effects of demand side management on chinese household electricity consumption empirical findings from chinese household survey abstract china s residential electricity demand has grown rapidly over the last three decades and given the expected continued growth demand side management dsm can play an important role in reducing electricity demand by using micro level data collected from 1450 households in 27 provinces in the first ever china residential energy consumption survey in 2012 this study estimates the effects of three dsm measures empirically tiered household electricity pricing china energy label program and information feedback mechanisms we find these measures have contributed to moderating residential electricity demand growth but additional policy reform and tools are needed to increase their effectiveness and impact residential electricity demand is found to be price and income inelastic and tiered pricing alone may not be as effective in electricity conservation the statistically significant relationship between china energy label efficient refrigerators but not televisions and lowered residential electricity consumption reflect mixed program effectiveness lastly of the information feedback currently available through electricity bills payment frequency and meters only meter reader is estimated to be statistically significant important policy implications and recommendations for improving each of these three dsm measures to expand their impact on reducing residential electricity consumption are identified

towards an attention based view of the firm the central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision makers what decision makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on what issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm s rules resources and relationships distribute various issues answers and decision makers into specific communications and procedures the paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

household electricity demand revisited respond to price changes this paper develops a model for evaluating the effects of alternative tariff designs on electricity use the model concurrently addresses several interrelated difficulties posed by nonlinear pricing heterogeneity in consumer price sensitivity and consumption aggregation over appliances and time we estimate the model using extensive data for a representative sample of 1300 california households the results imply a strikingly skewed distribution of household electricity price elasticities in the population with a small fraction of households accounting for most aggregate demand response we then estimate the aggregate and distributional consequences of recent tariff structure changes recent efforts to restructure electricity markets have renewed interest in electricity demand and pricing this interest reflects a broad desire to improve the efficiency of electricity markets and policy makers concerns over the impact of price changes on consumers how new pricing mechanisms would affect households consumption and expenditures is a matter of considerable uncertainty however this uncertainty has provoked controversy and debate in the regulatory policy arena hampering market reforms using econometric methods to assess the effects of electricity price changes presents several challenges these include the nonlinear structure of tariff schedules aggregation of metered consumption behaviour over time and appliances and the interdependence of energy use with longer term household decisions over appliance ownership and dwelling characteristics the first two issues introduce complex simultaneity problems between marginal prices and consumption the third issue imposes high data requirements information on household specific appliance holdings and residence features and creates heterogeneity in consumption responses related to the characteristics of these durable goods when the researcher s objective is to develop a model for simulating the effects of prospective tariff changes ignoring these issues will provide an incomplete assessment of demand responses and potentially misleading predictions of a new tariff s consumption and revenue consequences in this paper we estimate a model of household electricity demand that can be used

risk sharing by households within and across regions and industries abstract cochrane 1991 journal of political economy 99 957 976 and mace 1991 journal of political economy 99 928 956 test if risk sharing across households is complete in the sense that household consumption moves one for one with aggregate consumption in their studies the source of income risk is idiosyncratic and agents can share risk across the entire economy using a sample of households from the panel study on income dynamics psid we explore whether households share the risk associated with their industries and regions across households in other regions and industries we find that a large fraction of risk faced by households is not shared across regions and industries

reforming residential electricity tariff in china block tariffs pricing approach the chinese households that make up approximately a quarter of world households are facing a residential power tariff reform in which a rising block tariff structure will be implemented and this tariff mechanism is widely used around the world the basic principle of the structure is to assign a higher price for higher income consumers with low price elasticity of power demand to capture the non linear effects of price and income on elasticities we set up a translog demand model the empirical findings indicate that the higher income consumers are less sensitive than those with lower income to price changes we further put forward three proposals of chinese residential electricity tariffs compared to a flat tariff the reasonable block tariff structure generates more efficient allocation of cross subsidies better incentives for raising the efficiency of electricity usage and reducing emissions from power generation which also supports the living standards of low income households

unemployment risk and precautionary wealth evidence from households balance sheets this paper examines precautionary behavior by relating job loss risk to household net worth we use existing best practice and some new strategies to deal with some problematic issues inherent in this literature regarding proxying uncertainty instrumentation and incorporating theoretical restrictions we do not find precautionary variation in the wealth holdings of households with low permanent income but do find precautionary effects for moderate and higher income households when the dependent variable is total net worth these findings are robust to several alternative specifications but we do not find precautionary responses in subaggregates of wealth that exclude home equity

can poor consumers pay for energy and water an affordability analysis for transition countries low income households spend a substantial share of their income on utility services such as electricity heating and water the difficulty of these socially vulnerable consumers to absorb further price increases is often used as an argument against tariff reform however detailed quantitative information on the affordability of tariff adjustments for low income consumers is actually quite scarce much of the available information is based on households this paper takes a more detailed look at the affordability of electricity district heating and water for low income consumers in transition countries while the available data are incomplete the paper finds that affordability is a problem for low income consumers in most countries in particular in the water sector and in the commonwealth of independent states cis the affordability consequences of tariff reform ultimately depend on the speed of tariff adjustments relative to the growth in household income the level of tariffs needed for cost recovery the level of effective tariffs at the outset tariffs adjusted for non payment and the demand response to the tariff increase the paper finds that delaying tariff reform by a few years makes little difference to affordability constraints and may therefore not be an effective way to mitigate the social impact of utility reform

does energy poverty really exist in china from the perspective of residential electricity consumption abstract china is undergoing a market oriented reform in energy and the residential sector will be involved in the near future the analysis of energy poverty is crucial in breaking the illusion of the dilemma between enhancing energy efficiency and controlling poverty based on chinese residential energy consumption survey we firstly estimated the energy poverty in china by the 10 indicator and lihc indicators and then proposed a minimum end use method to classify the energy poor households into lifeline and consumption energy poverty results show that energy poverty exists in china at the proportion of 18 9 and 46 of the energy poor houses are in short of modern energy consumption and are sensitive to tariffs with a level of electricity consumption lower than the basic demand the energy poverty rate is highest in central china while the lifeline energy poor are relatively concentrated in the western region in terms of public policy we suggest focusing on heterogeneity by considering different groups of households when implementing energy efficiency measures and targeting more on the consumption energy poor in poverty alleviation we also suggest paying particular attention to targeting households with low income by supporting practices such as coupons for energy consumption and appliance purchasing

the dark side of board political capital enabling blockholder rent appropriation resource dependence theorists argue that boards of directors with political capital can benefit focal firms by reducing uncertainty and providing preferential resources here we develop theory reg

state intervention and the microcredit market the role of business development services we analyze in this paper how various forms of state intervention can impact microfinance institutions lending behavior using a simple model where entrepreneurs receive individual uncollateralized loans we show that not surprisingly state intervention through the loan guarantee increases the number of entrepreneurs receiving a loan however after modeling business development services bds provided by the microfinance institution we show that the loan guarantee can have a counterproductive effect by reducing the number of entrepreneurs benefiting from such services we therefore analyze an alternative policy bds subsidization we show that if bds are efficient enough and are targeted toward less performing borrowers then for fixed government expenditures such subsidies do better in terms of financial inclusion than the loan guarantee moreover we argue that under similar conditions bds subsidization alone does better in terms of financial inclusion than a mix of policies

consumer information and competition between nonprofit and for profit nursing homes this paper develops implications of arrow s hypothesis that nonprofit organizations are prevalent in health care because of quality uncertainty the model analyzes the ability of nonprofits to mitigate market failures created by asymmetric information in an environment characterized by potential competition from both explicitly for profit firms and for profits in disguise profit motivated firms who obtain nonprofit status in order to exploit the perceived trustworthiness of the nonprofit sector under certain conditions it is shown that nonprofit status can serve as a credible signal of quality and that nonprofits can decrease the underprovision of quality both by providing high quality services and indirectly via a spillover effect on quality in the for profit sector applicability to long term care and implications for empirical research and policy towards nonprofits in health care are discussed

a behavioral theory of r d expenditures and innovations evidence from shipbuilding i base an integrated model of innovation development and launch on the behavioral theory of the firm this model specifies that research and development expenses are increased when low performance causes problemistic search and when excess resources cause slack search innovations generated by search are launched if low performance gives managers high risk tolerance using data from shipbuilding firms i show that high performance reduces r d intensity and innovation launches and high slack increases r d intensity as predicted

a new look at residential electricity demand using household expenditure data the recent push for a federal energy policy that could substantially change electricity prices in the u s highlights the need to obtain accurate residential electricity demand estimates many electricity demand estimates have been obtained based on the assumption that consumers optimize with respect to known marginal prices but increasing empirical evidence suggests that consumers are more likely to respond to average prices under this assumption this paper develops a new strategy based on gmm to estimate household electricity demand our approach allows a national level demand estimation from publicly available expenditure data and utility level consumption data complementing studies that use individual billing data which are richer yet often proprietary we estimate the price elasticity near 1 which is at the upper end in magnitude among the estimates from previous studies we apply our elasticity estimates in a u s climate policy simulation to determine how these elasticity estimates alter consumption and price outcomes compared to the more conservative elasticity estimates commonly used in policy analysis

residential consumption of gas and electricity in the u s the role of prices and income abstract we study the residential demand for electricity and gas working with nationwide household level data that cover recent years namely 1997 2007 our dataset is a mixed panel multi year cross sections of dwellings households in the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the united states as of 2008 we estimate static and dynamic models of electricity and gas demand we find strong household response to energy prices both in the short and long term from the static models we get estimates of the own price elasticity of electricity demand in the 0 860 to 0 667 range while the own price elasticity of gas demand is 0 693 to 0 566 these results are robust to a variety of checks contrary to earlier literature metcalf and hassett 1999 reiss and white 2005 we find no evidence of significantly different elasticities across households with electric and gas heat the price elasticity of electricity demand declines with income but the magnitude of this effect is small these results are in sharp contrast to much of the literature on residential energy consumption in the united states and with the figures used in current government agency practice our results suggest that there might be greater potential for policies which affect energy price than may have been previously appreciated

behavioral responses to risk in rural china does risk perpetuate poverty in a credit constrained economy jalan and ravallion study portfolio and other behavioral responses to measured risk using household panel data for rural china one quarter of wealth is held in unproductive liquid forms but only a small share of this appears to be a precaution against income risk the authors estimate that eliminating income risk would reduce the share of wealth held in liquid form by less than 1 percentage point moreover that effect is confined largely to middle income groups high income households do not it seems need to hold unproductive cautionary wealth and the poor probably cannot afford to do so the authors find no evidence that income risk discourages schooling but risk does inhibit the out migration of labor generally the results provide only limited support for the idea that uninsured risks promote unproductive portfolio behavior in this setting there is such an effect but it is small in magnitude and cannot be deemed an important cause of poverty

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

an analytical approximate solution to the problem of precautionary savings abstract this paper considers the problem of precautionary savings for an expected utility specification with finite horizon the exact solution is known for only a few cases numerical methods have limited applications because of bellman s curse of dimensionality this paper derives a simple analytical approximate solution for a general specification of the felicity function which is linear in the variance of the innovations on human wealth numerically the approximation is very accurate for realistic values of the parameters of the problem

precautionary behavior migrant networks and household consumption decisions an empirical analysis using household panel data from rural china abstract we develop a test of precautionary behavior in the consumption decisions of rural agricultural households among surveyed households facing a median level of consumption risk 10 of savings can be attributed to a precautionary motive and this increases to 15 for households with consumption per capita below the poverty line we next use distant lags of local rainfall shocks uncorrelated with current consumption growth to identify the size of migrant networks outside the village and then present evidence that both poor and nonpoor households engage in less precautionary saving as the size of the village migrant network increases

demand specification for municipal water management evaluation of the stone geary form to specify demand in most water allocation problems researchers face a tradeoff between flexibility and parsimony flexible forms are less constraining on elasticity estimates but require large parameter sets that tend to cause poor out of sample forecasts and computational difficulties using a five year panel of texas municipalities the parsimonious stone geary form yields estimated demand functions that are comparable to flexible form results the stone geary specification also provides an estimate of the portion of water use that may not be responsive to price and is useful in analysing price structures and designing conservation policies

motive opportunity choice and corporate illegality research on corporate illegality spans several distinct literatures and defies ready integration this article helps to overcome those problems analysis of data from 80 u s industrial organizations indicates that lower industry profitability is associated with higher frequencies of detected serious violations of federal environmental laws organizational profitability industry concentration organization size structural complexity organizational decentralization and ethical climate join this variable in statistical interactions also associated with detected instances of serious environmental violations however none of those variables are found to be associated with the incidence of detected nonserious violations these results provide qualified support for a model of corporate illegality in which illegal behaviors are attributable to the interactive effects of motive opportunity and choice they suggest that illegal corporate activities resist simple explanation and that future research on corporate illegality should concentrate on further development of multivariable models

uncertain medical expenses and precautionary saving near the end of the life cycle this paper introduces a dynamic structural model of household consumption decisions in which elderly families consider the effects of uncertain future medical expenses when deciding current levels of consumption the model with uncertain medical expenses implies a potentially important role for precautionary saving incentives to explain slow rates of dissaving among elderly americans during retirement rather than just simulating the stochastic dynamic model preference parameters are estimated using panel data on health wealth and expenditures for retired families the health uncertainty model predicts consumption levels closer to observed expenditures than a life cycle model with uncertain longevity however elderly families typically dissave their financial assets more slowly than even the baseline health uncertainty model predicts is optimal

consumer durables and the real interest rate one important channel through which real interest rates affect aggregate demand is consumer expenditure on durable goods this paper examines empirically the link between interest rates and consumer durables solving for the decision rule relating income and interest rates to consumer demand is an intractable task this paper avoids this problem by examining the first order conditions necessary for maximization by the representative consumer structural parameters of there presentative utility function are thus recovered the estimated model suggests that expenditure on consumer durables is far more sensitive to changes in the interest rate than is expenditure on nondurables and services this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

balancing incentives in the compensation contracts of nonprofit hospital ceos abstract given the considerable insight into corporate governance achieved through studies of executive compensation in proprietary firms it is surprising that executive contracting in nonprofit organizations remains largely unexplored in this paper we use the multitask principal agent model of holmstrom and milgrom the journal of law economics and organization 7 1991 suppl 24 to argue that nonprofit hospitals represent an optimal response to information asymmetries between managers and boards for a board with multidimensional objectives the agency problem is getting top executives to distribute their efforts across all dimensions of the hospital s mission the nonprofit form is preferred because the absence of high powered incentives such as share ownership reduces executives incentives to place undue emphasis on improving financial performance at the expense of important but less observable tasks using newly available compensation data we test the model by comparing the conditional distributions of earnings for industrial and nonprofit hospital ceos in ontario our best estimates are that ceos in publicly traded firms earn twice as much on average as those in similarly sized nonprofit hospitals but bear roughly eight times the income variance estimates of the associated degree of risk aversion are well within conventional bounds and are consistent with the trade off between insurance and incentives predicted by the theory

strategic reference point theory how can executives achieve a match between expected external environmental conditions and internal organizational capabilities that facilitates improved performance this paper argues that a firm s choice of reference points can help achieve strategic alignment capable of yielding improved performance and potentially even a sustainable competitive advantage building upon prospect theory and other relevant theoretical perspectives the strategic reference point srp matrix is developed a firm s srp consists of three dimensions internal capability external conditions and time a theory is developed which posits an optimal srp structure and propositions are offered which articulate the expected relationships between the srp strategic choice behavior and firm performance the paper closes with some suggestions for using strategic reference points in both research and practice

demand and distributional effects of water pricing policies abstract worldwide water scarcity threatens delivery of water to urban centers water pricing is often recommended to reduce demand in this paper demand and distributional effects of water pricing policies are examined in a block pricing model that is applied to the metropolitan region of sao paulo water demand functions are estimated using marginal and average price models based on monthly data for the period 1997 2002 price elasticities of water demand range between 0 45 and 0 50 and income elasticities between 0 39 and 0 42 for the current combined regressive progressive block price system the poor spend almost 4 2 to 4 7 of their income on water the rich only pay 0 4 to 0 5 of their income whereas they consume more than twice as much a progressive block price or an income dependent price system may result in a more equalized income distribution however the analysis shows that there is a trade off between a more equalized income distribution and revenues earned by the water company more pro poor pricing systems may result as well in lower revenues for the water company

designation and influence of household increasing block electricity tariffs in china abstract electricity is the guarantee of normal life and the electricity price is widely concerned as a developing country in the transition stage abundant policy implications are included in the electricity price in china thus whether to adjust the resident electricity price is a dilemma for the government however the current single tariff system cannot cope with the complex social and environmental problems a new price mechanism is indeed needed this paper tries to design an increasing block tariffs system with the consideration of residential income and electricity consumption the result indicates that the increasing block tariffs system with four tier structure is more reasonable for china although the increasing block tariffs will result in the increase of electricity price it is still acceptable and affordable the increasing block tariffs will greatly improve the equity and efficiency and promote the electricity saving and emissions reduction moreover the power companies will increase tariffs revenue which would use to the transmission networks investment in poor area in order to the offset the limitations of the increasing block tariffs the government should adopt some complementary measures

international capital flows external assets and output volatility abstract cross sectional evidence for 119 developing emerging and developed countries shows over the last three decades that countries with an on average higher volatility of output growth experience more procyclical capital outflows over the business cycle than those countries with the same growth rate but a more stable output path this stylized pattern shows up in addition to the recently established fact that countries with higher macroeconomic uncertainty tend to accumulate higher external asset positions to explain this finding we present an open economy real business cycle model with stochastic growth rates in which higher uncertainty of the expected income stream increases the precautionary savings of households we show that the combination of income risk and the precautionary savings motive leads to both more procyclical capital outflows in the shorter run and a higher long run external asset position

mitigating principal agent problems in base of the pyramid markets an identity spillover perspective the potential for profitably distributing products to previously underserved base of the pyramid bop markets as a means of poverty alleviation has received growing interest within the management field however such business models often struggle with the agency costs that arise between the firm and local sales agents as the institutions and infrastructure in bop markets make traditional contractual and monitoring mechanisms difficult and expensive to employ we present the results of two complementary studies which were both conducted with salespeople in rural guatemala the first study employed a quasi experimental field study combined with in depth interviews while the second study was a laboratory experiment the results of the studies suggest that identity based mechanisms can potentially mitigate agency costs through a positive identity spillover effect in multiproduct settings abstract from author

risk pooling precautionary saving and consumption growth in this paper we model the evolution of income risk and consumption growth we decompose the time series innovation of the income process into its common and cohort specific components from these we compute conditional variances which are used as separate risk terms in a consumption growth equation using a long series of british household data we exploit the time series variation to identify precautionary saving effects and find strong evidence of their importance specifically after allowing for demographic and labour market status there is an independent role for income risk in explaining consumption growth rather than the component that is common across cohorts however it is the cohort specific element that is important in determining changes in consumption growth this result points to a failure of between cohort insurance mechanisms

the other side of the trade off the impact of risk on executive compensation the principal agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance yet the exiting empirical evidence supporting it is quite wea

corporate fraud and investment distortions in efficient capital markets inefficient investment allocation induced by corporate fraud where informed insiders strategically manipulate outside investors beliefs has been endemic historically and has recently attracted much attention we reconcile corporate fraud and investment distortions with efficient capital markets building on shareholder manager agency conflicts and investment renegotiation in active takeover markets because investments that are ex post inefficient are not renegotiation proof the optimal renegotiation proof contract induces overstatements by managers accompanied by overinvestment in low return states and underinvestment in high return states by rational investors our framework also helps explain why easy access to external capital appears to facilitate corporate fraud

complementarity status similarity and social capital as drivers of alliance formation using data on u s investment banking firms syndication in underwriting corporate stock offerings during the 1980s this study explores the factors that drive alliance formation between two specific firms we compare resource complementarity status similarity and social capital as a basis of alliance formation the findings indicate that the likelihood of investment banks alliance formation is positively related to the complementarity of their capabilities as well as their status similarity social capital arising from banks direct and indirect collaborative experiences also plays a very important role in alliance formation the number of deals given by a lead bank to a potential partner over the past three years has an inverted u shaped relationship to the probability that the lead bank will invite the potential partner to form an alliance our findings indicate that status similarity and social capital have a stronger effect on alliance formation in initial public offering deals than in secondary offering deals as the former are more uncertain than the latter using these findings we discuss the role of complementarity status similarity and social capital in alliance formation copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

incomplete markets labor supply and capital accumulation we explore the accumulation of capital in the presence of limited insurance against idiosyncratic shocks borrowing constraints and endogenous labor supply in the exogenous labor supply case e g aiyagari 1994 huggett 1997 the presence of limited insurance increases the demand for savings for precautionary reasons as a consequence capital and output are higher under incomplete markets we show that if labor hours are endogenous labor supply is likely to be lower under incomplete markets because those agents who experience a high shock to productivity are ex post richer and they work fewer hours in some cases this wealth effect can overcome the aggregate precautionary savings and give rise to lower savings and output under incomplete

agency problems and unrelated business income of non profit organizations an empirical analysis nonprofit organizations are traditionally assumed to dislike commercial activities in the usa they are however allowed to engage in commercial activities but the income they derive from these activities is then subject to the so called unrelated business income tax if npos do indeed dislike commercial income then why do they engage in these activities using a data set of 2103 us npos this study suggests that the presence of agency problems inside the organization can at least provide an explanation for the occurrence of unrelated business income

is all domestic water consumption sensitive to price control this paper presents a model of residential water demand based on the stone geary utility function which explicitly considers a threshold of water that is insensitive to price and a quantity that can adapt instantaneously to price changes first the threshold is assumed constant being then allowed to vary according to past levels of consumption a proxy for households water using equipment and habits a measure of the depreciation rate of habits is derived and the effectiveness of price and non price conservation measures are compared the results provide useful policy recommendations for the studied case of seville spain

how does future income affect current consumption this paper tests a straightforward implication of the basic life cycle model of consumption that current consumption depends on expected lifetime income the paper projects future income for a panel of households and finds that consumption is closely related to projected current income but unrelated to predictable changes in income however future income uncertainty has an important effect consumers facing greater income uncertainty consume less the results are consistent with buffer stock models of consumption like those of deaton 1991 or carroll 1992a 1992b where precautionary motives greatly reduce the willingness of prudent consumers to consume out of uncertain future income

getting to know you a theory of strategic group identity this paper develops a theory of strategic group identity that explains how strategic groups emerge in an industry and how they can affect firm behaviors and outcomes in so doing it provides a theoretical basis for the existence of strategic groups we argue that managers cognitively partition their industry environment to reduce uncertainty and to cope with bounded rationality social learning theory and social identification theory are used to describe how cognitive groups coalesce into meaningful substructures and how a group level identity emerges we describe the ways in which macro level factors condition the development of groups and their identities we introduce the notion of a strong identity which characterizes any group sufficiently recognized and attended to by members to affect individual action groups with weak identities are no more than transient agglomerations of firms and do not exist in any meaningful sense these ideas are developed into propositions that describe the conditions under which groups with strong identities are likely to emerge a second set of propositions describes their transformation over time identity strength is linked to both positive and negative outcomes in a final set of propositions we show how strategic groups with strong identities can affect firm performance resolving a longstanding problem which has plagued strategic groups research and conclude by suggesting some approaches for measurement and future research 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

investor protection and corporate governance recent research has documented large differences among countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms in the breadth and depth of capital markets in dividend policies and in the access of firms to external finance a common element to the explanations of these differences is how well investors both shareholders and creditors are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms we describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries discuss the possible origins of these differences summarize their consequences and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform we argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank centered and market centered financial systems

performance following changes of international presence in domestic and transition industries we examine relationships between firm performance and changes in international presence in five medical sector industries between 1978 and 1989 conditioned on the international status of the industries and the market position of the firms international expansion was necessary for survival when foreign firms began to enter a domestic market but only firms with substantial market share and international experience gained prior to the industry transition could expand successfully operating only in the home market may permit a firm to survive in a primarily domestic industry but moderate international expansion often brings current benefits and provides a base for future success should the industry become more global however expansion carries the risk of failure firms that retrench after expanding internationally disappear

welfare and distribution effects of water pricing policies in this paper distribution and welfare effects of changes in block price systems are evaluated a method is discussed to determine for a marshallian demand function equivalent variation in case of a block price system the method is applied to compare for the metropolitan region of sao paulo alternative pricing policies on the basis of their demand welfare and distribution effects of changing water prices results show that there is a trade off between average welfare and income distribution a pro poor price system may result in lower average welfare than a flat price system but in higher individual welfare for the poor moreover there is a trade off between revenues for the water company and income distribution even though pro poor price systems may not be as good for average welfare as flat price systems their direct effects on poverty are important introducing pro poor price systems however may have financial consequences for the water companies

policy cognition is more effective than step tariff in promoting electricity saving behaviour of residents abstract as a demand response plan the step tariff policy for electricity has been fully implemented for several years in china however it is not clear whether the step tariff policy for electricity is effective therefore we analysed and compared the effectiveness of step tariff policy from two aspects step tariff and policy cognition specifically combining macro scale statistical data and microscopic research data we constructed a regression discontinuity design and binary response model first we tested the correction effect of the step tariff to residential electricity consumption behaviour further combined with cognitive behavioural theory we analysed the role of policy cognition in the occurrence of electricity saving behaviour finally based on the cognitive evaluation theory the impact of residents heterogeneity on their cognitive differences was identified the specific conclusions are as follows 1 the step tariff based on the ramsay strategy cannot effectively correct electricity consumption behaviours as expected 2 compared with the step tariff construction of correct policy cognition has a more significant effect on changing the customary behaviour of electricity consumption 3 policy cognition of residents is heterogeneous and groups with weak policy cognition are accurately identified

consumption and the timing of income risk abstract when formulating a plan for savings does the timing of income risks matter should one be concerned with whether uncertainty in income is in the near term or the distant future of course and the impact of the timing of income risk is the subject of this article using a three period framework we provide approximate solutions for optimal consumption choices for preferences that display constant relative risk aversion and derive the relationship between innovations to income and innovations to consumption growth these results are contrasted with those for quadratic preferences and preferences that display constant absolute risk aversion we analyze consumption saving plans for several different situations of near term and distant future income risk and different kinds of preferences we conclude with a demonstration of the high degree of accuracy of our consumption approximations by comparing them to exact values computed by stochastic simulation

the life cycle model of consumption and saving a central implication of life cycle models is that agents smooth consumption we review the empirical evidence on smoothing at frequencies from within the year up to across a lifetime we find that life cycle models particular those which incorporate realistic features of markets and goods have more empirical successes than failures we also show that some apparent deviations from theoretical predictions imply very small welfare losses for agents finally we emphasize that the coherence of life cycle models imposes an important discipline when incorporating new features into models

law endowments and property rights while scholars have hypothesized about the sources of variation in property rights for over 2500 years it is only very recently that researchers have begun to test these theories empirically this paper reviews both the theory and empirical evidence supporting and refuting the law and endowment views of property rights the law view holds that historically determined differences in national legal traditions continue to shape cross country differences in property rights the endowment view argues that during european colonization differences in climate crops the indigenous population and the disease environment influenced long run property rights

the deterrence effects of vicarious punishments on corporate financial fraud this study extends the research on corporate financial fraud by developing a new perspective on the deterrence effects of vicarious punishments premised on social learning theory we posit that firms vicariously learn about punishments from their peers by picking up modeling cues environmental cues and social cues in the inhibitive learning process thus being deterred from committing future fraudulence using a matched sample of 604 observations of chinese listed firms between 2002 and 2008 our findings show that an observing firm is deterred from committing fraud if the peers in its industry are caught and punished we further find that such deterrence effects are subject to how the observing firm evaluates the possibility of being caught and the likelihood it will be punished the same way if it violates similar prohibitions in particular inhibitive learning effects are positively moderated by punishments of prominent firms and model observer similarity but negatively attenuated by the development of the legal system our study sheds light on the corporate fraud literature by illuminating the indirect inhibitive learning process from vicarious punishments and identifying the conditions for differential learning deterrence outcomes of the observing firms

residential electricity demand in taiwan this paper examines the residential demand for electricity in taiwan as a function of household disposable income population growth the price of electricity and the degree of urbanization short and long term effects are separated through the use of an error correction model in the long run the income elasticity is unit elastic the own price effect is negative and inelastic in an error correction framework the short run income and price effects are small and less than the long run effects cooling degree day effects have a positive impact on short run consumption we have used a proxy variable urbanization to capture economic development characteristics and changes in electricity using capital stocks not explained by income the variable provides significant explanatory power to the model both in the short and long run we interpret it as controlling for economic development factors not captured by the pure income effect and we think it holds promise for explaining residential electricity consumption in other developing countries

why good firms do bad things the effects of high aspirations high expectations and prominence on the incidence of corporate illegality recent high profile corporate scandals involving prominent high performing firms cast doubt on assertions that the costs of getting caught decrease the likelihood such high performers will act illegally we explain this paradox by using theories of loss aversion and hubris to examine a sample of s p 500 manufacturers results demonstrate that both performance above internal aspirations and performance above external expectations increase the likelihood of illegal activities the sample firms prominence enhanced the effects of performance above expectations on the likelihood of illegal actions prominent and less prominent firms displayed different patterns of behavior when their performance failed to meet aspirations

testing for prudence and skewness seeking numerous theoretical predictions such as precautionary saving or preventive behavior have been derived for prudent decision makers further prudence can be characterized as downside risk aversion and plays a key role in preference for skewness we use a simple experimental method to test for prudence and skewness preference in the laboratory and compare the two to this end we introduce a novel graphical representation of compound lotteries that is easily accessible to subjects and test it for robustness using a factorial design prudence is observed on the aggregate and individual level we find that prudence does not boil down to skewness seeking we further provide some theoretical explanations for this result this paper was accepted by peter wakker decision analysis

the long run performance of increasing block pricing in taiwan s residential electricity sector abstract this article examines the performance regarding efficiency and equity of increasing block pricing ibp in taiwan s residential electricity sector by using long term nationwide household data 1999 2014 actual variations in ibp rate structure are explored empirical results show that cross subsidization under ibp have resulted in inefficient over consumption by the poor and inefficient under consumption by the rich in addition the financial burden increased with decreases of household s income levels and a relatively high percentage of subsidies mistakenly went to non poor households the upward price adjustments and broadened first block in recent years have increased the household s financial burden and the rates of wrongly excluding the poor and wrongly including the rich to enjoy the subsidy being unable to take family size into consideration and send correct price signals to all users are two serious problems for ibp which may hinder the achievement of equity and efficiency in electricity use

opportunity and constraint organizations learning from the operating and competitive experience of industries organizational learning is central to a number of strategic theories recent arguments however identify risks associated with learning from own experience in the form of overattention to the short term and local conditions the experience of the industry may offer opportunities for organizational learning that the experience of the organization does not because industry experience is more varied and not tied to the path dependent history of any one organization we investigate the influence of own experience and of two types of industry experience on the failure rates of u s hotel chains the two types of industry experience are operating experience which is a discounted sum of the units operated by u s hotel chains in the history of the industry and competitive experience which is a discounted sum of the number of failures of u s hotel chains in the history of the industry we find that a organizations initially benefit from their own experience but are harmed in the long run b generalist organizations are more weakly affected by their own experience than specialists c organizations benefit from their industry s operating experience accumulated both before and after the organization s entry and d organizations benefit from their industry s competitive experience but only after the organization s entry 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

the liability of good reputation a study of product recalls in the u s automobile industry in this paper we explore opposing theoretical claims about how organizational reputation affects market reactions to product defects on the one hand good reputation could be a disadvantage because expectations about product quality are more likely to be violated by defects in highly reputed products on the other hand a good reputation could be an advantage because of strong inertial effects on reputation orderings we empirically test these competing hypotheses using data on product recalls in the u s automobile industry from 1975 to 1999 our results support for the idea that reputation can be an organizational liability in that highly reputed firms suffer more market penalty as a result of their product recalls we also propose that the reputational effects are moderated by two important factors substitutability and generalism specialism our results show that having few substitutes with an equivalent level of reputation or a focused product identity stemming from specialism buffers the negative market reactions to product recalls we conclude with a discussion on the implications of these results for institutional reputation and status theories