the demise of the rent controlled public housing programmes of ghana the story of the tema development corporation in 1952 a new town called tema was created in ghana the master plan for tema made provision for 19 planned communities each having roughly 1500 2000 homes about 6355 housing units are government owned rental housing the rental housing stock is the subject of this study this paper reports an empirical study that shows that rent controls coupled with public management have caused investment values in the rental housing stock to disappear for example this study finds that the nominal rate of return on total investment for these rentals based on replacement value has a mean value of only 3 per cent with inflation rates around 15 per cent during the study period this implies a negative real rate of return the findings provide empirical support and justification for recent attempts to privatise all rental public housing in ghana the study concludes with public policy recommendations

forecasting day ahead electricity load using a multiple equation time series approach the quality of short term electricity load forecasting is crucial to the operation and trading activities of market participants in an electricity market in this paper it is shown that a multiple equation time series model which is estimated by repeated application of ordinary least squares has the potential to match or even outperform more complex nonlinear and nonparametric forecasting models the key ingredient of the success of this simple model is the effective use of lagged information by allowing for interaction between seasonal patterns and intra day dependencies although the model is built using data for the queensland region of australia the method is completely generic and applicable to any load forecasting problem the model s forecasting ability is assessed by means of the mean absolute percentage error mape for day ahead forecast the mape returned by the model over a period of 11 years is an impressive 1 36 the forecast accuracy of the model is compared with a number of benchmarks including three popular alternatives and one industrial standard reported by the australia energy market operator aemo the performance of the model developed in this paper is superior to all benchmarks and outperforms the aemo forecasts by about a third in terms of the mape criterion

the non linear link between electricity consumption and temperature in europe a threshold panel approach this paper investigates the relationship between electricity demand and temperature in the european union we address this issue by means of a panel threshold regression model on 15 european countries over the last two decades our results confirm the non linearity of the link between electricity consumption and temperature found in more limited geographical areas in previous studies by distinguishing between north and south countries we also find that this non linear pattern is more pronounced in the warm countries finally rolling regressions show that the sensitivity of electricity consumption to temperature in summer has increased in the recent period

commodities momentum a behavioral perspective the growth in commodity related investments has sparked interest in the performance of momentum strategies in these markets this paper introduces a behavioral proxy of the 52 week high and low momentum that explains a significant proportion of the variation of conventional momentum returns after controlling for commodity specific risk factors our findings show that the 52 week high strategy generates significant profits after accounting for transaction costs we report that the 52 week high strategy is a better predictor of returns than conventional momentum our findings suggest that term structure and hedging pressure risk factors provide only a partial explanation of the results

forecasting quantiles of day ahead electricity load accurate load forecasting plays a crucial role in the decision making process of many market participants but probably is most important for the dispatch planning of an electricity market operator despite the competitive forecast accuracy achieved by existing point forecast models point forecasts can only provide limited information relating to the expected level of future load to account for the uncertainty of future load and provide a more complete picture of the future load conditions for dispatch planning purposes quantile forecasts can be useful this paper proposes a computationally efficient approach to forecasting the quantiles of electricity load which is then applied to forecasting in the national electricity market of australia the proposed model performs competitively in comparison with one industry standard and two recently proposed quantile forecasting methods one of the main advantages of the proposed approach is the ease with the number of covariates can be expanded this is a particularly important feature in the context of load forecasting where large numbers of important drivers are usually necessary to provide accurate load forecasts

interest rates and currency prices in a two country world abstract this paper is a theoretical study of the determination of prices interest rates and currency exchange rates set in an infinitely lived two country world which is subject both to stochastic endowment shocks and to monetary instability formulas are obtained for pricing all equity claims nominally denominated bonds and currencies and these formulas are related to earlier closely related results in the theories of money finance international trade

probabilistic forecasts of the magnitude and timing of peak electricity demand adequate capacity planning requires accurate forecasts of the future magnitude and timing of peak electricity demand electricity demand is affected by the day of the week seasonal variations holiday periods feast days and the weather a model that provides probabilistic forecasts of both magnitude and timing for lead times of one year is presented this model is capable of capturing the main sources of variation in demand and uses simulated weather time series including temperature wind speed and luminosity for producing probabilistic forecasts of future peak demand having access to such probabilistic forecasts provides a means of assessing the uncertainty in the forecasts and can lead to improved decision making and better risk management

lag length selection and tests of granger causality between money and income one of the most widely accepred relationships in macroeconomics is the positive relationship between the rate of growth of the money supply and the rate of growth of income a diversity of opinion arises however with the attempt to identify a causal relationship between these variables while friedman and schwartz 1963 initiated the empirical investigation of money income causality sims 1972 made the most significant contribution to this literature with a practical application of the criterion developed by granger 1969 for identifying a causal relationship since the appearance of sims s approach and an alternative one advanced by sargent 1976 many researchers have applied these techniques to the investigation of the causal relationship between money and income l with two exceptions hsiao 1981 and mcmillin and fackler 1984 these researchers have arbitrarily chosen the lengths of their distributed lags the purpose of this paper is to test for granger causality between money and income this paper differs from previous work in that considerably more attention is focused on the effect of the lag specification on the test results in particular we investigate the extent to which rules of thumb arbitrary lag specifications and

dynamic demand for residential electricity in taiwan under seasonality and increasing block pricing abstract this paper studies the dynamic demand for residential electricity in taiwan employing a monthly panel data set composed of 19 counties and spanning the period from 2007 01 to 2013 12 the partial adjustment model used addresses the endogeneity of the electricity price that results from the increasing block pricing the estimated results show that there is a significant seasonal difference in the demand for electricity between the summer and non summer periods both the adjustment speed and own price elasticity during the summer months are found to be lower than those in the non summer months due to the hot weather in summer it is easier for consumers to adjust their electricity consumption in response to the changes in electricity pricing during the non summer time the estimated inelastic short run and long run income effects show that electricity is a necessity for consumers moreover the controversial electricity conservation policies are found to be ineffective measures for reducing electricity consumption in taiwan

a new approach to modeling early warning systems for currency crises can a machine learning fuzzy expert system predict the currency crises effectively abstract this paper presents a hybrid causal model for predicting the occurrence of currency crises by using the neuro fuzzy modeling approach the model integrates the learning ability of the neural network with the inference mechanism of fuzzy logic the empirical results show that the proposed neuro fuzzy model leads to a better prediction of crisis significantly the model can also construct a reliable causal relationship among the variables through the obtained knowledge base compared to neural network and the traditionally used techniques such as logit the proposed model can thus lead to a somewhat more prescriptive modeling approach based on determinate causal mechanisms towards finding ways to prevent currency crises

in search of the exchange risk premium a six currency test assuming mean variance optimization abstract a number of authors examining deviations of actual rates of currency depreciation from forward discounts have claimed to find evidence of risk premiums if these deviations are indeed partly due to risk premiums rather than being entirely due to expectational errors then they should be systematically related to those variables on which risk premiums are thought to depend finance theory tells us that if investors optimize with respect to mean and variance the risk premium depends in a specific way on 1 the supplies of assets denominated in the various currencies 2 the variance covariance matrix of the rates of return and 3 the coefficient of risk aversion the null hypothesis of this paper is that the coefficient of risk aversion is zero countries assets are perfect substitutes and risk premiums are nonexistent the alternative hypothesis is that rates of return are systematically related to asset supplies by a macroeconomic portfolio balance function the maximum likelihood technique used dominates previous attempts to find such a relationship in that the parameters of the portfolio balance function are constrained to depend on the variance covariance matrix as the finance theory says they should on the other hand the technique also dominates previous applications of the finance theory in that the expected returns are allowed to vary over time as the macroeconomic portfolio balance theory says they should the paper s finding is a statistical inability to reject the null hypothesis for a portfolio of six currencies although this could be due to low power in the test

modelling weather effects for impact analysis of residential time of use electricity pricing abstract analyzing the impact of pricing policies such as time of use tou is challenging in the presence of confounding factors such as weather motivated by a lack of consensus and model selection details in prior work we present a methodology for modelling the effect of weather on residential electricity demand the best model is selected according to explanatory power out of sample prediction accuracy goodness of fit and interpretability we then evaluate the effect of mandatory tou pricing in a local distribution company in southwestern ontario canada we use a smart meter dataset of over 20 000 households which is particularly suited to our analysis it contains data from the summer before and after the implementation of tou pricing in november 2011 and all customers transitioned from tiered rates to tou rates at the same time we find that during the summer rate season tou pricing results in electricity conservation across all price periods the average demand change during on peak and mid peak periods is 2 6 and 2 4 respectively changes during off peak periods are not statistically significant these tou pricing effects are less pronounced compared to previous studies underscoring the need for clear reproducible impact analyses which include full details about the model selection process

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland

effect of stopping hydroelectric power generation on the dynamics of electricity prices an event study approach abstract supply shocks in electricity markets that disrupt energy production cause unexpected spikes in prices which in turn have economic consequences such as higher risk and therefore higher costs and losses for producers and consumers of electricity one relevant shock in this sector is the halting of hydroelectric power generation due to the freezing of water reservoirs after the temperature drops below zero degrees celsius and therefore less efficient technologies such as thermal plants must begin to produce electricity using an event study approach this shock in the nord pool market is explicitly identified and the economic importance of expanding the interconnected market and the inclusion of more renewable sources in the generation mix of the system to smooth out price spikes is quantified when a freezing event occurs it is found that the average electricity prices increase between 1 and 6 and that the negative relationship between temperature and prices also increases for each degree that the temperature decreases prices increase between 1 and 3 however as expected these changes are more pronounced in countries that are most dependent on hydropower generation by identifying this supply shock relevant insights are presented for market players such as policy makers investors and consumers and producers whose decisions are influenced by the effect of temperature particularly when it causes the stopping of hydroelectric plants

forecaster diversity and the benefits of combining forecasts the expected error variance of a combined forecast is necessarily lower than that of an individual forecast but in practice there may be considerable variation around these expected values this paper introduces a measure of the benefit from combining the probability of a reduction in error variance which recognizes this problem the measure is applied to data on the forecasts and forecasting methods of a panel of u s economists to determine how the benefits of combining vary with the number of forecasts combined and with the diversity in theories and techniques among the component forecasts

currency prices terms of trade and interest rates a general equilibrium asset pricing cash in advance approach currency prices terms of trade and interest rates a general equilibrium asset pricing cash in advance approach

residential energy demand for space heating in the nordic countries accounting for interfuel substitution abstract reliable estimation of fuel consumption in residential sector is crucial for the future development of fuel supply system three approaches are compared in this study to capture climate impact as well as and interfuel substitution between fuels on residential fuel consumption for space heating in the nordic countries the first approach aims at directly estimating the demand for each energy carrier as a function of explanatory variables including heating degree days fuels price and gdp per capita the second approach is a two stage model combing an econometric model for total energy use for space heating and the market share for energy carriers based on cross price elasticities while in the third approach a set of simultaneous equations models were estimated based on the results of the mean average error and root mean square error criteria for three approaches across the nordic countries it was found that the second and third approaches were able to capture the complementary and substitution effects between fuels this finding confirms our hypothesis that the interfuel substitution is a key factor for estimating changes in fuel demand and should be accounted for when residential energy demand is projected the results additionally have important implications for climate change policy by exploring the impact of fuel price on residential energy demand for space heating

modeling energy demand some emerging issues abstract the proliferation of papers on energy demand modeling has offered different dimensions both in terms of methodology and estimation while this development has strengthened our understanding of the subject it may render the identification of gaps in the literature arduous for future research thus this study sets out to document some emerging issues that seem to have engendered new directions on energy demand modeling ranging from asymmetric price responses time varying demand parameters triangulation analyses to seasonal and climate change effects it is hoped that access to this review complemented with the previous ones will facilitate the comprehension of the extant literature as well as areas of future research in energy demand modeling

risk uncertainty and exchange rates this paper is motivated by two facts failure of log linear empirical exchange rate models of the 1970 s and the observed variability of risk premiums in the forward market rational maximizing models predict that changes in conditional variances of monetary policies government spendings and income growths affect risk premiums and induce conditional volatility of exchange rates i examine theoretically how changes in these exogenous conditional variances affect the level of the current exchange rate and attempt to quantify the extent that this channel explains exchange rate volatility using autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models

short run electricity load forecasting with combinations of stationary wavelet transforms short term forecasting of electricity load is an essential issue for the management of power systems and for energy trading specific modeling approaches are needed given the strong seasonality and volatility in load data in this paper we investigate the benefit of combining stationary wavelet transforms to produce one day ahead forecasts of half hourly electric load in france first we assess the advantage of decomposing the aggregate load into several subseries with a wavelet transform each component is predicted separately and aggregated to get the final forecast one innovation of this paper is to propose several approaches to deal with the boundary problem which is particularly detrimental in electricity load forecasting second we examine the benefit of combining forecasts over individual models an extensive out of sample evaluation shows that a careful treatment of the border effect is required in the multiresolution analysis combinations including the wavelet predictions provide the most accurate forecasts this result is valid with several assumptions about the forecast error in temperature and for different types of hours peak normal off peak different days of the week and various forecasting periods

property value maximization and public sector efficiency abstract this paper analyses the efficiency implications of property value maximization communities are open so that utilities are parametric to housing producers and the local government each local government chooses its public good output to maximize aggregate property value in the community ignoring feedback effects on the composition of the housing stock it is shown that this type of government behavior generates an equilibrium in which all communities are internally pareto efficient

prediction of commercial bank failure via multivariate statistical analysis of financial structures the turkish case abstract the objective of this paper is to propose a methodological framework for constructing the integrated early warning system iews that can be used as a decision support tool in bank examination and supervision process for detection of banks which are experiencing serious problems sample and variable set of the study contains 40 privately owned turkish commercial banks 21 banks failed during the period 1997 2003 and their financial ratios well known multivariate statistical technique principal component analysis was used to explore the basic financial characteristics of the banks and discriminant logit and probit models were estimated based on these characteristics to construct iews also importance of early warning systems in bank examination was evaluated with respect to cost of failure results of the study show that if iews was effectively employed in bank supervision it can be possible to avoid from the bank restructuring costs at a significant amount of rate in the long run

residential electricity demand in spain new empirical evidence using aggregate data this paper presents an empirical analysis on residential demand for electricity this analysis has been performed using aggregate panel data at the province level for 47 spanish provinces for the period from 2000 to 2008 for this purpose we estimated a log log demand equation for electricity consumption using a dynamic partial adjustment approach this dynamic demand function has been estimated using a two step system gmm estimator proposed by blundell and bond 1998 the purpose of this empirical analysis is to highlight some of the characteristics of spanish residential electricity demand particular attention has been paid to the influence of price income and weather conditions on electricity demand the estimated short and long run own price elasticities are negative as expected but lower than 1 furthermore weather variables have a significant impact on electricity demand

modeling special day effects for forecasting intraday electricity demand abstract we propose and apply a novel approach for modeling special day effects to predict electricity demand in korea notably we model special day effects on an hourly rather than a daily basis hourly specified predictor variables are implemented in the regression model with a seasonal autoregressive moving average sarma type error structure in order to efficiently reflect the special day effects the interaction terms between the hour of day effects and the hourly based special day effects are also included to capture the unique intraday patterns of special days more accurately the multiplicative sarma mechanism is employed in order to identify the double seasonal cycles namely the intraday effect and the intraweek effect the forecast results of the suggested model are evaluated by comparing them with those of various benchmark models for the following year the empirical results indicate that the suggested model outperforms the benchmark models for both special and non special day predictions

autoregressive modelling and money income causality detection abstract a step wise procedure based on granger s concept of causality and abaike s final prediction error criterion is suggested as a practical means to identify the order of lags of each variable in a multivariate autoregressive process the model seems useful because it can serve as a reduced form formulation to avoid imposing often spurious or false restrictions of the model it also provides a reasonably powerful test of causality the idea is applied to u s postwar money and income data it is found that between m1 and gnp a bivariate feedback model fits the data best between m2 and gnp a one way causal model from money to income performs better diagnostic checks applied to our model seem to indicate the adequacy of our approach

currency crashes in emerging markets an empirical treatment we use a panel of annual data for over 100 developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes we define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation we examine the composition of the debt as well as its level and a variety of other macroeconomic factors external and foreign crashes tend to occur when output growth is low the growth of domestic credit is high and the level of foreign interest rates are high a low ratio of fdi to debt is consistently associated with a high likelihood of a crash

abatement and allocation in the pilot phase of the eu ets we use historical industrial emissions data to assess the level of abatement and over allocation that took place across european countries during the pilot phase 2005 2007 of the european union emission trading scheme using a dynamic panel data model we estimate the counter factual business as usual emissions scenario for eu member states comparing this baseline to allocated and verified emissions we find that both over allocation and abatement occurred along with under allocation and emissions inflation over the three trading years of the pilot phase we find over allocation of approximately 280 million euas and total abatement of 247 mt co2 however we calculate that emissions inflation of approximately 73 mt co2 also occurred possibly due to uncertainty about future policy design features

money and asset prices in a cash in advance economy an asset pricing model with money introduced via a cash in advance constraint is presented the monetary velocity is variable hence money demand does not obey the trivial quantity equation the effects of disturbances in output and money growth on real balances the price level and interest rates are examined monetary policy has effects on real asset prices the fisher relation and the premium on nominal bonds are discussed the precise role of the timing of information and transactions for properties of price levels and interest rates are clarified

cash demand forecasting in atms by clustering and neural networks abstract to improve atms cash demand forecasts this paper advocates the prediction of cash demand for groups of atms with similar day of the week cash demand patterns we first clustered atm centers into atm clusters having similar day of the week withdrawal patterns to retrieve day of the week withdrawal seasonality parameters effect of a monday etc we built a time series model for each atms for clustering the succession of seven continuous daily withdrawal seasonality parameters of atms is discretized next the similarity between the different atms discretized daily withdrawal seasonality sequence is measured by the sequence alignment method sam for each cluster of atms four neural networks viz general regression neural network grnn multi layer feed forward neural network mlff group method of data handling gmdh and wavelet neural network wnn are built to predict an atm center s cash demand the proposed methodology is applied on the nn5 competition dataset we observed that grnn yielded the best result of 18 44 symmetric mean absolute percentage error smape which is better than the result of andrawis atiya and el shishiny 2011 this is due to clustering followed by a forecasting phase further the proposed approach yielded much smaller smape values than the approach of direct prediction on the entire sample without clustering from a managerial perspective the clusterwise cash demand forecast helps the bank s top management to design similar cash replenishment plans for all the atms in the same cluster this cluster level replenishment plans could result in saving huge operational costs for atms operating in a similar geographical region

stochastic factor model for electricity spot price the case of the nordic market this paper presents a stochastic factor based approach to mid term modeling of spot prices in deregulated electricity markets the fundamentals affecting the spot price are modeled independently and a market equilibrium model combines them to form spot price main advantage of the model is the transparency of the generated prices because each underlying factor and the dynamics between factors can be modeled and studied in detail paper shows realistic numerical examples on the forerunner scandinavian electricity market the model is used to price an exotic electricity derivative

forecasting risks of natural gas consumption in slovenia abstract efficient operation of modern energy distribution systems often requires forecasting future energy demand this paper proposes a strategy to estimate forecasting risk the objective of the proposed method is to improve knowledge about expected forecasting risk and to estimate the expected cash flow in advance based on the risk model the strategy combines an energy demand forecasting model an economic incentive model and a risk model basic guidelines are given for the construction of a forecasting model that combines past energy consumption data weather data and weather forecast the forecasting model is required to estimate expected forecasting errors that are the basis for forecasting risk estimation the risk estimation strategy also requires an economic incentive model that describes the influence of forecasting accuracy on the energy distribution systems cash flow the economic model defines the critical forecasting error levels that most strongly influence cash flow based on the forecasting model and the economic model the development of a risk model is proposed the risk model is associated with critical forecasting error levels in the context of various influential parameters such as seasonal data month day of the week and temperature the risk model is applicable to estimating the daily forecasting risk based on the influential parameters the proposed approach is illustrated by a case study of a slovenian natural gas distribution company

the cost of quality in existing housing estimates from an implicit markets model abstract rosen s implicit markets approach is used to model and estimate the cost of improving the state of repair of rental housing in existing structures particular attention is devoted to potential errors in the measurement of state of repair and to the inconsistent estimates of supply and demand parameters implied by rosen s original econometric technique cost estimates imply that improvements in low income housing could be provided much less expensively in existing housing than by either public new construction or the section 8 existing housing program

temperature and seasonality influences on spanish electricity load abstract deregulation of the spanish electricity market in 1998 and the possible listing of electricity or weather derivative contracts have encouraged the study of the relationship between electricity demand and weather in spain in this paper a transfer function intervention model is developed for forecasting daily electricity load from cooling and heating degree days the influence of weather and seasonality is proved and is significant even when the autoregressive effects and the dynamic specification of the temperature are taken into account the estimated general model shows a high predictive power the results and information presented in this paper could be of interest for current users and potential traders in the deregulated spanish electricity market

indications for a changing electricity demand pattern the temperature dependence of electricity demand in the netherlands abstract this study assesses the electricity demand pattern in the relatively temperate climate of the netherlands latitude 52 30 n daily electricity demand and average temperature during the period from 1970 until 2007 are investigated for possible trends in the temperature dependence of electricity demand we hypothesize that the increased use of cooling applications has shifted the temperature dependence of electricity demand upwards in summer months our results show significant increases in temperature dependence of electricity demand in may june september october and during the summer holidays during the period studied temperature dependence in these months has shifted from negative to positive meaning that a higher temperature now leads to an increased electricity demand in these months rather than a decreased demand as observed historically although electricity demand in countries with moderate summer temperatures such as the netherlands generally peaks in winter months and shows a minimum in summer months this trend may signal the development of an additional peak in summer especially given the expected climatic change as power generating capacity may be negatively influenced by higher temperatures due to decreasing process cooling possibilities an increasing electricity demand at higher temperatures may have important consequences for power generation capacity planning and maintenance scheduling

estimation of tourism induced electricity consumption the case study of balearics islands spain tourism has started to be acknowledged as a significant contributor to the increase in environmental externalities especially to climate change various studies have started to estimate and compute the role of the different tourism sectors contributions to greenhouse gas ghg emissions these estimations have been made from a sectoral perspective assessing the contribution of air transport the accommodation sector or other tourism related economic sectors however in order to evaluate the impact of this sector on energy use the approaches used in the literature consider tourism in its disaggregated way this paper assesses the electricity demand pattern and investigates the aggregated contribution of tourism to electricity consumption using the case study of the balearic islands spain using a conventional daily electricity demand model including data for daily stocks of tourists the impact of the different population growth rate scenarios on electricity loads is also investigated the results show that in terms of electricity consumption tourism cannot be considered a very energy intensive sector

ejido reforms in mexico conceptual issues and potential outcomes the evolving privatization of the ejido system in mexico represents a challenge to standard economic models of common property regimes these models tend to emphasize human interrelations while discounting the ecological conditions which form the environment for human interactions a risk spreading safety first model capturing interrelationships between nature and humans is developed to analyze the potential implications of mexico s privatization efforts recognizing that the majority of ejido lands are communal not parcelized located primarily in arid areas the model supports the prediction that privatization will occur and be most successful on irrigated ejido lands with modern social and economic infrastructure

currency crises are they all the same abstract the plethora of currency crises around the world has fueled many theories on the causes of speculative attacks the first generation models focus on fiscal problems while the second generation models emphasize countercyclical policies and self fulfilling crises in the 1990s models pinpoint to financial excesses with the crisis of argentina in 2001 models of sovereign default have become popular again while the theoretical literature has emphasized variety the empirical literature has supported the one size fits all models this paper contributes to the empirical literature by assessing whether the crises of the last 30 years are of different varieties

residential energy demand in the united states analysis using static and dynamic approaches abstract the residential sector is the main consumer of energy in the united states and reducing energy consumption is an important goal for policymakers in each state to know how reducing residential energy demand could be achieved this study develops a set of static and dynamic models to investigate and identify the impact of socio economic and demographic characteristics building age energy prices and weather conditions on residential energy demand at the state level from 2005 to 2013 next this study proposes two alternative scenarios to reduce residential energy demand based on the most precise model for every 10 000 dollars of per capita income in each state 1 increasing residential electricity price by 1 cent per kw h and 2 decreasing average building age by 1 in the first scenario the findings indicate that annual residential electricity demand would decrease by 7 3 on average with the highest reductions in washington 11 9 north dakota 10 9 and idaho 9 7 in the second scenario residential gas demand would decrease by an average of 15 8 annually with the highest reduction in connecticut 33 2 followed by new york 33 0 and massachusetts 30 7 these proposed scenarios assist policymakers in optimizing decisions and investments to reduce residential energy consumption

econometric modeling of regional electricity spot prices in the australian market abstract wholesale electricity markets are increasingly integrated via high voltage interconnectors and inter regional trade in electricity is growing to model this we consider a spatial equilibrium model of price formation where constraints on inter regional flows result in three distinct equilibria in prices we use this to motivate an econometric model for the distribution of observed electricity spot prices that captures many of their unique empirical characteristics the econometric model features supply and inter regional trade cost functions which are estimated using bayesian monotonic regression smoothing methodology a copula multivariate time series model is employed to capture additional dependence both cross sectional and serial in regional prices the marginal distributions are nonparametric with means given by the regression means the model has the advantage of preserving the heavy right hand tail in the predictive densities of price we fit the model to half hourly spot price data in the five interconnected regions of the australian national electricity market the fitted model is then used to measure how both supply and price shocks in one region are transmitted to the distribution of prices in all regions in subsequent periods finally to validate our econometric model we show that prices forecast using the proposed model compares favorably with those from some benchmark alternatives

contagion and trade why are currency crises regional abstract currency crises tend to be regional they affect countries in geographic proximity this suggests that patterns of international trade are important in understanding how currency crises spread above and beyond any macroeconomic phenomena we provide empirical support for this hypothesis using data for five different currency crises in 1971 1973 1992 1994 and 1997 we show that currency crises affect clusters of countries tied together by international trade by way of contrast macroeconomic and financial influences are not closely associated with the cross country incidence of speculative attacks

forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures using intraday data abstract we use the information in intraday data to forecast the volatility of crude oil at a horizon of 1 66 days using a variety of models relying on the decomposition of realized variance in its positive or negative semivariances part and its continuous or discontinuous part jumps we show the importance of these decompositions in predictive in sample regressions using a number of specifications nevertheless an important empirical finding comes from an out of sample analysis which unambiguously shows the limited interest of considering these components overall our results indicates that a simple autoregressive specification mimicking long memory and using past realized variances as predictors does not perform significantly worse than more sophisticated models which include the various components of realized variance

congestion management rules and trading strategies in the spanish electricity market abstract this paper analyses the economic incentives embodied in the rules governing the resolution of transmission constraints in the spanish wholesale electricity market and the way these incentives may have influenced on the trading behaviour of both the generators and the demand side the evidence obtained is consistent with them responding to these incentives in particular buyers would respond to the way congestion costs are billed to them by abandoning the daily market in favour of the intraday market as far as possible additionally some strategic generators may have been prompted the system operator to require them to inject electricity into the system to solve network congestions finally these results may contribute to shed light on what should be expected of the reform in the aforementioned rules

predicting currency crises abstract in recent years a number of researchers have claimed success in systematically predicting which countries are more likely to suffer currency crises most notably kaminsky lizondo and reinhart 1998 this paper evaluates the klr approach to anticipating currency crises and develops and tests an alternative first we try to answer the question if we had been using the klr model in late 1996 how well armed would we have been to predict the asia crisis second we analyze a more general probit based model of predicting currency crises in the process we test several basic assumptions underlying the indicators approach

exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks this paper evaluates the causes and consequences of episodes of turbulence in foreign exchange markets using data from 1959 through 1993 for twenty oecd countries we consider the antecedents and aftermath of devaluations and revaluations flotations fixings and speculative attacks which may not be successful we find that realignments of fixed exchange rates are alike devaluations are preceded by political instability budget and current account deficits and fast growth of money and prices revaluations are mirror images of devaluations speculative attacks resemble devaluations but money growth and inflation are more endemic and there is no last minute attempt to tighten monetary policy in contrast few consistent correlations link regime transitions like flotations or fixings to macroeconomic or political variables transitions between exchange rate regimes are largely idiosyncratic and are neither consistently provoked ex ante by systematic imbalances nor typically justified ex post by subsequent changes in policy we conclude that there are no clear early warning signals of many speculative attacks and no easy solutions for policy makers barry eichengreen andrew k rose and charles wyplosz

equity and efficiency aspects of rent control an empirical study of new york city modem rent controls arose during world war ii to deal with the war related influx into urban areas since then numerous cities have either considered adopted or eliminated rent controls the policy debate about the desirability of rent controls continues unabated and becomes particularly acute when high inflation rates drive up rents rapidly rent controls have both efficiency and distributional consequences the economics literature has produced theoretical insights about the inefficiencies created by rent controls this literature is frequently cited by opponents of rent controls who argue that the efficiency costs of rent controls are manifested in a decaying housing stock and altered mobility patterns proponents of rent control invariably argue that the distributional impacts of rent controls outweigh efficiency costs considering the large number of cities that have investigated or adopted rent controls relatively little empirical research documents either the efficiency or distributional effects of rent controls the most notable exceptions are the studies of new york city by de salvo 3 olsen 13 and roistacher 15 and the studies of los angeles by rydell et al 16 and fallis and smith 4 more recently linneman lo and marks 12 have further examined ramifications of rent controls in new york city and vancouver this paper fills some gaps in knowledge about the effects of rent controls we examine rent controls in new york city in 1968 using the new york city housing and vacancy survey 2 the paper extends the work of olsen 13 although there are important differences in both the questions addressed and methodology used this paper examines in detail the distributional consequences of rent controls for new york city residents both

modeling and short term forecasting of new south wales electricity system load this article employs bayesian semiparametric regression methodology to model intraday electricity load data and obtain short term load forecasts the role of such forecasts in the new south wales wholesale electricity market is discussed and the method applied to new south wales system load data the semiparametric regression model used identifies daily periodic weekly periodic and temperature sensitive components of load each component is decomposed as a linear combination of basis functions with a nonzero probability mass that the corresponding coefficients are exactly zero three possible models for the errors are also considered including independent autoregressive and first differenced autoregressive models a moving window of data is used to overcome the slow time varying nature of the temperature and periodic effects the entire model is estimated using a bayesian markov chain monte carlo approach and forecasts are obtained using a monte carlo sample from the joint predictive distribution o

impact of temperature on electricity demand evidence from delhi and indian states abstract electricity for cooling improves health and quality of life and is an important mode of adapting to extreme weather conditions and to climate change this study measures the change in electricity demand in response to weather shocks at the household level in delhi and at various aggregate levels in india our econometric analysis uses a semi parametric model to capture the nonlinearity of short run temperature response on average aggregate electricity demand in india increases by 11 or more at temperatures above 30 c from demand at temperatures of 21 24 c with substantial heterogeneity across states aggregate demand in delhi increases by 30 or more at temperatures above 30 c using rich micro data on electricity demand in delhi we do a first of its kind estimation of household level temperature response we find evidence that low income consumers especially those living in slums show limited incremental response to high temperatures likely due to an absence of cooling options these findings underscore the need to improve our understanding of the constraints posed by poverty on climate change adaptation and for interventions to mitigate risks of heat stress among the poor this also suggests rising affluence will lead to sharp increases in electricity demand for cooling

dea as a tool for bankruptcy assessment a comparative study with logistic regression technique this paper proposes data envelopment analysis dea as a quick and easy tool for assessing corporate bankruptcy dea is a non parametric method that measures weight estimates not parameter estimates of a classification function for separating default and non default firms using a recent sample of large corporate failures in the united states we examine the capability of dea in assessing corporate bankruptcy by comparing it with logistic regression lr we find that dea outperforms lr in evaluating bankruptcy out of sample this feature of dea is appealing and has practical relevance for investors another advantage of dea over lr is that it does not have assumptions associated with statistical and econometric methods furthermore dea does not need a large sample size for bankruptcy evaluation usually required by such statistical and econometric approaches the need for such a large sample size is a significant disadvantage to practitioners when investment decisions are made using small samples dea can bypass such a difficulty related to a sample size thus dea is a practically appealing method for bankruptcy assessment

combining momentum with reversal in commodity futures this paper examines profitable trading strategies that jointly exploit momentum and reversal signals in commodity futures while the single sort momentum strategies returns 11 14 per annum on average a consistent reversal pattern of momentum profits is pronounced from 12 to 30 months after portfolio formation combining the observed reversal pattern with the momentum signal our double sort strategy returns 20 24 per annum which significantly outperforms single sort strategies the proposed strategy is robust to seasonality effects and sample adjustments in commodity futures the profitability of the double sort strategy cannot be explained by standard risk factors term structure market volatility investor sentiment data mining or transaction costs but appears to be related to global funding liquidity as a consequence the double sort strategy in commodity futures may be employed as a portfolio diversification tool

developing an early warning system to predict currency crises abstract the purpose of this paper is to develop an early warning system to predict currency crises in this study a data set covering the period of january 1992 december 2011 of turkish economy is used and an early warning system is developed with artificial neural networks ann decision trees and logistic regression models financial pressure index fpi is an aggregated value composed of the percentage changes in dollar exchange rate gross foreign exchange reserves of the central bank and overnight interest rate in this study fpi is the dependent variable and thirty two macroeconomic indicators are the independent variables three models which are tested in turkish crisis cases have given clear signals that predicted the 1994 and 2001 crises 12 months earlier considering all three prediction model results turkey s economy is not expected to have a currency crisis ceteris paribus until the end of 2012 this study presents uniqueness in that decision support model developed in this study uses basic macroeconomic indicators to predict crises up to a year before they actually happened with an accuracy rate of approximately 95 it also ranks the leading factors of currency crisis with regard to their importance in predicting the crisis

macroeconomic uncertainty and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract in modeling the risk premium in the foreign exchange market i assume that money and production follow a joint stochastic process with bivariate garch innovations my formulation is based on lucas asset pricing model and implies that the risk premium in the foreign exchange market is due to time varying volatilities in macroeconomic variables testing the model for three currencies shows the time varying risk premium to be significant in explaining the deviation of the forward foreign exchange rate from the future spot rate diagnostic testing of the model partially supports the market efficiency hypothesis after accounting for the time varying risk premium jel f31 1997 elsevier science ltd

rough sets and the role of the monetary policy in financial stability macroeconomic problem and the prediction of insolvency in insurance sector microeconomic problem abstract this paper faces two questions related with financial stability the first one is a macroeconomic problem in which we try to further investigate the role of monetary policy in explaining banking sector fragility and ultimately systemic banking crisis it analyses a large sample of countries in the period 1981 1999 we find that the degree of central bank independence is one of the key variables to explain financial crisis however the effects of the degree of independence are not linear surprisingly either a high degree of independence or a high degree of dependence are compatible with a situation of financial stability while intermediate levels of independence are more likely associated with financial crisis it seems that it is the uncertainty related with a non clear allocation of monetary policy responsibilities that contributes to financial crisis episodes the second one is a microeconomic problem the prediction of insolvency in insurance companies this question has been a concern of several parties stemmed from the perceived need to protect general public and to minimize the costs associated such as the effects on state insurance guaranty funds or the responsibilities for management and auditors we have developed a bankruptcy prediction model for spanish non life insurance companies and the results obtained are very encouraging in comparison with previous analysis this model could be used as an early warning system for supervisors in charge of the soundness of these entities and or in charge of the financial system stability most methods applied in the past to tackle these two problems are techniques of statistical nature and variables employed in these models do not usually satisfy statistical assumptions what complicates the analysis we propose an approach to undertake these questions based on rough set theory

electricity demand elasticities and temperature evidence from panel smooth transition regression with instrumental variable approach abstract this study applies a non linear model i e the recently developed panel smooth transition regression pstr model and takes into account the potential endogeneity biases to investigate the demand function of electricity for 24 oecd countries from the period 1978 2004 our empirical results demonstrate that there is a strongly non linear link among electricity consumption real income electricity price and temperature a result that is new to the literature as real income rises electricity consumption rapidly increases first and after the level of real income exceeds approximately us 2500 its increasing rate turns slow down an increase in electricity price has a negative or no influence on electricity consumption evidence of a u shaped relationship between electricity consumption and temperature is supported and the threshold value of temperature is approximately 53 f which is endogenously determined furthermore the estimated elasticities of time dynamic indicate that electricity demand is income inelastic price inelastic and temperature inelastic as time goes on the absolute elasticities of electricity demand gradually decrease with respect to real gdp and electricity price whereas they gradually increase with respect to temperature suggesting that the impact of temperature on electricity demand is becoming more important in recent years

spot price modeling and the valuation of electricity forward contracts the role of demand and capacity we propose a model where wholesale electricity prices are explained by two state variables demand and capacity we derive analytical expressions to price forward contracts and to calculate the forward premium we apply our model to the pjm england and wales and nord pool markets our empirical findings indicate that volatility of demand is seasonal and that the market price of demand risk is also seasonal and positive both of which exert an upward seasonal pressure on the price of forward contracts we assume that both volatility of capacity and the market price of capacity risk are constant and find that depending on the market and period under study it could either exert an upward or downward pressure on forward prices in all markets we find that the forward premium exhibits a seasonal pattern during the months of high volatility of demand forward contracts trade at a premium during months of low volatility of demand forwards can either trade at a relatively small premium or even in some cases at a discount i e they exhibit a negative forward premium

distributional aspects of public rental housing and rent control policies in spain abstract this paper studies the importance of the economic advantages and some distributional consequences generated by public and subsidized rental housing as well as rent control policies in spain individual benefits are defined as the difference between the rent the protected dwellings would have in the market minus the rent actually paid for them the market valuation is obtained with an hedonic function estimated for the uncontrolled private sector data for the madrid metropolitan area in 1974 show that for both policies benefits are of considerable importance while its distribution among beneficiaries is very unsatisfactory according to horizontal and vertical equity criteria