the indirect role of households in shaping us residential energy demand patterns abstract about a quarter of us energy demand is for domestic use yet an understanding of the processes determinants and consequences of household energy demand remains elusive conventional energy policy has overwhelmingly focused on improving energy efficiency of the buildings this research applies a non linear methodology and an interdisciplinary approach to household energy demand using data from the us residential sector 2009 residential energy consumption survey this research performs covariance structure analysis to isolate direct and indirect effects of household and housing characteristics on total annual domestic energy use outcomes uncover some of households indirect effects on energy demand which in this research mainly happen through household effects on building characteristics highlighting the indirect role of household choices in shaping residential energy demand patterns to maximize its efficiency in reducing energy demand and ghg emissions this paper suggests that in addition to investing in energy efficient technologies energy policy should incorporate indirect effects of household choices on the configuration of their future homes

economies of scale in energy use in adult only households the residential sector is responsible for 18 of australia s primary energy use thus improved knowledge about household energy use is vital to future energy management this study examines economies of scale in energy use and expenditure among adult only households and across three adult only household types significant economies of scale are found in all cases small households suffer a double penalty of greater per capita energy use and higher charge per unit of energy with older households the most affected the trend towards smaller average household size means that economies of scale are continually being lost offsetting gains in energy efficiency achieved through other means

interest rate expectations and interest parity abstract this paper examines an hypothesis for explaining divergences from interest parity that is based on interest rate expectations if interest rates are expected to rise significantly within the arbitrage oppurtunity implies riskless profit waiting in ths way has been noted in the historical literature seems to make sense theoritically if portfolio adjusment cost in the capital market outweigh any costs of being out of long term equilibrium and explains a significant portion of us uk interest parity divergences using onshore assets in a recent floating preiod

mean reversion in real exchange rates evidence and implications for forecasting abstract the stationarity of real exchange rates over the recent flexible exchange rate period is an issue that has long bedeviled researchers in international finance using a constrained multivariate framework this paper provides the strongest evidence yet that real exchange rates were mean reverting over the 1973 93 period we also investigate shifts in long run real exchange rates which may be important for the purpose of forecasting out of sample forecasting shows that the random walk model is outperformed by a mean stationary model especially at long horizons in addition there are substantial forecasting benefits from using a multivariate approach

the european union currencies and the us dollar from post bretton woods to the euro abstract in this paper we study the evolution of the us dollar real exchange rate vis a vis the european union currencies in the floating post bretton woods era both before and after the birth of the euro in the first period we find that most of the persistence shown by this rate is due to the movements of the us dollar during the mid 1980s once these effects are isolated we can conclude that the us dollar real exchange rate exhibits stationarity with those currencies that are closely linked to the german mark however when we include the observations covering the period during which the euro was created we cannot reject the unit root null hypothesis for any currency

purchasing power parity in the long run a cointegration approach this paper utilizes cointegration analysis to examine purchasing power parity relationships over a long time horizon the results indicate that the exchange rate is cointegrated strongly with the wholesale price index ratio and somewhat weakly with the consumer price index ratio the cointegrating coefficient between the exchange rate and the price ratio is close to one when cointegration is confirmed the hypothesis that the real exchange rate follows a random walk is rejected in most cases finally a new test for common trends finds no such common trends in exchange rates or price ratios copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

the great appreciation the great depreciation and the purchasing power parity hypothesis abstract although there has been much recent work on purchasing power parity ppp neither univariate nor panel methods have produced strong rejections of unit roots in us dollar real exchange rates for industrialized countries during the post 1973 period we investigate the hypothesis that these non rejections can be explained by one episode the large appreciation and depreciation of the dollar in the 1980s by developing unit root tests which account for this event and maintain long run ppp using panel methods we can strongly reject the unit root null for those countries that adhere to the typical pattern of the dollar s rise and fall

deviations from purchasing power parity in the long run this paper demonstrates that deviations from purchasing power parity reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data since this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper proposes an alternative explanation which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism this paper will demonstrate that deviations from purchasing power parity ppp reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible exchange rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper therefore proposes an alternative explanation which does not presuppose free trade in goods but which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism the major implication of the theory and the results is that ppp is as likely to be violated in the long as in the short run as an empirical matter deviations from ppp can be observed for most currencies at any instant see kravis et al 21 stockman 37 and genberg 15 among others these deviations are typically both cumulative and persistent the real exchange rate can remain on either side of parity for lengthy but variable time intervals of a year or more as a consequence the current consensus shared

exchange rate risk and the bid ask spread a seven country comparison this paper studies the determination of exchange market transaction costs using a large data set including seven currencies it provides empirical support for the theoretical prediction of a positive relationship between the level of uncertainty regarding future prices and current transaction costs in contrast to most previous work it considers explicitly the problem of omitted transactions volume showing that while estimators are less efficient and potentially inconsistent in the absence of the unavailable variable the direction of potential coefficient bias is such that hypothesis tests regarding the importance of uncertainty are rendered more conservative

energy comes home the growth in private energy consumption is an increasing problem in western countries from an environmental point of view this consumption has to be reduced on the basis of two norwegian case studies this article discusses private energy consumption and possibilities for reduction with a special focus on the home it argues against a rational economic view of the consumer and emphasizes the significance of a more subtle understanding of private energy use the article approaches the challenges of reducing private energy consumption by analysing the domestication of the home and discusses everyday life activities as well as the phenomenon of rebuilding and redecorating by using the concept of domestication the article challenges the linear understanding of technological as well as behavioural change private energy consumption is part of a complex network and it is necessary to understand this network in order to achieve a more permanent reduction

untangling the complexity of the direct and indirect determinants of the residential energy consumption in france quantitative analysis using a structural equation modeling approach abstract about a quarter of french energy demand is for residential use this study mobilises a multidisciplinary approach and a non linear modeling strategy to examine the total direct and indirect effects of households and housing units in designing french energy consumption based on micro level data from the new french 2012 phebus survey this research implements a structural equation model to tease out the effects of both dwelling characteristics household attributes climate and behaviours on the domestic energy use findings confirm that the direct effect of household related attributes on domestic energy demand is notably lower than the corresponding effect from the dwelling attributes nevertheless considering for the indirect effect of household factors on energy use across housing choices the total impact of household related attributes on the french domestic energy consumption is just slightly lower than that of dwelling characteristics therefore to highlight the spectrum of residential energy use this research calls to incorporate both direct and indirect effects of household attributes and choices this study suggests several key insights on how to incorporate housing policy into residential energy policy and reduce energy related greenhouse gas emissions

the response of exchange rates to permanent and transitory shocks under floating exchange rates abstract using the joint behavior of inflation and real exchange rates we develop an empirical model to uncover the sources of the fluctuations in the real dollar exchange rates of four major industrial countries under the current float this model allows us to construct two time series for each country pair one representing the permanent component of each real exchange rate and the other the purely transitory component over the period as a whole transitory shocks played a relatively small but statistically significant role real dollar exchange rates therefore did not simply evolve in response to permanent shocks instead there are instances in which temporary shocks made a substantial contribution we conclude that the random walk model though an approximate statistical description of real exchange rate behavior is a poor guide to model structure jel f31

purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data abstract this paper reports the results of unit root tests for real exchange rates using a panel framework this panel approach provides greatly improved power compared to conventional univariate time series unit root tests we obtain evidence supporting ppp over the recent flexible exchange rate period for g 6 and oecd countries we show explicitly that failure to find such evidence in previous research was due to the low power of the tests

residential energy use and conservation economics and demographics energy consumption in the residential sector offers an important opportunity for conserving resources however much of the current debate regarding energy efficiency in the housing market focuses on the physical and technical determinants of energy consumption neglecting the role of the economic behavior of resident households in this paper we analyze the extent to which the use of gas and electricity is determined by the technical specifications of the dwelling as compared to the demographic characteristics of the residents our analysis is based on a sample of more than 300 000 dutch homes and their occupants the results indicate that residential gas consumption is determined principally by structural dwelling characteristics such as the vintage building type and characteristics of the dwelling while electricity consumption varies more directly with household composition in particular income and family composition combining these results with projections on future economic and demographic trends we find that even absent price increases for residential energy the aging of the population and their increasing wealth will roughly offset improvements in the energy efficiency of the building stock resulting from policy interventions and natural revitalization

smooth breaks and non linear mean reversion post bretton woods real exchange rates the recent literature on purchasing power parity ppp has emphasized the role of two phenomena that may lead to the rejection of the ppp hypothesis structural breaks and non linear adjustment induced by transaction costs these two hypotheses are analyzed separately in the literature we develop tests for unit roots that account jointly for structural breaks and non linear adjustment structural breaks are modeled by means of a fourier function that allows for infrequent smooth temporary mean changes and is hence compatible with long run ppp nonlinear adjustment is modeled by means of an estar model our tests present good finite sample properties the tests are applied to a set of 15 oecd countries rers and are able to reject the null of a unit root in 14 cases the breaks are usually associated with the great appreciation and later depreciation of the dollar in the 1980s and the estar adjustment appears to play an important role

energy tax credits and housing improvement this paper investigates whether federal and state tax credits allowed to households who make energy saving improvements to their residence lead to an increase in improvement activity a two period utility maximization model of household behaviour is used to determine the theoretical influence of tax credits energy prices and other factors on the optimal magnitude of conservation capital improvement regressions using various qualitative measures of conservation improvement as the dependent variable are estimated using household level energy consumption and improvement data consistent with evidence from earlier surveys the empirical results do not support the hypothesis that energy tax credits lead to more widespread or more extensive energy conservation improvement activity

are real exchange rates nonstationary evidence from a panel data test it is well documented that real exchange rates between the united states and many industrialized countries in the post bretton woods period are integrated this result implies that purchasing power parity ppp does not hold even as a long run relationship this paper demonstrates that the failure to reject the unit root hypothesis may result from the low power of existing univariate test procedures i test for unit roots in real exchange rates by employing a more powerful panel based procedure using both cpi and wpi real dollar exchange rate data i strongly reject the null hypothesis of a unit root my results provide overwhelming support for the long run ppp under the current float copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

risk transactions charges and the market for foreign exchange services this paper suggests that transactions charges in foreign exchange markets rather than being solely brokerage fees represent exchange rate uncertainty in periods of great fluctuations by including remuneration for the assumption of risk by foreign exchange dealers since most of the cost of exchange rate uncertainty may be largely endogenously included in the foreign exchange markets attempts to examine the efficient market hypothesis in these markets should most appropriately include specific consideration of transactions costs there appears to be empirical support for the premise that transactions charges are positively related to exchange rate risk and as well inclusion of contemporaneous bid ask spreads into the interest parity schedule leaves few unexplained profits from dollar pound covered interest arbitrage during the 1970 s and underscores the notion of classifying periods by degree of turbulence in analyzing covered interest arbitrage

was it real the exchange rate interest differential relation over the modern floating rate period in this paper we explore the relationship between real exchange rates and real interest rate differentials in the united states germany japan and the united kingdom contrary to theories based on the joint hypothesis that domestic prices are sticky and monetary disturbances are predominant we find little evidence of a stable relationship between real interest rates and real exchange rates we consider both in sample and out of sample tests one hypothesis that is consistent with our findings is that real disturbances such as productivity shocks may be a major source of exchange rate volatility this paper investigates the empirical relationship between major currency real exchange rates and real interest rates over the modern post march 1973 flexible rate experience the exchange rates examined here include the dollar mark dollar yen and dollar pound rates our two major findings are as follows first the data do not indicate a strong correspondence between real interest rate differentials short term or long term and real exchange rates this finding appears to conflict with the predictions of most monetary and portfolio balance models of exchange rate determination though the conflict can be substantially reconciled if aggregate disturbances are primarily real in nature i e changes in productivity tastes etc it is true that in many cases the sign of the estimated exchange rate interest rate differential relationship is consistent with the possible predominance of financial market disturbances but the relationship is not stable enough to be statistically significant second although one does find some evidence of a unit root in both real exchange rates and long term but not shortterm real interest differentials these two series do not appear to be linearly cointegrated hence the nonstationarity or near nonstationarity in the two series cannot be attributed to the same factor in section i we briefly describe a class of small scale monetary models of exchange rate determination the importance of this class of models for empirical work derives from its strong predictions about how the exchange rate will move

a national micro data based model of residential electricity demand new evidence on seasonal variation building on earlier estimates of electricity demand the author estimates elasticities by month to determine differences between heating and cooling seasons he develops a three equation model of residential electricity demand that includes all the main components of economic theory the model generates seasonal elasticity estimates that generally support economic theory based on the model using a national current household data set monthly division the evidence indicates there is a seasonal pattern for price elasticity of demand while less pronounced there also appears to be seasonal patterns for cross price elasticity of alternative fuels for the elasticity of appliance stock index and for an intensity of use variable

real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates we find strong evidence of mean reverting real exchange rate behavior using simple stationary autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float such stationary univariate equations explain 60 80 percent of the in sample variation in real exchange rates although the degree of short run persistence may be high the econometric estimates imply a half life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar sterling and a little under 3 years for franc sterling

increasing evidence of purchasing power parity over the current float we conduct unit root tests of real exchange rates with the united states dollar and the german mark as base currencies using samples of data which begin in 1973 and end between 1982 and 1996 we find that as the sample is extended the evidence of ppp strengthens with panel but not univariate methods because of the sharp rise and fall of the dollar in the early 1980s rejections of the unit root null do not monotonically increase with the sample size the evidence of ppp is uniformly stronger when the mark is used as the base currency

modelling energy demand of developing countries are the specific features adequately captured abstract this paper critically reviews existing energy demand forecasting methodologies highlighting the methodological diversities and developments over the past four decades in order to investigate whether the existing energy demand models are appropriate for capturing the specific features of developing countries the study finds that two types of approaches econometric and end use accounting are commonly used in the existing energy demand models although energy demand models have greatly evolved since the early seventies key issues such as the poor rich and urban rural divides traditional energy resources and differentiation between commercial and non commercial energy commodities are often poorly reflected in these models while the end use energy accounting models with detailed sectoral representations produce more realistic projections as compared to the econometric models they still suffer from huge data deficiencies especially in developing countries development and maintenance of more detailed energy databases further development of models to better reflect developing country context and institutionalizing the modelling capacity in developing countries are the key requirements for energy demand modelling to deliver richer and more reliable input to policy formulation in developing countries

the re emergence of ppp in the 1990s abstract in this paper we investigate purchasing power parity ppp in a panel with 17 countries for the period 1972 through 1996 the novel feature of our panel methodology is that results are invariant to the choice of a benchmark on numeraire currency in the panel we allow individual country effects in the relation between prices and exchange rates in this way we can identify the currency pairs for which ppp holds or does not hold we conclude that there is substantive evidence for ppp although not to the same extent for every currency evidence in favor of ppp is strongest for many exchange rates relative to the dmark and weakest for the japanese yen for this currency a trend like variable like productivity growth is missing

cointegration between exchange rates and relative prices another view abstract in this paper the cointegration property of exchange rates and relative prices as implied by the purchasing power parity theory ppp is reexamined using a time varying parameter tvp approach such an approach recognizes the possibility that the lack of cointegration between exchange rates and relative prices found in recent literature may be the result of the nonstationarity of the cointegrating regression parameters themselves the tests of cointegration in a tvp framework indicate that ppp is better supported and point to the presence of structural instability in the long run equilibrium relationship between exchange rates and relative prices

residential energy use abstract the energy information administration recently published data they collected from the national interim energy consumption survey niecs niecs includes detailed information on 4081 individual households demographic characteristics energy related features of the structure heating equipment and appliances therein recent conservation actions taken by the household and fuel consumption and costs for the april 1978 march 1979 one year period this data set provides a new and valuable resource for analysis we summarized and analysed the niecs data on household energy consumption total energy use electricity use and use of the primary space heating fuel the regression equations constructed explain roughly half the variation in energy use among households these equations contain 10 or fewer independent variables the most important of which are fuel price year house was built floor area and heating degree days

exchange rate risk and transactions costs evidence from bid ask spreads abstract this paper develops a model of exchange rate bid ask spreads which is used to examine the relationship between exchange rate risk and volatility and to measure transactions costs the empirical results indicate that market makers judge the probability of exchange rate changes based on both recent and long term volatility and that the second moment alone is not a complete measure of volatility while a proxy for trading volume does not have the expected relationship with spreads weekend and holiday effects conform to theory transactions costs vary over time and seem responsive to the imposition of exchange controls

electricity consumption and durable housing understanding cohort effects we find that households living in california homes built in the 1960s and 1970s had high electricity consumption in 2000 relative to houses of more recent vintages because the price of electricity at the time of home construction was low homes built in the early 1990s had lower electricity consumption than homes of earlier vintages because the price of electricity was higher the elasticity of the price of electricity at the time of construction was 0 22 as homes built between 1960 and 1989 become a smaller share of the housing stock average household electricity purchases will fall

some new stylized facts of floating exchange rates abstract this paper re examines real exchange rate behavior of oecd currencies under the current float using the more extensive dataset that an additional decade s worth of experience has made available what emerges is a new set of stylized facts which suggest that the problems of the current float were not as commonly believed generic to that system but in fact rather specific being largely confined to one sub period the early and mid 1980s and one currency the us dollar this dollar behavior ranks as one of the important puzzles of the past 25 years

an ex ante evaluation of a white certificates scheme in the netherlands a case study for the household sector increased efficiency of energy demand is generally recognized as a very cost effective strategy to reduce energy requirements and the related environmental impacts e g the greenhouse effect in order to improve energy efficiency the use of innovative market mechanisms such as the white certificates whc has been proposed the basic idea underlying this policy instrument is that specific energy saving targets are set for energy suppliers or energy distributors these requirements must be fulfilled in a predefined time frame the focus of this paper is on the effect on energy efficiency improvement on the behavior of the end consumers and the market of energy efficiency measures furthermore we study the possible effects of whc in the netherlands by means of a theoretical analysis and an empirical bottom up model we compare concrete energy efficient technologies in terms of cost effectiveness and energy efficiency improvement in combination with existing dutch policies for energy efficiency improvement in the built environment the contribution of this innovative scheme could enhance the accomplishment of energy efficiency targets in this paper two packages of energy saving measures of a whc scheme are studied for dutch households the costs of these technologies are estimated through the use of different discount rates which imply overcoming of the market barriers through the use of the whc a scheme that includes all available technologies as flexible options appears as a realistic solution and can generate cost effectively up to 180 pj primary energy savings and 4550 m cumulative net savings in the year 2020 at a discount rate of 5 under the precondition that the policy and administrative costs can be kept low

the international transmission of interest rates a note on causal relationships between short term external and domestic u s dollar returns abstract this study extends the literature of capital market integration by investigating the relationship between u s dollar yield behavior in the domestic and in the external dollar market recognizing recent increases in world capital market speed of adjustment the analysis is based on daily changes in yields using granger causality tests much of the adjustmemt appears to be contemporaneous if contemporaneous is defined as weekly as opposed to daily changes and the eurodollar market adjusts more rapidly and more completely to changes in the domestic market than the domestic market adjusts to changes in the eurodollar market

residential energy demand additional empirical evidence by minority household type abstract in a number of recent studies household level data for specific urban areas or national household level micro data have been used to estimate price and income elasticities of energy demand none of this literature however provides us with elasticity estimates by minority majority household type the main focus of this paper is to measure the responsiveness of the quantity of electricity and total energy demanded for black hispanis and majority households to price and income price and income elasticities are compared among these groups over the short and long term a variable elasticity demand model is estimated the elasticities are allowed to vary with respect to non price and income variables the price elasticities of demand vary with heating and cooling degree days and the income elasticities with the number of household members mean estimates were calculated over the respective samples findings indicate that demand for electricity is relatively price inelastic irrespective of household group however blacks are more sensitive to variations in the short run to price than hispanic and majority households in the long run blacks are also more sensitive to price changes but the magnitude of the response to price changes in the long run relative to the short run is larger for hispanics and majority households respectively than for blacks

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

transactions costs and covered interest arbitrage theory and evidence the extent to which deviations from covered interest parity can be attributed to transactions costs has been exaggerated in the economic literature because the swap market in foreign exchange has been ignored it is shown that such deviations should be no greater than the lowest of the transactions costs in one of three markets the swap market or either of the two relevant securities markets this reconciles the theory with the data which show spreads of no more than a few basis points however the empirical results have no direct bearing on the conventional market efficiency hypothesis

an econometric analysis of residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources abstract economic theory suggests that residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources will be determined by the ability of households to purchase conservation inputs their incentive to invest in conserving energy the energy efficiency of existing homes and miscellaneous factors such as climate and age of the home owner empirical analyses of energy related expenditures reported on individual income tax returns confirm the importance of household income energy price increases and climate conditions in determining energy conservation investments income tax credits are also found to have stimulated residential spending on conservation and renewable energy

real exchange rates and structural breaks cointegration tests often fail to detect the existence of long term relationships such as purchasing power parity for two reasons i these tests have low power and ii structural shocks can alter the long run real exchange rate in this paper the long run movements of five exchange rates relative to the us dollar and five european exchange rates relative to the deutsche mark are investigated in particular corrected cointegration tests are applied which take into account the possibility of a structural break at an unknown date empirical evidence is found that structural changes can be responsible for most exchange rate deviations from their equilibrium defined by purchasing power parity or a generic monetary model

understanding the empirical literature on purchasing power parity the post bretton woods era abstract this paper argues that the empirical failure of statistical tests of ppp in post bretton woods data is largely due to the low power of the tests employed this result is demonstrated using monte carlo experiments on the size and power of different testing procedures a new procedure based on horvath and watson econometric theory 11 pp 984 1014 1995 has greater power than previous approaches using the horvath watson procedure we find moderate evidence in favor of ppp in the post bretton woods era

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

aggregation is not the solution the ppp puzzle strikes back we acknowledge financial support from the spanish ministry of education through grants sej2006 00369 and sej2005 05215 the fundacion ramon areces the barcelona economics program of crea and from the aragon s research unit seim

an analysis of monthly household energy consumption among single family residences in texas 2010 demographic socioeconomic and housing characteristics influence variation in household energy consumption by combining household level utility public and proprietary data we examine predictors of household energy consumption in a texas urban area using quantile regression this analysis assesses the relationship between energy consumption and predictors at the middle and both ends of the distribution 10th and 90th percentiles results indicate potential opportunities to lower consumption among the highest energy consuming households including those with pools with non central cooling with people working from home those built on pier post foundation and those that are renter occupied these findings suggest significant opportunities to reduce consumption and demand as in the study area almost 10 of housing units are renter occupied 18 percent are without central cooling and 7 have pools capturing a significant portion of these homes for retrofit conservation efforts through marketing has potential to produce substantial results producing a better understanding of determinants of household energy consumption using the methods presented has potential to assist development and implementation of strategies to reduce consumption and increase efficiency

an empirical examination of long run purchasing power parity using cointegration techniques this paper presents an empirical analysis of long run purchasing power parity ppp for five major exchange rates using recently developed econometric techniques on the cointegration of economic time series our empirical results are extremely unfavourable to the ppp hypothesis as a long run equilibrium condition even with an allowance made for measurement error and or tranportation costs in particular we are unable to reject the hypothesis of non cointegration of the exchange rate and relative prices for any of the countries concerned far from finding a stable long run proportionality between exchange rates and relative prices our results therefore suggest that they tend to drift apart without bound

understanding the spectrum of residential energy consumption a quantile regression approach abstract residential energy consumption accounts for 22 of the total energy consumption in the us however the impacts of local planning policies such as increasing density and changing the housing type mix on residential energy consumption are not well understood using residential energy consumption survey data from the energy information administration quantile regression analysis was used to tease out the effects of various factors on entire distribution on the energy consumption spectrum instead of focusing on the conditional average results show that while housing size matters for space conditioning housing type has a more nuanced impact self reported neighborhood density does not seem to have any impact on energy use furthermore the effects of these factors at the tails of the energy use distribution are substantially different than the average in some cases differing by a factor of six some not all types of multifamily housing offer almost as much savings as reduction in housing area by 100 m 2 compared to single family houses

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null