frictionless commerce a comparison of internet and conventional retailers there have been many claims that the internet represents a new nearly frictionless market our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products books and cds using a data set of over 8 500 price observations collected over a period of 15 months we compare pricing behavior at 41 internet and conventional retail outlets we find that prices on the internet are 9 16 lower than prices in conventional outlets depending on whether taxes shipping and shopping costs are included in the price additionally we find that internet retailers price adjustments over time are up to 100 times smaller than conventional retailers price adjustments presumably reflecting lower menu costs in internet channels we also find that levels of price dispersion depend importantly on the measures employed when we compare the prices posted by different internet retailers we find substantial dispersion internet retailer prices differ by an average of 33 for books and 25 for cds however when we weight these prices by proxies for market share we find dispersion is lower in internet channels than in conventional channels reflecting the dominance of certain heavily branded retailers we conclude that while there is lower friction in many dimensions of internet competition branding awareness and trust remain important sources of heterogeneity among internet retailers

earnings and ratings at google answers i introduction most research on internet transactions considers online markets as forums to facilitate the sale of physical goods ellison and fisher ellison 2009 goolsbee and chevalier 2003 sometimes the internet is analyzed as a market for matching workers and firms for an ordinary real world employment relationship kuhn 2004 but certain web sites can also supplement or even replace in person employment relationships this is the approach at google answers a web based service that facilitates paid matches between answerers who have answers or research skills and askers who offer payment for answers to their respective questions i analyze all questions and answers from the inception of the google answers service through november 2003 and i find notable trends in answerer behavior more experienced answerers provide answers with the characteristics askers most value receiving higher ratings as a result answerer earnings increases in experience consistent with learning on the job answerers who focus on particular question categories provide answers of higher quality but earn lower pay per hour perhaps reflecting a lack of versatility answers provided during the business day receive higher payments per hour a compensating differential for working when outside options are most attractive but more experienced answerers tend to forego these opportunities ii literature and context google answers is distinctive in that its entire service and entire employment relationship occur online in contrast most online sales processes anticipate offline functions such as packing and sending merchandise in some respects this online only environment eases analysis a researcher may see the answerer s entire service letting the researcher fully assess quality in contrast an ebay seller s quality generally is unobservable or only partially observer to a researcher nonetheless google answers does not provide all data researchers might seek for example although google answers receives answerers resumes and geographic locations as part of the application process google answers does not share this data with the general public chen ho and kim 2008 address these constraints through field experiments that pay google answers answerers to address questions posed by the authors allowing measurement of the effects of varying prices and gratuities parameters on answerers responses beyond chen ho and kim others have also examined google answers rafaeli raban and ravid 2005 present summary statistics of 2002 2004 answers regner 2005 finds that social preferences and reputation influence askers choice to provide optional gratuities to answerers adamic et al 2008 study answer quality and reputation at the competing though unpaid service yahoo answers iii methodology and data set all data for my analysis comes from the google answers web site http answers google com as it stood in november 2003 i wrote software to extract questions answers and profiles from the answers site forming a database of more than 40 000 questions and answers with only a few exceptions 1 i observe all google answers questions and answers posted through november 2003 2 for each question asked i observe the question itself text and title the question s categorization within google answers taxonomy the time at which the question was asked the payment amount offered by asker to answerer and the asker s username for answered questions i observe the time at which the question was answered the answer including length in characters and number of included urls and the answerer s username when the asker rated the answer i observe the rating when the asker offered a gratuity to the answerer i observe the amount of the gratuity google answers allows an answerer to lock a question obtaining the temporary exclusive fight to answer it for the following 4 8 hours depending on question price

the impact of unemployment insurance on job search evidence from google search data job search is a key choice variable in theories of labor markets but is difficult to measure directly we develop a job search activity index based on google search data the google job search index gjsi we validate the gjsi with both survey and web based measures of job search unlike those measures the gjsi is high frequency geographically precise and available in real time we demonstrate the gjsi s utility by using it to study the effects of unemployment insurance policy changes between 2008 and 2014 we find no evidence of an economically meaningful effect of these changes on aggregate search

oil prices and the stock prices of alternative energy companies energy security issues coupled with increased concern over the natural environment are driving factors behind oil price movements while it is widely accepted that rising oil prices are good for the financial performance of alternative energy companies there has been relatively little statistical work done to measure just how sensitive the financial performance of alternative energy companies are to changes in oil prices in this paper a four variable vector autoregression model is developed and estimated in order to investigate the empirical relationship between alternative energy stock prices technology stock prices oil prices and interest rates our results show technology stock prices and oil prices each individually granger cause the stock prices of alternative energy companies simulation results show that a shock to technology stock prices has a larger impact on alternative energy stock prices than does a shock to oil prices these results should be of use to investors managers and policy makers

are local minimum wages absorbed by price increases estimates from internet based restaurant menus the authors analyze 884 internet based restaurant menus from inside and outside san jose california which they collected before and after the city implemented a 25 minimum wage increase in 2013

truthtelling in matching markets we analyze a search and matching model with non transferable utility and asymmetric information randomly paired agents go through an evaluation phase at the end of which they discover each other s types and choose to match or not before deciding to enter this phase agents can communicate through cheap talk we provide conditions for this communication to be informative and we examine how it affects agents welfare we show that communication is pareto improving only when the matching is assortative in the absence of communication and left unchanged by information transmission

lessons about markets from the internet many of us have grown used to tired of and finally downright skeptical of claims of the transformative powers of the internet it was to usher in the new economy but we seem mostly to have the old it would transform retail but toys r us has outlasted etoys frictionless commerce would be the norm but plenty of friction still exists the internet was also claimed to require a whole new economics with all new laws while this too was very far from the truth existing theories have mostly done quite well the internet has had a substantial effect on economic thought in this paper we discuss some ways in which the internet has affected how economists think about markets

how changes in labor demand affect unemployed workers this study analyzes the manner in which certain favorable shifts in labor demand affect job search although all shifts increase reservation wages they do not necessarily decrease expected unemployment spell durations and increase expected post unemployment wages so that upward sloping short run phillips curves may occur a result due to chamberlain is used to demonstrate that if the wage offer distribution is restricted to be logconcave two of the shifts guarantee downward sloping phillips curves for one of these two shifts previous research by flinn and heckman used logconcavity in a different manner to achieve properly shaped phillips curves

intercountry comparisons of labor force trends and of related developments an overview this paper is a survey of analyses of women s labor force growth in 12 industrialized countries originally presented at a conference in sussex england in june 1983 the main focus of the conference papers and of the current survey is on growth of the labor force of married women in the years 1960 80 trends in fertility wages and family instability also receive attention as related developments married women s labor force growth is observed in all countries except for the ussr after 1970 where labor force rates of women reached the level of men growth rates differ among countries they apparently respond to growth in real wages and to growth in education but response elasticities differ among countries estimates of these elasticities contained in the country papers were helpful in predicting the trends other findings include ubiquitous declines in fertility and growth of divorce in the 1970s both developments are related to long run labor force growth in all countries wages of women were lo

renewable deployment in india financing costs and implications for policy india s ambitious goals for renewable energy raise many questions regarding the nature of investment required we conduct financial modeling of actual renewable projects in india and derive the following insights first the high cost of debt is the most pressing problem higher cost and inferior terms of debt in india may raise the cost of renewable energy by 24 32 compared to the u s second even if cost of debt goes down loan terms including short tenors and variable interest rates will become significant impediments given that they add 13 14 to the cost of renewable energy in india compared to the u s finally due to the high cost of debt policy lessons from the u s and europe which focus on finer instruments such as duration of revenue support revenue certainty investor risk perception and completion cost certainty are not likely to be as effective with potential impacts on the cost of renewable energy in the 3 11 range in fact we find that an interest rate subsidy which reduces the cost of debt reduces the overall subsidy burden by 13 16 this suggests that indian policymakers need to prioritize the provision of low cost long term debt and take a closer look at the successful efforts by china and brazil 2013 elsevier ltd

finding the right employee online determinants of internet recruitment in spanish firms this paper analyses the variation of recruitment strategies in spanish firms with special emphasis on the internet using data from the spanish labour trends survey for the period 2001 2011 we study the factors influencing the decision to use online recruitment and explore the differences between internet and eight traditional recruitment channels our results show that the adoption of the internet monotonically increases over the sample period when internet becomes more universal and even in periods with excess of applicants large firms operating in information intensive activities and located in regions more developed and with better infrastructures are more likely to search for new employees online we also find that internet and traditional recruitment methods follow different patterns especially when using personal referrals and public employment services our results suggest the presence of network externalities derived from the increase number of compatible online job seekers

are china s new energy stock prices driven by new energy policies abstract this paper studies the impact of china s new energy policies on expected changes and volatility in new energy stock prices considering different kinds of policies energy legislation binding targets for new energies economic incentives and technological research and development and several new energy indexes china s new energy sector and the solar wind nuclear and lithium battery subsectors we used a regression model with a garch specification and dummy variables to differentiate policy pre and post announcement effects on expected returns and volatility our evidence indicates that pre and post announcement energy legislation policies dampened price volatility in all subsector indexes and that economic incentives had a positive policy announcement effect on all subsector index prices other new energy policies had no significant impact on either the mean or the volatility of the new energy assets the potential implications for policy makers and investors are discussed

fishing in different pools job search strategies and job finding success in canada in the early 1980s this article examines the job search methods of jobless workers and emphasizes sample selectivity in choice of job search strategies especially use of public employment agencies longitudinal data from the labour force survey of canada for 1981 1983 and 1986 indicate that job search methods change with the business cycle and that many people find jobs without any reported search the determinants of job search success also vary substantially over the business cycle implying a substantial social return to public employment agencies at the 1983 trough of the recession but no noticeable benefits when aggregate unemployment is relatively low

do green investments react to oil price shocks implications for sustainable development abstract this study investigates whether green investments are connected to oil price shocks while earlier papers mainly investigate the linkage between clean energy stock and crude oil prices we consider recently introduced environmental indexes consisting of companies that use eco friendly production processes and develop green infrastructures using the markov regime switching regression approach we observe that the effect of crude oil prices on environmental investments appears to be statistically insignificant albeit positive in most of the cases one possible reason behind such a finding is that the oil dependence is limited to the case of eco friendly firms the results further indicate switching between low and high volatility regimes implying that there exist high and low volatility states for green assets given that growing concerns about climate change and energy security would inspire market participants shift towards ethical investments our results could be of interest to investors aiming at decarbonizing their portfolios by including more environmental assets one important finding of our empirical analysis is that green assets are found to be more susceptible to oil market volatility rather than to oil price fluctuations this is a novel finding given that prior literature focusing on the association of oil sectors and green assets mainly consider the information on oil prices rather than oil volatility hence our study aims to conceal an important void in the exiting literature

assessment and optimization of clean energy equity risks and commodity price volatility indexes implications for sustainability abstract although clean energy equities have emerged as a new asset class for market participants especially environmentally concerned investors existing and previous studies pay very little attention to how equity investors in clean energy markets can reduce their downside risk the authors of this paper address this void by considering the roles of the commodity market volatility indexes of crude oil gold and silver the results of the dynamic conditional correlation model show that commodity volatilities and clean energy equity prices move in opposite directions based on the hedging effectiveness each of the three volatility indexes acts as an effective tool for reducing the risk of clean energy equity indexes the implied volatility index of crude oil is the most effective tool followed by that of gold and silver further analysis indicates the robustness of the results to the application of an asymmetric conditional correlation model the findings extend the limited understanding of how to hedge the downside risk of clean energy stock indexes and provide useful implications to market participants on the ability of implied volatility indexes of major commodities to hedge that risk

public employment agencies and unemployment spells reconciling the experimental and nonexperimental evidence econometric evidence strongly suggests that unemployed job seekers who use the services of a public employment agency pea have longer unemployment spells than those choosing alternative search methods yet in some well designed u s experiments increased use of pea services has been associated with faster transitions intojobs the author argues that the nonexperimental studies may be biased toward finding a positive relationship between unemployment spell duration and pea use because they ignore the possibility that peas are chosen by manyjobseekers only after other search methods have been tried unsuccessfully and a period of unemployment has elapsed an analysis of u k survey data with information on the timing of pea use in 1987 88 supports that hypothesis

informal job search and black youth unemployment in this paper i analyze how young black and white unemployed jobseekers use various methods of search and the employment outcomes which result from their use the focus is on distinguishing informal search methods i e friends and relatives or direct application without referral from more formal ones in analyzing racial differences the results show that the two informal methods of search account for about 90 of the difference in employment probabilities between white and black youth this also accounts for 57 71 of the difference in unemployment rates between the two furthermore most of these results reflect differences in the ability of these methods to generate job offers as opposed to differences in search effort or job acceptance rates however our ability to explain these differences through personal family and household characteristics was generally quite limited this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the impact of energy prices on clean energy stock prices a multivariate quantile dependence approach abstract we assess the impact of quantile price movements in oil gas coal and electricity on the quantiles of clean energy stock returns using a multivariate vine copula dependence setup for the period 2009 2016 our evidence shows that oil and electricity prices were major contributors to the dynamics of clean energy stock returns in the usa and the eu respectively whereas the other energy prices played a minor role in shaping clean energy stock returns furthermore we find evidence of a symmetric energy price impact so extreme upward and downward energy price movements had a similar impact on clean energy stock returns this evidence has potential implications for risk management decision making by energy investors and for policy maker decisions regarding support for clean energy deployment

wavelet based test of co movement and causality between oil and renewable energy stock prices abstract we studied co movement and causality between oil and renewable energy stock prices using continuous and discrete wavelets firstly to obtain information on dynamic correlations over time and for different time scales from wavelet coherence and secondly to obtain information on linear and non linear granger causality in the time frequency domain for general and sectoral renewable energy indices for the period 2006 2015 our findings indicate that dependence between oil and renewable energy returns in the short run was weak but gradually strengthened towards the long run mainly for the period 2008 2012 our causality tests provide evidence against linear causality at higher frequencies and in favour of unidirectional and bidirectional linear causality at lower frequencies in contrast we found consistent evidence of non linear causality running from renewable energy indices to oil prices at different time horizons and mixed evidence of causality running from oil to renewable energy prices these results have potential implications for investors in terms of hedging and for policymakers in terms of policy support decisions regarding the development of renewable energy

modeling renewable energy company risk abstract the renewable energy sector is one of the fastest growing components of the energy industry and along with this increased demand for renewable energy there has been an increase in investing and financing activities the tradeoff between risk and return in the renewable energy sector is however precarious renewable energy companies are often among the riskiest types of companies to invest in and for this reason it is necessary to have a good understanding of the risk factors this paper uses a variable beta model to investigate the determinants of renewable energy company risk the empirical results show that company sales growth has a negative impact on company risk while oil price increases have a positive impact on company risk when oil price returns are positive and moderate increases in sales growth can offset the impact of oil price returns and this leads to lower systematic risk

the effect of sample size on european union s renewable energy investment drivers abstractmacroeconomic modelling results based on relatively varying sample sizes may lead to incoherent results such effects have not been adequately understood in the renewable energy literature regarding the european union eu this study focuses on the comparison of results obtained for renewable energy investment drivers for solar and wind energy investments on different samples of eu countries including all eu 27 former eu 15 and 11 high renewable investment eu countries the study used a random effect panel data modelling approach over the period 1995 2011 for studying the impact of the levelized cost regulation perception carbon emissions and climatic condition on wind and solar investments over the three samples the results demonstrate the importance of trustable regulation schemes to ensure that regulation will not have a significant negative effect on investment showing also the need to further extend the model to include support schemes as fundamental drivers for investment

green bond and financial markets co movement diversification and price spillover effects abstract we examine co movement between the green bond and financial markets finding that the green bond market couples with corporate and treasury bond markets and weakly co moves with stock and energy commodity markets we also find that green bonds have negligible diversification benefits for investors in corporate and treasury markets whereas diversification benefits are sizeable for investors in stock and energy markets we further confirm that green bonds are affected by substantial price spillovers from corporate and treasury fixed income markets and that large price swings in stock and energy markets have a negligible impact on green bond prices

which renewable energy policy is a venture capitalist s best friend empirical evidence from a survey of international cleantech investors governments around the world have adopted ambitious targets to increase the share of renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions they pursue a variety of policy approaches to achieve these targets it has been a popular theme for contributions in energy policy to investigate the effectiveness of such policies this article adds a new perspective to the debate namely looking at the policy preferences of private investors in innovative clean energy technology firms we surveyed 60 investment professionals from european and north american venture capital and private equity funds and asked them to assess the effectiveness of various policies in terms of stimulating their interest to invest in innovative clean energy technologies in addition to quantitative rankings we use qualitative interview data to capture additional information on why investors prefer some policies over others the combined analysis compensates for the inherent limitations of a quantitative ranking using generic policy types the results of this exploratory analysis demonstrate that all other things being equal investors in our sample perceived feed in tariffs to be the most effective renewable energy policy the overall preference for feed in tariffs is even more pronounced among investors based in europe and with higher exposure to clean energy

oil price uncertainty and clean energy stock returns new evidence from crude oil volatility index abstract earlier studies evidence that oil price shocks have significant impacts on clean energy stock returns while the previous literature uses traditional oil price series to investigate such effects we aim to assess whether the variance of alternative energy stock returns can be explained using the information content of crude oil volatility index ovx an indicator of oil price uncertainty to serve our purpose we employ several measures to frame the realized volatility rv of alternative energy sector equity returns in particular we use three different range based rv estimators recommended by parkinson 1980 rogers and satchell 1991 and alizadeh et al 2002 respectively our findings reveal that clean energy stock market returns are highly sensitive to ovx shocks thus oil market uncertainty measured by ovx embodies a crucial role in modeling the volatility of renewable energy equity returns in addition we find a strong indication that ovx provides additional information beyond what is contained in the historical volatilities of equity returns we also document that the magnitude of the effect of ovx is much bigger than that of the realized variance of wti oil spot prices finally we find that the information content of crude oil volatility index improves the volatility forecasts for the clean energy equity market

flexible parametric estimation of duration and competing risk models in this paper we specify and estimate a flexible parametric proportional hazards model the model specification is flexibly parametric in the sense that the baseline hazard is non parametric while the effect of the covariates takes a particular functional form we also add parametric heterogeneity to the underlying hazard model specification we specify a flexible parametric proportional competing risks model which permits unrestricted correlation among the risks unemployment duration data are then analysed using the flexible parametric duration and competing risks specifications we find an important effect arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance and significantly different hazards for the two types of risks new jobs and recalls

can small firms find and defend strategic niches a test of the porter hypothesis a number of studies have found a positive relation between market share and profitability michael porter argues that this need not hold when small firms find strategic niches protected by mobility barriers this paper examines that hypothesis by comparing the profitability of large and small lines of business when the activities of the two groups proxied by the allocation of sales across submarkets differ on average the authors find that in heterogeneous product mix industries profits of large lines of business are no longer significantly greater than profits of smaller rivals except that market leaders maintain their advantage regardless of product mix copyright 1989 by mit press

the exchange rate exposure of u s multinationals this article examines the exposure of u s multinationals to foreign currency risk evidence is presented that the relationship between stock returns and exchange rates differs systematically across multinationals given these results the study focuses on the determinants of exchange rate exposure the comovements between stock returns and the value of the dollar is found to be positively related to the percentage of foreign operations of u s multinationals copyright 1990 by the university of chicago

sectoral differences in the use of information technology and matching efficiency in the us labour market the present study examines how the heterogeneity of use of information technology in production affects the probability that an unemployed worker will be matched with a vacancy using us time series from 1967 to 2007 i construct measures of dispersion of the stocks of software and hardware per worker across 13 industries the measures exhibit three waves whose timing roughly corresponds to the diffusion of mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s personal computers in the 1980s and the internet in the late 1990s after controlling for other influences i find that the probability of transitioning from unemployment to employment responds negatively to an increase in either measure the results imply that by enhancing technical heterogeneity the diffusion of a new technology may suppress the job finding rate

internet job search and unemployment durations after decades of stability the technologies used by workers to locate new jobs began to change rapidly with the diffusion of internet access in the late 1990 s which types of persons incorporated the internet into their job search strategy and did searching for work on line help these workers find new jobs faster we address these questions using measures of internet job search derived from the december 1998 and august 2000 cps computer and internet supplements matched with job search outcomes from subsequent cps files we find that internet searchers are positively selected on observables but negatively selected on unobservables a beneficial unemployment duration reducing causal effect of internet job search is consistent with our estimates only if negative selection on unobservables is especially strong in other words only if the population of on line resumes is strongly adversely selected

search method use by unemployed youth this article presents a search model which shows that search method choices should be related to their costs and expected productivities as well as to nonwage income and wage offer distributions the empirical evidence then shows that the most frequently used search methods i e friends and relatives and direct applications without referral are also the most productive in generating offers and acceptances the number of methods used is affected by factors that presumably reflect opportunities as well as income sources and needs specific methods are chosen in a manner that generates positive average effects on outcomes for those using them

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

impact of silver price uncertainty on solar energy firms abstract to the best of our knowledge we are the first to investigate if silver market uncertainty impacts the stock price performance of solar energy firms such investigation could be of vital importance to investors and policymakers given that silver is heavily utilized in photovoltaic pv process for producing solar energy methodologically we apply the garch jump process to estimate the effect of silver market uncertainty proxied by silver volatility index vxslv on the global solar energy stock indexes using a recent data set we document the following key findings first there exists a negative effect of vxslv on the equity indexes under study this result suggests that an upsurge in silver market volatility would create a chaos in the solar energy business second the impact of silver volatility index on renewable energy firms holds even when we control for the impact of oil price volatility ovx albeit ovx when compared to vxslv transmits higher risk to alternative energy stocks as evidenced by the magnitudes of the estimated parameters third the impact of silver market uncertainty appears to be symmetric implying that increases and decreases in vxslv would have a homogeneous impact on the solar energy stock returns we finally show that equity prices of solar energy firms are characterized by time varying jumps the implications of the results are discussed as well

gender differences in displacement cost evidence and implications this paper uses a unique and newly available data set on displaced workers to estimate differences in the wage costs of displacement between women and men while predisplacement wages rise at about the same rate with tenure for women as men in this data set women lose more from displacement than men and the magnitude of this loss increases with tenure overall we interpret our results as not supportive of the specific capital hypothesis that women accumulate less firmspecific human capital than men and we suggest that future attempts to explain our result focus on gender differences in the process of search for a new job

assessing the impact of oil prices on firms of different sizes its tough being in the middle recent empirical research has found evidence of a relationship between oil price movements and stock prices most published research investigates the relationship between oil price movements and stock prices using either economy wide measures of stock prices or industry sector measures of stock prices an important question that has largely gone unanswered relates to the relationship between oil prices and stock prices when the size of firms is allowed to vary relative to large firms do oil price movements have larger or smaller impacts on the stock prices of small or medium sized firms the answer to this question could have important policy implications that affect economic growth and prosperity in this paper a panel of firms is followed over a 17 year period to investigate the relationship between oil price movements firm size and stock prices evidence is found that shows the relationship between oil price movements and stock prices does vary with firm size and the relationship is strongest for medium sized firms

broadband in the labor market the impact of residential high speed internet on married women s labor force participation the author investigates how high speed home internet use has affected labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross state variation in supply side constraints to reside

revolutionary effects of new information technologies in markets with imperfect information and heterogeneity the information technology affects the rate at which agents meet which affects the distribution of production technologies across firms multiple equilibria may arise because the reservation utility and the lowest production technology in use affect each other the adoption of novel information technologies may then entail a revolution in the sense of a move from an inefficient to equilibrium inefficient production technologies are swiftly moved even in sectors where the new information technology has only recently been introduced the results apply to consumer products labour intermediates and institutions royal economic society 2006

is there dependence and systemic risk between oil and renewable energy stock prices abstract we study systemic risk and dependence between oil and renewable energy markets using copulas to characterize the dependence structure and to compute the conditional value at risk as a measure of systemic risk we found significant time varying average and symmetric tail dependence between oil returns and several global and sectoral renewable energy indices our evidence on systemic risk indicates that oil price dynamics significantly contributes around 30 to downside and upside risk of renewable energy companies these results have important implications for risk management and renewable energy policies

upskilling do employers demand greater skill when workers are plentiful using a proprietary database of online job postings we find that education and experience requirements rose during the great recession these increases were larger in states and occupations that e

co movements and spillovers of oil and renewable firms under extreme conditions new evidence from negative wti prices during covid 19 we test for the existence of volatility spillovers and co movements among energy focused corporations during the outbreak of the covid 19 pandemic inclusive of the april 2020 events where west texas intermediate wti oil future prices became negative employing the spillover index approach of diebold and yilmaz 2012 as well as developing a dcc figarch conditional correlation framework and using estimated spillover indices built on a generalised vector autoregressive framework in which forecast error variance decompositions are invariant to the variable ordering we examine the sectoral transmission mechanisms of volatility shocks and contagion throughout the energy sector among several results we find positive and economically meaningful spillovers from falling oil prices to both renewable energy and coal markets however this result is only found for the narrow portion of our sample surrounding the negative wti event we interpret our results being directly attributed to a sharp drop in global oil gas and coal demand rather than because of a sudden increase in oil supply while investors observed the us fracking industry losing market share to coal they also viewed renewables as more reliable mechanism to generate long term stable and low cost supply