waste performance of nuts 2 regions in the eu a conditional directional distance benefit of the doubt model abstract this paper attempts to benchmark the municipal solid waste msw management performance of the nuts 2 regions in the eu by constructing a composite indicator in order to account for commensurability weighting and aggregation issues of the performance indicators in regional waste and materials management this paper advocates a conditional directional distance version of the benefit of the doubt weighting technique in addition the waste management hierarchy defined by the eu is strongly embedded in the construction of our composite indicator the results reveal considerable differences in the aggregate performance of the regions even within member states in general waste sectors of the nuts 2 regions in austria belgium and germany generally do well in terms of msw management our results also reveal that some differences in the operating environment of the regions such as the number of tourist overnight stays are related to the aggregate performance of the regions however the observation that other conditions are not significantly related to the performance on a regional level is interesting as many policy makers frequently argue that the level of performance in their regions cannot be compared to that in other regions precisely due to this difference in operating conditions

competitive cheap talk we study a competitive cheap talk model with two senders each sender is responsible for a single project and observes its return exactly one project will be implemented both senders share some common interests with the principal but have own project biases under simultaneous communication all equilibria are shown to be partition equilibria but all the equilibria can no longer be ranked ex ante in terms of pareto efficiency the payoff of the principal depends on both the total conflict between the agents and the asymmetry in the own project biases in the equilibrium preferred by the principal the agent with a smaller bias always has veto power to determine which alternative is implemented and weakly more messages in any given equilibrium decreasing the own project bias of one agent improves the precision of communication by both agents finally sequential communication and simple delegation are shown to be essentially outcome equivalent to simultaneous communication

information shocks liquidity shocks jumps and price discovery evidence from the u s treasury market in this paper we identify jumps in u s treasury bond t bond prices and investigate what causes such unexpected large price changes in particular we examine the relative importance of macroeconomic news announcements versus variation in market liquidity in explaining the observed jumps in the u s treasury market we show that while jumps occur mostly at prescheduled macroeconomic announcement times announcement surprises have limited power in explaining bond price jumps our analysis further shows that preannouncement liquidity shocks such as changes in the bid ask spread and market depth have significant predictive power for jumps the predictive power is significant even after controlling for information shocks finally we present evidence that post jump order flow is less informative relative to the case where there is no jump at announcement

directional shadow price estimation of co2 so2 and nox in the united states coal power industry 1990 2010 abstract shadow prices also termed marginal abatement costs provide valuable guidelines to support environmental regulatory policies for co 2 so 2 and no x the key contributors to climate change this paper complements the existing models and describes a directional marginal productivity dmp approach to estimate directional shadow prices dsps which present substitutability among three emissions and are jointly estimated we apply the method to a case study of co 2 so 2 and no x produced by coal power plants operating between 1990 and 2010 in the united states we find that dsp shows 1 1 times the maximal shadow prices estimated in the current literature we conclude that estimating the shadow prices of each by product separately may lead to an overestimation of the marginal productivity and an underestimation of the shadow prices

mixed strategy nash equilibrium in data envelopment analysis abstract in a typical productivity analysis the efficiency measure assumes a perfectly competitive market with an endogenous price and depends on a fixed orientation with respect to a specific firm such as an input oriented measure when an imperfectly competitive market affects the endogenous price however firms may take a mixed strategy approach to address uncertain competition this study proposes a mixed strategy measure msm we construct a model embedded with a data envelopment analysis dea framework that identifies the mixed strategy nash equilibrium in the first stage and considers a probabilistic and multi oriented efficiency measure in the second stage based on the environmental regulation and a typical nash measure we create two indices environmental consistency and strategic consistency to support the business roadmap development we validate the proposed msm with an empirical study of china s electric power industry the results find that the proposed msm complements the nash measure and the msm model successfully supports our two managerial strategies invest in capacity expansion or develop emission abatement technology

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

estimating the marginal abatement cost curve of co2 emissions in china provincial panel data analysis abstract this paper estimates the marginal abatement cost curve macc of co2 emissions in china based on a provincial panel for the period of 2001 2010 the provincial marginal abatement cost mac of co2 emissions is estimated using a parameterized directional output distance function four types of model specifications are applied to fit the mac carbon intensity pairs the optimal specification controlling for various covariates is identified econometrically a scenario simulation of china s 40 45 carbon intensity reduction based on our macc is illustrated our simulation results show that china would incur a 559 623 yuan t roughly 51 57 increase in marginal abatement cost to achieve a corresponding 40 45 reduction in carbon intensity compared to its 2005 level

energy efficiency and congestion assessment with energy mix effect the case of apec countries abstract to save energy and improve the environment has become a general consensus in the whole asia pacific economic cooperation region this study focuses on the issue of energy congestion which has been considered as one of the key factors influencing energy efficiency we employ a two stage data envelopment analysis model to assess the energy efficiency and congestion of asia pacific economic cooperation countries from 1995 to 2013 it is worth pointing out that the model takes undesirable outputs into account and is able to recognize energy mix effect on energy congestion there are some discussions which based on the empirical results it indicates that energy congestion has led to almost 20 percent of energy waste in asia pacific economic cooperation countries the conclusions are as follows in general energy efficiency of developing countries is lower than that of developed countries besides energy congestion mainly comes from fossil energy use however the congestion of non fossil energy shows a rising trend in recent years in addition a multiple liner regression analysis indicates that energy consumption and industry value added per gdp have positive effects on energy congestion and gdp per capita has negative effect on energy congestion at last we promote several policy recommendations to improve energy efficiency

shadow pricing of undesirable outputs in nonparametric analysis abstract for three decades a growing interest in the modeling of desirable and undesirable outputs has led to a theoretical and methodological debate in the nonparametric literature on production technology and efficiency the first main discussion is about the way of modeling bad undesirables as inputs or outputs or by transformation functions the second debate concerns the implications of the weak disposability assumption in the modeling of bad outputs in particular the possibility of assigning unexpected signs to shadow prices of bad outputs in addition we point out a current error in the modeling of weak disposability under a variable returns to scale technology in this paper we introduce a hybrid model to ensure the economically meaningful jointness of good and bad outputs while constraining shadow prices of bad outputs to their expected sign we argue that it is a sound compromise to model undesirable outputs with a meaningful primal dual economic interpretation finally we propose an extension to define shadow prices for undesirable outputs following the law of one price loop rule

further discussion on linear production functions and dea abstract the purpose of the current paper is to clarify the misunderstanding in using the constant returns to scale crs model in data envelopment analysis dea to estimate returns to scale rts classification by illustrating the following two different assumptions a all decision making units dmus are assumed to be compared to a crs frontier in the ccr model i e all dmus are assumed to be capable of operating under crs and b all dmus exhibit crs several incorrect points about rts estimation raised by chang k p and guh y y 1991 european journal of operational research 52 215 223 and chang k p 1997 european journal of operational research 97 597 599 are examined it is shown that the assumption a does not mean that the rts classification cannot be estimated the crs frontier assumption cannot change the rts nature of each dmu since the ccr model mixes a technical efficiency and a scale efficiency it is possible and meaningful to use the ccr results to determine the rts classification finally the infeasibility of chang and guh s 1991 treatment of non archimedean infinitesimal is discussed

optimal path for controlling co2 emissions in china a perspective of efficiency analysis this paper examines the optimal control of co2 emissions from a perspective of efficiency analysis several centralized data envelopment analysis dea models are introduced to study the optimal allocation of co2 emissions under spatial temporal and spatial temporal allocation strategies respectively the models have been used to determine the optimal paths for controlling co2 emissions at provincial and regional levels in china a sensitivity analysis of the optimal path on the emission control coefficient under spatial temporal allocation strategy is further carried out our empirical results show that more developed regions should take emission reduction responsibility earlier than less developed regions in china of the three allocation strategies spatial temporal allocation strategy seems to be a better choice for achieving the optimal control of co2 emissions at country level since it is more encompassing by allowing both timing and spatial substitutions it is also found that there exists an inverted u shape relationship between the aggregate optimal gdp and the emission control coefficient which shows that modest emission reduction policy might be more appropriate for china in order to achieve the joint goals of economic development and co2 emission reduction

an empirical analysis of the co2 shadow price in chinese thermal power enterprises abstract this paper estimates the shadow price of co2 and explores its determinants for thermal power enterprises in china using a parametric quadratic directional distance function we evaluate the inefficiency and shadow price of co2 for 124 power enterprises in 2004 applying deterministic and econometric methods a regression analysis is undertaken to examine the factors that drive shadow prices our results indicate that there are large inefficiencies in terms of electricity production and co2 emissions the shadow price is a negative function of firm size age and coal share and is positively correlated with the technology level this correlation between shadow prices and its determinants is not sensitive to changing assumptions regarding directional vectors although such changes do alter the distribution of shadow prices the large variation witnessed in shadow prices across power enterprises argues in favor of market based regulation such as an emissions trading system as opposed to the command and control regulation currently used in china to minimize overall abatement cost

how will the chinese national carbon emissions trading scheme work the assessment of regional potential gains abstract the implementation of a national emissions trading scheme ets in china is likely to have an important effect on potential regional gains this study proposes a unified analytical framework for anticipating such gains in 2020 and estimates the key factors involved using data envelopment analysis based models the results indicate that 1 when the value of the marginal abatement cost is higher than the carbon price no regions will have an incentive to reduce emissions by technological improvements the only source of direct potential gains is from the amounts of carbon quota 2 as carbon price increases from cny 10 to 4000 per ton the indirect potential gains will increase because the strategies for carbon reduction are technological innovation or limit economic activities however jiangsu and shanghai will suffer potential losses even though the price is high because they have no more carbon reduction potential 3 most central provinces will have potential gains when the carbon price is lower in ets while regions rich in fossil energy sources will suffer potential losses however a middle price interval of cny 1000 2000 ton is more rational because it helps motivate market transactions and benefits low carbon technological innovations

asymmetric information and legislative rules some amendments we reexamine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness when committees are heterogeneous full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modified rule in contrast the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies when committees are homogeneous the situation is different all equilibria are inefficient regardless of legislative rules but the closed rule leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule furthermore the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless of the degree of preference divergence we also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization

disagreement and learning dynamic patterns of trade we study volume dynamics when there are disagreements among investors for that purpose we develop a dynamic model in which differences in the interpretation of public information lead to trade we obtain a simple linear equilibrium in closed form in which risk averse agents take into account future trading opportunities when solving for their optimal portfolio allocation using this framework we then study what restrictions on the disagreement process are needed to generate empirically observed patterns in volume and prices we show that having infrequent but major disagreements leads to autocorrelation in volume and correlation between volume and absolute price changes when agents disagree on past news but agree on the interpretation of current news there is learning and the convergence of agents opinions leads to trade

economic versus environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms this article demonstrates how economic and environmental improvement potentials of danish pig farms can be estimated using data envelopment analysis dea to avoid some of the problems associated with the definition of undesirable outputs environmental variables are included as nutrients applied with manure and nutrients removed with the crops these environmental variables are combined with a series of economic variables including the costs of fertilizer furthermore subvector efficiency and a two step analysis are used in order to consider economic and environmental technical efficiency separately the empirical results show considerable improvement potentials especially on the environmental variables sensitivity studies validate that these results are robust to possible uncertainties in the measurement of the environmental variables

quantifying co2 abatement costs in the power sector co2 cap and trade mechanisms and co2 emission taxes are becoming increasingly widespread to assess the impact of a co2 price marginal abatement cost curves maccs are a commonly used tool by policy makers providing a direct graphical link between a co2 price and the expected abatement however such maccs can suffer from issues related to robustness and granularity this paper focuses on the relation between a co2 emission cost and co2 emission reductions in the power sector the authors present a new methodology that improves the understanding of the relation between a co2 cost and co2 abatement the methodology is based on the insight that co2 emissions in the power sector are driven by the composition of the conventional power portfolio the residual load and the generation costs of the conventional units the methodology addresses both the robustness issue and the granularity issue related to maccs the methodology is based on a bottom up approach starting from engineering knowledge of the power sector it offers policy makers a new tool to assess co2 abatement options the methodology is applied to the central western european power system and illustrates possible interaction effects between e g fuel switching and renewables deployment

can cross border transmission expansion lead to fair and stable cooperation northeast asia case analysis abstract in this paper we present a framework for analyzing cross border power interconnection projects based on cooperative game theory compared to existing studies we not only quantify the benefits of interconnections and suggest cost benefit allocation techniques but also analyze the stability of the allocations which is a crucial aspect in regions where coordination and mutual trust between countries have not been built yet we apply our framework to the northeast asia where six countries china russia mongolia south korea north korea and japan are suggested for cross border transmission expansion planning cooperation cost benefits allocation of the interconnections is analyzed according to the marginal contribution of each country to the grand coalition and the minimal dissatisfaction of each coalition that ensures the stability of the solution accordingly game theory concepts the shapley value and the nucleolus are used in our analysis moreover we employ the core concept to further analyze the stability of the allocation solution and present a visualization of the feasible space formed by all stable allocations we found out that the grand coalition i e the scenario where all countries agree on the cooperation is the optimal and stable coalition with 7 1 billion total savings per year we also suggested a scheme of investment allocation and payments between the northeast asian countries in order to ensure that the proposed interconnections are plausible in practice

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

cheap talk with two senders and complementary information this paper studies a cheap talk model with two senders having partial and non overlapping private information communicating with an uninformed receiver the two senders private information is complementary in the sense that the marginal impact of one sender s private information on the receiver s ideal action depends on the other sender s private information when the two senders communicate simultaneously their information transmission exhibits strategic complementarity more information transmitted by one sender leads to more information transmitted by the other sender when the two senders have like biases it is always optimal for the receiver to delegate the decision rights to the sender with a smaller bias when two senders have opposing biases simultaneous communication is more likely to dominate delegation

marginal co2 abatement costs findings from alternative shadow price estimates for shanghai industrial sectors abstract shanghai one of the most developed cities in china is implementing a pilot regional carbon emission trading scheme estimating the marginal abatement costs of co2 emissions for the industrial sectors covered in shanghai s emission trading scheme provides the government and participating firms useful information for devising compliance policies this paper employs multiple distance function approaches to estimating the shadow prices of co2 emissions for shanghai industrial sectors our empirical results show that the overall weighted average of shadow price estimates by different approaches ranges between 394 5 and 1906 1 yuan ton which indicates that model choice truly has a significant effect on the shadow price estimation we have also identified a negative relationship between the shadow price of co2 emissions and carbon intensity and the heavy industries with higher carbon intensities tend to have lower shadow prices it has been suggested that shanghai municipal government take various measures to improve its carbon market e g using the marginal abatement costs of participating sectors firms as a criterion in the initial allocation of carbon emission allowances

flexible tests for usda report announcement effects in futures markets the value of usda reports in commodity futures markets has been intensively researched but statistical hypothesis tests have been limited by the sheer number of reports and the consequent need to limit parameters to be estimated this has led most tests of usda report announcement effects to be based on single coefficients for each report series we relax the implicit assumption that a report series has a constant impact on futures price volatility or returns in two ways in order to introduce more flexible tests for announcement effects first we introduce a time trend into the impact of announcements on futures price volatility to determine if usda reports are becoming more or less influential over time then we allow each report to have a different impact on futures price returns using theil goldberger mixed estimation the results show that many but not all usda reports have significant effects on corn and soybean futures market returns or volatility

an investment analysis for china s sustainable development based on inverse data envelopment analysis abstract in the face of environmental degradation sustainable development has become a common goal across the globe making a scientifically based investment scheme is of great significance to promote the sustainable development of china s economy however there is scarce research related to such an investment scheme of sustainable development this paper proposes a new inverse data envelopment analysis method with undesirable outputs to make several scientifically based investment schemes from different perspectives namely the natural regulation and optimal perspectives by this method decision makers can scientifically forecast the specific amount of investment based on their actual sustainable development objectives which is conducive for reducing the blindness of investment in the future in addition a new ideal perspective is defined to guide a definite direction for improving the level of sustainable development combined with the gray forecasting model gm 1 1 the methods proposed by this paper were then applied to analyze the investment problem for china s sustainable development during the 2015 2024 period the results show that the unbalanced distribution of labor investment and the excessive investment in capital and energy are serious barriers to china s sustainable development in the short term and in the long term the demand for investment in labor and capital will continue to increase along with a lower demand for energy investment and that appropriately strengthening environmental regulations will not affect the overall demand for investment meanwhile improvement directions for improving china s sustainable development are discussed and the results show that most of developing and undeveloped regions in china have great potential for improvement finally some suggestions are proposed in order to create better conditions for china s sustainable development

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

does environmental degradation shackle economic growth a panel data investigation on 11 asian countries sustainable economic growth needs to be the primary objective of every government including developing asian countries to improve the social welfare of the people therefore to achieve the desirable level of sustainable economic growth environmental degradation must be controlled without lowering real growth and the well being of the society this study empirically investigates the impact of environmental degradation by co2 emissions on the economic growth of 11 asian countries between 1990 and 2011 based on the nature of the data traditional panel estimation techniques encompassing fixed effects and random effects are employed in which the results of hausman s test and other tests show that the use of fixed effects is preferable over the random effect estimator empirical results exhibit that environmental degradation has a significantly negative impact on economic growth empirical findings also suggest that environmental degradation should be regulated therefore environmentally enlightened management policies for the decrease of co2 emissions and fuel consumption by transportation and industries need to be pursued by asian countries the adoption of safe carbon emission cut back policies is a promising path to sustainable economic growth

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

how markets process information news releases and volatility we examine the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets we find these announcements are responsible for most of the observed time of day and day of the week volatility patterns in these markets while the bulk of the price adjustment to a major announcement occurs within the first minute volatility remains substantially higher than normal for roughly fifteen minutes and slightly elevated for several hours nonetheless these subsequent price adjustments are basically independent of the first minute s return we identify those announcements with the greatest impact on these markets we examine the impact on interest rate and foreign exchange markets of scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report the consumer price index cpi and the producer price index ppi many market participants believe that such announcements have a major impact on financial markets indeed a small industry devoted to predicting the figures to be released in upcoming releases has evolved in recent years with the exception of the weekly money supply figures however the impact of such announcements on financial markets has received scant attention 1 this is doubly surprising given the considerable research interest in market volatility since these news releases are a potential source of much of this volatility consider for instance figure 1 as shown there prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets are much more volatile between 8 30 and 8 35 a m eastern time et than during any other five minute trading period including

why do forecasters disagree lessons from the term structure of cross sectional dispersion abstract key sources of disagreement among economic forecasters are identified by using data on cross sectional dispersion in forecasters long and short run predictions of macroeconomic variables dispersion among forecasters is highest at long horizons where private information is of limited value and lower at short forecast horizons moreover differences in views persist through time such differences in opinion cannot be explained by differences in information sets our results indicate they stem from heterogeneity in priors or models differences in opinion move countercyclically with heterogeneity being strongest during recessions where forecasters appear to place greater weight on their prior beliefs

learning asymmetries in real business cycles when a boom ends the downturn is generally sharp and short when growth resumes the boom is more gradual our explanation rests on learning about productivity when agents believe productivity is high they work invest and produce more more production generates higher precision information when the boom ends precise estimates of the slowdown prompt decisive reactions investment and labor fall sharply when growth resumes low production yields noisy estimates of recovery noise impedes learning slows recovery and makes booms more gradual than downturns a calibrated model generates growth rate asymmetry similar to macroeconomic aggregates fluctuations in agents forecast precision match observed countercyclical errors of forecasters

rank dynamics and club convergence of sustainable development for countries around the world abstract assessment of country level sustainable development is a critical research topic entrenched in the global battle against climate change this study employs the frontier approach combined with convergence analysis to assess the sustainable development for a set of 121 countries over 1990 2014 focusing on analyzing the countries rank dynamics and convergence behavior the levels of the countries sustainable development are captured by data envelopment analysis a nonparametric frontier approach that can jointly assess a country s economic and environmental performance reflecting the divergent views on the importance of economic and environmental objectives in the pursuit of sustainability the proposed approach generates the countries sustainability scores by prioritizing either economic or environmental criterion this study finds that developed countries have significantly outperformed developing countries if environmental criterion takes precedence over economic criterion in performance assessment moreover regardless of the model employed there is strong evidence of club convergence i e convergence in subgroups of countries to different steady states rather than convergence in full sample we analyze the pattern of convergence paths and discuss policy implications obtained from our empirical findings

cheap talk with two audiences these problems have in common a simple structure an informed sender says something to two interested but uninformed receivers who then take actions based on their beliefs these actions affect the sender as well as the receivers in this paper we study how costless nonverifiable claims cheap talk can affect these beliefs and hence the actions and how the incentives for truthful revelation to one receiver are affected by the presence of the other we then ask how welfare is affected by whether claims are made in public or in private as some of the above examples suggest public messages may be more credible than private messages addressed to either audience one possibility is that the presence of one audience can discipline the sender s relationship with the other we call this one sided

the informational effects of competition and collusion in legislative politics we use a mechanism design approach to study the organization of interest groups in an informational model of lobbying interest groups influence the legislature only by communicating private information on their preferences and not by means of monetary transfers interest groups have private information on their ideal points in a one dimensional policy space and may either compete or adopt more collusive behaviors optimal policies result from a trade off between imposing rules which are non responsive to the groups preferences and flexibility that pleases groups better within a strong coalition interest groups credibly share information which facilitates communication of their joint interests helps screening by the legislature and induces flexible policies responsive to the groups joint interests an informativeness effect competing interest groups better transmit information on their individual preferences a screening effect the socially and privately optimal organization of lobbying favors competition between groups only when their preferences are not too congruent with those of the legislature with more congruence a strong coalition is preferred finally within a weak coalition interest groups must design incentive compatible collusive mechanisms to share information such weak coalitions are always inefficient

congestion measurement for regional industries in china a data envelopment analysis approach with undesirable outputs abstract the industry in china has been developing extensively in the last few decades large investments in china s industry may cause congestion because congestion is a widely observed economic phenomenon in such a scenario in order to know the performance and allocate resources well it is necessary for the chinese government to measure congestion of the industry many scholars have studied this topic by means of data envelopment analysis dea however previous studies only pay attention to the framework of desirable outputs in fact undesirable outputs often accompany desirable outputs in production thus in this study a new approach for measuring congestion with undesirable outputs is proposed and applied to analyzing congestion of the industry in 31 administrative regions of china the results show that five regions have congestion in their industry in 2010 besides the regions located in the east of the country perform the best in ecological efficiency followed by regions in central and west china based on these findings this paper proposes some political schemes to improve regional industrial efficiency

strategic communication networks in this paper we consider situations in which individuals want to choose an action close to others actions as well as close to a payoff relevant state of nature with the ideal proximity to the common state varying across the agents before this coordination game with heterogeneous preferences is played a cheap talk communication stage is offered to players who decide to whom they reveal the private information they hold about the state the strategic information transmission taking place in the communication stage is characterized by a strategic communication network we provide a direct link between players preferences and the strategic communication network emerging at equilibrium depending on the strength of the coordination motive and the prior information structure equilibrium strategic communication networks are characterized in a very tractable way and compared in term of efficiency in general a maximal strategic communication network may not exist and communication networks cannot be ordered in the sense of pareto however expected social welfare always increases when the communication network expands strategic information transmission can be improved when group or public communication is allowed and or when information is certifiable

an investigation of transactions data for nyse stocks using transactions data the behavior of returns and characteristics of trades at the micro level is examined a minute by minute market return series is formed and tested for normality and autocorrelation evidence of differences in return distributions is found among overnight trades trades during the first 30 minutes following the market opening trades at the close and trades during the remainder of the day the latter distribution is found to be normal unusually high returns and standard deviations of returns are found at the beginning and the end of the trading day when the beginningand end of the day effects are omitted autocorrelation in the market return series is reduced substantially a number of patterns in trading are reported this paper empirically investigates the nature of the return generating process and the characteristics of trade size price changes trading frequency and trading interval at the level of individual trades for a large sample of nyse stocks previous studies of market indices have used daily weekly or monthly

differential interpretation of public signals and trade in speculative markets most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically we provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption we then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume return relation then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts earnings forecasts the hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data

when does coordination require centralization this paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when manag ers are privately informed and communicate strategically we consider a multi divisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other information about local conditions is dispersed and held by self interested division managers who communicate via cheap talk the only available formal mechanism is the allocation of decision rights we show that a higher need for coordination improves horizontal com

information aggregation in debate who should speak first abstract privately informed individuals speak openly in front of other members of a committee about the desirability of a public decision each individual wishes to appear well informed for any given order of speech committee members may herd by suppressing their true information with individuals of heterogeneous expertise optimizing over the order of speech can improve the extraction of information but not perfectly so it is not always optimal to use the common anti seniority rule whereby experts speak in order of increasing expertise a committee with more able experts may be afflicted by greater herding problems yielding a worse outcome

the dependence between hourly prices and trading volume this study provides evidence on joint characteristics of hourly common stock trading vol ume and returns on the new york stock exchange average volume traded shows signifi cant differences across trading hours of the day and across days of the week average returns differ across hours ofthe day and to some extent across days ofthe week there is a strong contemporaneous relation between trading volume and returns and also a rela tion between trading volume and returns lagged up to four hours furthermore the trading volume returns relation is steeper for positive returns than for nonpositive returns

emission path planning based on dynamic abatement cost curve abstract global climate change is one of the most serious environmental problems that has attracted an unprecedented global attention the scientific community has recognized that human activity is mostly responsible for global climate warming therefore states participating in the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc have initiated a series of negotiations on how to develop their own emission reduction targets however the realization of these targets is at the expense of economic development to a great extent therefore an abatement plan is necessary to decide how and when to implement emission reduction targets a marginal abatement cost curve macc often used as an important quantitative tool to estimate abatement burden or evaluate abatement performance should be considered carefully in this paper we enrich the traditional macc by introducing the concept of an immediate unit marginal abatement cost to describe its intrinsic incremental abatement difficulty this cost is proved to be agreed with the actual situation in many ways and is therefore very suitable for practical use two factor learning curve are considered in the model which can go some way in improving the performance of the revised macc using a parameterization method the original problem can be converted into a tractable nonlinear programming problem we use an algorithm to search for the approximate global optimal solution the effectiveness and the efficiency of the algorithm are discussed respectively in the results we find that the abatement path distinguishes largely under different abatement targets some plausible reasons and policy advices are given

the integrated efficiency of economic development and co2 emissions among asia pacific economic cooperation members abstract in recent years the evaluation of energy economic and environmental efficiency employing the data envelopment analysis models has been a hot topic in academe when choosing models people always expect to improve desirable outputs while reducing undesirable outputs at the same time e g when using a directional distance function model however directional distance function models may lead to biased estimations due to different directions given to different units to overcome this shortcoming in this paper we propose another non radial efficiency evaluation model based on previous literature which can also improve desirable outputs and reduce undesirable outputs then we employ this model to analyse the economic efficiency and co 2 emissions efficiency of the asia pacific economic cooperation apec members meanwhile we also measure the efficiency change by using the luenberger index and analyse the reasons for efficiency changes from the perspectives of technical efficiency and technical changes the results indicate that most countries have an extremely high economic efficiency but relatively low co 2 emissions efficiency and integrated efficiency except for the united states japan and singapore according to the luenberger index we find an increase in integrated efficiency and co 2 emissions efficiency for most members from 2001 to 2010 however technical progress is the main contributor technical efficiency exhibits a downward trend for most members

the impact of twitter sentiment on renewable energy stocks abstract we study the impact of twitter sentiment and sentiment divergence on returns volatility and trading volumes for renewable energy stocks based on daily time series for twitter sentiment and twitter sentiment divergence we estimate var models and evaluate spillovers between sentiment and renewable energy stock pricing and trading we find that whereas twitter sentiment has no sizeable impact on returns volatility or trading volumes twitter sentiment divergence generates feedback effects on volatility and trading volumes our evidence would indicate that the wisdom of the twitter crowd is not substantial in shaping prices and trading for renewable energy companies

efficiency assessment of primary care providers a conditional nonparametric approach this paper uses a fully nonparametric approach to estimate efficiency measures for primary care units incorporating the effect of exogenous environmental factors this methodology allows us to account for different types of variables continuous and discrete describing the main characteristics of patients served by those providers in addition we use an extension of this nonparametric approach to deal with the presence of undesirable outputs in data represented by the rates of hospitalization for ambulatory care sensitive condition acsc the empirical results show that all the exogenous variables considered have a significant and negative effect on efficiency estimates

the relation between price changes and trading volume a survey this paper reviews previous and current research on the relation between price changes and trading volume in financial markets and makes four contributions first two empiri cal relations are established volume is positively related to the magnitude of the price change and in equity markets to the price change per se second previous theoretical research on the price volume relation is summarized and critiqued and major insights are emphasized third a simple model ofthe price volume relation is proposed that is consis tent with several seemingly unrelated or contradictory observations and fourth several directions for future research are identified

order imbalance liquidity and market returns traditionally volume has provided the link between trading activity and returns we focus on a hitherto unexplored but intuitive measure of trading activity the aggregate daily order imbalance on the new york stock exchange signed order imbalances increase decrease following market declines rises which reveals that investors are contrarians on aggregate order imbalances in either direction either excess buy or sell orders reduce liquidity market wide returns are strongly affected by contemporaneous and lagged order imbalances market wide returns reverse themselves after high negative imbalance large negative return days the magnitude of this reversal is partially predictable from the level of the imbalance and return even after controlling for aggregate market volume and liquidity market returns are affected by order imbalance

the allocation of co2 emissions as a claims problem abstract in the context of multilateral negotiations on climate change this paper proposes to use the claims approach as a reasonable and practicable alternative in order to allocate the admissible co2 emissions per region the proposed methodology entails analyze the application of a broad group of theoretical solutions through the establishment of equity and stability criteria to this regard the empirical analyzing combines several co2 world endowments from meinshausen et al 2009 together with claims forecasts associated with the rcp representative concentration pathways scenarios the results obtained indicate that the constrained equal awards and minimal solutions are clearly equity sensitive given that the co2 emission reduction imposed by the constrained equal awards solution on asia and the oecd are very important and considering the better balance between equity and proportionality associated with the min solution it could be that this latter solution would be the most practicable and acceptable

efficiency evaluation of chinese regional industrial systems with undesirable factors using a two stage slacks based measure approach abstract the process of a regional industrial system in china can be separated into two internal stages production stage and pollutant abatement stage this paper aims to examine the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by taking the operational performance of its two internal stages into consideration unlike traditional data envelopment analysis models that treat decision making units as black box when measuring their efficiencies with undesirable factors this paper proposes a two stage model based on slacks based measure to evaluate the efficiency of chinese regional industrial systems by decomposing the efficiency into production efficiency and abatement efficiency the proposed model can estimate the efficiencies of the whole regional industrial system its production stage and abatement stage simultaneously the model provides a way of improving performance of a regional industrial system through identifying its inefficient internal stages this can help to find out the main sources of the inefficiency that arise from the internal stages within the system which cannot be done by using conventional environmental data envelopment analysis models findings resulting from the model application show that there are great disparities in regional industrial systems efficiencies and the inefficiency of chinese industrial system is largely driven by the abatement stage

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

volume volatility and public news announcements we provide new empirical evidence for the way in which financial markets process information our results rely critically on high frequency intraday price and volume data for the s p 500 equity portfolio and u s treasury bonds along with new econometric techniques for making inference on the relationship between trading intensity and spot volatility around public news announcements consistent with the predictions derived from a theoretical model in which investors agree to disagree our estimates for the intraday volume volatility elasticity around important news announcements are systematically below unity our elasticity estimates also decrease significantly with measures of disagreements in beliefs economic uncertainty and textual based sentiment further highlighting the key role played by differences of opinion

the applicability of marginal abatement cost approach a comprehensive review abstract the marginal abatement cost mac methodology is widely used in climate change policies policy makers rely on mac to assess feasible strategies and related costs to achieve emission reduction goals this paper introduces a variety of mac methodologies aiming at solving diverse problems which utilizes various calculable logic thus producing different results and implications this study applies a mind mapping method to capture differentiation of mac methods and systematically classify mac methodologies the applicability path analysis was proposed based on principles such as stakeholder type decision making objectives cost concept strategy mode and information scope our goal is to assess the applicability of different methodologies to reduce misuse by policy makers and to serve as a guide for subsequent research which might prompt and lead to the derivation of more consequential results in future studies the results of this study suggest that the complex method is not always better than the simplified method because policy makers are required to select the appropriate method according to the type of information needed it may even be suggested that mac could be reliable by ranking relative value of options compared with baseline rather than focusing on the absolute value of individual measures

efficiency subsidies and environmental adaptation of animal farming under cap the purpose of this article is to model the interaction between the targets of the current cap environmental adaptation subsidies and efficiency q1 of animal farming to this end we first have to identify the production frontier and relative efficiency level for each animal oriented farm in the sample the production frontier and efficiency index for each type of farm assuming no specific production functions are identified using data envelope analysis dea techniques we then address the relationship between relative efficiency farm size and environmentally friendly behavior by carrying out a nonparametric regression of efficiency on economic size a proxy for the degree of environmental appropriateness and regional dummies calculations of the efficiency of the farms including direct subsidies are compared with the counterfactual exercise in the case in which direct subsidies are not considered finally we look for relations between subsidies and factors such as farm size efficiency and environmentally friendly behavior one key result shows that on average direct payments generally tend to increase efficiency however in most of the cases the mean efficiency decreases as the percentage of direct payments rises direct payments are found to be positively related to environmentally friendly production at least in germany however in general the direct payment system is not sufficient to offset the fact that the less environmentally friendly farms as well as the larger farms are more efficient

technical environmental and eco efficiency measurement for supplier selection an extension and application of data envelopment analysis with increased global awareness of environmental sustainability green supply chain management gscm has received considerable attention in the literature over the decade green supplier selection and assessment in gscm is one of the most significant and complex challenges for supply chain managers this paper provides a new model and approach for green supplier selections by decomposing their efficiency indicators into technical environmental and eco efficiency scores we show that the models in the literature are computationally intensive and are not able to measure eco efficiency properly instead of running three different models linear goal programming is used to integrate technical environmental and eco efficiency objectives into a multiple objective linear programming molp data envelopment analysis dea model therefore the model proposed in this paper is less computationally intensive than the models in the literature the new model provides a more valid eco efficiency indicator of decision making units dmus by utilizing a better combination of the technical and environmental efficiency objectives compared to the conventional models unlike the conventional models the new model identifies dmus as being eco efficient if and only if they are both technically and environmentally efficient we also discuss the non dominated weights as the solutions of the molp model and use them to construct technical environmental and eco cross efficiency matrices of the dmus in order to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed model we present the real world business case of the hyundai steel company and its suppliers

estimation and allocation of cost savings from collaborative co2 abatement in china abstract as an increasingly accepted way of relieving global warming collaborative carbon dioxide co2 abatement could improve not only emission performance but also cost effectiveness of abatement in this study we analyze the cost savings and benefits of collaborative abatement in the context of china by using data envelopment analysis dea approach specifically we establish 63 collaborative abatement scenarios by dividing the mainland china into six main regions and then estimate the costs savings in each collaboration abatement scenario through investigating the gains for each region in various scenarios the best collaborative partners for each region are suggested from perspectives of benefit maximization furthermore the contribution of each region to collaborative abatement cost saving is also differentiated with the shapley value approach

when does coordination require centralization corrigendum the equations on page 153 of when does coordination require centralization which appeared in the march 2008 issue of the american economic review failed to print in their entirety the complete text of section iii decision making appears below

a transaction data study of weekly and intradaily patterns in stock returns abstract weekly and intradaily patterns in common stock prices are examined using transaction data for large firms negative monday close to close returns accrue between the friday close and the monday open for smaller firms they accrue primarily during the monday trading day for all firms significant weekday differences in intraday returns accrue during the first 45 minutes after the market opens on monday mornings prices drop while on the other weekday mornings they rise otherwise the pattern of intraday returns is similar on all weekdays most notable is an increase in prices on the last trade of the day

volatility in the foreign currency futures market we examine the volatility implications of around the clock foreign exchange trading with transaction data on futures contracts from the chicago mercantile exchange and the london international financial futures exchange we find higher u s european and u s japanese exchange rate volatilities during u s trading hours and higher european cross rate volatilities during european trading hours while the diclosure of private information through trading may partly explain these volatility patterns we conclude that the increased volatility is more likely driven by macroeconomic news announcements an analysis of inter and intraday data also reveals that volatility increases at times that coincide with the release of u s macroeconomic news article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

jumps in financial markets a new nonparametric test and jump dynamics this paper introduces a new nonparametric test to detect jump arrival times and realized jump sizes in asset prices up to the intra day level we demonstrate that the likelihood of misclassiflcation of jumps becomes negligible when we use high frequency returns using our test we examine jump dynamics and their distributions in the u s equity markets the results show that individual stock jumps are associated with prescheduled earnings announcements and other company speciflc news events additionally s p 500 index jumps are associated with general market news announcements this suggests difierent pricing models for individual equity options versus index op

a dea approach for estimating the agricultural energy and environmental efficiency of eu countries this study attempts to evaluate the energy and environmental efficiency of the primary sectors of the eu member state countries the evaluation is based on a non radial data envelopment analysis dea model which allows for non proportional adjustments to energy inputs and undesirable outputs and thus it provides different estimations for energy and environmental efficiency scores the 2001 2008 time period was selected for this research one of the most important findings is that countries like germany sweden or austria with strong environmental protection standards appear to be less energy and environmentally efficient compared with countries like denmark belgium spain france or ireland in addition a series of eastern european countries achieve low efficiency scores which can be characterized as expectable due to low technology level being implemented in the primary production process there are also two sub periods for this research the first one 2001 2006 covers the fully coupled with specific cultivations period for subsidy administation and the second 2007 2008 where the new decoupled subsidy scheme was implemented there are significant hints for considerable changes of energy and environmental efficiency after the implementation of the the new cap with the new member states siginificantly differ of both energy and environmental efficiency copmared with the older ones

intra day and inter market volatility in foreign exchange rates four foreign exchange spot rate series recorded on an hourly basis for a six month period in 1986 are examined a seasonal garch model is developed to describe the time dependent volatility apparent in the percentage nominal return of each currency hourly patterns in volatility are found to be remarkably similar across currencies and appear to be related to the opening and closing of the worlds major markets robust lm tests designed to deal with the extreme leptokurtosis in the data fails to uncover any evidence of misspecification or the presence of volatility spillover effects between the currencies or across markets

what does monetary policy do to long term interest rates at the zero lower bound this article uses a structural var with daily data to identify the effects of monetary policy shocks on various longer term interest rates since the federal funds rate has been stuck at the zero lower bound the var is identified using the assumption that monetary policy shocks are heteroskedastic monetary policy shocks have especially high variance on days of fomc meetings and certain speeches while there is otherwise nothing unusual about these days a complementary high frequency event study approach is also used i find that stimulative monetary policy shocks lower treasury and corporate bond yields but the effects die off fairly fast

the price variability volume relationship on speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the daily volume of trading on the speculative markets our work extends the theory of speculative markets in two ways first we derive from economic theory the joint probability distribution of the price change and the trading volume over any interval of time within the trading day and second we determine how this joint distribution changes as more traders enter or exit from the market the model s parameters are estimated by fiml using daily data from the 90 day t bills futures market the results of the estimation can reconcile a conflict between the price variability volume relationship for this market and the relationship obtained by previous investigators for other speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the volume of trading on speculative markets previous empirical studies 2 3 6 12 14 16 of both futures and equity markets always find a positive association between price variability as measured by the squared price change ap2 and the trading volume 2 there are two explanations for the relationship clark s 2 explanation which is secondary to his effort to explain why the probability distribution of the daily price change is leptokurtic emphasizes randomness in the number of within day transactions in clark s model the daily price change is the sum of a random number of within day price changes the variance of the daily price change is thus a random variable with a mean proportional to the mean number of daily transactions clark argues that the trading volume is related positively to the number of within day transactions and so the trading volume is related positively to the variability of the price change the second explanation is due to epps and epps 6 their model examines the mechanics of within day trading the change in the market price on each within day transaction or market clearing is the average of the changes in all of the traders reservation prices epps and epps assume there is a positive relationship between the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices and the absolute value of the change in the market price that is an increase in the extent to which traders disagree is associated with a larger absolute price change the price variability volume relationship arises then because the volume of trading is positively related to the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices

economic structure and strategies for greenhouse gas mitigation abstract greenhouse gas ghg emission mitigation policy impacts the economic system directly in the short term by altering relative prices and indirectly in the long term by shifting the structure of the economy there may also be adjustments to economic structure independent of policy intervention due to changes in population consumption patterns and global markets the overall effectiveness of specific mitigation policy will partly depend on these indirect and exogenous changes to economic structure this study develops a new measure linking economic development with its environmental effects the technical cost of ghg mitigation under economic growth in an economy is calculated by combining traditional input output io analysis and a linear programming based sensitivity analysis the approach is applied to northern ireland ni producing an isoemission matrix that maps emission neutral expansion paths for the economy the measurement provides an indicator of the demand for technical improvement to achieve ghg mitigation at a national or regional level the flexibility and transparency of the approach make it useful for evaluating potential ghg mitigation strategies