consumer preference and willingness to pay for a renewable fuel standard rfs policy focusing on ex ante market analysis and segmentation abstract total energy consumption of oil in 2050 is expected to increase to 1 6 times its level in 2005 and greenhouse gas ghg emissions in the transportation sector will be second only to the electricity sector in order to reduce ghg emissions in transportation leading countries have started to implement renewable fuel standard rfs policies other countries such as korea have recently started implementing rfs policies in order to comply with the proposed global ghg reduction target however previous research did not consider the impact of rfs policy on consumer acceptance levels therefore this study analyzes consumer preferences and willingness to pay wtp for rfs to provide detailed policy strategies this study conducts additional analysis using market segmentation and sensitivity analysis the results indicate that consumers generally accept the cost of implementing an rfs policy if the cost falls between krw 101 78 liter usd 0 33 gal and krw 187 26 liter usd 0 60 gal in addition consumer wtp for implementing an rfs policy changes when the income exceeds krw 5 million usd 4229 1 in driver group and relatively lower income groups tend not to support rfs policies based on the results of this study we can suggest proper pricing policies for each income group and a public relations strategy to improve the level of policy acceptance

the use of parametric and non parametric frontier methods to measure the productive efficiency in the industrial sector a comparative study abstract parametric frontier models and non parametric methods have monopolised the recent literature on productive efficiency measurement empirical applications have usually dealt with either one or the other group of techniques this paper applies a range of both types of approaches to an industrial organisation setup the joint use can improve the accuracy of both although some methodological difficulties can arise the robustness of different methods in ranking productive units allows us to make a comparative analysis of them empirical results concern productive and market demand structure returns to scale and productive inefficiency sources the techniques are illustrated using data from the us electric power industry

impacts of opec s political risk on the international crude oil prices an empirical analysis based on the svar models abstract the impacts of opec s political risk on the fluctuations of international crude oil prices have caused widespread concern and analyzing the impacts is of great significance to the investment decisions and risk aversion strategies in the crude oil markets therefore using the international country risk guide icrg index as a proxy for the countries political risk situation we empirically investigate the impacts of opec s political risk on the brent crude oil prices based on several structural vector autoregression svar models the main empirical results indicate that 1 the political risk of opec countries does have a significant and positive influence on brent crude oil prices in the sample period from january 1998 to september 2014 and the most significant positive influences appear in about one and a half year and last about a year 2 opec s integrated political risk contributes to 17 58 of the oil price fluctuations in the sample period which is only lesser than that of the oil demand shocks 34 64 3 compared with the political risk of opec countries in north africa and south america the political risk of opec countries in the middle east contributes most to the oil price fluctuations 4 among the eight components of the political risk in opec the internal conflicts contribute most to the oil price fluctuations in the sample period

quantile serial dependence in crude oil markets evidence from improved quantilogram analysis with quantile wild bootstrapping we examine the quantile serial dependence in crude oil prices based on the linton and whang s quantile based portmanteau test which we improved by means of quantile wild bootstrapping qwb through monte carlo simulation we find that the quantile wild bootstrap based portmanteau test performs better than the bound testing procedure suggested by linton and whang we apply the improved test to examine the efficiency of two crude oil markets wti and brent we also examine if the dependence is stable via rolling sample tests our results show that both wti and brent are serially dependent in all except the median quantiles these findings suggest that it may be misleading to examine the efficiency of crude oil markets in terms of mean or median returns only these crude oil markets are relatively more serially dependent in non median ranges

the tale of two research communities the diffusion of research on productive efficiency abstract the field of theoretical and applied efficiency analysis is pursued both by economists and people from operational research and management science each group tends to cite a different paper as the seminal one recent availability of extensive electronically accessible databases of journal articles makes studies of the diffusion of papers through citations possible research strands inspired by the seminal paper within economics are identified and followed by citation analysis during the 20 year period before the operations research paper was published the first decade of the operations research paper is studied in a similar way and emerging differences in diffusion patterns are pointed out main factors influencing citations apart from the quality of the research contribution are reputation of journal reputation of author number of close followers colleagues cadres of proteges ph d students and extent of network invisible college such factors are revealed by the citing papers in spite of increasing cross contacts between economics and operations research the last decades co citation analysis reveals a relative constant tendency to stick to own camp references

marginal land for energy crops exploring definitions and embedded assumptions abstract the idea of using less productive or marginal land for energy crops is promoted as a way to overcome the previous land use controversies faced by biofuels it is argued that marginal land use would not compete with food production is widely available and would incur fewer environmental impacts this term is notoriously vague however as are the details of how marginal land use for energy crops would work in practice this paper explores definitions of the term marginal land in academic consultancy ngo government and industry documents in the uk it identifies three separate definitions of the term land unsuitable for food production ambiguous lower quality land and economically marginal land it probes these definitions further by exploring the technical normative and political assumptions embedded within them it finds that the first two definitions are normatively motivated this land should be used to overcome controversies and the latter definition is predictive this land is likely to be used it is important that the different advantages disadvantages and implications of the definitions are spelled out so definitions are not conflated to create unrealistic expectations about the role of marginal land in overcoming biofuels land use controversies

is wti crude oil market becoming weakly efficient over time new evidence from multiscale analysis based on detrended fluctuation analysis abstract this paper extends the work in tabak and cajueiro are the crude oil markets becoming weakly efficient over time energy economics 29 2007 28 36 and alvarez ramirez et al short term predictability of crude oil markets a detrended fluctuation analysis approach energy economics 30 2008 2645 2656 in this paper we test for the efficiency of wti crude oil market through observing the dynamic of local hurst exponents employing the method of rolling window based on multiscale detrended fluctuation analysis empirical results show that short term medium term and long term behaviors were generally turning into efficient behavior over time however in this way the results also show that the market did not evolve along stable conditions for long times multiscale analysis is also implemented based on multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis we found that the small fluctuations of wti crude oil market were persistent however the large fluctuations had high instability both in the short and long terms our discussion is also extended by incorporating arguments from the crude oil market structure for explaining the different correlation dynamics

are there exploitable inefficiencies in the futures market for oil if the crude oil futures market is not efficient in the fama sense profitable trading opportunities may exist this paper uses an artificial neural network model with moving average crossover inputs to predict price in the crude oil futures market the predictions of price are used to construct buy and sell signals for traders compared to those of benchmark models cumulative returns year to year returns returns over a market cycle and sharpe ratios all favor the ann model by a large factor the significant profitability of the ann model casts doubt on the efficiency of the oil futures market

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

young citizens knowledge and perceptions of bioenergy and future policy implications abstract in the past few years extensive discussions on bioenergy has been both positive and negative in europe the image of bioenergy appears to be low with lack of broad public support previous studies show that younger people are unsure about many issues surrounding renewable energy the aim of this study was to investigate the knowledge and perceptions of bioenergy among pupils in north karelia finland data drawn from 495 ninth grade students indicate that the majority of them lack in depth knowledge about different renewable energy sources including bioenergy only a small percentage has a high level of knowledge about bioenergy and the majority indicates critical perceptions of it statistically significant gender differences are not apparent girls appear to be more knowledgeable than boys results also show a clear urban and rural difference in perceptions of bioenergy perceptions of urban respondents being more positive than that of their rural counterparts developing collaboration between future bioenergy policies and bioenergy education for younger citizens is necessary for their engagement in critical debates on bioenergy

public attitudes toward political and technological options for biofuels abstract this paper explores detailed public attitudes regarding the expanding range of biofuels technologies and policy options subjects from 34 in depth focus groups in central indiana were fairly knowledgeable about biofuels technologies but uninformed about biofuels policies despite being from a state where biofuels are a salient political issue a narrow majority was supportive of biofuels in general but expressed greater enthusiasm about second generation biofuels subject beliefs about biofuels economic and environmental impacts were most important in shaping these opinions rather than concerns about energy independence or other issues in terms of policy options subjects were most supportive of an alternative fuels standard and least supportive of a fixed subsidy and a cap and trade policy in contrast to arguments about technologies participants primarily framed their attitudes toward policies in terms of fairness although discussion did not substantially change aggregate preferences for most policies it did increase support significantly for at least one policy proposal a variable subsidy for ethanol it is particularly noteworthy that subjects generally did not support the most common biofuel technology corn based ethanol or the most prominent biofuels policy option the fixed subsidy despite residing in a state hosting a strong corn industry and staunch political advocates for both positions

labeling renewable energies how the language surrounding biofuels can influence its public acceptance abstract despite growing interest and investments in biological fuels little is known of how the public form opinions toward this alternative fuel technology this study examines public opinion of biofuels by focusing on several factors that can be expected to influence citizens opinions about the issue first we tested the results of a framing experiment that was embedded within a public opinion survey this experiment explored how the public responded to the term biofuels as compared to the term ethanol our results suggest that overall respondents tended to react more favorably to the former as opposed to the latter term second we examined the impacts of sociodemographics on public attitudes toward biofuels we found that while sociodemographics did little to consistently explain attitudes toward biofuels there was clear evidence of ideological influences on attitudes with self identifying democrats showing more positive attitudes overall finally we explored the interaction between political partisanship and our experimental manipulation we found evidence that our wording manipulation differed based on the political party identification of our respondents with democrats fluctuating greatly in their assessments depending upon whether they were asked to evaluate biofuels or ethanol

unemployment equilibria and input prices theory and evidence from the united states the paper develops an efficiency wage model where input prices affect the equlibrium rate of unemployment we show that a simple framework based on only two prices the real price of oil and the real rate of interest is able to explain the main post war movements in the rate of u s joblessnss the equations do well in forecasting unemployment many out of sample and provide evidence that the oil price spike associated with iraq s invasion of kuweit appears to be a component of the mystery recession which followed

the effects of oil price shocks on the iranian economy abstract the iranian economy is highly vulnerable to oil price fluctuations this paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks and major macroeconomic variables in iran by applying a var approach the study points out the asymmetric effects of oil price shocks for instance positive as well as negative oil price shocks significantly increase inflation we find a strong positive relationship between positive oil price changes and industrial output growth unexpectedly we can only identify a marginal impact of oil price fluctuations on real government expenditures furthermore we observe the dutch disease syndrome through significant real effective exchange rate appreciation

public acceptance of biofuels abstract the public acceptance of biofuels in greece is examined in this work the analysis of 571 face to face interviews shows that 90 7 of the respondents believe that climatic changes are related to fossil fuel consumption while only 23 8 know the difference between biodiesel and bioethanol 76 1 believe that energy saving should precede the use of an alternative source of energy only 27 3 believe that priority must be given to biofuels over other renewable energy sources only 49 9 think that the use of biofuels can be an effective solution against climatic changes and 53 9 believe that the use of biofuels can be an effective solution for the energy problem finally 80 9 of the car owners are willing to use biofuels 44 8 are willing to pay the supplementary amount of 0 06 l of the fuel market price while the average amount reported as willing to pay was 0 079 l on top of the fuel market price furthermore eight models correlating the eight main responses with several socioeconomic variables are developed and analyzed those findings heave important policy implications related to the use and promotion of biofuels

global economic activity and crude oil prices a cointegration analysis abstract this paper empirically investigates the cointegrating relationship between crude oil prices and global economic activity the kilian economic index is used as an indicator of global economic activity based on a supply demand framework and the cointegration theory we find that real futures prices of crude oil are cointegrated with the kilian economic index and a trade weighted us dollar index and crude oil prices are influenced significantly by fluctuations in the kilian economic index through both long run equilibrium conditions and short run impacts we also develop an empirically stable data coherent and single equation error correction model ecm which has sensible economic properties empirical results based on the ecm show that the adjustment implied by a permanent change in the kilian economic index is a relatively drawn out process

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

do oil price shocks matter evidence for some european countries this paper analyzes the oil price macroeconomy relationship by means of analyzing the impact of oil prices on inflation and industrial production indexes for many european countries using quarterly data for the period 1960 1999 first we test for cointegration allowing for structural breaks among the variables second and in order to account for the possible non linear relationships we use different transformation of oil price data the main results suggest that oil prices have permanent effects on inflation and short run but asymmetric effects on production growth rates furthermore significant differences are found among the responses of the countries to these shocks

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

imperfect competition and the effects of energy price increases on economic activity the authors show that modifying the standard neoclassical growth model by assuming that competition is imperfect makes it easier to explain the size of the declines in output and real wages that follow increases in the price of oil plausibly parameterized models of this type are able to mimic the response of output and real wages in the united states the responses are particularly consistent with a model of implicit collusion where markups depend positively on the ratio of the expected present value of future profits to the current level of output copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

how technically efficient are singapore s manufacturing industries this study attempts to understand the technical efficiency performance i e how well resources and given technology are being used in 28 manufacturing industries in singapore from 1975 1994 using an improved version of the stochastic frontier model in addition an analytical model is used to investigate the causes of technical inefficiency in these industries to help policy formulation the efficiency performance of foreign and local dominated industries is also closely examined

short term variations and long term dynamics in commodity prices in this article we develop a two factor model of commodity prices that allows meanreversion in short term prices and uncertainty in the equilibrium level to which prices revert although these two factors are not directly observable they may be estimated from spot and futures prices intuitively movements in prices for long maturity futures contracts provide information about the equilibrium price level and differences between the prices for the short and long term contracts provide information about short term variations in prices we show that although this model does not explicitly consider changes in convenience yields over time this short term long term model is equivalent to the stochastic convenience yield model developed in gibson and schwartz 1990 we estimate the parameters of the model using prices for oil futures contracts and apply the model to some hypothetical oil linked assets to demonstrate its use and some of its advantages over the gibson schwartz model

r d and the growth of firms empirical analysis of a panel of italian firms abstract this paper deals with the growth of firms and with their innovative activities the main hypothesis of the paper maintains that firms with a strong commitment to r d have a higher rate of growth because they succeed in the product market after a review of the related literature the paper presents an econometric analysis of the r d growth of firms relation based on a database of italian firms data on a sample of 500 firms with time series in the range 1989 1997 were drawn from the mediocredito survey of italian manufacturing descriptive analysis shows that the sales growth rate of firms with r d is higher than that of firms without r d econometric analysis is performed in two steps first we apply a panel unit root test im k pesaran h shin y 1997 testing for unit roots in heterogeneous panels dae university of cambridge mimeo to verify whether the firm size significantly affects firm growth the test confirms gibrat s law that firm size has a stochastic trend second we explore whether there are variables with stochastic trends that could account for firm size according to our estimates the growth rate of firms is positively correlated with research intensity in these estimates a further interesting result is that investment in ict is not significant or shows a parameter with negative sign

identifying the oil price macroeconomy relationship an empirical mode decomposition analysis of us data this paper employs the empirical mode decomposition emd method to filter cyclical components of us quarterly gross domestic product gdp and quarterly average oil price west texas intermediate wti the method is adaptive and applicable to non linear and non stationary data a correlation analysis of the resulting components is performed and examined for insights into the relationship between oil and the economy several components of this relationship are identified however the principal one is that the medium run component of the oil price has a negative relationship with the main cyclical component of the gdp in addition weak correlations suggesting a lagging demand driven component and a long run component of the relationship were also identified comparisons of these findings with significant oil supply disruption and recession dates were supportive the study identifies a number of lessons applicable to recent oil market events including the eventuality of persistent oil price and economic decline following a long oil price run up in addition it was found that oil market related exogenous events are associated with short to medium run price implications regardless of whether they lead to actual supply losses

the efficiency of the crude oil markets evidence from variance ratio tests this study examines the random walk hypothesis for the crude oil markets using daily data over the period 1982 2008 the weak form efficient market hypothesis for two crude oil markets uk brent and us west texas intermediate is tested with non parametric variance ratio tests developed by wright j h 2000 alternative variance ratio tests using ranks and signs journal of business and economic statistics 18 1 9 and belaire franch j and contreras d 2004 ranks and signs based multiple variance ratio tests working paper department of economic analysis university of valencia as well as the wild bootstrap variance ratio tests suggested by kim j h 2006 wild bootstrapping variance ratio tests economics letters 92 38 43 we find that the brent crude oil market is weak form efficiency while the wti crude oil market seems to be inefficiency on the 1994 2008 sub period suggesting that the deregulation have not improved the efficiency on the wti crude oil market in the sense of making returns less predictable

predictability of price movements in deregulated electricity markets abstract in this paper we investigate predictability of electricity prices in the canadian provinces of alberta and ontario as well as in the us mid c market using scale dependent detrended fluctuation analysis spectral analysis and the probability distribution analysis we show that the studied markets exhibit strongly anti persistent properties suggesting that their dynamics can be predicted based on historic price records across the range of time scales from 1 h to one month for both canadian markets the price movements reveal three types of correlated behavior which can be used for forecasting the discovered scenarios remain the same on different time scales up to one month as well as for on and off peak electricity data these scenarios represent sharp increases of prices and are not present in the mid c market due to its lower volatility we argue that extreme price movements in this market should follow the same tendency as the more volatile canadian markets the estimated values of the pareto indices suggest that the prediction of these events can be statistically stable the results obtained provide new relevant information for managing financial risks associated with the dynamics of electricity derivatives over time frame exceeding one day

contribution of crude oil price to households budget the weight of indirect energy use we propose a new method to evaluate the burden of oil price on any set of goods and services and apply it to french households this method takes into account the contribution of indirect energy consumption which constitutes typically one half of the energy used by a typical french household it yields an average burden of 4 4 in 2006 with a higher relative burden for households with lower income older members and rural dwelling

firm specific knowledge and technical efficiency of watch and clock manufacturing firms in china abstract this paper tests whether firm specific knowledge in terms of capital intensity product differentiation and research and development contribute to an improvement in firm efficiency based on a representative dataset from the watch and clock industry in southern china the technical efficiency is estimated using a non parametric data envelopment analysis approach through a tobit model we investigate whether a firm s specific knowledge influences its efficiency the results suggest that capital intensity and research and development have a positive effect on the efficiency of the sample firms and identify their roles of firm specific knowledge in explaining inter firm variation in efficiency however sample firms with high level of product differentiation were found to have no obvious advantages in efficiency performance

jump dynamics with structural breaks for crude oil prices this study investigates the joint phenomena of permanent and transitory components in conditional variance and jump intensity along with verification of structural breaks for crude oil prices we adopt a component arji model with structural break analysis utilizing daily data on west texas intermediate crude oil spot and futures contracts the analytical results verify the existence of permanent and transitory components in conditional variance with the permanent component of conditional variance increasing with the occurrence of a sudden major event such as the iraqi invasion of kuwait operation desert storm and the war between the us and iraq and a relatively greater increase in the transitory component over the same period notably jump intensity fluctuates with an increase in the transitory component of conditional variance in response to abnormal events it is the transitory component which serves as the primary influential factor for jumps in returns therefore speculators are willing to take large risks particularly with respect to anticipating future price movements or gambling in the hopes of rapidly making substantial gains thus speculators prefer the temporary volatility component and engage in trade activities however investors prefer the permanent volatility component because they may well be better off relocating their assets into more stable portfolios to outperform the market portfolio over the long run

is efficiency of crude oil market affected by multifractality evidence from the wti crude oil market in this paper we investigate the dynamics of relationship between efficiency and multifractality of wti crude oil market based on the cross correlation analysis and the nonlinear granger causality analysis we find that the inefficiency and multifractality of the wti crude oil returns interact positively in a nonlinear mechanism this suggests that the increase of multifractality degree will lead to the lower degree of market efficiency and vice versa our findings have some important implications for oil price forecasting and portfolio management

quantifying multiscale inefficiency in electricity markets one of the basic features of efficient markets is the absence of correlations between price increments over any time scale leading to random walk type behavior of prices in this paper we propose a new approach for measuring deviations from the efficient market state based on an analysis of scale dependent fractal exponent characterizing correlations at different time scales the approach is applied to two electricity markets alberta and mid columbia mid c as well as to the aeco alberta natural gas market for purposes of providing a comparison between storable and non storable commodities we show that price fluctuations in all studied markets are not efficient with electricity prices exhibiting complex multiscale correlated behavior not captured by monofractal methods used in previous studies

a multiscale analysis for carbon price drivers abstract this study proposes a multiscale analysis model to explore and identify the carbon price drivers at different timescales by introducing the latest multivariate empirical mode decomposition carbon price and its potential drivers are decomposed into several groups of simple modes with specific economic meanings the cointegration techniques error correction model and newey west estimator are combined to capture the carbon price drivers at similar timescales illustrated by the samples of the european union emissions trading system from 2009 to 2016 a few interesting results can be found that at the original data level among the three most important drivers of carbon price electricity price and stock index show positive impacts while coal price shows a negative impact at different timescales the effects of electricity and stock index appear comparatively earlier which drive carbon price from the short timescales and continue to strengthen however the impacts of coal oil and gas prices are lagging behind which respectively drive the carbon price at the medium and long timescales

are the crude oil markets becoming weakly efficient over time a test for time varying long range dependence in prices and volatility this paper analyzes the efficiency of crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate by means of estimating the fractal structure of these time series we test for time varying degrees of long range dependence using the rescaled range hurst analysis and find evidence that this market has become more efficient over time these results are robust for controlling for short term autocorrelation by means of a shuffling procedure

crude oil market efficiency and modeling insights from the multiscaling autocorrelation pattern abstract empirical research on market inefficiencies focuses on the detection of autocorrelations in price time series in the case of crude oil markets statistical support is claimed for weak efficiency over a wide range of time scales however the results are still controversial since theoretical arguments point to deviations from efficiency as prices tend to revert towards an equilibrium path this paper studies the efficiency of crude oil markets by using lagged detrended fluctuation analysis dfa to detect delay effects in price autocorrelations quantified in terms of a multiscaling hurst exponent i e autocorrelations are dependent of the time scale results based on spot price data for the period 1986 2009 indicate important deviations from efficiency associated to lagged autocorrelations so imposing the random walk for crude oil prices has pronounced costs for forecasting evidences in favor of price reversion to a continuously evolving mean underscores the importance of adequately incorporating delay effects and multiscaling behavior in the modeling of crude oil price dynamics

oil and the macroeconomy since the 1970s economists have long been intrigued by empirical evidence that suggests that oil price shocks may be closely related to macroeconomic performance this interest dates back to the 1970s the 1970s were a period of growing dependence on imported oil unprecedented disruptions in the global oil market and poor macroeconomic performance in the united states thus it was natural to suspect a causal relationship from oil prices to u s macroeconomic aggregates since then a large body of work has accumulated that purports to establish this link on theoretical grounds and to provide empirical evidence in its support we do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature but rather provide an idiosyncratic synthesis of what we view as the key issues in this debate and the insights gained over the last 30 years the timing seems right for such an account although the experience of the 1970s continues to play an important role in discussions of the link between oil and the macroeconomy there have been a number of new oil price shocks since the 1970s notably the 1986 collapse of oil prices and the 2000 boom in oil prices as well as the oil price increases associated with the 1990 1991 gulf war and the 2003 iraq war given this richer case history we are arguably in a better position than two decades ago to distinguish the idiosyncratic features of each oil crisis from the systematic effects increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions periods of excessive inflation reduced productivity and lower economic growth in this paper we review the arguments supporting such views first we highlight some of the conceptual difficulties in assigning a central role to oil price shocks in explaining

firm size age and efficiency evidence from kenyan manufacturing firms translog stochastic frontier production functions are estimated using an unbalanced panel of 235 kenyan manufacturing firms in the food wood textile and metal sectors the sectors are estimated individually in order to investigate whether technical efficiency is systematically related to the size and age of firms the evidence suggests that firm size has a positive and significant effect in the wood and textile sectors the age effect is less systematic but is insignificant in all sectors except textiles

multiscale entropy analysis of crude oil price dynamics abstract price formation in crude oil markets is the result of the action of many participants e g producers governments speculators etc whose effects are perceived at different time scales from days to years the diversity of participants as well as the occurrence of extreme socio political events yields a market with complex price evolution this paper uses entropy methods to monitor the evolution of crude oil price movements as the complexity of the price can depend of the time horizon entropy computations are performed for different time scales via low pass filtering of the price difference dynamics the results are interpreted in term of relative market efficiency concepts in the sense that high entropy values should be related to a more complex and hence less predictable market evolution it is shown that the highest market efficiency is found for small time scales up to one or two weeks the multiscale entropy pattern for high time scales longer than one quarter is interesting as it shows alternating periods of high and low entropy levels interestingly this alternating pattern has a dominant spectral component of about 4 3 years which could be related to macroeconomic kitchin business cycles it is shown that u s recessions in the recent 25 years are coincident with periods of reduced entropy levels meaning that during economic downturn the long run market complexity is drastically reduced the possible effects of extreme events e g iraq war are analyzed in terms of the relative market efficiency suggesting that some events have affected the short term but not the long term market complexity overall these results show that methods based on entropy concepts can shed light on the structure of crude oil markets as well as on its link to macroeconomic conditions and socio political extreme events

public attitudes to biofuel use in aviation evidence from an emerging tourist market abstract aviation generates substantial carbon footprint which is projected to increase due to the continuous growth in international tourism especially in emerging markets this carbon footprint should be mitigated to bring the tourism industry towards its sustainability goals within a portfolio of prospective carbon mitigation measures biofuels represent a technological innovation which holds substantial potential to reduce the carbon significance of aviation the success of technological innovations often depends on public opinion the role of public opinion is particularly relevant in the aviation context where safety considerations of technological innovations may determine consumer choice focusing on poland an emerging tourist market in europe this study explored public opinion on biofuel use in aviation it found that public understanding of the perspectives of aviation biofuel technology including its safety is limited and needs to be reinforced public distrust in the national institutions of power and the industry sector representatives in poland calls for educational and public awareness raising campaigns to be delivered by the third sector organisations

ethical and legal challenges in bioenergy governance coping with value disagreement and regulatory complexity the article focuses on the interplay between two factors giving rise to friction in bioenergy governance profound value disagreements e g the prioritizing of carbon concerns like worries over ghg emissions savings over non carbon related concerns and regulatory complexity in terms of regulatory measures and options we present ethical and legal analyses of the current stalemate on bioenergy governance in the eu using two illustrative cases liquid biofuels for transport and solid biomass based bioenergy the two cases disclose some similarities between these two factors but the remaining differences may partly explain or justify contrasting forms of governance while there seems to be no easy way in which the eu and national governments can deal with the multiple sustainability issues raised by bioenergy it is argued that failure to deal explicitly with the underlying value disagreements or to make apparent the regulatory complexity clouds the issue of how to move forward with governance of bioenergy we suggest that governance should be shaped with greater focus on the role of value disagreements and regulatory complexity there is a need for more openness and transparency about such factors and about the inherent trade offs in bioenergy governance

a meta analysis of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a sur approach abstract automobile gasoline demand can be expressed as a multiplicative function of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership this implies a linear relationship between the price elasticity of total fuel demand and the price elasticities of fuel efficiency mileage per car and car ownership in this meta analytical study we aim to investigate and explain the variation in empirical estimates of the price elasticity of gasoline demand a methodological novelty is that we use the linear relationship between the elasticities to develop a meta analytical estimation approach based on a seemingly unrelated regression sur model with cross equation restrictions this approach enables us to combine observations of different elasticities and thus increase our sample size furthermore it allows for a more detailed interpretation of our meta regression results the empirical results of the study demonstrate that the sur approach leads to more precise results i e lower standard errors than a standard meta analytical approach we find that with mean short run and long run price elasticities of 0 34 and 0 84 respectively the demand for gasoline is not very price sensitive both in the short and the long run the impact of a change in the gasoline price on demand is mainly driven by responses in fuel efficiency and mileage per car and to a slightly lesser degree by changes in car ownership furthermore we find that study characteristics relating to the geographic area studied the year of the study the type of data used the time horizon and the functional specification of the demand equation have a significant impact on the estimated value of the price elasticity of gasoline demand

are the crude oil markets really becoming more efficient over time some new evidence abstract we replicate the study of tabak cajueiro 2007 are the crude oil markets becoming weakly efficient over time a test for time varying long range dependence in prices and volatility published in energy economics 29 pp 28 36 the results have been mostly confirmed specifically we have confirmed that the crude oil markets efficiency could be rejected up till approximately 1994 and this holds for both studied crude oil commodities brent and wti analyzing an extended dataset up till june 2017 we find that the markets remained efficient at least with respect to long range dependence until the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008 this is confirmed by all three applied methods the rescaled range analysis used in the original study and the detrended fluctuation analysis and the geweke porter hudak estimator which were added to strengthen validity of the results the markets returned back to efficiency around 2012 and remained there until 2015 when the hurst exponent started another rally and stayed rather high until the end of the examined sample comparing the two markets the brent crude oil shows stronger signs of inefficiency during the inefficient periods compared to the wti crude oil this is in hand with the results reported in the original study apart from rerunning the analysis on an extended dataset and using two additional methods we also provide a firmer validity check using the moving block bootstrap procedure which outperforms the original shuffling procedure in the provided forecasting study

on the predictability of energy commodity markets by an entropy based computational method this paper proposes a novel computational method for assessing the predictability of commodity market time series by predicting the entropy of the series under investigation assessing the predictability of a time series is the first mandatory step in order to further apply low risk and efficient price forecasting methods according to conventional entropy based analysis where the entropy is always ex post estimated high entropy values characterize unpredictable series while more stable series exhibits lesser entropy values here we predict i e ex ante the entropy regarding the future behavior of a series based on the observation of historical data our prediction is performed according to the optimum least squares minimization algorithm usually used in many computational aspects of management science preliminary results applied to energy commodity futures show the effectiveness of the proposed method for application to energy market time series

the sensitivity of productivity growth measures to alternative structural and behavioral assumptions an application to electric utilities 1951 1984 this article examines the sensitivity of three alternative multifactor productivity growth estimates for the electric utility industry during the 1951 1984 period the results indicate that multifactor productivity growth estimates are quite sensitive to the relaxation of various structural and behavioral assumptions first a benchmark measure is constructed along the lines suggested by solow 1957 this residual approach produces estimates that suggest a substantial decline in firm level productivity growth after the mid 1960s prior to obtaining the second and third estimates empirical tests of the structural and behavioral assumptions underlying a firm s operation are conducted first the structural assumption of constant returns to scale is rejected and the resulting long run scale adjusted multifactor productivity growth estimates are found to be consistently less than the residual estimates second the behavioral assumption of long run equilibrium is rejected comparing the long run scale ad

random fractal structures in north american energy markets this paper uses daily observations on west texas intermediate wti crude oil prices at chicago and henry hub natural gas prices at la over the deregulated period of the 1990s and various tests from statistics and dynamical systems theory to support a random fractal structure for north american energy markets in particular this evidence is supported by the vassilicos et al 1993 multifractal structure test and the ghashghaie et al nature 381 1996 767 turbulent behavior test

time varying long range dependence in energy futures markets abstract this study aims to investigate the presence of long range dependence in energy futures markets using a daily dataset covering from 1990 to 2013 which includes crucial events for energy markets such as invasion of iraq and global financial crisis of 2008 we estimate time varying generalized hurst exponents of several energy futures contracts with different times to maturity using a rolling window approach results reveal that efficiency of energy futures markets is clearly time varying and changes drastically over the sample period for futures contracts with 1 4 months to maturities crude oil and gasoline are found to be more efficient compared to others on the other hand for contracts with 5 9 months to maturities crude oil and natural gas futures are more efficient for almost every different month to maturity heating oil and gas oil futures are found to be the least efficient markets moreover in general the efficiency of energy futures markets is found to be decreasing dramatically when time to maturity is increasing several implications are discussed

modeling and forecasting the volatility of petroleum futures prices we investigate volatility models and their forecasting abilities for three types of petroleum futures contracts traded on the new york mercantile exchange west texas intermediate crude oil heating oil 2 and unleaded gasoline and suggest some stylized facts about the volatility of these futures markets particularly in regard to volatility persistence or long memory properties in this context we examine the persistence of market returns and volatility simultaneously using the following arfima garch class models arima garch arfima garch arfima igarch and arfima figarch although the arfima figarch model better captures long memory properties of returns and volatility the out of sample analysis indicates no unique model for all three types of petroleum futures contracts suggesting that investors should be careful when measuring and forecasting the volatility risk of petroleum futures markets

commodity futures and market efficiency we propose a comprehensive treatment of the leverage effect i e the relationship between returns and volatility of a specific asset focusing on energy commodities futures namely brent and wti crude oils natural gas and heating oil after estimating the volatility process without assuming any specific form of its behavior we find the volatility to be long term dependent with the hurst exponent on a verge of stationarity and non stationarity to overcome such complication we utilize the detrended cross correlation and the detrending moving average cross correlation coefficients and we find the standard leverage effect for both crude oils and heating oil for natural gas we find the inverse leverage effect additionally we report that the strength of the leverage effects is scale dependent finally we also show that none of the effects between returns and volatility is detected as the long term cross correlated one these findings can be further utilized to enhance forecasting models and mainly in the risk management and portfolio diversification

geographic proximity to coal plants and u s public support for extending the production tax credit abstract the production tax credit ptc is an important policy instrument through which the federal government promotes renewable energy development in the united states however the efficacy of the ptc is hampered by repeated expirations and short term extensions and by the general uncertainty surrounding its future status we examine the factors driving variation in public support for the extension of the ptc using a nationally representative internet based survey americans living near a coal fired power plant are significantly more likely to support extending the ptc than are their peers who are more insulated from the externalities of burning coal the evidence for this dynamic was strongest and most statistically significant among subjects experimentally primed to think about the adverse health effects of burning coal raising awareness of the public health ramifications of generating electricity from fossil fuels holds the potential to increase support for renewable energy policies among those living in proximity to coal plants even in a highly politicized policy debate

issues of social acceptance on biofuel development alongside with biofuel development social acceptance issues have been underestimated while social acceptance can emerge as powerful barrier for biofuel development this article provides discussion on social acceptance in biofuel context an acceptance framework based on life cycle biofuel production had been referred for a better understanding on social acceptance issues malaysia has been referred for the discussion as the country has faced with acceptance issue in their biofuel program the discussion point out different societal groups will demand specific consideration for either support or oppose biofuel this paper concludes that biofuel development will be constraint if social acceptance issues remain neglect

the measurement and sources of technical inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry production function models are estimated with a time series of cross section data on indonesian weaving establishments the sources of technical inefficiency are investigated three firm attributes are identified as being potentially related to firm efhciency tbey are firm ownership age and size the importance of these attributes as sources of inefficiency in the indonesian weaving industry is investigated and the implications of the find ings discussed

a non parametric analysis of productivity the case of u s and japanese manufacturing a nonparametric analysis of technology technical change and productivity is presented in the context of cost minimizing behavior a number of nonparametric tests concerning the existence and nature of technical change are applied to u s and japanese manufacturing data nonparametric measures of technical change are presented copyright 1990 by american economic association

the maturity structure of corporate debt we provide an empirical examination of the determinants of corporate debt maturity our evidence offers strong support for the contracting cost hypothesis firms that have few growth options are large or are regulated have more long term debt in their capital structure we find little evidence that firms use the maturity structure of their debt to signal information to the market the evidence is consistent however with the hypothesis that firms with larger information asymmetries issue more short term debt we find no evidence that taxes affect debt maturity

public opinion on energy development the interplay of issue framing top of mind associations and political ideology in this article we examine framing effects regarding unconventional oil and gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing or fracking an issue involving considerable controversy over potential impacts as well as terminology used to describe it specifically we explore how two commonly used terms to describe this issue fracking or shale oil or gas development serve as issue frames and influence public opinion extending existing research we suggest that these frames elicit different top of mind associations that reflect positive or negative connotations and resonate with people s political ideology these associations in turn help explain direct and indirect framing effects on support opposition as well as whether these effects differ by political ideology results of a split ballot national u s survey n 1000 reveal that people are more supportive of the energy extraction process when it is referred to as shale oil or gas development versus fracking and this relationship is mediated by greater perceptions of benefit versus risk political ideology did not moderate these effects further analysis suggests that these findings are partly explained by the tendency to associate fracking more with negative thoughts and impacts and shale oil or gas development more with positive thoughts and impacts however these associations also did not vary by political ideology we discuss implications for communicating risk regarding energy development

are the crude oil markets becoming more efficient over time new evidence from a generalized spectral test this paper utilizes the newly developed method of a generalized spectral test to examine the weak form efficiency of the main worldwide crude oil markets the generalized spectral test unlike other methods can detect both linear and nonlinear serial dependence in the conditional mean and allows for different forms of unknown conditional heteroscedasticity by using a rolling sample approach instead of an analysis of different time periods we find that the efficiency of oil markets may depend on time periods the main global crude oil markets reach weak form efficiency in the long term and the degree of efficiency of global oil markets changes over time among the oil markets examined in this study the brent and the wti oil markets possess the highest efficiency levels whereas the daqing oil market has the lowest efficiency level apparent anti synchronization is detected between the efficiency of brent and wti markets in recent years whereas synchronization is found between the efficiency of daqing and dubai oil markets during the last decade

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

efficiency of crude oil markets evidences from informational entropy analysis abstract the role of crude oil as the main energy source for the global economic activity has motivated the discussion about the dynamics and causes of crude oil price changes an accurate understanding of the issue should provide important guidelines for the design of optimal policies and government budget planning using daily data for wti over the period january 1986 march 2011 we analyze the evolution of the informational complexity and efficiency for the crude oil market through multiscale entropy analysis the results indicated that the crude oil market is informationally efficient over the scrutinized period except for two periods that correspond to the early 1990s and late 2000s us recessions overall the results showed that deregulation has improved the operation of the market in the sense of making returns less predictable on the other hand there is some evidence that the probability of having a severe us economic recession increases as the informational efficiency decreases which indicates that returns from crude oil markets are less uncertain during economic downturns