production economics and process quality a taguchi perspective abstract although several studies have analyzed the interaction between the economics of production and process quality most of them view quality from a very traditional perspective reject when outside specified limits or else accept recent views on quality have shown that such a definition greatly underestimates the costs of poor quality and leads to sub optimal decisions the primary intent in this paper is to revisit this interaction of the economics of production with process quality from a non traditional yet more realistic taguchi quality cost perspective specifically we investigate the possibility of investing in a process to decrease its variance although such an investment reduces the proportion of defects and when large enough the taguchi s loss it also increases the cost of holding inventory our model determines the optimal levels of inventory and the production lot size that minimizes the sum of inventory and quality related costs

is the troika bad for the environment an analysis of eu countries environmental performance in times of economic downturn and austerity memoranda abstract in this paper we examine the effect of the current economic crisis on the environmental performance of the eu countries by employing hierarchical linear multilevel hlm modeling we find that for the period 2000 2015 a drop in the national gdp a recession effect as well as endorsing a memorandum of understanding mou for receiving a imf eu ecb financial rescue package a troika effect have non significant to positive impacts on a number of national environmental quality and policy indicators over and above other economic political and governance predictors for eurozone and non eurozone countries alike nevertheless this changes drastically if we examine these two factors interaction experiencing a recession while being a recipient of a troika sponsored rescue package has detrimental effects on an eu country s national environment

biased predictors rationality and the evaluation of forecasts abstract optimal rational forecasts are often biased and thus the empirical finding that actual forecasts are biased is not necessarily evidence of irrational behavior using an asymmetric loss function and a regression forecasting problem these points are explicitly demonstrated

nature roads or hospitals an empirical evaluation of sustainable development preferences while a key proposition is that a sustainable path is one where wealth does not decline whether losses in natural capital can be compensated in wellbeing terms by more produced social or natural capital remains an area of controversy in this paper we seek to better understand preferences for different combinations of assets that comprise part of the asset portfolio of a nation in a study of coastal and marine natural assets we test for the existence of weak or strong sustainability preferences using different compensation options respectively produced capital and natural capital offered to a sample of the public in spain in the case of possible future oil spills as a further element of this test we provide an empirical reflection on aldred 2002 2006 and turner 2007 who speculate that individuals may not view money as compensating for certain environmental losses whereas investments in social assets may offer a more acceptable compensation option our results do appear to circumscribe in some way the acceptability of investing in produced capital and reveal a tendency towards a preference for social capital compensation nevertheless the size of the oil spill and the environmental beliefs of respondents also influence choices over the natural capital compensation option

the political drivers of renewable energies policies this paper empirically analyzes how political factors affect the deployment of renewable energy re sources and compares their explanatory power to that of other economic energy and environmental drivers that have received greater attention in the literature so far the sample encompasses the eu countries bound to attain the target of 20 share of gross final energy consumption by 2020 the panel data analysis shows that lobbying by the manufacturing industry negatively affects re deployment whereas standard measures of government quality show a positive effect furthermore left wing parties promote the deployment of re more than right wing parties

bias in federal reserve inflation forecasts is the federal reserve irrational or just cautious abstract inflation forecasts of the federal reserve seem to have systematically under predicted inflation from the fourth quarter of 1968 until volcker s appointment as chairman and to systematically over predict it afterwards until the second quarter of 1998 furthermore under quadratic loss commercial forecasts seem to have information not contained in those forecasts to investigate the cause of this apparent irrationality this paper recovers the loss function implied by federal reserve s inflation forecasts the results suggest that the cost of having inflation above an implicit time varying target was larger than the cost of having inflation below it for the period since volcker and that the opposite was true for the pre volcker era once these asymmetries are taken into account the federal reserve s inflation forecasts are found to be rational

the environment left wing political orientation and ecological economics the objectives of this commentary are twofold the first is to examine the relationship between a party s position within the left right political spectrum and its stance on environmental issues as stated in party manifestos the second is to examine the relationship between individuals ideological orientation and pro environmental beliefs attitudes and self reported behavior equality distributional concerns and market skepticism are typically regarded as defining factors of left wing political orientation our results suggest that left wing parties and individuals are also more pro environmental than their right wing counterparts ecological economics similarly embraces sustainability efficient resource allocation and equitable distribution and is skeptical towards the ability of unregulated markets to achieve these objectives the hypothesis is put forward that ecological economics is more likely to be supported by left wing parties and individuals

inequality as a cause of environmental degradation abstract this paper advances two hypotheses first the extent of an environmentally degrading economic activity is a function of the balance of power between the winners who derive net benefits from the activity and the losers who bear net costs second greater inequalities of power and wealth lead all else equal to more environmental degradation

political affiliation and willingness to pay an examination of the nature of benefits and means of provision non market techniques are widely used for valuing environmental goods and services recent articles obtain results showing respondents to the right of the political spectrum are significantly less likely to vote in favour of environmental programs that provide public goods through public means in consequence their wtp is lower than that of individuals on the political left we examine whether wtp differs systematically in accordance with political affiliation by using data from three stated preference surveys we obtain results similar to the previous literature from only one survey our other two surveys employ different contexts that change the nature of the benefits from the good and or its provision mechanism the first of these finds no significant differences in wtp by respondent political affiliation and the second finds that respondents on the right of the political spectrum have statistically higher wtps for a good when it is privately provided than under collective provision our results provide further support that context matters and that preferences elicited from surveys for environmental goods are not necessarily independent of the means by which the good is provided

the forecaster s dilemma influential forecasts occur when the forecast itself determines whether the forecast is tested new product sales forecasts are often influential because a low forecast may cause a firm not to launch a new product so that actual sales are never observed this paper considers a dilemma we face as influential forecasters our client requests an unbiased forecast but pressures sometimes exist to provide a bias forecast from theoretical and empirical perspectives we discuss the impact of these pressures on the quality of forecasts we find that noninfluential forecasts generally create no pressure for statistically biased forecasts as influence increases the pressures increase when our forecasts eliminate alternatives e g product designs advertising campaigns not all forecasts are tested not validating all forecasts causes two effects survivor s curse and prophet s fear survivor s curse makes statistically unbiased forecasts appear optimistic i e overestimate actual sales because often only optimistic forecasts are tested forecasts appearing statistically unbiased or pessimistic might cause concern perhaps some failures are justified prophet s fear encourages pessimistic forecasts because these forecasts cause hidden opportunity losses while optimistic forecasts cause observable actual losses tested forecasts may appear completely unbiased despite a pessimistic pre launch bias although no perfect solution exists clients may lessen bias with experimentation and by seeking more accurate forecasts forecasters may lessen bias with forecasts conditioned on launching and by seeking more accurate forecasts

public attitudes towards renewable energy technologies in norway the role of party preferences abstract transition to a sustainable society requires large scale conversion of the energy system to new renewable non fossil sources of energy this presupposes public support for new technologies which means the public must deal with challenges in terms of placement area requirements ecological degradation and price developments this paper discusses how citizens view renewable energy technologies it analyses responses to representative surveys of the norwegian population on the desirability of various energy technologies such as hydroelectric dams onshore and offshore wind energy bioenergy plants and for contrast gas plants with and without carbon capture and storage our main focus is on the influence of party political preference on views of renewable energy we find that the sometimes lukewarm enthusiasm for renewable energy technologies cannot be fully explained by existing theories and that political party preference has a larger impact on energy technology attitudes than previously believed

are left wing party strength and corporatism good for the environment evidence from panel analysis of air pollution in oecd countries abstract the effect of left wing party strength and corporatism on air pollution levels in up to 21 oecd countries over the period 1980 or 1990 1999 is tested with both fixed effects and random effects estimators controlling for scale composition technique as well as aggregate time effects robust evidence is found that parliamentary green left libertarian party strength is associated with lower pollution levels the rise of ecologically oriented parties has thus had a real impact on air pollution levels traditional left wing party strength is possibly also associated with lower pollution levels but the evidence is less consistent and robust combined left wing party strength in government is possibly associated with higher pollution levels but this result is also far from robust and is practically small no evidence is found for a consistent systematic impact of corporatism on pollution levels

rational expectations and macroeconomic forecasts the article presents extensive results from testing for bias and serially correlated errors in a collection of time series of quarterly multiperiod forecasts for six variables including real gnp growth inflation and unemployment the analysis covers responses by 79 frequent participants in economic outlook surveys conducted regularly since 1968 it shows much greater incidence of apparently systematic errors for inflation than for the other variables also the tests are more favorable to composite group forecasts than to most of the individual forecast sets

voting on the environment price or ideology evidence from swiss referendums studies on preferences for environmental quality usually posit that price and income explain most of the observed choices however we argue that conceptions of social norms and the common good are equally important when analyzing environmental voting outcomes and are a significant component of the environmental demand we study aggregate results of three ballot proposals in switzerland put to vote in the year 2000 which foresaw different tax schemes on fossil energy all three bills were rejected by the electorate we are able to show that regions with producer interests car commuting habits and elderly population are less supportive of ecological tax reforms unlike higher education and leftist political affinity that work in favor of the bills though more importantly our results underline the importance of including variables pertaining to the notion of ideology both in terms of statistical fit and obtaining unbiased estimates for price and income determinants

the informational efficiency of weekly money announcements an econometric critique studies of the weekly money announcement have found markets to be informationally efficient we demonstrate that this result apparently is related to one or more sources of bias and measurement error that have been introduced to the estimating equations of previous studies after correcting for these sources of bias and estimating the modified model over the samples employed in earlier studies we still find evidence to reject the hypothesis of informational efficiency an alternative explanation is that auxiliary assumptions imposed for empirical convenience introduce measurement error that affects standard tests of the efficient markets hypothesis

market and survey forecasts of the three month treasury bill rate in this article four readily available one quarter ahead forecasts of the three month u s treasury bill rate are compared the forecasts considered are 1 a prediction from the futures market 2 a forecast derived from an implicit forward rate calculation 3 a survey gathered forecast and 4 a no change forecast each forecast is examined for general forecast accuracy and for the extent of bias contained in each forecast over the twelve year period 1977 88 results indicate that the futures rate statistically dominates the other three forecasts while the survey and forward rate projections generally are found to be the least accurate and most biased copyright 1992 by university of chicago press

more flexible use of survey data on expectations in macroeconomic models a flexible procedure is proposed whereby both the random and systematic errors in measurement of survey data on inflation expectations can be appropriately handled when these surveys are used in the estimation of macroeconomic models during the period 1952 1980 livingston s two expectations series and the src series systematically underestimated inflation expectations by nearly 25 the asa nber survey however does not exhibit such underestimation thus the use of the livingston or src data as an unbiased measure of the true expectations of inflation would result in overestimation of the fisher effect and the ex ante real interest rate

on the restricted cointegration test as a test of the rational expectations hypothesis one of the main consequences of the cointegration revolution on the domain of the direct tests of the rational expectations hypothesis reh was the substitution of the restricted cointegration test rct for the unbiasedness test however the results of a monte carlo study show that a simple t test can be much more powerful than the rct it is argued that the rct is adequate to investigate the asymptotic rationality but that it is not sufficient to assess the muthian rationality of expectations the discussion is empirically illustrated with the test of the reh for the portuguese retail trade inflation expectations

what are political leaders environmental intentions the impact of social identification processes and macro economic conditions abstract evidence of continued environmental degradation has led to a questioning of the traditional vision of unlimited economic growth in favour of sustainable development although several explicit environmental strategies were designed at the supranational level the pursuit of environmental sustainability remains an aim driven by political concerns at the country level this study aims to investigate the role of both internal cognitive and motivational factors and external social forces and macro economic conditions contexts in influencing the propensity of political leaders regarding environmental matters the findings indicate that cognitive and motivational factors tend to shape the environmental intentions of political leaders whereas the external context does not have a significant impact our results suggest that the political leaders propensity for addressing environmental matters is largely affected by the desire of leaders to establish or confirm an individual status through political processes or to conform to group norms however younger political leaders demonstrate a higher environmental propensity than do older leaders

the rationality of usda forecasts under multivariate asymmetric loss a large number of previous studies suggest that many usda forecasts are biased and or inefficient these findings however may be the result of the assumed loss function of usda forecasters we test the rationality of the usda net cash income forecasts and the wasde production and price forecasts between 1988 and 2018 using a flexible multivariate loss function that allows for asymmetric loss and non separable forecast errors our results provide robust evidence that usda forecasters are rational expected loss minimizers yet demonstrate a tendency to place a greater weight on under or overprediction as a result this study provides an alternate interpretation of previous findings of forecast irrationality

an evaluation of survey exchange rate forecasts abstract a non parametric test of direction is employed to evaluate the survey forecasts provided by the money market services empirical results suggest that the forecasts are useful for predicting the direction of exchange rate changes the results are consistent with a weaker form of rationality than unbiasedness