unionization and labor market institutions in advanced capitalism 1950 1985 this article examines the depedence of unionization on labor market institutions and long run trends in inflation unemployment and the sectoral composition of the labor force in 18 oecd countries the large number of contending explanations highlights the difficulty in comparative sociology of drawing confident conclusions when there are few cases to compare this problem is addressed through diverse evidence a review of the comparative historical record and a time series analysis to form a bayesian prior distribution which is combined with a cross sectional data set to sharpen conventional estimates of economic and institutional effects this analysis indicates working class organization in trade unions expanded in the postwar period where labor acquired an institutional influence over capitalist labor markets

the supply and demand for exports in israel abstract using annual data for israel over the period 1960 1989 we estimate an econometric model for the supply and demand for exports a novel feature is that domestic absorption crowds out export supply exports are imperfect substitutes in world markets for tradeables produced abroad the price elasticity of demand is about 1 3 while the price elasticity of supply is about 1 5 the model is simulated to calculate the effects of policy instruments and other exogenous variables on exports and export prices

the economics of worldwide stagflation the last fifteen years have witnessed dramatic changes in economics not only in the manner in which the economics profession views economics but also in the manner in which the general public views economics and economists by the late 1960 s there had emerged more or less a consensus macroeconomic framework that is an agreed upon structure to be used to study economic problems at the aggregate level robert solow stated as quoted in leijonhufvud 1968

international interest rates and us monetary policy announcements evidence from hong kong and singapore this paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to us monetary policy announcements for the us and two emerging economies hong kong and singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years our results based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates document that fomc announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the us and both asian countries further international interest rate differentials around fomc meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases finally for the case of singapore we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements these results are robust to time varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations

domestic uk retrofit challenge barriers incentives and current performance leading into the green deal copyright 2012 elsevier the official published version can be accessed from the link below

policy options for the split incentive increasing energy efficiency for low income renters the split incentive problem concerns the lack of appropriate incentives to implement energy efficiency measures in particular low income tenants face a phenomenon of energy poverty in which they allocate significantly more of their household income to energy expenditures than other renters this problem is substantial affecting 1 89 of all united states energy use if effectively addressed it would create a range of savings between 4 and 11 billion dollars per year for many of the nation s poorest residents we argue that a carefully designed program of incentives for participants including landlords in conjunction with a unique type of utility managed on bill financing mechanism has significant potential to solve many of the complications we focus on three kinds of split incentives five concerns inherent to addressing split incentive problems scale endurance incentives savings political disfavor and provide a detailed policy proposal designed to surpass those problems with a particular focus on low income tenants in a u s context

import compression and export performance in developing countries the debt crisis that began in 1982 forced a number of developing countries that had relied on external financing into rapid adjustment of their current account positions in many of these countries external adjustment mainly took the form of import reduction or what has been termed import compression to generate trade balance surpluses necessary to service the existing stock of foreign debt while the effects of import compression on consumption and growth have been discussed in the literature there has been little concern expressed with regard to the direct effects such a policy can have on export performance this paper develops a model that takes explicit account of the feedbacks between imports and exports that arise through the effects of imported inputs on exports and the availability of foreign exchange on imports empirical tests of this model for 34 developing countries tend to confirm both these hypotheses these results point clearly for additional foreign financing to reduce the need for import compression and its attendant negative effects on the supply of exports

futures prices as risk adjusted forecasts of monetary policy many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets expectations of future monetary policy however to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia these measures require some adjustment in this paper we document that excess returns on federal funds futures have been positive on average and strongly countercyclical in particular excess returns are surprisingly well predicted by macroeconomic indicators such as employment growth and financial business cycle indicators such as treasury yield spreads and corporate bond spreads excess returns on eurodollar futures display similar patterns we document that simply ignoring these risk premia significantly biases forecasts of the future path of monetary policy we also show that risk premia matter for some futures based measures of monetary policy shocks used in the literature

different approaches of modelling reaction lags how do chilean manufacturing exports react to movements of the real exchange rate this study examines the relationship between export supply and the real exchange rate using annual chilean data for the period 1960 1996 the hypotheses to be tested are first that the real exchange rate does matter for the supply of exports contrary to studies relying on quarterly data and second that the impact of a real depreciation only ceases to be positive and significant after about two three years four different distributed lag models were considered as potentially adequate and useful to depict the impact of the real exchange rate over time even though all four models assumed different underlying lag structures they all point to the importance of maintaining a competitive real exchange rate over time the transfer function model is particularly well suited in shaping any lag structure in that it is not presumptive in form

attitudes and behaviours of private sector landlords towards the energy efficiency of tenanted homes abstract the uk s housing stock generates approximately 27 of the country s total annual carbon emissions in light of the legally binding targets to reduce carbon emissions new housing is subject to a tightening of regulations governing energy demand and efficiency resulting in a gradual improvement in carbon emissions the question is how to achieve the deep carbon emission reductions from existing domestic properties of which 75 will still be in use in 2050 government has sought to provide incentives to homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their households and mandate improvements in socially rented housing using a range of fiscal measures most recently the green deal there has however been little consideration of the 18 of uk households who privately rent their home a tenure that is growing fast the aim of this research is to investigate the factors that influence private sector landlords when considering energy efficiency improvements to their tenanted homes the results indicate that government policy has consistently failed to engage private sector landlords in the issue of energy efficiency and thus measures must be taken to understand the motivations of landlords in order to design effective incentives and interventions

federal reserve information and the behavior of interest rates this paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public by examining federal reserve and commercial inflation forecasts it demonstrates that the federal reserve has considerable information about inflation beyond what is known to commercial forecasters it also shows that monetary policy actions provide signals of the federal reserve s information and that commercial forecasters modify their forecasts in response to those signals these findings may explain why long term interest rates typically rise in response to shifts to tighter monetary policy jel e52 e43 d82 asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public is a phenomenon that is often posited but rarely tested numerous models of central bank behavior for example show that the existence of asymmetric information has important implications for the effectiveness of policy and the consequences of dynamic inconsistency yet there

stars and standards energy efficiency in rental markets abstract evidence suggests that rental properties are often associated with lower levels of energy efficiency than owner occupied buildings policy makers are increasingly concerned about this energy efficiency gap in this paper we investigate the energy investments made and the market efficiency gains associated with different policy interventions at the point of lease we introduce key features of the housing rental market in the laboratory and examine four policy options mandatory information on energy efficiency voluntary information mandatory minimum standards and a cost share treatment i e landlords pay a share of the tenants energy bill we find that enabling landlords to post the energy efficiency of their properties increases investment in energy efficiency voluntary information achieves efficiency levels comparable to those under a mandatory programme but may lead to lower levels of tenant participation mandatory minimum standards lead to higher investments in energy efficiency but also reduce the number of properties available for lease cost sharing leads to low market efficiency levels perhaps due to the uncertainty landlords face regarding the energy bill of their tenants

the impact of ecb and fed announcements on the euro interest rates abstract we investigate the impact of news in the ecb and fed monetary policy announcements on daily changes in euro interest rates we document significant impacts of ecb announcements throughout the period but only until mid 2004 of fed announcements

a natural experiment for identifying the impact of natural trade barriers on exports abstract the paper investigates the relative importance of trade policy and natural sources of export taxation in malawi a landlocked african economy these sources of export taxation are in turn used to explore how export supply would respond to trade liberalisation as opposed to measures which lower other international trade costs the findings indicate that trade policy barriers are now only a limited source of true export taxation and that trade policy reform needs to be complemented with reforms to reduce international trade including transport costs

partially independent central banks politically responsive governments and inflation theories of central bank independence have more exact implications regarding inflation in different political economic environments than generally understood or empirically examined they imply that inflation in any given country time will be a weighted average of what it would be if the central bank completely controlled monetary policy and what it would be if the government completely controlled it with the degree of central bank independence weighting the former an equation embodying this theoretical expectation is estimated by constrained least squares from a time series cross section of inflation rates in developed democracies since the bretton woods era the results confirm that the antiinflationary benefit of central bank independence is not constant but rather depends on every variable in the broader politicaleconomic environment to which wholly autonomous central banks and governments would respond differently conversely the inflationary impacts of all such political economic variables depend on the degree of central bank independence

monetary policy surprises and interest rates evidence from the fed funds futures market abstract this paper estimates the impact of monetary policy actions on bill note and bond yields using data from the futures market for federal funds to separate changes in the target funds rate into anticipated and unanticipated components interest rates response to anticipated target rate changes is small while their response to unanticipated changes is large and highly significant these responses are generally consistent with the expectations hypothesis of the term structure surprise target rate changes have little effect on expectations of future actions however which helps to explain the lack of empirical support for the expectations hypothesis at the short end of the yield curve

achieving affordable housing through energy efficiency strategy abstract cooperation between public and private sector has achieved a remarkable widespread in the italian context over the last two decades nevertheless the increasing difficulty in accessing the capital market and the rising cost of funding sources both noticeable over the past few years led to a slowdown of public private partnership ppp initiatives meanwhile the community is expressing new needs to be satisfied such as the conversion of brownfields the recovery of housing stock dating back to former times as well as the refurbishment of public offices or schools emerging priorities include the supply of affordable dwellings for low to medium income households this essay aims to examine a case study in which ppp and buildings energy efficiency have been successfully combined in order to jointly contribute to the achievement of a social housing settlement thanks to energy efficiency measures concerning building envelope insulation heating system and other installations the agreed rent results far higher than social rent of protected tenancies and furthermore above the range of fair rents characterising other regulated tenancies but mildly lower than market rents all this allows to achieve an equity yield rate satisfying from the perspective of a venture philanthropy investment

volatility spillovers and macroeconomic announcements evidence from crude oil markets the paper applies an event study methodologyaims to investigate the macroeconomic announcements effects on standard poor s500 and oil prices our results provide evidence for a significant impact of the us macroeconomic news on oil prices this impact is split into two components namely the direct effect common response and indirect effect volatility transmission altogether our results show that the volatility transmission is bidirectional not only a significant volatility transmission from the oil market to the us stock market is revealed but also a high volatility transmission is recorded from the oil market to the stock market especially after the release of consumption indicators

how strong is the macroeconomic case for downward real wage rigidity we explore the existence of downward real wage rigidity drwr at the industry level based on data from 19 oecd countries for the period 1973 1999 the results show that drwr compresses the distributions of industry wage changes overall as well as for specific geographical regions and time periods but there are not many real wage cuts that are prevented more important however drwr attenuates larger real wage cuts thus leading to higher real wages there is stronger evidence for downward nominal wage rigidity than for drwr real wage cuts are less prevalent in countries with strict employment protection legislation and high union density

export subsidies and the balance of trade abstract we analyze the relationship between export subsidies and the balance of trade in a semi small ldc type economy facing fixed world prices for imports but negatively sloped demand curves for exports the paper examines the dual role of export subsidies as a mechanism to increase the competitiveness of exports and thus reduce the trade deficit and as a net injection of government spending which will enlarge the trade deficit the key finding are i export subsidies by themselves will reduce the trade deficit only if the export price elasticity is very high and domestic prices are constant ii for a lower price elasticity and or changing domestic prices because say a sector is at full capacity export subsidies will worsen the trade deficit iii when however export subsidies are accompanied by a reduction of government spending equal to the cost of the subsidies the trade deficit will decrease while at the same time real gnp will increase

understanding the uneven diffusion of building scale renewable energy systems a review of household local and country level factors in diverse european countries abstract this review focuses on renewable energy technology deployment in residential buildings which is part of current targets to develop net zero carbon buildings in europe and to promote the deployment of renewable energy we focus on the adoption of four technologies heat pumps solar photovoltaics solar thermal systems for domestic hot water and space heating and advanced biomass heating while there are several studies on households investment criteria a research gap exists because building owners across europe are quite diverse and the european markets exhibit different stages of maturity this article conducts a critical review of the literature on the diffusion of building scale renewable energy solutions in order to answer the following questions 1 to what extent can findings from studies on household adoption criteria be generalized from one country to another and 2 what insights does the literature offer on factors that might explain the differences in adoption patterns between european countries

meeting the decent homes standard london housing associations asset management strategies the english government s 10 year flagship decent homes programme ended in 2010 the purpose of this article is to examine the asset management strategies that a sample of london housing associations took to meet the decent homes standard drawing on the concept of institutional logics the article outlines the social housing sector s conflicting regulatory context whereby organisations were statutorily obliged to improve housing standards without being able to raise rents as a way to fund improvements depending on whether the housing association adopts a market orientated or traditional task orientated approach to asset management the associations sampled have either disposed of non decent stock to generate cash flows or else retained the stock undertaking minimal repairs to meet the government s target deadline the article concludes that not only has this national performance target triggered different organisational responses it has also led to longer term unintended consequences for existing an

an empirical investigation into students experience of fuel poverty abstract the trend of expansion in higher education in the uk since 1992 has created a massive demand for accommodation for students where the housing stock is one of the oldest and least efficient in europe and the private rented sector is often singled out for containing some of the least energy efficient and in worst condition properties the extent to which students factor in energy efficiency and fuel poverty concerns into their accommodation choices is explored in this paper along with the perception of the phenomena by students from a survey of 286 students it was revealed that while students themselves may not consider themselves to be living in fuel poverty the activities taken in their day to day lives suggest the opposite the impact of the housing stock on student quality of life is investigated as well

homeownership for future generations in the uk this paper constructs a housing market model to analyse conditions for different generations of households in the uk previous policy work has suggested that baby boomers have benefitted at the expense of younger generations the model relies on a form of financial accelerator in which existing homeowners reinvest a proportion of the capital gains on moving home the model is extended to look at homeownership probabilities it also explains why an increasing share of mortgages has gone to existing owners despite market liberalisation and securitisation in addition the model contributes to the explanation of volatility

do measures of monetary policy in a var make sense no in many vector autoregressions vars monetary policy shocks are identified with the least squares residuals from a regression of the federal funds rate on an assortment of variables such regressions appear to be structurally fragile and are at odds with other evidence on the nature of the u s federal reserve s reaction function furthermore the residuals from these regressions show little correlation across various vars or with funds rate shocks that are derived from forward looking financial markets my results provide a sharp critique of current monetary vars

explaining the energy efficiency gap expected utility theory versus cumulative prospect theory abstract energy efficiency is one of the key factors in mitigating the impact of climate change and preserving non renewable resources although environmental and economic justifications for energy efficiency investments are compelling there is a gap between the observable and some notion of optimized energy consumption the so called energy efficiency gap behavioral biases in individual decision making have been resonated by environmental research to explain this gap to analyze the influence of behavioral biases on decisions upon energy efficiency investments quantitatively we compare expected utility theory with cumulative prospect theory on basis of a real world example we illustrate how the extent of the gap is influenced by behavioral biases such as loss aversion probability weighting and framing our findings indicate that cumulative prospect theory offers possible explanations for many barriers discussed in literature for example the size of the gap rises with increased risk and investment costs because behavioral biases are systematic and pervasive our insights constitute a valuable quantitative basis for environmental policy measures such as customer focused and quantitatively backed public awareness campaigns financial incentives or energy savings insurances in this vein this paper may contribute to an accelerated adaption of energy efficiency measures by the broader public