gender differences in trust and reciprocity evidence from a large scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects this article examines gender differences in an experimental trust game recent studies have shown that men trust more and that women are more reciprocal in laboratory experiments participants in these studies however are typically university students who may not be representative of the entire population in this study we use data from a large scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects who are representative of the german population we find that men exhibit not only more trusting behaviour but also more reciprocating behaviour than women moreover our results are indicative of age dependent gender differences for men we find an inverse u shaped relationship between age on the one hand and both trust and reciprocity on the other however we do not find age effects for women

the impact of private and public feedback on worker performance evidence from the lab previous empirical studies have demonstrated the positive incentive effects of private performance feedback as well as public recognition on work performance in our laboratory experiments we directly compare these two feedback schemes moreover we compare their incentive effects across two real effort tasks that differ in regard to how interesting the subjects perceive working on them we find that both feedback schemes lead to performance increases compared to the tasks respective control treatments in particular subjects ability and a positive interim feedback enhance performance competitive preferences significantly affect performance only in the less enjoyable and challenging task jel c9 j3 m1

impact of the carbon price on the integrating european electricity market we study the impact of the carbon price on the integrating electricity market in the eu our theoretical framework suggests that the price of carbon has a positive but uneven impact on electricity prices depending on the marginal production plant the carbon price may increase price differences in the short run we apply time series analysis on daily forward data from 2003 to 2011 and investigate whether we can find empirical evidence for our analytical findings our results support the hypotheses that integration in electricity prices has increased over time and that the carbon price has a positive but uneven impact on the integration of prices

time varying convergence in european electricity spot markets and their association with carbon and fuel prices abstract long run dynamics of electricity prices are expected to reflect fuel price developments since fuels generally account for a large share in the cost of generation as an integrated european market for electricity develops wholesale electricity prices should be converging as a result of market coupling and increased interconnectivity electricity mixes are also changing spurred by a drive to significantly increase the share of renewables consequently the electricity wholesale price dynamics are evolving and the fuel electricity price nexus that has been described in the literature is likely to reflect this evolution this study investigates associations between spot prices from the british french and nordpool markets with those in connected electricity markets and fuel input prices from december 2005 to october 2013 in order to assess the time varying dynamics of electricity spot price series localized autocorrelation functions are used electricity spot prices in the three markets are found to have stationary and non stationary periods when a trend in spot prices is observed it is likely to reflect the trend in fuel prices cointegration analysis is then used to assess co movement between electricity spot prices and fuel inputs to generation the results show that british electricity spot prices are associated with fuel prices and not with price developments in connected markets while the opposite is observed in the french and nordpool day ahead markets

electricity market integration decarbonisation and security of supply dynamic volatility connectedness in the irish and great britain markets abstract this study investigates the volatility connectedness between the irish and great britain electricity markets and how it is driven by changes in energy policy institutional structures and political ideologies we assess various aspects of this volatility connectedness including static unconditional vs dynamic conditional symmetric vs asymmetric characteristics between 2009 and 2018 we find that the volatility connectedness is time varying and it is significantly affected by important events policy reforms or market re designs such as brexit oil price slump an increasing share of renewables and fluctuations in the exchange rates our asymmetric analysis shows that magnitude of the good volatility connectedness is marginally larger than that of the bad volatility connectedness our result suggests that good volatility levels would be even higher once the irish market adopts the carbon price floor therefore supporting renewable generation by setting an appropriate price of carbon in interconnected wholesale electricity markets will improve market integration

protest responses and willingness to pay attitude toward paying for stormwater pollution abatement abstract in contingent valuation cv surveys there is often a proportion of individuals who are not willing to pay to obtain avoid an increase decrease in some attribute of a particular environmental public good some of these respondents might protest an aspect of the cv survey e g payment vehicle or the behavioral intention i e willingness to pay wtp constituting the measure of economic value respondents attitudes toward the behavior of paying for a particular public good may contribute to the decision to pay independent of other explanatory variables such as the price of the intervention household income and methodological characteristics of the cv survey moreover attitude toward paying for the good may manifest in protest responses as a reaction to higher prices and methodological factors e g the payment vehicle to the extent that protest beliefs are dependent on such matters of survey design they may be alleviated through changes in cv methodology however to the extent that protest beliefs are a reaction to the act of paying methodological remedies may not be effective cv surveys of stormwater pollution abatement were conducted in four australian state capital cities the surveys differed with respect to the type of pollution abatement intervention the payment regime the vector of prices used in the dichotomous choice question and the institution responsible for implementing the stormwater pollution intervention protest beliefs were measured for all respondents irrespective of their responses to the wtp question results indicated that attitude toward paying underpinned protest beliefs regarding the role of government in stormwater management and individual rights to unpolluted waterways this attitude was present in each city sample despite methodological differences between the cv surveys attitude toward paying explained variability in wtp and was a larger predictor than was price household income was significantly associated with attitude toward paying and this relationship was also invariant over city samples protest beliefs were not independent of either the wtp question or demographic factors such as household income rather these beliefs were related to wtp through attitudes toward the act of paying for stormwater pollution abatement censoring protest responses in the present study would bias cv samples toward those individuals who are favorably disposed toward paying for environmental public goods and those from higher income households

representative trust and reciprocity prevalence and determinants this paper provides evidence about the determinants of trust and reciprocal inclinations that is a tendency for people to respond in kind to hostile or kind actions in a representative setting we investigate the prevalence of reciprocity in the population the correlation between trust and positive and negative reciprocal inclinations within person the individual determinants of reciprocity and the relationship with psychological measures of personality we find that most people state reciprocal inclinations in particular in terms of positive reciprocity as well as substantial heterogeneity in the degree of trust and reciprocity trust and positive reciprocity are only weakly correlated while trust and negative reciprocity exhibit a negative correlation in terms of determinants being female and increasing age are associated with stronger positive and weaker negative reciprocal tendencies taller people are more positively reciprocal but height has no impact on negative reciprocity psychological traits also affect trust and reciprocity jel d63 j3 j6

on representative social capital abstract this paper analyzes the behavior of subjects randomly drawn from the dutch population who reveal their capacity to provide and sustain social capital by their propensity to invest and reward investments in an economic experiment we find that heterogeneity in behavior is characterized by several asymmetries men the young and elderly and low educated individuals invest relatively less but reward significantly more investments the age effects are found to corroborate existing findings whereas those of gender and education do not higher expected levels of investments by others are found to have a positive and significant effect on own investments finally a laboratory experiment with student subjects is found to provide a lower bound of the population level of social capital

causal modeling and inference for electricity markets abstract how does dynamic price information flow among northern european electricity spot prices and prices of major electricity generation fuel sources we use time series models combined with new advances in causal inference to answer these questions applying our methods to weekly nordic and german electricity prices and oil gas and coal prices with german wind power and nordic water reservoir levels as exogenous variables we estimate a causal model for the price dynamics both for contemporaneous and lagged relationships in contemporaneous time nordic and german electricity prices are interlinked through gas prices in the long run electricity prices and british gas prices adjust themselves to establish the equilibrium price level since oil coal continental gas and eur usd are found to be weakly exogenous

determinants of protest responses in environmental valuation a meta study abstract certain design characteristics of stated preference surveys are often linked to protest responses the dichotomous choice format for example is said to result in fewer protest responses however not much is known at present about the relationship between survey characteristics and the level of protesting only partial analysis comparing for instance the influence of different payment vehicles on protesting has been conducted to date this paper analyses the determinants of protest responses using 254 samples derived from 157 environmental valuation studies determinants include the elicitation format the payment vehicle the survey method and the geographical origin results of bivariate and multivariate analyses confirm some of the propositions presented in the literature such as a higher number of protesters when entrance fees are used as a payment vehicle however many of the characteristics included in the analysis do not significantly impact protesting another result is that reporting on identification and treatment of protest responses in subsequent analysis is inadequate in the majority of studies and would benefit from some standardisation

norms of punishment experiments with students and the general population i introduction the issue of external validity of laboratory experiments has received increasing attention in the last decades while the vast majority of experiments are conducted with a fitting sample of college students it remains an open question whether the behavior observed in such studies is informative about society at large here we focus on experiments on social dilemmas to study other regarding preferences and civic norms of cooperation we compare cooperation levels in two distinct subject pools originating from the same geographical area one sample was drawn from the student population of a large public university student treatment the other sample was drawn from the general adult population representative treatment and stratified according to gender age and employment status everyone participated in public good games with and without opportunities for peer punishment there are many contributions in the literature that compare the behavior of students with other pools of participants with the explicit aim to test the external validity of laboratory experiments 1 the existing evidence appears to suggest that students are less prosocial than other subject pools for instance in a prisoner s dilemma students cooperate less than white collar workers bigoni casari and camera 2012 or bicycle messengers burks carpenter and goette 2009 similarly students are less prosocial than rural and urban citizens in a public good game gachter and herrmann 2011 than rural villagers in the appropriation of common pool resources cardenas 2005 and than employees in a dictator game carpenter burks and verhoogen 2005 dragone galeotti and orsini 2013 the gap remains when one compares students and professionals that is self selected subjects with a high degree of expertise who ordinarily deal with situations resembling the experimental task the evidence includes studies on voluntary contributions to a public good among elected officials butler and kousser 2013 and shrimp fishermen carpenter and seki 2011 threshold public goods without refunding among nurses bram cadsby and maynes 1998 trust games among ceo principals fehr and list 2004 2 more in general the most appropriate pool of participants should depend both on the task and the goal of the study for instance contractors may be a better sample than college students for the external validity of auction experiments dyer kagel and levin 1989 and villagers may be a better sample than city dwellers for experiments about the management of a renewable natural resource cardenas 2005 contractors and villagers are more appropriate than students in this case because they are more familiar with the experimental task and their behavior is more relevant because they are those who actually make the decisions in the field both aspects boost the external validity of the experimental results 3 the goal of the study is also relevant when studying issues of bounded rationality for instance one may prefer participants with very high or very low cognitive skills depending on the initial conjecture to be tested high score participants may be preferred when collecting evidence about the presence of a bound to rationality showing that game theorists choose numbers in a guessing game away from the nash equilibrium prediction provides more compelling evidence about the descriptive inaccuracy of the theory than using a representative sample of the general population camerer 2003 conversely participants with low cognitive skills who succeed at a task suggest that such task is not too demanding in short to enhance the external validity of experimental results one should recruit participants with a bias against the initial conjecture as we are interested in norms of cooperation and punishment of the society broadly defined the most appropriate pool of participants would be a representative sample of the population at large

the value of information in explicit cross border capacity auction regimes in electricity markets abstract we study two electricity markets connected by a fixed amount of cross border capacity the total amount of capacity is known to all electricity traders and allocated via an auction the capacity allocated to each bidder in the auction remains private information we assume that traders are faced with a demand function reflecting the relationship between electricity transmitted between the markets and the spot price difference therefore traders act like bayesian cournot oligopolists in exercising their transmission rights when presented with incomplete information about the competitors capacities our analysis breaks down the welfare effect into three different components cournot behavior capacity constraints and incomplete information we find that social welfare increases with the level of information with which traders are endowed

volatility transmission and volatility impulse response functions in european electricity forward markets using daily data from march 2001 to june 2005 we estimate a var bekk model and find evidence of return and volatility spillovers between the german the dutch and the british forward electricity markets we apply hafner and herwartz 2006 journal of international money and finance 25 719 740 volatility impulse response function virf to quantify the impact of shock on expected conditional volatility we observe that a shock has a high positive impact only if its size is large compared to the current level of volatility the impact of shocks are usually not persistent which may be an indication of market efficiency finally we estimate the density of the virf at different forecast horizon these fitted distributions are asymmetric and show that extreme events are possible even if their probability is low these results have interesting implications for market participants whose risk management policy is based on option prices which themselves depend on the volatility level

interval estimates of non market resource values from referendum contingent valuation surveys contingent valuation methods cvm have attracted considerable attention in recent years as researchers have begun to resort to survey methods to elicit individual values for non market goods such as environmental resources or public goods cummings brookshire and schulze 1986 and mitchell and carson 1989 offer comprehensive assessments of these methods cvm survey questions come in a variety of forms one format which has proven to be popular is called the discrete choice or take it or leave it referendum or closedended question originally implemented in the literature by bishop and heberlein 1979 since respondents find it very difficult to identify precisely their true point value of access to some resource or public good open ended valuation questions can be unreliable or can discourage response in contrast most people are familiar with being confronted by a posted price for a good and with deciding whether or not they would buy at that price this is the strategy behind discrete choice cvm questions a different hypothetical price is offered to each respondent and by their yes no response to the question of whether they would be willing to pay this price the researcher gains information about their true underlying point value one persistent difficulty with the econometric techniques that are currently used most widely to analyze referendum contingent valuation data is the absence of confidence intervals for the ultimate value estimates early empirical applications approximate mean valuations using a truncated mean based on a logit model with the upper limit being the highest bid value in the sample unfortunately the variance of this estimated mean cannot easily be recovered from the numerical integration procedure commonly used to calculate the

cointegration analysis of spot electricity prices insights on transmission efficiency in the western us abstract the us energy policy act of 1992 promoted the development of spot markets for electric power by requiring utilities to open their transmission systems to wholesale power sales in this paper we specify and estimate a vector error correction model using peak and off peak electricity spot prices during 1994 1996 covering 11 regional markets in the western united states and test these prices for evidence of market integration the results show evidence of an efficient and stable wholesale power market

dynamic granger causal networks of electricity spot prices a novel approach to market integration this study uses network theory to analyze the interactions of a representative sample of 13 european eu electricity spot prices during the period 2007 2012 we construct 7651 dynamic multivariate networks where the nodes correspond to different eu countries and the links weight the granger causality between the variations of the respective electricity prices global connectivity is then characterized by the system s density or the total quantity of causal interactivity sustained by the network system which informs about the occurrence of abnormal changes in connectivity we report a considerably large peak lasting from october 2011 to april 2012 where the graph s density over basal jump reached a magnitude of 2 4 times suggesting an improved degree of connectivity of electricity markets during this period by applying the markov regime switching model on the network density we find that this change coincides with the implementation of the european commission s third energy package at the local level the in strength values quantifying the dependence of the electricity price variation of an eu country on other countries validate the reliability of our technique by verifying historical events such as the occurrence of interconnectors commissioning and market coupling on the path to full market integration market networks should be periodically monitored our model which is able to create a time varying network describing the evolving influences between the european electricity prices is able to detect important changes in market integration and can be considered a suitable and promising approach for this task

the aggregation of environmental benefit values welfare measures distance decay and total wtp abstract we review the literature regarding the aggregation of benefit value estimates for non market goods two case studies are presented through which we develop an approach to aggregation which applies the spatial analytic capabilities of a geographical information system to combine geo referenced physical census and survey data to estimate a spatially sensitive valuation function these case studies show that the common reliance upon political rather than economic jurisdictions and the use of sample mean values within the aggregation process are liable to lead to significant errors in resultant values we also highlight the fact that for resources with use values then we should expect overall values to reduce with increasing distance from such sites but that changes in the choice of welfare measure will determine whether such distance decay is to be expected within values stated by those who are presently non users the paper concludes by providing recommendations for future improvements to the methodology

you get what you pay for incentives and selection in the education system we analyse worker self selection with a special focus on teachers to explore whether worker composition is generally endogenous we analyse laboratory experimental data to provide causal evidence on particular sorting patterns our field data analysis focuses specifically on selection patterns of teachers we find that teachers are more risk averse than employees in other professions indicating that relatively risk averse individuals sort into teaching occupations under the current system using survey measures on trust and reciprocity we find that teachers trust more and are less negatively reciprocal than other employees and establish differences in personality based on the big five concept

the effect of protest votes on the estimates of wtp for use values of recreational sites contingent valuation studies are often characterized by a considerable number of protest responses which may cause selectivity bias on the final estimates for wtp sample selection models can detect and if necessary correct selectivity bias in economic applications where the relevant dependent variable is continuous sample selection models are generally estimated using heckman s 2 step method rather than the fiml estimator either method has its own drawback computational complexity for the fiml method susceptibility to collinearity problems for the 2 step method using data on valuation of forest resources for recreational use we analyse the performance of the two estimators in this application given the presence of some collinearity the fiml is preferred to the 2 step method a procedure is outlined to deal with selectivity problems in similar settings

divergence in technical efficiency of electric utilities evidence from the sapp abstract this paper investigates the convergence pattern of technical efficiency of the south africa power pool sapp utilities over the period april 2003 march 2010 by means of parametric and non parametric techniques technical efficiency scores are computed via both stochastic frontier analysis and data envelopment analysis mixed results are obtained from the neoclassical convergence approaches in addition distribution dynamics methods reveal some evidence of club formation and this result is supported with the occurrence of divergence taken as a whole technical efficiency is found to diverge among the utilities operating in the power pool

evaluating the market splitting determinants evidence from the iberian spot electricity prices abstract this paper aims to assess the main determinants on the market splitting behaviour of the iberian electricity spot markets iberia stands as an ideal case study where the high level deployment of wind power is observed together with the implementation of the market splitting arrangement between the portuguese and the spanish spot electricity markets logit and non parametric models are used to express the probability response for market splitting of day ahead spot electricity prices as a function of the explanatory variables representing the main technologies in the generation mix wind hydro thermal and nuclear power together with the available transfer capacity and electricity demand logit models give preliminary indications about market splitting behaviour and then notwithstanding the demanding computational challenge a non parametric model is applied in order to overcome the limitations of the former models results show an increase of market splitting probability with higher wind power generation or more generally with higher availability of low marginal cost electricity such as nuclear power generation the european interconnection capacity target of 10 of the peak demand of the smallest interconnected market might be insufficient to maintain electricity market integration therefore pro active coordination policies governing both interconnections and renewables deployment should be further developed

reassessing the integration of european electricity markets a fractional cointegration analysis this study extends existing literature on the assessment of electricity market integration in europe by developing and testing hypotheses on the convergence of electricity wholesale prices and adopting a time varying fractional cointegration analysis in addition the potential impacts of some special events that may affect system capacity new interconnection market coupling increase in share of intermittent generation on spot and forward markets are considered and evaluated daily spot prices from february 2000 to march 2013 of nine european electricity spot markets apx uk apx nl belpex epex fr epex de ipex nordpool omel and ote and month ahead prices in four markets french british german and dutch from november 2007 to december 2012 are investigated results show that unit root tests which are generally used in the literature to test market integration are inadequate for assessing electricity spot market convergence because spot prices are found to be fractionally integrated and mean reverting time series furthermore spot price behaviour and their association with different markets change over time reflecting changes in the eu electrical system one month ahead prices by contrast were found to have become more resilient to shocks and to follow more stable trends

wage increases and the dynamics of reciprocity we investigate how workers performance is affected by the timing of wages in a real effort experiment in all treatments agents earn the same wage sum but wage increases are distributed differently over time we find that agents work harder under increasing wage profiles if they do not know these profiles in advance a profile that continuously increases wages by small amounts raises performance by about 15 relative to a constant wage the effort reactions can be organized by a model in which agents reciprocally respond to wage impulses comparing wages to an adaptive reference standard determined by the previous wage

renewables diffusion and contagion effect in italian regional electricity markets assessment and policy implications abstract in the electricity market sudden price jumps occur more frequently than in other markets due to the peculiarity of electricity furthermore the structural spot characteristics of the electricity market determine high price variability all these characteristics have been accentuated by the dramatic increase of renewable energy supply in italy starting in 2010 these features suggest the possibility of contagion effects across italian regional electricity markets considering contagion such as a sudden and significant increase in cross market links arising from a shock to a specific market in this paper we investigate whether such a renewable energy increase has affected the contagion behavior in the italian electricity spot market taking into account both the difference between interdependence and contagion and the direction of the shock we find empirical evidence with significant tests that no changes have occurred in interdependence mechanism nor in contagion effects due to renewable energy sources development in italy

modeling extreme dependence between european electricity markets electricity spot prices are characterized by sudden large movements followed a few days later by an equally large movement in the opposite direction these phenomena are called spikes upward movements and drops downward movements recent research has suggested that the dynamics of the electricity spot prices can be accurately described by hidden markov regime switching mrs models regime switch models separate the ordinary dependence and the extreme spike or drop dependence this is a crucial point since it is the extreme dependence that is of interest when computing risks we fit a large number of mrs models to six european electricity markets eex powernext apx power uk nl nord pool system sweden in order to analyze the nature of the prices the estimated regimes are then used to analyze the probability of an extreme event and the conditional probability for one market to experience an extreme event conditional that another market is experiencing the same event we find that the frequency of extreme events is positively related to the amount of renewable energy sources in the power system it can be argued that the dependence results in this paper give an indication of what future dependence for even more integrated markets with more renewable energy will be the integration of markets will lead to efficient sharing of reserves while the additional renewable energy will increase the need for reserves the results are of interest when computing financial risks e g var or expected shortfall when designing reserves but also as an indication of the degree of integration between markets

forecasting day ahead electricity spot prices the impact of the exaa to other european electricity markets abstract in our paper we analyze the relationship between the day ahead electricity price of the energy exchange austria exaa and other day ahead electricity prices in europe we focus on markets which settle their prices after the exaa which enables traders to include the exaa price into their calculations for each market we employ econometric models to incorporate the exaa price and compare them with their counterparts without the price of the austrian exchange by employing a forecasting study we find that electricity price models can be improved when exaa prices are considered

long run relations in european electricity prices this paper analyses the interdependencies existing in wholesale electricity prices in six major european countries the results of a robust multivariate long run dynamic analysis reveal the presence of four highly integrated central european markets france germany the netherlands and austria the trend shared by these four electricity markets appears to be common also to gas prices but not to oil prices the existence of a common long term dynamics among electricity prices and between electricity prices and gas prices can be explained by the similarity of the market design across europe and by the same marginal generation technology since standard unit root and cointegration tests are not robust to the peculiar characteristics of electricity prices time series we also develop a battery of robust inference procedures that should assure the reliability of our results copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

cross border integration in the european electricity market evidence from the pricing behavior of norwegian and swiss exporters abstract this paper examines the electricity market integration process in two european areas based on the pricing behavior of norwegian and swiss exporters the aim is to gain evidence for the period after the adoption of the second legislative package 2003 the pricing behavior of norwegian exporters indicates that the wholesale markets for denmark and sweden are highly integrated moreover results are fully compatible with the existence of a very competitive marketplace for electricity this clearly contrasts with the evidence provided by swiss exporters in this last case analysis revealed differences in pricing to market behavior between italy france and germany which indicates that exporters take advantage of international market segmentation and divergences between market structures this outcome provides a reasonable explanation as to why price differences between countries cannot be fully attributed to transmission costs as has been claimed in previous research we also found cross country convergence in levels of markups and in pricing to market behavior of the swiss exporters for the first part of the period that was analyzed the evidence is fully consistent with an initial impulse toward market integration originated by reforms implemented at the beginning of the last decade

do protest responses to a contingent valuation question and a choice experiment differ it is suggested that the number of protest responses in stated preference surveys depends inter alia on the valuation method used choice experiments ce are said to generate a lower number of protest responses than contingent valuation cv however no comparison of both methods with respect to protest responses has been conducted to date we used both ce and cv in a survey on forest biodiversity in two german regions protest beliefs were measured for all respondents irrespective of whether they were willing to pay or not the results show no clear pattern of differences between ce and cv regarding protest beliefs and protest responses using an attitude scale based on respondents protest beliefs we see a significant negative effect of this attitude on willingness to pay in both methods however in one of the two study regions the effect is weaker in ce than in cv

bidding structure market efficiency and persistence in a multi time tariff setting the purpose of this study is to examine the fractal dynamics of day ahead electricity prices by using parametric and semi parametric approaches for each time zone in a multi time tariff setting in the framework of bidding strategies market efficiency and persistence of exogenous shocks we find that that electricity prices have long term correlation structure for the first and third time zones indicating that market participants bid hyperbolically and not at their marginal costs market is not weak form efficient at these hours and exogenous shocks to change the mean level of prices will have permanent effect and be effective on the other hand for the second time zone we find that price series does not exhibit long term memory this finding suggests the weak form efficiency of the market in these hours and that market participants bid at their marginal costs furthermore this indicates that exogenous shocks will have temporary effect on electricity prices in these hours these findings constitute an important foundation for policy makers and market participants to develop appropriate electricity price forecasting tools market monitoring indexes and to conduct ex ante impact assessment

the intergenerational transmission of risk and trust attitudes recent theories endogenize the attitude endowments of individuals assuming that they are shaped by the attitudes of parents and other role models this paper tests empirically for the relevance of three aspects of the attitude transmission process highlighted in this theoretical literature 1 transmission of attitudes from parents to children 2 an impact of prevailing attitudes in the local environment on child attitudes and 3 positive assortative mating of parents which enhances the ability of a parent to pass on his or her attitudes to the child we focus on two fundamentally important attitudes willingness to take risks and willingness to trust others we find empirical support for all three aspects providing an empirical underpinning for the literature an investigation of underlying mechanisms shows that socialization is important in the transmission process various parental characteristics and aspects of family structure are found to strengthen the socialization process with implications for modeling the socialization production function and for policies focused on affecting children s non cognitive skills the paper also provides evidence that the transmission of risk and trust attitudes affects a wide variety of child outcomes implying a potentially large total effect on children s economic situation

the labor supply of fixed wage workers estimates from a real effort experiment abstract fixed wage workers comprise the bulk of the labor force and yet little is known about how they respond to changes in their wage given recent interest in theories of reciprocity and intrinsic motivation and their implications for effort provision the neoclassical prediction seems less obvious today to better understand the motivation of these workers i estimate their labor supply using a real effort experiment two results stand out first no one theory seems to fit the pooled data on average people work considerably harder than the minimum but they do not respond to changes in the wage second pooling the data is deceptive because there seem to be distinct types with differing responses to the wage most workers can be classified as reciprocal or intrinsically motivated and indeed these types respond as theory would predict reciprocators return wage gifts with increased effort and extrinsic incentives crowd out motivation for intrinsic workers

marginal wtp and distance decay the role of protest and true zero responses in the economic valuation of recreational water quality we evaluate the sensitivity of distance decay in individuals stated willingness to pay wtp for water quality improvements in eutrophied lakes we extend the standard model of contingent valuation cv by allowing individuals to adopt a sequential evaluation process consisting of two decision stages in the first stage respondents decide whether they are protesters have a wtp true zero or a hbox wtp 0 conditioned on a strictly positive wtp we use lee s selectivity corrected model to determine the magnitude of their wtp in the second stage using cv survey data from norway we find significant distance decay in the first stage classification of respondents as protesters true zero wtp or positive wtp in the second stage model for positive wtp responses we find little or no significant relationships when correcting for selection results suggest that previous findings of significant distance decay in contingent valuation of lake and river water in europe may be driven by the definition of protest and true zero respondents we find that wtp for water quality may be more useful as a qualitative indicator of political support for user financed water quality measures than as a cardinal measure of marginal utility of water quality improvements

european product market integration after the euro using a detailed data set of prices of consumer goods in european cities from 1990 to spring 2003 we investigate the question of whether the introduction of the euro in january 1999 increased integration of consumer markets as reflected by consumer prices in fact we find no tendency for prices to converge after january 1999 this finding holds even when we control for a number of factors that might affect price dispersion on the other hand we find that there has been a significant reduction in price dispersion throughout the decade of the 1990s suggesting that efforts to reduce economic barriers initiated early in the decade may have in fact had the effect of significantly increasing the integration of consumer markets charles engel and john h rogers

limited dependent variables in willingness to pay studies applications in health care the appropriate technique for econometric analysis of wtp willingness to pay data is an issue which has not been addressed in many studies of wtp for health and health care this paper argues that whether an open ended question or a payment scale approach is adopted the way in which wtp is recorded means that limited dependent variable models are more appropriate than standard regression analysis data from an open ended question on wtp for maternity care contain a large proportion of zeros and the evidence suggests that a two part specification performs better than ols or a standard tobit model if the payment scale method is adopted our argument suggests that grouped data regression is an appropriate econometric technique in practice with data from a study in northern norway the results from ols and grouped data regression are broadly similar

the many faces of human sociality uncovering the distribution and stability of social preferences there is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others interests in decision making this heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other regarding behaviors and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations we tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome based and reciprocity based social preferences we find that non selfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception neither at the level of the representative agent nor when we allow for several preference types do purely selfish types emerge instead three temporally stable and qualitatively different other regarding types emerge endogenously i e without pre specifying assumptions about the characteristics of types when ahead all three types value others payoffs significantly more than when behind the first type which we denote as strongly altruistic type is characterized by a relatively large weight on others payoffs even when behind and moderate levels of reciprocity the second type denoted as moderately altruistic type also puts positive weight on others payoff yet at a considerable lower level and displays no positive reciprocity while the third type is behindness averse i e puts a large negative weight on others payoffs when behind and behaves selfishly otherwise we also find that there is an unambiguous and temporally stable assignment of individuals to types moreover the three type model substantially improves the out of sample predictions of individuals behavior across additional games while the information contained in subject specific parameter estimates leads to no or only minor additional predictive power this suggests that a parsimonious model with three types captures the bulk of the predictive power contained in the preference estimates

european power markets a journey towards efficiency abstract the liberalization process of european electricity markets has been a work in progress since early reforms beginning in the 1990 s a key goal of these reforms was to enable increased integration and attendant efficiency within these markets in this paper we analyse three major european electricity markets apxuk nordpool and phelix before and after the 2009 72 ec directive was introduced to examine the extent to which those markets are efficient and whether they have become more integrated we find little evidence of significant long run relationships between the different markets we also find that the nordpool and phelix markets in particular exhibit volatility persistence and clustering behaviour that is inconsistent with the postulations of market efficiency the existence of continued inefficiencies across these power markets indicates that the desired goal of achieving an efficient and unified electricity market in the eu context is still a work in progress

starting point bias in dichotomous choice valuation with follow up questioning abstract follow up questions are frequently used to improve the efficiency of dichotomous choice contingent valuation questionnaires however a number of authors e g 12 16 have noted a significant difference between the wtp distributions implied by initial and follow up question responses this paper investigates starting point bias as one explanation for the phenomenon we develop a model of starting point bias in the context of dichotomous choice questioning with follow up using a monte carlo simulation to illustrate the potential bias imparted to wtp estimates an application is provided based on data from a cv study in northcentral iowa

spike models in contingent valuation spike models allow for a nonzero probability of zero willingness to pay in referendum style contingent valuation experiments they include many of the often used models as special cases and allow various analyses that are not possible in standard applications in this paper the economic rationale for the spike models and their estimation techniques are discussed and empirical illustrations are provided one study suggests that mean willingness to pay is zero and both studies strongly suggest that median wtp is zero these results have some bearing on the continuing debate of the incentive properties of hypothetical surveys and the construction of scenarios in contingent valuation experiments

impact of electricity prices on foreign direct investment evidence from the european union in the course of recent years growing concerns over increasing energy prices have emerged in the context of maintaining europe s international competitiveness in particular rising electricity price differentials adversely affect firms total production costs and ultimately impact their investment decisions nonetheless electricity prices as locational determinants of foreign direct investment fdi have received little attention in the literature so far we address this gap by including electricity prices in the traditional framework of fdi analysis and examine the impact of price variation on net fdi inflows in countries of the european union eu we use a panel of 27 countries for a period of 2003 2013 and system generalised method of moments gmm as method of estimation the main findings of the paper confirm that besides tax rates unit labour costs and competitive disadvantage in secondary education also electricity prices contribute to eroding competitiveness of the countries yet the effect of electricity prices does not seem to be uniform across the eu in fact southwestern countries tend to be more adversely affected than north eastern both in the short and long run

testing for convergence in electricity consumption across croatian regions at the consumer s sectoral level abstract using the panel unit tests with and without structural break s the convergence hypothesis in relative per capita electricity consumption series is tested across croatian regions during the period 2001 2013 the results are mixed depending primarily on the consumption sector considered and the test applied they indicate the necessity to conduct analysis and formulate energy policy measures on the sector disaggregated and regional specific electricity consumption time series the croatian electricity markets are not fully integrated and some regions are faced with statistically significant structural break s demonstrating thereby the croatian gradual energy reform process with several sudden innovations significant regional differences and the market dependence on expectations domestic and international economic and non economic innovations the impacts of innovations are likely to be permanent for most of the regions and their electricity consumption behaviours are likely to be path dependent consequently innovations into the energy markets including government interventions may have long run effects indicating that space and time for experimenting with alternative mechanisms are quite limited

measuring market integration and estimating policy impacts on the swiss electricity market abstract we investigate market integration in central western european electricity markets with a focus on switzerland we propose a structural microeconometric approach to measuring the degree of market integration taking advantage of unilateral demand and supply shocks such as the generation from volatile renewable resources the unavailability of generation units and national holidays these exogenous events affect electricity prices in switzerland and allow estimating the level of market integration by disentangling their effects in congested and non congested situations exploiting information on congested and non congested situations in parametric instrumental variable estimation permits simulating hypothetical non congested swiss electricity prices in historically congested situations our approach allows considering the non linear nature of level shifts of congestion and disentangling it from the structurally different interplay of demand and supply in respective situations using data on hourly electricity prices and its determinants regarding switzerland and neighboring countries from 2015 and 2016 we find that an expansion of interconnector capacity at the german austrian swiss border could decrease swiss electricity prices substantially in a more attenuated way the same holds true for the french swiss and the italian swiss border for switzerland as a whole prices in congested situations are about 17 higher than hypothetical non congested prices

eu emission allowances and the stock market evidence from the electricity industry this paper constitutes to our best knowledge the first econometric analysis on stock market effects of the eu emission trading scheme eu ets our results suggest that eu emission allowance eua price developments matter to the stock performance of electricity firms eua price changes and stock returns of the most important european electricity corporations are shown to be positively related this effect does not work asymmetrically so that stock markets do not seem to react differently to eua appreciations in comparison to depreciations the carbon market effect is shown to be both time and country specific it is particularly strong for the period of eua market shock in early 2006 and differs with respect to the countries where the electricity corporations analysed are headquartered stock market reactions to eua volatility could not be shown

the role of risk and trust attitudes in explaining residential energy demand evidence from the united kingdom recent research into the determinants of household energy consumption has aimed to incorporate findings from economics sociology and psychology in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors determining energy demand the current paper contributes to this nascent stream of literature by studying the relationship between risk attitudes trust propensity and energy consumption at the household level drawing on the british household panel survey a well known data set in the context of energy studies i show that trust is negatively correlated with household energy demand while higher risk tolerance leads to increases in residential energy use potential explanations for these findings are investigated suggesting that risk preferences may be related with overall appliance stock and the size of the rebound effect

directional heterogeneity in wtp models for environmental valuation many studies in the stated preference literature on environmental valuation do not include the effects of substitutes and distance in willingness to pay wtp models in spite of the relevance of these effects in aggregation and benefit transfer heterogeneity in the availability of substitutes over space may cause multidirectional distance effects in wtp as a result disregarding this spatial heterogeneity may lead to biased estimators of the distance effect and associated wtp values cameron 2006 in this paper we demonstrate that distance decay is subject to significant directional effects which tend to be related to differences in the availability of substitutes across the study area we apply a straightforward methodology to account for such spatial heterogeneity in choice experiments and assess the effect on wtp for improvements in ecosystem services in a lake district we model distance decay effects whilst controlling for heterogeneity between users and non users and non use related wtp reasons the directional effects result in significantly different wtp estimates different market sizes reflecting the population with positive wtp and differences in total wtp up to 32

strengthening state capabilities the role of financial incentives in the call to public service we study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in mexico different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites and job offers were subsequently randomized screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants intellectual ability personality and motivation this allows the first experimental estimates of i the role of financial incentives in attracting a larger and more qualified pool of applicants ii the elasticity of the labor supply facing the employer and iii the role of job attributes distance attractiveness of the municipal environment in helping fill vacancies as well as the role of wages in helping fill positions in less attractive municipalities a theoretical model guides each stage of the empirical inquiry we find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their iq personality and proclivity towards public sector work i e we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities

multivariate mixed models for open ended contingent valuation data willingness to pay for conservation of monk seals although dichotomous choice dc contingent valuation cv has been recommended by the us noaa blue ribbon panel for large scale contingent valuation studies useful information can still be obtained from smaller open ended oe studies often undertaken as a precursor to a dc survey the cv study considered here was carried out in greece and looked at willingness to pay wtp for protecting the mediterranean monk seal monachus monachus in the aegean area this is the most endangered seal in the world and the application of the cv methodology was the first such application in greece the oe data consist of two responses first a binary response detailing whether or not respondents were in principle prepared to pay for the protection of this seal secondly those respondents who answered yes to the first question were then asked to state their maximum wtp for such protection a multivariate binomial log normal mixture model is used to develop a bid function including explanatory variables such as income sex age and education such a modelling approach provides an alternative to more commonplace tobit estimation however the model is extended to include further information which was collected on

risk premia in the german day ahead electricity market revisited the impact of negative prices abstract this paper replicates the study by viehmann 2011 that investigated risk premia in the german day ahead electricity market from october 2005 to september 2008 while estimated sizes of risk premia can be replicated this paper does not reproduce respective standard errors leading to remarkable differences between the reported significance levels an extension with data of preceding years points to further differences with respect to size and statistical significance in addition this paper analyzes the impact of negative prices on risk premia negative electricity prices were introduced in 2008 at the european power exchange epex and in 2013 at the energy exchange austria exaa the results of an econometric analysis suggest that the introduction of negative prices has led to a decrease in risk premia when compared to the period of a positive price regime

estimating the speed of adjustment to target levels the case of energy prices in this paper we propose a model that estimates the speed of energy price adjustment to its target level we also explain the source of price adjustment moreover we extract energy price bubbles and show that bubbles help explain price adjustment since ours is the first paper that develops an energy price adjustment model and links it to bubbles several avenues for future research have emerged from our analysis the first is to provide a theoretical framework for the bubbles and price adjustment mechanism the second direction of research will be to continue the search for other potential determinants of price adjustment

contingent valuation and social choice the contingent valuation method for estimating the existence value of natural resources is examined for psychophysical robustness statistical reliability and economic sensibility extensions of standard models for willingness to pay and suitable econometric techniques for analyzing these models are developed the analysis is applied to a series of experiments on the value of preserving wilderness areas in the western united states the results call into question the reliability of the cv method for estimating existence values

the extent of european power markets abstract there is an ongoing debate on the degree of integration of european wholesale power markets a major task of the european union is the creation of a common market in europe and a common power market is an important part of this goal the literature analyzing the degree of integration of european energy markets is growing and provides mixed results we add to this literature by using national holidays as exogenous demand shocks to measure integration of european energy markets our main findings indicate that integration of european wholesale energy markets has increased with regard to germany and austria as well as belgium and the netherlands

nonparticipation or misspecification the impacts of nonparticipation on dichotomous choice contingent valuation dichotomous choice or referendum contingent valuation surveys have become the predominate choice for valuing goods and services otherwise not valued in a standard market nonmarket goods and services a number of researchers have recently recommended that dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies include a follow up question to all no responses to determine whether the no response is a result of unwillingness to pay or nonparticipation if the goal of the study is to investigate the impact of covariates on either mean willingness to pay or the probability of nonparticipation simple identification of indifferent individuals will not suffice a simulation study shows that existing econometric models designed to account for nonparticipation are extremely sensitive to misspecification bias accurate identification of the probability of nonparticipation is hampered by potential misspecification of the distribution of willingness to pay

friends or foes optimal incentives for reciprocal agents abstract widely used performance based contracts put positive or negative externalities on co workers these externalities have been proven to shape an organization s working climate especially when workers exhibit social preferences however it is a priori unclear whether a more friendly or a more competitive working environment should be encouraged in this paper we develop a theoretical model in which a self interested principal has to motivate a set of agents to work hard agents are symmetric potentially risk averse and exhibit reciprocity concerns towards each other we show that the principal reduces the cost of achieving high effort provision by designing a psychological gift exchange game thereby replacing monetary with psychological incentives we find that the optimal incentive scheme depends on the interplay between the agents attitudes towards risks and their preferences for reciprocity in particular the optimal scheme implements i a relative performance compensation scheme which induces an exchange of unkindness if agents are relatively little risk averse and ii a joint performance compensation scheme which induces an exchange of kindness if agents are sufficiently risk averse our findings can explain some puzzling empirical results

integration and shock transmissions across european electricity forward markets abstract new results are presented relating to the integration of the french german british dutch and spanish power markets at day ahead week ahead one month ahead and two month ahead lead times overall there is evidence of market integration increasing over time despite an underlying inefficiency in each market with respect to the forward and spot price convergence the spatial analysis on a financial dimension is undertaken using causality tests cointegration and impulse response techniques for both price levels and volatilities in general we find less influence of the size and proximity of neighbouring markets than other studies more integration at baseload than peak and surprisingly less integration in forwards than spot prices

electricity wholesale market prices in europe convergence abstract this paper tests the hypothesis that the ongoing restructuring process in the european electricity sector has led to a common european market for electricity based on a principal component analysis pca of wholesale electricity prices in 2002 2006 we reject the assumption of full market integration for several pairs of countries the weaker hypothesis of bilateral convergence is accepted based on unit root tests kpss and adf and a convergence test based on filtered pairwise price relations this indicates that the efforts to develop a single european market for electricity were so far only partially successful we show that the daily auction prices of scarce cross border transmission capacities are insufficient to explain the persistence of international price differentials empirically our findings confirm the insufficiency of explicit capacity auctions as stated in the theoretical literature

time zero efficiency of european power derivatives markets abstract we study time zero efficiency of electricity derivatives markets by time zero efficiency is meant a sequence of prices of derivatives contracts having the same underlying asset but different times to maturity which implies that prices comply with a set of efficiency conditions that prevent profitable time zero arbitrage opportunities we investigate whether statistical tests based on the law of one price and trading rules based on price differentials and no arbitrage violations are useful for assessing time zero efficiency we apply tests and trading rules to daily data of three european power markets germany france and spain in the case of the german market after considering liquidity availability and transaction costs results are not inconsistent with time zero efficiency however in the case of the french and spanish markets limitations in liquidity and representativeness are challenges that prevent definite conclusions liquidity in french and spanish markets should improve by using pricing and marketing incentives these incentives should attract more participants into the electricity derivatives exchanges and should encourage them to settle otc trades in clearinghouses publication of statistics on prices volumes and open interest per type of participant should be promoted

a note on the estimation of models with sample selection biases abstract econometric models with sample selection biases are widely used in various fields of economics such as labor economics heckman s two step estimator is widely used to estimates these models this paper points out some limitations and problems of heckman s two step estimator

protest responses in contingent valuation a significant number of respondents to contingent valuation surveys tend to either state a zero bid or refuse to state a bid at all for reasons associated with the process of valuation these protest responses are routinely removed from contingent valuation samples because it is assumed that they are not indicative of respondents true values the censoring of protest responses has led to the emergence of a definitional controversy one view is that the definition of protest responses and the rules for censoring them are dependent on whether the practitioner conceives of the contingent valuation survey as a market or as a referendum however what is not acknowledged is the possibility that protest responses and their meaning may vary according to the type of good being valued the elicitation format and the interaction between these elements and external factors this potential renders the development of unambiguous rules for censoring protest responses difficult moreover when willingness to pay is viewed as a behavioural intention it becomes important to determine what the responses actually mean this approach does not assume an interpretative position a priori against which the responses should be judged but seeks to inform an existing understanding which is inadequate

why and how to regulate power exchanges in the eu market integration context abstract the european union eu market integration is leading to increasingly monopolistic electricity market infrastructures which has opened a debate on the regulation of these so called power exchanges in this paper we start by stating that there are two types of power exchanges in europe i e merchant and cost of service regulated power exchanges we then discuss how regulation can be used to better align their incentives with the main power exchange tasks we conclude that adopting the cost of service regulated model for all power exchanges in europe could be counterproductive in the current context but that regulation can help ensure that the benefits of the eu market integration materialize promising regulatory actions include tempering the reinforced market power of power exchanges and quality of service regulation for the ongoing cooperation among power exchanges to organize trade across borders

estimating benefits for effective enforcement of speed reduction from dichotomous choice cv we present an empirical estimation of the distribution of wtp foreffective speed restriction via implementation of local trafficcalming schemes random samples are drawn from the populations ofhouseholds henceforth hhs of three centres intersected by maintrunk roads with varying through traffic conditions we estimatethe underlying wtp distributions from discrete choice responsesto site specific referendum contingent valuation studiesaccounting for zero bidders we then test the hypothesis ofdifferent distributions across villages the statistical analysisconsists first of a parametric specification and then of atotally non parametric one stated welfare changes for effectivespeed reduction are found to be sizeable and the parameters ofthe random utility models are plausibly related to differences inobjective speed measures across centres the results appear toencourage the use of the referencum cv method in the estimationof local public goods in this case study the proposed publicproject would seem to pass the kaldor hicks potentialcompensation test

implicit auctioning on the kontek cable third time lucky implicit auctioning in europe is about eliminating cross border trade inefficiencies by internalizing crossborder trade into the day ahead auction procedures of the power exchanges that are already organizing trade nationally on the kontek cable implicit auctioning has first been implemented with no coupling between the relevant power exchanges followed by a volume coupling implementation and finally a one way price coupling implementation that is still operational today the main contribution of this paper is to compare the theoretical properties of these three implementations and to analyze their performance empirically we find that the third implementation is significantly outperforming the previous two implementations but in this third implementation stakeholders partly abandoned the volume coupling approach they initially believed to be a viable alternative and institutionally easier to implement

the heckman correction for sample selection and its critique this paper gives a short overview of monte carlo studies on the usefulness of heckman s 1976 1979 two step estimator for estimating selection models such models occur frequently in empirical work especially in microeconometrics when estimating wage equations or consumer expenditures it is shown that exploratory work to check for collinearity problems is strongly recommended before deciding on which estimator to apply in the absence of collinearity problems the full information maximum likelihood estimator is preferable to the limited information two step method of heckman although the latter also gives reasonable results if however collinearity problems prevail subsample ols or the two part model is the most robust amongst the simple to calculate estimators

a history of european electricity day ahead prices in this article we examine the development of day ahead prices in five european markets which became more connected over recent years where previous studies examined the convergence of price levels over time we focus on patterns in estimates for the parameters in a switching regimes model this makes it possible to distinguish between prices under normal market conditions and under non normal market conditions those market conditions that can cause extreme price spikes we expect that increased connectivity yields additional supply in the short term and therefore will reduce the impact of price spikes our results indicate that the impact of price spikes and volatility decreased over time that prices behave more random and that the parameter estimates between various connected markets seem to have converged between the belgian dutch french german and nordic day ahead markets over the years 2003 through 2010 these results can be explained by increased connectivity and improved liquidity

interconnections and market integration in the irish single electricity market interconnections can be an effective way to increase competition and improve market integration in concentrated wholesale electricity markets with limited number of participants this paper examines the potential for interconnections and increasing market integration in the irish single electricity market sem we use a time varying kalman filter technique to assess the degree of market integration between sem and other large mature and interconnected wholesale electricity markets in europe including great britain gb the results indicate no market integration between sem and other european markets except for elspot and gb we show that the current state of market integration between sem and gb is just 17 indicating potential to improve market integration via increased interconnector capacity the results indicate that liquidity of wholesale markets might be a crucial factor in the market integration process while our results remain inconclusive in determining whether increased trade of renewables can improve market integration

how to benefit from a common european electricity market design abstract the realization of an internal electricity market in europe is currently on the one hand progressing in particular thanks to the wide spread implementation of market coupling solutions for cross border congestion management on the other hand diverging national market designs pose a threat to the continuation of this process given the challenges to electricity market design in a multi regional context we analyze how different design aspects namely cross border congestion management and capacity mechanisms affect welfare and generation adequacy in europe in doing so we rely on an agent based simulation model for electricity wholesale markets which we apply within several numerical computational case studies for the region of central western europe 2012 2030 our results confirm the benefits of market coupling in terms of welfare as well as generation adequacy furthermore we find indications that coordinating market designs across regions supports these targets therefore we recommend that european energy policy forms a stable transparent regulatory framework with cross border market coupling as an integral component in this context energy policy targets should be clearly defined and operationalized which also needs to consider potential conflicts between them finally electricity market designs need to be coordinated among states to benefit most from a common european market

cooperation and norm enforcement the individual level perspective abstract we explore the relationship between individuals disposition to cooperate and their inclination to engage in peer punishment as well as their relative importance for mitigating social dilemmas using a modified strategy method approach we identify individual punishment patterns and link them with individual cooperation patterns classifying n 628 subjects along these two dimensions documents that cooperation and punishment patterns are aligned for most individuals however the data also reveal a sizable share of free riders that punish pro socially and conditional cooperators that do not engage in punishment analyzing the interplay between types in an additional experiment we show that pro social punishers are important for achieving cooperation incorporating information on punishment types explains large amounts of the between and within group variation in cooperation

a dynamic network analysis of spot electricity prices in the australian national electricity market abstract this study applies dynamic network analysis to the power sector examining the relationship between regional spot electricity prices in the australian national electricity market nem in particular we employ principal component analysis and generate granger causality networks to examine the degree of interconnectedness of the nem in a time varying setting we find that the derived measures of interdependence can be related to actual market events such as price spikes unexpected high demand for electricity sudden increases in price volatility rebidding of dominant generators the temporary or permanent outage of major power stations and upgrades and limitations in transmission capacity in the analysed network we find that stronger dependence is exhibited by regional markets that are linked through interconnectors while the direction of granger causality can be related to interregional trade we further examine the usefulness of the derived measures for forecasting distributional characteristics of spot prices such as the maximum price volatility price spreads or upcoming periods of price spikes our results suggest that the derived network measures have predictive power albeit limited for the behaviour of spot electricity prices in the nem

is swedish district heating operating on an integrated market differences in pricing price convergence and marketing strategy between public and private district heating companies abstract the deregulation of the swedish electricity market in 1996 made it possible to operate municipal district heating commercially until that time district heating had been organized mainly as municipal utilities after 1996 district heating is instead expected to function on a market in competitive and integrated markets prices are expected to be equal or converging to find out if district heating operates on an integrated market the differences in price levels price convergence price strategy and business goals among municipal private and state owned district heating companies are investigated price statistics was used along with results from a questionnaire that was answered by representatives for 109 swedish district heating companies the results show that prices among district heating systems do not converge significantly and that variations in prices among municipal systems are larger than among private and state owned systems furthermore despite the fact that district heating is supposed to be commercial a vast majority of district heating companies apply cost based pricing and not market pricing the municipal companies give priority to political goals before financial goals the conclusion is that a swedish integrated market for heat has not yet evolved and some district heating price controlling mechanism is necessary