energy consumption and economic growth nexus in tanzania an ardl bounds testing approach abstract in this paper we examine the intertemporal causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in tanzania during the period of 1971 2006 unlike the majority of the previous studies we employ the newly developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach by pesaran et al 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 16 289 326 to examine this linkage we also use two proxies of energy consumption namely total energy consumption per capita and electricity consumption per capita the results of the bounds test show that there is a stable long run relationship between each of the proxies of energy consumption and economic growth the results of the causality test on the other hand show that there is a unidirectional causal flow from total energy consumption to economic growth and a prima facie causal flow from electricity consumption to economic growth overall the study finds that energy consumption spurs economic growth in tanzania

aggregate demand for electricity in south africa an analysis using the bounds testing approach to cointegration abstract electricity demand in south africa has grown at a very rapid rate over the past decade as part of reform initiatives to enhance long term sustainability of the country s electricity industry south africa s authorities have in recent years sought to develop an electricity pricing framework that is cost reflective and forms the cornerstone of demand management schemes meant to foster changes in consumption behaviour and enhance efficiency in resource use the effects of any pricing policy on aggregate electricity consumption will depend on a useful understanding of the factors that influence electricity demand and the magnitude to which electricity demand responds to changes in such factors in this context this paper applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed lag framework to examine the aggregate demand for electricity in south africa during the period 1960 2007 the results indicate that in the long run income is the main determinant of electricity demand with electricity prices having an insignificant effect on aggregate electricity demand future pricing policies will need to ensure that electricity prices are cost reflective and enhance efficiency of electricity supply and use

the effect of technology spillover on co2 emissions embodied in china australia trade abstract co2 emissions embodied in international trade have drawn wide attention in the academia and national climate negotiations in this study we estimate the embodied co2 emissions in the trade between china and australia using long time series disaggregated sectoral data based on missions embodied in bilateral trade eebt method and analyse the major driving forces for these emissions changes based on structural decomposition analysis sda method the results show that export volume contributed to these embodied co2 emissions increase while emission intensity could offset these co2 emissions increase we further predict embodied co2 emission in sino australia trade under different scenarios and the results indicate that technology spillover can significantly reduce embodied co2 emissions in trade electricity transportation and cement industries have significant potential to reduce carbon emissions in addition we evaluate future carbon reduction potential till 2030 the results in this study can inform decision makers for australia and china to formulate energy conservation and emission reduction policies

what drives energy consumption in developing countries the experience of selected african countries abstract this study investigates the drivers of energy consumption in sub saharan african countries it applies the bounds testing approach to cointegration to time series data at individual country levels over the period from 1970 to 2011 the study finds that energy consumption is cointegrated with real gdp per capita industrial output imports foreign direct investment credit to private sector urbanization and population furthermore the sign and magnitude of long run estimates vary significantly for a single country and across countries depending on the energy consumption variable used overall the findings confirm the leading role of economic growth industrial output population and urbanization economic growth industrial output and population have positive effects on energy consumption in the majority of countries given the urgent need to address climate change african countries should adopt policies to improve energy efficiency and accelerate transition toward renewable energy the african renewable energy initiative launched at the 21st session of the united nations conference of the parties cop21 is an opportunity for african countries to provide and maintain widespread access to reliable and affordable environmentally cleaner energy to meet the requirements of rapid economic growth and improved living standards

affirmative action in higher education how do admission and financial aid rules affect future earnings this paper addresses how changing the admission and financial aid rules at colleges affects future earnings i estimate a structural model of the following decisions by individuals where to submit applications which school to attend and what field to study the model also includes decisions by schools as to which students to accept and how much financial aid to offer simulating how black educational choices would change were they to face the white admission and aid rules shows that race based advantages had little effect on earnings however removing race based advantages does affect black educational outcomes in particular removing advantages in admissions substantially decreases the number of black students at top tier schools while removing advantages in financial aid causes a decrease in the number of blacks who attend college

energy consumption and gdp in developing countries a cointegrated panel analysis in this paper we re investigate the co movement and the causality relationship between energy consumption and gdp in 18 developing countries using data for the period 1975 to 2001 recently developed tests for the panel unit root heterogeneous panel cointegration and panel based error correction models are employed the empirical results provide clear support of a long run cointegration relationship after allowing for the heterogeneous country effect the long run relationship is estimated using a full modified ols the evidence shows that long run and short run causalities run from energy consumption to gdp but not vice versa this result indicates that energy conservation may harm economic growth in developing countries regardless of being transitory or permanent

invisible energy policies a new agenda for energy demand reduction this article makes the case for a new and ambitious research and governance agenda for energy demand reduction it argues that existing demand side approaches focused on promoting technological efficiency and informed individual consumption are unlikely to be adequate to achieving future carbon emissions reduction goals it points out that very little attention has so far been paid to the impacts of non energy policies on energy demand and it submits that a much fuller integration of energy demand questions into policy is required it advances a general framework supported by illustrative examples for understanding the impacts of non energy policies on energy demand it reflects on why these connections have been so little explored and addressed within energy research and policy and it argues that for all their current invisibility there is nonetheless scope for increasing the visibility of and in effect mainstreaming energy demand reduction objectives within other policy areas researchers and policymakers we contend need to develop better understandings of how energy demand might be made governable and how non energy policies might be revised alone and in combination to help steer long term changes in energy demand

the demand for residential electricity in south africa abstract this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in south africa as a function of real gross domestic product per capita and the price of electricity during the period 1978 2005 we make use of the bounds testing approach to cointegration within an autoregressive distributed framework suggested by pesaran et al 2001 bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 16 3 289 326 following the literature we use a linear double logarithmic form using income and price as independent variables in the empirical analysis in the long run we find that income is the main determinant of electricity demand while electricity price is insignificant

economic growth and electricity consumption in cote d ivoire evidence from time series analysis this paper examines the causal relationship between the electric power industry and the economic growth of cote d ivoire using the data from 1971 to 2008 a test was conducted for the cointegration and granger causality within an error correction model results from these tests reveal a bidirectional causality between per capita electricity consumption and per capita gdp a unidirectional causality running from electricity consumption to industry value added appears in the short run economic growth is found to have great effects on electricity consumption and a reverse causality from electricity to economic growth may also appear in the long run there is a unidirectional causality between electricity and both gdp and industry value added from these findings we conclude that the country will be energy dependent in the long run and must therefore secure the production network from shortfalls to ensure a sustainable development path accordingly government should adopt policies aimed at increasing the investment in the sector by stepping up electricity production from existing and new energy sources

a literature survey on energy growth nexus abstract this paper provides a survey of the recent progress in the literature of energy consumption economic growth and electricity consumption economic growth causality nexus the survey highlights that most empirical studies focus on either testing the role of energy electricity in stimulating economic growth or examining the direction of causality between these two variables although the positive role of energy on growth has become a stylized fact there are some methodological reservations about the results from these empirical studies a general observation from these studies is that the literature produced conflicting results and there is no consensus neither on the existence nor on the direction of causality between energy consumption electricity consumption and economic growth as a policy implication to avoid from conflicting and unreliable results the authors may use the autoregressive distributed lags bounds test two regime threshold co integration models panel data approach and multivariate models including new variables such as real gross fixed capital formation labor force carbon dioxide emissions population exchange rates interest rates etc thus the authors should focus more on the new approaches and perspectives rather than by employing usual methods based on a set of common variables for different countries and different intervals of time

optimal risk sharing with background risk this paper examines qualitative properties of efficient insurance contracts in the presence of background risk in order to get results for all strictly risk averse expected utility maximizers the concept of stochastic increasingness is used different assumptions on the stochastic dependence between the insurable and uninsurable risk lead to different qualitative properties of the efficient contracts the new results obtained under hypotheses of dependent risks are compared to classical results in the absence of background risk or to the case of independent risks the theory is further generalized to nonexpected utility maximizers

does financial development increase energy consumption the role of industrialization and urbanization in tunisia this paper assesses the relationship among energy consumption financial development economic growth industrialization and urbanization in tunisia from 1971 to 2008 the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach to cointegration and granger causality tests is employed for the analysis the result confirms the existence of long run relationship among energy consumption economic growth financial development industrialization and urbanization in tunisia long run bidirectional causalities are found between financial development and energy consumption financial development and industrialization and industrialization and energy consumption hence sound and developed financial system that can attract investors boost the stock market and improve the efficiency of economic activities should be encouraged in the country nevertheless promoting industrialization and urbanization can never be left out from the process of development we add light to policy makers with the role of financial development industrialization and urbanization in the process of economic development

modelling aggregate domestic electricity demand in ghana an autoregressive distributed lag bounds cointegration approach in spite of the varying supply boosting efforts made by various governments to deal with the existing demand supply gap in the electricity sector the incessant growth in aggregate domestic electricity demand has made these efforts futile as an objective this paper attempts to identify the factors responsible for the historical growth trends in aggregate domestic electricity demand quantifying their effects both in the short run and long run periods using the ardl bounds cointegration approach and the sample period 1975 to 2005 in the long run real per capita gdp industry efficiency structural changes in the economy and degree of urbanisation are identified as the main driving force behind the historical growth trend in aggregate domestic electricity demand however in the short run real per capita gdp industry efficiency and degree of urbanisation are the main drivers of aggregate domestic electricity demand industry efficiency is the only factor that drives aggregate domestic electricity demand downwards however the negative efficiency effect is insufficient to have outweighed the positive income output and demographic effects hence the continual growth in aggregate domestic electricity demand as a policy option we recommend that appropriate electricity efficiency standards be implemented at the industry level

the effect of attending the flagship state university on earnings a discontinuity based approach abstract this paper examines the effect of attending the flagship state university on the earnings of 28 to 33 year olds by combining confidential admissions records from a large state university with earnings data collected through the state s unemployment insurance program to distinguish the effect of attending the flagship state university from the effects of confounding factors correlated with the university s admission decision or the applicant s enrollment decision i exploit a large discontinuity in the probability of enrollment at the admission cutoff the results indicate that attending the most selective state university causes earnings to be approximately 20 higher for white men

an empirical analysis of energy demand in namibia abstract using a unique database of end user local energy data and the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration we estimate the long run elasticities of the namibian energy demand function at both aggregated level and by type of energy electricity petrol and diesel for the period 1980 2002 our main results show that energy consumption responds positively to changes in gdp and negatively to changes in energy price and air temperature the differences in price elasticities across fuels uncovered by this study have significant implications for energy taxation by namibian policy makers we do not find any significant cross price elasticities between different fuel types

local risk aversion in the rank dependent expected utility model first order versus second order effects abstract we evaluate locally the risk premium of a lottery in the framework of the rdeu model as the sum of two terms the first is a measure of risk aversion while the second is a measure of spreading aversion

financial development and energy consumption in central and eastern european frontier economies this study examines the impact of financial development on energy consumption in a sample of 9 central and eastern european frontier economies several different measures of financial development are examined including bank related variables and stock market variables the empirical results obtained from dynamic panel demand models show a positive and statistically significant relationship between financial development and energy consumption when financial development is measured using banking variables like deposit money bank assets to gdp financial system deposits to gdp or liquid liabilities to gdp of the three stock market variables investigated only one stock market turnover has a positive and statistically significant impact on energy consumption both short run and long run elasticities are presented the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

a generalization of pratt arrow measure to nonexpected utility preferences and inseparable probability and utility the pratt arrow measure of local risk aversion is generalized for then dimensional state preference model of choice under uncertainty in which the decision maker may have inseparable subjective probabilities and utilities unobservable stochastic prior wealth and or smooth nonexpected utility preferences local risk aversion is measured by the matrix of derivatives of the decision maker s risk neutral probabilities without reference to true subjective probabilities or riskless wealth positions and comparative risk aversion is measured without requiring agreement on true probabilities risk neutral probabilities and their derivatives are shown to be sufficient statistics for approximately optimal investment and financing decisions in complete markets for contingent claims

a schur concave characterization of risk aversion for non expected utility preferences abstract this paper extends machina s econometrica 50 1982 277 323 characterization of risk aversion for frechet differentiable non expected utility preferences to the class of continuous non expected utility preferences without imposing any differentiability requirement the necessary and sufficient condition for risk aversion is derived in terms of the schur concavity of the preference functional when evaluated on finite lotteries with equal probabilities the latter is characterized by its marginal rate of substitution between a high income state and a low income state being not less than unity correspondingly the more risk averse the preference ordering the greater is its marginal rate of substitution between a high income state and a low income state finally we apply our results to characterize individual as well as comparative risk aversion for the class of g teaux differentiable preferences in terms of the concavity of the g teaux derivative or local utility function this extends machina s frechet based local expected utility analysis to the larger class of g teaux differentiable preferences journal of economic literature classification number d81

electricity consumption and economic growth in burkina faso a cointegration analysis abstract this study empirically establishes the direction of causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in burkina faso for the period 1968 2003 the bounds test yields evidence of cointegration between electricity consumption gdp and capital formation when electricity consumption and gdp are used as dependent variable causality results indicate that there is no significant causal relationship between electricity consumption and investment estimates however detect in the long run a bidirectional causal relationship between electricity use and real gdp there is also evidence of a positive feedback causal relationship between gdp and capital formation burkina faso is therefore an energy dependent country it is also a country in which electricity consumption is growing with the level of income all of this shows that electricity is a significant factor in socio economic development in burkina faso as such energy policy must be implemented to ensure that electricity generates fewer potential negative impacts

energy consumption and economic growth revisited in african countries abstract the aim of this paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for 21 african countries over the period from 1970 to 2006 using recently developed panel cointegration and causality tests the countries are divided into two groups net energy importers and net energy exporters it is found that there exists a long run equilibrium relationship between energy consumption real gdp prices labor and capital for each group of countries as well as for the whole set of countries this result is robust to possible cross country dependence and still holds when allowing for multiple endogenous structural breaks which can differ among countries furthermore we find that decreasing energy consumption decreases growth and vice versa and that increasing energy consumption increases growth and vice versa and that this applies for both energy exporters and importers finally there is a marked difference in the cointegration relationship when country groups are considered

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

the demand for gasoline in south africa an empirical analysis using co integration techniques abstract using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bound testing approach to co integration suggested by pesaran et al pesaran m h shin y smith r j bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships journal of applied econometrics 2001 16 3 289 326 we empirically analyzed the long run relationship among the variables in the aggregate gasoline demand function over the period 1978 2005 our study confirms the existence of a co integrating relationship the estimated price and income elasticities of 0 47 and 0 36 imply that gasoline demand in south africa is price and income inelastic

the effect of urbanization on co2 emissions in emerging economies the theories of ecological modernization and urban environmental transition both recognize that urbanization can have positive and negative impacts on the natural environment with the net effect being hard to determine a priori this study uses recently developed panel regression techniques that allow for heterogeneous slope coefficients and cross section dependence to model the impact that urbanization has on co2 emissions for a panel of emerging economies the estimated contemporaneous coefficients on the energy intensity and affluence variables are positive statistically significant and fairly similar across different estimation techniques by comparison the estimated contemporaneous coefficient on the urbanization variable is sensitive to the estimation technique in most specifications the estimated coefficient on the urbanization variable is positive but statistically insignificant the implications of these results for sustainable development policy are discussed

technology asymmetries group algebra and multiplant cost minimization for a homogeneous good this article studies firm level production activities when the firm controls a plural number of plants through careful construction of cost function technology asymmetries we inquire into the ordinal structure of the production vector for multiplant cost minimizers when schur convexity of a reference pseudo cost technology is the principal functional assumption then ordinal concepts of technical asymmetries map into rank order on the equilibrium production vector under a more generalized characterization of the technical asymmetries a multiplant firm encounters group theory is used to map a cardinal concept of asymmetries into cardinal bounds on the optimum allocation

estimation of electricity demand function for algeria revisit of time series analysis abstract this paper aims to empirically re examine whether economic growth has effect on electricity consumption for algerian economy we have incorporated urbanization and trade openness in electricity demand function as additional determinants of electricity consumption for the period of 1971 2012 for empirical purpose we have applied the recently developed combined cointegration test proposed by bayer and hanck 2013 and bounds testing approach to cointegration by pesaran et al 2001 for establishing the cointegration between the variables by accommodating structural breaks the results expose that income growth leads to higher electricity demand along with urbanization being another major contributing factor of rising electricity demand in contrast trade openness leads to reduce electricity demand the causal association between the variables is further examined with the application of innovation accounting approach of vector autoregressive var the empirical evidence indicates the presence of the neutral effect between income growth and electricity use urbanization causes electricity use and electricity use causes urbanization in granger sense

causal relationships between energy consumption foreign direct investment and economic growth fresh evidence from dynamic simultaneous equations models this paper examines the interrelationships between energy consumption foreign direct investment and economic growth using dynamic panel data models in simultaneous equations for a global panel consisting of 65 countries the time component of our dataset is 1990 2011 inclusive to make the panel data analysis more homogenous we also investigate this interrelationship for a number of sub panels which are constructed based on the income level of countries in this way we end up with three income panels namely high income middle income and low income panels in the empirical part we draw on the growth theory and augment the classical growth model which consists of capital stock labor force and inflation with foreign direct investment and energy generally we show mixed results about the interrelationship between energy consumption fdi and economic growth

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

valuing risky projects option pricing theory and decision analysis in the academic literature and professional practice there are a number of alternative and apparently competing methods for valuing risky projects in this paper we compare and contrast three different approaches risk adjusted discount rate analysis option pricing analysis and decision analysis focusing on the last two we show that in contrast to some of the claims made in the real options literature when both option pricing and decision analysis methods are correctly applied they must give consistent results we also explore ways in which option pricing and decision analysis methods can be profitably integrated in particular we show how option pricing techniques can be used to simplify decision analysis when some risks can be hedged by trading and conversely how decision analysis techniques can be used to extend option pricing techniques to problems with incomplete securities markets

a more robust definition of subjective probability the goal of choice theoretic derivations of subjective probability is to separate a decisionmaker s underlying beliefs subjective probabilities of events from their preferences attitudes toward risk classical derivations have all relied upon some form of the marschak samuelson independence axiom or the savage sure thing principle which imply that preferences over lotteries conform to the expected utility hypothesis this paper presents a choice theoretic derivation of subjective probability in a savage type setting of purely subjective uncertainty which neither assumes nor implies that the decisionmaker s preferences over lotteries necessarily conform to the expected utility hypothesis copyright 1992 by the econometric society

risk aversion in the theory of expected utility with rank dependent probabilities expected utility with rank dependent probability theory is a model of decision making under risk where the preference relations on the set of probability distributions is represented by the mathematical expectation of a utility function with respect to a transformation of the probability distributions on the set of outcomes this paper defines based on g teaux differentiability measures of risk aversion for such preferences which characterize the relation more risk averse and applies these measures to the analysis of unconditional and conditional portfolio choice problems

the invention of the independence condition for preferences this paper discusses the history and interrelations of three central ideas in preference theory the independence condition in decision under risk the sure thing principle in decision under uncertainty and conjoint independence for multiattribute decisions and consumer theory independence was recognized as an important component of decision under risk in the late 1940s by jacob marschak john nash herman rubin and norman dalkey and first appeared in publication in marschak marschak j 1950 rational behavior uncertain prospects and measurable utility econometrica18 111 141 and nash nash j f 1950 the bargaining problem econometrica18 155 162 the sure thing principle can be credited to savage savage l j 1953 une axiomatisation du comportement raisonnable face i l incertitude colloq internal centre national rech sci 40 econometrie 29 40 savage l j 1954 the foundations of statistics wiley new york 2nd edn dover new york 1972 conjoint independence for consumer theory was introduced by sono sono m 1943 the effect of price changes on the demand and supply of separable goods in japanese kokumin keisai zasshi74 1 51 and leontief leontief w w 1947a a note on the interrelation of subsets of independent variables of a continuous function with continuous first derivatives bull amer math soc 53 343 350 leontief w w 1947b introduction to a theory of the internal structure of functional relationships econometrica51 361 373 a form of it can also be recognized in samuelson samuelson p a 1947 foundations of economic analysis harvard university press cambridge ma presented earlier in samuelson samuelson p a 1940 foundations of analytical economics the observational significance of economic theory ph d dissertation harvard university boston ma independence and the sure thing principle are equivalent for decision under risk but in a less elementary way than has sometimes been thought the sure thing principle for decision under uncertainty and conjoint independence are identical in a mathematical sense the mathematics underlying our three preference conditions has an older history the independence condition for decision under risk can be recognized in the characterization of associative means and conjoint independence for multiattribute decisions in solutions to the generalized associativity functional equation

estimating the demand for gasoline in developing countries senegal abstract this paper estimates the aggregate demand for gasoline in senegal from 1970 to 2008 the long term and short term elasticities of demand with respect to gasoline prices and income are of paramount interest in this study in senegal rising food prices unemployment and shortage of electric supply are always associated with the spiking cost of world oil prices to understand the external shocks of world oil price and demand for gasoline in senegal this study tested a log linear model against the linear model of the demand for oil function with lagged dependent variables as an explanatory variable here the linear specification of the demand for oil is rejected in this study in favor of the log linear the natural log transformation is typical when using high frequency data and significantly reduces skewness and kurtosis generally in this study i found that short run elasticity is smaller than long run elasticity and gasoline demand is inelastic with respect to both price and income for both the short and long runs in senegal this is why researcher like moosa posits that this assertion can be rationalised on the grounds that oil is such an important commodity that does not have close substitutes at least for its uses 1998 p 3

the impact of financial development on energy consumption in emerging economies abstract financial development is often cited as a very important driver of economic growth in emerging economies and it is thus likely that financial development affects energy demand this study uses generalized method of moments estimation techniques to examine the impact of financial development on energy consumption in a sample of emerging countries several different measures of financial development are examined using a panel data set on 22 emerging countries covering the period 1990 2006 the empirical results show a positive and statistically significant relationship between financial development and energy consumption when financial development is measured using stock market variables like stock market capitalization to gdp stock market value traded to gdp and stock market turnover the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

threshold cointegration and causality relationship between energy use and growth in seven african countries abstract the paper investigates the long run and the causality relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for seven sub saharan african countries during the period 1970 2007 using the gregory and hansen 1996a 1996b testing approach to threshold cointegration we find that energy consumption is cointegrated with economic growth in cameroon cote d ivoire ghana nigeria and south africa moreover this test suggests that economic growth has a significant positive long run impact on energy consumption in these countries before 1988 and this effect becomes negative after 1988 in ghana and south africa furthermore causality tests suggest bidirectional causality between energy consumption and real gdp in cote d ivoire and unidirectional causality running from real gdp to energy usage in the case of congo and ghana

changes in background risk and risk taking behaviour economic decision making under uncertainty often takes place in the presence of multiple risks and in markets that are less than complete as a consequence choices about endogenous risks sometimes must be made while simultaneously facing one or more immutable exogenous background risks that are not under the control of the agent and that are independent of endogenous risks it is somehow natural to assume that an exogenous deterioration in background wealth will cause an individual to take more care elsewhere if we define a deterioration for example as making the individual poorer by removing a fixed amount of initial wealth we know from pratt 1964 that decreasing absolute risk aversion dara of an individual s von neumann morgenstern utility function yields this natural result if on the other hand background wealth becomes riskier due to the addition of a zero mean risk that is also statistically independent of all other risks behavior will be more risk averse if and only if preferences are risk vulnerable as defined by gollier and pratt 1996 risk vulnerability described below in section 4 is a stronger notion than dara and includes proper risk aversion pratt and zeckhauser 1987 and standard risk aversion eeckhoudt and kimball 1992 kimball 1993 as particular cases but a deterioration in background wealth may encompass more complicated distribution changes than the introduction of another statistically independent risk in this paper we examine background wealth deteriorations that take the form of both general firstand second degree stochastic dominance changes in risk fsd and ssd respectively in particular we determine conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for each of these two types of background risk changes to imply more risk averse behavior on the part of the individual for the case of fsd changes this condition turns out to be ross stronger characterization of decreasing absolute risk aversion in the case of general ssd changes in the distribution of background wealth the condition derived is a stronger version in ross sense of the conditions characterizing preferences that are locally risk vulnerable in the sense of gollier and pratt the necessary and sufficient conditions derived are fairly restrictive upon preferences however if we take as positive behavior that individuals act in a more risk averse manner whenever the distribution of background wealth deteriorates these conditions place canonical limits upon appropriate utility representations at the very least they

energy consumption and economic growth the experience of african countries revisited abstract the aim of this paper is to re examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for seventeen african countries in a multivariate framework by including labor and capital as additional variables we apply the variance decomposition analysis due to pesaran and shin pesaran m h and shin y generalised impulse response analysis in linear multivariate models economics letters 1998 58 17 29 to evaluate how important is the causal impact of energy consumption on economic growth relative to labor and capital the results of our multivariate modified granger causality analysis due to toda and yamamoto toda h y and yamamoto t statistical inference in vector autoregressions with possibly integrated process journal of econometrics 1995 66 225 250 tend to reject the neutrality hypothesis for the energy income relationship in fifteen out of the seventeen countries in contrast results of our variance decomposition analyses show that in eleven out of the seventeen countries energy is no more than a contributing factor to output growth and not an important one when compared to capital and labor labor and capital are the most important factors in output growth in fifteen out of the seventeen countries however these results should be interpreted with care as they may not be sufficiently robust enough to support the inference that energy consumption plays a minor role in the economic growth of african countries

gainfully employed assessing the employment and earnings of for profit college students using administrative data we draw on population level administrative data from the u s department of education and the internal revenue service to quantify the impact of for profit college attendance on the employment and earnings of more than one million students using a matched comparison group difference in differences design we find that certificate seeking students in for profit institutions are 1 5 percentage points less likely to be employed and conditional on employment have 11 percent lower earnings after attendance than students in public institutions these results hold for both men and women and for seven of the top ten fields of study we find that earnings and employment outcomes are particularly poor for students attending for profit colleges that offer the majority of their courses online and for multicampus chains we find that for profit students experience small statistically insignificant gains in annual earnings after attendance compared to a matched end page 342 control group of young individuals who do not attend college a back of the envelope comparison of these earnings gains to average debt burdens suggests that for profit certificate programs do not pay off for the average student abstract from author

some stronger measures of risk aversion in the small and the large with applications the arrow pratt measures of risk aversion for von neumann morgenstern utility functions have become workhorses for analyzing problems in the microeconomics of uncertainty they have been used to characterize the qualitative properties of demand in insurance and asset markets to examine the properties of risk taking in taxation models and to study the interaction between risk and life cycle savings problems to name just a few applications equally importantly they have generated the linear risk tolerance class of utility functions which has provided canonical examples in such diverse areas as portfolio theory and the theory of teams despite these successes there have been a number of areas for which the results have been weaker than hoped it is natural to use the risk aversion measures to compare the behavior of individuals in risky choice situations for example consider the individual portfolio choice problem in a two asset world with a riskless asset and a risky asset if individual a has a uniformly higher arrow pratt coefficient of risk aversion than individual b then b will always choose a portfolio combination with more wealth invested in the risky asset but suppose that both assets are risky now there is no obvious sense in which the more risk averse individual can be said to hold a less risky portfolio but it seems strange that such a simple alteration should destroy the analytics which support the basic intuition similarly consider the basic insurance problem if one individual a is more risk averse than another b in the arrow pratt sense it follows that a will pay a larger premium to insure against a random loss than will b typically though an individual evaluates partial rather than total insurance that is only some gambles can be insured against and others must be retained in this case even when the gambles which are retained are independent from those which are insured it is no longer true that the individual whose arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is higher will pay a larger insurance premium the situation is no better when we consider comparative statics exercises for a single individual decreasing absolute risk aversion in the sense of arrow and

impact of urbanization on energy demand an empirical study of the yangtze river economic belt in china abstract this paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of china s urbanization on its energy demand for 2003 2014 using a dataset of 108 cities located in the yangtze river economic belt both demographic urbanization du and land urbanization lu are considered in the empirical analysis the results show that urbanization exerts significant and positive impacts on energy demand during the study period our empirical suggest that one unit rises in du and lu rises the energy demand by 48 85 91 62 and 65 54 68 09 respectively without with considering control variables the energy demand effects of urbanization still hold when considering spatial and heterogeneity factors these results are robust to alternative measures of urbanization and empirical model specifications our results indicate that policymakers should improve the quality of urbanization to promote the growth of high tech and high quality industries avoiding excessive energy consumption with extensive urbanization large cities should not be allowed to grow unchecked more attention should be paid to promote the development of medium sized cities and implement a balanced population distribution among different cities the energy demand structure industrial and residential primary and secondary renewable and nonrenewable should be optimized by introducing cleaner low carbon technology and its transformation

can online learning bend the higher education cost curve we examine whether online learning technologies have led to lower prices in higher education using data from the integrated postsecondary education data system we show that online education is concentrated in large for profit chains and less selective public institutions we find that colleges with a higher share of online students charge lower tuition prices we present evidence of declining real and relative prices for full time undergraduate online education from 2006 to 2013 although the pattern of results suggests some hope that online technology can bend the cost curve in higher education the impact of online learning on education quality remains uncertain

supply vs demand under an affirmative action ban estimates from uc law schools affirmative action bans can reduce black enrollment not only by reducing black admission advantages contracting demand but also by reducing applications contracting supply from black students who can still gain admission but prefer alternative schools that still practice affirmative action when affirmative action was banned at uc law schools berkeley s black applications and enrollment declined by almost half even as black admission rates rose relative to whites i ask whether black enrollment at uc law schools would have markedly declined even if black supply had not contracted i find in a large sample of students applying to law schools nationwide that black supply contractions were driven mostly or entirely by students unlikely to gain admission under the ban yielding stronger post ban black applicant pools holding applicant pools constant i estimate that the ban reduced black admission rates at both berkeley and ucla by half hence black enrollment would likely have plummeted even if black supply had not contracted as could occur under a nationwide ban that eliminates affirmative action practicing alternatives

a definition of uncertainty aversion a definition of uncertainty or ambiguity aversion is proposed it is argued that the definition is well suited to modelling within the savage as opposed to anscombe and aumann domain of acts the defined property of uncertainty aversion has intuitive empirical content behaves well in specific models of preference multiple priors and choquet expected utility and is tractable tractability is established through use of a novel notion of differentiability for utility functions called eventwise differentiability

income segregation and intergenerational mobility across colleges in the united states we construct publicly available statistics on parents incomes and students earnings outcomes for each college in the united states using deidentified data from tax records these statistics reveal that the degree of parental income segregation across colleges is very high similar to that across neighborhoods differences in postcollege earnings between children from low and high income families are much smaller among students who attend the same college than across colleges colleges with the best earnings outcomes predominantly enroll students from high income families although a few mid tier public colleges have both low parent income levels and high student earnings linking these income data to sat and act scores we simulate how changes in the allocation of students to colleges affect segregation and intergenerational mobility equalizing application admission and matriculation rates across parental income groups conditional on test scores would reduce segregation substantially primarily by increasing the representation of middle class students at more selective colleges however it would have little effect on the fraction of low income students at elite private colleges because there are relatively few students from low income families with sufficiently high sat act scores differences in parental income distributions across colleges could be eliminated by giving low and middle income students a sliding scale preference in the application and admissions process similar to that implicitly given to legacy students at elite private colleges assuming that 80 of observational differences in students earnings conditional on test scores race and parental income are due to colleges causal effects a strong assumption but one consistent with prior work such changes could reduce intergenerational income persistence among college students by about 25 we conclude that changing how students are allocated to colleges could substantially reduce segregation and increase intergenerational mobility even without changing colleges educational programs

co2 emissions energy consumption and output in france abstract this paper examines the dynamic causal relationships between pollutant emissions energy consumption and output for france using cointegration and vector error correction modelling techniques we argue that these variables are strongly inter related and therefore their relationship must be examined using an integrated framework the results provide evidence for the existence of a fairly robust long run relationship between these variables for the period 1960 2000 the causality results support the argument that economic growth exerts a causal influence on growth of energy use and growth of pollution in the long run the results also point to a uni directional causality running from growth of energy use to output growth in the short run

who merits financial aid massachusetts adams scholarship abstract most states now fund merit based financial aid programs the effects of which depend on how strongly students react to changes in college costs i estimate such reactions using quasi experimental aspects of a recent massachusetts merit scholarship program intended to attract talented students to the state s public colleges despite its small monetary value the adams scholarship induced 6 of winners to choose four year public colleges instead of four year private colleges suggesting an elasticity of demand for public college enrollment above unity nonetheless most funds flowed to students who would have enrolled in public colleges absent the scholarship and the aid had no effect on winners overall college enrollment rate which already exceeded 90 regression discontinuity estimates are larger than those from difference in difference specifications because winners with relatively low academic skill and thus nearest the treatment threshold reacted much more strongly to the price change than did highly skilled winners conditional on academic skill low income winners reacted similarly to their higher income peers suggesting that previous research may have mistaken income heterogeneity for skill heterogeneity

admission tuition and financial aid policies in the market for higher education we present an equilibrium model of the market for higher education our model simultaneously predicts student selection into institutions of higher education financial aid educational expenditures and educational outcomes we show that the model gives rise to a strict hierarchy of colleges that differ by the educational quality provided to the students we also develop a new estimation procedure that exploits the observed variation in prices within colleges identification is based on variation in endowments and technology it does not rely on observed variation in potentially endogenous characteristics of colleges such as peer quality measures and expenditures we estimate the structural parameters using data collected by the national center for education statistics and aggregate data from peterson s and the national science foundation

precautionary saving in the small and in the large the theory of precautionary saving is shown to be isomorphic to the arrow pratt theory of risk aversion making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving and more generally to the theory of optimal choice under risk in particular a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive analogous to the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is used to establish a number of new propositions about precautionary saving and to give a new interpretation of the dreze modigliani substitution effect copyright 1990 by the econometric society

field of study earnings and self selection why do individuals choose different types of post secondary education and what are the labor market consequences of those choices we show that answering these questions is difficult because individuals choose between several unordered alternatives even with a valid instrument for every type of education instrumental variables estimation of the payoffs require information about individuals ranking of education types or strong additional assumptions like constant effects or restrictive preferences these identification results motivate and guide our empirical analysis of the choice of and payoff to field of study our context is norway s post secondary education system where a centralized admission process covers almost all universities and colleges this process creates credible instruments from discontinuities which effectively randomize applicants near unpredictable admission cutoffs into different fields of study at the same time it provides us with strategy proof measures of individuals ranking of fields taken together this allows us to estimate the payoffs to different fields while correcting for selection bias and keeping the next best alternatives as measured at the time of application fixed we find that different fields have widely different payoffs even after accounting for institutional differences and quality of peer groups for many fields the payoffs rival the college wage premiums suggesting the choice of field is potentially as important as the decision to enroll in college the estimated payoffs are consistent with individuals choosing fields in which they have comparative advantage we also test and reject assumptions of constant effects or restrictive preferences suggesting that information on next best alternatives is essential to identify payoffs to field of study