reconciling social welfare agent profits and consumer payments in electricity pools under a common condition called profit suboptimality market equilibrium cannot be reached in electricity pools in other words no system marginal price exists for which the profit driven independent generators would self schedule to levels that exactly meet the demand on the other hand although a centrally imposed generation schedule satisfies power balance it may force some agents to operate at a profit below what they could achieve under self scheduling this paper examines these incompatible goals and proposes a conflict resolution scheme based on the notion of generalized uplift functions these functions are defined such that they i change the offered generation cost characteristics so as to increase the system marginal price thus forcing the consumers to compensate the generators for part of their combined loss of profit ii execute an equitable transfer of revenues among the generators so that these also participate in any loss of profit compensation iii ensure market equilibrium at the centralized minimum cost solution and iv ensure that the net sum of the uplifts adds up to zero

the economic value of farm program base mixed integer programming and dynamic programming models were used to obtain the implicit economic value of the initial endowment of base acreage on a cotton farm while low levels of initial base have almost no impact on land value high levels can be worth a considerable premium with the implicit value of additional initial base endowment increasing at an increasing rate this pattern of increasing implicit value can be explained by provisions of the farm program allowing base to be created by a landowner who develops a planting history in a program commodity

a unified bilevel programming framework for price based market clearing under marginal pricing market clearing in restructured power systems is mostly implemented through an offer based setting with the goal of maximizing social welfare this approach leads to sound results from an economic viewpoint when generation offers reflect true production costs however offers may significantly differ from actual costs in practice thus yielding undesired distortion under a marginal pricing scheme this paper presents a general bilevel programming framework for alternative market clearing procedures dependent on market clearing prices rather than on offers the resulting nonlinear mixed integer bilevel programming formulation is transformed into an equivalent single level mixed integer linear program suitable for efficient off the shelf software the bilevel formulation is investigated through a particular instance of price based market clearing driven by consumer payment minimization this problem has recently received considerable attention due to the open challenges posed from both modeling and computational perspectives numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach

the ant or the grasshopper the long term consequences of unilateral divorce laws on savings of european households abstract unilateral divorce laws udls allow people to obtain divorce without the consent of their spouse using the staggered introduction of udls across european countries we show that households exposed to udls for a longer period of time accumulate more savings this effect holds for both financial and total wealth and is stronger at higher quantiles of the wealth distribution consistent with a precautionary motive for savings we also find that exposure to udls increases female labour supply numeracy trust in others and dispositional optimism

coordinated fuzzy constrained optimal power dispatch for bilateral contract balancing electricity and ancillary services markets this paper proposes a coordinated fuzzy constrained optimal power dispatch cfcopd algorithm for bilateral contract balancing electricity and ancillary services markets the cfcopd problem is decomposed into social welfare fuzzy maximization subproblem which is solved by mixed integer fuzzy linear programming miflp and combined reactive power cost and cost of real power loss fuzzy minimization subproblem which is solved by fuzzy linear programming flp the proposed cfcopd algorithm is tested on the modified ieee 30 bus system and the thai power 424 bus system the dispatch results show that the social welfare of the fuzzy constrained competitive electricity and ancillary services price ceasp scheme with bilateral contract curtailment bids is higher than those of competitive electricity price cep scheme and ceasp scheme with and without bilateral contract curtailment bids leading to a lower average electricity price

early life circumstance and adult mental health we show that psychological well being in adulthood varies with circumstance in early life combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

are ghettos good or bad spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups may theoretically have positive or negative effects on the economic performance of those groups we examine the effects of segregation on outcomes for blacks in schooling employment and single parenthood we find that blacks in more segregated areas have significantly worse outcomes than blacks in less segregated areas we control for the endogeneity of location choice using instruments based on political factors topographical features and residence before adulthood a one standard deviation decrease in segregation would eliminate one third of the black white differences in most of our outcomes

the decoupling of farm programs revisiting the wealth effect recent reforms of agricultural policies in developed countries have introduced direct payments as replacements for traditional production enhancing instruments whereas these new instruments can in principle influence production through several channels current empirical studies show no significant impact on production direct payments mainly increase land values in this article we revisit the evaluation of the coupling effects passing through the wealth of agricultural households the initial wealth of these agents while mainly being in the form of land asset holding is always assumed to be fixed to the contrary we show theoretically and through an empirical simulation exercise that once the impact of farm programs on initial wealth is properly accounted for the measure of the coupling effects is not as negligible as found in previous studies copyright 2010 oxford university press

pricing of fluctuations in electricity markets abstract in an electric power system demand fluctuations may result in significant ancillary cost to suppliers furthermore in the near future deep penetration of volatile renewable electricity generation is expected to exacerbate the variability of demand on conventional thermal generating units we address this issue by explicitly modeling the ancillary cost associated with demand variability we argue that a time varying price equal to the suppliers instantaneous marginal cost may not achieve social optimality and that consumer demand fluctuations should be properly priced we propose a dynamic pricing mechanism that explicitly encourages consumers to adapt their consumption so as to offset the variability of demand on conventional units through a dynamic game theoretic formulation we show that under suitable convexity assumptions the proposed pricing mechanism achieves social optimality asymptotically as the number of consumers increases to infinity numerical results demonstrate that compared with marginal cost pricing the proposed mechanism creates a stronger incentive for consumers to shift their peak load and therefore has the potential to reduce the need for long term investment in peaking plants

optimization based approach for price multiplicity in network constrained electricity markets this paper addresses the problem of price multiplicity in network constrained pool based electricity markets under marginal pricing this problem consists in the existence of multiple vectors of locational marginal prices for the same optimal market clearing dispatch solution as a consequence delicate conflicts of interest may arise among market participants price multiplicity may take place even in auction designs based on convex formulations for the market clearing procedure an effective duality based solution approach is proposed in this paper to handle the issue of price multiplicity once the optimal market clearing dispatch is known we propose the subsequent solution of a simple pricing problem in order to determine the vector of locational marginal prices unlike previously reported methodologies the proposed approach presents two salient features 1 it is based on sound mathematical programming and 2 it is computationally inexpensive since it relies on the solution of a linear program numerical results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed tool

on the solution of revenue and network constrained day ahead market clearing under marginal pricing part ii case studies this paper presents the numerical analysis of the bilevel programming approach for revenue and network constrained market clearing developed in its companion paper the impact of minimum revenue conditions and minimum declared profits on generation and consumption levels as well as on locational marginal prices for energy is examined in detail through three case studies first the results from an illustrative example including minimum revenue conditions are comprehensively analyzed the second case study is based on the ieee reliability test system and considers minimum declared profits in the third case study a modified version of the ieee 118 bus system is tested while accounting for minimum revenue conditions in addition the computational behavior of the proposed approach is illustrated with several case studies including the ieee 300 bus system numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach to handle revenue constraints as well as its superiority over the heuristic currently implemented in the iberian electricity market moreover simulations reveal that unlike previous works in the literature generation revenue constraints can be precisely incorporated in day ahead market clearing while explicitly considering the standard economic dispatch based marginal pricing scheme and without requiring price uplifts

a stochastic electricity market clearing formulation with consistent pricing properties we argue that deterministic market clearing formulations introduce arbitrary distortions between day ahead and expected real time prices that bias economic incentives we extend and analyze a previously proposed stochastic clearing formulation in which the social surplus function induces penalties between day ahead and real time quantities we prove that the formulation yields price bounded price distortions and we show that adding a similar penalty term to transmission flows and phase angles ensures boundedness throughout the network we prove that when the price distortions are zero day ahead quantities equal a quantile of their real time counterparts the undesired effects of price distortions suggest that stochastic settings provide significant benefits over deterministic ones that go beyond social surplus improvements we propose additional metrics to evaluate these benefits

social networks and the dynamics of labour market outcomes evidence from refugees resettled in the u s recent theoretical work suggests that social networks may play an important role in the dynamics of employment and wages across groups of individuals this paper provides empirical evidence of job information flows within social networks and the non linear relationship between social network size and labor market outcomes an extended version of the model developed by calvo armengol and jackson 2004 shows that competition can exist between network members for job referrals and investigates the dynamics between the size of a social network the tenure of network members and labor market outcomes the predictions of the model are tested empirically using a unique data set of refugees resettled in the u s from 2001 2005 the empirical strategy exploits the special institutional environment of refugee resettlement i find that a one standard deviation increase in the number of network members who have arrived in the u s one year ago lowers the probability of employment by 4 9 and the average hourly wage by 70 conversely as predicted by the model more tenured network members improve labor market outcomes for recently arrived refugees

urban poverty and juvenile crime evidence from a randomized housing mobility experiment this paper uses data from a randomized housing mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high to low poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime outcome measures come from juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data our e ndings seem to suggest that providing families with the opportunity to move to lower poverty neighborhoods reduces violent criminal behavior by teens

longer term effects of head start specially collected data on adults in the panel study of income dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer term effects of head start an early intervention program for poor preschool age children whites who attended head start are relative to their siblings who did not significantly more likely to complete high school attend college and possibly have higher earnings in their early twenties african americans who participated in head start are less likely to have been booked or charged with a crime there is some evidence of positive spillovers from older head start children to their younger siblings language en

on walrasian equilibrium for pool based electricity markets we present a single time period decentralized electricity market clearing model that includes reactive power and demand responsiveness in addition to the more common framework of generation side competition for the real power commodity the approach allows self interested agents namely producers and consumers independently to maximize their individual surpluses subject to prices this is consistent with the very notion of a competitive market as defined in equilibrium theory an auctioneer computes equilibrium prices that achieve power balance at every network node as required by kirchhoff s laws the overall scheme is justified by duality theory for which there is a rich theoretical support and convergence is achieved using a newton price updating algorithm

peer group effects and educational attainment abstract given the aims of an educational system the relationship between educational inputs and educational outputs the educational production function a frequency distribution of students by ability and a fixed educational budget how should students and educational expenditures be allocated over classrooms the paper focuses on peer group effects which capture the influence of a student s classmates on his educational attainment and the determinants of whether streaming or mixing is preferable it should be noted that peer group effects arise in other contexts notably in the workplace thus the paper casts some light on the optimal composition of teams

the impacts of the tax deferred exchange provision on farm real estate values this study examines the effects of the section 1031 tax deferred exchange provision on agricultural land values the provision allows taxpayers to defer taxation for relinquished productive assets if a like kind asset is acquired within the allotted time of 180 days the analysis examines a set of 3 580 farm real estate transaction from 55 agricultural counties in indiana over the period 2003 2006 hedonic price analysis suggests that properties acquired under a like kind exchange are associated with a 1 32 price premium jel h23 q15

moving to opportunity in boston early results of a randomized mobility experiment this paper examines the short run impacts of a change in residential neighborhood on the well being of low income families using evidence from a program in which eligibility for a housing voucher was determined by random lottery we examine the experiences of households at the boston site of moving to opportunity mto a demonstration program in five cities families in high poverty public housing projects applied to mto and were assigned by lottery to one of three groups experimental offered mobility counseling and a section 8 subsidy valid only in a census tract with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent section 8 comparison offered a geographically unrestricted section 8 subsidy or control offered no new assistance but continued to be eligible for public housing our quantitative analyses of program impacts uses data on 540 families from a baseline survey at program enrollment a follow up survey administered l to 3 5 years after random assignment and state administrative data on earnings and welfare receipt 48 percent of the experimental group and 62 percent of the section 8 comparison group moved through the mto program one to three years after program entry families in both treatment groups were more likely to be residing in neighborhoods with low poverty rates and high education levels than were families in the control group however while members of the experimental group were much more likely to be residing in suburban communities than were those in the section 8 group the lower program take up rate among the experimental group resulted in more families remaining in the most distressed communities households in both treatment groups experienced improvements in multiple measures of well being relative to the control group including increased safety improved health among household heads and fewer behavior problems among boys experimental group children were also less likely to be a victim of a personal crime to be injured or to experience an asthma attack there are no significant impacts of either mto treatment on the employment earnings or welfare receipt of household heads in the first three years after random assignment

sixty years after the magic carpet ride the long run effect of the early childhood environment on social and economic outcomes this paper estimates the effect of the early childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years to do this we exploit variation in the living conditions experienced by yemenite children after being airlifted to israel in 1949 we find that children who were placed in a more modern environment i e with better sanitary and infrastructure conditions were more likely to obtain higher education marry at an older age have fewer children and work at age 55 they were also more likely to be assimilated into israeli society to be less religious and have more worldly tastes in music and food however these effects are found mainly for women and not for men we also find an effect on the next generation children who lived in a better environment grew up to have children with more education

the long run consequences of living in a poor neighborhood author s oreopoulos philip abstract many social scientists presume that the quality of the neigborhood to which children are exposed affects a variety of long run social outcomes i examine the effect on the long run labor market outcomes of adults who were assigned when young to substantially different public housing projects in toronto administrative data are matched to public housing addresses to track children from the program for over 15 years the main finding is that neighborhood quality plays little role in determining a youth s adult earnings education attainment or welfare participation but does affect exposure to crime while living in contrasting housing projects cannot explain large variances in labor market outcomes family differences as measured by sibling outcome correlations account for up to 30 percent of the total variance in the data

existence and determination of competitive equilibrium in unit commitment power pool auctions price setting and scheduling alternatives the existence determination and effects of competitive market equilibrium for unit commitment power pool auctions are investigated in this paper when an equilibrium does not exist under specific situations conflictive multiple optimal primal solutions may exist when an equilibrium exists multiple primal solutions do not represent conflicts of interest the existence or nonexistence of competitive equilibrium can be determined if the dual problem is solved to optimality if equilibrium does not exist there is excess supply at the optimal dual solution which can be used to define priority orders and price setting alternatives to determine a final schedule and avoid the conflicts of interest and revenue deficiency under disequilibrium the optimal dual variables are not market clearing prices a nonuniform pricing rule that avoids the flaws and complications of other pricing rules such as maximum average cost and price minimization auctions is proposed in the paper the proposed scheduling and price setting alternatives show that unit commitment models can be used in a market environment

immigration regional conditions and crime evidence from an allocation policy in germany after the collapse of the soviet union more than 3 million people with german ancestors immigrated to germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic german immigrants by german authorities across regions upon arrival we find that immigration significantly increases crime the crime impact of immigration depends strongly on local labor market conditions with strong impacts in regions with high unemployment similarly we find substantially stronger effects in regions with high preexisting crime levels or large shares of foreigners

disease and development evidence from hookworm eradication in the american south this study evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the american south the hookworm eradication campaign c 1910 began soon after i the discovery that a variety of health problems among southerners could be attributed to the disease and ii the donation by john d rockefeller of a substantial sum to the effort the rockefeller sanitary commission rsc surveyed infection rates in the affected areas eleven southern states and found that an average of forty percent of school aged children were infected with hookworm the rsc then sponsored treatment and education campaigns across the region follow up studies indicate that this campaign substantially reduced hookworm disease almost immediately the sudden introduction of this treatment combines with the cross area differences in pre treatment infection rates to form the basis of the identification strategy areas with higher levels of hookworm infection prior to the rsc experienced greater increases in school enrollment attendance and literacy after the intervention this result is robust to controlling for a variety of alternative factors including differential trends across areas changing crop prices shifts in certain educational and health policies and the effect of malaria eradication no significant contemporaneous results are found for adults who should have benefited less from the intervention owing to their substantially lower prior infection rates a long term follow up of affected cohorts indicates a substantial gain in income that coincided with exposure to hookworm eradication i also find evidence that eradication increased the return to schooling

an oligopolistic model of an integrated market for energy and spinning reserve in this paper a model for oligopolistic competition in electricity markets is presented most previous proposed models have been static and focused only on the energy market incentives for strategic behavior in contrast in this paper a multiperiod market for energy and spinning reserve sr is considered by including such factors the competition among participants is modeled with more realism competition in the energy market is modeled by means of conjectured supply functions while conjectured reserve price response functions are used to consider the generators ability to alter the sr prices the resulting equilibrium problem is modeled in terms of complementarity conditions based upon a complementarity model the opportunity cost between the energy and sr markets is derived for oligopolistic markets the proposed model is illustrated by a six node network using a dc approximation

coordination in markets with nonconvexities as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints part ii case studies this paper is the second of a two paper series it is concerned with the numerical study of the solution procedure derived in to solve the coordination problem that arises in a new equilibrium model which for the purpose of this presentation applies to a static no time coupling costs or constraints electricity pool market with price inelastic demand and no network the new equilibrium model has the following main properties i every scheduled generator satisfies its minimum surplus or bid profit condition ii the energy price is a system marginal cost a lagrange multiplier associated with the power balance constraint in the related economic dispatch problem where all of the discrete variables are fixed to their optimal values iii the power balance and all of the generators technical constraints are satisfied we present some numerical results based on three test systems a simple three generating unit system that can be solved by hand a 32 generating unit system that consists of piecewise linear offer curves and a large system of 768 generating units with monotone and nonmonotone piecewise linear offer curves some of which are set as must run units the results demonstrate that the proposed procedure is more efficient than a heuristic approach both in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency

coordination in markets with nonconvexities as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints part i a solution procedure this paper is concerned with developing an algorithm for solving the coordination problem that arises in a new equilibrium model which for the purpose of this presentation applies to a static no time coupling costs or constraints electricity pool market with price inelastic demand and no network the new equilibrium model has the following main properties i every scheduled generator satisfies its minimum surplus or bid profit condition ii the energy price is a system marginal cost lagrange multiplier associated with the power balance constraint in the related economic dispatch problem where all of the discrete variables are fixed to their optimal values iii the power balance and all the generators technical constraints are satisfied to solve the coordination problem which is a subproblem of the new equilibrium model it is mathematically convenient to cast the former as a three level nested optimization problem we substitute the ensuing lower level subproblems with an equivalent set of explicit algebraic equalities and inequalities hence we obtain a one level problem which is a discrete continuous mathematical program with complementarity or equilibrium constraints mpec finally we transform the one level mathematical program into mixed integer linear form by substitution of the complementarity terms and the remaining nonlinear terms

do neighborhoods affect hours worked evidence from longitudinal data using a confidential version of the nlsy79 we estimate large effects of neighborhood social characteristics and job proximity on labor market activity a variety of neighborhood social characteristics are associated with less market work social characteristics have nonlinear effects with the greatest impact in the worst neighborhoods social characteristics are also more important for less educated workers exploiting the panel aspects of our data we find that estimates that do not account for neighborhood selection on the basis of time invariant and time varying unobserved individual characteristics substantially overstate the social effects of neighborhoods but understate the effects of job access

cities workers and wages a structural analysis of the urban wage premium workers earn higher wages in cities vs rural areas this gap could arise because cities make workers more productive or it could be the result of a non random selection of workers into cities based on their ability and their endogenous history of career choices to untangle these issues this paper estimates a dynamic programming model which embeds the choice of residing in a city or rural area within a model of career choices over time after controlling for all the sources of selection and endogeneity the estimates indicate that a given worker does earn more in the city for white collar work but not for blue collar work in addition city work experience is found to be worth more than rural work experience in the rural area for white collar work but not for blue collar work these results support the interpretation that cities make white collar workers more productive and suggest that workers may consider moving to the city not only in terms of locational choice but also as a form of human capital investment copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

a new pricing scheme for a multi period pool based electricity auction a new pricing scheme is proposed for determining the social welfare distribution in a centralized pool based auction in the context of solving the unit commitment problems under competition a significant contribution of this paper over previous publications on this subject is the inclusion of the price responsive demand side for the multi period auctions with dynamic commitment characteristics the model allows every thermal unit and every consumer to obtain individual maximum profits and at the same time it gives the market coordinator an adequate tool for solving the ensuing technologically constrained unit commitment problem with fair market clearing the pricing model is in the form of a mixed linear programming model that minimizes the sum of the compensation costs the accompanying case study illustrates the approach proposed

demand shifting bids in energy auction with non convexities and transmission constraints the major objective of this paper was to propose clearing and pricing models suitable for demand shifting bids in the efficient but non convex pool based auction complex generators offers bring non convexities into the efficient auctions due to e g start up costs and times this paper focused on the responsive demands introducing simple yet adequate linear constraints into a multi period bid offer based optimal power flow opf dc model as the standard locational marginal prices lmps may not support the auction outcomes due to non convexities uplifts are needed to reduce generators loss previous work has developed a minimum uplift pricing model that directly optimizes prices so that uplifts arising from generators profit suboptimality and simple elastic demands benefit suboptimality are minimized this work extended the mixed integer linear programming milp formulation of the previous model to incorporate new linear constraints defining benefit suboptimality of demand shifting bids furthermore the transmission constrained market was attempted as a result the buyers were protected against over curtailment moreover prices complemented with minimum uplifts were fair for both generators and demands the models were validated on the literature based cases including ieee rts 24 node 24 hour system

dual pricing algorithm in iso markets the challenge to create efficient market clearing prices in centralized day ahead electricity markets arises from inherent nonconvexities in unit commitment problems when this aspect is ignored marginal prices may result in economic losses to market participants who are part of the welfare maximizing solution in this essay we present an axiomatic approach to efficient prices and cost allocation for a revenue neutral and nonconfiscatory day ahead market current cost allocation practices do not adequately attribute costs based on transparent cost causation criteria instead we propose an ex post multipart pricing scheme which we refer to as the dual pricing algorithm our approach can be incorporated into current day ahead markets without altering the market equilibrium

on the solution of revenue and network constrained day ahead market clearing under marginal pricing part i an exact bilevel programming approach the first of this two paper series addresses a practical day ahead auction model where generation revenue constraints are explicitly incorporated in the problem formulation as routinely done in several national electricity markets across europe the revenue constrained market clearing procedure includes the effect of the transmission network inter temporal constraints associated with generation scheduling demand side bidding and marginal pricing this auction design is an instance of price based market clearing which features two major complicating factors first locational marginal prices become decision variables of the optimization process in addition producer revenues are formulated as bilinear and highly nonconvex products of power outputs and market clearing prices the resulting problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear bilevel program with bilinear terms for which available solution techniques rely on heuristics approximations or modeling simplifications this paper presents a novel and exact methodology whereby the original problem is recast as an equivalent single level mixed integer linear program as a consequence finite convergence to optimality is guaranteed and the use of standard commercial software is allowed the proposed transformation is based on duality theory of linear programming karush kuhn tucker optimality conditions and integer algebra results in the second part of this two paper series numerical results from several case studies illustrate the effective performance of the proposed solution approach

artificial power markets and unintended consequences administrative pricing rules that try to mimic economic equilibria often fail to capture the complexity of real markets and in that failure can distort incentives as much as or more than cost based pricing in this paper the authors provide three examples of the failure of administrative mechanisms meant to mimic a market two of those examples are very relevant to current debates over industry restructuring in each case the pricing rule fails to maximize social welfare even though in the last two examples production cost is minimized

women s schooling and fertility under low female labor force participation evidence from mobility restrictions in israel this paper studies the effect of mothers education on fertility in a mostly muslim population with very low female labor force participation we first show that a removal of travel restrictions on israeli arabs had raised female education and had almost no effect on male education next we show that it lowered fertility rates among exposed women which we interpret as an effect of female education on fertility we rule out labor force participation age at marriage marriage and divorce rates and spousal labor force participation and earnings as confounding factors or as mechanisms but find that spousal education and children quality play a role in the fertility decline we provide a variety of robustness tests that rule out other channels by which the removal of the travel restrictions could have affected fertility directly these results are particularly interesting and important for the context of many muslim countries with low rates of female labor force participation

understanding farmland price changes this paper develops a structural model of land prices which includes the multidimensional effects of inflation on capital erosion savings return erosion and real debt reduction as well as the effect of changes in the opportunity cost of capital the results show that inflation and changes in the real returns on capital are major explanatory factors in farmland price swings in addition to returns to farming additionally the effects of credit market constraints and expectations schemes are considered explicitly in the analytical model

education and human capital externalities evidence from colonial benin colonial benin we investigate the effect of education on living standards occupation and political participation since both school locations and student cohorts were selected with very little information treatment and control groups are balanced on observables we can therefore estimate the effect of education by comparing the treated to the untreated living in the same village as well as those living in villages where no schools were set up we find a significant positive treatment effect of education for the first generation of students as well as their descendants they have higher living standards are less likely to be farmers and are more likely to be politically active we find large village level externalities descendants of the uneducated in villages with schools do better than those in control villages we also find extended family externalities nephews and nieces directly benefit from their uncle s education and show that this represents a family tax as educated uncles transfer resources to the extended family

decentralized participation of flexible demand in electricity markets part i market mechanism in the deregulated power systems setting the realization of the significant demand flexibility potential should be coupled with its integration in electricity markets centralized market mechanisms raise communication computational and privacy issues while existing dynamic pricing schemes fail to realize the actual value of demand flexibility in this two part paper a novel day ahead pool market mechanism is proposed combining the solution optimality of centralized mechanisms with the decentralized demand participation structure of dynamic pricing schemes and based on lagrangian relaxation lr principles part i presents the theoretical background algorithmic approaches and suitable examples to address challenges associated with the application of the mechanism and provides an implementation framework non convexities in reschedulable demand participants price response and their impacts on the ability of the basic lr structure to reach feasible market clearing solutions are identified and a simple yet effective lr heuristic method is developed to produce both feasible and high quality solutions by limiting the concentrated shift of reschedulable demand to the same low priced time periods

network effects and welfare cultures we empirically examine the role of social networks in welfare participation using data on language spoken at home to better infer networks within an area our empirical strategy asks whether being surrounded by others who speak the same language increases welfare use more for those from high welfare using language groups this methodology allows us to include local area and language group fixed effects and to control for the direct effect of being surrounded by one s language group these controls eliminate many of the problems in previous studies the results strongly confirm the importance of networks in welfare participation

pricing electricity in pools with wind producers this paper considers an electricity pool that includes a significant number of wind producers and is cleared through a network constrained auction one day in advance and on an hourly basis the hourly auction is formulated as a two stage stochastic programming problem where the first stage represents the clearing of the market and the second stage models the system operation under a number of plausible wind production realizations this formulation co optimizes energy and reserve and allows deriving both pool energy prices and balancing energy prices these prices result in both cost recovery for producers and revenue reconciliation a case study of realistic size is used to illustrate the functioning of the proposed pricing scheme

ethnic enclaves and the economic success of immigrants evidence from a natural experiment recent immigrants tend to locate in ethnic enclaves within metropolitan areas the economic consequence of living in such enclaves is still an unresolved issue we use an immigrant policy initiative in sweden when government authorities distributed refugee immigrants across locales in a way that may be considered exogenous this policy initiative provides a unique natural experiment which allows us to estimate the causal effect on labor market outcomes of living in enclaves we find substantive evidence of sorting across locations when sorting is taken into account living in enclaves improves labor market outcomes for instance the earnings gain associated with a standard deviation increase in ethnic concentration is in the order of four to five percent

nodal uniform or zonal pricing distribution of economic surplus competitive markets for electricity determine either a uniform marginal price ump a set of nodal marginal prices nmps or a smaller set of zonal marginal prices zmps in theory the nmp system is best as it correctly accounts for transmission constraints and losses in some versions but critics allege that the large number of prices is confusing since the ump or zmp solution must be adjusted to account for transmission constraints and losses it is reasonable to consider a market design in which actual dispatch corresponds to an nmp model that accounts for losses and if a ump or zmp model is used at all it is only to compute prices for settlements and compensation for constrained on or off generation or load we prove that if used in this way the ump or zmp models a do not affect the total economic surplus b redistribute the surplus among generators and loads at the different nodes and c give perverse incentives for generation expansion we illustrate on a realistic system

consumer payment minimization in power pool auctions this paper presents a new methodology within the framework of centralized optimization for calculating optimal generation schedules that minimize energy payments by power pool consumers this paper addresses issues related to market structure and the operation of power pools such as bid evaluation generator no load and start up cost recovery generator unit operating constraints and market clearing price determination unlike conventional unit commitment algorithms that minimize total energy production costs the method presented here minimizes payments by power pool consumers a payment minimization objective leads to a different unit commitment and dispatch solution and lower market clearing prices additionally optimal allocation of generator no load and start up costs over the scheduling period is integrated in the bid evaluation process leading to a further reduction in consumer payments

immigrating to opportunity estimating the effect of school quality using a natural experiment on ethiopians in israel in may 1991 fifteen thousand ethiopian jews were brought to israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centers across the country this quasi random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of ethiopian children can be considered exogenous to their family background and parental decisions we examine the extent to which the initial elementary school environment affected the high school outcomes of ethiopian children using administrative panel data on the educational career of each child in israel through much of the 1990s the results show that the early schooling environment has an important effect on high school dropout rates repetition rates and the passing rate on matriculation exams necessary to enter college the results are robust to using alternative measures of the schooling environment and to the inclusion of community fixed effects which suggests that aspects of the elementary school itself are important for high school success

discussion of equilibrium of auction markets with unit commitment the need for augmented pricing the author comments on the paper by l alexis et al see ibid vol 17 p 798 805 2002 the author asks alexis et al to comment on the two additional issues regarding the applicability of the approach

ethnic concentration and language fluency of immigrants evidence from the guest worker placement in germany this paper analyses the impact of regional ethnic concentration on the language proficiency and language use of immigrants it solves the endogeneity of immigrants location choices by exploiting a peculiar episode of the german immigration history the exogenous placement of guest workers after wwii one of the largest guest worker programs on record the econometric approach accounts for several sources of measurement error and provides a falsification exercise that hypothetically relocates the most language proficient immigrants into ethnic enclaves to test the extent of cross regional sorting necessary to render the results purely spurious the results show a robust negative effect of ethnic concentration on immigrants language ability which is driven by differences in contact rates with natives and not by differences in the willingness to integrate the paper discusses these findings against the background of a language production function and in the light of feasible policy options to foster the language acquisition of immigrants

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

desegregation and black dropout rates in 1954 the united states supreme court ruled that separate schools for black and white children were inherently unequal this paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years benefited black and white students in desegregated school districts data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses suggest desegregation plans of the 1970 s reduced high school dropout rates of blacks by two to three percentage points during this decade no significant change is observed among whites the results are robust to controls for family income parental education and state and region specific trends as well as to tests for selective migration

a stochastic programming model for a day ahead electricity market with real time reserve shortage pricing we present a multi period stochastic mixed integer programming model for power generation scheduling in a day ahead electricity market the model considers various scenarios and integrates the idea of reserve shortage pricing in real time instead of including all the possible scenarios we parsimoniously select a certain number of scenarios to limit the size of the model as realistic size models are still intractable for exact methods we propose a heuristic solution methodology based on scenario rolling that is capable of finding good quality feasible solutions within reasonable computation time

the value of free water analyzing south africa s free basic water policy this paper analyzes south africa s free basic water policy under which households receive a free water allowance equal to the world health organization s recommended minimum of 6 kiloliters per month i structurally estimate residential water demand evaluate the welfare eects of free water and provide optimal price schedules derived from a social planner s problem i use a unique dataset of monthly metered billing data for 60 000 households for 2002 2008 from a particularly disadvantaged suburb of pretoria the dataset contains rich price variation across 18 dierent nonlinear tarischedules and includes a policy experiment which removed the free allowance i nd that without government subsidy the mean monthly consumption would decrease from 12 6 to 5 6 kiloliters which is below the clean water consumption recommended by the who however it is possible to reallocate the current subsidy to form an optimal tari without a free allowance which would increase welfare while leaving the water provider s revenue unchanged this optimal tariwould also reduce the number of households consuming below the who recommended level

network constrained day ahead auction for consumer payment minimization this paper presents an alternative day ahead auction based on consumer payment minimization for pool based electricity markets this auction is an instance of price based market clearing wherein market clearing prices are explicitly modeled as decision variables of the optimization the auction design includes network constraints inter temporal constraints associated with generation scheduling and marginal pricing hence consumer payment is expressed in terms of locational marginal prices the proposed solution approach is based on bilevel programming in the upper level optimization generation is scheduled with the goal of minimizing the total consumer payment while taking into account that locational marginal prices are determined by a multiperiod optimal power flow in the lower level in this bilevel programming setting locational marginal prices are the lagrange multipliers or dual variables associated with the nodal power balance equations of the lower level problem the resulting mixed integer linear bilevel program is transformed into an equivalent single level mixed integer linear program suitable for efficient off the shelf software this transformation relies on the application of results from duality theory of linear programming and integer algebra the proposed methodology has been successfully applied to several test systems including the ieee 118 bus system numerical results have been compared with those obtained from declared social welfare maximization

auction implementation problems using lagrangian relaxation lagrangian relaxation lr is used as an auction method for bidding in a deregulated environment this paper focuses on the problems that occur while using lr as an auction method identical or similar units can prevent lr from finding the optimal solution if the units are similar lr may have trouble selecting some of them for the optimal solution a feasible solution may thus not be found since a heuristic selection of which unit data to alter has to be applied this is inequitable to the unit s not selected and may result in lawsuit s because the dispatcher has to use heuristic selection there is no fair solution to these problems the authors suggest previously published methods to implement auctions sensitivity analysis has also been applied in this paper to show that the percentage difference of similarity between units may affect the solution found

unit commitment with dual variable constraints a new unit commitment model is proposed for market economies with some form of indivisibilities nonconvexities coordination in electricity pool auction markets with unit commitment is a conspicuous example this presentation applies to a single time period unit commitment with no network the new formulation includes a market coordinator who collects the sale and purchase bids and determines the optimal solution that balances the total generation with the forecast demand a solution to the new commitment model is said to be optimal if it maximizes the monetary margin of every accepted production unit while minimizing the sum of the margins of the unaccepted units that would achieve positive margins at the prevailing market price the new unit commitment model produces a market price that is the system wide marginal bid cost some preliminary results are reported considering the single period unit commitment problem which provide some insights into the adequacy of the proposed approach as well as its economic implications as a tool for managing restructured energy systems

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

the intrahousehold demand for nutrients in rural south india individual estimates fixed effects and permanent income good estimates of nutrient intake responses to prices and income are very useful for the evaluation of the numerous efforts to improve nutrition in many developing countries through pricesubsidy and income generation policies we discuss three problems in standard estimates of these responses and then illustrate their implications for nutrient demand relations for a poor sample from rural south india 1 intra household nutrient allocations usually are ignored in this case nutrient intakes for females systematically have algebraically lower price elasticities than do those for males which may leave the females particularly vulnerable at times of food shortages 2 unobserved fixed effects may bias the estimates of responses to observed variables in this case not only the community fixed effects on which the previous literature has focused but also household and individual fixed effects are important failure to control for them results in substantial algebraically upward biases in many estimated price responses 3 most previous studies use current instead of permanent income which a priori may account for the low estimated income elasticities in this case however the use of permanent income does not change the conclusion that the nutrient intakes responses to income are quite small

uniform and non uniform second best input taxes we investigate second best input based taxes foragricultural nonpoint pollution control when marketprices are endogenous and production isheterogeneous theoretically we derive the optimalforms of taxes which take account of heterogeneity non uniform taxes and a tax which does not auniform tax empirically we use a multi factor market equilibrium simulation model to determineoptimal tax rates and associated equity effects particularly differences in landowner gains lossesacross a heterogeneous region when market prices areendogenous second best tax policies result inpecuniary externalities that affect existingenvironmental externalities in particular thepecuniary externalities amplify the effect of producerheterogeneity on determination of sub regionaldifferences in tax rates and returns to land particularly for the uniform policy with endogenousprices the uniform tax rate is considerably higherthan any of the non uniform rates and ironically thenon uniform taxes result in less dispersion oflandowner gains across sub regions than the uniformtax

books are forever early life conditions education and lifetime earnings in europe we estimate the effect of education on lifetime earnings by distinguishing between individuals who lived in rural or urban areas during childhood and between individuals with access to many or few books at home at age 10 we instrument years of education using compulsory school reforms and find that whereas individuals in rural areas were most affected by the reforms those with many books enjoyed substantially higher returns to their additional education we show that books retain explanatory power even when we select relatively homogeneous groups in terms of the economic position of the household

generation scheduling and the switching curve law the switching curve law is an analytic procedure derived from the dual of the lagrangian relaxation approach to the static unit commitment suc problem it is argued here that this analytic result provides a new understanding of the general unit commitment problem not otherwise possible from numerical methods moreover the suc problem and the analytic results presented here have direct applications in the scheduling of hydro generation in power plants and in the interpretation of the pricing rules of the england and wales power pool

under the weather health schooling and economic consequences of early life rainfall life in rural areas of developing countries is prone to many kinds of risk such as illness or mortality of household members crop or other income loss due to natural phenomena weather insect infestations or fire for example and civil conflict in addition to their contemporaneous effects the effects of certain types of shocks may still be felt many years or even decades later from a public policy standpoint it is particularly important to identify shocks that have large long run effects moreover the mechanics underlying the persistence of shocks may be of con siderable interest for example a health shock may have a long run effect simply because the health shock itself persists over time alternately the health shock may not directly affect long run outcomes but it could affect some other outcome such as educational attainment that helps determine long run well being in this paper we focus on shocks that occur at the very beginning of life we ask how sensi tive long run individual well being is to environmental conditions around the time of birth in particular we examine the effect of weather shocks around the time of birth on the adult health education and socioeconomic outcomes of indonesian women and men born between 1953 and 1974 in addition we attempt to shed light on the intervening pathways connecting early life rainfall to adult outcomes illuminating the roles of health and educational attainment in deter mining adult socioeconomic status this investigation has considerable data requirements it necessitates information on weather shocks experienced by individuals several decades earlier as well as detailed current informa tion on adult outcomes we use information in the indonesian family life surveys ifls on an individual s year and location of birth and link each individual in that survey to locality specific rainfall data for their birth year for individuals born in rural areas on whom we focus rainfall variation across space and time should generate corresponding variation in agricultural output and thus household income to deal with measurement error in the rainfall data we run instrumental variables regressions where variables for rainfall measured at slightly more distant rainfall stations serve as instruments for rainfall in the individual s birthplace and birth year we examine the impact of early life rainfall on a range of adult outcomes observed in 2000 we find that higher early life rainfall leads to improved health schooling and socioeconomic status for women women with 20 percent higher rainfall relative to normal local rainfall in their year and location of birth are 3 8 percentage points less likely to self report poor or very poor health they attain 0 57 centimeters greater height attain 0 22 more completed grades of

economic inefficiencies and cross subsidies in an auction based electricity pool this paper compares two contrasting yet often used electricity market clearing procedures i an auction based algorithm including congestion management and transmission loss cost allocation and ii an optimal power flow the auction procedure produces a single period unit commitment and hence can be compared directly to an optimal power flow solution these algorithms are compared in terms of the economic efficiency of the solution attained and in terms of cross subsidies among generators and demands the purpose of this comparison is to quantify the actual cost to market participants of using a simple seemingly transparent procedure such as an auction based algorithm versus an integrated but computationally intensive one such as an optimal power flow

agri environmental policies in the eu and united states a comparison abstract agri environmental policies aeps in the united states and the european union are examples of payments for environmental services that pay farmers to reduce the negative externalities of agricultural production while serving as a means to transfer public funds to farmers we show that despite similar origins aeps in the two regions differ both in their specific objectives and in their implementation for example aeps in most member states of the eu 15 have the additional objective of using agriculture as a driver for rural development this objective is achieved by compensating farmers for the private delivery of positive public goods such as attractive landscapes produced by agriculture the rationale is market failure and there is empirical evidence that europeans are willing to pay for such positive externalities no comparable provision exists in u s policy by contrast u s aeps focus almost entirely on reducing agriculture s negative externalities such as soil erosion second we find that u s programs are more targeted than their eu counterparts and take opportunity cost into account the eu programs on the other hand address a wider range of externalities and are focused more on the paying for a particular farming process than reducing specific negative externalities the eu takes a broader view of aeps than does the united states both in terms of type of activity that can be funded and by using less targeting by land characteristics and so the european program could be more easily used as a mechanism for transferring income to producers despite this we find evidence that many of the amenities targeted by the programs are demanded by the population

direct minimum uplift model for pricing pool based auction with network constraints auctions with non convexities as considered in this paper use a multi period optimal power flow opf model based on generators offers to calculate efficient schedules the standard locational marginal prices lmps may not support these schedules and uplifts are needed to help the generators break even this paper presents a direct minimum uplift dmu pricing model which is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem with uplift minimization objective new dmu prices are major variables constrained with decomposition formula based on shift factors similar to the actual practice of developing lmps the remaining constraints reflect the generators profits and uplifts modeled as functions of the dmu prices the main feature of the dmu model is individual rationality attained in pool based auction under prices properly reflecting network constraints complemented with minimum uplifts the model is validated on several cases including the ieee 24 node system

education expenditure responses to crop loss in indonesia a gender bias this paper examines the impact of transitory income on educational expenditure using data from the 1993 indonesian family life survey covering a sample of 7224 households across 13 provinces in indonesia also it investigates whether households are able to smooth consumption several assumptions were made in this paper first it obtains estimates of permanent and transitory income second it studies the educational expenditure instead of the total expenditure or savings third it examines gender differences in educational expenditure after crop loss overall data show that the self reported measures that the respondents took to overcome crop loss suggest that not all farm households are capable of smoothing consumption in the face of income shocks of the households that reported a crop loss in 1993 34 reported that they cut expenditure which may be due to lack of access to credit markets or labor markets considering the socially valuable category of educational expenditure it is noted that the households reporting a cutback on expenditure have a marginal propensity to consume education the estimate of the marginal propensity to spend on education out of transitory income is 0 822 and strongly significant for households that reported cutting back on expenditure and having girls of school age this research suggests that providing subsidies for girls education may be a suitable way of targeting educational policies