risk taking and taxation an alternative perspective abstract the analysis of risk taking and taxation has almost invariably been in a portfolio choice framework this paper presents the alternative perspective of an occupational choice framework where risk taking involves the additional element of discrete choice between safe and risky activities it is shown that the specification of equilibrium must of necessity have a general equilibrium character in this setting the paper develops rules for government intervention in the market equilibrium and analyses the effects of taxation on risk taking

measuring the efficiency of energy intensive industries across european countries abstract this study evaluates the energy efficiency trends of five energy intensive industries in 23 european union eu countries over the period 2000 2009 in particular the performance of the construction electricity manufacturing mining and quarrying and transport sectors is examined the analysis is based on data envelopment analysis dea combined with the malmquist productivity index mpi which allows for distinctions between efficiency and technology changes over time at the second stage of the analysis cross classified multilevel modelling is applied to analyse the main drivers behind efficiency performance using a number of sector and country characteristics based on dea results an overall improvement in efficiency is observed in all sectors over the period the decomposition of the mpi indicates that technology change is primarily responsible for the improvements achieved in most sectors the results obtained by the cross classified model show among other things that the high electricity prices energy taxes and market share of the largest generator in the electricity market have a negative effect on industrial energy efficiency

competitive procurement of ancillary services by an independent system operator this paper discusses the competitive procurement of ancillary services by an independent system operator iso the paper assumes the existence of an underlying market for energy and explains why this energy market must be accompanied by a market for ancillary services these services include operating reserves and automatic generation control agc both of which may require generators that are infra marginal in the energy market to choose between supplying energy or ancillary services the paper discusses the design of an auction for these services that has formed the basis for the california iso s ancillary services market the paper also discusses the real time dispatch of ancillary services

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

market clearing with stochastic security part i formulation the first of this two paper series formulates a stochastic security constrained multi period electricity market clearing problem with unit commitment the stochastic security criterion accounts for a pre selected set of random generator and line outages with known historical failure rates and involuntary load shedding as optimization variables unlike the classical deterministic reserve constrained unit commitment here the reserve services are determined by economically penalizing the operation of the market by the expected load not served the proposed formulation is a stochastic programming problem that optimizes concurrently with the pre contingency social welfare the expected operating costs associated with the deployment of the reserves following the contingencies this stochastic programming formulation is solved in the second companion paper using mixed integer linear programming methods two cases are presented a small transmission constrained three bus network scheduled over a horizon of four hours and the ieee reliability test system scheduled over 24 h the impact on the resulting generation and reserve schedules of transmission constraints and generation ramp limits of demand side reserve of the value of load not served and of the constitution of the pre selected set of contingencies are assessed

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

efficient use of generator resources in emerging electricity markets in the emerging electricity market generators sell ancillary services as well as energy to the system operator pricing of ancillary services makes the scheduling of units more difficult due to the resulting unit cost curves the new climate will encourage generators to exploit the flexibility of their units in terms of operating modes this paper uses the augmented hopfield neural network to deal with ancillary service prices specifically reserve and ramping prices submitted by generators and to schedule units with a choice of operating modes

examining the cost efficiency of chinese hydroelectric companies using a finite mixture model this paper evaluates the operational activities of chinese hydroelectric power companies over the period 2000 2010 using a finite mixture model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity in so doing a stochastic frontier latent class model which allows for the existence of different technologies is adopted to estimate cost frontiers this procedure not only enables us to identify different groups among the hydro power companies analysed but also permits the analysis of their cost efficiency the main result is that three groups are identified in the sample each equipped with different technologies suggesting that distinct business strategies need to be adapted to the characteristics of china s hydro power companies some managerial implications are developed

reserve requirements to efficiently manage intra zonal congestion the security constrained unit commitment problem schedules power generators to minimize cost subject to operating constraints reserve requirements ensure that reserve is available to re balance the system following a contingency but do not guarantee reliability in congested systems where reserve activation is limited by transmission constraints operators improve reserve deliverability by limiting power flows and controlling the location of reserves zones are used to address inter zonal congestion but operators lack efficient ways to handle intra zonal congestion we propose dynamically relating minimum reserve levels to transmission stress in a computationally efficient approach that complements existing reserve models from the literature analysis on the ieee rts 96 test case demonstrates the approach can mitigate intra zonal congestion more economically than traditional reserve policies

what are the effects of different tax policies on china s coal fired power generation industry an empirical research from a network slacks based measure perspective abstract data envelopment analysis dea has been widely applied to evaluate performance in the power generation industry nevertheless most studies view the production system as a black box few studies attempt to deal with the case of china s thermal power generation industry in the framework of network dea separating the overall power generation process into two internal stages the production stage and the pollutant abatement stage with the pollutant emissions as intermediate products this paper employs a network slacks based measure sbm model to research the production efficiency and environmental efficiency of china s coal fired power generation industry from 2006 to 2010 under two different tax policies these two tax policies are the pollution tax policy to negatively penalize for emissions of pollutants and the tax deductions or exemptions policy to positively encourage environmental protection the empirical results show that the effect of compulsory measures was better than that of self motivation measures for china s environmental protection in this observation period another important finding is that the year 2008 was a turning point in the five years statistical analysis shows that the effects of the two different policies were statistically independent

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

efficiency analysis of chinese industry a directional distance function approach two efficiency measures of chinese industry were estimated at the provincial level from 1994 to 2002 using a directional output distance function one is a traditional efficiency measure that considers only desirable output while the other considers both desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously a comparison of the two measures revealed that efficiency levels are biased only if desirable output is considered five coastal provinces municipalities that have attracted a large amount of foreign direct investment are found to be the most efficient when only desirable output is considered and also when both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered however omitting undesirable output tends to lead to an overestimate of industrial efficiency levels in shandong sichuan and hebei provinces we also found that a province s industrial structure has significant effects on its efficiency levels

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

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

entrepreneurship and economic theory this article discusses economic theories of entrepreneurship drawing principally on work conducted in labour economics microeconomics macroeconomics and financial economics the article explains how incentives and constraints of various kinds affect occupational choices and entrepreneurial innovation as well as how entrepreneurial decisions affect macroeconomic performance implications for public policy are drawn

environmental efficiency analysis of power industry in china based on an entropy sbm model chinese national natural science fund 71073040 710201139 71273075 humanities and social science fund of the ministry of education 09yjc790061

wealth enterprise and credit policy empirical evidence suggests that capital market constraints prevent low wealth individuals from setting up in business this paper shows this finding to be consistent with socially excessive lending and an interest rate tax being welfare improving one feature of the model banks inability to identify entrepreneurial quality leads to excessive bank lending and investment in low return projects the reduction in the probability of bankruptcy lowers the cost of borrowing and eliminates deadweight costs and hence promotes entry if the incentive effects are sufficiently large wealth and the volume of entrepreneurial activity move together a key result of the paper is to show that a market equilibrium in which there is a positive relationship between entry and the level of wealth is consistent with either subsidies to inactivity or taxes on interest raising welfare

the technology gap and efficiency measure in wec countries application of the hybrid meta frontier model this study develops the hybrid meta frontier dea model for which inputs are distinguished into radial inputs that change proportionally and non radial inputs that change non proportionally in order to measure the technical efficiency and technology gap ratios tgr of four different regions asia africa america and europe this paper selects 87 countries that are members of the world energy council from 2005 to 2007 the input variables are industry and population while the output variances are gross domestic product gdp and the amount of fossil fuel co2 emissions the result shows that countries efficiency ranking among their own region presents more implied volatility in view of the technology gap ratio europe is the most efficient of any region but during the same period asia has a lower efficiency than other regions finally regions with higher industry or gdp might not have higher efficiency from 2005 to 2007 and higher co2 emissions or population also might not mean lower efficiency for other regions in addition brazil is not oecd member but it is higher efficiency than other oecd members in emerging countries case oecd countries are better efficiency than non oecd countries and europe is higher than asia to control co2 emissions if non oecd countries or asia countries could reach the best efficiency score they should try to control co2 emissions

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

energy and reserve market designs with explicit consideration to lost opportunity costs the primary goal of this work is to investigate the basic energy and reserve dispatch optimization cooptimization in the setting of a pool based market of particular interest is the modeling of lost opportunity cost introduced by reserve allocation the authors derive the marginal costs of energy and reserves under a variety of market designs they also analyze existence algorithm and multiplicity of optimal solutions the results of this study are used to support the reserve market design and implementation in iso new england control area

dea environmental assessment on u s industrial sectors investment for improvement in operational and environmental performance to attain corporate sustainability abstract environmental assessment has recently become an important business concern because consumers are interested in environmental protection they try to avoid purchasing products from dirt imaged companies which do not pay attention to environmental protection even if their prices are much less than the ones produced by green imaged companies thus a green image is very important for corporate survivability in a global market this study considers corporate sustainability indicating that companies need to consider both economic prosperity and pollution prevention in their operations to discuss the issue from corporate strategy for modern business this study discusses a use of data envelopment analysis dea for environmental assessment by focusing upon research and development r d strategy as well as technology innovation and selection for reduction of undesirable outputs e g co 2 emission this type of research has never been explored in previous studies it is easily envisioned that the proposed dea environmental assessment will guide corporate leaders in identifying how to invest for technology innovation to reduce an amount of undesirable outputs to discuss the practicality this study applies the proposed approach to 153 observations on s p 500 corporations in 2012 and 2013 the empirical investigation confirms that investors pay more serious attention to company s green image and the reality for a long run sustainability than profitability in a short run concern furthermore the energy sector is the best investment target among seven industrial sectors examined in this study the measurement of corporate sustainability can serve as an empirical basis in selecting what type of technology is fitted for a specific industry

does the popularization of agricultural mechanization improve energy environment performance in china s agricultural sector abstract environmental problems caused by the rapid popularization of agricultural mechanization and the increase of energy input in china s agricultural production have caused increasing concern based on the study sample of china s 30 provinces from 2000 to 2017 this paper estimates the energy environment performance of agricultural sector using the global dea method furthermore it applied a panel tobit model based on censored data to empirically analyze the impact of popularization of mechanization on energy environment performance in china s agricultural sector the main findings are as follows firstly the mean value of energy environment performance is 0 1842 and the values of national and regional performance showed a downward trend in the sample period indicating that most regions in china s agricultural sector did not perform well in terms of energy saving and pollution control secondly the development of agricultural mechanization has a significant negative effect on energy environment performance this result confirms the fact that the regions with high penetration rates of agricultural mechanization usually have a low energy environment performance finally in regard to the control variables energy price reservoir infrastructure construction and agricultural industrial structure negatively affect energy environment performance while the agricultural labor force and agricultural mechanization service organizations have a positive effect on china s energy environment performance

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

the poor are twice cursed wealth inequality and inefficient credit market abstract this paper investigates the role of unobservable wealth differences on credit market equilibrium given there is also asymmetric information concerning effort preferences and choices in equilibrium poor but able entrepreneurs may subsidise the rich and incompetent or be excluded as a result investment may exceed or fall short of the optimal level low inequality may deliver conditions for perfect screening and an efficient level of investment the equilibrium with cross subsidisation is consistent with otherwise puzzling empirical observations

asymmetric information occupational choice and government policy a model of credit markets under asymmetric information is proposed in which individuals differ in abilities that are valued in both entrepreneurship and paid employment unlike the heterogeneous ability model of de meza and webb 1987 over investment is not inevitable under investment and credit rationing can occur instead this result depends on the novel possibility of there being greater separation of types in paid employment than in entrepreneurship the model allows individuals to be monitored in both occupations and permits derivation of the conditions under which the novel possibility holds the role of corrective government policies is also discussed

optimal linear income taxation in models with occupational choice the purpose of this paper is to investigate the implication of occupational choice for linear income taxation occupational choice is restricted to entrepreneurship versus wage earning different settings are considered concerning the introduction of uncertainty and that of individuals heterogeneity in ability or risk aversion for each setting an optimal tax formula is derived and shown to be made up of various components pertaining to insurance redistribution and efficiency

a probabilistic reserve market incorporating interruptible load a probabilistic method for a pool based combined energy and reserve market which considers both generators and interruptible loads ils is proposed in this paper we minimize generation production cost together with the cost associated with expected energy not supplied eens due to outages of generating units and failures of ils to supply the reserve when required the proposed settlement scheme allocates equitably cost of reserve among generators and ils given that the method takes into account reliability of individual generators and ils the proposed scheme provides incentives for all market participants to improve their performance a number of case studies are carried out to illustrate the impact of participant s characteristics on the reserve cost allocation

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

transmission congestion management in competitive electricity markets this paper studies the management of costs associated with transmission constraints i e transmission congestion costs in a competitive electricity market the paper examines two approaches for dealing with these costs the first approach is based on a nodal pricing framework and forms the basis of the so called pool model the paper also provides an analysis of financial instruments proposed to complement nodal pricing and includes illustrative test results on a large scale system the second approach is based on cost allocation procedures proposed for the so called bilateral model the paper explains the basis for this model including a game theoretic evaluation of some of its aspects both the pool and bilateral models have been at the center of the electric utility restructuring debate in california

business cycle turning points a new coincident index and tests of duration dependence based on a dynamic factor model with regime switching the synthesis of the dynamic factor model of stock and watson 1989 and the regime switching model of hamilton 1989 proposed by diebold and rudebusch 1996 potentially encompasses both features of the business cycle identified by burns and mitchell 1946 1 comovement among economic variables through the cycle and 2 nonlinearity in its evolution however maximum likelihood estimation has required approximation recent advances in multimove gibbs sampling methodology open the way to approximation free inference in such non gaussian nonlinear models this paper estimates the model for u s data and attempts to address three questions are both features of the business cycle empirically relevant might the implied new index of coincident indicators be a useful one in practice do the resulting estimates of regime switches show evidence of duration dependence the answers to all three would appear to be yes

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

total factor energy efficiency of coal consumption an empirical analysis of china s energy intensive industries abstract improvement of coal consumption efficiency is very important both for china in solving its problems of energy security and environmental pollution and for the world in addressing the issue of greenhouse gas emissions using a total factor framework this paper employs a data envelopment analysis dea approach to evaluate the coal consumption efficiency of six energy intensive sub industries in china in 2015 coal consumption efficiency is factorized into economic efficiency and environmental efficiency with sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide and industrial smoke dust and soot emissions treated as undesirable outputs of energy consumptions the results show the following 1 of the six energy intensive sub industries studied two exhibit both dea effective coal economic efficiency and coal environmental efficiency coal economic efficiency is found to be greater than coal environmental efficiency indicating that the benefits of economic efficiency have masked the negative effects of the environmental impact china should therefore pay more attention to the clean utilization of coal 2 low environmental efficiency mainly resulted from the joint effects of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency therefore enterprises in these industries must engage in management efforts to improve their ability to manage large enterprises 3 the energy intensive industries characterized by coal environmental efficiency that failed to achieve pure technological effectiveness all exhibited input redundancy or output inadequacy of varying degrees while showing a potential for energy conservation and emissions reductions

power industry restructuring and eco efficiency changes a new slacks based model in malmquist luenberger index measurement measuring variations in efficiency and its extension eco efficiency during a restructuring period in different industries has always been a point of interest for regulators and policy makers this paper assesses the impacts of restructuring of procurement in the iranian power industry on the performance of power plants we introduce a new slacks based model for malmquist luenberger ml index measurement and apply it to the power plants to calculate the efficiency eco efficiency and technological changes over the 8 year period 2003 2010 of restructuring in the power industry the results reveal that although the restructuring had different effects on the individual power plants the overall growth in the eco efficiency of the sector was mainly due to advances in pure technology we also assess the correlation between efficiency and eco efficiency of the power plants which indicates a close relationship between these two steps thus lending support to the incorporation of environmental factors in efficiency analysis

optimal scheduling of spinning reserve effective control of spinning reserve can provide substantial cost reductions in large power systems this paper suggests that this goal can he achieved by tightly integrating a probabilistic reserve assessment with the unit commitment uc function this enables the reliability of individual units and the uncertainty of the load forecast to be considered for short term scheduling the generation can then be scheduled to meet a given risk index it is further argued that the optimal value of this risk index should be selected on the basis of a tradeoff between the total schedule cost obtained from the uc solution and the expected cost of energy not served which can be derived from the probabilistic reserve assessment finally the problem of over commitment of reserve in lagrangian relaxation based uc is reduced by means of a new unit decommitment technique incorporating a look ahead feature

and a vision appeared unto them of a great profit evidence of self deception among the self employed evidence is presented that the self employed expect better financial outcomes than do employees but experience worse realisations this is consistent with theories that entrepreneurship is driven by unrealistic optimism

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

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

evaluating environmental performance using data envelopment analysis the case of european countries abstract environmental efficiency is considered to be a critical pillar of sustainable development consequently improving environmental performance has aroused attention at both the local and global level this study evaluated the environmental performance of european union eu countries using the data envelopment analysis dea approach and the global malmquist luenberger index although literature using the dea approach to measure environmental performance exists this study s main contribution was considering different types of undesirable outputs and using long term panel data on eu countries in particular the dea window analysis technique was applied to evaluate the environmental performance of 27 eu countries in cross sectional and time varying data during the period 2000 2017 three dea models were examined labor capital and energy were used as common inputs with a combination of different outputs including gross domestic product carbon dioxide and particulate matter emissions and waste the empirical results revealed that the trends in the environmental performance of the entire eu and its individual countries were similar under all examined models environmental performance was indeed negatively affected by the financial crisis of 2007 2008 this impact was mainly observed in eastern eu countries furthermore both economic and environmental variables significantly influenced countries overall efficiency the analysis using the global malmquist luenberger index elucidated that overall eu countries experienced the efficiency improvement during the study period although fluctuations were observed these results enable countries and policymakers to understand their environmental performance identify strengths and weaknesses and set targets for further improvement based on the current best practices of comparable peers

the productivity and efficiency of the australian electricity supply industry australia s electricity supply industry has been through a period of reform over the last 10 years the purpose of this paper is to analyse the changes that have occurred to the australian electricity supply industry over the past 30 years in order to evaluate to what degree these reforms have improved the productivity and efficiency performance of the industry

who become serial and portfolio entrepreneurs serial entrepreneurs run multiple businesses in sequence while portfolio entrepreneurs run multiple businesses in parallel they differ from novice entrepreneurs who have so far operated only one venture the present paper is the first to model occupational choices between all three entrepreneurial types it goes on to discuss its theoretical predictions in the light of independent evidence about serial and portfolio entrepreneurship from the extant literature

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

methodological comparison among radial non radial and intermediate approaches for dea environmental assessment abstract this study compares three dea approaches for environmental assessment all of which are designed to examine the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the degree of sustainability development dea standing for data envelopment analysis has been widely applied for performance assessment in the past five decades a new type of applications is referred to as dea environmental assessment and it measures the performance of many organizations that utilize inputs to produce not only desirable outputs e g electricity but also undesirable outputs e g co 2 in the previous studies dea based performance evaluation for environment assessment is methodologically classified into radial or non radial category recently a new intermediate approach analytically locating between the radial and non radial measures has been proposed as the third alternative a use of the intermediate approach has several unique features all of which cannot be found in the radial and non radial ones the new approach measures the degree 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 this study discusses the analytical features by comparing the intermediate approach with the radial and non radial ones the methodological comparison attempts to convey a message that dea is indeed an important methodology but not perfect rather it is an approximation approach to examine the performance of various organizations many dea applications on energy and environment often suffer from a methodological bias implying that different approaches produce different empirical results thus in guiding a large policy issue such as the global warming and climate change it is necessary for us to compare several different approaches e g models and concepts to derive a reliable empirical suggestion the importance of such a message is applicable to not only dea but also the other types of empirical research in natural and social sciences therefore this study discusses the methodological bias issue from the practicality of the three dea approaches in assessing various concerns on energy and environment

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

optimal dispatch of a system based on offers and bids a mixed integer lp formulation the federal energy regulatory commission s ferc orders 888 and 889 will have far reaching consequences on the operation and dispatch of electric power systems a common element of the change is that of dispatching the system based on offers and bids to sell and buy unbundled commodities this paper formulates and solves the optimal dispatch problem as a mixed integer linear program such a formulation allows the acceptance of offers with minimum takes arising from generator characteristics

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

too much investment a problem of asymmetric information this paper shows that under plausible assumptions the inability of lenders to discover all of the relevant characteristics of borrowers results in investment in excess of the socially efficient level raising the rate of interest above the free market level will restore optimality this conflicts with generally held views and is contrasted with the stiglitz weiss model it is shown that the assumptions which yield overinvestment support debt as the equilibrium method of finance however under the stiglitz weiss assumptions used to derive an underinvestment result equity is shown to be the equilibrium method of finance

entrepreneurial learning and the existence of credit markets abstract i explore the economic implications of learning by doing by borrower entrepreneurs who are initially imperfectly informed about their innate abilities it is shown how entrepreneurial learning worsens the adverse effects of moral hazard causing the possible disappearance of otherwise viable credit markets and thereby decreasing social welfare the reason is that learning reduces subjective uncertainty about risky future outcomes thus encouraging excessive risk taking behaviour

unfair credit allocations this article investigates the impact of credit allocation on heterogeneous wealth entrepreneurs we show that with decreasing risk aversion and unobservable wealth poorer borrowers exert more effort as a consequence of endogenous adverse selection they are either excluded from the market or necessarily subsidize richer borrowers in a pooling equilibrium resulting in a paradoxical and inequitable redistribution alternatively a less likely separating equilibrium may occur in which poor types bear the entire weight of separation in the form of excess risk taking

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

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

energy and reserve dispatch in a multi zone electricity market competitive bidding for ancillary services a s in addition to bidding for energy is increasingly recognized as an important part of electricity markets in this paper an lp based approach is presented for solving the multi product i e energy and a s products multi zone area physical market dispatch problem the approach can explicitly represent various constraints such as reserve requirement constraints network security limits and sharing of constrained resource capacity e g maximum unit generation between energy and reserve the joint dispatch method which dispatches energy and reserve market concurrently is extended to allow inter zonal reserve trading in a multi zone competitive pool numerical examples are included to demonstrate the salient characteristics of the joint dispatch solution

malmquist index measurement for sustainability enhancement in chinese municipalities and provinces abstract this study discusses a use of dea environmental assessment in a time horizon we use a radial approach to examine a dynamic change of index measures related to china s regional development and industrial pollution prevention in applying the proposed assessment to a time series data we need to examine components that produce a shift of an efficiency frontier in a time horizon a unique feature of the proposed assessment is that it incorporates a framework of malmquist index to examine the frontier shift among multiple periods here the frontier shift indicates a progress potential on technology development and or managerial improvement among observed periods thus it is not an efficiency measure rather the measurement eliminates inefficiency by shifting an organization to an efficiency frontier in this study the index is conceptually separated into 6 subcomponents which are further disaggregated into 12 different elements 6 subcomponents 2 disposability concepts under natural and managerial disposability concepts the proposed index measurement needs to consider a possible occurrence of a frontier crossover among different periods because technology diffusion on production activities usually has a time lag until it becomes really effective methodologically this study conveys the message that dea is an approximation method so being not perfect therefore it is necessary for us to use several different approaches e g potential improvement by measuring a frontier shift and efficiency analysis to obtain reliable empirical evidence as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 municipalities and provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the following six policy implications are obtained in this study first all municipalities and provinces have made a considerable progress on their economies and pollution prevention efforts second the effect of the frontier crossover is limited in china because they attain a high level of their potentials on economic development and pollution prevention of course this effort is within the chinese boundary not international because this study does not compare them with other industrial nations third china needs to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments fourth the government should reinforce efforts on environmental protection in central and southern regions fifth the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban municipalities and provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally different empirical results are confirmed by the potential analysis which consists of the malmquist index measurement and the efficiency analysis both approaches need to be examined for future planning on chinese regional development

business cycle turning points based on dea discriminant analysis abstractrecently the turning points of business cycle are decided with wide viewpoints after passing a couple of years from the points this study tries to develop a model for judging the turning points in real time by using a non parametric approach dea discriminant analysis because we have sometimes faced sudden changes of economy and non parametric approaches are useful for covering these movements the constructed model succeeds to separate periods in japanese economic expanding and recession terms and the model would be helpful for the real time judgments of the turning points of business cycle

slack adjusted dea for time series analysis performance measurement of japanese electric power generation industry in 1984 1993 abstract using a new slack adjusted data envelopment analysis sa dea model which explicitly incorporates an influence of slacks into its efficiency measurement this study discusses a use of various efficiencies and index measures for dea dynamic analysis an analytical formulation to determine the type of return to scale rts is proposed for the new dea model this paper mathematically discusses when multiple solutions occur on rts and how to deal with such a difficulty as an important case study this paper applies the proposed dea approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power generation companies from 1984 to 1993 two policy implications are suggested for guiding the japanese electric power industry

priced based operation in an auction market structure open transmission access is a new legal requirement within the electric power industry interchange will require evaluation of the existing conditions to determine if the product can be delivered at the time required and at the level awarded through the bidding or negotiation process this paper seeks to identify the likely deregulation details for a full market implementation when native load is considered equal to any other third party load comparability this paper seeks to identify the technical issues such as standards and algorithms necessary for changing the national infrastructure from a vertically integrated industry to a horizontally integrated industry

rationality of energy efficiency improvement targets under the pat scheme in india a case of thermal power plants abstract the market based perform achieve and trade scheme was introduced in india to enhance the energy efficiency of energy intensive sectors and for thermal power plants by reducing their specific energy consumption within the framework of a tradable certificate scheme international experience suggests that effectiveness of such schemes is greatly influenced by the assigned targets of the obligated units setting rational targets is thus a key aspect of successful implementation of the scheme in the present study we examine the rationality of the targets set for the power sector of india based on comparing it with energy saving potential of the plants and the targets assigned to the respective plants data envelopment analysis models are used to determine relative efficiency and energy saving potential the study results indicate that in most cases i the targets are much less than the actual potentials of the thermal power sector ii there exist substantial inefficiencies within the system in both energy use and managerial dexterity and iii if the sector realizes its full potential then the energy saving certificate market may witness a surplus of 4 7 million certificates on account of thermal power sector alone

data envelopment analysis for unified efficiency evaluation an assessment of regional industries in china abstract data envelopment analysis has recently gained popularity and attention in operational and environmental assessment a common feature of previous studies is decreasing an input vector to decrease the vector of undesirable outputs which is referred to as natural disposability however little research has considered how to increase the amount of capital input for clean production technology to decrease the amount of undesirable outputs in a data envelopment analysis framework which is referred to as managerial disposability thus this paper proposes an improved approach that considers measuring unified operational and environmental efficiency for managerial disposability and compares this approach with the one for natural disposability the proposed approach provides a positive strategy to reduce undesirable outputs and improve unified efficiency through increasing capital investment in clean production technology a case study of regional industries in china in 2006 2010 utilizing this approach is also presented the empirical study shows that the unified efficiencies of regional industries in china have relatively high scores for managerial disposability and increasing capital investment is vital to achieve sustainable development in clean production technology

reliability and reserve in competitive electricity market scheduling power systems are typically scheduled at least cost subject to operational and security constraints generally no account is taken of generator reliability when scheduling units also the security criteria which include reserve are usually deterministic in nature this paper proposes a method to consider generator reliability explicitly in the scheduling problem a competitive structure is proposed which includes a market for reserve this is formulated as an augmented lagrangian dual function and is solved using a new recurrent neural network the price for reserve is used along with the unit reliability to find a balance between the cost of reserve and the risk of not providing it

financial contracting under risk neutrality limited liability and ex ante asymmetric information this paper derives equilibrium financial contract forms in a risk neutral capital market with asymmetrically informed borrowers entrepeneurs and investors in doing so the analysis generalizes the work of demeza and webb 1987 by allowing for arbitrary profit distributions arbitrary contract forms and variable investment choices the main result of this inquiry is as follows when higher quality entrepreneurs have better ex post profit distributions in the sense of the monotone likelihood ratio property equilibrium contracts take a standard debt form so long as admissible investor payoff functions are monotone non decreasing in firm profit without the monotonicity constraint contracts often take a different live or die form

eco efficiency change in power plants using a slacks based measure for the meta frontier malmquist luenberger productivity index abstract malmquist luenberger index is a popular index deployed for evaluating eco efficiency and productivity change over a certain period when both desirable and undesirable factors are jointly produced in some production processes however conventional data envelopment analysis dea models used for computing this index are unable to distinguish the various technologies employed by the decision making units when heterogeneity exists in the technology the meta frontier malmquist luenberger approach is adopted to evaluate eco efficiency and productivity change over a period when undesirable outputs are incorporated in the analysis of efficiency in this paper a new slacks based dea measure is developed and used to compute the meta frontier malmquist luenberger productivity index this approach is then deployed to evaluate 48 iranian thermal power plants productivity change in three different categories steam gas and combined cycle over an eight year period of restructuring in the power industry this technique enables the calculation of eco efficiency change of thermal power plants operating under different technologies as well as the technology gap ratios and measures the extent to which the efficiency frontiers of individual categories of power plants deviate from the meta frontier the results reveal that the last years of the restructuring period saw a greater rate of productivity growth compared to the initial years and evidence of significant eco efficiency improvements over the period in all the three types of the thermal power plants finally it is expected that the findings in this study aid policy makers and power industry regulators in developing sustainable energy policies towards environmental protection and planning power plant operations

dependent self employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation this paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self employment while making transitions to independent self employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self employment in favour of the former in conducting this analysis discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the european community household panel from 1994 to 2001 to test the hypotheses a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self employment is found the opposite effects however are detected for individuals becoming independent self employed

total factor carbon emission performance of fossil fuel power plants in china a metafrontier non radial malmquist index analysis article i nfo this paper proposes the metafrontier non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index mnmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time the mnmcpi method allows for the incorporation of group heterogeneity and non radial slack into the previously introduced malmquist co2 emission performance index mcpi we derive the mnmcpi by solving several non radial data envelop ment analysis dea models we decompose the mnmcpi into an efficiency change ec index a best practice gap change bpc index and a technology gap change tgc index and based on the proposed indices we examine the dynamic changes in co2 emission performance and its decomposition of fossil fuel power plants in china for the 2005 2010 period the empirical results show a 0 38 increase in total factor co2 emission performance as a whole and a u shaped mnmcpi curve for the sample period because companies owned by the central government lack innovation and technological leadership the results suggest a missing link in the role of the central government in promoting co2 emission performance

dea environmental assessment on us petroleum industry non radial approach with translation invariance in time horizon abstract this study empirically assesses the performance of the petroleum industry focusing upon independent companies in the united states us for the empirical study we use the data envelopment analysis dea that has been widely used for environmental assessment and performance measurement the conventional use of dea requests that all observations in the data set should be positive prohibiting an occurrence of zero and or negative values the requirement of non negative value is inconsistent with the reality of us petroleum industry because many oil firms recently experience negative shocks in financial performance to overcome the obstacle this study discusses the property of translation invariance under undesirable congestion e g capacity limit in the transportation pipeline network and desirable congestion e g green technology innovation based on the non radial models the property implies that the unified efficiency measure should be not influenced even if production factors are shifted toward the same direction by adding or subtracting a specific real number the property makes it possible that we can evaluate the performance of firms whose production factors contain zero and or negative values this study is empirically concerned with practical implications of translation invariance from energy and environmental perspectives in addition this study examines the proposed environmental assessment in a time horizon for the purpose this study uses window analysis to examine an efficiency change along with a time shift our empirical investigation finds the following three implications first under the natural disposability the oil firms efficiency growth rates have become less than unity implying the industry wide difficulty or inability to cut back their drilling and production operations second all firms have been under regulatory and stakeholder pressures on air pollution therefore the efficiency growth rates under managerial disposability have not exhibited a major change during the observed annual periods finally such implications are statistically reconfirmed by regression analysis that examines how the change of energy price influences unified efficiencies under natural and managerial disposability an exception can be found in the natural disposability where energy prices influence their efficiency growths thus an increase in energy prices is important in maintaining a high level of efficiency growths in the us petroleum industry

some evidence on the empirical significance of credit rationing this paper examines the credit rationing debate using detailed contract information on over one million commercial bank loans from 1977 to 1988 while commercial loan rates are sticky consistent with rationing this stickiness varies with loan contract terms in ways that are not predicted by equilibrium credit rationing theory in addition the proportion of new loans issued under commitment does not increase significantly when credit markets are tight despite the fact that borrowers without commitments can be rationed whereas commitment borrowers are contractually insulated from rationing overall the data suggest that equilibrium rationing is not a significant macroeconomic phenomenon

credit and equity rationing in markets with adverse selection previous theories of financial market rationing focussed on a single market either the credit or the equity market an interesting question is whether credit and equity rationing are mutually compatible and how they interact we consider a model with two dimensional asymmetric information where entrepreneurs have private information about both the expected returns and the risk of their projects we show that credit and equity rationing may occur individually or simultaneously moreover competition between the two markets may generate the adverse selection that leads to rationing outcomes

eco efficiency analysis of power plants an extension of data envelopment analysis abstract in public discussion on environmental policy the notion of eco efficiency is often used the joint production of goods and undesirable outputs such as pollutants which may not be freely disposable without costs causes difficulties to measure the overall performance of the firm because of the absence of market prices for the undesirable outputs we are not able to estimate the environmental costs some of the measurement and evaluation difficulties can be overcome by employing data envelopment analysis dea as the efficiency measurement vehicle we propose the use of two different approaches in the first approach we start by decomposing the problem into two parts 1 the problem of measuring technical efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the inputs and 2 the problem of measuring so called ecological efficiency as the relation of the desirable outputs to the undesirable outputs separately those two efficiency indicators are then combined in the second approach we treat pollutants as the inputs in the sense that we wish to increase desirable outputs and decrease pollutants and inputs the approaches are applied to the problem of measuring the efficiency of 24 power plants in a european country

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 optimal linear taxation of employment and self employment incomes abstract this paper models optimal linear taxation when occupational choice and labour supply are endogenous workers choose between paid employment self employment and unemployment self employment incomes are risky and employees may be involuntarily laid off calibrating the model to the uk economy the optimal tax solution involves relatively high taxation with substantial redistribution and a higher nominal but not effective marginal tax rate imposed on the self employed than on employees the implications of making unemployment benefits as well as tax rates endogenous are also analysed and robustness checks are performed