analysis of energy intensity in japan this study discusses the causes of the increase in japan s energy intensity defined as energy consumption divided by gdp since the early 1990s the significant reduction in japan s energy intensity ceased in the early 1980s and has even slightly increased since the early 1990s indicating that japan seemingly stopped taking aggressive action to improve energy use however further analysis at prefecture level and sector level provides additional insight on energy intensity trends to analyze the causes of the increase in japan s energy intensity energy intensity is decomposed into energy efficiency improvements in energy efficiency and energy activity structural changes from the secondary sector to the tertiary sector of the economy our result indicates that the non uniform energy intensity trends between prefectures are attributed to a high variability in energy efficiency at sector level we estimate the income elasticity of energy consumption in each sector and find that a structural change in energy consumption behaviors occurred in all sectors at different time points the industrial sector and commercial sector became less energy efficient after 1981 and 1988 respectively which is presumably responsible for the deterioration of japan s energy intensity since the early 1990s

employee cost sharing and the welfare effects of flexible spending accounts flexible spending accounts fsas subsidize out of pocket health expenses not covered by employerprovided health insurance making health care cheaper ex post but also reducing the incentive to insure we use a cross section of firm level data to show that fsas are indeed associated with reduced insurance coverage and to evaluate the welfare consequences of this shift correcting for selection effects we find that fsas are associated with insurance contracts that have coinsurance rates about 7 percentage points higher relative to a sample average coinsurance rate of 17 meanwhile coinsurance rates net of the subsidy are approximately unchanged providing evidence that fsas are only welfare neutral if we ignore distributional considerations and the deadweight loss of the taxes necessary to finance the subsidy these results also suggest that fsas may explain a significant fraction of the shift in health care costs to employees that has occurred in recent years

primary energy demand in japan an empirical analysis of long term trends and future co2 emissions abstract this paper examines the long run relationship between energy demand gnp and the real energy price in japan using data covering 1887 2001 it is found that if an underlying energy demand trend is appropriately incorporated the resulting econometric model produces a long run income elasticity of about unity and a long run price elasticity of about 0 2 the estimated model is utilised to forecast energy consumption and co 2 emissions up to 2012 it is shown that given current economic conditions and policies there is considerable uncertainty about whether japan will be able to meet its kyoto target by reducing co 2 emissions in 2008 2012 to the 1990 level it is shown that this uncertainty depends on the strength of the economy and leaves the japanese government with a difficult policy dilemma if there is a resurgence in growth to something near the annual average growth rate since the early 1980s a considerable effort will be required in order to meet its kyoto target requiring not only using the kyoto mechanisms but also additional tougher domestic policies and measures such as emissions capping r d incentives and education for energy conservation in addition to a pricing and tax policy

short and long run demand for energy in mexico a cointegration approach abstract the objective of this paper is to estimate the demands for the different types of energy consumption for the mexican economy over the period 1965 2001 these demands are modeled as a function of output and the own real price the johansen j econ dynamics control 12 1988 231 procedure and the likelihood ratio tests indicate the existence of long run and stable relationships between each type of energy demand and income with the exception of the industrial sector where the cointegrating vector also includes the relative prices the weak exogeneity tests indicate that energy consumption and income do not reject the null hypothesis of weak exogeneity when relative prices are weak exogenous the final econometric models show that relative prices in the short run are relevant in all cases with the exception of the residential sector these results indicate that in mexico the demand for energy is fundamentally driven by income and that the effect of the relative prices is basically concentrated on the short run with the exception of the industrial sector which also shows a long term price impact the strong dependence of energy consumption with respect to income and the price inelastic response indicates that it is necessary to introduce strong measures to decouple energy consumption from output in order to obtain sustainable economic growth in mexico

optimal economic policy and the problem of instrument instability it has been said that in a world of perfect knowledge regarding the structure of the economic system and the values of all exogenous variables policy making becomes a trivial problem 1 this is true in the sense that it is always possible with full knowledge and perfect foresight to choose the appropriate policy for the following period but it ignores the fact that the correct policy on a period to period basis may turn out to be impractical or even impossible in the longer run current policy decisions do not ordinarily have their impact solely in the current period but rather over a number of periods in the future thus in addition to offsetting the undesired effects of changes in exogenous variables current policy decisions must offset the current impact of past policy

stock watson dynamic ols dols and error correction modelling approaches to estimating long and short run elasticities in a demand function new evidence and methodological implications from an application to the demand for coal in mainland china in this paper robust elasticity estimates of coal demand for china are derived using annual data 1953 92 in so doing we illustrate the use of a powerful yet practically convenient and recently developed modelling procedure devised by stock and watson known as dynamic ols dols who provide evidence based on monte carlo simulations of this estimator being superior in small samples compared to a number of alternative estimators as well as being able not only to accommodate higher orders of integration but also to account for possible simultaneity within regressors of a potential demand system furthermore cointegration and error correction methods are employed to derive short run price and income elasticities estimated results are quite robust not only in terms of statistical prowess but also in terms of economic intuition and indicate that over the long run both price and income elasticities are close to unity while short run price and income elasticities are less in absolute value than their long run counterparts there seems to be some divergence in short run parameters from a subsample analysis overall results seem to imply that for china coal consumption should remain relatively constant as future modernization strategies for economic development are pursued in addition the study has clear methodological implications for estimating the long and short run elasticities in a demand function in general and in a wide variety of fields in future applied research

the employment effects of low wage subsidies abstract low wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled but the empirical evidence on their effects is still scarce this paper examines the employment effects of a finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme which is targeted at the employers of older full time low wage workers the system s clear eligibility criteria open up an opportunity for a reliable estimation of the causal impacts of the subsidy scheme our results indicate that the subsidy system had no effect on the employment rate or wages of the eligible groups but it increased slightly working hours among those already at work

the elusive wage benefit trade off the case of employer provided health insurance this study shows that standard regressions estimated to measure a trade off between wages and health insurance are misspecified by insufficiently accounting for establishment and firm size an interactive size corrected specification is more likely to reveal a trade off furthermore because insurance decisions are typically made by firms and wages set by establishments the insurance constraint on establishments in multi establishment firms weakens the trade off we use model generated data to show that both factors contribute to the failure in previous research to identify a trade off and data from a cross section of northern californian establishments to test for a trade off in multi establishment and single establishment firms

estimating energy elasticity with structural changes in japan abstract the purpose of this paper is to estimate energy elasticity in japan taking into account structural changes we employ a residual based cointegration model developed by gregory and hansen gregory allan w hansen bruce e 1996 residual based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts journal of econometrics 70 99 126 the empirical results show that the three variables have a stable relationship in the long term when considering structural changes in the second quarter of 1993 as compared with the values obtained in previous studies the income elasticity is higher and the price elasticity is lower from our analysis we can confirm whether a carbon tax will meet the objective of the kyoto protocol in conclusion the tax rate required in the case without structural changes is lower than that in the case with structural changes

an examination of flexible spending accounts this paper develops a framework for analyzing flexible spending account fsa participation and usage we explore patterns of fsa usage using data from a benefits firm for 1996 including an examination of types of fsa expenditures and their timing we estimate some simple econometric models of the participation decision and also the decision of how much to put into an fsa several pieces of evidence suggest that much of an fsa election amount is based on foreknowledge of expenditures we also find that participants tend to spend their election amount early thus obtaining an interest free loan

optimal expenditures for agricultural research and extension implications of underfunding significant increases in agricultural productivity will be needed for the united states to meet its future food policy goals related to an abundant and stable food supply the nation s ability to meet this challenge will depend on the level of investment in agricultural research and extension each dollar of underfunding relative to the economically efficient level of research and extension expenditures a will cost the government 2 56 1 50 discounted if it later makes up for the low investment level or b will cost consumers 4 39 3 07 discounted if the government does not make up for the low level of investment

econometric modelling of international carbon tax regimes an econometric model of fossil fuel demand has been estimated for eight oecd countries relating coal oil and gas demands to gdp and prices in addition a model of endogenous technical progress has been estimated aiming to include both price induced innovation in energy and structural change in the economy as long term determinants of energy consumption a number of possible international carbon energy tax agreements are simulated showing the impacts on carbon dioxide emissions and comparing the two models in the long run the magnitude of taxes required to stabilize or reduce emissions would be large and there are important differences between countries in price responses which must be taken into account in international modelling and policy formulation

causality relationship between the price of oil and economic growth in japan abstract this paper investigates the relationship between the price of oil and economic growth in japan during the period from 2000 to 2008 using an exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity egarch model we employ a residual cross correlation function ccf approach developed by cheung y w ng n k 1996 a causality in variance test and its application to financial market prices journal of econometrics 72 33 48 the empirical results reveal that the economic growth rate granger causes the change of oil price in mean and variance and the change of oil price granger causes the economic growth rate in mean and variance previous studies have analyzed the response of economic activity to oil price shocks however we analyze the causality relations for both means and variances and identify the direction of information flow and the timing of causation

the incidence of mandated maternity benefits i consider the labor market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group the efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group specific wages i study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age i find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group correspondingly i find little effect on total labor input for that group jel 118 j32 h51 in an era of tight fiscal budget constraints mandating employer provision of workplace benefits to employees is an attractive means for a government to finance its policy agenda consequently in recent years there has been a growth of interest in mandated benefits as a tool of social policy for example the centerpiece of president bill clinton s health care proposal is mandated employer provision of health insurance and more than 20 states have man

oil prices nuclear energy consumption and economic growth new evidence using a heterogeneous panel analysis abstract this paper applies panel data analysis to examine the short run dynamics and long run equilibrium relationships among nuclear energy consumption oil prices oil consumption and economic growth for developed countries covering the period 1971 2006 the panel cointegration results show that in the long run oil prices have a positive impact on nuclear energy consumption suggesting the existence of the substitution relationship between nuclear energy and oil the long run elasticity of nuclear energy with respect to real income is approximately 0 89 and real income has a greater impact on nuclear energy than do oil prices in the long run furthermore the panel causality results find evidence of unidirectional causality running from oil prices and economic growth to nuclear energy consumption in the long run while there is no causality between nuclear energy consumption and economic growth in the short run

the dark side of sunshine regulatory oversight and status quo bias abstract as the mortgage foreclosure crisis accelerated in the u s in the late 2000s state level policymakers implemented measures designed to protect consumers and stem the tide of foreclosures one form of policy was simply to require lenders to report on foreclosure prevention activities such policies represented a shift from the status quo for mortgage loan servicing firms operating under incomplete information doing nothing with non paying loans while waiting for more information to be revealed to either foreclosing on the borrower or offering the borrower a modification of loan terms using a difference in difference in differences empirical strategy we exploit one policy implemented in maryland for a subset of mortgage servicers and find evidence that firms perform more loan modifications as well as file more foreclosures increasing foreclosure filings was contrary to the intent of the policy suggesting that policymakers should be aware of how firms exhibit systematic biases much like individuals

energy consumption and income a semiparametric panel data analysis this paper proposes a semiparametric analysis for the study of the relationship between energy consumption per capita and income per capita for an international panel dataset it shows little evidence for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for energy consumption energy consumption increases with income for a majority of countries and then stabilizes for very high income countries neither changes in energy structure nor macroeconomic cycle technological change have significant effect on energy consumption

the residential demand for electricity in australia an application of the bounds testing approach to cointegration this paper reports estimates of the long and short run elasticities of residential demand for electricity in australia using the bounds testing procedure to cointegration within an autoregressive distributive lag framework in the long run we find that income and own price are the most important determinants of residential electricity demand while temperature is significant some of the time and gas prices are insignificant our estimates of long run income elasticity and price elasticity of demand are consistent with previous studies although they are towards the lower end of existing estimates as expected the short run elasticities are much smaller than the long run elasticities and the coefficients on the error correction coefficients are small consistent with the fact that in the short run energy appliances are fixed

flexible and fixed target stabilisation in an open economy abstract this paper contains a comparison in an applied framework of the effectiveness of implementing two alternative stabilisation strategies in an open economy in particular the familiar optimisation flexible target technique is compared with the newly developed dynamic tinbergen fixed target technique the fixed target approach allows for the exact achievement of targets over time when there are more targets than instruments provided the planning authorities are prepared to anticipate the target path alternatively the flexible target approach imposes the constraint of compromising all targets when the number of targets exceeds the number of instruments

the saving and investment nexus for china evidence from cointegration tests the saving and investment nexus as postulated by feldstein and horioka fh 1980 is revisited the saving investment correlation for china is estimated over the periods 1952 1998 and 1952 1994 the latter culminating in a period of fixed exchange rate regime amongst the key results it is found that saving and investment are correlated for china for both the period of the fixed exchange rate and the entire sample period with high saving investment correlation the results suggest that the chinese economy is in conformity with the fh hypothesis this is a valid outcome for in china capital mobility was fairly restricted over the 1952 1994 period as indicated by the relatively low foreign direct investment