the impact of ict investment and energy price on industrial electricity demand dynamic growth model approach the authors investigate the effects of information and communications technology ict investment electricity price and oil price on the consumption of electricity in south korea s industries using a logistic growth model the concept electricity intensity is used to explain electricity consumption patterns an empirical analysis implies that ict investment in manufacturing industries that normally consume relatively large amounts of electricity promotes input factor substitution away from the labor intensive to the electricity intensive moreover results also suggest that ict investment in some specific manufacturing sectors is conducive to the reduction of electricity consumption whereas ict investment in the service sector and most manufacturing sectors increases electricity consumption it is concluded that electricity prices critically affect electricity consumption in half of south korea s industrial sectors but not in the other half a finding that differs somewhat from previous research results reasons are suggested to explain why the south korean case is so different policymakers may find this study useful as it answers the question of whether ict investment can ultimately reduce energy consumption and may aid in planning the capacity of south korea s national electric power

estimation on oil demand and oil saving potential of china s road transport sector national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013 national natural science foundation of china 71203186 fundamental research funds for the central universities 2010221051 national science foundation for disting

modeling the co movements between crude oil and refined petroleum markets abstract in this paper we investigate two types of asymmetries i e the asymmetry in the lower and upper tail dependences and the asymmetry in the propagation of crisis bubble between crude oil market and refined petroleum markets based on copula models thirteen copula models with different types of dependence structures and time varying dependence parameters are considered we find that in general the malm copula fits our sample data best based on aic criterion we find that lower and upper tail dependences are both positive indicating that crude oil and refined product markets tend to move together using the asymmetric copulas we find asymmetry in tail dependence between crude oil and heating oil returns and that between crude oil and jet fuel returns interestingly upper tail dependence is significantly greater than the lower tail dependence for the pre crisis period while the result is reversed for the post crisis period finally although our data prefers the nonexchangeable malm copula the asymmetry in the propagation of crisis bubble between crude oil and refined product returns is very weak

environmental regulation technological innovation and energy consumption a cross region analysis in china abstract china has encountered the environmental issues and energy pressures in the middle income stage strengthening environmental regulation is a crucial measure to prevent environment deterioration and energy dilemma this paper investigates the three types of environmental regulations on energy consumption using feasible generalized least squares method during 1997 2015 in direct and indirect path the main conclusions are as follows in the direct path the economical and supervised types of environmental regulations have inhibited energy consumption whilst legal environmental regulation has no significant impact as for indirect path the rebound effect of energy is greater than the energy conservation generated by technological innovation which is embodied as an inhibitory effect the effects of environmental regulation display regional difference the legal and supervised types of environmental regulations have significant cost effect and rebound effect on energy consumption in the entire samples on the contrary the economical environmental regulation shows the opposite sigh in eastern regions the counterfactual simulation results show that the net effects of environmental regulations on energy consumption are negative which is beneficial for relieving energy pressures based on the findings this paper provides pertinent policy implications

strategic interdependence in models of property rights the concept of strategic interdependence has opened a wide spectrum of explanation beyond the robinson crusoe economy this essay explores the implications of strategic interdependence for the theory of property rights and the new institutional economics schotter it attempts to clarify some of the linkages from institutional economics to micro and macroeconomic theory by considering how property institutions result from strategic interdependence confer payoffs to individual agents and reflect collective choices based on individual preferences

income and price elasticities of energy consumption in egypt a time series analysis abstract the purpose of this paper is to provide empirical estimates of the price and income elasticities of energy consumption in egypt it fills an important gap since policy discussion of energy pricing issues has so far been based more on assumptions than on hard evidence the paper shows that the real relative price of energy has been falling steadily since 1972 while per capita energy consumption rose some 50 over the decade 1972 81 evidence produced in this exercise indicates quite clearly that price and income elasticities of energy consumption are significantly much lower than was generally believed

heating homes understanding the impact of prices abstract studies show that energy prices have an impact on household energy consumption however these studies pay little attention to interpreting the findings and therefore little is known about how and why households respond to energy prices this paper provide an example of an interpretation of the impact of energy prices on consumption from a social practice theoretical perspective this paper investigates the impact of district heating price level on energy used for space heating and hot water by danish households living in single family detached houses the results show a moderately negative effect of the price level on consumption which is stronger in newer presumably more energy efficient houses and for higher income households however the effect varies across years which suggests that the price responsiveness is more a matter of changing everyday practices short term response than being able to afford energy improvements long term response in a practice theoretical perspective the results indicate that price differences have an impact on everyday practices where for example the aspect of energy in everyday practices is perceived as more valuable to practitioners in expensive areas compared to cheaper areas and that the meaning of price in practices is influenced by the social and material contexts

the breakdown of hierarchies in the soviet union and china a neoinstitutional perspective why did modest attempts to decentralize the centrally administered soviet system lead to its collapse while more far reaching decentralization in china left central political and administrative hierarchies intact this article analyzes the disintegration of centrally planned organizations in the context of a neoinstitutional model of the breakdown of authority within hierarchies an agency model of hierarchy is presented that incorporates the ambiguous property rights authority relations and risk sharing conditions that prevailed under central planning and then persist during postcommunist transitions this model suggests that decentralizing reforms could trigger an organizational bank run prompting local agents to seize organizational assets under their control the article also considers reputation preserving strategies that central authorities might use to avert disintegration as an application of this model the collapse of soviet political industrial and state fiscal hierarchies are considered and compared with the experience of analogous sectors in china reforms in both states transferred significant autonomy from the center to local field agents in the soviet case these agents appropriated organizational assets with little interference from the center in china by contrast the center preserved both its capacity for monitoring and its reputation for disciplining transgressions and the rise of hybrid ownership forms made expropriation of state and party assets far less attractive

the perception of man and the conception of society two approaches to understanding society the social sciences offer two distinct approaches to understanding society one originated with the scottish moral philosophers and shaped the discipline of economics the other emerged from the french enlightenment and influenced the study of sociology the two approaches are based on radically different perceptions of man and man s relation to society this paper explores these alternative hypotheses and examines some major implications it concludes that the hypothesis reaching back to the scottish philosophers provides the basis for a unified approach in the social sciences

should investors include commodities in their portfolios after all new evidence abstract this paper investigates whether an investor is made better off by including commodities in a portfolio that consists of traditional asset classes first we revisit the posed question within an in sample setting by employing mean variance and non mean variance spanning tests then we form optimal portfolios by taking into account the higher order moments of the portfolio returns distribution and evaluate their out of sample performance under the in sample setting we find that commodities are beneficial only to non mean variance investors however these benefits are not preserved out of sample our findings challenge the alleged diversification benefits of commodities and are robust across a number of performance evaluation measures utility functions and datasets the results hold even when transaction costs are considered and across various sub periods not surprisingly the only exception appears over the 2005 2008 unprecedented commodity boom period

was privateering plunder efficient abstract this paper argues that when contracts between enemies are enforceable and transaction costs are low plunderers and their victims benefit from trade that facilitates the former s ability to plunder the latter coasean plunder contracts transform part of plunder s social costs into private benefits for plunderers and their victims a significant portion of the wealth that plunder would otherwise destroy is preserved instead the result is more efficient plunder to investigate our hypothesis we consider maritime marauding in the 18th and 19th centuries privateers developed a system of ransom and parole founded on coasean plunder contracts with victim merchantmen

squatting as rent seeking and pressure group competition a south african case study a new squatting phenomenon in south africa is analysed from a rent seeking pressure group perspective while such squatting may play an expanded role in privatising publicly and even privately held land and in redistributing wealth over the near future in the longer term its expansion will tend to be limited by rent protecting and counter innovation as long as this rent seeking competition stays within the bounds set by constitutional government

the welfare analytics of transaction costs externalities and institutional choice a natural result of the economist s participation in externality literature has been a strong emphasis upon market and price guided policies available theoretical foundations are insufficient for supporting this ideology absent is a conceptual framework which integrates institutional options and their attendant resource costs with what we know of resource and technology constraints this paper addresses this omission by incorporating an explicit role for transaction costs into traditional welfare diagrammatics

a note on the conditional correlation between energy prices evidence from future markets abstract we model the joint movements of daily returns on one month futures for crude oil heating oil and natural gas through the multivariate garch with dynamic conditional correlations and elliptical distributions introduced by pelagatti and rondena pelagatti m m rondena s 2007 dynamic conditional correlation with elliptical distributions unpublished manuscript universita di milano bicocca august futures prices of crude and heating oil covary strongly the conditional correlation between the futures prices of natural gas and crude oil has been rising over the last 5 years however this correlation has been low on average over two thirds of the sample suggesting that future markets have no established tradition of pricing natural gas as a function of developments on oil markets

cooperation when n is large evidence from the mining camps of the american west abstract the sources of cooperation in small groups are well documented there is however less understanding about cooperation in large groups i study the enforcement of property rights in the mining camps of the american west miners demanded secure property rights and protection from violence to exploit the region s mineral wealth in the model miners must divide their labor between mining and supporting property rights institutions the main prediction of the model is that cooperation in property rights enforcement emerges only when social norms of cooperation are sufficiently widespread the model also predicts that social norms are less effective in mining camps with large populations or high labor productivity i test these predictions against detailed evidence from the letters diaries and reminiscences of miners in 25 camps in california colorado and montana and find that the evidence supports the predictions the results show that social norms can significantly lower the costs of collective action in large groups

non linear prices and energy demand abstract this paper examines the use of non linear price structures in the context of the demand for energy such structures are attractive because they permit policy makers to meet the objective of equity without sacrificing that of resource mobilization and economic efficiency the paper concentrates on two aspects of this issue the first is the accurate forecasting of demand in the presence of such price structures and the second is the design of the optimal non linear tariff given some suitable welfare loss minimizing criterion in addition to looking at the theoretical aspects of the problem the paper also has some illustrative results on forecasting demand with non linear electricity tariffs in pakistan

the fuelwood market in greece an empirical approach abstract wood has been since ancient times the basic household heating medium nowadays wood remains the primary energy source in rural areas of developing countries mainly in africa in greece the domestic demand of fuelwood is relied mainly on the fuelwood domestic supply especially during the post war period the domestic supply satisfies adequately the domestic demand eliminating the role of imports the present study surveys the long run relationship between the fuelwood prices of different forest species in order to determine the role of the special market conditions in their price formation in addition the error correction model is estimated in order to survey the direction of the granger causality among the prices of the fuelwood forest species the implementation of the impulse response analysis and the variance decomposition confirmed that coniferous and beech fuelwood producer price may account for the volatility of the oak fuelwood producer price this result may contribute greatly to the conservation of oak forest an important carbon storage forest ecosystem

price sensitivity of residential energy consumption in norway abstract the main aim of this paper is to test the stability of the results of a model which focus on the relationship between the choice of heating equipment and the residential energy consumption the results for the income and energy price variables are of special interest stability in the time dimension is tested by applying the model on micro data for each of the years 1993 1995 the parameter estimates are stable within a 95 confidence interval however the estimated impact of the energy price variable on energy consumption was considerably weaker in 1994 than in 1993 and 1995 the results for two different income groups in the pooled data set are also subject to stability testing the energy price sensitivity in residential energy consumption is found to be higher for high income households than for low income households

on the effects of insecure property consider a contested resource land of size t t for territory that no one clearly possesses and suppose the settling of claims on this resource is primarily determined by the actual or potential use of force we will examine three types of institutional arrangements winner take all conflict with the relative strengths of the contestants determining the winner of t negotiated settlement and division of t under the threat of winner take all conflict and a negotiated division of t with the possibility of trade in other commodities again under the threat of winner take all conflict we suppose the existence of two agents competing for t they can be either individuals or collectivities and are labeled 1 and 2 each agent i

aggregate industrial energy consumer response to wholesale prices in the restructured texas electricity market abstract the aggregate response of consumers to wholesale price signals is very limited in the restructured electric reliability council of texas ercot market an overall average own price elasticity of demand of 0 000008 for industrial energy consumers served at transmission voltage is estimated using a symmetric generalized mcfadden cost function model to date ercot has sought to promote demand response to price signals without reliance on stand alone demand response programs but with a market structure that is designed to facilitate economic demand response this very limited responsiveness to wholesale price signals may prove problematic in light of policy decisions to pursue an energy only resource adequacy mechanism for ercot

dynamics of oil price precious metal prices and exchange rate this study examines the co movements and information transmission among the spot prices of four precious metals gold silver platinum and palladium oil price and the us dollar euro exchange rate we find evidence of a weak long run equilibrium relationship but strong feedbacks in the short run the spot precious metal markets respond significantly but temporarily to a shock in any of the prices of the other metal prices and the exchange rate furthermore we discover some evidence of market overreactions in the palladium and platinum cases as well as in the exchange rate market in conclusion whether there are overreactions and re adjustments or not investors may diversify at least a portion of the risk away by investing in precious metals oil and the euro policy implications are provided

dependence and extreme dependence of crude oil and natural gas prices with applications to risk management abstract in this article we show how the copula garch approach can be appropriately used to investigate the conditional dependence structure between the crude oil and natural gas markets as well as to derive implications for portfolio risk management in extreme economic conditions using daily price data from january 1997 to october 2011 our in sample results show evidence of asymmetric dependence between the two markets the crude oil and gas markets tend to comove closely together during bullish periods but not at all during bearish periods moreover taking the extreme comovement into account leads to an improvement in the accuracy of the out of sample value at risk forecasts

can foreign direct investment harness energy consumption in china a time series investigation abstract this study assesses the long run relationship and short run dynamics between foreign direct investment fdi and energy consumption in china applying the bounds testing approach to annual data from 1982 to 2012 we find that a stable fdi energy nexus exists in the long run and a 1 increase in fdi reduces energy consumption by 0 21 however this study shows a positive association between fdi and energy consumption in the short run attributing to the dominance of the scale effect our results remain robust to different measurements and estimators it is suggested that the chinese government shall support the inward fdi in the tertiary and energy sectors and strengthen local absorptive capacities to fully internalize fdi related knowledge spillovers in energy conservation

economists and public policy chicago political economy versus conventional views both conventional welfare economics and public choice analysis suggest that economists have an important educational role to play in the public policy process in improving the decision making process in sharp contrast information and incentive problems related to voting rules the bureaucracy and the legislature do not arise in cpe because these processes are all perfect agents of interest groups consequently the political process is efficient and there is no scope for beneficial economic analysis as it relates to the sugar program or other public policies that is the polity is efficient or it would be reordered by competing interest groups to make it so but as mitchell 1989 290 stresses the important unanswered question in cpe remains if there is no scope for improvement how and why does change occur

the short and long run efficiency of energy precious metals and base metals markets evidence from the exponential smooth transition autoregressive models abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the long and short run relationship between spot and futures prices of the energy precious metals and base metals markets we analyze daily data from january 1985 to february 2019 the empirical findings based on the cointegration test which follows a nonlinear process suggest that the spot prices of energy and metals assets have long run relationships with their futures prices nonparametric granger causality test results also indicate bi directional causality among futures and spot prices these findings indicate that the energy and metals markets are informationally efficient in the sense of fama 1970

on the short and long run efficiency of energy and precious metal markets this article contributes to the related literature by empirically investigating the efficiency of nine energy and precious metal markets over the last decades employing several pronounced models we test for both short and the long run efficiency using in addition to linear cointegration models nonlinear cointegration and error correction models ecms which allow the efficiency intensity to change per regime our findings can be summarized as follows i futures prices are found to be cointegrated with spot prices but they do not constitute unbiased predictors of future spot prices ii the hypothesis of risk neutrality is rejected iii the short run efficiency hypothesis is rejected suggesting that using past futures price returns improves the modeling and forecasting of future spot prices and iv the nonlinear modeling suggests the presence of two distinct regimes wherein the first regime the efficiency hypothesis is supported whereas in the second it is rejected the empirical findings have important implications for producers hedgers speculators and policymakers

contribution of crude oil price to households budget the weight of indirect energy use we propose a new method to evaluate the burden of oil price on any set of goods and services and apply it to french households this method takes into account the contribution of indirect energy consumption which constitutes typically one half of the energy used by a typical french household it yields an average burden of 4 4 in 2006 with a higher relative burden for households with lower income older members and rural dwelling

anarchy and its breakdown anarchy defined as a system in which participants can seize and defend resources without regulation from above is not chaos but rather a spontaneous order however anarchy is fragile and may dissolve either into formless amorphy or into a more organized system such as hierarchy under anarchy each contestant balances between productive exploitation of the current resource base and fighting to acquire or defend resources anarchy is sustainable only when there are strongly diminishing returns to fighting effort the decisiveness parameter is sufficiently low and incomes exceed the viability minimum these considerations explain many features of animal and human conflict

modelling oecd industrial energy demand asymmetric price responses and energy saving technical change abstract the industrial sector embodies a multifaceted production process consequently modelling the derived demand for energy is a complex issue made all the more difficult by the need to capture the effect of technical progress of the capital stock this paper is an exercise in econometric modelling of industrial energy demand using panel data for 15 oecd countries over the period 1962 2003 exploring the issue of energy saving technical change and asymmetric price responses although difficult to determine precisely it is tentatively concluded that the preferred specification for oecd industrial energy demand incorporates asymmetric price responses but not exogenous energy saving technical change

might makes rights a theory of the formation and initial distribution of property rights this paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into the formation and initial distribution of property rights violence is singled out as a major constraint on this formation process its role is explicitly modeled in a choice theoretic framework and some of the implications are tested using data collected from contracts written during the california gold rush of 1848

the long term relationships among china s energy consumption sources and adjustments to its renewable energy policy abstract to reduce its consumption of coal and oil in its primary energy consumption china promotes the development of renewable energy resources i have analysed the long term relationship among china s primary energy consumption sources changes in coal consumption lead those in the consumption of other energy sources in the long term coal and oil fuels substitute for each other equally the long term elasticities of china s coal consumption relative to its hydroelectricity consumption were greater than one and nearly equal during the two sample periods therefore increased hydroelectricity consumption did not imply a reduction in coal consumption china holds abundant hydroelectricity wind and solar energy potential china must prevent an excessive escalation of its economy and resultant energy demand to realise a meaningful substitution of coal with hydroelectricity moreover china must develop and use wind and solar energy sources natural gas can be a good substitute for coal given its moderate price growth and affordable price levels

liberalisation consumption heterogeneity and the dynamics of energy prices in this study the methodology var and the cointegration analysis are used to examine the dynamic interaction among the energy prices of the competitor energy sources in a liberalised market data from the uk market were applied and models for the residential and industrial sectors were developed our results indicate the existence of long run relationships between the energy prices before and after the liberalisation implying the possibility of substitution among the different forms of energy however the results appear to be also largely influenced by external variables not included in the models that may be reducing the importance of the energy prices over their own evolution and offsetting the basic substitution relationships the general results of the impulse response functions both for the residential and industrial sectors present low statistical significance which seems to be due to the still slow rate of adjustment of the energy market to price changes along with the immaturity of the liberalisation process taking into consideration the results some routes for future research are pointed out namely the need to include in the analysis variables which would proxy the general state of the economy

the relationship among energy prices and energy consumption in china the pricing mechanism for energy is not in line with the international standards because the energy prices are controlled by the government partly or completely in china chinese government made a lot of efforts to improve the pricing mechanism for energy the relations between chinese energy prices and energy consumption are the foundations to reform the mechanism in this paper the relations between chinese energy consumption and energy prices are researched by cointegration equations impulse response functions granger causality and variance decomposition the cointegration relations among energy prices energy consumption and economic outputs show that higher energy price will decrease energy consumption in chinese industrial sectors but will not reduce the economic output in the long run the cointegration relation between energy price and household energy consumption shows that higher energy price will decrease household energy consumption in the long run and increase it in the short run so chinese government should deepen the reform of pricing mechanism for energy and increase the energy prices reasonably to save energy

empirical assessment of energy price policies the case for cross price elasticities abstract evaluations of energy price policies are necessarily based on measures of the substitution of energy and non energy inputs facing a variety of substitution elasticities the central question arises which measure would be appropriate apparently for a long time this question has not been at issue allen s elasticities of substitution aes have been the most used measures in applied production analysis this paper s main contribution is an instructive survey of the origin of substitution measures and of the trinity of empirical substitution elasticities aes cross price elasticities and the morishima elasticities of substitution mes with particular emphasis on their interpretations and the perspectives that will be captured by these measures this survey clarifies why classical cross price elasticities are to be preferred for many practical purposes berndt and wood s rev econom stat 57 1975 259 frequently applied data set of us manufacturing is used to illustrate why assessments of energy price policies would be better based on cross price elasticities like the energy price elasticity of capital rather than on aes or mes

appropriation violent enforcement and transaction costs a critical survey this paper focuses on the extension of transaction costs to appropriative activity and coercive power in the property rights approach it has been argued that including the costs of appropriation and violent enforcement in transaction costs is based on the assumption that coaseian bargaining can be extended to any institutional scenario i e voluntary as well as coercive exchange however voluntary transactions cannot capture the logic of coercive power this means that the assumption of an efficient political market is not valid and that the political coase theorem lacks the logical consistency to provide a cornerstone for political theory

a new statistic and practical guidelines for nonparametric granger causality testing abstract in this paper we introduce a new nonparametric test for granger non causality which avoids the over rejection observed in the frequently used test proposed by hiemstra and jones 1994 testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the stock price volume relation journal of finance 49 1639 1664 after illustrating the problem by showing that rejection probabilities under the null hypothesis may tend to one as the sample size increases we study the reason behind this phenomenon analytically it turns out that the hiemstra jones test for the null of granger non causality which can be rephrased in terms of conditional independence of two vectors x and z given a third vector y is sensitive to variations in the conditional distributions of x and z that may be present under the null to overcome this problem we replace the global test statistic by an average of local conditional dependence measures by letting the bandwidth tend to zero at appropriate rates the variations in the conditional distributions are accounted for automatically based on asymptotic theory we formulate practical guidelines for choosing the bandwidth depending on the sample size we conclude with an application to historical returns and trading volumes of the standard and poor s index which indicates that the evidence for volume granger causing returns is weaker than suggested by the hiemstra jones test

testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the stock price volume relation linear and nonlinear granger causality tests are used to examine the dynamic relation between daily dow jones stock returns and percentage changes in new york stock exchange trading volume we find evidence of significant bidirectional nonlinear causality between returns and volume we also examine whether the nonlinear causality from volume to returns can be explained by volume serving as a proxy for information flow in the stochastic process generating stock return variance as suggested by clark s 1973 latent common factor model after controlling for volatility persistence in returns we continue to find evidence of nonlinear causality from volume to returns

world oil and agricultural commodity prices evidence from nonlinear causality abstract the increasing co movements between the world oil and agricultural commodity prices have renewed interest in determining price transmission from oil prices to those of agricultural commodities this study extends the literature on the oil agricultural commodity prices nexus which particularly concentrates on nonlinear causal relationships between the world oil and three key agricultural commodity prices corn soybeans and wheat to this end the linear causality approach of toda yamamoto and the nonparametric causality method of diks panchenko are applied to the weekly data spanning from 1994 to 2010 the linear causality analysis indicates that the oil prices and the agricultural commodity prices do not influence each other which supports evidence on the neutrality hypothesis in contrast the nonlinear causality analysis shows that i there are nonlinear feedbacks between the oil and the agricultural prices and ii there is a persistent unidirectional nonlinear causality running from the oil prices to the corn and to the soybeans prices the findings from the nonlinear causality analysis therefore provide clues for better understanding the recent dynamics of the agricultural commodity prices and some policy implications for policy makers farmers and global investors this study also suggests the directions for future studies

renewable energy consumption co2 emissions and oil prices in the g7 countries abstract economic and societal issues related to energy security and global warming is placing greater emphasis on the consumption of renewable energy this paper presents and estimates an empirical model of renewable energy consumption for the g7 countries panel cointegration estimates show that in the long term increases in real gdp per capita and co2 per capita are found to be major drivers behind per capita renewable energy consumption these results are robust across two different panel cointegration estimators oil price increases have a smaller although negative impact on renewable energy consumption deviations from equilibrium are driven mostly by the error correction term as opposed to short term shocks short term deviations from the long term equilibrium take anywhere from between 1 3 years france and 7 3 years japan to correct

price elasticities policy measures and actual developments in household energy consumption a bottom up analysis for the netherlands in the netherlands it seems likely that the large number of new policy measures in the past decade has influenced the response of households to changing prices to investigate this issue the energy trends in the period 1990 2000 have been simulated with a bottom up model applied earlier for scenario studies and extensive data from surveys for a number of alternative price cases the elasticity values found are explained using the bottom up changes in energy trends one finding is that the specific set of saving options defines for a great part the price response the price effect has been analysed too in combination with the policy measures standards subsidies and energy taxes the simulation results indicate that the elasticity value could be 30 40 higher without these measures

energy price impacts modelling in the agriculture sector abstract energy price impacts in the agriculture sector are mainly of economic and non economic types however economic impacts are well researched this paper surveys the various types of energy price impacts and different estimation techniques used in the past the study suggests that the energy price impacts estimation from a systems model of the agriculture sector is the best for several reasons for this purpose a price endogenous sectoral programming model of agriculture can be developed in a partial or general equilibrium framework however data requirements for this are enormous

energy consumption employment output and temporal causality evidence from taiwan based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques in this study a cointegration analysis and a vector autoregressive model var are used to examine the causal relationships among energy consumption employment and output for taiwan over the period january 1982 to november 1997 johansen 1988 and johansen and juselius 1990 cointegration test result indicates these three variables are cointegrated with one cointegrating vector the results from granger causality tests based on vector error correction models vecm suggest bidirectional grange causality for employment output and employment energy consumption but only unidirectional causality running from energy consumption to output furthermore the impulse responses and variance decompositions are also incorporated into the analysis the results from impulsive response and variance decomposition analysis tell similar stories energy consumption appears to have led to output growth in taiwan over this period the policy implication of this finding is that energy conservation will restrain the outpu

are gold and silver cointegrated new evidence from quantile cointegrating regressions this paper revisits the study on the long run relationship between gold and silver by escribano and granger 1998 we apply a quantile cointegration model to gold and silver prices and to prices of the corresponding futures contracts whereas cointegration models assuming a constant cointegrating vector fail to detect a cointegration relationship between gold and silver we are able to show that a nonlinear long run relationship exits the cointegrating vector is modelled as state dependent and time varying in our framework and the quantile cointegration estimates reveal substantial asymmetry in the relationship the results suggest that the pronounced role of precious metals as investment opportunities particularly in bubble like episodes and times of financial turmoil leads to comovement of gold and silver in these periods

balance of power and the propensity of conflict we study the role of an imbalance in fighting strengths when players bargain in the shadow of conflict our experimental results suggest in a simple bargaining game with an exogenous mediation proposal the likelihood of conflict is independent of the balance of power if bargaining involves endogenous demand choices however the likelihood of conflict is higher if power is more imbalanced even though endogenous bargaining outcomes reflect the players unequal fighting strengths strategic uncertainty causes outcomes to be most efficient when power is balanced in turn the importance of exogenous mediation proposals depends on the balance of power

a theory of price control price or rent control is but one of many forms of legislative action which interfere with private contracting in the market place to delimit the scope of my analysis i shall use the term price control to refer only to any set of regulations which satisfies the following three conditions first the control must fix the price or income terms of private contracts this categorically excludes any laws which regulate the distribution of income among the contracting parties on a share or percentage basis 2 second the control must involve no appropriation of proceeds to or from the government taxation and subsidization are thus excluded finally the fixing of price must not be associated with direct government sales purchases or manipulation of resources so as to maintain the regulated price 3 by this stipulation price support is also excluded even on such terms legal regulations to control price are still many and varied to evaluate our understanding of the class of phenomena which we seek to explain it is essential that we discover implications refutable by facts by this criterion the available body of economic theory pertaining to price control is deficient indeed the massive literature on the subject offers few such implications 4 an alternative approach to analyzing the observable effects of price control is presented here

the relationship between energy consumption energy prices and economic growth time series evidence from asian developing countries this paper estimates the causal relationships between energy consumption and income for india indonesia the philippines and thailand using cointegration and error correction modelling techniques the results indicate that in the short run unidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for india and indonesia while bidirectional granger causality runs from energy to income for thailand and the philippines in the case of thailand and the philippines energy income and prices are mutually causal the study results do not support the view that energy and income are neutral with respect to each other with the exception of indonesia and india where neutrality is observed in the short run c 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classifications c22 q43 q48

blueprint for an international lender of last resort abstract this paper proposes a low cost alternative to the large bailout packages that the international monetary fund imf has organized to address financial crises the imf would act as a lender of last resort faced with an unsustainable debt burden a government would declare default it would announce negotiations to restructure its debt at a sustainable level and a minimum restructured value of the debt during the restructuring period the imf would provide a cash support bid at a discount to the government s minimum offer the imf floor would guarantee liquidity and create a functioning market in the defaulted debt the proposal would remedy market failure preclude panic and contagion and facilitate an orderly debt restructuring this would be achieved without substantial official funds lenders would be forced to bear the risks they undertake thereby reducing moral hazard and future instability

commodity futures and market efficiency we propose a comprehensive treatment of the leverage effect i e the relationship between returns and volatility of a specific asset focusing on energy commodities futures namely brent and wti crude oils natural gas and heating oil after estimating the volatility process without assuming any specific form of its behavior we find the volatility to be long term dependent with the hurst exponent on a verge of stationarity and non stationarity to overcome such complication we utilize the detrended cross correlation and the detrending moving average cross correlation coefficients and we find the standard leverage effect for both crude oils and heating oil for natural gas we find the inverse leverage effect additionally we report that the strength of the leverage effects is scale dependent finally we also show that none of the effects between returns and volatility is detected as the long term cross correlated one these findings can be further utilized to enhance forecasting models and mainly in the risk management and portfolio diversification

tenure issues in higher education the system of tenure that dominates american higher education has long been a source of controversy the institution of tenure has been attacked for entrenching a lazy professoriate more interested in attending faraway conferences and producing unreadable research than in teaching or developing practical insights while on the other hand it has long been defended as an absolute necessity for the defense of open intellectual inquiry the tenure controversy has been sharpened in recent years by several events the end of mandatory retirement which was abolished by federal law effective january 1 1994 has heightened concerns about the productivity and commitment of professors who received tenure long ago and who no longer have the same incentives to invest in long term reputation there is also ongoing concern over the steadily rising cost of higher education which raises the question of what students as well as the taxpayers who support public institutions of higher education are getting for their money 1 the idea that tenure is a wasteful institution for universities runs up against the puzzling fact that the commitment to tenure is one that academic institutions impose on themselves although the american association of university professors aaup provides a powerful lobby in favor of tenure generally colleges and universities most notably private ones are under no legal requirement to observe tenure constraints although as administrators we certainly feel the weight of those constraints our view is that a tenure system in fact provides important benefits to society and to colleges and universities we argue here that the role of tenure is

are public goods really common pools considerations of the evolution of policing and highways in england figures omitted a series of property rights alterations made by the english government undermined individuals incentives to cooperate in the production of both policing and road maintenance ultimately leading to government production the result is more accurately characterized as a free access common pool than as a public good common pool analysis suggests an array of possible policy prescriptions involving the internalization of costs and benefits through privatization of rights in contrast the public goods concept appears to be simply an ex post justification for claiming that the only efficient policy is public provision of these services at zero money prices i introduction policing and highways are frequently cited as important examples of production of public goods and it is often contended that private provision of these public goods will not occur as in samuelson and nordhaus 1985 48 49 and 713 according to tullock 1970 83 84 and samuelson and nordhaus 1985 49 for instance private sector production of policing and or highways generates non exclusionary external benefits for which private suppliers are unable to charge thus creating free rider incentives and non cooperative behavior i offer an alternative explanation for this lack of cooperation however which fits the historical evolution of public policing and highways in england the fact is that public policing and highways evolved because of changes in property rights which undermined private incentives to cooperate in the provision these services indeed these services are like the television signals discussed by minasian 1964 in that different institutional arrangements create different incentives for the allocation of resources 1 however my presentation goes beyond simply providing two supporting examples for minasian s 1964 77 contention that the public goods concept is misleading by proposing a more appropriate analytical tool for at least some allocation issues labeled as public good free rider problems in the case of policing for example before english kings began to concentrate and centralize power individuals had rights to a very important private benefit arising from successful pursuit and prosecution victims received restitution effective collection of restitution required the cooperation of witnesses and of neighbors to aid in pursuit but anyone who did not cooperate with victims could not obtain similar support when victimized and therefore could be excluded from this very important benefit of law enforcement policing was carried out by neighborhood associations and free riding did not appear to be a problem because anyone who did not cooperate was ostracized by the group in other words policing was not a public good in medieval england the primary benefits were private and or internal to small groups and non contributors were excluded one consequence of the development of monarchical government was the creation of criminal law as a source of royal revenues criminalization took away the private right to restitution and significantly reduced the incentives to voluntarily cooperate in law enforcement a very different set of institutions evolved as a consequence today rights to many attributes of public policing can be accessed by anyone as in a common pool although effective public policing still requires a substantial commitment of private resources including victim and witness cooperation 2 incentives for individuals to underinvest in the commons are substantial relative to incentives to invest in the production of any private benefits that remain in other words policing is not a public good today either its publicly produced aspects are generally treated as free access common pools and private individuals underinvest in their maintenance as demonstrated below the same is true of highways it might be argued that non excludable public goods and free access common pools are simply two terms for the same concept

how does administrative pricing affect energy consumption and co2 emissions in china despite reforms china still largely applies the cost plus pricing mechanism for the energy sector government administrative energy pricing leads to energy price distortions which could result in not only the excessive and wasteful energy consumption but also environmental deterioration thereby undermining energy conservation and emission abatement using fossil fuel subsidies as a proxy for the level of energy price distortions this paper estimates the subsidy of 22 chinese departments during the period 2006 2010 and adopts the price gap approach to analyze the impacts of subsidy removal on energy consumption and co2 emissions for the various sectors and energy types the results demonstrate that removing energy subsidies would reduce energy consumption and emissions by 3 77 and 2 85 respectively but the effects vary across sectors the transport storage and post sector and the electricity gas and water supply sector are much more affected by energy subsidies removal than other sectors with respect to energy types fuel oil and natural gas are sensitive to subsidies indicating the magnitude of their consumption this suggests that removing subsidies on these fuel types could significantly reduce co2 emissions finally we comprehensively discuss relevant policy issues on energy price formation reform

the relationship between crude oil spot and futures prices cointegration linear and nonlinear causality the present study investigates the linear and nonlinear causal linkages between daily spot and futures prices for maturities of one two three and four months of west texas intermediate wti crude oil the data cover two periods october 1991 october 1999 and november 1999 october 2007 with the latter being significantly more turbulent apart from the conventional linear granger test we apply a new nonparametric test for nonlinear causality by diks and panchenko after controlling for cointegration in addition to the traditional pairwise analysis we test for causality while correcting for the effects of the other variables to check if any of the observed causality is strictly nonlinear in nature we also examine the nonlinear causal relationships of vecm filtered residuals finally we investigate the hypothesis of nonlinear non causality after controlling for conditional heteroskedasticity in the data using a garch bekk model whilst the linear causal relationships disappear after vecm cointegration filtering nonlinear causal linkages in some cases persist even after garch filtering in both periods this indicates that spot and futures returns may exhibit asymmetric garch effects and or statistically significant higher order conditional moments moreover the results imply that if nonlinear effects are accounted for neither market leads or lags the other consistently videlicet the pattern of leads and lags changes over time

zoning returns to scale and the value of undeveloped land when land markets are incomplete parcels can be scaled to make control compatible with use and to internalize externalities the authors show that an arbitrage proof equilibrium implies an increasing and strictly concave relationship between the value and size of land parcels undeveloped land sales in southern california strongly confirm the theoretical relationship the authors find that zoning primarily restricts the conversion of land from agriculture to residential and industrial uses relative to the competitive equilibrium the scale of land units is an effective private instrument for providing compatible land use even in the presence of strong zoning copyright 1991 by mit press

the effects of energy prices urbanization and economic growth on energy consumption per capita in 186 countries abstract energy is the material basis for the development of national economy however energy shortages become increasingly serious as a result of the growing population and the modernization of the global economy therefore investigating drivers of energy consumption is crucial to coordinate the relationship between energy and national economic growth this study aimed to uncover the effects of energy prices ep urbanization urn and gdp on per capita energy consumption ec with considering the income gaps between countries the paper adopted the granger causality test approach and the impulse response function analysis by using long term time series data on ec ep urn and gdp during 1980 2015 in 186 countries divided into three groups high income upper and lower middle income groups the results indicated a long term co integration relationship among these variables granger causality test showed a bidirectional causality between urn and ec in high and lower middle income countries but no causality in the upper middle income group in all groups there is a bidirectional causal link between gdp and ec the results of irf showed that as urbanization level improves its role in promoting ec become less significant moreover ep affected ec negatively both in high and lower middle income countries but it has a positive impact on ec in upper middle income countries the study supports the finding that urbanization is an important factor affecting energy consumption per capita although its contributions vary across income groups which offers a new pathway to control the excessive growth of energy consumption

decomposition of us manufacturing energy intensity and elasticities of components with respect to energy prices this paper proposes an analysis of changes in the us manufacturing energy intensity between 1974 and 1998 the starting point is a three term decomposition of an intensity index which evaluates annually the respective contributions of changes in industrial structure efficiency gains at the sectoral level and substitution between energy resources to aggregate productivity improvements then we study the time paths followed by each of these three components using spectral analysis techniques we show that they behave very differently as the structural influence plays a part mainly in the short run substitution between energy resources acts principally in the long run and the changes in sectoral intensity cause both trend variations and cyclical ones finally we focus on the effect of energy price evolution on each of the three components allowing energy price rises and decreases to have asymmetric effects we estimate both the long run impacts and the short run adjustments

market efficiency of oil spot and futures a mean variance and stochastic dominance approach this paper examines the market efficiency of oil spot and futures prices by using both mean variance mv and stochastic dominance sd approaches based on the west texas intermediate crude oil data for the sample period 1989 2008 we find no evidence of any mv and sd relationships between oil spot and futures indices this infers that there is no arbitrage opportunity between these two markets spot and futures do not dominate one another investors are indifferent to investing spot or futures and the spot and futures oil markets are efficient and rational the empirical findings are robust to each sub period before and after the crises for different crises and also to portfolio diversification

are asset price guarantees useful for preventing sudden stops a quantitative investigation of the globalization hazard moral hazard tradeoff abstract an implication of the globalization hazard hypothesis is that sudden stops caused by global financial frictions could be prevented by offering foreign investors price guarantees on emerging markets assets these guarantees create a tradeoff however because they weaken globalization hazard while creating international moral hazard we study this tradeoff using a quantitative equilibrium asset pricing model without guarantees margin calls and trading costs cause sudden stops driven by a fisherian deflation price guarantees prevent this deflation by propping up foreign demand for assets the effectiveness of price guarantees their distortions on asset markets and their welfare implications depend critically on whether the guarantees are contingent on debt levels and on the price elasticity of foreign demand for domestic assets

the impacts of energy prices on energy intensity evidence from china in this paper we present a review of the deregulation of energy prices in china between 1985 and 2004 and assess the impacts of changes in energy prices on aggregate energy intensity and coal oil electricity intensity we used time series data to provide estimates of energy price elasticities empirical results showed that 1 the own price elasticities of coal oil and aggregate energy were negative in periods both before and after 1995 implying that higher relative prices of different energy types lead to the decrease in coal oil and aggregate energy intensities however the positive own price elasticity of electricity after 1995 probably indicates that the price effect was weaker than other factors such as income effect and population effect 2 the impacts of energy prices were asymmetric over time 3 sectoral adjustment also drove the decrease in aggregate energy intensity although raising energy prices to boost efficiency of energy use seems to be an effective policy tool other policy implications concerned with energy prices such as energy supply security and fuel poverty must also be considered

efficiency of crude oil markets evidences from informational entropy analysis abstract the role of crude oil as the main energy source for the global economic activity has motivated the discussion about the dynamics and causes of crude oil price changes an accurate understanding of the issue should provide important guidelines for the design of optimal policies and government budget planning using daily data for wti over the period january 1986 march 2011 we analyze the evolution of the informational complexity and efficiency for the crude oil market through multiscale entropy analysis the results indicated that the crude oil market is informationally efficient over the scrutinized period except for two periods that correspond to the early 1990s and late 2000s us recessions overall the results showed that deregulation has improved the operation of the market in the sense of making returns less predictable on the other hand there is some evidence that the probability of having a severe us economic recession increases as the informational efficiency decreases which indicates that returns from crude oil markets are less uncertain during economic downturns