defining the rebound effect abstract this paper gives rigorous definitions of the rebound effect not only in the well described single commodity case khazzoom 1980 the energy journal 1 4 21 40 but also for a multiple commodity case it is shown that the familiar laws for the single case do not hold for the multiple case the paper describes the state of the art of empirical estimation of the rebound effect with special focus on the estimates done for the netherlands we conclude that according to every definition empirical evidence shows that the re is probably small between 0 and 15

corporate conservatism and relative compensation this paper demonstrates that in a simple setting with managerial concern for reputation and asymmetric information on ability most managers may refrain from undertaking innovations that stochastically dominate an industry standard common components of uncertainty lead to market inferences of managerial ability based on relative performance managers who undertake the industry standard are consequently evaluated with a more accurate benchmark than those innovating discontinuities in compensation when performance is low because of firings lead managers to have differing valuations of an accurate benchmark depending on type in particular very high and very low ability managers are more likely to undertake superior innovations than those of average ability

standard risk aversion this paper introduces the concept of standard risk aversion a von neumann morgenstern utility function has standard risk aversion if any risk makes a small reduction in wealth more painful in the sense of an increased reduction in expected utility also makes any undesirable independent risk more painful it is shown that given monotonicity and concavity the combination of decreasing absolute risk aversion and decreasing absolute prudence is necessary and sufficient for standard risk aversion standard risk aversion is shown to imply not only pratt and zeckhauser s proper risk aversion individually undesirable independent risks always being jointly undesirable but also that being forced to face an undesirable risk reduces the optimal investment in a risky security with and independent return similar results are established for the effect of broad class of increases in one risk on the desirability of or optimal investment in a second independent risk

turning lights into flights estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for uk households energy efficiency improvements by households lead to rebound effects that offset the potential energy and emissions savings direct rebound effects result from increased demand for cheaper energy services while indirect rebound effects result from increased demand for other goods and services that also require energy to provide research to date has focused upon the former but both are important for climate change this study estimates the combined direct and indirect rebound effects from seven measures that improve the energy efficiency of uk dwellings the methodology is based upon estimates of the income elasticity and greenhouse gas ghg intensity of 16 categories of household goods and services and allows for the embodied emissions of the energy efficiency measures themselves as well as the capital cost of the measures rebound effects are measured in ghg terms and relate to the adoption of these measures by an average uk household the study finds that the rebound effects from these measures are typically in the range 5 15 and arise mostly from indirect effects this is largely because expenditure on gas and electricity is more ghg intensive than expenditure on other goods and services however the anticipated shift towards a low carbon electricity system in the uk may lead to much larger rebound effects

rebound effects and green growth an examination of their relationship in a parsimonious equilibrium input output framework abstract attempts to curb pollution or reduce resource consumption while maintaining growth and thus to achieve what is often referred to as green growth are frequently compromised by rebound effects that is the reduction of emissions or resource consumption is less than what would be expected from a technical perspective rebound effects may occur because greater efficiency makes the use of a resource cheaper in economic terms and thereby more widespread or because the demand for green products induces additional demand for brown products the focus of the present research is to examine from a theoretical cum simulation perspective the latter aspect and the resulting possibility that firms may invest in additional capacity for producing brown rather than green products even if initially there is increasing demand for green products such effects could be termed macro level rebound effects in that there occurrence and significance depends on the properties of the production system as a whole the purpose of the paper is to develop a parsimonious framework combining a simple input output model with some standard macroeconomic relationships between savings consumption and investment within which macroeconomic rebound effects can be analysed in doing so the paper purports to show undertaking a monte carlo study that in a broad range of technological configurations green growth may be feasible in the sense that macroeconomic rebound effects are unlikely to occur however depending on the structure of the economy i e depending on the extent to which sectors are green this result must be qualified the more sectors exist where green capital is equally productive the higher is the likelihood of rebound effects moreover it is mainly the productivity of using a good for its own production which determines the likelihood of rebound the lower the productivity the higher the likelihood that an increase in the production of that capital good will be eaten up to a large extent by the resulting input requirements of the same industry

evidence of direct and indirect rebound effect in households in eu 27 countries abstract this research estimates the direct and indirect rebound effect of energy efficiency in households for the eu 27 countries the first twenty seven member states of the european union a hybrid methodology that combines econometric estimates environmental extended input output analysis and re spending models has been developed although most of the economies present values below 100 there are seven countries situated above this critical threshold by weighting individual estimates by gdp an average value for the overall eu 27 economy has been found between 73 62 and 81 16 these results suggest that the energy policy at the european level should be rethought if efficiency measures pursue reducing energy consumption and tackling climate change

technological change and the rebound effect in the stirpat model a critical view abstract technological change is key to understand the explanatory variables behind environmental impacts in the context of the stirpat stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology model an adequate representation and analysis of the significance of the technology variable t in the stirpat model becomes crucial even more if one aims to better understand underlying processes such as the environmental rebound effect e re a critical review of the application of the stirpat model has been conducted to understand the diversity and value of the variables scopes assumptions statistical approaches and the environmental impacts commonly studied the findings highlight that despite the multiple applications and the high potential of the stirpat model inconclusive results and or knowledge gaps remain notably 1 a geographical imbalance in the scope of studies 2 the almost exclusive focus on carbon emissions 3 a lack of agreement on the choice of data additional explanatory variables and regression models 4 a lack of consensus on how to approximate t and 5 a lack of explicit analyses of the e re our findings are useful to both policymakers and academics for method design further research and policy evaluation

analyst forecasts and herding behavior the use of analyst forecasts as proxies for investors earnings expectations is commonplace in empirical research an implicit assumption behind their use is that they reflect analysts private information in an unbiased manner as demonstrated here this assumption is not necessarily valid there is shown to be a tendency for analysts to release forecasts closer to prior earnings expectations than is appropriate given their information further analysts exhibit herding behavior whereby they release forecasts similar to those previously announced by other analysts even when this is not justified by their information these results are shown to have interesting empirical implications article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

the relationship between the level of capital expenditures and firm value when a firm s management needs to raise external capital in order to finance an invest ment project it is likely to have better information about the project s future return than do potential investors in such a case as has been shown in the literature management may be able to signal its information through the use of certain financial variables how ever the possibility that management may be able to use the level of investment in the project itself to signal their information has not been considered the purpose of this paper is to examine this possibility it is shown here that the level of capital investment may be able to perfectly reveal management s information with a higher input level signalling more favorable information it is further demonstrated that even in this equilibrium finan cial variables still play an important role among other results it is shown in contrast to a conclusion of a study by leland and pyle that in this setting the number of shares held by management may be negatively correlated with the favorableness of their information

evaluating energy embodied in national products through input output analysis theoretical definition and practical application of international trades treatment methods abstract production activities of modern economies are ultimately sustained by depletion of non renewable fossil fuels in the perspective of non renewables displacement an accurate evaluation of energy embodied in goods and services is crucial in order to select among alternative products or policies economic based input output models are widely used for this purpose however due to the increasing amount of international trades of products definition of appropriate methods to account for the energy embodied in trades is nowadays crucial in this paper international trades treatment methods in input output analysis are comprehensively formalized and applied to a case study based on the world input output database wiod energy embodied in final demand and in detailed products of key national energy sectors have been evaluated for the wiod countries according to single region and multi regional models it is found that an inappropriate use of international trades treatment models may produce very inaccurate estimations of numerical values of embodied energy three country groups has been identified characterized by different ranges of fractions of imported exported primary fossil fuels single region method a returns best results for countries of group 1 with high values of fossil exports and low values of fossil imports multi regional method c is to be preferred for countries of group 2 with high values of fossil imports and low values of fossil exports finally single region method b returns lower deviations compared to other methods for countries of group 3 with low values of fossil imports and exports this paper aims at supporting researchers in the field of life cycle assessment in the application of environmentally extended input output analysis finding the best trade off between the efforts due to data collection and the accuracy of results

estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for u s households with input output analysis part 2 simulation abstract this is the second part of a two part paper that integrates economic and industrial ecology methods to estimate the indirect rebound effect from residential energy efficiency investments we apply the model developed in part one to simulate the indirect rebound given an estimate of the direct rebound using a 2002 environmentally extended input output model and the 2004 consumer expenditure survey in 2002 for the u s we find an indirect rebound of 5 15 in primary energy and co 2 e emissions assuming a 10 direct rebound depending on the fuel saved with efficiency and household income the indirect rebound can be as high as 30 40 in no x or so 2 emissions for efficiency in natural gas services the substitution effect modeled in part one is small in most cases and we discuss appropriate applications for proportional or income elasticity spending assumptions large indirect rebound effects occur as the u s electric grid becomes less carbon intensive in households with large transportation demands or as energy prices increase even in extreme cases there is limited evidence for backfire or a rebound effect greater than 100 enacting pollution taxes or auctioned permits that internalize the externalities of energy use would ensure that rebound effects unambiguously increase consumers welfare

estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for u s households with input output analysis part 1 theoretical framework abstract this is the first part of a two part paper providing an analytical model of the indirect rebound effect given a direct rebound estimate that integrates consumer demand theory with the embodied energy of household spending from environmentally extended input output analysis the second part applies the model developed in part one to simulate the direct and indirect rebound for the average u s household in terms of primary energy co2e nox and so2 emissions and for energy efficiency investments in electricity natural gas or gasoline services part one provides a critical review of the largely independent economic and industrial ecology literatures on the indirect rebound by studying the two goods case and the n goods case we demonstrate that the indirect rebound is bounded by the consumer budget constraint and inversely related to the direct rebound we also compare the common proportional spending and income elasticity spending assumptions with our model of cross price elasticities including both substitution and income effects for the indirect rebound by assuming zero incremental capital costs and the same embodied energy as conventional technologies for efficient appliances we model an upper bound of the indirect rebound future work should also consider the increase in consumer welfare possible through the rebound effect

what if consumers decided to all go green environmental rebound effects from consumption decisions shifting consumer preferences towards green consumption is promoted by many governments and environmental groups rebound effects which reduce the effectiveness of such actions are estimated for cost saving green consumption choices using australian data cases examined are reduced vehicle use reduced electricity use changing to smaller passenger vehicles and utilising fluorescent lighting it is found that if rebound effects are ignored when evaluating green consumption environmental benefits will be overstated by around 20 for reduced vehicle use and 7 for reduced electricity use rebound effects are higher and environmental benefits lower when more efficient vehicles or lighting are utilised rather than simple conservation actions of forgoing use in addition lower income households have higher rebound effects suggesting that environmental policy directed at changing consumer behaviour is most effective when targeted at high income households an inherent trade off between economic and environmental benefits of green consumption choices is demonstrated the size of the rebound effect and the observed variation with household income is attributed to life cycle analysis lca methodologies associated with the calculation of embodied ghg emissions of consumption goods these results should be therefore be interpreted as the minimum rebound effect to include in policy evaluation

risk sharing on the labour market and second best wage rigidities the starting point of the analysis is that a significant proportion of the labour force is not covered by efficient labour contracts in particular the non existence of forward labour contracts limits the opportunity of efficient risk sharing through private arrangements among young labour suppliers and capital owners in such a context state dependent labour taxes and employment subsidies would be required to achieve ex ante pareto efficiency in the absence of employment subsidies a certain limited degree of downward wage rigidity is in general pareto superior to full wage flexibility at the second best optimum so defined productive efficiency is sacrificed in some states in order to achieve greater efficiency in risk sharing thus the unemployment associated with wage rigidity is inefficient though voluntary due to the levels of benefits and second best efficient a limited degree of wage discrimination by hiring date is typically part of the second best policy

education and the allocation of talent i study how education affects the allocation of talent into different sectors of the economy i focus on two forces first education adds to a worker s information capital and thus may change her self confidence second performance contracts give a worker incentives to choose a sector according to her abilities the baseline model predicts that workers with intermediate ability educate while the most able skip education in an extension i compare the u k and the u s bachelor s degrees and moreover discuss hybrid educational systems common in europe that offer both u k and u s types of bachelor s degrees

career concerns inaction and market inefficiency evidence from utility regulation we study how incentive conflicts known as career concerns can generate inefficiencies not only within firms but also in market outcomes career concerns may lead agents to avoid actions that while valueincreasing in expectation could potentially be associated with a bad outcome we apply this theory to natural gas procurement by regulated public utilities and show that career concerns may lead to a reduction in surplus increasing market transactions during periods when the benefits of trade are likely to be greatest we show that data from natural gas markets are consistent with this prediction and difficult to explain using alternative theories

coal use for world economy provision and transfer network by multi region input output analysis concerns surrounding climate change and environmental challenge make the coal utilization network essential not only for understanding the pattern of energy provision and transfer but also for illustrating the interaction between anthropogenic activities and ecological systems at global level this paper fills the research gap by dint of multi regional input output model to outline coal embodied routes from natural boundaries to economic activities and to identify the central hubs in the global coal supply chain based on the most recent available statistics for 2011 as the economic value and environmental influences of different kinds of coals could be remarkably diverse the separation of coal categories in systematic analysis could provide fundamental information regarding the displacement and teleconnection of coal utilization in the world the estimation shows that in weight 64 99 of coal direct supply is ultimately embodied in international trade indicating the crucial roles of trade interlinks in global coal utilization apart from this the findings pertinent to sectoral structure regional supply chain and per capita characteristics of coal embodied utilization could be valuable to identify the global energy routes driven by international trade as well as to facilitate energy and environmental policy

decreasing absolute prudence characterization and applications to second best risk sharing abstract in this paper we provide two basic properties of utility functions u which exhibit decreasing absolute prudence i e u u 0 these properties are used to examine the allocation of risks in an economy when some agents bear non transferable risks we show that it is fair pareto efficient to let those with a non transferable risk bear relatively less of the transferable risk in the economy if and only if absolute prudence is decreasing in another model there is a complete set of contingent markets but some agents have no direct access to them we examine the fair efficient allocation of risk in a pool gathering a trader and a non trader decreasing absolute prudence provides an upper bound to the share of the pool s risk that should be borne by the trader

a real effects perspective to accounting measurement and disclosure implications and insights for future research accounting measurement and disclosure rules have a significant impact on the real decisions that firms make in this essay we provide an analytical framework to illustrate how such real effects arise using this framework we examine three specific measurement issues that remain controversial 1 how does the measurement of investments affect a firm s investment efficiency 2 how does the measurement and disclosure of a firm s derivative transactions affect a firm s choice of intrinsic risk exposures risk management strategy and the incentive to speculate 3 how could marking to market the asset portfolios of financial institutions generate procyclical real effects we draw upon these real effects studies to generate sharper and novel insights that we believe are useful not only for the development of accounting standards but also for guiding future empirical research

pandemics and the environmental rebound effect reflections from covid 19 the irruption of the covid 19 pandemic has raised concerns on sustainability issues the pandemic has accelerated the implementation of technologies such as ict and shifts in mobility behaviour such changes have the potential to reduce environmental burdens but also to trigger large environmental rebound effects this perspective article reflects on some emerging concerns on the socio economic effects of a pandemic on the environment from a rebound effect perspective although the pandemic offers potential to improve the environmental conditions it brings also a high risk to produce jevons paradox i e increase environmental burdens rather than decrease them as initially expected governments should be aware of these risks and assess the possibility to implement additional measures like environmental taxation or limiting the use of resources to help achieving sustainability targets

energy models for demand forecasting a review abstract energy is vital for sustainable development of any nation be it social economic or environment in the past decade energy consumption has increased exponentially globally energy management is crucial for the future economic prosperity and environmental security energy is linked to industrial production agricultural output health access to water population education quality of life etc energy demand management is required for proper allocation of the available resources during the last decade several new techniques are being used for energy demand management to accurately predict the future energy needs in this paper an attempt is made to review the various energy demand forecasting models traditional methods such as time series regression econometric arima as well as soft computing techniques such as fuzzy logic genetic algorithm and neural networks are being extensively used for demand side management support vector regression ant colony and particle swarm optimization are new techniques being adopted for energy demand forecasting bottom up models such as markal and leap are also being used at the national and regional level for energy demand management

persuasion and learning by countersignaling abstract we model countersignaling i e very high types refraining from signaling arising from the tradeoff between persuasion and learning in a signaling game we assume that the agent has imperfect private information regarding his her productivity which the signaling action provides additional verifiable information about a higher type agent benefits more from providing such objective albeit imprecise proof for the market but may also gain less from learning about his her productivity when the latter effect dominates the former for the very high types the equilibrium exhibits countersignaling very high and low types pool on refraining from signaling and only the medium types signal under certain conditions the countersignaling equilibrium is the unique pure strategy perfect sequential equilibrium

missing carbon reductions exploring rebound and backfire effects in uk households households are expected to play a pivotal role in reducing the uk s greenhouse gas ghg emissions and the uk government is encouraging specific household actions to help meet its targets however due to the rebound effect only a portion of the ghg emission reductions estimated by simple engineering calculations are generally achieved in practice for example replacing short car journeys by walking or cycling reduces consumption of motor fuels but this frees up money that may be spent on for example purchasing extra clothes or flying on vacation alternatively the money may be put into savings since all of these options lead to ghg emissions total ghg savings may be less than anticipated indeed in some instances emissions may increase a phenomenon known as backfire we estimate that the rebound effect for a combination of three abatement actions by uk households is approximately 34 targeting re spending on goods and services with a low ghg intensity reduces this to a minimum of around 12 while re spending on goods and services with a high ghg intensity leads to backfire our study highlights the importance of shifting consumption to lower ghg intensive categories and investing in low carbon investments

a view from the macro side rebound backfire and khazzoom brookes abstract this paper attempts to delineate a few key insights extracted from theoretical macroeconomic considerations of the rebound issue the goal has been to reduce these thoughts to a clear set of assertions that if true would be useful points of reference in the ongoing discussion despite their non empirical nature

are people risk vulnerable we report on a within subject experiment with substantial monetary incentives designed to test whether or not people are risk vulnerable in the experiment subjects face the standard portfolio choice problem in which the investor has to allocate part of his wealth between one safe asset and one risky asset we elicit risk vulnerability by observing each subject s portfolio choice in two different contexts that differ only by the presence or absence of an actuarially neutral background risk our main result is that most of the subjects are risk vulnerable 81 chose a less risky portfolio when exposed to background risk more precisely 47 invested a strictly smaller amount in the risky asset whereas 34 were indifferent furthermore contrasting the predictions provided by competing decision theoretic models we conclude that expected utility theory best fits our experimental data this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

technological progress and sustainable development what about the rebound effect abstract sustainability concepts that rest on the idea of resource or energy efficiency improvements due to technological progress tend to overestimate the potential saving effects because they frequently ignore the behavioral responses evoked by technological improvements efficiency improvements also affect the demand for resources and energy and often an increase in efficiency by 1 will cause a reduction in resource use that is far below 1 or sometimes it can even cause an increase in resource use this phenomenon is commonly labeled the rebound effect which is well known among energy economists but never attracted much attention in ecological economics the paper starts with the traditional neoclassical analysis of the rebound effect in a partial equilibrium framework that concentrates on the demand of one particular energy service such as mobility or room temperature it also provides an overview of some of the main empirical studies based on this model that mostly confirm the existence of the rebound effect but are controversial about its actual importance however we have to go beyond the neoclassical single service model in order to take care of the variety of possible feedback affecting energy use the paper presents two important expansions of the single service model in order to show the potential relevance of the rebound effect to ecological economics first it is shown that in a multi services model it proves to be difficult to make general statements about the relevance of the rebound effect in this case the overall effect of an increase in energy efficiency on total energy use depends on the on the assumptions about the substitutability between the services considered and the direction of the income effect second the paper also tries to take care of the fact that changes in resource use or energy use are frequently just side effects of other forms of technological progress especially technological change of a time saving nature can have a large influence on energy use as many time saving devices for example faster modes of transport require an increase in energy consumption that is frequently reinforced by a rebound effect with respect to time this effect will be especially strong when wages are high and at the same time energy prices are low as is currently the case in most industrialized countries consequently the paper also provides a strong argument for the introduction of energy taxes

empirical evidence of direct rebound effect in catalonia this paper reviews the empirical literature concerning the direct rebound effect in households it briefly analyzes the main theoretical and methodological aspects and finally estimates the magnitude of direct rebound effect for all energy services using electricity in households of catalonia spain using econometric techniques the main results show an estimated direct rebound effect of 35 in the short term and 49 in the long term the existence of a rebound effect reduces the effectiveness of energy efficiency policies

do short term objectives lead to under or overinvestment in long term projects we examine managerial investment decisions in the presence of imperfect information and short term managerial objectives prior research has argued that such an environment induces managers to underinvest in long run projects we show that short term objectives and imperfect information may also lead to overinvestment and we identify how the direction of the distortion depends upon the type of informational imperfection present when investors cannot observe the level of investment in the long run project suboptimal investment will be induced when investors can observe investment but not its productivity however overinvestment will occur there has been in recent years substantial public debate on the question of whether the long run investment decisions of the managers of publicly traded companies may be distorted by market pressures recent work by economists has tried to identify the potential source and nature of such distortions research has naturally focused on situations that are characterized by i short term managerial objectives the managers are concerned not only with the firm s long run stock price but also with the firm s short run stock price due to incentive schemes or the fear of losing control and ii imperfect information the market has less information than the firm s managers about the firm s long run projects the results of this research have indicated that in some situations short term objectives and imperfect information may lead to underinvestment in long run projects this paper seeks to extend prior work on the effects of short term objectives and imperfect information on long run investment decisions we demonstrate that imperfect information together with an emphasis on a firm s short run valuation may lead not only to underinvestment but also to overinvestment in long run projects the direction of the distortion depends

the impact of prudence on optimal prevention revisited this paper re examines the link between absolute prudence and self protection activities we show that the level of efiort chosen by an agent with positive and decreasing absolute prudence is larger than the optimal efiort chosen by a risk neutral agent if the degree of absolute prudence is less than a threshold that is utility independent and empirically veriflable we explain this threshold by a trade ofi between the variation of the variance and the level of the third moment of the loss distribution we also discuss our result in terms of skewness our contribution extends the model of eeckhoudt and gollier 2005

economic structure and energy savings from energy efficiency in households when an energy efficiency improvement occurs at the household level several mechanisms grouped under the name of the rebound effect increase the available income and consumption increasing the total energy consumption of the economic structure the present research analyses the links between energy efficiency improvements in households consumption and the economic structure in an input output framework we examine from an empirical perspective the relationship between energy efficiency improvements and the economic structure and between the direct and the indirect rebound effect the limits of the input output methodology in assessing the direct and indirect rebound effect have been empirically tested with respect to efficiency improvements of electricity uses in households in catalonia

when managers cover their posteriors making the decisions the market wants to see the stock market has opinions as to what choices firms should make we show that concern for current share prices may lead managers to make these choices rather than those suggested by their own superior information even when arbitrarily many privately informed firms have to make a similar decision the market s prejudices may still prevail we compare the distortions that arise from share price maximization with those due to herd behavior among profit maximizing firms and show that the former results in strictly less efficient use of information

hiding information in electoral competition abstract we model a two candidate electoral competition in which there is uncertainty about a policy relevant state of the world the candidates receive private signals about the true state which are imperfectly correlated we study whether the candidates are able to credibly communicate their information to voters through their choice of policy platforms our results show that the fact that private information is dispersed between the candidates creates a strong incentive for them to bias their messages toward the electorate s prior information transmission becomes more difficult the less correlated are the candidates signals the lower is the signals quality and the stronger is the electorate s prior indeed for weak priors welfare decreases as the prior becomes stronger and welfare always decreases as the signals become less correlated

emergy based resource intensities of industry sectors in china abstract emergy analysis can facilitate unified system resources accounting by combining emergy method with input output modeling technology this paper developed an eco thermodynamic input output model of the 2007 china economy to account for the sector specific resource intensities the results show that the resource intensities for chinese industry sectors present a distribution with a certain pattern which may vary over three orders of magnitude measured in terms of resource consumption against economic capital generation at the scale of the entire economy the emergy intensities for the resource extraction sectors of non metallic minerals and metallic ores are the highest sectors with the smallest emergy to money ratios are service sectors which rely less on primary natural resources the sector of coal mining is found to have the largest resource intensity of 6 19e 16 sej 1e 4 cny among all sectors while the sectoral intensity of scrap and waste is only 6 44e 14 sej 1e 4 cny the least one the insight obtained by juxtaposing resource intensities as well as their structures of industry sectors is useful to identify opportunities for reducing resource intensities that could enable improvements in their ecological sustainability

herding and anti herding a model of reputational differentiation abstract we analyze a model related to the strategic herding literature where a second expert maximizes his expected second period value by conforming with a first expert herding in contrast to the herding literature we assume that an agent is most valuable if he is the only smart agent if the value of being the only smart agent is sufficiently large the second expert always opposes its predecessor s report otherwise herding may result

the influence of energy efficiency on other natural resources use an input output perspective abstract energy efficiency improvements reduce the costs of energy services and under some circumstances increase the available income this generates an additional increase of consumption of goods and services that need additional energy to be produced distributed and consumed this effect is known as the indirect rebound effect in the literature however beyond this additional increase of global energy consumption there is also a variation of the use of other natural resources due to the same mechanism this effect which we label as direct and indirect cross rebound effect is generally not considered by academia nor policy making when designing and implementing energy policies this research conceptualizes this effect develops a methodology for its estimation and provides estimates for the spanish economy results show that an energy efficiency in households could increase the use of minerals and water while reducing the use of energy fossil fuels and metal ores in spain these reductions however are lower than the expected ones from an input output perspective leading to positive direct and indirect cross rebound effects between 64 6 and 74 7 for energy equivalent to direct and indirect rebound effect 48 63 for fossil fuels 84 89 for metal ores backfire for non metallic minerals 147 134 and extreme backfire for water 1191 1628

how does the implementation of the policy of electricity substitution influence green economic growth in china abstract to promote the level of electrification reduce environmental pollution and achieve the goal of clean energy usage and green economic growth in china the national development and reform commission and other eight departments jointly issued and implemented the policy of electricity substitution in 2016 electricity substitution aims to replace traditional fossil fuels such as coal and fuel oil with clean electric energy in different fields e g industry transportation and construction and deal with the pollutants at power generation however we still need to find out the exact impact of the policy of electricity substitution on energy saving and emission reduction in this paper we estimate the economically feasible increment of electricity demand according to different classifications in electricity substitution technology furthermore based on the input output model we discuss the relative influence of the policy of lectricity substitution the main conclusions are first the policy of electricity substitution alone is not adequate to reduce the dependence on fossil energy and environmental pollution under china s current power generation structure we should also increase the use of renewable energy second the power sector plays a leading role in stimulating economic output and the increasing electricity consumption due to the policy of electricity substitution can boost the green development of china s economy

who rebounds most estimating direct and indirect rebound effects for different uk socioeconomic groups this study estimates the combined direct and indirect rebound effects from various types of energy efficiency improvement and behavioural change by uk households and explores how these effects vary with total expenditure the methodology is based upon estimates of the expenditure elasticity and ghg intensity of 16 categories of goods and services and allows for the capital cost and embodied emissions of the energy efficiency measures themselves the study finds that rebound effects in ghg terms are modest 0 32 for measures affecting domestic energy use larger 25 65 for measures affecting vehicle fuel use and very large 66 106 for measures that reduce food waste furthermore measures undertaken by low income households are associated with the largest rebound effects with direct emissions forming a larger proportion of the total rebound effect for those households measures that are subsidised or affect highly taxed energy commodities may be less effective in reducing aggregate emissions these findings highlight the importance of allowing for rebound effects within policy appraisals as well as reinforcing the case for economy wide carbon pricing

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

pandering to persuade a principal chooses one of multiple projects or an outside option an agent is privately informed about the projects benets and shares the principal s preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option we show that for moderate outside option values strategic communication is characterized by pandering the agent biases his recommendation toward conditionally better looking projects even when both parties would be better o with some other project a project that has lower expected value can be conditionally better looking we develop some comparative statics of pandering pandering is also induced by an optimal mechanism without transfers

rational frenzies and crashes most markets clear through a sequence of sales rather than through a walrasian auctioneer because buyers can decide whether to buy now or later rather than only now or never their current willingness to pay is much more sensitive to price than the demand curve is a consequence is that markets will be extremely sensitive to new information leading to both frenzies in which demand feeds on itself and crashes in which price drops discontinuously the paper also shows how a result from static auction theory the revenue equivalence theorem can be applied to solve for a dynamic price path

sequential sales learning and cascades when ipo shares are sold sequentially later potential investors can learn from the purchasing decisions of earlier investors this can lead rapidly to cascades in which subsequent investors optimally ignore their private information and imitate earlier investors although rationing in this situation gives rise to a winner s curse it is irrelevant the model predicts that 1 offerings succeed or fail rapidly 2 demand can be so elastic that even risk neutral issuers underprice to completely avoid failure 3 issuers with good inside information can price their shares so high that they sometimes fail 4 an underwriter may want to reduce the communication among investors by spreading the selling effort over a more segmented market consider a scenario in which an issuer is selling a new security of uncertain value for example an ipo initial public offering of stock or high yield debt through an underwriter the s e c has banned variable price sales while the value of this new security is highly uncertain to individual market participants investors hold perfectly accurate information when aggregated moreover there are many potential investors and a small number of these investors can jointly determine the value of the firm or its project with high precision it would seem that in this scenario underpriced offerings would succeed and overpriced offerings would fail nevertheless this paper shows that if the distribution channels of invest ment banks are limited underpriced offerings can fail and overpriced offer ings can succeed with limited distribution channels it takes the under writer time to approach interested investors therefore later investors can observe how well an offering has sold to date or at least how successful it has sold relative to offerings previously undertaken by this underwriter

special interests and the media theory and an application to climate change a journalist reports to a voter on an unknown policy relevant state competing special interests can make claims that contradict the facts but seem credible to the voter a reputational incentive to avoid taking sides leads the journalist to report special interests claims to the voter in equilibrium the voter can remain uninformed even when the journalist is perfectly informed communication is improved if the journalist discloses her partisan leanings the model provides an account of persistent public ignorance on climate change that is consistent with narrative and quantitative evidence

conflicting interests in information disclosure and short term orientation of firms abstract this paper explains why firms might be excessively short term oriented even when they are able to inform the capital market about the true quality of their assets the information a firm reveals to the capital market can be used by competitors to the firm s detriment in this case the future profitability of the firm s assets is no longer exogenous but is influenced by the strategic actions of its competitors which in turn depend on the information the firm discloses this motivates the firm to switch resources from future prospects to short term profits the results have policy implications and may help explain the empirical observation that u s firms tend to be more short term oriented than japanese firms

a regional dynamic general equilibrium model of alternative climate change strategies outcomes and noncooperative equilibria this study finds that cooperative policies show much higher levels of emissions reductions than do noncooperative strategies that there are substantial differences in the levels of controls in both the cooperative and the noncooperative policies among different countries and that high income countries may be the major losers from cooperation jel h41 q4 q2 q20

sunflower management and capital budgeting in organizations ideas are often delegated for evaluation as a means of efficiently aggregating multiple information signals however those who delegate often find it impossible to separate the evaluation of the ideas they delegate from the evaluation of abilities of those delegated the task of assessing these ideas this commingling of the assessment of the idea with that of the individual agent generates a tendency for the agent to ignore his or her own information and instead attempt to confirm the superior s prior belief we refer to this as sunflower management and examine its effects on capital budgeting practices

composition of energy outflows embodied in the gross exports of the construction sector abstract energy sustainability has great importance in the development of the economy and society since energy is a necessary driving force for economic growth the construction sector accounts for a greater percentage of global energy consumption than most other sectors the structure of exports in the current trade pattern has affected the transmission of sectoral embodied energy through changes in regional economies this paper uncovers the composition of productions for gross exports and examines embodied energy from the viewpoint of value added through a case study in the construction sector multi regional input output tables have been used to process the data relevant to economic trade and energy input while the production of gross exports in 40 countries has been decomposed into the exports of value added trade and the exports of vertical specialisation trade based on data from world input output tables the decomposition and reorganisation clearly show the pathways and composition in the trade activities of gross exports the embodied energy of value added exports accounted for 60 90 of gross exports in the construction sectors of 37 countries the framework for sharing production in the construction sector still dominated the connections among many countries especially the trade relationships between large economies in the process of vertical specialisation trade the foreign value added of the construction sector was still limited by significant events such as the global financial crisis the construction sectors were ranked between 5 and 11 in all 35 domestic sectors in 34 countries as measured by the total export of embodied energy so the creation of high value added is enhanced by improvement in energy efficiency in the construction sector however the reduction of energy consumption in the construction sector may indirectly increase energy consumption in its upstream sectors because of the connection between exports and related production the balance between energy consumption and creation of value added in exports is an important consideration for government supervision and sectoral development local construction markets need to strengthen their ability in the supply of intermediate goods which benefits value added exports and domestic demand moreover developing national and international supply chains can positively offset the impact of the imbalanced distribution of globalised production

environmental rebound effect of energy efficiency improvements in colombian households abstract colombia aims to diversify and decarbonize its energy sector by encouraging the use of non conventional renewable resources policies and or measures to achieve this will presumably help to achieve national and international environmental goals yet potential rebound effects may reduce its efficacy by triggering additional demand and environmental burdens one of such rebound effects may take place as household demand rises in response to cheaper electricity prices due to the increasing shares of wind power this study assesses the environmental rebound effect ere in the household sector from increased shares of wind power into the colombian power grid across six environmental impacts and for the period 2020 2030 the method used combines life cycle assessment input output modelling energy system modelling econometrics and re spending modelling the results show that the ere has the potential to partially and even completely offset any environmental savings backfire effect depending on the specific impact year and modelling choices considered the magnitude of the ere as the percentage of potential environmental savings that are offset ranges highly across impacts from a negligible 1 eutrophication to a staggering 9241 photochemical ozone creation the ere has thus the potential to render decarbonization policies largely ineffective which calls for rebound mitigation policies such as environmental taxes

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

reputation concerned policy makers and institutional status quo bias abstract we study the policy choice of an office holding politician who is concerned with the public s perception of his capabilities the politician decides whether to maintain the status quo or to conduct a risky reform the reform s success depends critically on the politician s capabilities which are privately known to the politician the public observes both his policy choice and the outcome of the reform and assesses his competence we show that the politician may engage in socially detrimental reform in order to be perceived as more capable we investigate the institutional remedy that balances the gains and costs when the policy maker is subject to reputation concerns conservative institutions that thwart beneficial reform may potentially improve social welfare