how do people cope with natural disasters evidence from the great hanshin awaji kobe earthquake in 1995 this paper investigates the coping strategies employed by victims of the great hanshin awaji kobe earthquake in 1995 using a unique household data set we show that households that held a large amount of collateralizable assets before the catastrophe and were free from a binding borrowing constraint were able to maintain their consumption levels by borrowing in contrast households subject to a binding borrowing constraint before the disaster were unable to borrow to cope with the losses inflicted by the earthquake on the other hand both types of households relied on private transfers depending on the extent of the damage

beyond carbon pricing the role of banking and monetary policy in financing the transition to a low carbon economy it is widely acknowledged that introducing a price on carbon represents a crucial precondition for filling the current gap in low carbon investment however as this paper argues carbon pricing in itself may not be sufficient this is due to the existence of market failures in the process of creation and allocation of credit that may lead commercial banks the most important source of external finance for firms not to respond as expected to price signals under certain economic conditions banks would shy away from lending to low carbon activities even in the presence of a carbon price this possibility calls for the implementation of additional policies not based on prices in particular the paper discusses the potential role of monetary policies and macroprudential financial regulation modifying the incentives and constraints that banks face when deciding their lending strategy through for instance a differentiation of reserve requirements according to the destination of lending may fruitfully expand credit creation directed towards low carbon sectors this seems to be especially feasible in emerging economies where the central banking framework usually allows for a stronger public control on credit allocation and a wider range of monetary policy instruments than the sole interest rate

what policy adjustments in the eu ets truly affected the carbon prices abstract carbon market becomes increasingly popular as a cost effective instrument to mitigate co 2 emissions however its construction is a learning by doing process and needs consistent regulatory updates in order to deliver optimal effects this paper uses the event study method to assess the impacts of different policy adjustments on the eua returns in the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets since 2005 comparing to existing studies that focus on the impact of a single policy this paper provides a complementary reference on if and to what extent policy adjustments can impact the carbon prices by classifying all regulatory update events into six categories its key findings are as follows first aggregate impacts of total 50 events studied are low while impacts of events having underlying negative impacts are higher than those having underlying positive impacts second 24 events have significant impacts on eua returns and are coherent to their theoretical impacts except one event third events having negligible impact on eua returns are those that are announced not for the first time or those having no impact on co 2 quotas supply and demand finally there are different impact patterns some events have different impacts on short end and long end carbon prices

credit market constraints consumption smoothing and the accumulation of durable production assets in low income countries investments in bullocks in india in this paper we formulate and estimate a finite horizon structural dynamic model of agricultural investment behavior that incorporates the major features of low income agricultural environments income uncertainty constraints on borrowing and rental markets and the use of investment assets to generate income and smooth consumption the model is fit to longitudinal indian household data on farm profits bullock stocks and pump sets the estimated structural parameters are used to assess the effects on the life cycle accumulation of bullocks agricultural profits and welfare associated with complete markets and bullock liquidity and with second best policies that provide assured sources of income to farmers and weather insurance

government failure rent seeking and capture the design of climate change policy climate change has been described as one of the biggest market failures less attention has been paid to the government failures associated with interventions and the implications for the design of climate change policy this paper sets out the main types of government failure and shows how the processes of rent seeking and capture help to explain both why the choice of targets and instruments has been so inefficient and also why the resulting costs of carbon mitigation are likely to be considerably higher than the estimates provided by the stern review and other recent studies two examples are given emissions trading and renewables policy a number of generic conclusions are drawn about how taking account of government failures can help to improve policy design and limit the impact of the climate change pork barrel which existing policies have created copyright 2010 oxford university press

region division of china s carbon market based on the provincial municipal carbon intensity abstract the difference of carbon trading prices among emission trading scheme pilots may hinder the unified carbon market that china s government plans to establish in 2017 to achieve this goal this study develops a regional carbon market mode based on the similarity of thirty provinces municipalities carbon intensity by the aid of logarithmic mean divisia index autoregressive and dynamic time warping models according to the dynamic clustering result we divide these provinces municipalities into three sub markets that are the western eastern and central markets furthermore we propose the carbon emission modes corresponding to each sub market namely the energy dependence mode western market sustainable economy mode eastern market and industrial upgrading mode central market briefly we suggest that the unified market should be firstly divided into some sub markets finally we propose some critical routes as well as corresponding managerial implications for establishing such unified market

policy options to improve the effectiveness of the eu emissions trading system a multi criteria analysis abstract this paper considers several policy options which have been proposed to improve the functioning of the ets these options require an intervention either on the ets cap 30 target set aside carbon central bank long term target or on the carbon price european and national price floor we analyse the impact of each policy on the ets carbon price and emissions a multi criteria evaluation method is applied to compare the policy options against a plurality of environmental economic and procedural criteria we find that the final ranking depends on the goals to be achieved i e the relative weights attributed to the criteria when policymakers want mainly to support the carbon price both in the short and long run while improving ets flexibility and harmonization the ccb and the eu price floor are respectively ranked as first and second best options as the preference for environmental and implementation goals gradually increases the position of the eu price floor and ccb options tend to invert the 30 target should be adopted when reducing emissions is the priority goal while a national price floor is the worst option in this case nevertheless self interested states looking for a relatively quick feasible solution may find it optimal

a decade of tax and benefit reforms in sweden effects on labour supply welfare and inequality sweden has experienced a sequence of tax and benefit reforms during the last decade in this paper we evaluate these reforms from labour supply welfare and inequality points of view we depart from a household labour supply model simulation of the model reveals that tax and benefit reforms have led to a considerable reduction of the excess burden regarding social welfare and inequality we show that the results depend to a large extent on the income inequality measure and the measure of social welfare as well as the income concept household disposable income or money metric utility

investment risks under uncertain climate change policy abstract this paper describes results from a model of decision making under uncertainty using a real options methodology developed by the international energy agency iea the model represents investment decisions in power generation from the perspective of a private company the investments are subject to uncertain future climate policy which is treated as an external risk factor over which the company has no control the aims of this paper are to i quantify these regulatory risks in order to improve understanding of how policy uncertainty may affect investment behaviour by private companies and ii illustrate the effectiveness of the real options approach as a policy analysis tool the study analysed firms investment options of coal and gas fired power plants and carbon capture and storage ccs technologies policy uncertainty is represented as an exogenous event that creates uncertainty in the carbon price our findings indicate that climate policy uncertainty creates a risk premium for power generation investments in the case of gas and coal fired power generation the risk premium would lead to an increase in electricity prices of 5 10 in order to stimulate investment in the case of ccs the risk premium would increase the carbon price required to stimulate investment by 16 37 compared to a situation of perfect certainty the option to retrofit ccs acts as a hedge against high future carbon prices and could accelerate investment in coal plant this paper concludes that to minimise investment risks in low carbon technologies policy makers should aim to provide some long term regulatory certainty

poverty and household size the widely held view that larger families tend to be poorer in developing countries has influenced research and policy the scope for size economies in consumption cautions against this view we find that the correlation between poverty and size vanishes in pakistan when the size elasticity of the cost of living is about 0 6 this turns out to be the elasticity implied by a modified version of the food share method of setting scales by contrast some measures of child nutritional status indicate an elasticity of unity consideration of the weight attached to child versus adult welfare may help resolve the non robustness of demographic profiles of poverty excerpt

fuel poverty and access to electricity comparing households when they differ in needs although sequential stochastic dominance techniques have been used in the literature to make comparisons of income poverty which are robust to the assumptions made about the economies of scale within households the techniques could be applied to a much wider set of issues in this paper these techniques are applied to energy deprivation in guatemala fuel poverty is compared among households with and without access to electricity and it is assessed whether access to electricity for those who do not have access currently would eliminate the observed difference in fuel poverty between the two groups of households

a fuzzy stochastic model for carbon price prediction under the effect of demand related policy in china s carbon market abstract the establishment of china s carbon market has an obvious policy oriented feature and the carbon price is easily affected by demand related policies within a compliance period as prior models cannot help with clear simulation of the volatility of carbon price in china this paper develops a fuzzy stochastic model to predict such price under the effect of demand related policy first we quantify corporate final profit obtained from carbon trading based on different free allowance policies to measure the actual allowance demand in the carbon market second based on such demand we add the fuzzy number in each parameter of a stochastic differential equation and then develop a fuzzy stochastic model that can help to analyse the effect of demand related policy on carbon price in the immature carbon market third by analysing the demand related policy formulated in the second developing phase of the shanghai environment and energy exchange from nov 17 in 2016 through our model we predict the price trend after each demand related policy publication experimental results reveal the accurate fitting effect of the developed model that can help to estimate the supply and demand in the carbon market and evaluate the effectiveness of current carbon trading policy as well further our model can provide a robust theoretical implication for both corporate carbon trading strategies and governmental regulations on carbon demand related policy

equivalence scale relativities and the extent of inequality and poverty most inequality and poverty theory analyzes equivalent income distributions for homogeneous populations incomes are assumed to be deflated by an equivalence scale that accounts for differences in needs between households yet in practice there is no consensus about what the appropriate equivalence scale is the authors analyze how the choice of equivalence scale affects inequality and poverty measures and show that there is a systematic relationship between equivalence scale generosity and the extent of inequality and poverty they consider most of the measures in common use and provide some empirical illustrations copyright 1992 by royal economic society

nonmarket institutions for credit and risk sharing in low income countries the design credit and risk institutions in low income countries provides one of the most exciting testing grounds for theories of contracting with imperfect information and limited enforcement this paper reviews some of the recent literature with a special focus on nonmarket institutions that cope with risk and provide credit this literature attempts to bring together insights from economic theory especially information economics contract theory and mechanism design theory however it is also applied being motivated by the circumstance of the poor countries that their authors have visited and studied

relative wage movements and the distribution of consumption we analyze how relative wage movements among birth cohorts and education groups affected the distribution of household consumption and economic welfare our empirical work draws on the best available cross sectional data sets to construct synthetic panel data on u s consumption labor supply and wages during the 1980s we find that low frequency movements in the cohort education structure of pretax hourly wages among men drove large changes in the distribution of household consumption the results constitute a spectacular failure of between group consumption insurance a failure not explained by existing theories of informationally constrained optimal consumption behavior a welfare analysis indicates that the cost of between group consumption variability is larger than the cost of aggregate consumption variability by two orders of magnitude

sequential dominance and weighted utilitarianism abstract one well known way to make heterogeneous welfare comparisons comparing distributions in which households differ in both income and needs is atkinson and bourguignon s atkinson a b bourguignon f 1987 income distribution and differences in needs in feiwel g r ed arrow and the foundations of the theory of economic policy macmillan london pp 350 370 sequential generalized lorenz dominance criterion we show that it suffices to be a weighted utilitarian with higher weights for the more needy to accept the sequential generalized lorenz dominance criterion

dynamic linkages among carbon energy and financial markets a smooth transition approach this article explores how price linkages between carbon allowances and market fundamentals in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets vary over time i adopt a multivariate garch model that allows the conditional correlation between carbon energy and financial prices to change smoothly across regimes governed by functions of two transition variables that explain why price linkages vary i use i time as transition variable to allow for structural changes associated with institutional advances in the eu ets and ii implied volatility to account for heterogeneity in the behaviour of correlations in times of distress compared to calm periods the results point to a new pricing regime with much closer carbon energy price linkages in the second phase of the eu ets furthermore i find that correlations depend on market uncertainty conditions which exposes the link between carbon and financial markets due to common macroeconomic shocks during the current financial crisis

price drivers and structural breaks in european carbon prices 2005 2007 this article aims at characterizing the daily price fundamentals of european union allowances euas traded since 2005 as part of the emissions trading scheme ets the presence of two structural changes on april 2006 following the disclosure of 2005 verified emissions and on october 2006 following the european commission announcement of stricter phase ii allocation allows to isolate distinct fundamentals evolving overtime the results extend previous literature by showing that eua spot prices react not only to energy prices with forecast errors but also to unanticipated temperatures changes during colder events besides the sub period decomposition of the pilot phase gives a better grasp of institutional and market events that drive allowance price changes

time patience and specialization patterns in the presence of asset trade specialization patterns in an open economy two sector growth model with endogenous capital accumulation are examined in the presence of free international lending and borrowing without free international lending and borrowing it is known that whereas the less time patient country decumulates real capital the more patient country accumulates real capital and eventually specializes in a capital intensive industry however free trade of international financial assets causes a dramatic change in long run specialization patterns in this case the less patient country may well specialize in the capital intensive industry and the more patient country in the labor intensive industry

carbon allowance auction design of china s emissions trading scheme a multi agent based approach in this paper a multi agent based ets simulation model is proposed for carbon allowance auction design in china in the proposed model two main agents i e the government the ets implementer and the firms in different sectors the ets targets are considered under the ets policy all agents make various decisions individually according to their own goals and interact with each other through three main markets the commodity market the primary carbon auction market and the secondary carbon trading market different popular auction designs are introduced into the ets formulation to offer helpful insights into china s ets design 1 generally the ets would lead to positive effects on china s carbon mitigation and energy structure improvement but a negative impact on economy 2 as for auction forms the uniform price design is relatively moderate while the discriminative price design is quite aggressive in both economic damage and emissions reduction 3 as for carbon price the uniform price auction might generate a slightly higher market clearing price than the discriminative price auction and the prices under two auction rules fluctuate about rmb 40 per metric ton 4 as for carbon cap the total allowances in the carbon auction market should be carefully set to well balance economic growth and mitigation effect

is consumption growth consistent with intertemporal optimization evidence from the consumer expenditure survey in this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in u s household level data we propose a flexible specification of preferences that allows multiple commodities and yields empirically tractable equations we estimate preference parameters using the only u s micro data set with complete consumption information we show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made in previous studies we also show that results obtained using good consumption or aggregate data can be misleading

risk sharing between and within families this paper uses the panel study of income dynamics to test whether risk sharing is complete between or within american families the tests accommodate a wide variety in the configuration and availability of family data the test results reject inter as well as intra family full risk sharing even assuming that leisure is endogenous or that leisure and consumption are nonseparable

emissions pricing spillovers and public investment in environmentally friendly technologies in a second best world of below optimal pollution pricing the public return to r d may be greater than under pigouvian pricing due to excess benefits of increasing abatement or it may be lower since private actors lack the incentives to take full advantage of the new cleaner technologies this paper uses a simple model to demonstrate the interaction between environmental policies r d externalities and the social return to innovation the results indicate that strong public support for innovation in abatement technologies is only justified if at least a moderate emissions policy is in place and spillover effects are significant if emissions policy can adjust to cost changes the public role may be enhanced since private actors will prefer to avoid ratcheting social gains from innovation increase only if innovation can allow emissions to be more fully priced technology policy is more effective with fuller emissions pricing and is better viewed as a complement to than a substitute for mitigation policy

health and income a robust comparison of canada and the us abstract this paper uses sequential stochastic dominance procedures to compare the joint distribution of health and income across space and time it is the first application of which we are aware of methods to compare multidimensional distributions of income and health using procedures that are robust to aggregation techniques the paper s approach is more general than comparisons of health gradients and does not require the estimation of health equivalent incomes we illustrate the approach by contrasting canada and the us using comparable data canada dominates the us over the bottom part of the bi dimensional distribution of health and income though not generally over the uni dimensional distributions of health or income the paper also finds that welfare for both canadians and americans has not unambiguously improved during the last decade over the joint distribution of income and health in spite of the fact that the uni dimensional distributions of income have clearly improved during that period

allowance price drivers in the first phase of the eu ets abstract in the first phase of the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets the price per ton of co 2 initially rose to over 30 the price then collapsed to essentially zero by mid 2007 by deriving a structural model of the allowance price under the assumption of efficient markets i examine the extent to which this variation in price can be explained by marginal abatement costs i then gradually relax the model by allowing for delayed adjustment of price to fundamentals as well as by introducing lagged lhs variables the pattern of results suggests that while prices were not initially driven by marginal abatement costs this inefficiency was largely corrected after the accounting of 2005 emissions in april 2006

wealth varying intertemporal elasticities of substitution evidence from panel and aggregate data abstract this paper constructs and estimates a model of consumer preferences in which the intertemporal elasticity of substitution ies of consumption expenditure rises with the level of wealth the purpose of this paper is to measure the effect that systematic variation in the ies of poor and rich consumers has on the ies of aggregate consumption expenditure we find economically significant differences in the ies of poor and rich consumers in indian panel data on the consumption of individual households we also find economically significant differences in the ies measured in aggregate time series data for the u s and india

testing for full insurance using exogenous information we strongly reject the full insurance hypothesis using testing variables that are not decision variables for the households under investigation we find that households are not insured against changes in the unemployment rate associated with the household head s occupational category using this exogenous information we also investigate the appropriateness of exogeneity assumptions on idiosyncratic variables that have been used as testing variables in the full insurance literature it is shown that several exogeneity assumptions made in the existing literature are potentially problematic

risk and insurance in village india comment the protection of poor households in high risk agrarian economies from shocks to their incomes has often been seen as a compelling motive for various forms of policy intervention including transfers of cash or food credit subsidies and public employment schemes for a survey see lipton and ravallion 1995 the desirability of such safety net policies clearly depends on how well pre existing risk sharing arrangements work while it is commonly thought that without effective policy intervention rural households are vulnerable to village wide shocks such as adverse prices or poor rains it is less clear to what extent risk sharing institutions within the village mitigate the effects of idiosyncratic income risk stemming for instance from ill health or localized crop damage 2 several recent papers have used household level data to implement tests of risk sharing that might inform such concerns 3 these tests are based on the proposition that with perfect risk sharing consumption at the household level should be insured against idiosyncratic risks and thus depend solely on the realization of the aggregate risk wilson 1968 diamond 1967 townsend 1994 tests this implication of perfect intra village risk sharing using longitudinal household data on consumptions and incomes for three villages in india he reports that the full insurance hypothesis provides a surprisingly good benchmark in that household consumptions co move and do not appear to be much influenced by contemporaneous own income our aim here is to examine the robustness of this potentially important finding we have two main concerns the first is that the specification townsend adopts potentially biases his test towards the null hypothesis of full insurance because it yields inconsistent estimates of the key test parameter under a plausible alternative we therefore estimate a different specification that generates consistent estimates under both the null and the alternative our second concern is that a particular form of measurement error in the consumption data townsend uses may have further biased his results toward the null hypothesis of full insurance to address this concern we use an instrumental variables procedure when we implement the test of consumption insurance with townsend s consumption data we also re estimate the test equations with a measure of consumption derived from the same underlying primary data by an alternate method finally townsend reports 1discussions with robert townsend stimulated our interest in this investigation the staff of the

decreasing relative risk aversion risk sharing and the permanent income hypothesis this article develops a method for testing the risk sharing hypothesis rsh against various versions of the permanent income hypothesis pih while allowing for heterogeneity in risk preferences across households using 1 year and longer differences in household total nondurable consumption data from indian villages we find evidence that favors the rsh over the pih at the village level

robust multidimensional poverty comparisons we demonstrate how to make poverty comparisons using multidimensional indicators of well being showing in particular how to check whether the comparisons are robust to aggregation procedures and to the choice of multidimensional poverty lines in contrast to earlier work our methodology applies equally well to what can be defined as union intersection or intermediate approaches to dealing with multidimensional indicators of well being to make this procedure of some practical usefulness the paper also derives the sampling distribution of various multidimensional poverty estimators including estimators of the critical poverty frontiers outside which multidimensional poverty comparisons can no longer be deemed ethically robust the results are illustrated using data from a number of developing countries

the sensitivity of consumption to transitory income estimates from panel data on households we investigate the stochastic relation between income and consumption specifically consumption of food within a panel of about 2 000 households our major findings are 1 consumption responds much more strongly to permanent than to transitory movements of income 2 the response to transitory income is nonetheless clearly positive 3 a simple test independent of our model of consumption rejects a central implication of the pure life cycle permanent income hypothesis the observed covariation of income and consumption is compatible with pure life cycle permanent income behavior on the part of80 percent of families and simple proportionality of consumption and income among the remaining 20 percent as a general matter our findings support the view that families respond differently to different sources of income variations in particular temporary income tax policies have smaller effects on consumption than do other more permanent changes in income of the same magnitude this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

emissions trading in china emerging experiences and international lessons grants by the robert bosch foundation under the program sustainable partners partners for sustainability the australian research council and the australian government supported different parts of the project

eua and scer phase ii price drivers unveiling the reasons for the existence of the eua scer spread abstract this article studies the price relationships between eu emissions allowances euas valid under the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets and secondary certified emissions reductions scers established from primary cers generated through the kyoto protocol s clean development mechanism cdm given the price differences between euas and scers financial and industrial operators may benefit from arbitrage strategies by buying scers and selling euas i e selling the eua scer spread to cover their compliance position as industrial operators are allowed to use scers towards compliance with their emissions cap within the european system up to 13 4 our central results show that the spread is mainly driven by eua prices and market microstructure variables and less importantly as we would expect by emissions related fundamental drivers this might be justified by the fact that the eu ets remains the greatest source of cer demand to date

carbon trading in a socialist market economy can china make a difference a global carbon trading system has gained shape since several major asia pacific economies declared their participation as the largest national source of greenhouse gases china is probably the most prominent newcomer pilot emission trading schemes are being introduced in this country with prospects for developing into a national scheme the initiative is primarily motivated by expected economic benefits rather than environmental commitments viability is uncertain due to the absence of a liberal political economic system as we know in the western world the theory of carbon trading is being tested in an unusual place with huge implications both practically and theoretically

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

asset pricing with multiplicative habit and power expo preferences abstract multiplicative habit introduces an additional consumption risk as a determinant of the equity premium and allows time preference and habit strength in addition to risk aversion to affect the price of risk a model combining multiplicative habit and power expo preferences cannot be rejected

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

factors affecting the carbon allowance market in the us the us carbon allowance market has different characteristic and price determination process from the eu ets market since emitting installations voluntarily participate in emission trading scheme this paper examines factors affecting the us carbon allowance market an autoregressive distributed lag model is used to examine the short and long run relationships between the us carbon allowance market and its determinant factors in the long run the price of coal is a main factor in the determination of carbon allowance trading in the short run on the other hand the changes in crude oil and natural gas prices as well as coal price have significant effects on carbon allowance market

measuring poverty and differences in family composition the equivalence scales used to adjust for differences in family composition when measuring poverty exhibit considerable variation this paper suggests an alternative approach that allows for differences in social judgements regarding the treatment of different types of family and examines the relation with the choice of poverty measure the resulting dominance criteria cannot provide a complete ranking but allow the extent of disagreement to be identified their application is illustrated by the example of changes in child benefits copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

optimal strategies for carbon reduction at dual levels in china based on a hybrid nonlinear grey prediction and quota allocation model abstract in this research a hybrid nonlinear grey prediction and quota allocation model hngp qam wasdeveloped for supporting optimal planning of china s carbon intensity reduction at both departmentaland provincial levels in 2020 at such dual levels hngp qam can not only help forecast carbon intensityand its uctuations over the concerned period but also facilitate the identi cation of china s carbonintensity reduction target in 2020 and the corresponding quotas for minimizing the total abatement cost two scenarios were developed based on multiple governmental policies and allocation schemes amongprovinces and departments the results showed that the total abatement cost would be 92 07 and98 93 10 9 as well as 180 57 and 194 19 10 9 rmb it is another shortname for china yuan for pro vincial and departmental allocation schemes under the reduction ratios of 40 and 45 respectively furthermore the west the east and the central china would be allocated the emission assignments thatwould be accounting for 48 53 28 26 and 23 21 of the total national emission reduction respectively the obtained results were particularly useful for multi level governments in providing information toidentify the carbon intensity reduction target conducting emission reduction assignments amongprovinces and departments as well as supporting relevant policy making the results also suggested thatthe developed hngp qam be applicable to similar engineering and planning problems 2014 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

equity regarding poverty measures differences in needs and the role of equivalence scales the paper investigates the definition of equity regarding poverty measures when there are different household types in the population it demonstrates the implications of a between type regressive transfer principle for poverty measures for the choice of poverty lines and for the measurement of living standard the role of equivalence scales which are popular in empirical work on poverty measurement is clarified ce memoire examine la definition de mesures de pauvrete fondees sur l equite quand existent differents types de menages dans la population on montre les implications d un principe de transfert regressif entre types de menages pour les mesures de pauvrete pour la definition des seuils de pauvrete et pour la mesure du niveau de vie on clarifie le role des echelles d equivalence qui sont d un usage generalise dans les travaux sur la mesure de la pauvrete

policy interactions risk and price formation in carbon markets carbon pricing is an important mechanism for providing companies with incentives to invest in carbon abatement price formation in carbon markets involves a complex interplay between policy targets dynamic technology costs and market rules carbon pricing may under deliver investment due to r d externalities requiring additional policies which themselves affect market prices also abatement costs depend on the extent of technology deployment due to learning by doing this paper introduces an analytical framework based on marginal abatement cost mac curves with the aim of providing an intuitive understanding of the key dynamics and risk factors in carbon markets the framework extends the usual static mac representation of the market to incorporate policy interactions and some technology cost dynamics the analysis indicates that supporting large scale deployment of mature abatement technologies suppresses the marginal cost of abatement sometimes to zero whilst increasing total abatement costs however support for early stage r d may reduce both total abatement cost and carbon price risk an important aspect of the analysis is in elevating risk management considerations into energy policy formation as the results of the stochastic modelling indicate wide distributions for the emergence of carbon prices and public costs around the policy expectations

decreasing relative risk aversion and tests of risk sharing the relative risk aversion rra coefficient of a household whose consumption is close to the subsistence level may be very high for example if consumption is exactly at the subsistence level the household may not be willing to bear any risk if this is the case then the rra coefficient must be a decreasing function of wealth for poor households therefore we should allow the possibility of decreasing rra drra in testing the full risk sharing hypothesis however existing tests in the empirical literature are derived using preferences that exhibit either increasing or constant rra even when they are applied to data containing low income households we therefore use a hyperbolic absolute risk aversion hara utility which implies increasing constant and decreasing rra as special cases to test full risk sharing hypothesis using the international food policy research institute ifpri and the international crops research institute of the semi arid tropics icrisat household level data sets we find evidence in support of the drra hypothesis along with evidence favoring full risk sharing hypothesis at the village level and evidence against the hypothesis at the inter village level when rra is restricted to be constant we replicate the previous results in the literature reject the full risk sharing hypothesis at both levels our tests however reject this restriction and favor drra in almost all cases these results suggest that it is important to allow for drra in testing the full risk sharing hypothesis when data containing low income households are investigated this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

evaluating the power investment options with uncertainty in climate policy abstract this paper uses a real options approach roa for analysing the effects of government climate policy uncertainty on private investors decision making in the power sector it presents an analysis undertaken by the international energy agency iea that implements roa within a dynamic programming approach for technology investment choice case studies for gas coal and nuclear power investment are undertaken with the model illustrative results from the model indicate four broad conclusions i climate change policy risks can become large if there is only a short time between a future climate policy event such as post 2012 and the time when the investment decision is being made ii the way in which co 2 and fuel price variations feed through to electricity price variations is an important determinant of the overall investment risk that companies will face iii investment risks vary according to the technology being considered with nuclear power appearing to be particularly exposed to fuel and co 2 price risks under various assumptions and iv the government will be able to reduce investors risks by implementing long term say 10 years rather than short term say 5 years climate change policy frameworks contributions of this study include 1 having created a step function with stochastic volume of jump at a particular time to simulate carbon price shock under a particular climate policy event 2 quantifying the implicit risk premium of carbon price uncertainty to investors in new capacity 3 evaluating carbon price risk alongside energy price risk in investment decision making and 4 demonstrating roa to be a useful tool to quantify the impacts of climate change policy uncertainty on power investment

how to improve the market efficiency of carbon trading a perspective of china abstract emissions trading scheme ets is one of the effective measures to realize energy conservation and emission reduction in order to set up a nationwide carbon emissions trading mechanism seven ets pilots have been launched in china firstly based on empirical investigation and research of seven pilots this paper analyzed the market efficiency of ets pilots from four aspects carbon price trading volume market liquidity and information transparency the result showed that the market efficiency of ets pilots is not satisfactory in spite of the fact that system designs of ets have achieved preliminary result then the reason for low market efficiency of ets pilots was discussed from some factors such as institutional arrangements market participants the supply and demand etc finally this paper puts forward some policy suggestions to improve the market efficiency of china s carbon trading market

the effect of allocation above emissions and price uncertainty on abatement investments under the eu ets abstract the european union emission trading scheme eu ets by far the largest in its kind has inspired several other carbon markets in the world based on interviews with plant managers from almost all belgian ceramics lime and cement producers this study describes how manager s perceptions on emission trading affected investment decisions in line with behavioural economics reference dependence is found to explain why free allocation below emissions creates a greater incentive to abatement investment compared to allocation above emissions in the ceramics sector allocation above emissions refrained managers from including carbon gains in payback times this contradicts the famous coase theorem which predicts that free allocation has no effect on abatement incentives the results indicate that auctioning part of the emission rights will reduce barriers to abatement investment carbon price uncertainty is seen as a disincentive for abatement investment by some managers and as an incentive by others intermediate levels of uncertainty add option value to abatement investments because the associated gradual learning adds flexibility in an uncertain carbon constrained future however high levels of uncertainty creating a risk of offshoring even when companies innovate creates an option value to postpone abatement investments narrow framing misperceiving the risk hedging counter cyclicality of carbon costs reinforces the option value to wait therefore policy should aim to reduce price uncertainty for very low and very high carbon prices not for an intermediary price range

assessing the operational performance and maturity of the carbon trading pilot program the case study of beijing s carbon market on november 28 2013 beijing s carbon emissions trading opened on beijing s environmental exchange as one of the pilot cities beijing has been pursuing low carbon development strategies under state intervention and market regulation this paper chooses the carbon market a medium through which beijing manages emission reduction as the object of study firstly we compare the basic construction circumstances of beijing with other pilot cities then we qualitatively analyze the development of beijing s carbon market from the perspective of transaction status execution of the contract and improvement of the policies and regulations finally we use the topsis model to develop a comprehensive evaluation system of beijing s carbon market it is used to quantitatively evaluate the operational performance and maturity of the mechanism the results show that beijing s carbon market has good comprehensive capabilities ranking second place among seven pilot markets but the maturity of beijing s carbon market is relatively poor for insufficient market liquidity its operations are well managed but economic efficiency still need to be improved the depth of transaction and the effect of reduction in emissions make it meaningful therefore in order to improve the construction of beijing s carbon market measures should be taken as follows 1 strengthening the quota management and increasing carbon trading activity to avoid poor market liquidity 2 accelerating emission reduction actions and encouraging technology innovation such as carrying out several policies and measures supporting new energy and energy saving emission reduction and increasing investment and subsidy in research and development for the technology innovation of firms etc 3 improving regulatory mechanism and enhancing the disclosure of carbon trading such as drawing lessons from the eu emission trading scheme ets about measuring reporting and verification system mrv

research on a single policy or policy mix in carbon emissions reduction abstract existing literature on the optimal type of carbon mitigation policy and whether it is better to apply a policy mix instead of a single policy is still unclear this paper assesses the policy effectiveness under exogenous shocks by applying a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model comparing the differences between the carbon mitigation and economic impacts of a policy mix versus a single policy carbon tax or carbon trading scheme the results showed that energy demand is rigid in response to technological shocks therefore there is no significant difference for the energy consumption related carbon emissions in response to the technological progress under three different policy scenarios a carbon tax scenario i a carbon trading scheme scenario ii and a carbon policy mix scenario iii overall carbon emissions policy has a negative impact on the economy compared to the other two policies a carbon trading scheme has a relatively slight impact on the economy a mandatory carbon price would have a more significant impact than would a market based carbon price the policy mix formed by a carbon tax and a carbon trading is comprehensive in terms of both price flexibility and coverage scope

risk sharing and information in village economies arrangements for achieving efficient risk sharing vary depending on the information available to agents in the economy the usual euler equation restricts efficient allocations in an economy which obeys the permanent income hypothesis while efficient allocations in an economy with private information and long term contracts satisfy a symmetric restriction but not the euler equation full insurance arrangements are unique in that they satisfy both restrictions we look at an environment in which it seems likely that long term contracts play a role in mitigating the effects of private information three village economies in south india the evidence that consumption allocations satisfy the private information restriction is quite strong for households in two of the three villages the evidence for the third village suggests that while consumption for some households satisfies the private information restrictions other households consumption obey the permanent income hypothesis

climate change policy why has so little been achieved while the scientific evidence for climate change grows the policy responses have so far had little or no impact on the build up of emissions current trends in emissions are adverse the paper considers why the disconnect between science and policy exists and in particular why the kyoto protocol has achieved so little some contributing factors considered are the focus on carbon production rather than consumption in the architecture of kyoto the flaws in the analysis presented in the stern report notably on the impacts of climate change on economic growth on the costs of mitigation and on discounting and the political economy of the choice of policy instruments the politics of the rents that arise and the technology bias the challenges facing the copenhagen conference are noted and it is concluded that with a recasting of the economics of climate change the prospects for closing the gap between the science and policy are grim

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains

how china s current carbon trading policy affects carbon price an investigation of the shanghai emission trading scheme pilot abstract to better establish a unified carbon market in china this study evaluates the effect of current carbon trading policy and further investigates the relationship between such policy that is published during the second phase of shanghai environment and energy exchange seee and shanghai emission allowance shea price we aim to analyze whether these policies can improve the operation efficiency of current carbon market by the mean reversion test cox ingersoll ross cir model and event study method we first analyze the potential price discovery function of shea products thereby describing the transmission channel of current policy to shea price then we examine the effect of carbon policies published in different periods on their corresponding shea price by the auto correlation test and cir simulation we find that 3 4 of all auto correlation values are less than 0 after apr 2017 and the minimum cumulative error is 31 3792 under the supply and demand channel these findings imply that shea price has the discovery function at the middle and end of trading period and the current policy affects shea price through its effect on the fundamentals of supply and demand further more than 60 of all r values r value that reflects the response of price to policy are less than 1 which implies that the published policy will improves future shea price accordingly we argue that seee belongs to a policy oriented market and the change of carbon price is closely related to emission allocation policies in this case china s government should further push forward the smooth operation of current carbon market by the aid of incentive policy in the coming period

how does tax system on energy industries affect energy demand co2 emissions and economy in china abstract energy savings and co2 emission reduction have become a major issue in recent years taxes on energy production sectors may be an effective way to save energy reduce co2 emissions and improve environmental quality this paper constructs a dynamic recursive computable general equilibrium cge model to analyze the impact of the energy tax on energy economy and environment from the perspective of tax rates and tax forms specific tax and ad valorem tax the results show that adjusting the tax system and the tax rate has important implications for energy conservation while having minor impacts on the output of other industries the impact of an increasing energy tax on the energy demand is greater than the impact on sectoral output indicating that energy efficiency will be increased to some extent the co2 reduction will increase over time when an ad valorem tax is implemented on enterprises we found that ad valorem tax has greater elasticity of economic output energy demand and co2 emission reduction the results support the direction of china s resource tax reform however we argue that it is better to increase the tax rate relatively and relax the control on energy prices so that energy efficiency will increase

consumption over the life cycle and over the business cycle the main aim of this paper is to assess the validity of the life cycle model of consumption in particular we address an issue that has recently received much attention especially in the macroeconomic literature that of excess sensitivity of consumption growth to income growth we do this using a time series of cross sections and a novel and flexible parameterization of preferences the former allows us to address aggregation issues directly while with the latter we can allow both the discount factor and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution eis to be affected by various observable variables and lifetime wealth the main findings can be summarized as follows i the excess sensitivity of consumption growth to labor income disappears when we control for demographic variables this is true both at life cycle and business cycle frequencies ii estimation of a flexible specification of preferences indicates that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is a function of several variables including the level of consumption the eis increases with the level of consumption as expected iii the variables that change the eis are also important in explaining why we observe excess sensitivity over the business cycle iv we are able to reconcile our results with those reported both in the macro and micro literature v in our specification the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is not very well determined this result however should be taken with care as we have not made an effort to construct a preferred specification which would probably include additional controls for labor supply behavior the evidence presented shows that the life cycle model cannot be easily dismissed indeed we believe that the model does a good job at representing consumption behavior both over the life cycle and over the business cycle