energy conservation more effective with rebound policy this article sketches the problem of indirect energy use effects also known as rebound of energy conservation there is widespread support for energy conservation especially when it is voluntary as this seems a cheap way to realize environmental and energy climate goals however this overlooks the phenomenon of rebound the topic of energy rebound has mainly attracted attention from energy analysts but has been surprisingly neglected in environmental economics even though economists generally are concerned with indirect or economy wide impacts of technical change and policies this paper presents definitions and interpretations of energy and environmental rebound as well as four fundamental reasons for the existence of the rebound phenomenon it further offers the most complete list of rebound pathways or mechanisms available in the literature in addition it discusses empirical estimates of rebound and addresses the implications of uncertainties and difficulties in assessing rebound suggestions are offered for strategies and public policies to contain rebound it is advised that rebound evaluation is an essential part of environmental policy and project assessments as opposed to earlier studies this paper stresses the relevance of the distinction between energy conservation resulting from autonomous demand changes and from efficiency improvements in technology equipment in addition it argues that rebound is especially relevant for developing countries

getting into the energy efficiency scene does corporate social responsibility matter for energy efficiency in smes a growing body of literature argues that improving energy efficiency is an essential step that firms must take to mitigate climate change issues it is assumed that corporate social responsibility

clustering of initial public offerings information revelation and underpricing abstract by providing an analysis of sequential going public decisions the paper outlines conditions under which hot issue markets arise i e under which the likelihood of a second initial public offering increases after a first firm has gone public two effects can trigger the rise of hot issue markets in a setting with asymmetric and costly information about both firm quality and industry prospects the risk averse entrepreneur can be subject to risk induced selling pressure because of uncertain industry prospects conveyed by a first ipo in the industry also investors can free ride on the industry news and increase their valuation for a second firm by abstaining from further costly information production finally the model offers an explanation for the empirical finding that hot issue markets exhibit a higher degree of underpricing than cold issue markets

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

the berlin stock exchange in imperial germany a market for new technology analysing 474 cases of firms going public in the german capital between 1892 and 1913 we show that innovative firms could rely on the berlin stock market as a source of financing the data also reveal that initial public offerings ipo of innovative firms were characterized by particularly low underpricing comparatively high first trading prices and no long run underperformance we interpret these empirical results as evidence for the surprising fact that contemporary investors had rational expectations

jevons paradox revisited the evidence for backfire from improved energy efficiency beginning with william stanley jevons in 1865 a number of authors have claimed that economically justified energy efficiency improvements will increase rather than reduce energy consumption jevons paradox is extremely difficult to test empirically but could have profound implications for energy and climate policy this paper summarises and critiques the arguments and evidence that have been cited in support of jevons paradox focusing in particular on the work of len brookes and harry saunders it identifies some empirical and theoretical weaknesses in these arguments highlights the questions they raise for economic orthodoxy and points to some interesting parallels between these arguments and those used by the biophysical school of ecological economics while the evidence in favour of jevons paradox is far from conclusive it does suggest that economy wide rebound effects are larger than is conventionally assumed and that energy plays a more important role in driving productivity improvements and economic growth than is conventionally assumed

capital theory and the measurement of sustainable development an indicator of weak sustainability the measurement of sustainable development is not without considerable difficulties yet this should not detract from the positive advances that can be made in this direction in this paper we present one form that a weak sustainability indicator can take derived from a simple but intuitive savings rule it incorporates the idea that the level of overall capital stock should be non decreasing although subject to qualification at this stage some interesting results emerge from the application of the rule to 18 countries

work environment and opt out rates at motherhood across high education career paths observing a sample of harvard alumnae in their late thirties the authors study the relationship between workplace flexibility and the labor force participation of mothers they first document a large variation in labor force participation rates across higher education fields mindful of the possibility of systematic patterns in the types of women who complete various graduate degrees they use the rich information available for the sample supplemented by the longitudinal nature of a subset of these data to assess the extent to which these labor supply patterns may reflect variation in the difficulty of combining work with family although ruling out systematic sorting entirely is not possible their evidence suggests that inflexible work environments push women out of the labor force at motherhood

weak sustainability and viable technologies abstract the context of the concept of weak sustainability is examined using a three tier hierarchy of value we argue that weak sustainability is relevant only in the context of market exchange at a particular point in time it offers an inadequate guide to the sustainability of social institutions and of the natural world on the other hand georgescu roegen s concept of a viable technology recognizes that the integrity of the social and environmental systems surrounding market activity must be maintained if the human species is to persist through time the concept of viability recognizes that market activity depends not only upon the sustaining functions of the environment but also upon the social sustaining functions of human institutions

william stanley jevons the coal question 1865 beyond the rebound effect before his major 1870s economic writings william stanley jevons wrote in 1865 his first important book entitled the coal question jevons displays an interest for the problem of resource depletion and some opportunism linked to the treatment of a subject in vogue at the time the coal question is retrospectively essentially known for having pointed out the first bases of what we call today the rebound effect known as well as the jevons paradox no one can deny the major contribution jevons did by insisting on the energy efficiency paradoxical phenomenon however this is not the only interesting idea proposed in the coal question this article aims at drawing a larger framework of the ideas developed by jevons looking at some specific points that testify to his position as a turning point in the history of environmental studies we see that jevons expresses a desire of emancipation from both natural sciences and engineering yet without ignoring the necessity of interdisciplinary perspectives to deal with environmental matters it places jevons as a pioneer of several modern approaches towards environmental economics including ecological economics

pricing initial public offerings further evidence from germany abstract in a recent article in this review wasserfallen and wittleder pricing initial public offerings evidence from germany european economic review 38 1505 1517 1994 ww provide evidence of the well known underpricing phenomenon for 92 german ipos coming to market in 1961 1987 using a larger sample of 189 firms from 1970 1993 this paper i reassesses the evidence on underpricing in germany after choosing a different risk proxy to avoid potential endogeneity problems and ii provides evidence of long run ipo performance a number of new results emerge stock market returns the macroeconomic climate insider retention rates and inverse offer size all affect underpricing positively over longer horizons german ipos are poor investments losing more than twelve percent over their first three years of trading relative to the market exclusive of the initial underpricing return negative performance is heavily concentrated after the end of ww s sampling period in the post 1987 cohort

pricing initial public offerings evidence on the pricing of initial public offerings is presented for germany a data set of 92 going publics over the years 1961 1987 is analyzed on average the initial return from the offer price to the first day of trading adjusted for market movements is more than 15 o tests of several hypotheses indicate that underpricing is related to ex ante uncertainty about the value of the shares

underwriter price support and the ipo underpricing puzzle abstract this paper reassesses the apparent systematic underpricing of initial public offerings ipos investigation of the distribution of initial returns following ipos shows that positive mean initial returns may reflect the existence of a partially unobserved left negative tail moreover most ipos with zero one day returns subsequently fall in price suggesting that underwriter price support may account for the skewed distribution and hence the phenomenon of positive average initial ipo returns even if offering prices are set at expected market value this paper thus challenges the presumption underlying previous research that positive average initial ipo returns result primarily from deliberate underpricing

a model of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for new issues this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for the case in which the investment banker is better informed about the capital market than is the issuer and the issuer cannot observe the distribution effort expended by the banker the optimal contract under which the offer price decision is delegated to the better informed banker in order to deal with the adverse selection and moral hazard problems resulting from the informational asymmetry and the observability problem is characterized the model demonstrates a positive demand for investment banking advising and distribution services and provides an explanation of the underpricing of new issues an investment banker performs three functions which may be of value to an issuer of new securities underwriting advising and distribution this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services based on an informational asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and an investment banker ultimately a theory of the organization of the financial intermediary industry is required that would predict which firms would use which types of financial intermediaries for which purposes and which firms would raise capital without engaging the services of a financial intermediary only a limited set of such predictions are developed here in the context of a model of a fixedprice offering under a negotiated contract in which the investment banker is

broadband in the labor market the impact of residential high speed internet on married women s labor force participation the author investigates how high speed home internet use has affected labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross state variation in supply side constraints to reside

financing technology based small firms in europe what do we know this paper reviews the evidence on financing technology based small firms tbsfs in europe european tbsfs finance new investments by relying primarily on internal funds due to capital market failures induced by asymmetric information european venture capital has caught up with us venture capital but this is mainly because of the growth in uk venture investments it is unclear whether european venture capital has been able to certify the quality and enhance the growth of funded companies compared with the nasdaq there is little development of trading in high tech stocks in europe the so called new markets established in the 1990s collapsed in the wake of the internet bubble crash public venture capital and research and development r d tax incentives seem to have positively affected high tech firms

the costs of going public abstract this paper presents evidence regarding the two quantifiable components of the costs of going public direct expenses and underpricing together these costs average 21 22 of the realized market value of the securities issued for firm commitment offers and 31 87 for best efforts offers for a given size offer the direct expenses are of the same order of magnitude for both contract types but the underpricing is greater for best efforts offers an explanation of why some firms choose to use best efforts offers in spite of their apparent higher total costs is given

time discounting in harold hotelling s approach to natural resource economics the unsolved ethical question the paper focuses on harold hotelling s approach to time discounting in the context of the intertemporal allocation of exhaustible natural resources in 1931 hotelling introduces a positive discount rate when dealing with the social value or total utility derived from a resource his position was in contrast with early economic literature on conservation as well as with the point of view of frank ramsey according to whom time discounting expressed an unjustified preference for the welfare of present generations over that of future ones hence it has been argued that hotelling dismissed ethical concerns using archival material we find that for hotelling economic questions should not be restricted to issues of economic efficiency that his choice to discount utility which he considered as analogous to a concrete benefit at the interest rate is compatible with ramsey s position and more broadly that this choice does not preclude an ethical position on the desirable distribution of exhaustible resources through time to hotelling ethics is implemented by politics through fiscal corrections of the interest rate revisiting hotelling on the articulation between ethics allocative efficiency and policies allows us to rethink the way we do that in current models using time discounting

environmental economics and ecological economics where they can converge abstract environmental economics and ecological economics share the common objective of understanding the human economy environment interaction in order to redirect the economies towards sustainability in pursuing this objective these two perspectives utilise different types of analytical framework and are opposed to each other on many of the fundamental theoretical and methodological issues while the environmental economics has progressed within a narrowly but sharply focused neoclassical analytical approach the ecological economics has expanded by adopting a diversified approach which led to widen the gap between the two this article makes an attempt to highlight the divergence between these two perspectives on different issues and identifies certain research avenues that would potentially bring convergence between these two perspectives