pro environmental households and energy efficiency in spain the residential building sector is a major driver of current and future energy consumption and associated emissions which can be potentially mitigated through significant energy efficiency ee improvements in both emerging and developed countries yet there are several persistent barriers that hinder the attainment of ee improvements in this area using data from a 2008 national representative survey of spanish households this paper is interested in the determinants of ee related decisions in particular a discrete choice model empirically analyzes whether pro environmental households are more likely to invest in ee and to adopt daily energy saving habits we show that households with eco friendly behaviors are more likely to investment in well differentiated ee measures as well as to steer daily habits towards energy savings however no effects are found for households with environmental attitudes based on stated willingness to pay to protect the environment in addition to this households belonging to higher income groups and education levels are more likely to invest in ee but not to adopt energy saving habits while households with older members are less likely to invest in ee and show fewer eco friendly habits

household preferences of hybrid home heating systems a choice experiment application abstract the residential heating sector presents considerable energy savings potential as numerous heating solutions for reducing electricity consumption and utilizing renewable energy sources are available in the market the aim of this paper is to examine determinants of household heating system choices and to use this information for policy planning purposes this paper investigates residential homeowner attitudes regarding innovative hybrid home heating systems hhhs with choice experiment heating system scenarios are designed to represent the most relevant primary and supplementary heating alternatives currently available in finland the choice sets include six main heating alternatives district heat solid wood wood pellet electric storage heating ground heat pump and exhaust air heat pump that are described by five attributes supplementary heating systems investment costs operating costs comfort of use and environmental friendliness the results imply that hhhss generally appear to be accepted among households however several factors affect perceptions of these technologies the results reveal differing household attitudes toward the main heating alternatives and show that such views are affected by socio demographic characteristics age living environment education etc the results suggest that households view supplementary heating systems especially solar based favorably the other attributes studied also play a significant role in decision making

methods of pay and earnings a longitudinal analysis using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1988 90 the author investigates the relationship between methods of pay including piece rates and bonuses and the level and variance of wages among men piece rate workers earned a premium compared to other workers but the evidence on bonuses is mixed the author finds evidence that female piece rate workers earned more than other female workers once a control variable for the presence of dependents is interacted with the piece rate variable with controls for the wage effects of schooling and experience unobserved worker productivity is found to have accounted for most of the wage variance among both male and female piece rate workers wage variance among workers not having explicit pay for performance schemes in contrast was predominantly due to other factors

planning under incomplete information and the ratchet effect abstract central planning of production is usually performed under asymmetric information the firm in general has more information about its productive possibilities than the central planner from now on for short cp this justifies the use of incentives schemes in which the cp does not directly fix activity levels casual observation of such existing schemes suggests that the time dimensions is crucial for their working typically the cp revises the incentive scheme over time to take into account the information provided by the firm s performance managers of centrally planned economies as well as economists have long recognized that this revision induces firms to underproduce in order to avoid demanding schemes in the future this is the ratchet effect it is purpose of the present paper to study the ratchet effect under the non commitment assumption which we believe to be more realistic the inadequacy of conceptual tools made if difficult in the past to consider such an assumption now basic research on dynamic games with incomplete information recently resulted in new ideas which look particularly relevant for a theoretical analysis of the problem

limited intertemporal commitment and job design abstract the paper shows that some of the guidelines for job design that emerge from a static analysis of the multitask agency problem can be overturned in a dynamic model with limited commitment static analyses have shown that it is optimal to assign workers sole responsibility for tasks and to allocate them tasks which are as homogeneous as possible with respect to the ease of measuring performance our dynamic analysis demonstrates that it can instead be optimal to make workers jointly responsible for tasks and to make their task portfolios as similar to one another but as internally diverse as possible

contracting in the shadow of the law economic models of contract typically assume that courts enforce obligations based on verifiable events corresponding to the legal rule of specific performance as a matter of law this is not the case this leaves open the question of optimal contract design given the available remedies used by the courts this article shows that american standard form construction contracts can be viewed as an efficient mechanism for implementing building projects given existing legal rules it is shown that a central feature of these contracts is the inclusion of governance covenants that shape the scope of authority and regulate the ex post bargaining power of parties our model also implies that the legal remedies of mistake impossibility and the doctrine limiting damages for unforeseen events developed in the case of hadley v baxendale are efficient solutions to the problem of implementing complex exchange

china s transition to green energy systems the economics of home solar water heaters and their popularization in dezhou city abstract studying the popularization of solar water heaters swhs is significant for understanding china s transition to green energy systems using dezhou as a case study this paper presents new angles on analyzing swh deployment in china by addressing both the economic potential and the institutional dimensions at the local level using estimates from the demand side of hot water for a typical three person household in dezhou the paper evaluates the economic potential of a swh in saving electricity and reducing carbon dioxide emissions then expanding the analysis beyond economics we take an institutionalist approach to study the institutional factors that contribute to dezhou s success in swh adoptions by examining the five main actors in dezhou s energy regime we find that dezhou s swh deployment is driven by an urge to develop businesses and the local economy and its success results from at least five unique factors including the development of swh industrial clusters in dezhou big manufacturers market leadership in swh innovations a tight private enterprise local government relation geographic location within the swh industrial belt and the adaptive attitude of dezhou s households towards natural resource scarcity

general training in labor markets common value auctions with unobservable investment abstract this paper studies the puzzle of employer financing for the general training of workers a parsimonious theory is developed based on asymmetric information between employers about the quantity of training the labor market is modeled as a common value auction with an informed and an uninformed bidder the novel feature of the game is that one of the bidders can make an unobservable investment that increases the value of the item before the auction by randomizing the amount of training provided an employer can create an endogenous adverse selection problem enabling it to compress the wage structure and capture some returns from its training investment the model generates continuous equilibrium wage and training distributions and identical employees can receive different wage offers and training levels a parametric example is used to illustrate how the shape of the wage distribution depends on the elasticity of production with respect to human capital

reputation and hierarchy in dynamic models of employment the employment relationship with employees ability and their actions both private information thus combining adverse selection with moral hazard is modeled as a repeated game with self enforcing contracts being perfect bayesian nash equilibria under termination contracts the equilibrium contract structure consists of a hierarchy of ranks finite in number even though ability is continuous reputation acts as an effective device for worker discipline without the need for involuntary unemployment selection by bonding is not in general incentive compatible but selection by promotion of employees through the ranks is many other features correspond to observed employment structures

decomposing final energy use for heating in the residential sector in austria abstract in austria a considerable number of measures have been implemented to reduce final energy use for residential heating since the 1990s the aim of this analysis is to investigate why despite these implemented measures final energy use for heating has not decreased in the expected way the impact of eight factors on final energy use for heating is quantified by applying the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi i method the dataset covers the sector of private households in austria for the period from 1993 to 2009 the main findings of the analysis are 1 while technical improvements reduce final energy use for heating significantly rising comfort needs nearly outweigh these savings 2 consumer behaviour reduces calculated final energy use considerably 3 the extent of this reduction is declining significantly in the period observed 4 the growing share of single family houses has increased energy demand for heating in the observed period though a reversal of this trend is detected from 2007 onwards 5 the impact of growing floor space per person is the major effect revealed by the analysis 6 weather conditions have a major impact on annual fluctuations of energy consumption

payback period for residential solar water heaters in taiwan abstract taiwan is a leaf shaped island straddling the tropic of cancer with abundant and reliable supply of solar energy under the individual circumstances solar radiation ambient temperature and hot water consumption pattern solar heating could be economically competitive with conventional heating fuels electricity natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas in this context the market of residential solar water heaters swhs in taiwan has been highly developed with subsidy programs offered by the government of taiwan so far next the economic viability of residential swhs is determined by the life cycle savings this study develops a procedure for estimating the payback period of residential swhs in terms of operation cost and effective energy savings over conventional heating fuels a case study in southern taiwan indicates that the increase in daily load volume per area of solar collector installed has a beneficial effect an end user should determine the economically optimal solar collector area of an swh according to the hot water consumption pattern of each household payback period is shorter when the substituted conventional fuel is electricity with the subsidy program an swh is in a favorable situation when compared with an electrical water heater findings of the present study would assist partially system design of residential swhs and help accrue more monetary benefit to the end users

is there an energy efficiency gap many analysts have argued that energy efficiency investments offer an enormous win win opportunity to both reduce negative externalities and save money this overview paper presents a simple model of investment in energy using capital stock with two types of market failures first uninternalized externalities from energy consumption and second forces such as imperfect information that cause consumers and firms not to exploit privately profitable energy efficiency investments the model clarifies that only if the second type of market failure cannot be addressed directly through mechanisms such as information provision energy efficiency subsidies and standards may be merited this chapter therefore reviews the empirical work on the magnitude of profitable unexploited energy efficiency investments a literature which frequently does not meet modern standards for credibly estimating the net present value of energy cost savings and often leaves other benefits and costs unmeasured these problems notwithstanding recent empirical work in a variety of contexts implies that on average the magnitude of profitable unexploited investment opportunities is much smaller than engineering accounting studies suggest finally there is tremendous opportunity and need for policy relevant research that utilizes randomized controlled trials and quasi experimental techniques to estimate the returns to energy efficiency investments and the welfare effects of energy efficiency programs

the response of worker effort to piece rates we measure the elasticity of worker effort with respect to changes in the piece rate using panel data collected from the payroll records of a british columbia tree planting firm our data contain information on daily worker productivity and the piece rate received over a five month period using a structural model to control for the endogeneity of the piece rate we estimate this elasticity to be approximately 2 14 we also calculate a nonstructural lower bound to this elasticity equal to 0 77 structural estimation also allows us to perform policy experiments and to compare firm profits under alternative compensation systems our results suggest that profits would increase by at least 17 percent were the firm to implement the optimal static contract as predicted by principal agent theory this increase in profits would be due to capturing worker rents after the revelation of private information over ability yet only a negligible proportion of these rents could be captured while inducing workers to reveal ability truthfully suggesting that dynamic considerations were important in determining the firm s actual choice of contract

high compensation creates a ratchet effect consider a firm which pays a credit constrained worker for his effort over two periods the more the firm pays in one period the wealthier is the worker in the following period and so the more he must then be paid for a given effort we describe the profit maximising contract under these conditions showing how this wealth ratchet effect can raise wages over time and cause the firm to fire older workers

bonuses and promotion tournaments theory and evidence standard models of promotion tournaments do not distinguish between wages and bonuses and thus cannot explain variation in the use of bonuses we combine classic and market based tournament theories to develop a model in which wages and bonuses serve distinctly different roles we use this model to derive testable predictions which we test employing both a single firm data set and a data set encompassing a large segment of the finnish economy our empirical analysis supports the testable predictions and shows that our theoretical approach better matches the data than alternative theories of bonus determination based on arguments already in the literature

competition and the ratchet effect in labor markets the ratchet effect refers to a situation where workers subject to performance pay choose to restrict their output because they rationally anticipate that firms will respond to higher output levels by raising output requirements or by cutting pay we model this effect as a multiperiod principal agent problem with hidden information and study its robustness to labor market competition both theoretically and experimentally consistent with our theoretical model we observe substantial ratchet effects in the absence of competition which are nearly eliminated when competition is introduced this is true regardless of whether market conditions favor firms or workers

green transition of energy systems in rural china national survey evidence of households discrete choices on water heaters abstract energy systems in rural china are experiencing a transition from traditional fossil fuels to renewables this paper aims to investigate the potential factors that influence the choices of rural residents regarding water heaters with a focus on the low carbon transition to solar water heating systems to this end a face to face questionnaire survey is undertaken with 3404 rural households randomly selected among 12 representative provinces a comprehensive set of discrete choice modelling approaches were used the empirical results show that 1 sociodemographic variables have significant effects on residents first stage choice of a water heater to buy or not to buy but few effects on the second stage decision to choose electric lpg or solar water heaters which type to buy 2 information spillover is important to facilitate the usage of water heaters particularly of solar products 3 the electricity price which is regulated at a very low rate has no apparent effect on the choice of solar water heaters 4 government subsidy has a significant effect in the first stage but no differentiated effect on the decision choice in the second stage policy and managerial implications are presented to speed up the ongoing low carbon transition of energy systems in china

learning about the nature of production from equilibrium assignment patterns this paper exploits empirically a key insight from lucas 1978 and rosen 1982 that the organization of production and the distribution of earnings across individuals are jointly determined by the equilibrium assignment of individuals to firms and hierarchical positions we study how different classes of production functions generate alternative equilibrium assignments we then use confidential census data on u s law offices to investigate the form that the production function should take to rationalize earnings patterns in legal services we argue that earnings patterns in this industry are consistent with a production function that is characterized by asymmetric sensitivity to the skill of agents in different organizational positions complementarity between managers and workers skill and scale effects in individual skill

willingness to pay for renewable energy primary and discretionary choice of british households for micro generation technologies this paper documents the policy context of renewable energy production in the european union the research adopts a choice experiment approach to investigate households wtp for these renewable energy technologies in the uk the micro generation technologies comprise solar photovoltaic micro wind solar thermal heat pumps and biomass boilers and pellet stoves the study compares the results from conditional and mixed logit models which estimate the distribution of utility coefficients and then derives wtp values as a ratio of the attribute coefficient to the price coefficient with a model in which the wtp distribution is estimated directly from utility in the money space the results suggest that whilst renewable energy adoption is significantly valued by households this value is not sufficiently large for the vast majority of households to cover the higher capital costs of micro generation energy technologies

local market of solar water heaters in taiwan review and perspectives for promotion of solar water heaters in taiwan incentive programs were first initiated from 1986 to 1991 and re initiated from 2000 to the present the subsidies create an economic incentive for the end users and have been rather instrumental at the initial stage of each program but lost their significance thereafter to analyze the behavior of the major actors in the local market two questionnaires were developed one was addressed to sales and distribution agents while the other one consisted of person to person interviews with household owners the market driven mechanism is a multi parametric phenomenon other than the capital cost and energy price cost to benefit architectural type of buildings or degree of urbanization and household composition play the major roles in market diffusion

decomposition analysis of the variations in residential electricity consumption in brazil for the 1980 2007 period measuring the activity intensity and structure effects abstract introduced at the end of the 1970s to study the impacts of structural changes on electricity consumption by industry index decomposition analysis techniques have been extended to various other areas to help in the formulation of energy policies notably in developed countries however few authors have applied these techniques to study the evolution of energy consumption in developing countries in brazil the few available studies have focused only on the industrial sector in this article we apply the decomposition technique called the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi to electricity consumption of the brazilian residential sector to explain its evolution in terms of the activity structure and intensity affects over the period from 1980 to 2007 the technique is sufficiently robust and flexible to perform this analysis by disaggregating residential consumers by consumption classes and regions of the country among the main results is measurement of the impact of government programs for income transfer and universal service on variations in residential consumption typical of developing countries

decomposition analysis of gas consumption in the residential sector in ireland abstract to date decomposition analysis has been widely used at the macro economic level and for in depth analyses of the industry and transport sectors however its application in the residential sector has been rare this paper uses the log mean divisia index i lmdi i methodology to decompose gas consumption trends in the gas connected residential sector in ireland from 1990 to 2008 which despite an increasing number of energy efficiency policies experienced total final consumption growth of 470 the analysis decomposes this change in gas consumption into a number of effects examining the impact over time of market factors such as a growing customer base varying mix of dwelling types changing share of vacant dwellings changing size of new dwellings the impact of building regulations policy and other factors such as the weather the analysis finds the most significant effects are changing customer numbers and changing intensity the analysis also quantifies the impact of building regulations and compares it with other effects such as changing size of new dwellings by comparing the historical impact on gas consumption of policy factors and non policy factors this paper highlights the challenge for policy makers in achieving overall energy consumption reduction

motivational factors influencing the homeowners decisions between residential heating systems an empirical analysis for germany heating demand accounts for a large fraction of the overall energy demand of private households in germany a better understanding of the adoption and diffusion of energy efficient and renewables based residential heating systems rhs is of high policy relevance particularly against the background of climate change security of energy supply and increasing energy prices in this paper we explore the multi dimensionality of the homeowners motivation to decide between competing rhs a questionnaire survey n 2440 conducted in 2010 among homeowners who had recently installed a rhs provides the empirical foundation principal component analysis shows that 25 items capturing different adoption motivations can be grouped around six dimensions 1 cost aspects 2 general attitude towards the rhs 3 government grant 4 reactions to external threats i e environmental or energy supply security considerations 5 comfort considerations and 6 influence of peers moreover a cluster analysis with the identified motivational factors as segmentation variables reveals three adopter types 1 the convenience oriented 2 the consequences aware and 3 the multilaterally motivated rhs adopter finally we show that the influence of the motivational factors on the adoption decision also differs by certain characteristics of the homeowner and features of the home

china s changing energy intensity trend a decomposition analysis china experienced a dramatic decline in energy intensity from the onset of economic reform in the late 1970s until 2000 but since then the rate of decline slowed and energy intensity actually increased in 2003 most previous studies found that most of the decline was due to technological change but disagreed on the role of structural change to the best of our knowledge no decomposition study has investigated the role of inter fuel substitution in the decline in energy intensity or the causes of the rise in energy intensity since 2000 in this paper we use logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi techniques to decompose changes in energy intensity in the period 1980 2003 we find that 1 technological change is confirmed as the dominant contributor to the decline in energy intensity 2 structural change at the industry and sector sub industry level actually increased energy intensity over the period of 1980 2003 although the structural change at the industry level was very different in the 1980s and in the post 1990 period 3 structural change involving shifts of production between sub sectors however decreased overall energy intensity 4 the increase in energy intensity since 2000 is explained by negative technological progress 5 inter fuel substitution is found to contribute little to the changes in energy intensity

comparing structural decomposition analysis and index to analyze and understand historical changes in economic environmental employment or other socio economic indicators it is useful to assess the driving forces or determinants that underlie these changes two techniques for decomposing indicator changes at the sector level are structural decomposition analysis sda and index decomposition analysis ida for example sda and ida have been used to analyze changes in indicators such as energy use co2 emissions labor demand and value added the changes in these variables are decomposed into determinants such as technological demand and structural effects sda uses information from input output tables while ida uses aggregate data at the sector level the two methods have developed quite independently which has resulted in each method being characterized by specific unique techniques and approaches this paper has three aims first the similarities and differences between the two approaches are summarized second the possibility of transferring specific techniques and indices is explored finally a numerical example is used to illustrate differences between the two approaches

the ratchet effect and the market for secondhand workers workers in a long term relationship often have an incentive to hide their ability early in the relationship to avoid having the firm increase the level of output expected from them in the future we show that competition for older workers will permit the implementation of efficient piece rate contracts when the difficulty of the job is unobserved by the firm gibbons 1987 has shown that all piece rate contracts will be inefficient together these results may explain why piece rates are common in some jobs such as agricultural work and sales and not as popular for many manufacturing jobs

the signaling role of promotions further theory and empirical evidence an extensive theoretical literature investigates the role of promotions as a signal of worker ability we extend the theory by focusing on how the signaling role of promotion varies with education and then investigate the resulting predictions using a longitudinal data set that contains detailed information concerning the internal labor market history of a medium sized firm in the financial services industry our results support signaling being important for understanding the differences between promotion practices concerning bachelor s and master s degree holders while the evidence concerning the importance of signaling for high school graduates and phds is mixed

managerial task assignment and promotions a two period model of managerial task assignment is developed where the current employer has the advantage of observing the actual performanc e of the manager while outside employers can observe only the assign ments optimal contracts are rigid but the market value of managers is below actual productivity and they are promoted less than is effic ient the author introduces the idea of managers explo iting their information to separate themselves out in the market plac e as a consequence the model has the appealing property of small ab ility based wage differentials within a task as well as large ones b etween tasks copyright 1988 by the econometric society

worker allocation hierarchies and the wage distribution economists have traditionally viewed the allocation of workers among jobs through the concept of comparative advantage this paper investigates hierarchical production models which display an absence of comparative advantage in order to demonstrate that for hierarchical production there is a second allocating factor which plays an important role two results are found first the allocation of workers among jobs tends to match high ability workers with positions which value ability highly second despite the fact that the models display an absence of comparative advantage i e the standard theoretical explanation for why wage distributions might be skewed the models wage distributions are skewed to the right relative to the underlying ability distributions

contract form wage flexibility and employment we begin with two uncontroversial hypotheses firm productivity is expensive to measure and employment entails relationship specific investments these assumptions imply that firms would optimally choose fixed wage contracts and complement these with bonus pay when measuring employee performance is not too costly these assumptions imply that under an optimal employment contract hours of work is less responsive while total compensation is more responsive to shocks under bonus pay contracts compared to fixed wage contracts using data from the panel study of income dynamics psid where shocks are proxied using the local unemployment rate we find strong support for these two implications

incentives between firms and within this paper reviews the significant progress in agency theory i e the economic theory of incentives during the 1990s with an eye toward applications to supply transactions i emphasize six recent models in three pairs 1 new foundations for the theory of incentive contracts 2 new directions in incentive theory and 3 new applications to supply transactions by reviewing these six models i hope to establish three things first the theory of incentive contracts needed and received new foundations second new directions in incentive theory teach us that incentive contracts are not the only source of incentives finally and especially relevant to supply transactions the integration decision is an instrument in the incentive problem

determinants of households space heating type a discrete choice analysis for german households abstract considering the increasing attention on efficient use of energy it becomes vitally important to understand the energy related behavior of households this article presents empirical evidence on the determinants of the space heating technology applied by a household three sets of variables are examined as potential influences building socio economic and regional characteristics to highlight both the differences and similarities the results are obtained from a sample of house owners and from a sample including all households the influence of socio economic factors is similar across these groups income is found to exert only a minor impact on the system choice dwelling features are significant in determining the heating type particularly in the sample including all households regional effects are important clear differences prevail between east and west germany

career concerns contracts and effort distortions a two period career concerns model with symmetric information but uncertainty about each worker s ability is analyzed contracts are unobservable but incomes are observable it is shown that effort is distorted upward by contracts being unobservable and that the distortion depends positively on turnover

piece rate incentive schemes this paper uses recent results from incentive theory to study heretofore informal critiques of piece rate compensation schemes the informal critiques are based on the history of failed attempts to install piece rate compensation schemes at the turn of the century the formal analysis emphasizes the importance of information and commitment in contracting the main result is as follows in a work environment characterized by hidden information and a hidden action if neither the firm nor the worker can commit to future behavior then no compensation scheme piece rate or otherwise can induce the worker not to restrict output

the dynamics of incentive contracts the paper studies a simple two period principal agent model in which the principal updates the incentive scheme after observing the agent s first period performance the agent has superior information about his ability the principal offers a first period incentive scheme and observes some measure of the agent s first period performance cost or profit which depends on the agent s ability and unobservable first period effort the relationship is entirely run by short term contracts in the second period the principal updates the incentive scheme and the agent is free to accept the new incentive scheme or to quit the strategies are required to be perfect and updating of the principal s beliefs about the agent s ability follows bayes rule the central theme of the paper is that the ratchet effect leads to much pooling in the first period first for any first period incentive scheme there exists no separating equilibrium second when the uncertainty about the agent s ability is small the optimal scheme must involve a large amount of pooling the paper also gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of partition equilibria and looks at the effect of cost uncertainty

review of renewable energy investment and financing in china status mode issues and countermeasures abstract with the support of national policies china s renewable energy generation industry has experienced a rapid development period and entered the world forefront level especially in the aspects of installed capacity and speed of newly installed capacity however with the rapid development of renewable energy the power generation industry is facing more and more challenges particularly in investment and financing as for wind power industry there are also some problems such as single financing channels blindness of projects investment and so on which will result in financing difficulties for some advanced projects in addition the problems for the investment of photovoltaic pv power generation leads to vicious competition and a tumble in international market thus the overcapacity of china s entire pv industry emerges generally speaking the renewable energy industry is facing a seemingly contradictory predicament of funding deficiencies and blind investment which is derived from the government centered renewable energy investment and financing this government centered mode has promoted the development of renewable energy industry in the early stage but it cannot be adapted to the requirements of sustainable development in view of these the problems of renewable energy investment and financing are deeply studied in this paper this paper proceeds as follows firstly the overview of the development of china s renewable energy industry is briefly introduced secondly the status quo of china s renewable energy investment and financing is explored in detail based on overview of the following five perspectives investment situation investment and financing bodies investment and financing means sources of funding and financing channels secondly the patterns and characteristics of renewable energy financing are summarized and a comparative analysis of wind power and photovoltaic power generation financing means is carried out finally renewable energy investment and financing issues are discussed and further feasible proposals are put forward in all this paper is of great significance in the sustainable and healthy development of china s renewable energy

identifying electricity saving potential in rural china empirical evidence from a household survey in recent years there has been a fast growing body of literature examining energy saving potential in relation to electricity however empirical studies focusing on non western nations are limited to fill this gap this study intends to examine the electricity saving potential of rural households in china using a unique data set from the china residential electricity consumption survey crecs in collaboration with the china general social survey cgss conducted nationwide at the household level in rural china we use a stochastic frontier model which allows us to decompose residential electricity consumption into the minimum necessary amount of consumption based on physical characteristics e g house size house age number of televisions or refrigerators and estimate the consumption slack i e the amount of electricity consumption that could be saved which depends on various factors we find that rural households in china are generally efficient in electricity saving and the saving potential is affected by fast information feedback and social demographic characteristics instead of by the averaged electricity price or energy efficiency labelling signals in addition we find no evidence of regional heterogeneity on electricity saving potential for rural households policy implications are derived

tournaments as a response to ambiguity aversion in incentive contracts we study a principal agent problem with multiple identical agents where the action dependent stochastic relationship between actions and output is perceived to be ambiguous and agents are ambiguity averse we argue that ambiguity and particularly ambiguity aversion make it more attractive for the principal to choose a tournament if agents are risk neutral but ambiguity averse we show that the set of optimal incentive schemes contains a tournament moreover if ambiguity is rich enough all optimal incentive schemes must be such that realized output levels affect only the distribution of wages across agents and not the total wages paid out as it is true for tournaments when agents are both risk averse and ambiguity averse tournaments need not be optimal but ambiguity and ambiguity aversion still favor in many cases the use of tournaments or tournament like schemes over e g incentive schemes that only depend on each agent s own output level

classic promotion tournaments versus market based tournaments as initially formulated in the seminal analysis of lazear and rosen 1981 an important perspective for understanding the role of promotions in firms is the tournament perspective that is a promotion and in particular the wage increase associated with a promotion is a prize that serves as an incentive for workers to exert effort and take other actions beneficial to the firm such as the accumulation of human capital in this paper i consider whether the best way to model promotion tournaments is by having firms commit to prizes ex ante as in lazear and rosen s initial formulation or whether promotion prizes should be modeled as arising from the signaling role of promotions and the competition between firms for promoted workers

residential energy consumption in urban china a decomposition analysis abstract residential energy consumption rec is the second largest energy use category 10 in china and urban residents account for 63 of the rec understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban rec thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy measures this paper applies the lmdi method to a decomposition of china s urban rec during the period of 1998 2007 at disaggregated product activity level using data collected from a wide range of sources our results have shown an extensive structure change towards a more energy intensive household consumption structure as well as an intensive structure change towards high quality and cleaner energy such as electricity oil and natural gas which reflects a changing lifestyle and consumption mode in pursuit of a higher level of comfort convenience and environmental protection we have also found that china s price reforms in the energy sector have contributed to a reduction of rec while scale factors including increased urban population and income levels have played a key role in the rapid growth of rec we suggest that further deregulation in energy prices and regulatory as well as voluntary energy efficiency and conservation policies in the residential sector should be promoted

consumer choice on ecologically efficient water heaters marketing strategy and policy implications in japan abstract this study examines how consumers select ecologically efficient water heaters in japan energy conservation in household water heating is increasingly important for reducing an amount of co 2 emission because the share of water heating in household energy consumption is approximately 30 recently japanese households have widely used ecologically efficient electric heat pump water heaters eco cute or gas fired water heaters eco jozu the total number of such efficient water heaters sold in japan was more than 2 5 million at the end of 2008 this study investigates various factors and impacts of marketing strategy for promoting the appliances in japan we apply mixed and nested logit models to a disaggregated choice data on water heaters from 2004 to 2008 this study considers retail energy prices a government financial support and marketing activities as important factors for appliance selection in addition we consider consumers housing attributes such as floor space and age of building this empirical study finds two business implications one of the two implications is that an increase in an energy price may enhance a choice probability of eco cute and eco jozu because a price increase invites consumer s consciousness on energy conservation so that a cost reduction on energy consumption becomes essential in a use of the efficient appliances the other implication is that marketing activities especially by recommendations from sales representatives and or housing suppliers are important for consumer behaviors the other important findings are discussed in this study this business experience in japan is useful to the other countries where ecologically efficient water heaters are not popular at the current moment

subsidy programs on diffusion of solar water heaters taiwan s experience abstract financial incentives are essentially one of the key factors influencing diffusion of solar water heaters in many countries two subsidy programs were initiated by the government of taiwan in 1986 1986 1991 and 2000 2000 present respectively those long term national programs are considered to be the driving force on local market expansion in 2008 the regional subsidy programs for solar water heaters were announced by kaohsiung city and kiemen county which resulted in the growth in sales a revised subsidy was also initiated by the government of taiwan in 2009 the subsidy is 50 more however the tremendous enlargement of market size with a high level ratio of subsidy over total installation cost might result in a negative impact on a sustainable swh industry and long term development of the local market which is associated with system design and post installation service this paper aims to address the relative efficiency and pitfalls of those national and regional programs

asymmetric employer information promotions and the wage policy of firms abstract this paper provides evidence that inefficient promotion strategies and large wage increases upon promotion may both arise as a consequence of asymmetric employer information building on the seminal work by waldman 1984a and milgrom and oster 1987 we first present a model that illustrates how both phenomena may jointly arise due to the information revealing character of promotions using experimental labor markets we find evidence consistent with asymmetric employer information being a causal factor for both inefficient promotions and large wage increases upon promotion furthermore we analyze the effect of asymmetric employer information on profits and turnover

driving forces of residential co2 emissions in urban and rural china an index decomposition analysis abstract there exist many differences between urban and rural china among which residential co 2 emissions arising from energy consumption is a major one in this paper we estimate and compare the energy related co 2 emissions from urban and rural residential energy consumption from 1991 to 2004 the logarithmic mean divisia index decomposition analysis is then applied to investigate the factors that may affect the changes of the co 2 emissions it is found that energy intensity and the income effects respectively contributed most to the decline and the increase of residential co 2 emissions for both urban and rural china in urban china the population effect was found to contribute to the increase of residential co 2 emissions with a rising tendency however in rural china the population effect for residential co 2 emissions kept decreasing since 1998

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

the power industry reform in china 2015 policies evaluations and solutions abstract more than a decade ago in china s electric power industry the investment for generation side and power grids was inadequate and the gap between power supply and demand kept enlarging in order to relief the problems above power industry reform has been carried out in 2002 under the guidance of no 5 document by the central government the reform in 2002 has made a series of achievements including the enhancement of operation efficiency of power industry and the fulfillment of power demand all over the country during the past decade as the rapid development of the society and economy the external environment of china s power industry has changed greatly however the pricing and planning mechanism of china s power industry still operates following the requirements of no 5 document this has led to a number of problems including twisted pricing mechanism irrational power system planning inefficient utilization of renewable energy and so on these problems have not only hindered the development of power industry in china for quite a long time but also brought negative influence on the business operation of upstream and downstream industries therefore chinese government has issued no 9 document in 2015 and launched a new round of power industry reform policies were carried out to form new pricing mechanism new policies about renewable energy generation and power system planning process to solve the problems mentioned above this paper has reviewed the history of reform in 2002 and summarized the existing problems of china s power industry besides the main policies of no 9 document were deeply analyzed and their significance as well as backwards were illustrated at last solutions were proposed accordingly and these solutions have considerable theoretical and practical significance to china s electric power industry reform in the future

worker cooperation and the ratchet effect workers paid by the piece should be happy to introduce new techniques that increase output but firms always seem to reduce the piece rate when workers start earning too much money workers respond by restricting output and keeping good new ideas to themselves we show that this outcome is inevitable in a competitive environment however there are noncompetitive situations where firms can use piece rates to get cooperation from their workers these predictions are consistent with case history evidence from the cotton spinning industry in england in the nineteenth century and the lincoln electric company in the united states even today

empirical analysis of occupational hierarchies using data on u s engineers and the position of engineering jobs within firms this paper estimates a model of hierarchies within firms the model extends rosen s 1982 model of recursive production to two skills and multiple hierarchy levels the model generates an empirical model that is nested within a general roy 1951 model of self selection maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters of the production technology and the skill experience profiles are estimated the results suggest that approximately two thirds of changes in employment shares across hierarchy levels across time are explained by demographic shifts in the stock of engineering skills most of the returns to experience and to assignment to higher hierarchy levels within firms are caused by skill accumulation and self selection rather than technological dierences across hierarchy levels

factorial decomposition of co2 emissions a generalized divisia index approach abstract this paper introduces a novel approach to estimating the impact of the major factors driving co 2 emissions gdp energy consumption population their carbon intensities and other related indicators that may be chosen arbitrarily the suggested approach is based on the generalization of the divisia index to interconnected factors the approach also extends the kaya identity by explicitly including gross domestic product and energy consumption a computer program in r language aimed at automating the calculations is supplied factorial analysis of the united states and china s co 2 emissions is provided as an example of application

consumer lock in with asymmetric information abstract a two period version of the rothschild and stiglitz 1976 model of competitive screening in an insurance market is presented its features include repeat purchase of insurance among consumers no commitment among insurers or consumers asymmetric information among insurers about a consumer s accident history and state contingent contracts an equilibrium may exist in this model with full pooling in period one and consumer lock in in period two in such an equilibrium high risk consumers are experience rated and firms earn negative profits in period one and positive profits in period two

the influence of rebate programs on the demand for water heaters the case of new south wales this paper examines the role of australian hot water system rebate programs in shifting the existing stock of electric water heaters toward more climate friendly versions using two unique data sets from new south wales homeowners the first data set is based on a survey of households who recently purchased a water heater before and after the rebate programs were in place the other is based on a set of stated preference questions asked of households soon to face a replacement decision while the former allows us to look at recent responses the latter enables us to forecast future demand we find that the programs significantly increase shares of solar heat pump systems the programs however appear less effective in reducing the stock of electric heaters for households with access to natural gas this pattern is consistent in both datasets results from the discrete choice experiments suggest considerable heterogeneity with respect to household preferences toward different types of water heaters and the discount rates they hold the effective cost of reducing carbon emissions via incentives for water heater replacement is considered from the counterfactual perspective of no government incentives