are moderate this outcome is somewhat insensitive to group weighting schemes and to interpersonal utility correspondences copyright 1993 by mit press

household portfolio diversification a case for rank dependent preferences the proliferation of novel preference theories in financial economics is hampered by a lack of non experimental evidence and by the theories additional complexity which has not been shown to be critical in applications in this article i present arguments in support of preferences with rank dependency using the survey of consumer finances data i document two widespread patterns inconsistent with expected utility i many households simultaneously invest in well deversified funds and in poorly diversified portfolios of stocks and ii some households with substantial savings do not invest anything in equities i show that portfolio choice models with rank dependent preferences plausibly parameterized and under fully rational assumptions are quantitatively consistent with the observed diversification these results call for further efforts to integrate the models of rank dependent preferences in portfolio theory and asset pricing the decision theoretic literature has long acknowledged the shortcomings of the expected utility theory of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 several generalizations of the theory are inspired by the experimental evidence and aimed at improving its descriptive accuracy however there are few applications of new models of preferences in finance and expected utility continues to dominate the field 1 two principal hurdles slow the proliferation of novel preferences in financial economics first the lack of empirical non experimental or field data confirming that the behavior motivating non expected utilities is widespread outside the laboratory settings second the additional and often significant complexity of the alternative preferences which has not been shown to be critical in applications where the models based on expected utility fall short of reasonable predictions this article presents empirical and theoretical this paper was previously circulated under the title household portfolio diversification the paper has benefited from the comments of shlomo benartzi luca benzoni markus brunnermeier john dickhaut maria perozek raj singh hersh shefrin and workshop participants at minnesota finance bag lunch 2003 wharton conference household financial decision making and portfolio choice and 2003 summer meetings of econometric society i would like to thank cam harvey the editor and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments and suggestions a special thanks to jack kareken for comments and editorial help on an earlier draft i am grateful to donna zerwitz for editorial assistance the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system all errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author address correspondence to valery polkovnichenko finance 3 122 csom 319 19 th

the shape of utility functions and organizational behavior based on measurements among 332 owner managers we investigate how theglobal shape of the utility function i e s shaped versus concave or convex over the total range of outcomes relates to choice behavior we find that the global shape of the utility function differs across decision makers about one third of the owner managers exhibit an s shaped utility function and that the global shape is linked to organizational behavior i e the production system employed a result that does not change when using different methods to identify the decision maker s global shape of the utility function the decision maker s risk attitude risk averse or risk seeking does not affect the choice of the production system whereas the degree of risk aversion based on thelocal shape of the utility function may be important in explaining owner managers trading behavior pennings and smidts 2000 more structural organizational behavior appears to be linked to theglobal shape of the utility function

public private partnerships investment in energy as new determinant of co2 emissions the role of technological innovations in china this paper explores the relationship between public private partnerships investment in energy sector and carbon emissions considering the vital role of technological innovations in carbon emissions function for china in doing so we apply bootstrapping autoregressive distributed lag modeling bardl for examining the cointegration between carbon emissions and its determinants the empirical results reveal that public private partnerships investment in energy impedes environmental quality by increasing carbon emissions on contrary technological innovations have negative effect on carbon emissions the relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions is inverted u shaped i e environmental kuznets curve hypothesis exports are positively linked with carbon emissions foreign direct investment impedes environmental quality by stimulating co2 emissions the empirical findings provide new insights for policy makers to direct public private partnerships investment in energy for the betterment of environmental quality in china

changes in carbon intensity in china empirical findings from 1980 2003 china experienced sustainable rapid economic growth over the period 1980 2003 but at the same time energy related carbon intensity showed a downward trend it begs the question therefore what factors were driving this decline in carbon intensity and will this decline be maintained in future moreover what measures can be adopted to ensure a continual decline in carbon intensity these questions led to increased research in the factors governing co2 emission in china this paper quantifies the driving force behind china s primary energy related carbon intensity and measures the material production sectors final energy related carbon intensity our results show that the overwhelming contributor to the decline of energy related carbon intensity was the reduction in real energy intensity however policies that focus only on the decline in energy intensity are insufficient to further decrease carbon intensity the change of primary energy mix can improve the decline of carbon intensity this should focus on the material production sectors development strategies and final energy use greater emphasis should be given to secondary industry which needs national and regional governments policy support

product services as a research field past present and future reflections from a decade of research in the last decade many researchers institutes and programs in the eu paid attention to product service systems pss given this massive effort it is time to take stock is pss research a theoretical field in its own right is the pss concept indeed the road to the factor 10 world is it the road to enhanced competitiveness what is needed to really use the potential of the concept this paper discusses these questions summarizing the analysis done in the pss review book new business for old europe various eu sponsored projects and the conceptual approach chosen in a new research network on sustainable consumption and production called score 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

pooled mean group estimation of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 abstract we apply the pooled mean group estimator to test for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 in 22 oecd countries this approach allows for more flexible assumptions in a panel data framework the period goes from 1975 to 1998

evaluating the relationships among economic growth energy consumption air emissions and air environmental protection investment in china abstract this paper analyzed the interactions among china s economic growth and its energy consumption air emissions and air environmental protection investment during 2000 2007 conventional energy and emergy are applied to quantify energy consumption and emissions impact respectively the five indicators based on money energy and emergy including ratio of nonrenewable energy to renewable energy rnr energy use per unit gdp eupg environmental cost per unit gdp ecpg impact of emissions per unit energy consumption iepec and environmental benefit per unit environmental protection investment ebpei are presented to depict the relationships among economic growth and energy consumption and impact of air emissions and air environmental protection investment the results show that energy consumption rapidly rises with china s fast economic growth however energy efficiency and environmental loading intensity from energy consumption are reduced simultaneously but their improvements fall far behind economic growth rate impact of air emissions mainly composed of impact of emissions on human health especially dust is slightly decreased the performance of air environmental protection investment is obviously declined in the study period generally speaking the conflict among economy energy and air environment protection is slightly mitigated but still acute due to great dependence of china s economy on fossil energy and inefficient environmental protection measures finally this paper discusses the corresponding issues and then puts forward some related suggestions

farmers long term investment decisions a study of sri lankan rubber smallholders planting and replanting of perennial crops confronts small farmers with a long term investment decision in this study we analyse the behaviour of rubber smallholders in sri lanka when faced with a replacement decision an intertemporal profit maximizing model maximizing discounted stream of expected future net revenues predicts behaviour of larger hired labour using farmers quite well the model can also be extended successfully to smaller family farms when a lower than market wage rate is imputed to family labour to better reflect opportunity cost of labour and risk considerations are incorporated in relatively simple fashion the difference between a cash investment and a labour investment is crucial for the poorer family farmers and an appropriate cash subsidy can play a vital role in inducing them to undertake long term investments

new indices of money supply and the flexible laurent demand system the article begins by surveying the existing results on the new divisia monetary aggregates charts display the differences in behavior between the divisia aggregates and the federal reserve s official simple sum monetary aggregates the article then compares system wide fit for the simple sum and divisia monetary aggregates when used as data in the joint estimation of a system of demand equations the demand system is derived from a new laurent expansion approximation to the reciprocal indirect utility function the laurent expansion provides a better behaved remainder term than that of the more commonly used taylor series the results favor the divisia aggregates

tri criterion inverse portfolio optimization with application to socially responsible mutual funds we present a framework for inverse optimization in a markowitz portfolio model that is extended to include a third criterion the third criterion causes the traditional nondominated frontier to become a surface until recently it had not been possible to compute such a surface but by using a new method that is able to generate the nondominated surfaces of tri criterion portfolio selection problems we are able to compute via inverse optimization the implied risk tolerances of given funds that pursue an additional objective beyond risk and return in applying this capability to a broad sample of conventional and socially responsible sr mutual funds we find that after the screening process there appears to be no significant di erence between how assets are allocated in socially responsible and conventional mutual funds which is likely to be di erent from what most sr investors would expect

portfolio selection and skewness evidence from international stock markets abstract this paper finds that the returns of the world s 14 major stock markets are not normally distributed and that the correlation matrix of these stock markets was stable during the january 1988 december 1993 time period polynomial goal programming in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio consisting of the choices of 14 international stock indexes the empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investor s portfolio decision causes a major change in the construction of the optimal portfolio the evidence also indicate that investors trade expected return of the portfolio for skewness

integration of var and expected utility under departures from normality this article identifies the level of the expected utility eu risk aversion and value at risk var confidence level that yield the same choice from a given distribution of outcomes and thus allow for consistent application of the two criteria the result for a given distribution is an explicit mapping between risk aversion under eu and var for both normal and nonnormal distributions the cornish fisher expansion is used to establish adjusted mean deviates for nonnormal outcome distributions and the investor s preference function is expanded to include elements for variance skewness and excess kurtosis a farm level application with nonnormal revenue distribution illustrates these approaches

gospel or disaster an empirical study on the environmental influences of domestic investment in china abstract since the beginning of china s reform and opening up in late 1970s the contradiction between environmental quality and economic development has become increasingly acute as the main driving force of development china s fixed asset investment fai has grown rapidly in the meanwhile china s energy consumption surged and the environmental pressures mounted the surge in fai may have great influences on the environmental quality on the one hand the rapid increase in fai facilitated the development of the secondary industry especially energy and pollution intensive industries which brought about significant amount of energy related pollution on the other hand growing investment on environmental investment is expected to slow environmental deterioration moreover the environmental quality and domestic investment may have potential spatial correlations in this paper after fully accounting for the spatial dependence the relationship between domestic investment and environmental quality in china is quantitatively investigated using co2 and so2 as two representative pollutants the estimation results indicate that the spatial dependence indeed exists and total effects of fai on pollutant emissions are positive however there is no evidence that environmental protection investment had expected effects to effectively curb pollutant emissions in china

selecting a portfolio with skewness recent evidence from us european and latin american equity markets abstract polynomial goal programming in which investor preferences for skewness can be incorporated is utilized to determine the optimal portfolio from latin american us and european capital markets the empirical findings suggest that the incorporation of skewness into an investor s portfolio decision causes a major change in the resultant optimal portfolio the empirical evidence indicates that investors do trade expected return of the portfolio for skewness

optimal fuel mix in chp plants under a stochastic permit price risk neutrality versus risk aversion abstract this paper studies the optimal fuel mix of a chp producer under emission permit price risk the producer s multi fuel plant uses two co2 intensive fuels and one clean fuel using a mean variance framework we develop three models the models are divided into spot models risk neutral and risk averse cases and a forward model risk averse case we derive the effects of price risk on optimal fuel use an increase in price risk can in fact increase the use of co2 intensive fuel in the spot model in the forward model the production and financial decisions are separate we also evaluate the risk bearing behavior of seven finnish chp producers we found that risk neutrality describes behavior better than risk aversion

portfolio selection in the mean variance model a note a little recognized feature of the mean variance portfolio selection model is that induced preferences for asset holdings are not necessarily monotone more of an asset or portfolio is not necessarily better even if the asset or portfolio has positive expected return the model predicts that an investor typically wants only a limited number of shares of an asset and beyond that the increase in mean return from costlessly getting more of an asset is not sufficient to compensate for the increased risk this is reasonable if the model describes a market for contracts with unlimited liability where total returns may be negative e g they may be normally distributed it is unreasonable however if the model is used to describe a stock market with limited liability in that case it is desirable to impose conditions that ensure that there is no upper limit to how much of an asset or portfolio the investor wants the sharpest possible conditions are identified in section i since portfolio preferences are not monotone global satiation is possible again this is unrealistic when liability is limited satiation is bothersome also because it may lead to nonexistence of equilibrium in black s 4 capm without a riskless asset as demonstrated in nielsen 9 uniqueness of equilibrium in capm is investigated in nielsen 10 section i identifies the exact conditions under which global satiation does or does not occur the conditions compare the maximum ratio of mean to standard deviation of total return available from the assets with the investor s limiting degree of risk aversion as measured by the slope of his or her indifference curves at high levels of risk an optimal portfolio may or may not exist in the portfolio selection problem depending on the asymptotic slopes of the efficient frontier and the investor s indifference curves section ii identifies the exact conditions mean variance behavior can arise from expected utility maximization based on normal distributions in that case the conditions for nonsatiation and for existence of optimal portfolios can be stated in terms of the von neumannmorgenstern utility function section iii relates the relevant properties of the utility function for standard deviation and mean to properties of the von neumann morgenstern utility function