cost efficiency and optimal scale of electricity distribution firms in taiwan an application of metafrontier analysis abstract this paper analyzes the cost efficiency and optimal scale of taiwan s electricity distribution industry due to the substantial difference in network density firms may differ widely in production technology we employ the stochastic metafrontier approach to estimate the cost efficiency of 24 distribution units during the period 1997 2002 empirical results find that the average cost efficiency is overestimated using the traditional stochastic frontier model especially for low density regions the average cost efficiency of the high density group is significantly higher than that of the low density group as it benefits from network economies this study also calculates both short term and long term optimal scales of electricity distribution firms lending policy implications for the deregulation of the electricity distribution industry

economic determinants of free trade agreements abstract the purpose of this study is to provide the first systematic empirical analysis of the economic determinants of the formation of free trade agreements ftas and of the likelihood of ftas between pairs of countries using a qualitative choice model we develop this econometric model based upon a general equilibrium model of world trade with two factors of production two monopolistically competitive product markets and explicit intercontinental and intracontinental transportation costs among multiple countries on multiple continents the empirical model correctly predicts based solely upon economic characteristics 85 of the 286 ftas existing in 1996 among 1431 pairs of countries and 97 of the remaining 1145 pairs with no ftas

what determines bits abstract similar to bilateral or regional preferential trade agreements ptas bilateral investment treaties bits have proliferated over the past 50 years the purpose of this study is to provide the first systematic empirical analysis of the economic determinants of bits and of the likelihood of bits between pairs of countries using a qualitative choice model in a manner consistent with explaining ptas we develop the econometric specification for explaining the two based upon a general equilibrium model of world trade and foreign direct investment with three factors two products and trade and investment costs among multiple countries in the presence of national and multinational firms the empirical model for bits and ptas is bivariate in nature and supports a set of hypotheses drawn from the general equilibrium model using the preferred empirical model for a sample of 12 880 country pairs in the year 2000 we predict correctly 88 of all pairs with a bit and a pta 81 with a bit but no pta and 84 with a pta but no bit

futures prices on yields forward prices and implied forward prices from term structure when futures contracts are settled with respect to underlying asset prices received theory suggests that the differences between futures prices and implied forward prices from the term structure are strictly due to marking to market ceteris paribus empirical evidence appears to indicate that such differences are small for contracts with short maturities what happens when the futures contract settles to yields implied by future prices of underlying assets the eurodollar futures contract which is the most actively traded futures contract in the united states settles to yield as opposed to prices this unique settlement feature is shown to imply that the implied forward prices from the libor term structure should differ from the futures prices even in the absence of marking to market differences due to marking to market effect are small they are shown to vary between 2 to 45 basis points less than one half percent of futures prices on the other hand differences between implied forward prices and futures prices are shown to be relatively large

assessment of the economic impacts of continuous energy intensity target constraint in china based on an analytical general equilibrium model abstract based on the framework of analytical general equilibrium model this study builds an energy intensity target eit constraint model and simulates the impacts of continuous eit constraint policy on the fossil fuel production ffp sector non fossil fuel production nffp sector household sector and price system in china the main findings of this paper are firstly the eit constraint can change the marginal products and the cross price elasticities of input factors secondly stricter eit constraint can transfer capital and labor inputs from the ffp sector to the nffp sector and lead to a contractionary effect in the ffp sector shown as declining inputs and output the contractionary effect will decline gradually or even fade away if the eit constraint is gradually reduced thirdly if the total capital and labor inputs in the whole economy continue to grow at certain rates along with the weakening of the eit constraint the reduction in energy input and the growth of capital and labor inputs in the nffp sector will slow down however the growth rates of output and intermediate input will increase continuously fourthly the eit constraint has negative impacts on the nffp sector price system and household consumption but these impacts are affordable to the whole economy if the eit constraint is loosened under a certain level it may not curb the growth of fossil fuel consumption anymore therefore other supporting policies for energy conservation must be in place

market trading structures and asset pricing evidence from the treasury bill markets earlier studies report signfficant price disparities betweenfutures andforward or spot markets examining the treasury bill markets this article demonstrates that differences in market trading structures explain these disparities treasury billfutures rates contain significantly lower liquidity and default premia than do syntheticforward rates this reflects the functioning of a futures clearing association and differences between an open outcry auction futures market and an over the counter dealer spot market the same factors that make futures contracts nonredundant securities also explain the existence in equilibrium of price disparities

optimal currency risk hedging abstract this paper investigates the optimal hedging strategy of a domestic expected utility maximizer endowed with a temporarily non traded position in a foreign investment the domestic and foreign yield curves the exchange rate between the two involved currencies and the foreign investment value are stochastic and obey fairly general diffusion processes we compare the hedger s optimal strategies using either exchange rate forward contracts or futures contracts for both strategies the optimal number of contracts held can be broken down into several components having clear economic interpretations however while futures contracts are known in such a context to be more difficult to price than their forward counterparts the optimal strategy using them is simpler this is due to the fact that when forward contracts are used incurred profits or losses that accrue to the investor s wealth at each instant are locked in in the forward position up to the contract maturity thus discounting these gains or losses back at the current date brings about an interest rate risk therefore the investor s hedging strategy itself generates an additional risk which in turn induces the need for additional hedging the magnitude of the difference between the two hedge ratios may be significant under a set of plausible assumptions since in general financial markets are not complete the additional interest rate risk cannot be perfectly hedged hence the marking to market mechanism that characterizes futures contracts and allows for the complete elimination of this risk is valuable for risk averse agents

relative pricing of eurodollar futures and forward contracts past research explains observed spreads between futures and forward eurodollar yields as being due to the futures contract s mark to market feature we derive closed form solutions for this yield spread and show that theoretically it should be small also differences in liquidity taxation and default risk cannot account for the large spreads observed we also present evidence that the spreads which are nonnegligible primarily in the first half of the sample period are likely to be attributable to the mispricing of futures contracts relative to the forward rates and that the mispricing was gradually eliminated over time

estimating the effects of free trade agreements on international trade flows using matching econometrics abstract this paper provides the first cross section estimates of long run treatment effects of free trade agreements on members bilateral international trade flows using nonparametric matching econometrics our nonparametric cross section estimates of ex post long run treatment effects are much more stable across years and have more economically plausible values than corresponding ols cross section estimates from typical gravity equations we provide plausible estimates of the long run effects of membership in the original european economic community eec and the central american common market cacm between 1960 and 2000 and the estimates confirm anecdotal reports of these agreements effectiveness

on the relationship between the breadth of preferential trading arrangements and trade flows this paper uses matching econometrics to extend the literature investigating the impact of preferential trading arrangements ptas on goods trade flows heterogeneity in ptas is accounted for through a provision count index derived from data provided in a recent world bank study pta formation now involves two separate sequential decisions first whether two trading partners should form a pta and second if they do how broad that agreement should be we find our explanatory variables are significant for both decisions but often have opposing effects on each using matched pta and non pta groups of country pairs we estimate a dose response function which indicates that arrangements with few provisions and arrangements with many provisions do not appear to have a significant impact on goods trade flows between their members ptas in an intermediate range are shown to have a significant positive effect we then relate these outcomes to the actual content of the ptas using the concept of provision intensity

efficiency analysis of chinese industry a directional distance function approach two efficiency measures of chinese industry were estimated at the provincial level from 1994 to 2002 using a directional output distance function one is a traditional efficiency measure that considers only desirable output while the other considers both desirable and undesirable outputs simultaneously a comparison of the two measures revealed that efficiency levels are biased only if desirable output is considered five coastal provinces municipalities that have attracted a large amount of foreign direct investment are found to be the most efficient when only desirable output is considered and also when both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered however omitting undesirable output tends to lead to an overestimate of industrial efficiency levels in shandong sichuan and hebei provinces we also found that a province s industrial structure has significant effects on its efficiency levels

energy efficiency in china s iron and steel industry evidence and policy implications abstract currently the iron and steel industry isi accounts for more than 16 of china s total energy consumption improving energy efficiency ee and promoting energy savings in this industry have vital significance for china s further sustainable development using provincial panel data from 2000 to 2014 and meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper investigates ee and the energy saving potential ep of china s isi by considering regional technology heterogeneities the results show that 1 from 2001 to 2014 ee in china s isi achieved significant improvement technological progress is the most powerful driving factor while the declines in scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency are two obstructive factors 2 the sources of energy inefficiency ei show distinct spatial difference characteristics ei in the eastern region mainly stems from scale inefficiency and pure technical inefficiency while that in the central and western regions stems from three aspects of scale inefficiency pure technical inefficiency and technology gap and 3 there is considerable ep in china s isi which represents nearly 80 of isi s current total energy consumption because the sources of ep vary across regions the focus of future work for china s regional isi should also vary

does market based electricity price affect china s energy efficiency abstract china is in a critical period of market oriented reform and energy transition as a crucial means to regulate supply and demand under the market oriented mechanism the electricity price can promote the development of energy efficiency by optimizing resource allocation with the gradual increase in electricity consumption the influence of its price on energy consumption is also gradually enhanced therefore this paper evaluated the process of electricity price marketization and conducted a spatial temporal comparative analysis of the effect of electricity price on energy efficiency by controlling economic policy and other price factors the results show that 1 the marketization degree of china s electricity price has improved with steady steps 2 market oriented electricity price has a stable positive correlation with energy efficiency in both the short and long term 3 marketization improves the promotion effect of electricity price on energy efficiency and the influence of electricity price is more significant in the eastern region with a high degree of marketization and the subsequent stage 4 the impact of market oriented electricity price on energy efficiency is asymmetric the impulse response under positive and negative shock is opposite and under the positive shock the response time is longer and the degree is greater

examining the cost efficiency of chinese hydroelectric companies using a finite mixture model this paper evaluates the operational activities of chinese hydroelectric power companies over the period 2000 2010 using a finite mixture model that controls for unobserved heterogeneity in so doing a stochastic frontier latent class model which allows for the existence of different technologies is adopted to estimate cost frontiers this procedure not only enables us to identify different groups among the hydro power companies analysed but also permits the analysis of their cost efficiency the main result is that three groups are identified in the sample each equipped with different technologies suggesting that distinct business strategies need to be adapted to the characteristics of china s hydro power companies some managerial implications are developed

efficiency analysis of hydroelectric generating plants a case study for portugal abstract this paper estimates changes in total productivity breaking this down into technically efficient change and technological change by means of data envelopment analysis dea applied to the hydroelectric energy generating plants of edp the portugal electricity company the aim of this procedure is to seek out those best practices that will lead to improved performance in the energy market we rank the plants according to their change in total productivity for the period 2001 2004 concluding that some plants experienced productivity growth while others experienced a decrease in productivity the implications arising from the study are that edp should adopt an internal benchmark management procedure in order to evaluate the relative position of each hydroelectric generating plant and to adopt managerial strategies designed to catch up with the frontier of best practices as the frontier is shifting along the time constant efforts are needed in this respect along the time

the approach to realizing the potential of emissions reduction in china an implication from data envelopment analysis abstract by proposing a three hierarchy meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper first decomposes co 2 emissions efficiency and the potential for emissions reduction into the following three components structural technical and management based on these components we then conduct an empirical analysis of china s total factor co 2 emissions efficiency its potential for co 2 emissions reduction and its corresponding implementation path the results show that co 2 emissions efficiency in mainland china is relatively low because of structural inefficiency technical inefficiency and management inefficiency the chinese government is expected to realize a large quantity of co 2 emissions reduction potential nearly 40 of the current total co 2 emissions through adjusting the industrial structure narrowing the technology gap among regions promoting the reform of marketization and strengthening environmental regulation the causes of co 2 emissions inefficiency and the distribution of potential reductions in emissions show a distinct spatial difference characteristic therefore this paper also formulates emissions reduction strategies for china s 30 provinces according to their specific situations noting the direction of the industrial structure adjustment and the path to improving co 2 emissions efficiency

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

does the popularization of agricultural mechanization improve energy environment performance in china s agricultural sector abstract environmental problems caused by the rapid popularization of agricultural mechanization and the increase of energy input in china s agricultural production have caused increasing concern based on the study sample of china s 30 provinces from 2000 to 2017 this paper estimates the energy environment performance of agricultural sector using the global dea method furthermore it applied a panel tobit model based on censored data to empirically analyze the impact of popularization of mechanization on energy environment performance in china s agricultural sector the main findings are as follows firstly the mean value of energy environment performance is 0 1842 and the values of national and regional performance showed a downward trend in the sample period indicating that most regions in china s agricultural sector did not perform well in terms of energy saving and pollution control secondly the development of agricultural mechanization has a significant negative effect on energy environment performance this result confirms the fact that the regions with high penetration rates of agricultural mechanization usually have a low energy environment performance finally in regard to the control variables energy price reservoir infrastructure construction and agricultural industrial structure negatively affect energy environment performance while the agricultural labor force and agricultural mechanization service organizations have a positive effect on china s energy environment performance

national research funding and energy efficiency evidence from the national science foundation of china abstract the enhancement of energy efficiency is crucial to saving energy and reducing pollution emissions increasing investment in basic research may promote innovative energy technologies that improve energy efficiency in this paper the authors employ a stochastic frontier analysis to evaluate the impact of government funded research programs on improving national energy efficiency using estimates of energy efficiency based on the shepherd energy distance function the analysis used panel data from 30 provinces in china over the 2006 2015 period using the number of research programs funded by the national natural science foundation of china nsfc as a proxy the results show that research funding has a significantly negative effect on energy inefficiency the average energy efficiency continually increased from 2006 to 2015 in china while the energy efficiency in the eastern region was higher than that in the central and western regions in most years moreover a robustness test further validates and supports these findings some policy implications are proposed based on the empirical results

efficient energy saving targets for apec economies abstract energy saving target ratios estr for 17 apec economies during 1991 2000 are computed in a total factor framework all nominal variables are transformed into real variables by the purchasing power parity ppp at the 1995 price level the data envelopment analysis dea approach is used to find the energy saving target est for apec economies without reducing their maximum potential gross domestic productions gdps in each year energy labor and capital are the three inputs while gdp is the single output our major findings are as follows 1 china has the largest est up to almost half of its current usage 2 hong kong the philippines and the united states have the highest energy efficiency 3 the energy efficiency generally increases for apec economies except for canada and new zealand 4 chile mexico and taiwan have significantly improved their energy efficiency in the last 5 years 5 an inverted u shape relation exists between per capita est and per capita gdp 6 estr has a positive relation with the value added percentage of gdp of the industry sector and a negative relation with that of the service sector

a metafrontier approach for measuring an environmentally sensitive productivity growth index this paper presents an alternative environmentally sensitive productivity growth index to incorporate group heterogeneities into a conventional malmquist luenberger productivity growth index the p

the impact of collateralization on swap rates interest rate swap pricing theory traditionally views swaps as a portfolio of forward contracts with net swap payments discounted at libor rates in practice the use of marking to market and collateralization questions this view as they introduce intermediate cash flows and alter credit characteristics we provide a swap valuation theory under marking to market and costly collateral and examine the theory s empirical implications we find evidence consistent with costly collateral using two different approaches the first uses single factor models and eurodollar futures prices and the second uses a formal term structure model and treasury swap data the traditional approach to interest rate swap valuation sundaresan 1991a and duffie and singleton 1997 treats a swap as a portfolio of forward contracts on the underlying floating interest rate under specific assumptions regarding the nature of default and the credit risk of the counterparties duffie and singleton 1997 prove that swap rates are par bond rates of an issuer who remains at libor quality throughout the life of the contract this result is extremely useful for extracting zero coupon bond prices pricing swap derivatives and testing spot rate models despite the popularity of the traditional view market practice brings into question some of the underlying assumptions of this approach as the swap market rapidly grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s an increasingly diverse group of counterparties entered the market to mitigate their exposure to counterparty credit risk market participants began using a number of credit enhancements to improve the credit quality of swap contracts without question the most important credit enhancement is the posting of collateral in the amount of the current mark to market value of the swap contract isda 1999 due to these credit enhancements market participants commonly view interest rate swaps as free of counterparty default risk see e g tuckman 2002 this implies that in contrast to the traditional approach swap rates should be discounted not at default risky libor rates but rather at default free rates johannes and sundaresan are with the columbia business school we thank seminar partici

ecological total factor energy efficiency of regions in china most existing energy efficiency indices are computed without taking into account undesirable outputs such as co2 and so2 emissions this paper computes the ecological total factor energy efficiency etfee of 30 regions in china for the period 2005 2009 through the slack based model sbm with undesirable outputs we calculate the etfee index by comparing the target energy input obtained from sbm with undesirable outputs to the actual energy input findings show that china s regional etfee still remains a low level of around 0 600 and regional energy efficiency is overestimated by more than 0 100 when not looking at environmental impacts china s regional energy efficiency is extremely unbalanced the east area ranks first with the highest etfee of above 0 700 the northeast and central areas follow and the west area has the lowest etfee of less than 0 500 a monotone increasing relation exists between the area s etfee and china s per capita gdp the truncated regression model shows that the ratio of r d expenditure to gdp and the degree of foreign dependence have positive impacts whereas the ratio of the secondary industry to gdp and the ratio of government subsidies for industrial pollution treatment to gdp have negative effects on the etfee

technological gap scale economy and china s industrial energy demand abstract the industrial sector in china is energy intensive and accounts for more than 60 of the nation s total energy consumption demand narrating the story behind the growth of china s industrial energy consumption could help us understand the past and prepare for the future this paper aims to investigate the factors affecting china s industrial energy consumption in the 21st century by using an extended production theoretical decomposition approach pda with considering the technological gap and scale of the economy effects the new proposed decomposition framework includes four new factors namely the energy technological gap the output technological gap energy scale efficiency and output scale efficiency the results show that in the 21st century the energy consumption of china s industry increased by more than one billion tons of standard coal the expansion of the industrial economy is a dominant driver of china s industrial energy consumption while potential energy intensity energy technology and output technology are the three largest energy saving factors in addition to the conventional factors the newly proposed factors also have important effects on china s industrial energy consumption specifically output scale efficiency is an energy saving factor while the energy technological gap output technological gap and energy scale efficiency are drivers of energy consumption this suggests that china s industry is at the stage of returns to scale that is beneficial to output performance but harmful to energy performance meanwhile the widening of the industrial technological gaps has negative impacts on china s industrial energy conservation the proposed decomposition approach can provide information that cannot be obtained from traditional approaches and it can also be applied to many other cases for investigating feasible paths of energy saving and emissions reduction

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

technical efficiency shadow price of carbon dioxide emissions and substitutability for energy in the chinese manufacturing industries abstract china is the world s largest co 2 producer and energy consumer in this paper we calculate the maximum technically obtainable co 2 emissions reduction from the efficient use of inputs and estimate the shadow prices of co 2 emissions in order to assess the potential cost savings deriving from trading emissions among industries by measuring the input distance function for 30 chinese manufacturing industries our empirical results indicate that co 2 emissions could be reduced by as much as 680 million tons in the aggregate the shadow prices of co 2 vary from a high of 18 82 to a low of zero across industries with an average of 3 13 per ton additionally the estimated indirect morishima elasticities of substitution of capital for fossil fuels indicate that the substitutabilities of capital for oil gas and coal are higher than the substitutability for labor

the measurement and influences of china s urban total factor energy efficiency under environmental pollution based on the game cross efficiency dea abstract in recent years urban energy efficiency has received much attention from researchers however ignorance of the competitive relationships among regions results in inaccurate energy efficiency game cross efficiency data envelopment analysis dea which can account for the competitive relationships is a reliable method to measure energy efficiency first this paper applies game cross efficiency dea to analyze the urban total factor energy efficiency utfee of 26 chinese prefectural level cities from 2005 to 2015 under environmental constraints then a comparative analysis and a concrete analysis are conducted based on the urban energy efficiency finally a tobit model is used to examine the effects of 10 potential influence factors the measurement results show that the urban energy efficiency considering the competitive relationship is lower than the traditionally calculated efficiency additionally the urban energy efficiency did not improve during the research period furthermore regression analysis suggests that economic development and city scale can promote urban energy efficiency while government expenditure industrial structures energy prices foreign investments research investments and production endowment have negative impacts on urban energy efficiency according to our results some implications of theory and practice are discussed for researchers and policy makers

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

an empirical examination of the convexity bias in the pricing of interest rate swaps abstract this paper examines the convexity bias caused by the non linearity of payoffs in the pricing of interest rate swaps off the eurocurrency futures curve the evidence from four major currencies dm and during 1987 1996 suggests that swaps were initially being priced off the futures curve ignoring the convexity adjustment subsequently the market swap rates drifted below the rates implied by futures prices after rejecting alternative explanations we use alternative term structure models to show that the convexity bias is related to the empirically observed swap futures differential we interpret these results as evidence of mispricing of swap contracts during the early years which was eliminated over time

a comparison of futures and forward prices abstract this paper uses the pricing models of cox ingersoll and ross 1981 richard and sundaresan 1981 and french 1982 to examine the relation between futures and forward prices for copper and silver there are significant differences between these prices the average differences are generally consistent with the predictions of the futures and forward price models however these models are not helpful in describing intra sample variations in the futures forward price differences this failure is apparently caused by measurement errors in both the price differences and in the explanatory variables

what induced china s energy intensity to fluctuate 1997 2006 abstract china is the second largest energy consumer in the world during 1997 2002 china s energy intensity declined by 33 however it rose by 10 7 over 2003 2005 and declined by 1 2 in 2006 what induced china s energy intensity to fluctuate so drastically industry accounts for approximately 70 of the total energy consumption in china in this paper we decompose china s industrial energy intensity changes between 1997 and 2002 into sectoral structural effects and efficiency effects measured by sectoral energy intensities at two digit level and including the shifts of product mix in the sub sector or firm level using tornqvist and sato vartia index methods the results show that in this period efficiency effects possibly contributed to a majority of the decline while the contribution from structural effects was less during 2003 2005 the excessive expansion of high energy consuming sub sectors and the high investment ratio were foremost sources of the increasing energy intensity attributed to the government efforts the energy intensity has started to decline slightly since july 2006 in future to save more energy in addition to technical progress china should attach more importance to optimizing its sectoral structure and lowering its investment ratio

conditional time varying interest rate risk premium evidence from the treasury bill futures market existing studies of the term structure of interest rates often use spot treasury rates to represent default free interest rates however part of the premium in treasury rates is compensation for the risk that short sellers may default since treasury bill futures are default free they provide cleaner data to estimate the interest rate risk premium the mean excess return in defaultfree treasury bill futures is zero this suggests that the interest rate risk premium could be economically negligible we find that although the mean unconditional premium is zero futures returns contain economically and statistically significant time varying conditional interest rate risk premiums the conditional premium depends significantly positively on its own conditional variance and its conditional covariance with the equity premium the conditional premium is large in the volatile 1979 82 period but small afterwards

regulatory reforms and productivity an empirical analysis of the japanese electricity industry the japanese electricity industry has experienced regulatory reforms since the mid 1990s this article measures productivity in japan s steam power generation sector and examines the effect of reforms on the productivity of this industry over the period 1978 2003 we estimate the luenberger productivity indicator which is a generalization of the commonly used malmquist productivity index using a data envelopment analysis approach factors associated with productivity change are investigated through dynamic generalized method of moments gmm estimation of panel data our empirical analysis shows that the regulatory reforms have contributed to productivity growth in the steam power generation sector in japan

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

energy savings potential in china s industrial sector from the perspectives of factor price distortion and allocative inefficiency abstract china s industrial energy consumption accounted for 70 82 of national and 14 12 of world energy usage in 2011 in the context of energy scarcity and environmental pollution the industrial sector in china faces unsustainable growth problems by adopting the stochastic frontier analysis sfa framework this paper analyzes the factor allocative efficiency of china s industrial sector and estimates the energy savings potential from the perspective of allocative inefficiency this paper focuses on three issues the first is examining the factor allocative inefficiency of china s industrial sector the second is measuring factor price distortion by the shadow price model the third is estimating the energy savings potential in china s industrial sector during 2001 2009 major conclusions are thus drawn first factor prices of capital labor and energy are distorted in china due to government regulations moreover energy price is relatively low compared to capital price while is relatively high compared to labor price second the industry wide energy savings potential resulted from energy allocative inefficiency was about 9 71 during 2001 2009 the downward trend of energy savings potential implies the increasing energy allocative efficiency in china s industrial sector third a transparent and reasonable pricing mechanism is conducive to improving energy allocative efficiency

efficiency based rank assessment for electric power industry a combined use of data envelopment analysis dea and dea discriminant analysis da abstract this study discusses a combined use of dea data environment analysis and dea da discriminant analysis to determine the efficiency based rank of energy firms this type of performance evaluation is important because we often have a difficulty in accessing a large sample on energy firms to derive reliable empirical results the proposed approach is useful in dealing with such a limited number of energy firms often found in previous dea studies on energy industries in the world the proposed approach uses dea to classify energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups based upon their efficiency scores then it utilizes dea da to assess their efficiency scores and ranks in this stage we can find an adjusted efficiency score for each energy firm the proposed approach provides us with the following analytical capabilities all of which cannot be found in a conventional use of dea in assessing energy firms first the proposed dea approach can avoid zero in all multipliers on efficient energy firms by incorporating scsc strong complementary slackness condition so that it can handle an occurrence of multiple reference sets and multiple projections the dea result classifies all energy firms into efficient and inefficient groups second dea da applied to the two groups evaluates all energy firms by an industry wide evaluation not depending upon a limited number of efficient energy firms in a reference set as found in a conventional use of dea the analytical capability can reduce the number of efficient energy firms third the proposed approach can provide their efficiency based ranking scores finally we can conduct a rank sum test based upon their ranking scores to obtain a statistical inference as an application this study uses the proposed approach to examine the performance of japanese electric power industry we find two economic implications one of the two implications is that no major change has occurred in the operational performance of japanese electric power industry because of japanese sluggish economy from 2005 to 2009 the other implication indicates that there are strategic differences in the operation of japanese electric power firms after the liberalization

examining the influencing factors of co2 emissions at city level via panel quantile regression evidence from 102 chinese cities ascertaining the influencing factors of carbon dioxide emissions in chinese cities is an important issue for policy makers this paper investigates the effect of several determinants on carbon emis

productivity growth and pollution in state manufacturing the directional output distance function chambers chung fare 1996 is used to construct a malmquist luenberger index of total factor productivity growth for manufacturing when both good and bad outputs are jointly produced the index is constructed using information on good and bad output quantities and input quantities circumventing the problem of recovering shadow price information for the bad output needed for the fisher or tornqvist type of productivity indices accounting for toxic releases in manufacturing productivity growth averages 1 4 an nually during 1988 1994 the findings also suggest that the failure to account for toxic releases in manufacturing results in a significant under statement of total factor productivity growth

intra day tests of the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market in this paper we use intra day prices to examine the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market the use of intra day data allows us to carefully match in time trades in the futures and cash markets by matching trades and allowing delays between observing apparent inefficiencies and the trade we are examining realistic trading strategies we find profitable arbitrage swaps and a preferred strategy for initial purchase these profits do not depend on an assumption of an equilibrium model hence these tests are direct tests of efficiency rather than a joint test of efficiency and equilibrium t his paper examines the efficiency of the treasury bill futures market this subject has been examined before by capozza and cornell 1979 cornell 1981 lang and rasche 1978 rendleman and carabini 1979 vignola and dale 1979 poole 1978 and puglisi 1978 there are a number of reasons why this paper makes an important contribution to the literature the first reason is that by using trade by trade futures prices we can make more realistic assumptions about the pnces at which trades could have taken place this paper uses intra day prices to examine efficiency prior studies at best used closing prices to examine apparent inefficiencies and assumed that transactions took place at these closing prices there are two problems with this procedure first simultaneous transactions cannot actually occur at closing prices there is almost an hour difference between the closing of the chicago futures and new york spot markets thus when the closing spot market price is observed the futures market has been closed for about an hour closing prices could be used to judge apparent discrepancies however it would be necessary to execute trades at the open making decisions based on closing prices and then assuming trades can take place at these prices is an approximation which could significantly affect results in addition using only closing prices ignores any intra day trades which could lead to profits in this study we match in time intra day prices in the spot and futures market these matched prices are used to identify apparently profitable trading rules we then assume trades take place at prices which are observed later in the day this is a test of a trading rule which an investor could actually follow as we discuss later in the paper our results differ from prior studies these differences are primarily due to using intra day prices and carefully matching times so that information used to initiate trades would actually be available to the investor at the time of the trade the second reason is that we examine more complex trading strategies than those which have been employed in other studies the random walk literature provides a useful analogy the original random walk studies simply correlated past and future prices or returns later studies examined filter rules and other more complicated trading rules in this study we employ alternative trading rules of increased complexity to test for the existence of trading profits finally we explicitly examine the consequence of t bills futures contracts being futures rather than forward contracts futures contracts unlike forward contracts involve flows every settlement day the intermediate cash flows on futures contracts can affect the profitability of any strategy the only prior study that even considered this effect is the one by rendleman and carabini 1979 they used the theoretical model of cox ingersoll and ross 1981 to try to estimate whether the difference between forward and futures prices was likely to be large enough to affect the payoff from alternative trading strategies this is a useful first attempt however ultimately the effect of daily settlement or marking to the market has to be examined directly as part of trading strategies to see if it affects the outcome of these strategies there are other problems with prior studies these involve gross estimates of prices and averaging data in a way that can mask inefficiencies since these problems are discussed in some detail in rendleman and carabini there is no reason to review them further here probably no area in finance has received more attention than the efficiency literature the reader may well wonder why even given the approximareceived for publication august 23 1982 revision accepted for publication may 20 1983 new york university new york university and baruch college respectively the authors would like to thank the center for the study of futures markets at columbia business school for financial support

decomposition of energy efficiency and energy saving potential in china a three hierarchy meta frontier approach abstract considering both regional heterogeneity and industrial heterogeneity this paper proposes a three hierarchy meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea to decompose energy efficiency and energy saving potential into three components i e industrial structure regional balance development and management based on this approach the paper then analyses the historical evolution and current status of energy efficiency in china the results show the following 1 from 2001 to 2015 mainland china s energy efficiency increased by a factor of 2 48 primarily because of technological progress and the optimization of its industrial structure 2 nonetheless the current energy efficiency in mainland china remains very low and energy inefficiency is as high as 0 5922 indicating that 59 22 of total energy consumption is invalidly used severe industrial structure inefficiency and regional balance development inefficiency are the two main factors responsible for the very low energy efficiency 3 by promoting industrial restructuring regional balance development and management improvement mainland china is expected to save respectively 13 67 24 54 and 61 73 of its current total invalid energy consumption based on the estimation results this paper formulates strategies to improve energy efficiency and save energy for china s provinces based on their specific situations considering not only the direction of industrial restructuring in both the short and long terms but also the path to improved energy efficiency in addition a brief discussion about the applicability and the preconditions for an application of the multi hierarchy meta frontier approach is given at the end of the paper

the impact of industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency in china abstract regional disparity in terms of industrial energy efficiency is noticeable in china due to the unbalanced economic progress in past decades analyzing the provincial industrial energy efficiency and its influencing factors is of great significance to formulate differentiated policies to date the influence of many social economic factors on the industrial energy efficiency have been examined but the impact of the inter industry structure has almost been ignored in this paper the slacks based measure model incorporating undesirable output is applied to evaluate the industrial energy efficiency both at the provincial level and the sectoral level in china for the period 2010 to 2016 then industrial structure efficiency is introduced which reflects the inter industry structure and takes the sectoral level energy efficiency into consideration and the impact of the industrial structure efficiency on provincial industrial energy efficiency is tested by tobit regression model the results show that huge discrepancies of provincial industrial energy efficiency exist and the industrial structure efficiency is confirmed to be a determinative factor to the provincial industrial energy efficiency with the coefficient of 0 525 policy recommendations are provided for adjusting the provincial inter industry structure and improving the industrial energy efficiency

total factor energy efficiency in developing countries this paper uses a total factor framework to investigate energy efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980 2005 we explore the total factor energy efficiency and change trends by applying data envelopment analysis dea window which is capable of measuring efficiency in cross sectional and time varying data the empirical results indicate that botswana mexico and panama perform the best in terms of energy efficiency whereas kenya sri lanka syria and the philippines perform the worst during the entire research period seven countries show little change in energy efficiency over time eleven countries experienced continuous decreases in energy efficiency among five countries witnessing continuous increase in total factor energy efficiency china experienced the most rapid rise practice in china indicates that effective energy policies play a crucial role in improving energy efficiency tobit regression analysis indicates that a u shaped relationship exists between total factor energy efficiency and income per capita

regional energy efficiency evaluation in china a super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs abstract with the rapid development of global economy the demand for energy has increased significantly therefore energy efficiency improvement is essential for global energy and economic transformation in the chinese context study on the energy efficiency of various provinces can contribute to better understand china s energy utilization status and provide policy implications for improving china s energy utilization efficiency in this study based on the super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs the energy efficiency of china s 30 provinces in 2013 and 2014 was investigated then the energy efficiency of the eastern central and western china was compared and further discussed finally according to the results the relevant policy implications were put forward the results showed that china s overall energy efficiency had decreased while taking the undesirable outputs into consideration in addition eastern china had the highest energy efficiency and the energy efficiency of western china was relatively low the energy efficiency gap among china s provinces was still large therefore it was necessary to improve china s overall energy efficiency by developing targeted policies considering regional conditions

are weak patent rights a barrier to u s exports abstract this paper assesses whether how and to what extent u s exports are sensitive to national differences in patent rights i estimate bilateral trade equations that account for trade distortions related to patent rights using data on state to country manufacturing exports in 1992 i find that weak patent rights are a barrier to u s exports but only to countries that pose a strong threat of imitation e g china the stronger patent rights required under the wto agreement increase u s exports to these high threat markets alternatively strengthening patent rights in countries that pose a weak threat of imitation reinforces monopoly power and reduces u s exports to these markets

index futures arbitrage and the behavior of stock index futures prices this article examines intraday transaction datafor s p 500 stock indexfutures prices and the intraday quotes for the underlying index the data indicate that thefutures price changes are uncorrelated and that the variability of these price changes exceeds the variability ofprice changes in the s p 500 index this excess variability of the futures over the index remains even after controlling for the nonsynchronous prices in the index quotes which induces autocorrelation in the index changes we advance and examine empirically two hypotheses regarding the difference between the futures price and its theoretical value that this mispricing increases on average with maturity and that it is path dependent evidence supporting these hypotheses is presented

industrial energy efficiency and driving forces behind efficiency improvement evidence from the pearl river delta urban agglomeration in china abstract improving energy efficiency of industrial sectors is essential to achieve energy conservation in the pearl river delta urban agglomeration prdua in china this study adopted stochastic frontier analysis sfa to evaluate the industrial total factor energy efficiency tfee of nine cities in prdua during 2004 2016 and then to decompose the growth of tfee into technical change tc technical efficiency change tec and economies of scale sc effects results show that the tfee of industrial sectors of prdua had an overall downward trend during the study period and that technical change was the major driving force behind the growth of tfee the tobit model was then adopted to further investigate the determinants of energy efficiency improvement and test the robustness of empirical results the main contributions of this study to the existing literature lie in showing that 1 the degree of openness local government spending foreign direct investment factor input structure environmental regulation strength and gdp per capita have positive impacts on the industrial tfee 2 enterprise scale and energy consumption structure have a negative impact on industrial energy efficiency finally we address policy implications for energy management regarding their economic and environmental aspects in industrial sectors of the prdua

a comparison of forward and futures prices of an interest rate sensitive financial asset this paper focuses on contractual distinctions as an explanation for the price divergence between futures and forward contracts specifically it investigates the effect of marking to market on the observed price differences using the pricing model described in cox ingersoll and ross cir 1981 journal of financial economics 9 321 346 using previously unavailable data this paper employs eurodollars an interest rate sensitive financial asset to test the cir model unlike prior empirical studies test results support both the weak prediction concerning the sign of the average price difference and the stronger prediction that specific covariances explain the variation in the price differences futures contracts and forward contracts are fundamentally similar both contracts are agreements between two parties to trade a specific good or asset at a future date at a price determined today these agreements facilitate the transfer of risk between contracting parties permitting the creation of hedging strategies in spite of their conceptual similarity the implementation of these two contracts is quite different participants in futures markets trade highly standardized contracts by open outcry on organized exchanges clearing associations tor the exchanges control default risk by assuming the opposite side of each transaction guaranteeing payment to reduce traders incentive to default the exchanges mark positions to market by settling contract gains and losses daily in contrast to the futures market the market for forward contracts is mostly an over the counter market in the absence of a clearinghouse trader reputation helps control default risk unlike futures contracts no markingto market occurs the parties in the contract make no payments until maturity of the contract the forward market for financial interest rate instruments departs even further from the futures market format a trader can use the cash market for interest rate instruments to establish a forward position for example a trader can secure a forward position for a three month t bill beginning three months in the future by buying a t bill with a six month maturity and selling a t bill with a three month maturity

output elasticities and inter factor substitution empirical evidence from the transportation sector of shanghai abstract as a major consumer of fossil fuels the transportation sector in shanghai presents a wide range of problems including air pollution noise and traffic congestion this study aims to explore the energy substitution effect based on a trans log production function to evaluate the contribution of each input factor to sectoral output and reveal the substitution possibilities between capital labor and energy to deal with a multicollinearity problem we adopt ridge regression to obtain the coefficient of each variable under the appropriate penalty value the bootstrap method is used for making statistical inferences and the 95 confidence interval is obtained with 1000 bootstrap samples the empirical results demonstrate the following 1 the output elasticities of capital 0 13 0 15 labor 0 24 0 25 and energy 0 43 0 48 are positive and show an increasing trend over the study period 2 the substitution elasticity between labor and energy is the highest among the input factors around 1 0095 with a slight decreasing trend 3 the substitution elasticity between energy and capital ranges from 1 0018 to 1 0021 and the substitution elasticity between capital and labor is infinitely close to 1

taxes and the pricing of stock index futures stock index futures prices are generally below the level predicted by simple arbitrage models this paper suggests that the discrepancy between the actual and predicted prices is caused by taxes capital gains and losses are not taxed until they are realized as constantinides demonstrates in a recent paper this gives stockholders a valuable timing option if the stock price drops the investor can pass part of the loss on to the government by selling the stock on the other hand if the stock price rises the investor can postpone the tax by not realizing the gain since this option is not available to stock index futures traders the futures prices will be lower than standard no tax models predict on 24 february 1982 the kansas city board of trade began trading futures contracts on the value line average stock index during the next two months both the chicago mercantile exchange and the new york futures exchange also initiated trading in stock index futures although these contracts are actively traded their prices have puzzled both practitioners and academics the observed

industrial energy efficiency with co2 emissions in china a nonparametric analysis abstract global awareness on energy security and climate change has created much interest in assessing economy wide energy efficiency performance a number of previous studies have contributed to evaluate energy efficiency performance using different analytical techniques among which data envelopment analysis dea has recently received increasing attention most of dea related energy efficiency studies do not consider undesirable outputs such as co 2 emissions in their modeling framework which may lead to biased energy efficiency values within a joint production framework of desirable and undesirable outputs in this paper we construct both static and dynamic energy efficiency performance indexes for measuring industrial energy efficiency performance by using several environmental dea models with co 2 emissions the dynamic energy efficiency performance indexes have further been decomposed into two contributing components we finally apply the indexes proposed to assess the industrial energy efficiency performance of different provinces in china over time our empirical study shows that the energy efficiency improvement in china s industrial sector was mainly driven by technological improvement

a review of optimal energy policy instruments on industrial energy efficiency programs rebound effects and government policies abstract industrial energy efficiency programs ieeps are defined as one of the most popular government policies that aim to reduce energy consumption in industrial energy intensive sectors in this paper we review and classify the most important academic studies that have addressed the environmental and economic aspects of ieeps using a systematic review the classification of energy policy instruments has been developed based on an analytical approach we discuss also the outputs benefits and barriers of ieeps besides a comprehensive argument about the restrictive policies on the rebound effects made after the implementation of these programs the results disclose that china usa and sweden are the most addressed countries on ieeps and their applications in this regard incentive energy policies e g voluntary agreements and subsidies have been applied more than others in the last decade furthermore most of the reviewed studies emphasize energy price reform as an effective practical policy while a few analytical methods can be seen to help policy makers determine the optimal levels of decision variables finally according to the state of the art analysis the authors provide some novel recommendations to improve the performance of ieeps using some restrictive policies on the negative impacts of rebound effects

how does administrative pricing affect energy consumption and co2 emissions in china despite reforms china still largely applies the cost plus pricing mechanism for the energy sector government administrative energy pricing leads to energy price distortions which could result in not only the excessive and wasteful energy consumption but also environmental deterioration thereby undermining energy conservation and emission abatement using fossil fuel subsidies as a proxy for the level of energy price distortions this paper estimates the subsidy of 22 chinese departments during the period 2006 2010 and adopts the price gap approach to analyze the impacts of subsidy removal on energy consumption and co2 emissions for the various sectors and energy types the results demonstrate that removing energy subsidies would reduce energy consumption and emissions by 3 77 and 2 85 respectively but the effects vary across sectors the transport storage and post sector and the electricity gas and water supply sector are much more affected by energy subsidies removal than other sectors with respect to energy types fuel oil and natural gas are sensitive to subsidies indicating the magnitude of their consumption this suggests that removing subsidies on these fuel types could significantly reduce co2 emissions finally we comprehensively discuss relevant policy issues on energy price formation reform

the relation between forward prices and futures prices abstract this paper consolidates the results of some recent work on the relation between forward prices and futures prices it develops a number of propositions characterizing the two prices these propositions contain several testable implications about the difference between forward and futures prices many of the propositions show that equilibrium forward and futures prices are equal to the values of particular assets even though they are not in themselves asset prices the paper then illustrates these results in the context of two valuation models and discusses the effects of taxes and other institutional factors

total factor carbon emission performance of fossil fuel power plants in china a metafrontier non radial malmquist index analysis article i nfo this paper proposes the metafrontier non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index mnmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time the mnmcpi method allows for the incorporation of group heterogeneity and non radial slack into the previously introduced malmquist co2 emission performance index mcpi we derive the mnmcpi by solving several non radial data envelop ment analysis dea models we decompose the mnmcpi into an efficiency change ec index a best practice gap change bpc index and a technology gap change tgc index and based on the proposed indices we examine the dynamic changes in co2 emission performance and its decomposition of fossil fuel power plants in china for the 2005 2010 period the empirical results show a 0 38 increase in total factor co2 emission performance as a whole and a u shaped mnmcpi curve for the sample period because companies owned by the central government lack innovation and technological leadership the results suggest a missing link in the role of the central government in promoting co2 emission performance

the saga of the first stock index futures contract benchmarks models and learning in the presence of imperfect or perturbed benchmarks pricing based on relative valuation or arbitrage can be affected adversely this study highlights persistent pricing irregularities in the kansas city value line kcvl stock index futures market this contract is especially interesting because the underlying benchmark underwent a midstream change in definition from a complex equally weighted geometric index to an equally weighted arithmetic index empirical analysis reveals that during a four year period the market displayed herd like behavior and priced the kcvl geometric contract using the simple but wrong cost of carry benchmark model a dramatic change occurs around the publication of the eytan harpaz 1986 model when the market turns efficient from the perspective of this new model the market appears to have succumbed initially to a bad information cascade primarily because arbitrage was difficult to understand and carry out under complex benchmarking the evidence provides empirical extension to the observational social learning paradigms of simon 1955 banerjee 1992 and bikhchandani hirshleifer and welch 1992 that lead to behavioral herding and information cascades

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

forward and futures prices evidence from the foreign exchange markets empirical studies of the treasury bill markets have revealed substantial differences between the futures price and the implied forward price these differences have been attributed to taxes transaction costs and the settling up procedure employed in the futures market this paper examines the forward and futures prices in foreign exchange in an attempt to distinguish between the competing explanations empirical studies of the treasury bill market have revealed differences between the futures price or rate and the implicit forward price derived from the term structure of interest rates 1 these differences have generally been attributed to market imperfections such as taxes and transaction costs see for example arak 1 capozza and cornell 2 and rendelman and carabini 6 recently however cox ingersoll and ross 3 henceforth cir derived a model in which forward and futures prices need not be equal even in perfect markets without taxes as long as interest rates are stochastic the significance of the cir effect may be hard to investigate using only data from the bill market because of the potentially complicating effects of taxes and transaction costs unique to this market by using data from the foreign exchange market we are able to eliminate the tax effect and reduce the impact of transaction costs the question we address is whether the discrepancies observed in the treasury bill market are also observed in the foreign exchange market if they are then we have evidence that the differences are due to a combination of the cir effect and the transaction costs common to both markets if they are not then either the magnitude of the cir effect is much less in the foreign exchange market or the treasury bill results are due to the unique tax treatment and transaction costs of that market this paper is organized as follows in section i the trading mechanics of the forward and futures markets in foreign exchange are discussed section ii reviews the explanations for the discrepancies between the forward and futures prices for treasury bills the institutional differences between the foreign exchange and bill markets are also summarized to show which of these explanations cannot apply to the foreign exchange market in section iii the data are decribed and the empirical results are presented the conclusions are summarized in the final section

metafroniter energy efficiency with co2 emissions and its convergence analysis for china this paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 30 provinces in china during the period of 1997 2011 using a meta frontier framework with the improved directional distance function ddf we construct a new environmental production possibility set by combining the super efficiency and sequential data envelopment analysis dea models to avoid discriminating power problem and technical regress when evaluating efficiency by ddf then it is used in a meta frontier framework to reflect the technology heterogeneities across east central and west china the results indicate that eastern china achieved the highest progress inefficiency relative to the metafrontier followed by western and the central china by focusing on technology gaps we offer some suggestions for the different groups based on group frontier and meta frontier analyses the inefficiency can be attributed to managerial failure for eastern and western china and technological differences for central china the convergence analysis shows that energy and co2 emission governance will produce negative effects on economic growth and it is suitable and acceptable to introduce rigorous environmental measures in eastern china

the decrease of co2 emission intensity is decarbonization at national and global levels abstract this viewpoint proposes the definition decarbonization refers to a decrease of co2 emission intensity in a trend this viewpoint then argues that an analysis of decarbonization at national and global levels based on that definition would lead to the correct calculation of decarbonization

analysis of energy efficiency and energy savings potential in china s provincial industrial sectors abstract because industrial sectors in china are energy intensive improving energy efficiency and promoting energy savings in these sectors are of great importance for the further sustainable development of china s economy using a proposed meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper analyzes the total factor energy efficiency and energy savings potential in china s provincial industrial sectors for the years 2000 2014 from three perspectives namely the technology gap management and scale the results indicate that 1 driven by technological progress energy efficiency during the sample period was greatly improved though the expansion of technology gaps between regions and the decline in scale efficiency represented two significant handicaps 2 the current energy efficiency in china s industrial sectors remains extremely low indicating that there is considerable potential for energy efficiency improvement and energy savings and 3 the sources of energy inefficiency and energy savings potential in china s industrial sectors exhibit spatially distinct characteristics accordingly it is determined that most of china s eastern provinces should focus on improving scale and management efficiency whereas most of its central and western provinces should concentrate on three factors narrowing the regional technology gap improving management efficiency and optimizing the industrial scale

dea approach for unified efficiency measurement assessment of japanese fossil fuel power generation this study discusses a new dea data envelopment analysis approach to measure the unified operational and environmental efficiency of energy firms it is widely known that they produce not only desirable good outputs e g electricity but also undesirable bad outputs e g co2 as a result of their plant operations the proposed approach incorporates an output separation desirable and undesirable outputs for the performance evaluation of energy firms in addition to the output separation this study separates inputs into energy and non energy inputs consequently the proposed approach incorporates not only the output separation but also the input separation within a computational framework of dea non radial measurement this study compares the proposed approach with other previous dea approaches used for the performance evaluation of energy firms after the methodological comparison this study applies the proposed approach for measuring the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation this empirical study confirms that the implementation of kyoto protocol 2005 has not been effective on the unified efficiency of japanese fossil fuel power generation during the observed period 2004 2008 although the empirical result is inconsistent with the current japanese environmental policy under kyoto protocol it contains policy implications for guiding the future direction of japanese environmental policy on the electric power industry