urbanization openness emissions and energy intensity a study of increasingly urbanized emerging economies this paper analyses the impact of urbanization and trade openness on emissions and energy intensity in twenty two increasingly urbanized emerging economies we employ three second generation heterogeneous linear panel models as well as recently developed nonlinear panel estimation techniques allowing for cross sectional dependence the empirical results show that population density and affluence increase emissions and energy intensity while renewable energy seems to be dormant in these emerging economies but non renewable energy increases both co2 emissions and energy intensity in addition openness significantly reduces both pollutant emissions and energy intensity whereas urbanization significantly increases energy intensity but it is insignificant in increasing emissions this may be in part due to the recent increasing trend in adopting cleaner technologies in these increasingly urbanized developing economies

energy efficiency and conservation in china s chemical fiber industry abstract china is currently experiencing rapid economic growth as a result of industrialization and urbanization in the next 20 years china s energy demand will increase substantially and energy conservation will become imperative for the country s low carbon economic transformation since 1998 china s chemical fiber production has ranked first in the world in 2011 china s chemical fiber production accounted for about 70 of the world s total output therefore energy saving is important for china s chemical fiber industry and can provide immense benefits and hence the need for thorough and intense research in this paper the co integration method is used to test the relationship between energy consumption and its influencing factors such as gdp energy prices population and r d expenditures the results show that there is a long term relationship between the variables based on this we estimate energy demand and predict the energy saving potential for the industry under different scenarios we apply the monte carlo simulation method to verify the reliability of the prediction scenario analysis is adopted to predict energy demand and energy saving in the industry under different scenarios finally we propose some policy suggestions on energy saving based on the research

the relationship between energy consumption structure economic structure and energy intensity in china this paper investigates the long run equilibrium relationships temporal dynamic relationships and causal relationships between energy consumption structure economic structure and energy intensity in china time series variables over the periods from 1980 to 2006 are employed in empirical tests cointegration tests suggest that these three variables tend to move together in the long run in addition granger causality tests indicate that there is a unidirectional causality running from energy intensity to economic structure but not vice versa impulse response analysis provides reasonable evidences that one shock of the three variables will cause the periods of destabilized that followed however the impact of the energy consumption structure shock on energy intensity and the impact of the economic structure shock on energy consumption structure seem to be rather marginal the findings have significant implications from the point of view of energy conservation and economic development in order to decrease energy intensity chinese government must continue to reduce the proportion of coal in energy consumption increase the utilization efficiency of coal and promote the upgrade of economic structure furthermore a full analysis of factors that may relate to energy intensity e g energy consumption structure economic structure should be conducted before making energy policies

stochastic convenience yield and the pricing of oil contingent claims this paper develops and empirically tests a two factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil the factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield the parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from january 1984 to november 1988 and the model s performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period november 1988 to may 1989 finally the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time

when where and how to estimate persistent and transient efficiency in stochastic frontier panel data models abstract in this paper we examine robustness of a recently developed panel data stochastic frontier model that allows for both persistent and transient also known as long run and short run or time invariant and time varying inefficiency along with random firm effects heterogeneity and noise we address some concerns that the practitioners might have about this model first given that there are two random time invariant components persistent inefficiency and firm effects the concern is whether the model can accurately identify them and if so how precisely can the model estimate them second there are two time varying random components transient inefficiency and noise and the concern is whether the model can separate noise from transient inefficiency and if so how precisely can the model estimate transient inefficiency third how well are persistent and transient inefficiency estimated under different scenarios viz under different configurations of the variance parameters of the four random components given that the model is quite complex relatively new and becoming quite popular in the panel efficiency literature we feel that there is need for a detailed simulation study to examine when where and how one can use this model with confidence to estimate persistent and transient inefficiency

evaluating natural resource investments notwithstanding impressive advances in the theory of finance over the past 2 decades practical procedures for capital budgeting have evolved only slowly the standard technique which has remained unchanged in essentials since it was originally proposed see dean 1951 bierman and smidt 1960 derives from a simple adaptation of the fisher 1907 model of valuation under certainty under this technique expected cash flows from an investment project are discounted at a rate deemed appropriate to their risk and the resulting present value is compared with the cost of the project this standard textbook technique reflects modern theoretical developments only insofar as estimates of the discount rate may be obtained from crude application of single period asset pricing theory but see brennan 1973 bogue and roll 1974 turnbull 1977 constantinides 1978 the inadequacy of this approach to capital budgeting is widely acknowledged although not widely discussed its obvious deficiency is its the evaluation of mining and other natural resource projects is made particularly difficult by the high degree of uncertainty attaching to output prices it is shown that the techniques of continuous time arbitrage and stochastic control theory may be used not only to value such projects but also to determine the optimal policies for developing managing and abandoning them the approach may be adapted to a wide variety of contexts outside the natural resource sector where uncertainty about future project revenues is a paramount concern

the effect of new type urbanization on energy consumption in china a spatial econometric analysis abstract china s urbanization is rapidly proceeding while bringing marked impact on the energy consumption this paper contributes to current literature by using an improved spatial econometric model stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat to investigate the effect of urbanization on energy consumption for china s regions the impact of urbanization is further disaggregated into direct and indirect impacts from the perspective of spatial econometrics results show that if the urbanization level increases by 1 0 energy consumption levels will correspondingly decrease by 0 089 the spatial spillover effect on adjacent areas is positive a 1 0 increase in one specific area s urbanization level leads to a 0 136 increase in an adjacent area s energy consumption it is suggested that it is essential to devote major efforts to energy conservation in the process of improving the new type urbanization in particular disaggregating china s targets for controlling energy consumption into smaller targets for different regions will contribute to controlling the growth of energy consumption

soybean inventory and forward curve dynamics we present two results concerning soybean prices first we exhibit a simple relationship between stocks and price volatility the observation of an increasing price volatility with decreasing inventory is often mentioned in the literature but has so far been documented using a proxy for inventory see fama and french 1987 1988 litzenberger and rabinowitz 1995 instead we reconstruct a yearly quarterly and monthly database of worldwide soybean inventories using aggregate data from the united states brazil and argentina we show that under all time scales price volatility is an increasing linear function of inverse inventory which we term scarcity second we show how the addition of the factor scarcity in a state variable approach to the dynamics of the term structure of soybean forward prices improves the quality of the fit we document this property on a 25 year database of cbot futures contracts and show that the superior accuracy also affects long maturity futures contracts an important property for the valuation of long term origination contracts between producing countries and the agrifood industry

the influential factors of china s regional energy intensity and its spatial linkages 1988 2007 abstract a large amount of literature on china s energy intensity seldom considers the regional differences of energy intensity inside china and the spatial effects based on spatial statistics methods this paper explores the regional imbalance of china s provincial energy intensity and the spatially correlation of energy intensity among provinces using spatial panel data models this paper finds that gdp per capita transportation infrastructure the level of marketization and scientific and technological input significantly reduce the energy intensity the ratio of heavy industries to total industries and the ratio of coal consumption to total energy consumption significantly expand the energy intensity meanwhile the coefficient of the ratio of export to gdp is not significant then the spillover and convergence of china s regional energy intensity have been tested the results indicate that the spillover effect between the eastern and western china is remarkable and there exist absolute convergence of provincial energy intensity moreover gdp per capita transportation infrastructure the level of marketization and scientific technological input are conducive to conditional convergence after the spatial effects are controlled according to the empirical results this paper proposes some policy suggestions on reducing china s energy intensity

the information content of a nonlinear macro finance model for commodity prices state of the art term structure models of commodity prices have serious difficulties extrapolating the prices of long maturity futures contracts from short dated contracts this situation is problematic for valuing real commodity linked assets we estimate a nonlinear four factor continuous time model of commodity price dynamics the model nests many previous specifications to estimate the model we use crude oil prices and inventories the inventory data and nonlinear price dynamics have a large impact on oil price forecasts the additional factor in our model compared with current three factor models has a significant impact on model implied long maturity futures prices received november 23 2015 editorial decision september 12 2016 by editor geert bekaert

what drives the change in china s energy intensity combining decomposition analysis and econometric analysis at the provincial level abstract we employ decomposition analysis and econometric analysis to investigate the driving forces behind china s changing energy intensity using a provincial level panel data set for the period from 1995 to 2009 the decomposition analysis indicates that a all of the provinces except for a few experienced efficiency improvement while around three fourths of the provinces economics became more energy intensive or remained unchanged b consequently the efficiency improvement accounts for more than 90 of china s energy intensity change as opposed to the economic structural change the econometric analysis shows that the rising income plays a significant role in the reduction of energy intensity while the effect of energy price is relatively limited the result may reflect the urgency of deregulating the price and establishing a market oriented pricing system in china s energy sector the implementation of the energy intensity reduction policies in the eleventh five year plan fyp has helped reverse the increasing trend of energy intensity since 2002 although the chinese government intended to change the industry led economic growth pattern it seems that most of the policy effects flow through the efficiency improvement as opposed to the economic structure adjustment more fundamental changes to the economic structure are needed to achieve more sustainable progress in energy intensity reduction

government expenditure and energy intensity in china the recent economic stimulus package of china has raised growing concern about its potential impact on energy demand and efficiency to what extent does such expansion of government expenditure influence energy intensity this question has not been well answered by the previous research using provincial panel data this paper provides some evidence of a link between government expenditure and energy intensity in china the empirical results demonstrate that the expansion of government expenditure since asian financial crisis has exerted a significant influence on energy intensity an increase in government expenditure in china leads to an increase in energy intensity further analysis compares such relationships in different economic situations the comparison shows that such positive effect of government expenditure remains significant after the alteration in economic situation therefore the results suggest introducing some measures to consolidate china s existing gains in energy efficiency the analysis also explains why the downward trend in energy intensity is reversed in china since 2002

energy intensity and its determinants in china s regional economies abstract this paper contributes to the existing literature as well as policy debates by examining energy intensity and its determinants in china s regional economies the analysis is based on a comprehensive database of china s regional energy balance constructed for this project through its focus on regional china this study extends the existing literature which mainly covers nationwide studies it is found in this paper that energy intensity declined substantially in china the main contributing factor is the improvement in energy efficiency changes in the economic structure have so far affected energy intensity modestly thus there is considerable scope to reduce energy intensity through the structural transformation of the chinese economy in the future

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

interaction and imitation with heterogeneous agents a misleading evolutionary equilibrium abstract in a two population evolutionary game we analyze the interaction between individuals belonging to two populations with the same strategy set but different payoffs a game is played among individuals in the two populations they imitate agents belonging to the same and also the alternative population when a revising agent is matched with someone in the alternative population who plays differently his expected payoff and the observed payoff of his partner diverge hence he conjectures the payoff from switching to the other strategy by weighing what he expected and what he observes the evolutionary dynamics has a unique locally asymptotically stable fixed point which typically differs from the evolutionary stable equilibrium without inter population imitation for a collective action game we analyze to what extent the compliance rate and the social welfare differ from the nash equilibrium and how these gaps depend on the confidence that agents assign to what they see

effects of urbanization on energy efficiency in china new evidence from short run and long run efficiency models abstract energy efficiency in china has been the cause for increasing concern for national and local sustainable development due to rapid economic development and large scale energy consumption using panel data of 30 provinces between 1997 and 2016 in china the measurement of energy efficiency is disentangled and the effects of urbanization on different types of energy efficiency are explored first the measurement of energy efficiency is disentangled with long run and short run efficiencies derived results of energy efficiency scores highlight the predominant status of long run inefficiency is low and that disparate energy efficiency is present between provinces second the effects of urbanization were found to be significantly negative on short run long run and overall energy efficiency comparatively the effect of urbanization on long run efficiency was shown to have recently grown implying an urgent call for energy conservation during rapid urbanization finally this study outlines broader implications and suggests policies to improve energy efficiency here application of energy conservation technology industrial structure upgrading and efficiency information disclosure to urban residents are thought to be smart ways to improve energy efficiency

a brave new world kantian nashian interaction and the dynamics of global climate change mitigation abstract we model game theoretic situations in which agents motivated by kantian ethics interact with conventional nashian agents we define the concept of generalized kant nash equilibrium which encompasses the nash equilibrium the kantian equilibrium and the kant nash equilibrium as special cases we show the existence and uniqueness of a kant nash equilibrium in a static game of climate change mitigation and derive its properties in a dynamic setting we analyze a differential game of climate change mitigation in the presence of both types of agents and compare their markov emission strategies for both the static model and the dynamic model as the population share of kantians increases the quality of the environment improves and both types of agents are better off

effects of urbanisation on energy consumption in china as a key issue in china s economic development urbanisation creates increasing pressure on energy supply and the natural environment thus a better understanding of the relationship between urbanisation and energy consumption is necessary for chinese decision makers at various levels to address energy security and sustainable economic and social development this paper empirically investigates the effects of china s urbanisation on residential energy consumption rec and production energy consumption pec through a time series analysis the results show that compared with rural areas urbanisation slows per capita rec growth because of the economy of scale and technological advantages associated with urbanisation but has greater promotional effects on the growth of rec and the improvement of rec structure the economic growth caused by urbanisation most significantly contributes to an increase in pec whereas technological advancement was found to reduce the scale of pec except from 2001 to 2005 finally the structural effect of the energy supply increased rather than decreased china s pec and the effect of industrial structure adjustment on pec was found to be insignificant

what induced china s energy intensity to fluctuate 1997 2006 abstract china is the second largest energy consumer in the world during 1997 2002 china s energy intensity declined by 33 however it rose by 10 7 over 2003 2005 and declined by 1 2 in 2006 what induced china s energy intensity to fluctuate so drastically industry accounts for approximately 70 of the total energy consumption in china in this paper we decompose china s industrial energy intensity changes between 1997 and 2002 into sectoral structural effects and efficiency effects measured by sectoral energy intensities at two digit level and including the shifts of product mix in the sub sector or firm level using tornqvist and sato vartia index methods the results show that in this period efficiency effects possibly contributed to a majority of the decline while the contribution from structural effects was less during 2003 2005 the excessive expansion of high energy consuming sub sectors and the high investment ratio were foremost sources of the increasing energy intensity attributed to the government efforts the energy intensity has started to decline slightly since july 2006 in future to save more energy in addition to technical progress china should attach more importance to optimizing its sectoral structure and lowering its investment ratio

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

equilibrium exhaustible resource price dynamics we develop equilibrium models of exhaustible resource markets with endogenous extraction choices and prices our analysis demonstrates how adjustment costs can generate oil and gas forward price dynamics with two factors consistent with the behavior these commodities exhibit in the schwartz and smith 2000 calibration our two factor model predicts that stochastic volatility will arise in these markets as a natural consequence of production adjustments however and we provide supporting empirical evidence differences between endogenous price processes from our general equilibrium model and exogenous processes in earlier papers can generate significant differences in both financial and real option values

impacts of urbanization and industrialization on energy consumption co2 emissions does the level of development matter urbanization and industrialization have significant impacts on energy consumption and co2 emissions but their relationship varies at different stages of economic development taking cognizance of heterogeneity and the ratchet effect this paper adopts the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework as a starting point and re estimates the relationship using different panel date models the main results are obtained by dynamic panel threshold regression models which divide a balanced panel dataset of 73 countries over the period of 1971 2010 into four groups according to their annual income levels the key results are 1 in the low income group urbanization decreases energy consumption but increases co2 emissions 2 in the middle low income and high income groups industrialization decreases energy consumption but increases co2 emissions while urbanization significantly increases both energy consumption and co2 emissions 3 for the middle high income group urbanization does not significantly affect energy consumption but does hinder the growth of emissions while industrialization was found to have an insignificant impact on energy consumption and co2 emissions 4 from the population perspective it produces positive effects on energy consumption and also increases emissions except for the high income group these novel methodology and findings reveal that different development strategies of urbanization and industrialization should be pursued depending on the levels of income in a bid to conserve energy and reduce emissions

does urbanization lead to less energy use and lower co2 emissions a cross country analysis despite the relationship between urbanization energy use and co2 emissions has been extensively studied in recent years little attention has been paid to differences in development stages or income levels most previous studies have implicitly assumed that the impact of urbanization is homogenous for all countries this assumption can be questionable as there are many characteristic differences among countries of different levels of affluence this paper investigates empirically the effects of urbanization on energy use and co2 emissions with consideration of the different development stages using the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat model and a balanced panel dataset of 99 countries over the period 1975 2005 the findings suggest that the impact of urbanization on energy use and emissions varies across the stages of development surprisingly urbanization decreases energy use in the low income group while it increases energy use in the middle and high income groups the impact of urbanization on emissions is positive for all the income groups but it is more pronounced in the middle income group than in the other income groups these novel findings not only help advance the existing literature but also can be of special interest to policy makers and urban planners

do urbanization and industrialization affect energy intensity in developing countries abstract against a backdrop of concerns about climate change peak oil and energy security issues reducing energy intensity is often advocated as a way to at least partially mitigate these impacts this study uses recently developed heterogeneous panel regression techniques like mean group estimators and common correlated effects estimators to model the impact that income urbanization and industrialization has on energy intensity for a panel of 76 developing countries in the long run a 1 increase in income reduces energy intensity by 0 45 to 0 35 long run industrialization elasticities are in the range 0 07 to 0 12 the impact of urbanization on energy intensity is mixed in specifications where the estimated coefficient on urbanization is statistically significant it is slightly larger than unity the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

imitation and the evolution of walrasian behavior theoretically fragile but behaviorally robust a well known result by vega redondo implies that in symmetric cournot oligopoly imitation leads to the walrasian outcome where price equals marginal cost in this paper we show that this result is not robust to the slightest asymmetry in fixed costs instead of obtaining the walrasian outcome as unique prediction every outcome where agents choose identical actions will be played some fraction of the time in the long run we then conduct experiments to check this fragility we obtain that contrary to the theoretical prediction the walrasian outcome is still a good predictor of behavior

prices technology development and the rebound effect abstract energy efficiency is the critical parameter for policies that aim at reducing energy consumption while maintaining or even boosting economic growth the two main options to influence energy efficiency are changes in relative prices i e raising the price of energy through economic instruments or to introduce new technologies which increase the productivity of each unit of energy this paper is based on the notion that in an equilibrium economy the marginal economic productivity is identical for all factors i e energy labour knowledge and capital from this premise two main conclusions can be drawn first any change in price or technology will have an impact on the whole economy by creating feedbacks through the substitution of factors of production and goods as well as increased wealth second the two policy approaches changing relative prices and technology development are not opposite to each other they are the two faces of the same reality and should be developed and promoted simultaneously and consistently

unspanned stochastic volatility and the pricing of commodity derivatives commodity derivatives are becoming an increasingly important part of the global derivatives market here we develop a tractable stochastic volatility model for pricing commodity derivatives the model features unspanned stochastic volatility quasi analytical prices of options on futures contracts and dynamics of the futures curve in terms of a low dimensional affine state vector we estimate the model on nymex crude oil derivatives using an extensive panel data set of 45 517 futures prices and 233 104 option prices spanning 4082 business days we find strong evidence for two predominantly unspanned volatility factors jel g13

the effect of increasing exports on industrial energy intensity in china abstract given china s heavy reliance on fuel energy and the dominance of its industrial sector in the economy improving energy efficiency remains one of the practical means for the country to decrease energy intensity and to fulfill its commitment made at the copenhagen climate change conference to achieve a 40 45 percent reduction in co 2 emission intensity by 2020 this study investigates the impact of exports on industrial energy intensity to explore the possibility of reducing energy intensity through greater exports a panel varying coefficient regression model with a dataset of china s 20 industrial sub sectors over 1999 2007 suggests that in general greater exports aggravate energy intensity of the industrial sector and that great divergences exist in the impact of exports on energy intensity across sub sectors a panel threshold model further estimates the thresholds for the major determinants of energy intensity exports input in technological innovations and foreign direct investment fdi intensity given the great differences in specific sub sector characteristics and the changing roles played by different factors across sub sectors there is no general export policy that would work for all sub sectors in reducing sub sector energy intensity instead policies and measures aiming to encourage more efficient use of energy should take into full consideration the characteristics and situations of individual sub sectors

does urbanization affect energy intensities across provinces in china long run elasticities estimation using dynamic panels with heterogeneous slopes abstract although there has been extensive debate in the literature that addresses the impact of urbanization on total energy use the relative magnitude of each impact channel has not been empirically examined and urbanization s effects on energy transition dynamics in china remains unknown using panel datasets at the provincial level from 1986 to 2011 this paper employs dynamic models to investigate both the long run and short run elasticities of urbanization on energy intensities and the most significant impact channel is identified coal intensity and electricity intensity are also modeled to reveal energy transition dynamics driven by urbanization a set of newly developed regression techniques namely well performed common correlated effects mean group ccemg and augmented mean group amg estimators are used to treat residual cross sectional dependence nonstationary residuals and unlikely to hold homogeneous slope assumptions the results obtained verify that the net effects of urbanization on overall energy intensity and electricity intensity are statistically positive with long run elasticities of 0 14 to 0 37 and 0 23 to 0 29 respectively whereas china s urbanization does not significantly increase coal intensity the fact that short run elasticities account for a majority of corresponding long run values indicates that the short run effect that is indirect energy use induced by urban infrastructures is the most significant impact channel of urbanization on energy use in china an energy transition from high pollution coal to clean electricity is also present in china although the fundamental transition to renewable energy is still in its infancy from a regional perspective urbanization exerts asymmetric impacts on provincial energy use so that energy policies associated with urbanization should be province specific the findings also illustrate that for a panel dataset on regional dimension within large and fast growing economies such as china error cross sectional dependence and residual nonstationarity must be tested and properly treated to avoid size distortion and biased estimators

altruists egoists and hooligans in a local interaction model the authors study a population of agents each of whom can be an altruist or an egoist altruism is a strictly dominated strategy agents choose their actions by imitating others who earn high payoffs interactions between agents are local so that each agent affects and is affected by only his neighbors altruists can survive in such a world if they are grouped together so that the benefits of altruism are enjoyed primarily by other altruists who then earn relatively high payoffs and are imitated altruists continue to survive in the presence of mutations that continually introduce egoists into the population copyright 1998 by american economic association

revisiting drivers of energy intensity in china during 1997 2007 a structural decomposition analysis the decline of china s energy intensity slowed since 2000 during 2002 2005 it actually increased reversing the long term trend therefore it is important to identify drivers of the fluctuation of energy intensity we use input output structural decomposition analysis to investigate the contributions of changes in energy mix sectoral energy efficiency production structure final demand structure and final demand category composition to china s energy intensity fluctuation during 1997 2007 we include household energy consumption in the study by closing the input output model with respect to households results show that sectoral energy efficiency improvements contribute the most to the energy intensity decline during 1997 2007 the increase in china s energy intensity during 2002 2007 is instead explained by changes in final demand composition and production structure changes in final demand composition are mainly due to increasing share of exports while changes in production structure mainly arise from the shift of chinese economy to more energy intensive industries changes in energy mix and final demand structure contribute little to china s energy intensity fluctuation from the consumption perspective growing exports of energy intensive products and increasing infrastructure demands explain the majority of energy intensity increase during 2002 2007

measurement of energy efficiency based on economic foundations abstract energy efficiency policy is seen as a very important activity by almost all policy makers in practical energy policy analysis the typical indicator used as a proxy for energy efficiency is energy intensity however this simple indicator is not necessarily an accurate measure given changes in energy intensity are a function of changes in several factors as well as true energy efficiency hence it is difficult to make conclusions for energy policy based upon simple energy intensity measures related to this some published academic papers over the last few years have attempted to use empirical methods to measure the efficient use of energy based on the economic theory of production however these studies do not generally provide a systematic discussion of the theoretical basis nor the possible parametric empirical approaches that are available for estimating the level of energy efficiency the objective of this paper therefore is to sketch out and explain from an economic perspective the theoretical framework as well as the empirical methods for measuring the level of energy efficiency additionally in the second part of the paper some of the empirical studies that have attempted to measure energy efficiency using such an economics approach are summarized and discussed

mean reversion in equilibrium asset prices evidence from the futures term structure we use the term structure of futures prices to test whether investors anticipate mean reversion in spot asset prices the empirical results indicate mean reversion in each market we examine for agricultural commodities and crude oil the magnitude of the estimated mean reversion is large for example point estimates indicate that 44 percent of a typical spot oil price shock is expected to be reversed over the subsequent eight months for metals the degree of mean reversion is substantially less but still statistically significant we detect only weak evidence of mean reversion in financial asset prices in this study we provide evidence of mean reversion in the prices of several real and financial assets rather than examining evidence of ex post reversion using time series of asset prices we use price data from futures contracts with varying delivery horizons to test whether investors expect asset prices to revert this approach offers two advantages first since futures prices are readily available for many markets our procedure can be implemented for many assets including those for which reliable spot price data is elusive second there is little ambiguity as to the source of any mean reversion detected using our method subject only to the maintained assumption that the no arbitrage cost of carry condition holds our test detects mean reversion that is expected to occur in equilibrium but has no power to detect mean reversion resulting from noise or inefficiencies our methodology focuses on relations between price levels and the slope of the futures term structure defined as the change across delivery dates in the futures prices observed on a given trading date an inverse relation between prices and the futures term slope constitutes evidence that investors expect mean reversion in spot prices to illustrate initially assume there are no

energy intensity and investment ownership across chinese provinces abstract the main objective of this paper is to investigate whether openness and investment ownership are key factors in explaining the diffusion of energy saving technologies in china compared with previous studies the novel aspect of this work is the use of a rich dataset at provincial level which allows the high level of regional heterogeneity to be taken into consideration the unbalanced regional growth has been translated into differences in the need for energy resources across the vast territory of china a detailed analysis of these issues may provide new insights into the energy situation in this country the analysis is also disaggregated by type of energy coal electricity and petroleum we estimate the models by panel corrected standard errors developed by beck and katz 1995 over the period 1985 2008 results obtained confirm the hypothesis that both foreign and non state investments play a leading role in the decline of energy intensity across chinese regions whereas there is no evidence of a positive contribution of state investment the findings also reveal differences in energy intensity across regions thus confirming the importance of accounting for the regional dimension when analyzing energy consumption in china

asset pricing under the quadratic class we identify and characterize a class of term structure models where bond yields are quadratic functions of the state vector we label this class the quadratic class and aim to lay a solid theoretical foundation for its future empirical application we consider asset pricing in general and derivative pricing in particular under the quadratic class we provide two general transform methods in pricing a wide variety of fixed income derivatives in closed or semi closed form we further illustrate how the quadratic model and the transform methods can be applied to more general settings i introduction we identify and characterize a class of term structure models where bond yields are quadratic functions of the markov process we label this class the quadratic class and aim to lay a solid theoretical foundation for its future empirical application we identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the quadratic class and consider the general asset pricing problem under the quadratic framework in particular we propose two transform methods to price a wide variety of interest rate derivatives in closed or semi closed form we further illustrate how the pricing methods can be applied to more general settings examples include option pricing for currencies or stocks with quadratic stochastic volatilities our interests in the quadratic class come mainly from concerns on empirical application recent empirical research within the affine framework of duffie and kan 1996 indicates an inherent tension between i delivering good empirical performance in matching salient features of the interest rate data and ii excluding positive probabilities of having negative interest rates for example backus telmer and wu 1999 and dai and singleton 2000 find that incorporating gaussian state variables in the affine framework significantly increases the flexibility for model design and greatly improves its empirical performance in capturing the conditional dynamics of interest rates dai and singleton 2001

homo moralis preference evolution under incomplete information and assortative matching what preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is driven by the resulting payoffs we show that when individuals preferences are their private information a convex combination of selfishness and morality stands out as evolutionarily stable we call individuals with such preferences homo moralis a t one end of the spectrum is homo oeconomicus who acts so as to maximize his or her own payoff at the opposite end is homo kantiensis who does what would be the right thing to do in terms of payoffs if all others would do likewise we show that the stable degree of morality the weight placed on the moral goal is determined by the degree of assortativity in the process whereby individuals are matched to interact

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

efficient equilibrium selection in evolutionary games with random matching abstract this paper investigates the sensitivity of recent evolutionary models of learning to the specification of the matching mechanism we study a literally random matching mechanism combined with a process of strategy adjustment based on the realized average performance of each strategy in the key class of symmetric 2 2 coordination games the pareto efficient equilibrium per se is selected rather than the risk dominant equilibrium as the probability of experimentation or mutation goes to zero furthermore convergence to the equilibrium is relatively fast we extend these results for example to games of common interest journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c73

unspanned stochastic volatility evidence from hedging interest rate derivatives most existing dynamic term structure models assume that interest rate derivatives are redundant securities and can be perfectly hedged using solely bonds we find that the quadratic term structure models have serious difficulties in hedging caps and cap straddles even though they capture bond yields well furthermore at the money straddle hedging errors are highly correlated with cap implied volatilities and can explain a large fraction of hedging errors of all caps and straddles across moneyness and maturities our results strongly suggest the existence of systematic unspanned factors related to stochastic volatility in interest rate derivatives markets

accounting for a shift in term structure behavior with no arbitrage and macro finance models this paper examines a shift in the dynamics of the term structure of interest rates in the u s during the mid 1980s we document this shift using standard interest rate regressions and using dynamic a ne no arbitrage models estimated for the pre and post shift subsamples the term structure shift largely appears to be the result of changes in the pricing of risk associated with a level factor using a macro nance model we suggest a link between this shift in term structure behavior and changes in the dynamics and risk pricing of the federal reserve s in ation target as perceived by investors