performance rating and yardstick competition in social service provision abstract this paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends by lessening local information spill overs to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto correlation among local government expenditures it analyses local government expenditures on personal social services in the uk before and after the introduction of a national performance assessment system sspr social services performance rating that would attribute a rating to each local authority the empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the sspr has reduced local yardstick competition

optimal electricity market for wind power abstract this paper is about electricity market operation when looking from the wind power producers point of view the focus in on market time horizons how many hours there is between the closing and delivering the bids the case is for the nordic countries the nordpool electricity market and the danish wind power production real data from year 2001 was used to study the benefits of a more flexible market to wind power producer as a result of reduced regulating market costs from better hourly predictions to the market wind power producer would gain up to 8 more if the time between market bids and delivery was shortened from the day ahead elspot market hourly bids by noon for 12 36 h ahead an after sales market where surplus or deficit production could be traded 2 h before delivery could benefit the producer almost as much gaining 7

strategic offering for a wind power producer as a result of subsidies and technological maturity renewable electricity producers have grown in some jurisdictions to clearly dominant positions in the market under this context we propose an offering strategy for a wind power producer with market power that participates in the day ahead market as a price maker and in the balancing market as a deviator uncertainty pertaining to wind power production and balancing market price is represented through a set of correlated scenarios the proposed model is a stochastic mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec that can be recast as a tractable mixed integer linear programming milp problem which is solvable using available optimization software results from an illustrative example and two case studies show the effectiveness of the proposed model

distributed stochastic market clearing with high penetration wind power integrating renewable energy into the modern power grid requires risk cognizant dispatch of resources to account for the stochastic availability of renewables toward this goal day ahead stochastic market clearing with high penetration wind energy is pursued in this paper based on the dc optimal power flow opf the objective is to minimize the social cost which consists of conventional generation costs end user disutility as well as a risk measure of the system re dispatching cost capitalizing on the conditional value at risk cvar the novel model is able to mitigate the potentially high risk of the recourse actions to compensate wind forecast errors the resulting convex optimization task is tackled via a distribution free sample average based approximation to bypass the prohibitively complex high dimensional integration furthermore to cope with possibly large scale dispatchable loads a fast distributed solver is developed with guaranteed convergence using the alternating direction method of multipliers admm numerical results tested on a modified benchmark system are reported to corroborate the merits of the novel framework and proposed approaches

property rights and consumption volatility evidence from a land reform in vietnam summary during vietnam s transition from a socialist to a market economy household s property rights over agricultural land were considerably strengthened through a land certification program this resulted in active formal credit and land markets either of which potentially affects consumption levels and volatility this article evaluates the program impact with respect to consumption outcomes in particular it identifies the channel of impact through which improved property rights affect consumption volatility we find that land certification increases consumption levels for rural households but also consumption volatility for a subgroup of households identified by an instrument we show that the certification program affects consumption outcomes of this subgroup through presumably more risky credit based agricultural investment at the intensive margin

does rising landlessness signal success or failure for vietnam s agrarian transition in the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land use rights vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness to some observers this is a harmless by product of a more efficient economy while to others it signals the return of the pre socialist class structure with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder the authors theoretical model suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will increase landlessness among the poor but that there will be both gainers and losers with uncertain impacts on aggregate poverty empirically they find that landlessness is less likely for the poor and that the observed rise in landlessness is poverty reducing on balance however there are marked regional differences notably between the north and the south

dilemmas of local governance under the development zone fever in china a case study of the suzhou region this article aims to explore the mechanisms of the development zone fever in the suzhou region located in the fast growing yangtze river delta and investigates from an institutional perspective the practice of relevant intragovernmental governance in the context of rapid industrialisation since the 1990s a specific mode of governance the evaluative economic indicators scheme inherited from the earlier socialist planning system combined with the party state s promotion evaluation system plays an essential role in this transformation of farmland property rights however this model of development is not necessarily helpful for local financial conditions and it results in the disclacement of peasants and the loss of land resources based on the resulting dilemmas of governance it is argued that in addition to the economic paradigm which focuses on consequences of fiscal reforms and devolution scholars should pay more attention to factors such as the party state s promotion evaluation system and

intraday trading of wind energy in this paper we tackle the problem of a wind power producer participating in a short term electricity market that allows for the continuous but potentially illiquid intraday trading of energy considering the realistic case of a wind farm operating in the western danish price area of nord pool we build a simple but effective algorithm for the wind power producer to fully benefit from the elbas intraday market we then investigate the sensitivity of the obtained benefits to the maximum volume of energy the wind power producer is willing to trade in the intraday market the ultimate aim of the trade either to decrease energy imbalances or to increase profits and to the installed capacity of the wind farm our numerical results reveal that the wind power producer can substantially increase his revenues by partaking in the intraday market but with diminishing returns to scale a result that we attribute to the low liquidity of elbas

analysis of a wind farm s revenue in the british and spanish markets the composition of the revenue of a wind generation company wgenco under two different european markets is estimated in this paper the two markets under consideration british and spanish have a very different structure the spanish market is a pool based system while the british market encourages bilateral trading these markets have also different ways to provide incentives to wind farms and deal with the trading imbalances to which they are particularly susceptible given the variability of the resource all these conditions are explained and accounted for in our study of a hypothetical wgenco that can participate in the two markets real wind profiles two wind speed forecasting tools and market rules and conditions are used to estimate the wgenco s revenue over a period of 3 months our results show that the net revenue would have been fairly similar under the two market structures however the composition of this revenue shows significant differences in terms of renewable incentives and generation revenue

trading wind generation in short term energy markets even with state of the art forecasting methods the short term generation of wind farms cannot be predicted with a high degree of accuracy in a market situation these forecasting errors lead to commercial risk through imbalance costs when advance contracting this situation is one that needs to be addressed due to the steady increase in the amount of grid connected wind generation combined with the rise of deregulated market orientated electricity systems in the presence of imbalance prices and uncertain generation a method is required to determine the optimum level of contract energy to be sold on the advance markets such a method is presented here using markov probabilities for a wind farm and demonstrates substantial reductions in the imbalance costs the effect of market closure delays and forecasting window lengths are also shown

offering strategy of wind power producer a multi stage risk constrained approach given the significant amount of installed generation capacity based on wind power and also due to current economic downturn the subsidies and incentives that have been widely used by wind power producers to recover their investment costs have decreased and are even expected to disappear in the near future in these conditions wind power producers need to develop offering strategies to make their investments profitable counting solely on the market this paper proposes a multi stage risk constrained stochastic complementarity model to derive the optimal offering strategy of a wind power producer that participates in both the day ahead and the balancing markets uncertainties concerning wind power productions market prices demands bids and rivals offers are efficiently modeled using a set of scenarios the conditional value at risk metric is used to model the profit risk associated with the offering decisions the proposed model is recast as a tractable mixed integer linear programming program solvable using available branch and cut algorithms results of a case study are reported and discussed to show the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach

dimensions and diversity of property rights in rural china dilemmas on the road to further reform abstract this paper contributes to the debate over land tenure in rural china by conceptualizing and measuring multiple dimensions of property rights in a way that elucidates the competing interests that are affected by the property rights regime utilizing a unique village level data set this paper argues that the regional and temporal variation in rural property rights signals a pattern in which decentralized institutional innovation occurs in response to the competing interests of the national state of local authorities and of present and possible future individual land users unlike the earlier debate concerning the household responsibility system the current property rights dilemma is intrinsically more complex because the potential conflicts of interest between individuals local collectives and the state are greater resolution of that debate will ultimately require careful exploration of the reality and substance of the tradeoffs and competing interests that make further reform of rural property rights so difficult

bringing wind energy to market wind energy is a rapidly growing source of renewable energy generation however the current extra market approach to its assimilation into the electric grid will not scale at deep penetration levels in this paper we investigate how an independent wind power producer might optimally offer its variable power into a competitive electricity market for energy starting with a stochastic model for wind power production and a model for a perfectly competitive two settlement market we derive explicit formulae for optimal contract offerings and the corresponding optimal expected profit as wind is an inherently variable source of energy we explore the sensitivity of optimal expected profit to uncertainty in the underlying wind process we also examine the role of forecast information and recourse markets in this setting we quantify the role of reserves in increasing reliability of offered contracts and obtain analytical expressions for marginal profits resulting from investments in improved forecasting and local auxiliary generation the formulae make explicit the relationship between price signals and the value of such firming strategies

land use change and economic growth in urban china a structural equation analysis land use change is not only the consequence of economic growth but also its direct and indirect driver based on official land use change data from 2004 to 2008 this study found substantial land use changes in china with considerable cultivated land conversion into urban industrial and transportation purposes correlation analysis shows a strong association between land use change and absolute gdp expansion structural equation analysis indicates that economic growth drives land use change industrial land expansion directly stimulates economic growth land has been successfully used as a tool to attract foreign investments and to sustain infrastructure investments indirectly triggering economic growth the findings suggest that land is not a simple factor of production but a strategic tool for economic development in urban china

minimization of imbalance cost trading wind power on the short term power market present power markets are designed for trading conventional generation for wind generation to participate in a short term energy market lengthy wind power production forecasts are required although wind speed forecasting techniques are constantly improving wind speed forecasts are never perfect and resulting wind power forecast errors imply imbalance costs for wind farm owners in this paper a new method for minimization of imbalance costs is developed stochastic programming is used to generate optimal wind power production bids for a short term power market a wind power forecast error is represented as a stochastic process the imbalance costs resulting from this strategy are then compared to the case when wind power production bids on a short term power market are based directly on a wind speed forecast

land ownership security and farm investment comment economists have long argued that increasing security of individual property rights in land leads to increased investment feder and onchan ft are among the first to empirically test this argument in a rigorous way based on data from thailand ft infer that ownership of land title increases capital accumulation and investment their analysis broadens our understanding of the linkages between capital markets and land investment and offers hypotheses for further research this comment raises two issues concerning the ft article first the empirical results are open to several interpretations because of fundamental questions about causality and the definition of ownership security a reinterpretation of the data suggests that the aggregate impact of title on investment may have been small second inference from the thailand study must be made with caution consideration of a more general model suggests other conditions which influence the impact of title on investment and productivity our comments do not diminish the importance of the ft study but raise conceptual issues that may prove useful for future land titling research

the effects of land sales restrictions evidence from south india abstract the effects of land sales restrictions on credit use land investment and cultivation decisions are investigated using data from two villages in south india sales restrictions are found to have little effect on credit supply and demand or demand for land improvements some household characteristics are found to affect investment demand on plots subject to sales restrictions in one village suggesting that the transactions effect of such restrictions may be inhibiting allocative efficiency however we also find that household characteristics influence investment on titled plots and that the magnitude of impact of such characteristics is greater on titled plots these results imply that sales restrictions are not a major source of inefficiency in the villages studied and suggest that the nature of village credit and land markets and enforcement of sales restrictions are critical determinants of the impacts of such restrictions

credit constraints and productivity in peruvian agriculture this article evaluates the performance of a rural credit market in peru we develop a model that shows that collateral requirements imposed by lenders in response to asymmetric information can lead not just to quantity rationing but also to transaction cost rationing and risk rationing just like quantity rationing these two additional forms of nonprice rationing adversely affect farm resource allocation and productivity we test the insights of the model using a panel data set from northern peru we estimate the returns to productive endowments for constrained and unconstrained households using a switching regression model we find that consistent with the theory productivity is independent of endowments for unconstrained households but is tightly linked to endowments for constrained households we estimate that credit constraints lower the value of agricultural output in the study region by 26

regional decentralization and fiscal incentives federalism chinese style abstract aligning the interests of local governments with market development is an important issue for developing and transition economies using a panel data set from china we investigate the relationship between provincial government s fiscal incentives and provincial market development we report three empirical findings first we find that during the period of fiscal contracting system the discrepancy between ex ante contracts and ex post implementation was relatively small suggesting that the fiscal contracts were credible second we find a much higher correlation about four times between the provincial government s budgetary revenue and its expenditure during 1980s and 1990s as compared to 1970s demonstrating that provincial governments faced much stronger ex post fiscal incentives after reform third we find that stronger ex ante fiscal incentives measured by the contractual marginal retention rate of the provincial government in its budgetary revenue are associated with faster development of the non state sector as well as more reforms in the state sector in the provincial economy this holds even when we control for the conventional measure of fiscal decentralization finally we compare federalism chinese style to federalism russian style

on the market impact of wind energy forecasts this paper presents an analysis of how day ahead electricity spot prices are affected by day ahead wind power forecasts demonstration of this relationship is given as a test case for the western danish price area of the nord pool s elspot market impact on the average price behaviour is investigated as well as that on the distributional properties of the price by using a non parametric regression model to assess the effects of wind power forecasts on the average behaviour the non linearities and time variations in the relationship are captured well and the effects are shown to be quite substantial furthermore by evaluating the distributional properties of the spot prices under different scenarios the impact of the wind power forecasts on the price distribution is proved to be considerable the conditional price distribution is moreover shown to be non gaussian this implies that forecasting models for electricity spot prices for which parameters are estimated by a least squares techniques will not have gaussian residuals hence the widespread assumption of gaussian residuals from electricity spot price models is shown to be inadequate for these model types the revealed effects are likely to be observable and qualitatively similar in other day ahead electricity markets significantly penetrated by wind power

the impact of market friendly reforms on credit and land markets in honduras and nicaragua summary this article explores the impacts on credit access and agrarian structure of land market liberalization policies undertaken in honduras and nicaragua during the 1990s like liberalization efforts pursued in many latin american countries these market friendly reforms were designed to activate land transfers and enhance agricultural efficiency in large part by improving the access of the rural poor to both credit and land markets panel data sets gathered in honduras and nicaragua are used to compare title credit and land access patterns before and after the reforms descriptive nonparametric regression analyses show that despite major gains in titling across the land size spectrum and some increase in land market activity the other hoped for improvements in credit and land access did not occur and appear unlikely to occur without further policy attention to credit markets

optimal bidding of a group of wind farms in day ahead markets through an external agent in deregulated electricity markets producers offer their energy to the day ahead market as the subsidies for renewable producers are becoming lower and lower they have to adapt to market prices this paper models the energy trading in the day ahead market for wind power producers different strategies are proposed for this purpose 1 several wind farms offering their energy separately to the day ahead market 2 the same strategy as in 1 but compensating the imbalance among different wind farms and 3 a joint offer involving several wind farms through an external agent in order to minimize the imbalances between the offer and the final power generation the strategies are modeled with stochastic mixed integer linear programming and conditional value at risk is used to consider the risk assessment the expected profit including risk aversion is maximized for each wind power producer and for the set of wind power producers in the case of a joint offer a comparison of the different cases is described in detail in a case study and relevant conclusions are provided

remittances and income smoothing due to inadequate savings and binding borrowing constraints income volatility can make households in developing countries particularly susceptible to economic hardship we examine the role of remittances in either alleviating or increasing household income volatility using mexican household level data over the 2000 through 2008 period we correct for reverse causality and endogeneity and find that while income smoothing does not appear to be the main motive for sending remittances in a non negligible share of households remittances do indeed smooth household income on average other variables surrounding income volatility are also considered and evaluated

the economic benefit of short term forecasting for wind energy in the uk electricity market in the uk market the total price of renewable electricity is made up of the renewables obligation certificate and the price achieved for the electricity accurate forecasting improves the price if electricity is traded via the power exchange in order to understand the size of wind farm for which short term forecasting becomes economically viable we develop a model for wind energy simulations were carried out for 2003 electricity prices for different forecast accuracies and strategies the results indicate that it is possible to increase the price obtained by around 5 mwh which is about 14 of the electricity price in 2003 and about 6 of the total price we show that the economic benefit of using short term forecasting is also dependant on the accuracy and cost of purchasing the forecast as the amount of wind energy requiring integration into the grid increases short term forecasting becomes more important to both wind farm owners and the transmission distribution operators

incentives and the de soto effect this paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate hernando de soto we use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from sri lanka we show that the effects are likely to be nonlinear and heterogeneous by wealth group they also depend on the extent of competition between lenders there can be significant increases in profits and reductions in interest rates when credit markets are competitive however since these are due to reductions in moral hazard that is increased effort the welfare gains tend to be modest when cost of effort is taken into account allowing for an extensive margin where borrowers gain access to the credit market can make these effects larger depending on the underlying wealth distribution

an evaluation of intraday trading and demand response for a predominantly hydro wind system under nordic market rules many countries are planning for a large scale expansion of wind power this development will have a significant impact on power system operation and economics one of the challenges is that the dif

wind power offering strategy in day ahead markets employing demand response in a two stage plan this paper deals with wind power offering strategies in day ahead markets a new plan is proposed in which a wind power producer participates in the day ahead market while employing demand response dr to smooth its power variations in this context a new dr scheme is presented through which the wind power producer is able to achieve dr by establishing various dr agreements with dr aggregators the proposed offering plan involves two stages the first stage clears on the day ahead market the wind power producer decides on day ahead offers as well as dr agreements with the aggregator the second stage takes place on the balancing market in a successive approach the wind power producer determines its energy trading for each period until the whole day is covered additionally proper dr agreements for each period are confirmed here the proposed plan is formulated in a stochastic programming approach where its validity is assessed on a case of the nordic market

economic assessment of the participation of wind generation in the secondary regulation market the aim of this paper is to analyze the profitability of wind technology as a potential participant in the frequency regulation specifically in the secondary regulation market the study is conducted for the spanish system using existing market rules however although this system has some peculiarities the main methodology could be applied in other systems firstly a bibliographical review of the relevant technical possibilities of this technology is carried out then a simulation study based on real data is conducted in order to evaluate the maximum possible incomes later a specific offer strategy is proposed and the income is estimated based on statistical modeling and checked by simulating its performance using the actual and forecasted productions of a wind portfolio it is concluded that under the current generation structure and regulatory framework in the spanish system the incomes obtained from the participation of wind technology would be modest however secondary regulation by wind generators might facilitate higher penetration levels of this technology in the long term with expected wind generation subsidies much reduced a greater need for regulation reserves and a possible increase in regulation prices regulation related incomes might become a sizeable fraction of the total income of wind generators

trading wind generation from short term probabilistic forecasts of wind power due to the fluctuating nature of the wind resource a wind power producer participating in a liberalized electricity market is subject to penalties related to regulation costs accurate forecasts of wind generation are therefore paramount for reducing such penalties and thus maximizing revenue despite the fact that increasing accuracy in spot forecasts may reduce penalties this paper shows that if such forecasts are accompanied with information on their uncertainty i e in the form of predictive distributions then this can be the basis for defining advanced strategies for market participation such strategies permit to further increase revenues and thus enhance competitiveness of wind generation compared to other forms of dispatchable generation this paper formulates a general methodology for deriving optimal bidding strategies based on probabilistic forecasts of wind generation as well as on modeling of the sensitivity a wind power producer may have to regulation costs the benefits resulting from the application of these strategies are clearly demonstrated on the test case of the participation of a multi mw wind farm in the dutch electricity market over a year

review of de soto s the mystery of capital in the mystery of capital hernando de soto promotes his explanation of why formal capital markets function poorly in developing countries de soto argues that much of the population of developing countries lacks access to credit not because they lack assets but because ownership of their property is secured informally which prevents the use of property as collateral the inability to convert assets into capital keeps the developing world from benefiting from capitalism

land tenure and property rights theory and implications for development policy this article explores the nature of property rights systems their evolution and their effect on resource allocation it is argued that certain institutional arrangements for land rights have evolved in order to reduce uncertainty and increase efficiency in credit as well as in land markets of particular relevance to developing countries the article emphasizes the contribution of public sector infrastructure to effective land rights systems an appendix to the article presents a formal model analyzing the effects of security of land rights on land prices the intensity of cultivation and the use of credit empirical evidence from thailand supports several of the propositions derived from the model

land leasing and local public finance in china s regional development evidence from prefecture level cities by analysing the evolution of local governments roles in different periods of china s growth in transition this paper explores local fiscal incentives to use subsidised land and infrastructure as key instruments in regional competition for manufacturing investment since the mid 1990s local land development behaviour is related to china s current land use institutions and intergovernmental arrangements on the basis of panel data covering prefectural level cities from 1999 to 2003 the paper empirically identifies and compares the fiscal impacts of different forms of land leasing by negotiation versus by auction tender policy implications are drawn from this analysis for the further reform of china s urban land system and fiscal institutions

land reallocation in an agrarian transition liberalising key factor markets is a crucial step in the transition from a socialist control economy to a market economy however the process can be stalled by imperfect information high transaction costs and covert resistance from entrenched interests the article studies agricultural land reallocation in the wake of vietnam s efforts to establish a free market in land use rights following de collectivisation inefficiencies in the initial administrative allocation are measured against an explicit counterfactual land allocation responded positively but slowly to the initial inefficiencies there is no sign that the transition favoured the land rich or that it was thwarted by local officials vietnam s agrarian transition has closely followed a now classic policy scenario for economies in transition first one privatises the main productive assets in this case agricultural land use rights then one legalises their free exchange in the first step the de collectivisation of vietnam s agriculture meant that the land that had previously been farmed collectively was to be allocated by administrative means across households within each commune without a market mechanism to guide the process it can be expected that inefficiencies in land allocation would remain with some households having too much land relative to a competitive market allocation and some too little ravallion and van de walle 2004 document evidence of such inefficiencies in the initial administrative allocation at the time of de collectivisation

land tenure and agricultural productivity in africa a comparative analysis of the economics literature and recent policy strategies and reforms summary this paper examines the convergence and divergence of results from economic studies of the relationships between land tenure security and agricultural productivity in africa and how these results have been incorporated into recent agricultural poverty alleviation and land policy documents the paper finds that there are both areas of convergence and divergence in the economics literature similarly the attention given to land tenure and its perceived effects on productivity varies considerably in the policy literature the significant heterogeneity in findings itself suggests that policy responses must pay attention to local context and the overarching macro and sectoral conditions within which tenure systems operate

global value chains labor organization and private social standards lessons from east african cut flower industries summary this article examines the opportunities and challenges that private social standards pose for labor organizations it explores different labor responses to private social standards in east african cut flower industries the analysis incorporates the concept of labor agency in global value chain analysis and reveals how retailer driven chains offer more room for labor organizations to exercise their agency than the traditional cut flower value chains labor organizations have been able to influence social standard setting and implementation and to use standards to further labor representation at production sites however labor organizations ability to seriously challenge the prevailing governance structure of the cut flower value chain appears extremely limited

pros and cons of exposing renewables to electricity market risks a comparison of the market integration approaches in germany spain and the uk abstract the article examines how renewable electricity res e producers are integrated into the electricity market under the support legislations and regulatory frameworks of germany spain and the uk focus is on wind power which faces the highest market integration challenge of all res e the analysis shows that the three countries follow contrasting approaches of exposing res e producers to the market risks of forward electricity markets balancing markets and system planning requirements risk exposure is highest in the uk and lowest in germany from a policy maker s perspective there is a trade off between a high risk and a low risk approach when res e face high market risks a higher level of financial support is required to stimulate res e development than in a low risk environment but the exposure to market risks may also give an incentive to make efficient use of the respective market thus limiting the indirect costs to society the special characteristics of wind energy however put natural limits to the response of wind power plants to market prices and locational price signals and will increasingly influence electricity markets and grid infrastructure these interdependencies should be recognised in the design of res e policies and market regulations

did the single market cause competition in excise taxes evidence from eu countries tax competition theory predicts that the introduction of the eu single market in 1993 should have caused excise tax competition and thus increased strategic interaction in the setting of excise taxes among eu countries we test this prediction using a panel data set of 12 eu countries over the period 1987 2004 we find that for excise duties on still and sparkling wine beer and ethyl alcohol strategic interaction significantly increased after 1993 there is weaker evidence of increased interaction in cigarette taxes possibly because cigarettes are widely smuggled giving rise to tax competition even before the single market

do countries compete over corporate tax rates this paper tests whether oecd countries compete with each other over corporate taxes in order to attract investment we develop two models with firm mobility countries compete only over the statutory tax rate or the effective average tax rate while with capital mobility countries compete only over the effective marginal tax rate we estimate the parameters of reaction functions using data from 21 countries between 1983 99 we find evidence that countries compete over all three measures but particularly over the statutory tax rate and the effective average tax rate this is consistent with a belief amongst governments that location choices by multinational firms are discrete we also find evidence of concave reaction functions consistent with the model outlined in the paper

risk constrained profit maximization in day ahead electricity market the deregulation of the electricity industry has caused for the generation company genco the need of tools for measuring and managing the risk beyond the classical problem of generating unit scheduling in this paper a probabilistic framework for the problem of managing risk faced by gencos trading in day ahead energy market is proposed in particular a stochastic forecast of electricity price and the technical features of hydrothermal units are considered the approach is based on an optimization procedure for maximizing expected profits in the presence of risk constraints conditional value at risk for the distribution of daily profit is used as risk measure

land titling and rural transition in vietnam abstract we examine the impact of the 1993 land law of vietnam which gave households the power to exchange transfer lease inherit and mortgage their land use rights we use household surveys before and after the law was passed together with the considerable variation across provinces in the speed of implementation of the reform to identify the impact of the law we find that the additional land rights led to statistically significant increases in the share of total area devoted to long term crops and in labor devoted to nonfarm activities however these changes are not large in magnitude and appear to be driven mainly by the increased security of tenure provided by the law rather than by increased access to credit markets or greater land market participation

strategic interaction in local governments industrial land supply evidence from china land is an important tool for local governments to attract investments and promote local economic growth in china based on panel data of chinese prefecture level cities from 2003 to 2012 this paper employs spatial panel data models to examine the strategic interaction among local governments in industrial land supply and to indentify its possible sources the empirical results show that there exists strategic interaction among local governments in industrial land leasing price local governments industrial land leasing price is significantly impacted by the action of neighbouring cities they mimic each other in terms of industrial land leasing price to attract outside investments empirical evidence reveals that the strategic interaction comes from both yardstick competition and resource flow effects local governments react more to their neighbours industrial land leasing price during political cycle periods

opportunity cost bidding by wind generators in forward markets analytical results wind generation must trade in forward electricity markets based on imperfect forecasts of its output and real time prices when the real time price differs for generators that are short and long the optimal forward strategy must be based on the opportunity costs of charges and payments in real time rather than a central estimate of wind output we present analytical results for wind s optimal forward strategy in the risk neutral case the optimal strategy is determined by the distribution of real time available wind capacity and the expected real time prices conditioned on the forward price and wind out turn our approach is simpler and more computationally efficient than formulations requiring specification of full joint distributions or a large set of scenarios informative closed form examples are derived for particular specifications of the wind price dependence structure in the usual case of uncertain forward prices the optimal bidding strategy generally consists of a bid curve for wind power rather than a fixed quantity bid a discussion of the risk averse problem is also provided an analytical result is available for aversion to production volume risk however we doubt whether wind owners should be risk averse with respect to the income from a single settlement period given the large number of such periods in a year

the thai rural credit system public subsidies private information and segmented markets thailand has sought to increase farmers access to credit by government intervention in 1966 it created a government agricultural bank to lend solely to farm households and beginning in the late 1970s it required commercial banks to lend heavily in the rural sector either directly or by making deposits in the agricultural bank the result was an enormous expansion of credit in the rural sector but because formal lenders were either unable or unwilling to solve the information problems involved in the broad range of rural credit transactions the informal credit sector wbich charged interest rates many times higher than the formal sector continued to thrive using household surveys and surveys of moneylenders this article provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which lenders in the informal sector have solved the information problems of providing credit the authors argue that the informal sector is competitive and that high interest rates reflect high information costs not the scarcity of funds this article reports on a set of investigations of the impact of thai government policies to expand bank lending in the rural sector their purpose was to increase farmers access to capital and reduce their dependence on informal lenders fifteen years after the principal government measures were introduced we hope to be able to answer several questions how has the expansion of formal sector lending affected the informal sector did the increase in the supply of formal credit reduce the business of informal lenders and lower interest rates in the informal market what has been the performance of the formal credit system in terms of coverage efficiency and incidence lacking time series data on the informal sector we cannot give a direct answer to these questions but we can with confidence say that the informal lenders are still very much alive by examining the behavior of the rural credit market at the present time we can throw an indirect light on what transpired over the last fifteen years our main findings are the following on the basis of our 1984 85 survey of households and moneylenders

analysis of the imbalance price scheme in the spanish electricity market a wind power test case this work investigates the interaction between wind power and electricity markets the paper is focused on balancing markets pricing policies the proposal of a new imbalance price scheme is included and conveniently evaluated this proposed scheme tries to minimise the use of ancillary services to compensate for deviations in searching for a more efficient market design the effectiveness of imbalance prices as market signals is also examined and policy recommendations regarding imbalance services are discussed two test cases are included that analyse the participation of a wind power producer in the spanish electricity market using a stochastic optimisation strategy for this purpose the uncertainty of the variables is considered i e wind power production and prediction intraday and imbalance prices test cases were run with real data for 10 months and realistic results are presented along with a hypothetical test case the regulation of the imbalance prices may not be adequate for the spanish electricity market because an error drop is not sufficiently encouraged therefore we suggest the application of a new imbalance price scheme which includes an additional constraint the conclusions of this paper can be assumed to be general policy recommendations

pool strategy of a price maker wind power producer we consider the problem of a wind power producer trading energy in short term electricity markets the producer is a price taker in the day ahead market but a price maker in the balancing market and aims at optimizing its expected revenues from these market floors the problem is formulated as a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints mpec and cast as a mixed integer linear program milp which can be solved employing off the shelf optimization software the optimal bid is shown to deliver significantly improved performance compared to traditional bids such as the conditional mean or median forecast of wind power distribution finally sensitivity analyses are carried out to assess the impact on the offering strategy of the producer s penetration in the market of the correlation between wind power production and residual system deviation and of the shape of the forecast distribution of wind power production

incumbent behavior vote seeking tax setting and yardstick competition this paper develops a model of the political economy of tax setting in a multijurisdictional world where voters choices and incumbent behavior are determined simultaneously voters are assumed to make comparisons between jurisdictions to overcome political agency problems this forces incumbents into a yardstick competition in which they care about what other incumbents are doing we provide a theoretical framework and empirical evidence using u s state data from 1960 to 1988 the results are encouraging to the view that vote seeking and tax setting are tied together through the nexus of yardstick competition

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

interactions in local governments spending decisions evidence from portugal costa h goncalves veiga l and portela m interactions in local governments spending decisions evidence from portugal regional studies this paper aims to analyse the degree of interaction between portuguese municipalities expenditure levels by estimating a dynamic panel model based on jurisdictional reaction functions the analysis is performed for all 278 portuguese mainland municipalities from 1986 to 2006 using alternative ways to measure neighbourhood results indicate that local governments spending decisions are significantly and positively influenced by the actions of neighbouring municipalities attempts to identify the sources of interaction allow it to be concluded that they are due to spillovers that require coordination in expenditure items and to mimicking behaviour possibly to attract households and firms

distribution of costs induced by the integration of res e power this article focuses on the distribution of costs induced by the integration of electricity generation from renewable energy sources res e the treatment to distribute these costs on different market actors is crucial for its development for this purpose individual actors of electricity markets and several cost categories are identified according to the defined cost structure possible treatments to distribute the individual cost categories on different relevant actors are described finally an evaluation of the cost distribution treatments based on an economic analysis is given economic efficiency recommends that clearly attributable shallow grid connection as well as deep grid costs are charged to the corresponding res e producer and that the res e producers are also charged the regulating power costs however deep grid integration costs should be updated to reflect evolving scarcities also regulating power costs should reflect actual scarcity and thus be symmetric and based on real time prices taking into account the overall system imbalance moreover the time span between the closure of the spot market and actual delivery should be chosen as short as possible to enable accurate res e production forecasts

wind power bidding strategy in the short term electricity market abstract this paper presents an analytical trading electricity model for wind power producers wpps in the short term electricity market in the u s this model addresses four specific uncertainties real time rt wind power generation day ahead da locational marginal prices lmps rt lmps and deviation penalty rates the model is designed to find the optimal bidding strategy to maximize the expected revenue under these uncertainties in addition this paper shows that advanced forecasting techniques could be used with the proposed bidding strategy to help wpps trade energy in short term markets a case study is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed bidding strategy and advanced forecasting techniques using a set of real data taken from a wind farm in the pjm electricity market

rolling optimization of wind farm and energy storage system in electricity markets intraday energy markets have been established in some power markets mainly because of large scale wind power integration inspired by the spanish power market this paper proposes a modified market design which contains day ahead and intraday energy bidding sections to better accommodate stochastic wind energy then coordinated operation of the wind farm wf and energy storage system ess is studied rolling stochastic optimization formulations for day ahead intraday biddings and real time operations are put forward to obtain the optimal bidding strategy of wf ess union in each bidding section to maximize its overall profit case studies and sensitivity analyses are carried out on a union of wfs and a pumped storage plant psp simulation results show that the proposed rolling optimization method can effectively utilize the updated wind power forecast data and regulation capability of ess and thus increase profit for the union prominently

wind aggregation via risky power markets aggregation of diverse wind power sources can effectively reduce their uncertainty and hence the cost of wind energy integration a risky power contract is proposed by which wind power producers wpps can trade uncertain future power for efficient wind aggregation a two settlement market with both the risky power contract and a conventional firm power contract is shown to have a unique competitive equilibrium ce characterized in closed form the marginal contribution and diversity contribution of each wpp to the group of all wpps are fairly reflected in the profit earned by this wpp at the ce moreover the ce achieves the same total profit as achieved by a grand coalition of wpps in a coalitional game setting the profit allocation induced by the ce is always in the core and is achieved via a non cooperative risky power market the benefits of the risky power market are demonstrated using wind generation and locational marginal price data for ten wpps in the pjm interconnection

exit voice and mimicking behavior evidence from swiss cantons previous empirical literature hasshown that in order to overcome agencyproblems voters make inter jurisdictionalcomparisons of fiscal performance whenmaking electoral decisions incumbents therefore anticipate voters feedback by copying fiscal policy decisionsfrom neighbors this paper argues thatfiscal autonomy exit as well as directlegislation voice enrich politicalcompetition reducing thus the influence of electoral competition onfiscal decisions consequently policymimicking does not matter in circumstancesof direct legislation and fiscal autonomywhere the impact of voters on the politicalagenda is particularly strong based onpanel data between 1980 and 1998 we findencouraging evidence supporting ourtheoretical arguments

electricity market participation of wind farms the success story of the spanish pragmatism abstract in the last 10 years more than 15 gw of wind power asociacion empresarial eolica spanish wind energy association nota de prensa press release 17 de enero de 2008 http www aeeolica org doc np 080117 espana supera los 15000 mw eolicos pdf have been installed in spain of which more than 3 5 gw in 2007 furthermore plans are to reach 20 gw by 2010 and there are expectations of an installed capacity exceeding 40 gw by 2020 this article will present the innovative solutions for technical and economical integration that allow to reach such high level wind penetration objectives the system peaks at around 44 gw and is almost isolated it will be described how the regulation has evolved from a pure feed in tariff to a market premium option where technical and economic integration has been a priority today approximately 97 of installed wind capacity accesses the spanish wholesale electricity market market integration has been crucial sending the correct signals to participants to look for the optimum technical solutions technical improvements have come from both wind power producers fault ride through capabilities visibility and controllability of wind power power production forecasting reactive power control and the system operator specific control centre dedicated to renewable energy sources res new security analysis tools gaining technical confidence of wind capabilities

wind power trading under uncertainty in lmp markets this paper presents a new model for optimal trading of wind power in day ahead da electricity markets under uncertainty in wind power and prices the model considers settlement mechanisms in markets with locational marginal prices lmps where wind power is not necessarily penalized from deviations between da schedule and real time rt dispatch we use kernel density estimation to produce a probabilistic wind power forecast whereas uncertainties in da and rt prices are assumed to be gaussian utility theory and conditional value at risk cvar are used to represent the risk preferences of the wind power producers the model is tested on real world data from a large scale wind farm in the united states optimal da bids are derived under different assumptions for risk preferences and deviation penalty schemes the results show that in the absence of a deviation penalty the optimal bidding strategy is largely driven by price expectations a deviation penalty brings the bid closer to the expected wind power forecast furthermore the results illustrate that the proposed model can effectively control the trade off between risk and return for wind power producers operating in volatile electricity markets

electricity market design for facilitating the integration of wind energy experience and prospects with the australian national electricity market abstract australia has been an early and enthusiastic adopter of both electricity industry restructuring and market based environmental regulation the australian national electricity market nem was established in 1999 and australia also implemented one of the world s first renewable energy target schemes in 2001 with significant recent growth in wind generation australia provides an interesting case for assessing different approaches to facilitating wind integration into the electricity industry wind project developers in australia must assess both potential energy market and tradeable green certificate income streams when making investments wind farm energy income depends on the match of its uncertain time varying output with the regional half hourly market price a price that exhibits daily weekly and seasonal patterns and considerable uncertainty such price signals assist in driving investments that maximize project value to the electricity industry as a whole including integration costs and benefits for other participants recent nem rule changes will formally integrate wind generation in the market s scheduling processes while a centralized wind forecasting system has also been introduced this paper outlines experience to date with wind integration in the nem describes the evolution of market rules in response and assesses their possible implications for facilitating high future wind penetrations

risk rationing and wealth effects in credit markets theory and implications for agricultural development we develop a model that shows that asymmetric information can result in two types of credit rationing conventional quantity rationing and risk rationing whereby farmers are able to borrow but only under high collateral contracts that offer them lower expected well being than a safe subsistence activity after exploring its incidence with respect to wealth we show that risk rationing has important policy implications specifically land titling will be only partially effective because it does not enhance producers willingness to offer up the collateral needed to secure loans under moral hazard constraints efforts to enhance agricultural investment and the working of agricultural credit markets must step beyond land titling and also deal with risk copyright 2008 oxford university press

land allocation in vietnam s agrarian transition while liberalizing key factor markets is a crucial step in the transition from a socialist control economy to a market economy the process can be stalled by imperfect information high transaction costs and covert resistance from entrenched interests the authors study land market adjustment in the wake of vietnam s reforms aiming to establish a free market in land use rights following de collectivization inefficiencies in the initial administrative allocation are measured against an explicit counterfactual market solution the authors tests using a farm household panel data set spanning the reforms suggest that land allocation responded positively but slowly to the inefficiencies of the administrative allocation they find no sign that the transition favored the land rich or that it was thwarted by the continuing power over land held by local officials