coalitional manipulation on networks abstract we study allocation rules that are robust to coalitional manipulation by transferring merging or splitting individual characteristics among coalition partners e g merging or splitting claims in bankruptcy problems coalition formation is restricted by an exogenous network a non directed graph so that only connected subsets of agents can form a coalition we offer a full characterization of non manipulable rules without any assumption on the network structure this result yields a variety of useful corollaries for specific networks such as complete network trees and networks without a bridge and corollaries for specialized models dealing with bankruptcy surplus sharing cost sharing income redistribution social choice with transferable utility etc

balancing the carbon budget for oil the distributive effects of alternative policies keeping temperature change below 2 c will require leaving large reserves of fossil fuels unextracted we assess alternative policies to achieve this goal in a world divided into two regions one regulated with emissions pricing and one unregulated supplied by multiple resource pools with different extraction costs and a carbon free backstop whose costs decline over time global emissions can be reduced by combinations of three policies 1 increasing the size of the regulated coalition 2 raising the tax or tightening the cap within the regulated coalition and 3 accelerating cost reductions of the clean technology we ask how combinations achieving the same cumulative co2 emissions the carbon budget affect the discounted surplus of regulated and unregulated consumers and the wealth of the extractors we first evaluate these policy alternatives in a two pool theoretical model with high and low cost extractors and once tradeoffs are illuminated in a calibrated oil market model a global co2 tax is both cost effective and the best policy for regulated consumers extractors and unregulated consumers however prefer a technology only policy when the regulating coalition is subglobal support for the clean substitute is desired and often required but the preferred policy portfolio of the coalition involves a tighter cap and less technology policy than is globally optimal leaving room for bargaining over who pays for clean innovation

non manipulable division rules in claim problems and generalizations abstract when resources are divided among agents the characteristics of the agents are taken into consideration a simple example is the bankruptcy problem where the liquidation value of a bankrupt firm is divided among the creditors based on their claims we characterize division rules under which no group of agents can increase the total amount they receive by transferring their characteristics within the group by allowing agents characteristics to be multi dimensional and choosing the meaning of variables appropriately our model can subsume a number of existing and new allocation problems such as cost sharing social choice with transferable utilities income redistribution bankruptcy with multiple types of assets probability updating and probability aggregation a number of existing and new results in specific problems are obtained as corollaries

residential energy demand in oecd countries and the role of irreversible efficiency improvements abstract after undergoing substantial changes during a period of high energy prices household energy demand did not rebound in times of declining energy prices as might have been expected hence other factors such as irreversible improvements in technical efficiency must be understood in order to describe both past and future household energy demand in this paper we consider irreversible efficiency improvements as a major reason for the moderate growth in energy demand after the plummeting of the oil price in 1985 we test different econometric models to take into account efficiency indicators the major conclusions of our investigation are i price elasticities are different for rising and falling prices for the latter they are close to zero implying a low rebound effect in the residential sector ii technical efficiency is an important parameter for describing and forecasting energy demand and iii income elasticities turn out to be higher once we incorporate indicators of technological efficiency in the process of estimating energy demand

accounting for asymmetric price responses and underlying energy demand trends in oecd industrial energy demand abstract this paper explores the way technical progress and improvements in energy efficiency are captured when modelling oecd industrial energy demand the industrial sectors of the developed world involve a number of different practices and processes utilising a range of different technologies consequently given the derived demand nature of energy it is vital when modelling industrial energy demand that the impact of technical progress is appropriately captured however the energy economics literature does not give a clear guide on how this can be achieved one strand suggests that technical progress is endogenous via asymmetric price responses whereas another strand suggests that it is exogenous more recently it has been suggested that potentially there is a role for both endogenous technical progress and exogenous technical progress and consequently the general model should be specified accordingly this paper therefore attempts to model oecd industrial energy demand using annual time series data over the period 1962 2010 for 15 oecd countries using the structural time series model framework the general specifications allow for both asymmetric price responses for technical progress to impact endogenously and an underlying energy demand trend for technical progress and other factors to impact exogenously but in a non linear way the results show that almost all of the preferred models for oecd industrial energy demand incorporate both a stochastic underlying energy demand trend and asymmetric price responses this gives estimated long run income elasticities in the range of 0 34 to 0 96 estimated long run price maximum elasticities in the range of 0 06 to 1 22 estimated long run price recovery elasticities in the range of 0 00 to 0 27 and estimated long run price cut elasticities in the range of 0 00 to 0 18 furthermore the analysis suggests that when modelling industrial energy demand there is a place for endogenous technical progress and an exogenous underlying energy demand trend consequently it is argued that any modelling strategy should start by including both and only imposed restrictions if accepted by the data

world oil market or mayhem the world oil market is regarded by many as a puzzle why are oil prices so volatile what is opec and what does opec do where are oil prices headed in the long run is peak oil a genuine concern why did oil prices spike in the summer of 2008 and what role did speculators play any attempt to answer these questions must be informed and disciplined by economics such is the purpose of this essay to illuminate recent developments in the world oil market from the perspective of economic theory

accounting for the declining economic effects of oil price shocks abstract many studies have concluded that the effects of oil price shocks have diminished since the mid 1980s this paper revisits the evidence in blanchard and gali 2010 i show that the apparent instability in the oil price macroeconomy relationship they find can be accounted for by the endogeneity of oil price changes and the lower energy share in consumption in recent decades when these two factors are taken into account the effects of oil price shocks on real economic activity appear to be stable over time nevertheless the impact of oil prices on inflation has noticeably weakened

characterizations of the pivotal mechanism the pivotal mechanism is strategyproof demand revealing in public decision problems where preferences are quasi linear moreover no agent has an incentive to free ride by withdrawing from the committee and consuming whatever decision is taken by the remaining agents strategyproofness plus no free ride characterize the pivotal mechanism this mechanism is anonymous and neutral yet together strategyproofness anonymity and neutrality do not characterize it they will however if reasonable lower or upper bounds on final utilities are imposed our last characterization of the pivotal mechanism uses the no free ride axiom and two mild monotonicity properties but not strategyproofness

modelling oecd industrial energy demand asymmetric price responses and energy saving technical change abstract the industrial sector embodies a multifaceted production process consequently modelling the derived demand for energy is a complex issue made all the more difficult by the need to capture the effect of technical progress of the capital stock this paper is an exercise in econometric modelling of industrial energy demand using panel data for 15 oecd countries over the period 1962 2003 exploring the issue of energy saving technical change and asymmetric price responses although difficult to determine precisely it is tentatively concluded that the preferred specification for oecd industrial energy demand incorporates asymmetric price responses but not exogenous energy saving technical change

u s oil dependence 2014 is energy independence in sight abstract the importance of reducing u s oil dependence may have changed in light of developments in the world oil market over the past two decades since 2005 increased domestic production and decreased oil use have cut u s import dependence in half the direct costs of oil dependence to the u s economy are estimated under four u s energy information administration scenarios to 2040 the key premises of the analysis are that the primary oil market failure is the use of market power by opec and that u s economic vulnerability is a result of the quantity of oil consumed the lack of readily available economical substitutes and the quantity of oil imported monte carlo simulations of future oil market conditions indicate that the costs of u s oil dependence are likely to increase in constant dollars but decrease relative to u s gross domestic product unless oil resources are larger than estimated by the u s energy information administration reducing oil dependence therefore remains a valuable goal for u s energy policy and an important co benefit of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions

exogeneity and the export led growth hypothesis the case of china during the past two decades many empirical studies such as balassa 3 4 emery 7 fajana 11 feder 12 maizels 21 rams 22 23 tyler 26 voivodas 27 williamson 28 and others have found that exports promote economic growth in all of these studies a real output growth variable is regressed on either i export levels ii export shares or iii export growth by using a single equation model the statistical significance of the positive coefficient of the export variables has then been interpreted as evidence supporting the export led growth hypothesis chow 6 hsiao 16 and jung and marshall 17 have recently questioned the validity of the above findings this is because the single equation or so called impact studies using ols regression are from an econometric perspective mostly inadequate in addressing the issue of causality if a bidirectional causality between these two variables exports and output exists the estimation and tests used in the impact studies are inconsistent these concerns have subsequently generated a series of new empirical work aimed directly at resolving the issue of causality between exports and output growth 1 2 14 20 the granger 15 causality tests carried out in these studies have revealed that the causal direction in general depends on the country and commodity group under consideration notwithstanding the important contributions of the above mentioned causality studies there are shortcomings that must be dealt with to permit a better understanding of the subject matter first the impact studies presume that the export variable is exogenous this is a rather restrictive assumption as a feedback from output to exports is very likely 17 20 second the existing causality gtudies do not make a clear distinction between exogeneity and causality as suggested by engle hendry and richard 10 hereinafter ehr causality tests such as the granger 15 method are valid only for testing one component of strong exogeneity because they are concerned with sequential marginalizing feedback effects rather than contemporaneous conditioning

no profitable decompositions in quasi linear allocation problems abstract we study the problem of allocating a bundle of perfectly divisible private goods from an axiomatic point of view in situations where compensations can be made through monetary transfers the key property we impose on the allocation rule requires that no agent should be able to gain by decomposing the problem into sequences of subproblems combined with additional standard properties it leads to a characterization of the rule that shares the total surplus equally hence a traditional welfarist rule emerges as the unique consequence of our axioms phrased in a natural economic environment

performance analysis of sustainable investments in the brazilian stock market a study about the corporate sustainability index ise in this article we studied the corporate sustainability index ise of the brazilian mercantile futures and stock exchange bm fbovespa with the main objective of analyzing the performance of sustainable investments in the brazilian stock market during the period from december 2005 to december 2010 to achieve this aim we characterized ise portfolios and we compared its performance with the ibovespa representing the market portfolio and other bm fbovespa sectoral indices in the performance comparison we used level of liquidity return and risk indicators as well as the following measures sharpe treynor sortino and omega our results show that although sustainable investments have presented some interesting characteristics such as increasing liquidity and low diversifiable risk they did not achieve satisfactory financial performance in the analysis period this indicates that the constraints imposed by this type of investment in capital allocation in brazil may be harming their return and risk attractiveness

review of key international demand elasticities for major industrializing economies abstract this paper conducts a selective review of various estimates for energy demand responses focused specially upon lower income industrializing economies rather than richer mature nations it emphasizes recent trends from empirical studies that have been published after 2000 emphasis is placed on the five major emerging or transitional economies in brazil china india mexico and russia although other important nations like chile and south korea are also discussed when studies are available the review focuses attention on the long run responses to changes in prices and income after capital stock turnover has been completed the terminology often refers to elasticities or the percentage change in energy use divided by the percentage change in price or income holding constant all other factors that could influence energy use decisions estimates cover petroleum products natural gas and electricity although the available studies often ignore coal they also include the economy wide impacts real gdp to price changes most studies have focused upon household and transportation use of liquid fuels many fewer studies have investigated fuels used by industry or commerce or for electric generation based upon the available estimates price and income elasticities for liquid fuels are generally less than one unity for many countries and sectors except for the long run income effect for transportation purposes which can range widely by country between 0 24 and 1 75 while averaging 0 94 for all countries

welfarism in economic domains abstract in economies with public goods and agents with quasi linear preferences we give a characterization of the welfare egalitarian correspondence in terms of three axioms pareto optimality symmetry and solidarity this last property requires that an increase in the willingness to pay for the public goods of some of the agents should not decrease the welfare of any of them journal of economic literature classification numbers d63 h41

world oil demand s shift toward faster growing and less price responsive products and regions abstract using data for 1971 2008 we estimate the effects of changes in price and income on world oil demand disaggregated by product transport oil fuel oil residual and heating oil and other oil for six groups of countries most of the demand reductions since 1973 74 were due to fuel switching away from fuel oil especially in the oecd in addition the collapse of the former soviet union fsu reduced their oil consumption substantially demand for transport and other oil was much less price responsive and has grown almost as rapidly as income especially outside the oecd and fsu world oil demand has shifted toward products and regions that are faster growing and less price responsive in contrast to projections to 2030 of declining per capita demand for the world as a whole by the u s department of energy doe international energy agency iea and opec we project modest growth our projections for total world demand in 2030 are at least 20 higher than projections by those three institutions using similar assumptions about income growth and oil prices because we project rest of world growth that is consistent with historical patterns in contrast to the dramatic slowdowns which they project

the rapid growth of opec s domestic oil consumption abstract opec s domestic oil consumption has increased seven fold in 40 years to 8 5 million barrels per day mbd they consume almost as much oil as china this constitutes one fourth of their production such rapid growth in consumption 5 1 annually faster than their income growth of 3 1 will challenge opec s ability to increase their oil exports which are relied upon in long term world oil projections by the international energy agency iea us department of energy doe eia and british petroleum bp however these institutions assume unprecedented slowdowns in opec oil consumption to less than 2 in the future allowing them to project increases in opec oil exports with only modest increases in production we analyze 1971 2010 data econometrically with panel co integration methods we estimate that the income elasticity of consumption is about 1 for energy and oil this means that opec s energy and oil consumption will grow as rapidly as their income hence continued high growth rates for domestic oil consumption are more likely than the unprecedented slowdowns projected by iea doe eia and bp adding an extra 6 mbd of opec consumption in 2030 this will have major implications for opec production and export levels and for world oil prices

differentially monotonic redistribution of income we suggest a differential version of monotonicity for redistribution rules whenever the differential of two persons income weakly increases then the differential of their post redistribution rewards also weakly increases together with efficiency and non negativity differential monotonicity characterizes redistribution via taxation at a fixed rate and equal distribution of the total tax revenue

coalitional manipulation in a quasilinear economy in our model it is assumed that each agent knows the sum of the utility functions of the entire society as well as his own utility under this information assumption a social choice mechanism has to make a public decision and choose a balanced set of side payments the mechanisms providing for stability against coalitational manipulation are shown to be egalitarian an extension of an arbitrary egalitarian mechanism to a set of inconsistent messages is given in an explicit form journal of economic literature classification number d82

the separability axiom and equal sharing methods a quasi linear social choice problem is defined as selecting one among finitely many indivisible public decision and a vector of monetary transfers among agents to cover the cost of this decision this decision is based upon individual preferences which are assumed to be additively separable and linear in money the separability axiom is a consistency property for choice methods on societies with variable size the decision is not affected if we remove an arbitrary agent under the condition that he be guaranteed his original utility level and the cost to the remaining agents is modified accordingly thus the utility level assigned by the social choice function to agent i is the price at which the other agents are unanimously willing to buy agent is share of the decision power a general characterization of choice methods satisfying this axiom is provided three subclasses of particular interest are characterized by additional milder axioms those are i equal sharing of the surplus left over some reference utility e g the utility at a status quo decision ii utilitarian methods that merely select the efficient public decision and perform no monetary transfers and iii equal allocation of nonseparable costs which divides equally the surplus left over from the utility derived from the pivotal mechanism also known as the vickrey clarke groves mechanism

the rebound effect for automobile travel asymmetric response to price changes and novel features of the 2000s abstract previous research suggests that the elasticity of light duty motor vehicle travel with respect to fuel cost known as the rebound effect is modest in size and probably declined in magnitude between the 1960s and the late 1990s however turmoil in energy markets during the early 2000s has raised new questions about the stability of this elasticity using panel data on u s states we revisit the simultaneous equations methodology of small and van dender 2007 and hymel et al 2010 to see whether structural parameters have changed using data through 2009 we confirm the earlier finding of a rebound effect that declines in magnitude with income but we also find an upward shift in its magnitude of about 0 025 during the years 2003 2009 in addition we find that the rebound effect is much greater in magnitude in years when gasoline prices are rising than when they are falling it is also greater during times of media attention and price volatility which explains about half the upward shift just mentioned

how sensitive to time period sampling is the asymmetric price response specification in energy demand modelling abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the criticism that energy demand estimates based on a specific price decomposition are sensitive to the chosen time period used for the estimation to analyse this in a systematic way different time series sample periods are constructed from annual data for 17 oecd countries covering the overall period 1960 to 2008 the specific price decomposition under consideration often used to estimate asymmetric price response models of energy demand separates the impact of prices above the previous maximum of a price recovery below the previous maximum and of a price cut therefore the analysis does not just involve using different time periods instead for each time period investigated a new dataset is constructed and for each dataset the price variable is decomposed in this way an energy demand relationship allowing for asymmetric price responses is therefore estimated for each different sample period and the results suggest that recalculation of the decomposed price variables for each different period does affect the stability of the estimated energy demand responses in contrast a similarly estimated energy demand relationship with symmetric price responses for each different sample period is found to have less instability

the nature of oil shocks and the global economy abstract this paper identifies the main driving force behind oil price shocks in 1970 2006 by applying a simple identification strategy of supply driven and demand driven price shocks the identification hypothesis states that supply driven oil price shocks have a negative impact on the macroeconomic activity of countries which are net consumers of oil while demand driven oil price shocks do not have negative effects in order to identify global demand driven shocks a weighted aggregate gdp series of countries which are net consumers of oil is constructed over 1970 2006 the key result is that the main driving force behind oil price shocks has changed from supply driven shocks in 1970 1992 to demand driven shocks in 1992 2006

on the investment implications of bankruptcy laws axiomatic analysis of bankruptcy problems reveals three major principles i proportionality pro ii equal awards ea and iii equal losses el however most real life bankruptcy procedures implement only the proportionality principle we construct a noncooperative investment game to explore whether the explanation lies in the alternative implications of these principles on investment behavior our results are as follows i el always induces higher total investment than pro which in turn induces higher total investment than ea ii pro always induces higher egalitarian social welfare than both ea and el in interior equilibria iii pro induces higher utilitarian social welfare than el in interior equilibria but its relation to ea depends on the parameter values however a numerical analysis shows that on a large part of the parameter space pro induces higher utilitarian social welfare than ea

china s soaring vehicle population even greater than forecasted abstract china s vehicle population is widely forecasted to grow 6 11 per year into the foreseeable future barring aggressive policy intervention or a collapse of the chinese economy we suggest that those forecasts are conservative we analyze the historical vehicle growth patterns of seven of the largest vehicle producing countries at comparable times in their motorization history we estimate vehicle growth rates for this analogous group of countries to have 13 17 per year roughly twice the rate forecasted for china by others applying these higher growth rates to china results in the total vehicle fleet reaching considerably higher volumes than forecasted by others implying far higher global oil use and carbon emissions than projected by the international energy agency and others

backcasting u s oil demand over a turbulent decade abstract this paper compares 10 year backcast projections of u s petroleum consumption for the 2000 2009 period based upon a range of functional forms although a univariate specification based upon only lagged consumption performed better than most approaches it provides little value to the policymaker who wants to understand the factors that influence oil consumption and by how much one structural approach performed considerably better than all other approaches including the univariate model this specification is the autoregressive distributed lag adl model that allowed oil demand to respond differently asymmetrically to price increases and decreases certain forms of this equation however do well while others perform poorly evaluations of backcast projections over different periods and updated frequently can be important byproducts of energy modeling

commodity prices and fiscal policy design procyclical despite a rule recent studies offer evidence of reduced fiscal procyclicality to commodity price changes in resource rich countries a feature commonly attributed to the adoption of fiscal policy rules we revisit this issue and find that by controlling for global activity shocks while allowing for time varying changes in both fiscal policy and the volatility of shocks this finding does not hold to show this we develop a time varying dynamic factor model allowing for a multiple of shocks stochastic volatility and time varying parameters and estimate it on data for norway whose handling of resource wealth is often cited as exemplary

industry effects of oil price shocks a re examination abstract sectoral responses to oil price shocks help determine how these shocks are transmitted throughout the economy textbook treatments of oil price shocks often emphasize negative supply or cost effects on oil importing countries by contrast the seminal contribution of lee and ni 2002 has shown that almost all u s industries experience oil price shocks largely through a reduction in their respective demands only industries with very high oil intensities face a supply driven reduction in this paper we re examine this seminal finding using two additional decades of data further we apply updated empirical methods including structural factor augmented vector autoregressions that take into account how industries are linked among themselves and with the remainder of the macro economy our results confirm the original finding of lee and ni that demand effects of oil price shocks dominate in all but a handful of u s industries