experimental comparison of impact of auction format on carbon allowance market abstract carbon allowances auctions are a good way to achieve the carbon allowance allocations under international agreements to address global climate change based on an economic experiment this paper compares three possible carbon allowance auction formats uniform price auction discriminatory price auction and english clock auction with heterogeneous bidders coal power plants and gas power plants from four perspectives carbon price auction efficiency demand withholding and fluctuations in power supplies possibilities of collusion among bidders and impacts of allowance banking and penalty price on bidders behaviors under different auction formats are also examined the results show that 1 when there are relatively more bidders and there are no obvious communications between them despite there being some tacit collusion efficiency of english clock auction is greater than the other two formats 2 when there are relatively fewer bidders and there are obvious communications between them explicit collusions are observed under english clock auction in this case discriminatory price auction helps prevent collusion to some extents 3 in the banking scenario more speculations are observed while penalty price exacerbates price volatility

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

institutional investment patterns and corporate financial behavior in the united states and japan abstract this paper examines the agency problem between shareholders and debtholders of japanese and u s firms whereas u s institutional investors are restricted from doing so japanese financial institutions take large equity positions in firms to which they lend particularly in firms more susceptible to the agency problem debt ratios of u s firms are negatively related to the firm s potential to engage in risky suboptimal investments whereas japanese debt ratios show no such relation the evidence is consistent with the notion that the agency problem is mitigated to a greater degree in japan than in the u s

modern energy access to all in rural india an integrated implementation strategy abstract expanding energy access to the rural population of india presents a critical challenge for its government the presence of 364 million people without access to electricity and 726 million who rely on biomass for cooking indicate both the failure of past policies and programs and the need for a radical redesign of the current system we propose an integrated implementation framework with recommendations for adopting business principles with innovative institutional regulatory financing and delivery mechanisms the framework entails establishment of rural energy access authorities and energy access funds both at the national and regional levels to be empowered with enabling regulatory policies capital resources and the support of multi stakeholder partnership these institutions are expected to design lead manage and monitor the rural energy interventions at the other end trained entrepreneurs would be expected to establish bioenergy based micro enterprises that will produce and distribute energy carriers to rural households at an affordable cost the escos will function as intermediaries between these enterprises and the international carbon market both in aggregating carbon credits and in trading them under cdm if implemented such a program could address the challenges of rural energy empowerment by creating access to modern energy carriers and climate change mitigation

openness and inflation a new assessment romer 1993 uses a barro gordon type model to argue that openness puts a check on the government s incentive to engage in unanticipated inflation because of induced exchange rate depreciation 2 therefore in the absence of precommitment in monetary policy more open economies will tend to have lower inflation rates romer finds that empirically over a large sample of countries and over a broad time frame average inflation rates are lower in smaller more open economies this relationship is significant quantitatively large and robust moreover these findings suggest that models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to inefficiently high average levels of inflation are essential to understanding inflation in most of the world this comment suggests that the negative link between inflation and openness romer found may be largely driven by the responses of severely indebted countries sics to the debt crisis of the 1980s figures i and ii show the scatterplots of the logarithms of average inflation and openness for the subperiods 1973 to 1981 predebt crisis and 1982 to 1990 the debt crisis period different groups of countries are separated according to their indebtedness level 3 the solid lines in the figures represent the predicted value of inflation obtained from a regression of openness on inflation for the countries in each group as the scatterplots show there is indeed a strong negative relation between openness and inflation among sics during the debt crisis

globalisation and inflation in this paper charles bean executive director chief economist and member of the monetary policy committee of the bank of england discusses the impact of globalisation on the industrialised countries and in particular the inflation process he explains how globalisation has affected the returns to labour and capital and the location of production in the world economy globalisation has also influenced relative prices lowering the prices of imported goods but boosting the prices of oil and other commodities and it may have changed the inflationary process flattening the trade off between domestic activity and inflation through a number of channels although globalisation has provided a benign backdrop for monetary policy it poses a number of challenges going forward the beneficial tailwind has waned and changes in product and labour markets have altered the determination of prices and wages in ways central bankers do not yet fully understand

the impact of urbanization on residential energy consumption in china an aggregated and disaggregated analysis abstract although the relationship among urbanization energy consumption and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to the effect of urbanization on residential energy consumption china as the largest developing country still has tremendous potential for urbanization in the future and this paper thus explores the effect of urbanization on the changes of residential energy consumption during 1996 2012 for china both from aggregated and disaggregated perspectives using the divisia decomposition method the findings on aggregated energy show that the urbanization contributes 15 4 to the increase of residential energy consumption during 1996 2012 but with a diminishing trend over time meanwhile from the disaggregated perspective the urbanization process contributes to an improvement of residential energy consumption structure specifically 1 of increase in urbanization rate may result in a decrease of 420 thousand million tonnes of residential coal consumption and an increase of 301 thousand tonnes of oil consumption

a new assessment of openness and inflation reply terra 1998 argues that my finding romer 1993 of a negative relationship across countries between openness and inflation is actually caused by the severely indebted countries over the debt crisis period she proposes an explanation of the openness inflation relationship based on indebted countries need to raise revenue to repay their debts the smaller a country s trade share the more depreciated the real value of the currency must be in order to generate a given trade surplus as a share of gdp and the more depreciated the currency the greater the pressure on the government s budget and thus the greater pressure to inflate in contrast in my paper i argue that the relationship stems from imperfect commitment in monetary policy the less open the economy the greater the benefits of surprise inflation and thus the higher the level of inflation in the absence of complete commitment terra has uncovered interesting variation in the opennessinflation relationship across countries and over time nonetheless i want to make three brief points that suggest that the channel she proposes accounts for only a modest part of the overall relationship first terra s results do not justify her claim that the relationship is a product only of the severely indebted countries sics during the debt crisis this can be seen from her table i for the sics the openness inflation link in the precrisis period though weaker than during the crisis is large and statistically significant the estimates for the moderately indebted countries although imprecise suggest a relationship that is very similar to that for the sics in both periods and for the less indebted countries the point estimates again suggest a negative relationship indeed for the full sample period the coefficient on openness is significantly different from zero only for the high income countries terra s all other countries is there no evidence of a negative association between openness and inflation

openness inflation and the phillips curve a puzzle models of open economies with nominal rigidities are often thought to predict a correlation between openness to trade and the slope of the output inflation trade off or phillips curve using a variety of measures of the trade off and a standard measure of openness this paper argues that the direct evidence for a correlation is not strong in turn this calls into question the usual explanation for the negative correlation between openness and inflation that was documented by romer 1993 the paper considers some alternative explanations for the romer evidence

towards a national circular economy indicator system in china an evaluation and critical analysis abstract it is widely acknowledged that china s economic miracle has been achieved at the expense of its natural capital and environment in order to deal with this problem the circular economy ce has been chosen as a national policy for sustainable development national laws and regulations have been enacted to facilitate the implementation of ce and national ce demonstration projects have been initiated such that national benchmarking activities could be completed china is the first country to release nationally focused ce indicators so that objective and credible information on the status of ce implementation can be recognized these ce indicators are valuable metrics for policy and decision makers and can help achieve ce goals and outcomes this unique indicator system has not been communicated to international communities this paper aims to more broadly introduce this unique national ce indicator system china s ce efforts are first detailed with various provisions of the national indicator system a critical analysis of such an indicator system is presented we show that certain benefits can be gained but substantive revision is also needed due to the lack of a comprehensive set of sustainability indicators which should include social business indicators urban industrial symbiosis absolute material energy reduction and prevention oriented indicators concerns related to barriers on implementation are also presented in this paper the knowledge gained from chinese efforts on ce indicators are valuable to both developed and developing nations seeking to implement sustainable development measures within their regulatory policies

an optimization model for renewable energy generation and its application in china a perspective of maximum utilization in response to climate change china s power industry is undertaking the task of reducing carbon emissions renewable energy generation has become an important option for the government and state grid companies it is important to know the maximum possible capacities of renewable energy generation from its different sources in order to plan the construction of the power grid in the future in this paper several important factors affecting the development of renewable energy generation are identified through a review of the existing literature such as cost technical maturity and so on and analyzed combined with the learning curve model the technology diffusion model and expectations about future economic development in china a new model the renewable energy optimization model reom is developed to analyze the development of three renewable energy sources wind power solar power and biomass power from 2009 to 2020 results show that 1 the maximum installed capacities of wind power solar power and biomass power will reach 233321 26680 and 35506 mw in 2020 2 from 2009 to 2020 biomass power will develop rapidly at the early stage while wind power is developed massively at the final stage and solar power has relatively stable growth 3 due to the added capacity in the early periods the unit investment cost of solar power shows a large decline which is good for its following scale development 4 the investment ratio constraint has a large effect on the development of wind power while the constraint of on grid proportion of renewable energy generation has a significant effect on the development of wind power and solar power the results have important policy implications for long term energy planning in developing countries such as china and india

risk capital financing and the separation of ownership and control in business groups abstract this paper analyses business groups composed of legally independent firms connected through a network of cross shareholdings a model which allows to calculate the value of the firms of a group and the integrated ownership shares held by an outside stockholder is described a taxonomy for the collection of risk capital generalizing the one which applies for a single firm is proposed the connection between the process of raising risk capital and the separation of ownership from control in business groups is demonstrated and given a formal mathematical description empirical evidence relating to the amount of risk capital collected by italian business groups in the 80s and to the extent of the divorce between ownership and control is also provided

cross holdings estimation issues biases and distortions cross holding occurs when listed corporations own securities issued by other corporations we analyze the effect of cross holdings on market capitalization and return measures as well as implications for econometric testing of asset pricing theories we show that cross holdings generally distort standard market return and risk measures the magnitudes of such distortions are calculated for simulated economies by using a variety of crossholding patterns in addition cross holdings are shown to induce nonstationarity in the covariance matrix of security returns we examine the effect of this nonstationarity for estimating efficient frontiers and factor structures we also discuss the implications for risk return estimates in equilibrium asset pricing models article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

has the rise in globalization reduced u s inflation in the 1990s juann h hung this article investigates whether increased globalization of the u s economy has helped hold down inflation in the 1990s based on several measures we find that globalization has increased further we find that import prices exert a greater impact on prices of products in industries faced with greater import penetration high foreign excess capacity accounts for much of the recent decline in u s inflation our results suggest that the decline in inflation is explained by the interaction of increased globalization and high excess foreign capacity globalization by itself does not lead to less inflation just greater sensitivity to foreign economic conditions jel e3 i introduction has the rise in globalization helped reduce u s inflation in the 1990s two hypotheses have been proposed for how the rise in globalization may have held down inflation the first is the so called competing goods effect hypothesis which contends that greater competition from foreign producers has limited the ability of domestic producers to raise prices the second hypothesis maintains that excess capacity abroad has helped u s manufactures meet the robust domestic demand in the united states without straining domestic resources and pushing up inflationary pressures this article first lays out a general framework that integrates these two hypotheses and then investigates each of them empirically we find evidence in support of both hypotheses to examine the competing goods effect hypothesis we estimate panel data regressions to find whether import prices have indeed exerted a greater impact on product prices in industries that are faced with greater import penetration the results are affirmative we study the second more general hypothesis by making two inquiries first has the rise in globalization coincided with the breakdown of the traditional phillips curve s ability to predict inflation that began in the early 1990s that is has the united states become considerably more open in the 1990s than in previous years when the phillips curve tracked inflation with reasonable accuracy second has foreign capacity utilization played an important role along with traditional explanatory variables in predicting inflation our empirical evidence suggests that the answers to both inquires are also positive most striking is the finding that by including foreign capacity utilization in the estimation of a phillips curve equation almost all of the missing inflation the difference between actual inflation and predicted inflation based on the traditional phillips curve since 1994 disappears our findings suggest that the interaction of slack foreign economic conditions and greater openness to trade may have helped tame the u s inflation in the 1990s but globalization alone has not permanently reduced the threat of recession or inflation indeed greater globalization may even help increase inflation when the u s and foreign economic expansions are synchronized no single researcher has looked at all of the questions posed in this article but each question has been investigated separately before krugman 1994 1995 and irwin 1996 have looked at whether the united states has become more globalized over the past decade they find that trade with the rest of the world is not a significant or rapidly growing influence on the u s economy the question of whether prices of foreign goods influence domestic prices through the competing goods effect has been investigated by swagel 1997 he finds a statistically significant but small impact in 10 of the 19 industries in his sample similarly slaughter and swagel 1997 find that increased globalization has had only a modest impact on wages in industrialized economies finally orr 1994 and tootel 1998 find very little or no impact of foreign capacity utilization on domestic inflation

how has globalisation affected inflation in china this paper investigates how globalisation has affected inflation in china we estimated standard phillips curve inflation equations and examined whether globalisation has affected the structure of inflation dynamics as captured by the phillips curve empirical results suggest that the globalisation of the chinese economy has changed the behaviour of inflation dynamics in particular the impact of domestic and global output gaps on domestic inflation in china has changed significantly since 1994 before 1994 the domestic output gap was a major factor in driving domestic inflation after 1994 however the global output gap plays a significant and more important role in affecting domestic inflation the finding implies that chinese monetary authorities should specifically take into account the developments in global output in their monetary policymaking process

the indirect energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption in china an analysis based on the input output method in recent decades china s rapid economy development has been coupling with the steadily increasing household consumption which in turn leads to ever growing energy consumption and co2 emission with a focus on the decade of 2000 2010 this study examines the energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption using the input output method as well as the influencing factors of the indirect co2 emission the results show that first the indirect energy consumption and co2 emission appear the main parts of total energy consumption and co2 emission caused by household consumption accounting for 69 77 and 77 84 respectively second the indirect co2 emission indicates an increasing trend mainly driven by per capita household consumption and energy intensity finally the five sectors with relatively higher direct or total co2 emission intensity are the key sectors for reducing co2 emission in china i e 1 production and distribution of electric power and heat power pdeh 2 smelting and pressing of metals spm 3 processing of petroleum coking processing of nuclear fuel ppcpn 4 manufacture of non metallic mineral products mnm and 5 manufacture of chemical materials mcm

yes the apt is testable the arbitrage pricing theory apt has been proposed as an alternative to the meanvariance capital asset pricing model capm this paper considers the testability of the apt and points out the irrelevance for testing of the approximation error we refute shanken s objections including his assertion that roll s critique of the capm is applicable to the apt we also explain the testability of the apt on subsets and we explore the relationship between the apt and the capm the arbitrage pricing theory apt has been the subject of extensive research efforts since it was introduced by ross 36 37 the research has included theoretical papers and a growing empirical literature 2 nonetheless there seems to be some confusion in the literature about the relation between the theoretical underpinnings of the apt and its empirical tests this paper is an attempt to alleviate the confusion to illustrate the issues and to provide a focus section i of this paper is devoted to examining and refuting some points raised in shanken 40 which considers the testability of the apt the underlying premise of the apt is that asset returns ri are generated by a factor model of the form

household biogas use in rural china a study of opportunities and constraints as a renewable energy biogas is not only an important part of the development of rural new energy but also an important aspect of sustainable development in china the development process and present status of household biogas specifically the opportunities and constraints of household biogas in rural china are discussed in this paper only about 19 of the biogas potential has been utilized in rural china there are several opportunities for household biogas development in rural china including the problem of rural household energy consumption the availability of biogas fermentation materials national financial subsidies legal and international clean development mechanisms also more research needs to be done in straw fermentation and cold fermentation technology training should be conducted to raise the level of biogas customers in comprehensive biogas utilization measures should be taken to improve the follow up services and management of biogas plants the information presented in this paper will be helpful not only to the sustainable development of household biogas in rural china but also to the development of biogas in similar countries around the world

a sustainable biogas model in china the case study of beijing deqingyuan biogas project according to the paris agreement china has the ambition to develop non fossil energy which will account for 20 of the total energy consumption in 2030 china has abundant biomass potential implying the bioenergy should be an important option of non fossil energy in this analysis we present an representative biogas project the deqingyuan project dqy in beijing and conduct a cost benefit analysis for the whole value chain dqy is the first large scale biogas project in china that utilizes 100 chicken manure as a feedstock and integrates biogas production with ecological agriculture using advanced technologies dqy uses 80 000 t of chicken manure and 100 000 t of sewage each year to produce biogas which generates 14 million kwh of power annually and obtains an additional revenue of rmb 8 million yuan each year through the clean development mechanism cdm operating as an example of a sustainable bioenergy model dqy accomplishes the full use of a recycled resource while showing consideration for animal welfare during the entire production which is a fundamental component of the new rural energy strategy the circular economy model of dqy plays a prominent role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions mitigating pollution and increasing employment among other benefits this paper aims to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the typical demonstration model dqy in utilization of agricultural waste in china and further proposes a general development model of chinese biogas in the future

globalization macroeconomic performance and monetary policy the paper argues that many of the exaggerated claims that globalization has been an important factor in lowering inflation in recent years just do not hold up globalization does however have the potential to be stabilizing for individual economies and has been a key factor in promoting economic growth the paper then examines four questions about the impact of globalization on the monetary transmission mechanism and arrives at the following answers i has globalization led to a decline in the sensitivity of inflation to domestic output gaps and thus to domestic monetary policy no ii are foreign output gaps playing a more prominent role in the domestic inflation process so that domestic monetary policy has more difficulty stabilizing inflation no iii can domestic monetary policy still control domestic interest rates and so stabilize both inflation and output yes iv are there other ways besides possible influences on inflation and interest rates in which globalization may have affected the transmission mechanism of monetary policy yes