a theory of voting equilibria a voting equilibrium arises when the voters in an electorate acting in accordance with both their preferences for the candidates and their perceptions of the relative chances of various pairs of candidates being in contention for victory generate an election result that justifies their perceptions voting equilibria always exist and the set of equilibria can vary substantially with the choice of voting system we compare equilibria under the plurality rule approval voting and the borda system we consider a candidate positioning game and find that the plurality rule imposes little restriction on the position of the winning candidate in three candidate races while approval voting leads to a winner positioned at the median of the voter distribution we contrast campaign activities intended to influence voter preferences with activities meant to influence only perceptions of candidate viability

returns to scale damages to scale marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution in dea environmental assessment abstract this study discusses a new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution between desirable and undesirable outputs to discuss mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of corporate strategies to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the concept of disposability is separated into natural and managerial disposability then this study explores the computational framework of rts returns to scale and dts damages to scale the type of rts is measured within the natural disposability while the type of dts is measured within the managerial disposability considering the two types of disposability this study discusses mrt and rs between desirable and undesirable outputs as an illustrative example this study applies the proposed approach to evaluate the performance of us coal fired power plants this study finds that the regulation policy on no x and so 2 has been effective on their emission controls under us clean air act caa the regulation on co 2 or a major source of the global warming and climate change is still insufficient in the united states therefore this study recommends that us federal and local governments should regulate the amount of co 2 emission under the caa

sustainability development for supply chain management in u s petroleum industry by dea environmental assessment abstract environmental assessment and protection are important concerns in modern business consumers are interested in environmental protection they avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies the green image is very important for business survivability in our global market a business concern associated with the green image is how to attain corporate sustainability where companies can attain both economic success and pollution prevention in their operations there is tradeoff between economic prosperity and environmental concern to attain a high level of corporate sustainability companies need to measure the current performance in terms of their operational and environmental achievements this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for such assessment the proposed dea assessment provides corporate leaders and managers with not only the measure of corporate sustainability but also information regarding how to invest for technology innovation for abatement of undesirable outputs e g co 2 as an application this study utilizes the proposed approach to measure the corporate sustainability of petroleum firms in the united states the petroleum industry is functionally separated into integrated and independent companies the integrated companies referred to as major have their large supply chains for both upstream e g exploration development and production of crude oil or natural gas and downstream e g oil tankers refineries storages and retails meanwhile the independent companies focus upon the upstream function but not the downstream in their business operations the empirical comparison between the two groups of petroleum firms identifies that the integrated companies outperform the independent companies because a large supply chain incorporated into the former group provides them with both a scale merit in their operations and an opportunity to obtain consumer s opinions on their business operations thus the large supply chain system covering business functions for upstream and downstream enhances corporate sustainability in the u s petroleum industry it is easily envisioned that the empirical findings discussed in this study are useful in preparing business strategy and industrial policy for the petroleum industry of not only the united states but also other nations involved in oil and gas production

marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution measured by dea environmental assessment comparison among european and north american nations this study discusses the new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution among production factors e g inputs desirable and undesirable outputs to measure the degree on mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of economic strategies to combat various environmental issues the strategies are extendable to a policy change for pollution prevention the underlying concept is separated into natural and managerial disposability under managerial disposability it is possible for us to measure an occurrence of desirable congestion or eco technology innovation considering the disposability concept this study discusses how to measure the type and magnitude of mrt and rs a problem of the mrt rs measurement is that these measures usually become unstable e g very large or small in these magnitudes because dea does not assume any functional form for economic activities to overcome such a difficulty this study equips dea environmental assessment with multiplier restriction by utilizing a unique feature on a proposed data treatment the multiplier restriction in dea has been never explored in previous works on environmental assessment in an application this study finds three important economic concerns on europe and north america first western europe outperforms eastern europe and north america in their unified efficiency measures under managerial disposability this study statistically confirms a difference between western and eastern europe but not between western europe and north america this result exhibits that eastern europe is not yet well developed at the level of the other two regions second eastern europe has exhibited mrt estimates that are different from western europe and north america the nations in eastern europe have an economic potential for industrial developments because the level of their industrial pollutions is less than that of the other two regions the potential is also found in their mrt estimates finally an interesting difference can be found in the rs estimate between eastern europe and western europe from 2008 to 2012 they have statistically exhibited a difference between the two regimes but not with north america this is because most nations in both western europe and north america have already attained a high level of economic successes so that they have a limited industrial potential under current production technology and eco technology the situation of the two regions will be changed along with new technology development in contrast eastern europe is different from the other two regions in terms of attaining such a level of social sustainability because of limited capital accumulation and limited opportunity for technology innovation

comparison among u s industrial sectors by dea environmental assessment equipped with analytical capability to handle zero or negative in production factors abstract a green image is recently an important component of corporate sustainability in modern business by extending the two previous works i e wang et al 2014 sueyoshi and wang 2014a this study discusses a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by incorporating an analytical capability to handle zero and or negative in a data set the proposed approach provides us with not only new quantitative assessment on unified operational and environmental performance of firms but also information regarding how to invest for eco technology innovation for abating an amount of their industrial pollutions according to the previous studies the energy industry is an attractive investment target if desirable outputs are measured by return on assets roa as a short term concern and an amount of co 2 emission reduction the selection on a desirable output combination is important in understanding the corporate sustainability of the energy industry because it is the largest emitter among seven industry sectors examined in the previous studies however if the roa is replaced by a corporate value measured by tobin s q ratio as a long term concern the energy industry is not so attractive because it uses a very large production process so that green investment does not immediately increase the corporate value an empirical problem of these previous studies is that they have investigated only successful companies with positive roa or tobin s q ratios the analytical feature clearly indicates a methodological drawback of their studies in contrast this study pays attention to both successful companies with positive net incomes and unsuccessful companies with negative net incomes so being able to measure all aspects of their performance in a short term concern this study finds that the energy industry exhibits a high level of potential on green investment however the energy industry may be not attractive even in the short term concern i e net income partly because governmental regulations on their operation and pollution prevention efforts are stricter than the other industrial sectors this result may be seemingly inconsistent with wang et al 2014 rather the result indicates that successful energy firms can attain the corporate sustainability by investing eco technology innovation but unsuccessful ones cannot attain the sustainability even in the short term concern because they do not have large capital accumulation for eco technology investment whose importance has been first discussed by sueyoshi and goto 2010a in other words the eco technology investment for enhancing a high level of corporate sustainability depends upon an amount of net income generated by each energy firm

voting in legislative elections under plurality rule conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences i show that when there are multiple district elections for a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters an extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority of districts while the existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats furthermore i show that while single district elections always have misaligned voting i e some voters do not vote for their preferred choice equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district finally i show that when parties are impatient a xed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments while uncertainty will favour single party governments

measuring the liquidity effect this paper measures the effect on the federal funds rate of an open market operation the paper deals with simultaneous equations bias by developing a proxy for the errors the federal reserve makes in forecasting the extent to which treasury operations will add or drain reserves available to private banks these errors induce fluctuations in bank reserves which have measurable consequences for the federal funds rate the paper estimates that a reduction in nonborrowed reserves of 30 million if sustained for an entire fourteen day reserve maintenance period will cause the federal funds rate to rise by ten basis points copyright 1997 by american economic association

dea radial and non radial models for unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability theoretical extension by strong complementary slackness conditions abstract this study proposes a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment all radial and non radial models are discussed under natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability implies corporate strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to decrease a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy supported by economists indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its performance by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy supported by corporate strategists in u s business schools indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change on undesirable outputs using the proposed dea assessment this study examines the relationship among energy consumption economic development and environmental protection in japanese prefectures to theoretically extend the use of dea for environmental assessment this study incorporates strong complementary slackness conditions scscs into the proposed radial models the incorporation of scscs has three methodological strengths first dea scscs can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections second the incorporation of scscs makes it possible to restrict dual variables multiples in a specific range without any prior information finally dea scscs can bypass the conventional procedure i e a radial model combined with an additive model used for dea radial measurement

when are plurality rule voting games dominance solvable this paper studies the dominance solvability by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies of plurality rule voting games for any number of alternatives and at least four voters we find sufficient conditions for the game to be dominance solvable ds and not to be ds these conditions can be stated in terms of only one aspect of the game the largest proportion of voters who agree on which alternative is worst in a sequence of subsets of the original set of alternatives when the number of voters is large almost all games can be classified as either ds or not ds when the electorate is sufficiently replicated then if the game is ds a condorcet winner always exists and the outcome is the condorcet winner

japanese fuel mix strategy after disaster of fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant lessons from international comparison among industrial nations measured by dea environmental assessment in time horizon abstract on june 1 2015 the japanese government has announced that the fuel mix will consist of nuclear generation with a range between 20 and 22 and renewable generation with a range between 22 and 24 of the total electricity generation by 2030 a difficulty in understanding the governmental future energy plan is that it does not contain any scientific evidence concerning why japan needs to maintain the amount of nuclear generation and that of renewable at the level between 20 and 22 and between 22 and 24 respectively to investigate the future energy plan this study uses data envelopment analysis dea as a methodology the proposed dea approach incorporates the property of translation invariance the property indicates that an efficiency measure should not be influenced even if inputs and or outputs are shifted toward a same direction by adding or subtracting a specific real number the property makes it possible that we can evaluate the performance of organizations whose production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs contain many zeros and negative values in a data set such an occurrence of zero and negative in production factors is widely observed in many dea performance evaluations this study first uses the desirable property for dea environmental assessment in a time horizon the proposed dea environmental assessment identifies that the reasonable ranges for japanese future fuel mix are a combustible fuel generation within the range between 34 5 and 56 1 b hydro generation within the range between 22 4 and 40 5 c nuclear generation within the range between 10 4 and 13 7 d pumped hydro generation within the range between 3 9 and 6 9 and e renewable generation within the range between 3 7 and 8 4 all of which are measured by these generation capacities it is clearly identified that the future fuel mix proposed by the japanese government is inconsistent with the estimated one which we determine by relatively comparing it with the energy structures of 33 industrial nations the comparison indicates that the japanese future energy plan will be too ambitious to implement the future goal it is easily envisioned that the energy plan will have a considerable difficulty in future it is hoped that the electric power industry can access drastic technological advancements including eco technology innovation and then japan will be able to change the future direction on fuel mix as the government expects

expressive vs strategic voters an empirical assessment abstract leading theories of how voters choose between candidates are rooted in two very different paradigms with starkly different behavioral implications exploiting the incentive structure of germany s electoral system i develop a novel set of empirical tests that pit the canonical pivotal voter model against alternative accounts according to which individuals derive expressive utility from supporting their most preferred candidate the results show that neither paradigm can explain the most salient features of the data in addition the evidence suggests that voters cannot be neatly categorized into sincere and strategic types

a theory of strategic voting in runoff elections abstract this paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic a model of three candidate runoff elections is presented and two new features are included the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous and many types of runoff systems are considered three main results emerge first runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes second a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist finally runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the condorcet loser jel c72 d72

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

optimal path for controlling co2 emissions in china a perspective of efficiency analysis this paper examines the optimal control of co2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis several centralized data envelopment analysis dea models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of co2 emissions under spatial temporal and spatial temporal allocation strategies respectively the models have been used to determine the optimal paths for controlling co2 emissions at provincial and regional levels in china a sensitivity analysis of the optimal path on the emission control coefficient under spatial temporal allocation strategy is further carried out our empirical results show that more developed regions should take emission reduction responsibility earlier than less developed regions in china of the three allocation strategies spatial temporal allocation strategy seems to be a better choice for achieving the optimal control of co2 emissions at country level since it is more encompassing by allowing both timing and spatial substitutions it is also found that there exists an inverted u shape relationship between the aggregate optimal gdp and the emission control coefficient which shows that modest emission reduction policy might be more appropriate for china in order to achieve the joint goals of economic development and co2 emission reduction

returns to scale and damages to scale on u s fossil fuel power plants radial and non radial approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study proposes a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment paying attention to a methodological bias i e different methods produce different results dea is analytically classified into radial and non radial approaches the radial approach determines the level of unified operational and environmental efficiency by measuring an inefficiency score the score indicates the distance of a projection from an observed performance to an efficiency frontier in contrast the non radial approach determines the level of unified efficiency by measuring a total amount of slacks because each slack indicates inefficiency to avoid the methodological bias this study considers the use of radial and non radial approaches in this study we consider a production process where all organizations produce not only desirable good but also undesirable bad outputs as a result of their business operations to unify the two types of outputs this study discusses the concept of disposability which is separated into natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates negative adaptation to a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates corporate strategy by which a firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified efficiency by utilizing new environmental technology and or new management this type of strategy indicates positive adaptation to the regulation change under the two disposability concepts this study discusses how to measure rts returns to scale under natural disposability and dts damages to scale corresponding to rts on undesirable outputs under managerial disposability the two scale measures are analytically discussed by the proposed radial and non radial approaches with scscs or without scscs where scscs indicate strong complementary slackness conditions an illustrative example on u s fossil fuel power plants indicates a policy implication that they need to introduce new technology for environmental protection this study also discusses a necessity of examining a methodological bias in energy studies empirical findings identified in this study document the practicality of the proposed approaches to measure rts dts

the problem of strategic behavior under approval voting approval voting is being promoted as the election reform of the 20th century brams 1980 p 105 and indeed if voters preferences are dichotomous approval voting has some remarkable qualities it is uniquely strategy proof a candidate wins if and only if he is a condorcet winner and voters have simple strategies that are at once sincere and sophisticated however all of these results depend on the existence of dichotomous preferences a contrived and empirically unlikely assumption here i show that these virtues of approval voting are replaced by some rather undesirable features under more plausible assumptions more fundamentally rather than promoting honest behavior as is sometimes implied the existence of multiple sincere strategies almost begs voters to behave strategically i also examine sophisticated approval voting and show that in the general case it need not pick a condorcet alternative ironically there is a condition under which condorcet winners may always be picked but for this to occur voters sometimes have to vote for candidates of whom they disapprove

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

a model of pre electoral coalition formation abstract in many countries three or more candidates compete against one another in single office elections i present a model of three candidates competing for a single office in which two candidates can form a coalition prior to the election a pre electoral coalition since the candidates are both policy and office motivated one candidate can incentivize the other candidate to withdraw his candidacy by choosing a joint policy platform i examine how electoral environments such as election rules ideological distance and pre election polls influence incentives to form pre electoral coalitions i find that pre electoral coalitions are more likely to form i in plurality elections than in two round runoff elections ii as the threshold for first round victory decreases in two round runoff elections iii as the two potential coalition partners ideological distance increases conditional on divided support and iv as the fraction of office value which is transferable increases moreover i analyze and compare voter welfare under plurality and the two round runoff rules

a dynamic duverger s law electoral systems promote strategic voting and affect party systems duverger les partis politiques 1951 proposed that plurality rule leads to bi partyism and proportional representation leads to multi partyism we show that in a dynamic setting these static effects also lead to a higher option value for existing minor parties under plurality rule so their incentive to exit the party system is mitigated by their future benefits from continued participation the predictions of our model are consistent with multiple cross sectional predictions on the comparative number of parties under plurality rule and proportional representation in particular there could be more parties under plurality rule than under proportional representation at any point in time however our model makes a unique time series prediction the number of parties under plurality rule should be less variable than under proportional representation we provide extensive empirical evidence in support of these results

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

the banzhaf fallacy according to a frequently published argument which i will label the banzhaf argument there is an intrinsic large state advantage in presidential elections proportional to the square root of the relative size of the state if the argument were empirically meaningful as its proponents have always implied and usually asserted then a voter in california would enjoy about twice the voting power of a voter in virginia reflecting the roughly fourfold ratio in population this advantage moreover is presented as an intrinsic mathematical property of the electoral college scheme not something deduced from demography voting patterns or some other appeal to empirical observations the earliest versions of the argument are banzhaf 1968 and riker and shapley 1968 subsequent variants of the argument can be found among other places in brams and davis 1974 owen 1975 and lake 1979 with the obvious exception of arrow s impossibility theorem there cannot be many mathematical arguments more often cited by nonmathematical political scientists however when mathematical analysis produces a counterintuitive result it is prudent to allow for the possibility that what needs to be corrected is the mathematics brian barry has made this point in a recent discussion of indices of voting power barry 1980 as it happens the particular voting power index we are considering here provides a very striking illustration of barry s message a preliminary point of the discussion that follows is that the banzhaf argument depends on a treatment of elections for purpose of calculating a power index as if they were like experiments in coin tossing each voter tossing a coin to decide whether to vote democratic or republican of itself the unrealism of the coin tossing model does not make the banzhaf result a fallacy because all models use some more or less unrealistic simplifying assumptions even in the natural sciences and even extremely artificial assumptions occasionally produce adequate approximations of real situations

the macroeconomic effects of large scale asset purchase programmes the effects of asset purchase programs on macroeconomic variables are likely to be moderate we reach this conclusion after simulating the impact of the federal reserve s second large scale asset purchase program lsap ii in a dsge model enriched with a preferred habitat framework and estimated on u s data our simulations suggest that such a program increases gdp growth by less than half a percentage point although the effect on the level of gdp is very persistent the program s marginal contribution to infl ation is very small one key reason for our fi ndings is that we estimate a small degree of fi nancial market segmentation if we enrich the set of observables with a measure of long term debt the semi elasticity of the risk premium to the amount of debt in privatesector hands is substantially smaller than that reported in the recent empirical literature in this case our baseline estimates of the effects of lsap ii on the macroeconomy decrease by at least a factor of two throughout the analysis a commitment to an extended period at the zero lower bound for nominal interest rates increases the effects of asset purchase programs on gdp growth and infl ation

data envelopment analysis for environmental assessment comparison between public and private ownership in petroleum industry abstract environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue in the world this study discusses how to apply data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment an important feature of the dea environmental assessment is that it needs to classify outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because private and public entities often produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the three types of unification for dea environmental assessment by using non radial dea models the first unification considers both an increase and a decrease in the input vector along with a decrease in the direction vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification measures unified efficiency the second unification considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability and measures unified efficiency under natural disposability the third unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as managerial disposability and measures unified efficiency under managerial disposability all the unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs to document their practical implications this study has applied the proposed approach to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil firms this study identifies two important findings on the petroleum industry one of the two findings is that national oil companies under public ownership outperform international oil companies under private ownership in terms of unified operational and environmental efficiency and unified efficiency under natural disposability however the performance of international oil companies exhibits an increasing trend in unified efficiency the other finding is that national oil companies need to satisfy the environmental standard of its own country while international oil companies need to satisfy the international standard that is more restricted than the national standards as a consequence international oil companies outperform national oil companies in terms of unified efficiency under managerial disposability

voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information we analyze two candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters each voter has noisy private information about the state variable we show that the fraction of voters whose vote depends on their private information goes to zero as the size of the electorate goes to infinity nevertheless elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge equilibrium voting behavior is to a large extent determined by the electoral rule i e if a candidate is required to get at least x percent of the vote in order to win the election then in equilibrium this candidate gets very close to x percent of the vote with probability close to one finally if the distribution from which preferences are drawn is uncertain then elections will generally not satisfy full information equivalence and the fraction of voters who take informative action does not converge to zero

clientelism contagious voting and governance this paper explains inferior quality of governance in less affluent countries in terms of a patron client relationship between political parties and a large section of voters the client voters resort to strategic voting which is shown to be contagious leading to suboptimal effort choice by the incumbent government and a higher probability for the incumbent to remain in power the possibility of competition between the incumbent and the opposition in terms of expenditure on political propaganda actually helps the incumbent and reinforces these results

a new approach to measure tactical voting evidence from the british elections although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences in this article we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results this approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies we show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election mainly for liberal democratic voters supporting labour moreover our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes we also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting

divided majority and information aggregation theory and experiment this paper studies theoretically and experimentally the properties of plurality and approval voting when a majority gets divided by information imperfections the majority faces two challenges aggregating information to select the best majority candidate and coordinating to defeat the minority candidate under plurality the majority cannot achieve both goals at once under approval voting it can welfare is strictly higher because some voters approve of both majority alternatives in the laboratory we find i strong evidence of strategic voting and ii superiority of approval voting over plurality finally subject behavior suggests the need to study equilibria in asymmetric strategies

multicandidate elections aggregate uncertainty in the laboratory the rational voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions the paradox of voting and duverger s law are at odds with reality recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an arguably unrealistic assumption the absence of aggregate uncertainty about the distribution of preferences in the electorate in this paper we propose direct empirical evidence of the effects of aggregate uncertainty in multicandidate elections adopting a theory based experimental approach we explore whether aggregate uncertainty indeed favors the emergence of non duverger s law equilibria in plurality elections our experimental results support the main theoretical predictions

the relevance of irrelevant alternatives abstract in an experimental setting subjects face a standard elicitation task for certainty equivalents we show that when a third objectively irrelevant option is added to the standard task the willingness to take risks increases

radial and non radial approaches for environmental assessment by data envelopment analysis corporate sustainability and effective investment for technology innovation abstract environmental assessment and protection are important concerns in modern business consumers are interested in corporate effort and investment for environmental protection it can be easily imagined that they avoid purchasing products from dirty imaged companies even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies a green image is recently a very important concern for corporate survivability in a competitive global market by extending previous works on environment assessment and corporate sustainability where companies need to consider both economic prosperity and pollution prevention in their operations this study discusses a new use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by utilizing its radial and non radial measurements the proposed radial and non radial approaches may guide corporate leaders managers and policy makers by providing not only quantitative assessment on their efforts for environmental protection but also information regarding how to invest for technology innovation on abatement of undesirable outputs the empirical investigation identifies that the green investment in u s energy industry is useful for improving its unified operational and environmental performance if operational performance is measured by roa return on assets and an amount of co 2 emission reduction because the industry is the largest emitter among seven industry sectors examined in this study the green investment makes it possible that firms can increase their net incomes by a good corporate image however if the financial measure is replaced by a corporate value i e tobin s q ratio mainly measured by stock price the energy industry does not exhibit the best investment opportunity because the effect of green investment is limited on enhancing its corporate value the energy industry is a very large process industry so that the green investment does not immediately increase its corporate value as found in the other industrial sectors such as information technology industry

sources of production inefficiency and productivity growth in china a global data envelopment analysis abstract the current mode of production in china is extensive and inefficient and has caused great stress on both resources and the environment this paper focuses on analyzing the sources of production inefficiency and productivity growth in china here a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose production inefficiency into three components input inefficiency economic output inefficiency and environmental inefficiency furthermore by applying a method based on global data envelopment analysis we take a further step to analyze the key factors responsible for the change of environmental productivity during 2003 2011 from the point of view of technical progress productive scale and management level the results show that redundancy in energy and labor inputs and excessive emission of sulfur dioxide chemical oxygen demand and ammonia nitrogen are the main sources of production inefficiency in china during the sample period the efficiency in all inputs and environmental emissions has improved except for capital input efficiency which had a decreasing trend further analysis shows that the overall environmental productivity in china has begun to follow an ascending path technical progress is the most powerful contributor to china s productivity growth while the decreases in scale and management efficiency are the two main obstacles preventing productivity improvement

rewriting monetary policy 101 what s the fed s preferred post crisis approach to raising interest rates abstract for many years prior to the global financial crisis the federal open market committee set a target for the federal funds rate and achieved that target through small purchases and sales of securities in the open market in the aftermath of the financial crisis with a superabundant level of reserve balances in the banking system having been created as a result of the federal reserve s large scale asset purchase programs this approach to implementing monetary policy will no longer work this paper provides a primer on the fed s implementation of monetary policy we use the standard textbook model to illustrate why the approach used by the federal reserve before the financial crisis to keep the federal funds rate near the federal open market committee s target will not work in current circumstances and explain the approach that the committee intends to use instead when it decides to begin raising short term interest rates

social interactions in voting behavior distinguishing between strategic voting and the bandwagon effect prior studies of strategic voting in multi party elections potentially overestimate the extent of it by counting erroneously votes cast under different motivations as strategic votes we propose a method that corrects some of this overestimation by distinguishing between strategic voting voting for a candidate other than the most preferred one to reduce the likelihood of an election victory by a third candidate that is disliked even more and the votes cast under the bandwagon effect voting for the expected winner instead of the most preferred party to conform to the majority or to be on the winning side our method follows from the observation that a vote cannot be strategic unless the voter believes that it will affect the outcome of the election with a non zero probability while a vote cast under the bandwagon effect requires no such belief employing survey data that include the respondent s assessment of the importance of his vote we illustrate this method by estimating the extent of strategic voting in the 2005 uk general election the estimated extent of strategic voting 4 22 is strictly less than self reported strategic voting 6 94 but the discrepancy cannot be attributed in a statistically significant way to the bandwagon effect suggesting that motivations other than those identified in the literature may be at work

who votes more strategically strategic voting is an important explanation for aggregate political phenomena but we know little about how strategic voting varies across types of voters are richer voters more strategic than poorer voters does strategic behavior vary with age education gender or political leaning the answers may be important for assessing how well an electoral system represents different preferences in society we introduce a new approach to measuring and comparing strategic voting across voters that can be broadly applied given appropriate survey data in recent british elections we find that older voters vote more strategically than younger voters and that richer voters vote more strategically than poorer voters even as strategic behavior varies little across the education level the differences in strategic voting by age and income are smaller than observed differences in turnout by age and income but they tend to exacerbate these better known inequalities in political participation

theoretical comparisons of electoral systems abstract elements of an economic theory of political institutions are introduced a variety of electoral systems are reviewed cox s threshold is shown to measure incentives for diversity and specialization of candidates positions when the number of serious candidates is given duverger s law and its generalizations are discussed to predict the number of serious candidates duverger s law is interpreted as a statement about electoral barriers to entry and this idea is linked to the question of the effectiveness of democratic competition as a deterrent to political corruption the impact of post electoral bargaining on party structure in presidential and parliamentary systems is discussed

moderating political extremism single round versus runoff elections under plurality rule we compare single round versus runoff elections under plurality rule allowing for partly endogenous party formation under runoff elections the number of political candidates is larger but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy and hence policy volatility is smaller because the bargaining power of the political extremes is reduced compared to single round elections the predictions on the number of candidates and on policy volatility are confirmed by evidence from a regression discontinuity design in italy where cities above 15 000 inhabitants elect the mayor with a runoff system while those below hold single round elections jel c78 d72

photovoltaic power stations in germany and the united states a comparative study by data envelopment analysis abstract this study compares photovoltaic pv power stations between germany and the united states to examine which country more efficiently provides renewable energy in their usages for the comparative analysis this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea as a methodology to evaluate the performance of pv power stations from the perspective of both solar and land usages a total of one hundred sixty pv power stations eighty in germany and eighty in the united states are used for this comparison the demand for sustainable energy and energy security has been rapidly increasing over the past decade because of concerns about environment and limited resources pv solutions are one of many renewable technologies that are being developed to satisfy a recent demand of electricity germany is the world s top installer and consumer of pv power and the united states is one of the top five nations germany leads the way in installed pv capacity even though the nation has less solar resources and land area due to limited solar resources low insolation and sunshine and land area the united states should have a clear advantage over germany however the empirical result of this study exhibits that pv power stations in germany operate more efficiently than those of the united states even if the latter has many solar and land advantages the surprising result indicates that the united states has room for improvement when it comes to utilizing solar and land resources and needs to reform the solar policy for such a purpose feed in tariff fit may be an effective energy policy at the state level in the united states because the fit provides investors such as utility companies and other types of energy firms with financial incentives to develop large pv power stations and generation facilities for other renewable energy it may be true that the fit is a powerful policy tool to promote pv and other renewable installation and support a reduction of an amount of greenhouse gases however the fit poses a large financial burden to consumers with a massive increase in renewable energy installation like in germany and spain therefore it is necessary for the united states to consider how to align a policy with a speed of technology innovation to balance between the benefit and the cost derived from the policy implementation on renewable energy in addition this study discusses policy issues regarding cost allocation due to fit among stakeholders related to the electric power industry at the end this study proposes a new type of wholesale electricity market that provides simultaneous trading on electricity and greenhouse gas emissions by fully utilizing modern computer science technology that exists in universities and national laboratories of the united states

environmental assessment for corporate sustainability by resource utilization and technology innovation dea radial measurement on japanese industrial sectors abstract this study proposes a new use of dea data envelopment analysis radial approach to examine the corporate sustainability of japanese industrial sectors the concept of corporate sustainability is measured by its subcomponent measures including uen unified efficiency under natural disposability uem unified efficiency under managerial disposability uenm unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uei unified efficiency for intermediate measurement and uenm dc unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability with desirable congestion among the five measures the uei examines a degree of how each firm can efficiently utilize its resources the uenm dc examines a degree of how the firm can reduce an amount of undesirable outputs by technology innovation and or managerial change such a combined use between uei and uenm dc has been never explored in dea environmental assessment the empirical results obtained from the proposed approach have identified two important implications one of the two implications is that the japanese energy industry has been long under governmental regulation so that energy firms do not have corporate governance capabilities at the level of other industrial sectors which are competing in a global market in particular the implication is applicable to japanese electric power firms it is necessary for them to change their corporate governances e g by adding new executive board members who have international experience and or woman executives as widely found in american and european energy industries so that they can pay attention to consumers not regulatory agencies of the japanese government the other implication is that technology innovation can more effectively improve the performance of the energy sector employing high efficiency and low carbon generation technologies to achieve desirable fuel mix is essential for improving the corporate sustainability of the japanese energy sector

weak and strong disposability vs natural and managerial disposability in dea environmental assessment comparison between japanese electric power industry and manufacturing industries the economic concept of weak and strong disposability has long dominated studies on dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment this study reviews the two disposability concepts from their conceptual and methodological implications in particular this study is interested in the concept of weak disposability because the concept is believed to have an analytical capability to measure an occurrence of congestion the two economic concepts on disposability accepted by production economists are replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy by which a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector a firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation in contrast the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified performance by utilizing new clean air technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two groups of disposability this study compares between weak strong disposability and natural managerial disposability in terms of their conceptual and methodological differences focusing upon the concept of congestion and technology innovation furthermore using the concept of natural and managerial disposability this study compares japanese electric power firms with manufacturing firms this study finds that the manufacturing firms outperform the electric power firms under natural disposability an opposite result is found under managerial disposability this empirical study also finds that the two groups of japanese firms have attained desirable good congestion due to technology innovation based upon such empirical results this study identifies two policy implications one of the two implications is that the two groups of japanese industries have attained a high level of technology innovation by a result of environmental regulation the other is that the electric power industry operates more efficiently to reduce the co2 emission than the manufacturing industries

estimating dynamic games of electoral competition to evaluate term limits in us gubernatorial elections this paper shows how to identify and estimate using standard semi parametric techniques a class of dynamic games with perfect monitoring that have been at the frontier of recent research in political economy the empirical analysis provides novel quantitative insights into the trade off that voters face between ideology and ability the differences in ability and ideology among parties and states and the differences in preferences between political candidates and voters we analyze the consequences of term limits and quantify their relative importance specifically we characterize conditions under which term limits improve voters welfare

dea radial measurement for environmental assessment and planning desirable procedures to evaluate fossil fuel power plants abstract energy policy depends on a proper use of methodology in guiding a large energy issue such as the global warming and climate change dea is one of such methodologies that are often used for preparing environmental policy which is closely linked to various energy issues unfortunately the use of dea applied to environmental policy is insufficient often misguiding policy makers and other individuals who are involved in energy issues this study provides three guidelines for a use of dea in preparing environmental assessment first it is important to prepare both primal and dual formulations to confirm whether information regarding all production factors i e inputs desirable and undesirable outputs is fully utilized in dea assessment second dea has model variations in radial and non radial measurements it is necessary for us to examine environmental issues by different models in order to avoid a methodological bias existing in those empirical studies finally dea environmental assessment needs to incorporate the concept of natural and managerial disposability the natural disposability indicates that a firm negatively adapts a regulation change on undesirable outputs in contrast the managerial disposability indicates that a firm positively adapts the regulation change because the firm considers the regulation change as a new business opportunity

proportional versus winner take all electoral vote allocations this paper considers how the welfare of voters is affected under an electoral college system when some state elects to award electoral votes in proportion to the number of votes received by each candidate rather than awarding all electoral votes to the winner of the state i show that a majority of voters in that state is made worse off as a result of the change i also give conditions under which voters in other states are made better or worse off as a result of the change

returns to scale and damages to scale under natural and managerial disposability strategy efficiency and competitiveness of petroleum firms environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue all over the world this study discusses how to use data environment analysis dea for environmental assessment for planning corporate strategy and international competitiveness an important feature of dea environmental assessment is that it classifies outputs into desirable good and undesirable bad outputs because all private and public entities produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities this study proposes the two types of output unification for dea environmental assessment by using a non radial model one of the two output unifications is that it considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of unification is referred to as natural disposability the other unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs this type of strategy is referred to as managerial disposability both unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs after developing the two concepts on disposability this study theoretically explores how to measure returns to scale rts under natural disposability and damages to scale dts under managerial disposability to document the practicality of the proposed approach this study applies it to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil companies this study identifies four important findings on the petroleum industry first national oil companies outperform international oil companies in the unified efficiency under natural disposability second international oil companies outperform national oil companies in the unified efficiency under managerial disposability third national oil firms exhibit a mixed result on rts while international oil firms exhibit decreasing rts finally both national and international oil companies exhibit increasing dts implying that all oil firms need to decrease their operational sizes for improving their environmental performance on co2 emission as an alternative strategy the result suggests that they need to introduce technology innovation e g clean air technology into their business operations the technology based strategy has more practicality than the size reduction in their operations

china s regional sustainability and diversified resource allocation dea environmental assessment on economic development and air pollution abstract environmental protection including the prevention of air pollution and health hazard materials such as pm2 5 and pm10 is now a very serious policy issue in china after attaining the rapid economic growth and development the pm stands for particular matter indicating the size of both solid particles and liquid droplets found in air unfortunately the economic development has produced a serious healthcare problem in not only china and other surrounding nations to enhance people s healthcare and appeal a good national image to the world china is recently looking for the new industrial and environmental policy direction to attain social sustainability in terms of economic development and environmental prevention to discuss policy implications on the new policy direction this study utilizes data envelopment analysis dea for assessment on its regional performance by incorporating pm2 5 and pm10 as undesirable outputs along with two disposability concepts i e natural disposability and managerial disposability no previous dea study has incorporated the amount of pm2 5 and pm10 in empirical investigation using a simulated data set for the period of 2013 2014 this study measures the efficiency of municipality cities under four different types of regional classifications the empirical results indicate that the chinese government should distribute its economic resources to cities which locate in the northwest region including lanzhou xining yinchuan and urumqi and reinforce more strict regulation on energy consumptions for environmental prevention in major cities e g beijing tianjin shanghai and chongqing the industrial policy change from the economic growth to the environment protection is essential for the future of china which is currently the second largest economic power in the world the environmental protection can enhance the china s image of contributing in economics industry and environmental protection to all other nations it can be envisioned that the new policy effort reduces the regional imbalance and increases the social sustainability in china the empirical findings and policy implications discussed in this study are applicable to not only china but also other industrial and developing nations and those are useful in guiding their industrial and environmental policy development

efficiency based rank assessment for electric power industry a combined use of data envelopment analysis dea and dea discriminant analysis da abstract this study discusses a combined use of dea data environment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis to determine the efficiency based rank of energy firms this type of performance evaluation is important because we often have a difficulty in accessing a large sample on energy firms to derive reliable empirical results the proposed approach is useful in dealing with such a limited number of energy firms often found in previous dea studies on energy industries in the world the proposed approach uses dea to classify energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups based upon their efficiency scores then it utilizes dea da to assess their efficiency scores and ranks in this stage we can find an adjusted efficiency score for each energy firm the proposed approach provides us with the following analytical capabilities all of which cannot be found in a conventional use of dea in assessing energy firms first the proposed dea approach can avoid zero in all multipliers on efficient energy firms by incorporating scsc strong complementary slackness condition so that it can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections the dea result classifies all energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups second dea da applied to the two groups evaluates all energy firms by an industry wide evaluation not depending upon a limited number of efficient energy firms in a reference set as found in a conventional use of dea the analytical capability can reduce the number of efficient energy firms third the proposed approach can provide their efficiency based ranking scores finally we can conduct a rank sum test based upon their ranking scores to obtain a statistical inference as an application this study uses the proposed approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power industry we find two economic implications one of the two implications is that no major change has occurred in the operational performance of japanese electric power industry because of japanese sluggish economy from 2005 to 2009 the other implication indicates that there are strategic differences in the operation of japanese electric power firms after the liberalization

manipulation through political endorsements abstract we study elections with three candidates under plurality voting a candidate is a condorcet loser if the majority of the voters place that candidate at the bottom of their preference rankings we first show that a condorcet loser might win the election in a three way race next we introduce to the model an endorser who has private information about the true probability distribution of the preferences of the voters observable endorsements facilitate coordination among voters who may otherwise split their votes and lead to the victory of the condorcet loser when the endorser has an ideological bias towards one of the candidates the coordination impact of endorsements remains unaltered moreover the endorser successfully manipulates the outcome of the election in favor of his bias even if his ideological bias is known by the voters the results are true for any endorsement cost and any magnitude of bias as long as the electorate is large enough

environmental assessment by dea radial measurement u s coal fired power plants in iso independent system operator and rto regional transmission organization abstract the economic concept of weak and strong disposability on undesirable outputs dominated the previous discussions on dea data envelopment analysis radial measurement for environmental assessment this study reexamines the economic concept from the perspective of corporate strategies on how to adapt a regulation change on undesirable outputs the economic concept of disposability conventionally accepted by production economists is replaced by natural and managerial disposability in this study the natural disposability implies an environmental strategy that a firm attempts to decrease an input vector to reduce a vector of undesirable outputs given the decreased input vector the firm attempts to increase a vector of desirable outputs as much as possible this type of strategy indicates negative adaptation meanwhile the managerial disposability indicates an opposite strategy by increasing the input vector this disposability expresses an environmental strategy by which a firm considers a regulation change on undesirable outputs as a new business opportunity a firm attempts to improve its unified operational and environmental performance by utilizing new technology and or new management the strategy indicates positive adaptation considering the two types of disposability this study discusses how to measure unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability by dea radial models to document the practicality of the proposed dea environmental assessment this study applies it to compare the performance of u s coal fired power plants under isos rtos independent system operators regional transmission organizations with that of the other power plants not belonging to any organization this study identifies two empirical findings one of the two findings is that the latter coal fired power plants outperform the former power plants belonging to isos rtos in terms of three efficiency measures this result indicates that isos and rtos do not provide an effective coordination for coal fired power plants at the level that can be found in the other power plants the other finding is that there is technological improvement in the operation of coal fired power plants

dynamic government performance honeymoons and crises of confidence we use a formal theoretical framework to explore the interplay between a government s longevity and its performance ministers perform well when their careers are valuable this is so when the government s duration is expected to be long the government s survival depends on its popularity and finally that popularity depends on its ministers performance the feedback loop between performance and longevity means that multiple rational expectations equilibria can arise ministers work hard for a popular government but divert efforts elsewhere if they believe the government is doomed these alternatives are both self fulfilling prophecies however the presence of perhaps small random events that buffet the performance and popularity of a government is sufficient to pin down a unique equilibrium we explore the dynamics that arise a crisis of confidence involving the rapid collapse of a government s performance is sparked when a sequence of negative shocks push the popularity of the government below a unique critical threshold

investment strategy for sustainable society by development of regional economies and prevention of industrial pollutions in japanese manufacturing sectors abstract a balance between industrial pollution prevention and economic growth becomes a world wide issue to develop a sustainable society in many industrial nations to discuss the issue this study proposes a new use of dea environmental assessment to determine how to effectively allocate capital for developing regional industries the amount of capital is used to invest for technology innovation for both local economic growth and environmental protection in this study the proposed approach separates outputs into desirable and undesirable categories inputs are also separated into two categories one of which indicates an amount of investment on capital assets the other category is used for production activities the proposed approach unifies them by two disposability concepts this study has evaluated the performance of manufacturing industries in 47 prefectures local government units in japan by unified efficiency under natural disposability uen unified efficiency under managerial disposability uem and unified efficiency under natural and managerial disposability uenm the uenm is further separated into its two cases with and without a possible occurrence on desirable congestion or technology innovation on undesirable outputs this study has empirically confirmed that japanese manufacturing industries need to make their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution substances by investing in technology innovation furthermore most of economic activities are currently located at metropolitan regions e g tokyo in japan to develop a sustainable society japan needs to allocate capital into regions with a high level of investment effectiveness by shifting the manufacturing industries from the metropolitan regions to much promising local areas identified in this study such a shift along with technology innovation makes it possible to reduce air pollutions in the entire japan by balancing economic growth and pollution prevention this empirical study confirms that the proposed approach is useful in both guiding regional planning and developing a sustainable society it is easily envisioned that the proposed approach is useful for not only japan but also the other industrial and developing nations

strategic voting equilibria under the single nontransferable vote previous investigations of strategic voting equilibria in mass electorates have looked only at single member districts i shall investigate such equilibria in multimember districts operating under the single nontransferable vote system what appear to be the most natural equilibria conform to the m 1 rule according to which strategic voting in m seat districts produces exactly m 1 vote getting candidates in equilibrium any others having their support totally undercut this result provides the beginnings of a formal underpinning for reed s recent extension of duverger s law to the japanese case the model also generates specific and empirically testable hypotheses concerning the exceptions to the m 1 rule that one ought to expect in equilibrium i test these hypotheses with japanese data finally the model also reveals a type of strategic voting that is specific to multimember districts i use japanese data again to explore the empirical importance of this kind of strategic voting

tactical coordination in plurality electoral systems simple plurality election systems commonly known as first past the post are often associated with the dominance of two political parties such systems tend to reward leading parties with a disproportionately large number of seats the mechanical effect and provoke tactical voting where voters switch away from trailing parties the psychological effect we view tactical voting as a coordination problem a group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party such as the conservatives in recent uk elections and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger such as labour or the liberal democrats in order to do this crucially voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played tactical voting is a global game we show that in this setting voters will only partially coordinate furthermore tactical voting exhibits negative feedback tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction we calibrate our model and apply it to the uk general election of 1997 throughout england we find that the mechanical and psychological effects tend to offset each other tactical voting serves to reverse the conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of preferences

dea environmental assessment in time horizon radial approach for malmquist index measurement on petroleum companies abstract the climate change and various pollutions have been influencing our societies and economies the environmental assessment to be discussed in this study is increasingly important because it serves as an initial step toward pollution prevention corporate leaders policy makers researchers and individuals who are interested in environmental protection have been paying attention to the assessment so that they can prepare policy suggestions on the global warming and climate change as a methodology for the assessment this study proposes a use of data environment analysis dea in a time horizon most of data sets on the climate change are sampled in a time series where the performance of organizations fluctuates every moment in applying the dea environmental assessment to such a data set it is necessary for us to classify outputs into desirable e g oil production and undesirable e g co 2 emission categories because all organizations usually produce not only desirable but also undesirable outputs as a result of their economic activities to unify the two different types of outputs this study incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of dea and extends them into a time horizon for the research purpose this study incorporates malmquist index into the proposed dea environmental assessment to examine an occurrence of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is further separated into four subcomponents in a time horizon these subcomponents are differently expressed under the natural and managerial disposability thus eight different subcomponents on the malmquist index are proposed to measure the frontier shift as an application this study uses the proposed dea approach to examine whether the frontier shift due to technology progress occurs or not in the petroleum industry from 2005 to 2009 our empirical study finds that the industry has not exhibited any major frontier shift under natural disposability but showing a considerable frontier shift under managerial disposability in other words the petroleum firms have improved their environmental performance by eco technology to reduce an amount of co 2 emission during the observed annual periods

measuring energy consumption efficiency of the construction industry the case of china the energy conservation has become a considerable issue in construction industry for achieving sustainable development therefore it is crucial for policy makers to look for optimized and flexible tools to measure the total energy consumption efficiency in construction industry data envelopment analysis dea can be applied for multiple input and output decision making units dmus productivity measurement dea based malmquist productivity index mpi can be used as a tool for measuring the productivity change longitudinally in this paper we use input oriented model to measure the energy consumption productivity change of the construction industry from 2004 to 2009 with data in 26 provinces of china it is found that only guangdong demonstrated effective energy improving in the whole reference period it also identified the regional groups always lie on the efficiency frontier of energy consumption as benchmarks regional analysis shows that energy conservation gaps exist between northeastern western region and central eastern region dea based malmquist productivity index provides a good way to measure the energy consumption efficiency and can help policy makers to improve strategies of sustainable development in china

voter uncertainty and failure of duverger s law an empirical analysis real world simple plurality elections rarely bear out the strong duvergerian prediction that in equilibrium only two competitors receive votes recent advances in strategic voting theory demonstrate that voter uncertainty about competitors true support levels in the constituency may lead to limited strategic voting and hence incomplete desertion of trailing parties this is the first attempt to estimate empirically the impact of uncertainty on incentives to vote strategically calibrating a model of strategic voting to voting results from simple plurality elections in german constituencies it is found that strategic voters operate under high levels of uncertainty these results support the proposition that uncertainty about party support impedes formation of duvergerian equilibria

voting as communicating this paper develops a model where voters trade off two different motives when deciding how to vote they care about current decision making they are strategic but they also care about communicating their views about their most preferred candidate so as to influence future elections by influencing other voters opinion and or party positioning in effect voters in this model are intermediate between strategic and sincere voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates this allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication e g by opting for 2 round systems rather than 1 round systems

dea environmental assessment in a time horizon malmquist index on fuel mix electricity and co2 of industrial nations abstract climate change and global warming become a major policy issue in the world economic activities produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission the important policy issue is how each nation can balance between economic development and environmental protection to attain a sustainable society in attaining the sustainable society environmental assessment is increasingly important because it can serve as an initial step toward the green growth of each nation for the purpose this study proposes a new use of dea data environment analysis for environmental assessment in a time horizon the proposed use of dea incorporates malmquist index to examine the degree of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is conceptually separated into six subcomponents which are further divided into twelve different subcomponents six subcomponents two disposability concepts under the natural and managerial disposability in the index measurement it is necessary for us to consider a frontier crossover among different periods because technology innovation usually has a time lag until it really appears as an empirical application this study utilizes the proposed approach to identify the relationship among fuel mix electricity and co 2 of ten industrial nations this study finds three important empirical findings first there is a time lag in technology innovation on electricity generation and co 2 emission reduction consequently it is necessary to consider the existence of a frontier crossover in assessing the electric power industry second nuclear generation as found in france as well as hydro and renewable energy as found in netherlands are important for the development of a sustainable society although the former is associated with a very high level of risk and the latter has a limited generation capacity finally the electric power industry has been making a corporate effort to reduce the amount of co 2 emission by utilizing nuclear and renewable energy

analysis on china s eco innovations regulation context intertemporal change and regional differences abstract eco innovation is recognized as a determinant of success or failure of environmental protection efforts in the long run this paper attempts to examine china s eco innovation gains in response to the energy saving and emissions reduction eser policy enforced during 2006 2010 we first construct an integrated analysis framework to evaluate the changes of energy and environmental performance used as the proxy of eco innovation and then the intertemporal change of china s eco innovation gains as well as the regional differences is investigated the results indicate that china had accelerated its process of eco innovations during 2006 2010 when a series of eser policies were enforced the developments and wide adoptions of advanced energy saving and environmentally friendly technologies serve as the primary driving forces while upgrading management skills and organizational designs contribute relatively little furthermore the realizing paths of cross region eco innovations in china are obviously discrepant

on 64 majority rule introduction d une definition de consensus social base sur deux restrictions une sur les preferences individuelles et l autre sur la distribution des preferences dans ce cas de consensus une regle de majorite a 64 presente de nombreuses proprietes interessantes par opposition aux regles de super majorite possedant des proprietes paradoxales comme les regles electorales americaines

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

green productivity growth in china s industrial economy abstract this paper uses a directional distance function ddf and the malmquist luenberger productivity index to estimate the changing patterns of green total factor productivity gtfp growth of 38 chinese industrial sectors during the period 1980 2010 unlike the measures of traditional total factor productivity tfp growth the ddf incorporates carbon dioxide emissions as an undesirable output directly into the production technology which credit sectors for simultaneously reducing their emissions and increasing their output our estimates of aggregate and sector level gtfp growth reveal that chinese industry is not yet on the path towards sustainable low carbon growth a dynamic panel data analysis of the determinants of gtfp across sectors is used to identify factors that might rectify this situation including state owned enterprise soe reform the growth of small private enterprises continued openness to foreign investment and higher spending on r d particularly in emission intensive sectors

stability and coordination in duverger s law a formal model of preelection polls and strategic voting this paper investigates the dynamics of the wasted vote phenomenon and duverger s law i construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate the results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election specifically i show that in a bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes in the limit these equilibria require extreme coordination however and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the duvergerian equilibria thus non duvergerian equilibria are unstable while two party equilibria are not in addition i describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a duvergerian outcome

have we underestimated the likelihood and severity of zero lower bound events prior to the financial crisis most economists probably did not view the zero lower bound zlb as a major problem for central banks using a range of structural and statistical models we find that previous research understated the zlb threat by ignoring uncertainty about model parameters and latent variables focusing too much on the great moderation experience and relying on structural models whose dynamics cannot generate sustained zlb episodes our analysis also suggests that the federal reserve s asset purchases while materially improving macroeconomic conditions did not prevent the zlb constraint from having first order adverse effects on real activity and inflation

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

sequential voting in large elections with multiple candidates abstract i analyze strategic voting incentives in large elections with three candidates when voting takes place sequentially voters have perfect information about their private preferences but do not know the distribution from which other voters preferences are drawn if a candidate finishes last in an early voting round voters deduce that this candidate is likely to be less popular amongst the remaining voters and the remaining voters almost always have an incentive to stop voting for this candidate by contrast sincere voting equilibria can exist under either simultaneous voting or an early voting round of sequential voting without knife edge assumptions

groups in rational turnout models a model of the strategic calculus of voting that incorporates the behavior of groups is presented if candidates choose different positions positive turnout is possible in partial equilibrium and is generally larger than that without group rationality nevertheless if candidates are probability maximizers and a unique general equilibrium exists the candidates will choose equivalent positions and turnout will be zero even with group rationality but if candidates care about both policy and winning they will choose different positions and cause positive turnout this turnout will be larger than that that would occur without group rationality group rationality alone cannot explain positive turnout in a general equilibrium theory of elections it does imply larger turnout in conjunction with policy oriented candidates than would be predicted solely by individualistic rational behavior

a unified method of evaluating electoral systems and redistricting plans we derive a unified statistical method with which one can produce substantially improved definitions and estimates of almost any feature of two party electoral systems that can be defined based on district vote shares our single method enables one to calculate more efficient estimates with more trustworthy assessments of their uncertainty than each of the separate multifarious existing measures of partisan bias electoral responsiveness seats votes curves expected or predicted vote in each district in a legislature the probability that a given party will win the seat in each district the proportion of incumbents or others who will lose their seats the proportion of women or minority candidates to be elected the incumbency advantage and other causal effects the likely effects on the electoral system and district votes of proposed electoral reforms such as term limitations campaign spending limits and drawing majority minority districts and numerous others to illustrate we estimate the partisan bias and electoral responsiveness of the u s house of representatives since 1900 and evaluate the fairness of competing redistricting plans for the 1992 ohio state legislature

the federal reserve s tools for policy normalization in a preferred habitat model of financial markets we develop a model to analyze monetary policy implementation with multiple federal reserve liabilities and superabundant reserves the analysis demonstrates the federal reserve s tools including interest on excess reserves ioer overnight reverse repurchase agreements on rrp and term deposits should allow the federal reserve to raise the short term interest rates to any desired level we find the contribution of each the increase in the ioer and on rrp offering rates in firming money market rates suggested by the data during the december 2015 policy tightening event is remarkably similar to the effect of each tool implied by the calibrated model

a comprehensive analysis of china s regional energy saving and emission reduction efficiency from production and treatment perspectives abstract energy and environmental issues have recently aroused increasing interest in china and many approaches are used to evaluate energy and environmental performance in this paper a two stage network dea framework is applied to evaluate the efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction in china during the period of the eleventh five year plan from 2006 to 2010 in this study economic activities are divided into production and treatment processes this is different from previous research which generally focused on either environmental efficiency or energy efficiency omitting the integration of energy and environmental measures today energy saving and emission reduction are both parts of the basic state policy of china and are equally important the empirical results in this study show that i eastern china has the best energy saving and emission reduction efficiency performing is better than western and central china ii the efficiency of the production process in central china is better than that in western china while the western area performs better than the central area in term of treatment efficiency iii integrated efficiency of energy saving and emission reduction of china was relatively stable in the five years and the pollution treatment efficiency maintained a rising trend

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

inferring strategic voting we estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes we adopt a set estimator using japanese general election data we nd a large fraction 75 3 80 3 of strategic voters only a small fraction 2 4 5 5 of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred misaligned voting existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting accordingly while our estimate of strategic voting is high our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies

metafroniter energy efficiency with co2 emissions and its convergence analysis for china this paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 30 provinces in china during the period of 1997 2011 using a meta frontier framework with the improved directional distance function ddf we construct a new environmental production possibility set by combining the super efficiency and sequential data envelopment analysis dea models to avoid discriminating power problem and technical regress when evaluating efficiency by ddf then it is used in a meta frontier framework to reflect the technology heterogeneities across east central and west china the results indicate that eastern china achieved the highest progress inefficiency relative to the metafrontier followed by western and the central china by focusing on technology gaps we offer some suggestions for the different groups based on group frontier and meta frontier analyses the inefficiency can be attributed to managerial failure for eastern and western china and technological differences for central china the convergence analysis shows that energy and co2 emission governance will produce negative effects on economic growth and it is suitable and acceptable to introduce rigorous environmental measures in eastern china

coordination risk and the price of debt abstract creditors of a distressed borrower face a coordination problem even if the fundamentals are sound fear of premature foreclosure by others may lead to pre emptive action undermining the project recognition of this problem lies behind corporate bankruptcy provisions across the world and it has been identified as a culprit in international financial crises but has received scant attention from the literature on debt pricing without common knowledge of fundamentals the incidence of failure is uniquely determined provided that private information is precise enough this affords a way to price the coordination failure comparative statics on the unique equilibrium provides several insights on the role of information and the incidence of inefficient liquidation

social sustainability measured by intermediate approach for dea environmental assessment chinese regional planning for economic development and pollution prevention abstract this study examines the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the level of sustainability by a newly proposed intermediate approach conventionally dea data envelopment analysis for performance evaluation was used to assess various economic activities of organizations that utilized inputs e g the number of employees to yield desirable outputs e g the number of products the methodology was usually classified into radial or non radial category in an effort of extending it to environmental assessment dea needs to incorporate undesirable outputs e g the amount of co 2 into the computational framework this type of assessment is referred to as dea environmental assessment the proposed intermediate approach develops a new type of dea environmental assessment by combining the analytical features of radial approach with those of non radial approach the new approach measures the level of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores a rank sum test and a mean test are additionally incorporated into the proposed intermediate approach such a combination enhances the statistical capability as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the application finds four policy implications first it is important for china to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments second the government continues to reinforce the policy making effort on environmental protection by paying attention to central and southern regions the chinese industries need to transfer toward green energy the transfer should be efficiently executed for their future developments third the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally the policy implementation needs a time lag until it becomes effective the time lag on economic policy is longer than that of environmental policy the economic policy has historically produced a regional imbalance often leading to educational and income imbalances among chinese provinces

dea approach for unified efficiency measurement assessment of japanese fossil fuel power generation this study discusses a new dea data envelopment analysis approach to measure the unified operational and environmental efficiency of energy firms it is widely known that they produce not only desirable good outputs e g electricity but also undesirable bad outputs e g co2 as a result of their plant operations the proposed approach incorporates an output separation desirable and undesirable outputs for the performance evaluation of energy firms in addition to the output separation this study separates inputs into energy and non energy inputs consequently the proposed approach incorporates not only the output separation but also the input separation within a computational framework of dea non radial measurement this study compares the proposed approach with other previous dea approaches used for the performance evaluation of energy firms after the methodological comparison this study applies the proposed approach for measuring the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation this empirical study confirms that the implementation of kyoto protocol 2005 has not been effective on the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation during the observed period 2004 2008 although the empirical result is inconsistent with the current japanese environmental policy under kyoto protocol it contains policy implications for guiding the future direction of japanese environmental policy on the electric power industry

the runner up effect exploiting regression discontinuity designs in brazilian indian and canadian first past the post elections we document that second place candidates are substantially more likely than close third place candidates to run in and win subsequent elections since both candidates lost the election and had similar electoral performance this is the effect of being labeled the runner up selection into candidacy is unlikely to explain the effect on winning subsequent elections and we find no effect of finishing in third place versus fourth place we develop a simple model of strategic coordination by voters that rationalizes the results and provides further predictions that are supported by the data