extended benefits and the duration of ui spells evidence from the new jersey extended benefit program abstract this paper examines the impact on the duration of unemployment insurance receipt of a politically motivated program that offered 13 weeks of extended benefits for 6 months in 1996 using state level data and individual administrative records from before during and after the program we find that it raised the fraction of claimants who exhausted their regular benefits by 1 3 percentage points had the program run long enough to affect claimants from the first day of their spell the fraction exhausting would have risen by 7 percentage points and the average recipient would have collected regular benefits for one extra week

genco s risk constrained hydrothermal scheduling this paper presents a stochastic midterm risk constrained hydrothermal scheduling algorithm in a generation company genco the objective of a genco is to maximize payoffs and minimize financial risks when scheduling its midterm generation of thermal cascaded hydro and pumped storage units the proposed schedule will be used by the genco for bidding purposes to the iso the optimization model is based on stochastic price based unit commitment the proposed genco solution may be used to schedule midterm fuel and natural water inflow resources for a few months to a year the proposed stochastic mixed integer programming solution considers random market prices for energy and ancillary services as well as the availability of natural water inflows and generators in monte carlo scenarios financial risks associated with uncertainties are considered by applying expected downside risks which are incorporated explicitly as constraints variable time steps are adopted to avoid the exponential growth in solution time and memory requirements when considering midterm constraints a single water to power conversion function is used instead of several curves for representing water head and discharge parameters piecewise linearized head dependant water to power conversion functions are used for computational efficiency illustrative examples examine gencos midterm generation schedules risk levels fuel and water usage and hourly generation dispatches for bidding in energy and ancillary services markets the paper shows that gencos could decrease their financial risks by adjusting expected payoffs

political implications of increasing numbers of women in the labor force political scientists generally agree that women s behavior is strongly affected by their growing labor market participation but how will political life be affected when practically all women in a

unemployment insurance and male unemployment duration in canada a model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on canadian men entitlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment the probability of a worker leaving unemployment declines with the duration of unemployment holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant when entitlement is allowed to vary the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration these results are robust with respect to allowing for person specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative specifications of duration dependence

the impact of unemployment insurance benefit levels on recipiency this article studies the effect of unemployment insurance benefit levels on recipiency increasing benefit levels as measured by the fraction of weekly earnings of the lost job that they replace is found to significantly increase the probability of unemployment insurance recipiency among the eligible there is some evidence however that the effect is smaller at high replacement rates cost increases resulting from take up responses are found to be substantial for increases in the state s maximum benefit amount and for increases in the weekly benefit amount in low replacement rate states

stepping into formal politics women s engagement in formal political processes in irrigation in rural india summary gender quotas decentralization of irrigation management and reliance on mgnrega for labor provision challenge the traditional patriarchal canal management system by institutionalizing women as formal decision makers and members of the irrigation labor force in northern india based on a survey of 592 women in rural himachal pradesh this paper quantitatively analyses how these policies affect women s engagement in formal political processes results indicate that factors from the private and individual domains influence female participation in formal political processes most importantly india s gender inclusive policies provide women with the opportunity to legitimately engage in formal political processes governing resource management

scenario reduction for futures market trading in electricity markets to make informed decisions in futures markets of electric energy stochastic programming models are commonly used such models treat stochastic processes via a set of scenarios which are plausible realizations throughout the decision making horizon of the stochastic processes the number of scenarios needed to accurately represent the uncertainty involved is generally large which may render the associated stochastic programming problem intractable hence scenario reduction techniques are needed to trim down the number of scenarios while keeping most of the stochastic information embedded in such scenarios this paper proposes a novel scenario reduction procedure that advantageously compares with existing ones for electricity market problems tackled via two stage stochastic programming

short term transmission line maintenance scheduling in a deregulated system in this paper the authors present a decomposition approach based on duality theory for line maintenance scheduling with transmission and voltage constraints the given formulation consists of a master program and sub problems with two independent programming in the master problem the maintenance problem is solved and in the subproblems the transmission and voltage problems are solved independently since canceling a transaction or purchasing reactive power relates to the loss of revenue the trade off between maintenance cost and revenue loss will be optimized in the proposed method the test results on the modified ieee 118 bus system demonstrate that limits on transmission and voltage affect the line maintenance scheduling and increase the maintenance cost while introducing the loss of revenue as one of the objective functions the proposed method is flexible enough to accommodate various pricing objectives and methods

stochastic security constrained unit commitment this paper presents a stochastic model for the long term solution of security constrained unit commitment scuc the proposed approach could be used by vertically integrated utilities as well as the isos in electricity markets in this model random disturbances such as outages of generation units and transmission lines as well as load forecasting inaccuracies are modeled as scenario trees using the monte carlo simulation method for dual optimization coupling constraints among scenarios are relaxed and the optimization problem is decomposed into deterministic long term scuc subproblems for each deterministic long term scuc resource constraints represent fuel and emission constraints in the case of vertically integrated utilities and energy constraints in the case of electricity markets lagrangian relaxation is used to decompose subproblems with long term scuc into tractable short term mip based scuc subproblems without resource constraints accordingly penalty prices lagrangian multipliers are signals to coordinate the master problem and small scale subproblems computational requirements for solving scenario based optimization models depend on the number of scenarios in which the objective is to minimize the weighted average generation cost over the entire scenario tree in large scale applications the scenario reduction method is introduced for enhancing a tradeoff between calculation speed and accuracy of long term scuc solution numerical simulations indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for solving the stochastic security constrained unit commitment

genco s risk based maintenance outage scheduling this paper presents a stochastic model for the optimal risk based generation maintenance outage scheduling based on hourly price based unit commitment in a generation company genco such maintenance outage schedules will be submitted by gencos to the iso for approval before implementation the objective of a genco is to consider financial risks when scheduling its midterm maintenance outages the genco also coordinates its proposed outage scheduling with short term unit commitment for maximizing payoffs the proposed model is a stochastic mixed integer linear program in which random hourly prices of energy ancillary services and fuel are modeled as scenarios in the monte carlo method financial risks associated with price uncertainty are considered by applying expected downside risks which are incorporated explicitly as constraints this paper shows that gencos could decrease financial risks by adjusting expected payoffs illustrative examples show the calculation of genco s midterm generation maintenance schedule risk level hourly unit commitment and hourly dispatch for bidding into energy and ancillary services markets

security constrained unit commitment with ac constraints in a restructured power market the independent system operator iso executes the security constrained unit commitment scuc program to plan a secure and economical hourly generation schedule for the day ahead market this paper introduces an efficient scuc approach with ac constraints that obtains the minimum system operating cost while maintaining the security of power systems the proposed approach applies the benders decomposition for separating the unit commitment uc in the master problem from the network security check in subproblems the master problem applies the augmented lagrangian relaxation lr method and dynamic programming dp to solve uc the subproblem checks ac network security constraints for the uc solution to determine whether a converged and secure ac power flow can be obtained if any network violations arise corresponding benders cuts will be formed and added to the master problem for solving the next iteration of uc the iterative process will continue until ac violations are eliminated and a converged optimal solution is found in this paper a six bus system and the ieee 118 bus system with 54 units are analyzed to exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed approach

impact of natural gas system on risk constrained midterm hydrothermal scheduling this paper studies the impact of natural gas ng contracts and constraints on a genco s midterm risk constrained hydrothermal scheduling problem the ng contracts and constraints are modeled as a set of linear equations the proposed model utilizes the stochastic price based unit commitment pbuc the pbuc hourly solution considers uncertainties of market prices for energy and ancillary services uncertainties of natural water inflows and random ng infrastructure interruptions in monte carlo scenarios illustrative examples analyze the genco s risk levels when considering midterm schedules for generating units target payoffs and usages of water inflow ng and other thermal resources simulation results show that a genco s midterm schedules and financial risks could be impacted significantly with the consideration of ng contracts and constraints

the radical right gender gap in this article the author argues that a gender gap exists in the vote for the radical right and that this gender gap can be explained using techniques drawn from the literature on mainstream gender gaps the analysis emphasizes the impact of the immigration issue on the vote for the radical right logit and regression analysis are used to determine what can be explained by structural situational and political factors versus gender alone in france germany and austria it is found that there is a gender gap but it varies across the three cases that attitudes toward political issues particularly immigration have a disproportionate impact on the probability of voting radical right but not on the gender gap specifically and that there is a difference between men and women on the immigration issue and blue collar workers are more likely to be anti immigrant than those in other sectors

arima models to predict next day electricity prices price forecasting is becoming increasingly relevant to producers and consumers in the new competitive electric power markets both for spot markets and long term contracts price forecasts are necessary to develop bidding strategies or negotiation skills in order to maximize benefit this paper provides a method to predict next day electricity prices based on the arima methodology arima techniques are used to analyze time series and in the past have been mainly used for load forecasting due to their accuracy and mathematical soundness a detailed explanation of the aforementioned arima models and results from mainland spain and californian markets are presented

risk assessment in energy trading this paper provides a state of the art summary of risk assessment in energy trading techniques from financial engineering are needed by electric energy companies to manage price risk these tools are needed by suppliers distributors and traders in a competitive electric power marketplace tools that have been adapted to the specific environment of the electric power system include portfolio analysis and hedging instruments this paper provides a comprehensive critical literature survey of what has been applied to date in the power markets and which areas continue to need additional research one example market scenario is used throughout the paper to demonstrate the usefulness of the risk assessment methods

financial risk evaluation in stochastic pbuc this letter is an extension of our previous price based unit commitment pbuc work this letter identifies a frontier relationship between payoff and risk this letter also discusses the calculation of target value and risk using payoff risk frontiers test results show a trade off between risk minimization and payoff maximization for power generation utilities

the effect of unemployment compensation on unemployment duration in germany in west germany during the 1980s law changes cut the level of unemployment compensation for the unemployed without children and extended the duration of unemployment insurance for unemployed aged over 41 analysis of these changes using the german socioeconomic panel shows that transitions from unemployment for those under 49 were particularly responsive to extensions of unemployment insurance the implied elasticity for escapes of men to employment is similar to estimates for men in the united states suggesting that differences in the potential duration of unemployment insurance only partially explain the difference in spell lengths between germany and the united states

unemployment insurance rules joblessness and part time work developed and under general conditions an increase in the disregard is shown to increase both the part time and overall re employment hazards data from the current population survey s displaced worker supplements are used to test these predictions estimates from a competing risks model with correlated risks and time varying coefficients shows that increasing the disregard significantly increases the conditional probability of part time re employment during the first three months of joblessness

path shifting of the welfare state electoral competition and the expansion of work family policies in western europe what explains the surprising growth of work family policies in several west european countries much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change yet over the past two decades governments in germany the netherlands and the united kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes enacting paid leave schemes expanded rights to part time work and greater investments in child care a comparison of these countries reveals a similar sequence of political and policy change faced with growing electoral instability and the decline of core constituencies party leaders sought to attract dealigning voter groups such as women this led them to introduce feminizing reforms of their party structures and adopt policies to support mothers employment in all three cases women working within the parties played an important role in hatching or lobbying for these reforms after comparing three countries that moved in a path shifting direction this article engages in a brief traveling exercise examining whether a similar set of dynamics are lacking in two countries austria and italy that have moved more slowly in reforming these policies against the prevailing scholarly literature that emphasizes path dependence and slow moving change this article reveals the continued power of electoral politics in shaping redistributive policies