scenario based forecast for the electricity demand in qatar and the role of energy efficiency improvements abstract we model the electricity consumption in the market segment that compose the qatari electricity market we link electricity consumption to gdp growth and population growth building on the estimated model we develop long range forecasts of electricity consumption from 2017 to 2030 over different scenarios for the economic drivers in addition we proxy for electricity efficiency improvements by reducing the long run elasticity of electricity consumption to gdp and population we show that electricity efficiency has a crucial role in controlling the future development of electricity consumption energy policies should consider this aspect and support both electricity efficiency improvement programs as well as a price reform

public schooling for young children and maternal labor supply as policy makers have sought to reduce the welfare rolls by increasing labor supply among single mothers much attention has been given to the possible role of expanded child care subsidies including direct provision of public preschool at the same time public interest in child care subsidies for two parent households is high for example former vice president gore not long ago proposed to make high quality pre school fully available to every family for every child in every community in america albert gore 1999 in this paper i use 1980 census data to estimate the effect of public school enrollment for a woman s five year old on measures of labor supply and public assistance receipt this approach has two advantages first i am able to estimate the effect of a large implicit child care subsidy 1 second because public kindergarten is universally available to all age eligible children where it is provided selection problems related to means testing do not arise a difficulty with public school enrollment arises because parents may choose to hold their children back a year or enroll them in private school i deal with this issue by using five yearold s quarter of birth qob variables as instruments for public school enrollment status this strategy works because parents ability to enroll a child in public kindergarten in the academic year when the child turns five typically depends on the calendar date of the child s birth 2 in most states children born in the second quarter april 1 june 30 of 1974 will have been eligible to start kindergarten in the fall of 1979 while children born in the first quarter january 1march 31 of 1975 generally will not eligibility for children born between july 1 and december 31 1974 depends on the rules where they live 3

the new electricity market of singapore regulatory framework market power and competition abstract this study examines whether the new electricity market of singapore nems is functioning at a workable level of competition the generation market of the nems appears highly concentrated by a four firm concentration ratio or the herfindahl hirschman index however other measures of market power present that the nems is working at close to a competitive market first there seems to be a number of effective competitors in the market second supply margin assessment and residual supply index support that the market is competitive though there are some possibilities in which the largest generator or a few large generators jointly could still have market power third the lerner index of the nems shows that the generation market is fairly competitive and the lerner index adjusted with an industry level price elasticity of demand implies that there has not been much exercise of market power finally vesting contracts a contractual obligation of a specified quantity of electricity supply to the market have appeared to be a strong and effective tool to mitigate market power in the nems the vesting contracts are considered the force behind the lowering in the average uniform singapore electricity price and the lerner index in 2004

measuring the value of life saving from consumer reactions to new information abstract past studies have relied on cross section patterns of risky behavior to generate estimates of the value of life saving this approach is colored by several problems that affect the reliability of the results in potentially serious ways it is difficult to separate the risk components from the dis utility attributes of work or consumption to avoid selectivity biases and to disentangle user costs e g wearing a face mask from the risk premium paid for accepting risk to circumvent some of these difficulties this paper uses a different approach one which exploits the information about the value of risk reduction that is provided by changing consumption patterns over time brought about by changes in available information about risks this approach makes it possible to more reliably estimate the pure effects of risks on behavior and to generate unbiased distributions of the value of life saving the case of cigarette consumption over time provides an ideal setting to illustrate this methodology

co2 emissions energy consumption and economic growth in bric countries abstract this paper examines dynamic causal relationships between pollutant emissions energy consumption and output for a panel of bric countries over the period 1971 2005 except for russia 1990 2005 in long run equilibrium energy consumption has a positive and statistically significant impact on emissions while real output exhibits the inverted u shape pattern associated with the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis with the threshold income of 5 393 in logarithms in the short term changes in emissions are driven mostly by the error correction term and short term energy consumption shocks as opposed to short term output shocks for each country short term deviations from the long term equilibrium take from 0 770 years russia to 5 848 years brazil to correct the panel causality results indicate there are energy consumption emissions bidirectional strong causality and energy consumption output bidirectional long run causality along with unidirectional both strong and short run causalities from emissions and energy consumption respectively to output overall in order to reduce emissions and not to adversely affect economic growth increasing both energy supply investment and energy efficiency and stepping up energy conservation policies to reduce unnecessary wastage of energy can be initiated for energy dependent bric countries

the theory of domestic content protection and content preference this paper investigates the resource reallocation effected by content protection and content preference schemes under alternative assumptions regarding the definition of domestic content the number of intermediate goods and the market structure of the domestic intermediate good industry content protection is shown to be equivalent to a combination of more familiar commercial policies however the extent of application of these policies is determined endogenously by parameters of the production functions for intermediate and final goods a number of anomalous and undesirable outcomes that may result from content protection and content preference are discussed

does money matter in canada evidence from a vector error correction model this paper investigates the statistical properties of a set of canadian and u s economic time series and uses the data to address the question of the importance of monetary variables in canadian business cycle fluctuations the individual time series are found to contain unit roots but the data reveal the existence of several economically meaningful cointegrating vectors a multivariate vector error correction model is estimated and canadian velocity which appears as an error correction term is significant in the canadian output equation this supports the contention that monetary variables have predictive content for real output copyright 1989 by mit press

energy consumption real income and temporal causality results from a multi country study based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques abstract unlike previous studies on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth this paper illustrates how the finding of cointegration i e long term equilibrium relationship between these variables may be used in testing granger causality based on the most recent johansen s multivariate cointegration tests preceded by various unit root or non stationarity tests we test for cointegration between total energy consumption and real income of six asian economies india pakistan malaysia singapore indonesia and the philippines non rejection of cointegration between variables rules out granger non causality and imples at least one way of granger causality either unidirectional or bidirectionial secondly by using a dynamic vector error correction model we then analyse the direction of granger causation and hence the within sample granger exogeneity or endogeneity of each of the variables thirdly the relative strength of the causality is gauged through the dynamic variance decomposition technique by decomposing the total impact of an unanticipated shock to each of the variables beyond the sample period into proportions attributable to shocks in the other variables including its own in the bivariate system results based on these tools of methodology indicate that while all pair wise relationships shared common univariate integrational properties only relationships for three countries india pakistan and indonesia were cointegrated for these countries temporal causality results were mixed with unidirectional causality from energy to income for india exactly the reverse for indonesia and mutual causality for pakistan the vdcs were not inconsistent with these results and provided us with an additional insight as to the relatively more dominant direction of causation in pakistan simple bivariate vector autoregressive models for the three non cointegrated systems did not indicate any direction of causality significantly in either direction

content protection and transnational monopoly abstract the paper investigates how domestic content requirements imposed on a vertically integrated monopolist affect production and welfare three content schemes are investigated it is shown that a scheme can be formulated which increases the range of intermediate goods as well as the quantity of final good produced this occurs even though the firms production costs are invariably increased by content protection the scheme can also increase domestic welfare

content protection and oligopolistic interactions in oligopolistic situations content protection can have unexpected effects as it changes the nature of interactions between input suppliers with a duopoly it does so in a manner that makes the foreign firm wish to match price increases and decreases of the domestic firm domestic input suppliers can therefore lose from such policies even when set at free trade levels the relation between input demands the form of protection and the degree of substitution between inputs is shown to define the effects of content protection and to provide the basis for understanding who might lobby for protection in different environments

the canadian u s exchange rate evidence from a vector autoregression a vector autoregression is used to elicit the empirical facts co ncerning exchange rate movements the author finds 1 the exchange rate relati ve price levels and trade balances are closely related 2 most other lagged v ariables have no perceptible influence in theexchange rate equation 3 exchan ge rate innovations are negativelycorrelated with innovations in output and pri ces positively with innovations in the balance of trade and almost not at all with innovations in money and 4 impulses in money trade balances and govern ment spending are followed by opposing future movements in theexchange rate and the price level taken as a whole the evidence suggests that exchange rate cha nges may be associated with real rather than monetary shocks copyright 1986 by mit press

lag length selection and tests of granger causality between money and income one of the most widely accepred relationships in macroeconomics is the positive relationship between the rate of growth of the money supply and the rate of growth of income a diversity of opinion arises however with the attempt to identify a causal relationship between these variables while friedman and schwartz 1963 initiated the empirical investigation of money income causality sims 1972 made the most significant contribution to this literature with a practical application of the criterion developed by granger 1969 for identifying a causal relationship since the appearance of sims s approach and an alternative one advanced by sargent 1976 many researchers have applied these techniques to the investigation of the causal relationship between money and income l with two exceptions hsiao 1981 and mcmillin and fackler 1984 these researchers have arbitrarily chosen the lengths of their distributed lags the purpose of this paper is to test for granger causality between money and income this paper differs from previous work in that considerably more attention is focused on the effect of the lag specification on the test results in particular we investigate the extent to which rules of thumb arbitrary lag specifications and

energy consumption prices and economic growth in three ssa countries a comparative study in this paper we examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in three sub saharan african countries namely south africa kenya and congo drc we incorporate prices as an intermittent variable in a bivariate setting between energy consumption and economic growth thereby creating a simple trivariate framework using the ardl bounds testing procedure we find that the causality between energy consumption and economic growth varies significantly across the countries under study the results show that for south africa and kenya there is a unidirectional causal flow from energy consumption to economic growth however for congo drc it is economic growth that drives energy consumption these findings have important policy implications insofar as energy conservation policies are concerned in the case of congo drc for example the implementation of energy conservation policies may not significantly affect economic growth because the country s economy is not entirely energy dependent however for south africa and kenya there is a need for more energy supply augmentations in order to cope with the long run energy demand in the short run however the two countries should explore more efficient and cost effective sources of energy in order to address the energy dependency problem

testing hypotheses about firm behavior in the cigarette industry data on the effects of excise taxes are used to investigate the level of competition in the cigarette industry a lower bound on the numbers equivalent of firms in the context of the conjectural variations model is derived and estimated results point to at least a moderately high level of competition and in particular allow for the rejection of the perfect cartel model this paper relies on comparative statics results and hence circumvents recent criticisms of a study of monopoly behavior in the cigarette industry

measurement of monopoly behavior an application to the cigarette industry a simple scheme is proposed to measure monopoly pricing behavior the coefficient of the tax rate term in a price equation identifies the ratio of price to marginal cost no direct measurement of costs is required so a major problem for other empirical studies of monopoly is avoided empirical results for cross section time series data support rejection of atomistic competition but also provide evidence against the operation of an effective cartel in the cigarette industry the model represents an alternative interpretation of related results in a recent paper by barzel application of the methodology to other markets is feasible

content protection and tariffs under monopoly and competition abstract this paper compares the relative efficiency of local content schemes and tariffs as alternative means of achieving certain non economic distributional objectives the efficiency comparison is made under the alternative assumptions that an intermediate good component is produced a competitively and b by a single firm the paper shows how the ranking of tariffs and content schemes i is sensitive to these assumptions and ii depends on the local content ratio and the elasticity of demand for components the possible implications of vertical integration in the production process and rent revenue seeking behaviour are also considered insofar as they affect the ranking of policies

effect of lengthening the school day on mother s labor supply this article examines how a policy oriented toward a specific group within the population can have collateral effects on the economic decisions of other groups in 1996 the chilean government approved the extension of the school day from half to full day school this article exploits the quasi experimental nature of the reform s implementation by time municipality and age targeting of the program in order to examine how the maternal labor supply is affected by the childcare subsidy implicit in the lengthening of the school day using data from the chilean socioeconomic household survey and administrative data from the ministry of education for 1990 2011 the authors estimate that on average there is a 5 percent increase in labor participation and employment rates of single mothers with eligible children between 8 and 13 years old with no younger children who are the group that would be mainly affected by the policy no significant labor supply responses are detected among others mothers with eligible children

trade and efficiency effects of domestic content protection the australian tobacco and cigarette industries this paper provides an empirical investigation into the international trade and domestic market efficiency effects of physical domestic content requirements in the australian tobacco leaf growing and cigarette manufacturing industries the authors empirical evidence suggests that the content requirement has distorted trade by restricting leaf imports nevertheless the data are also consistent with the efficient contract hypothesis the mix of domestic to imported leaf used in cigarette manufacturing depends on domestic leaf production costs and on world leaf prices but not on the negotiated domestic leaf price copyright 1993 by mit press

the effect of pre primary education on primary school performance although the theoretical case for universal pre primary education is strong the empirical foundation is weak in this paper we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre primary education on subsequent primary school performance in argentina we estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores we also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student s self control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention effort class participation and discipline

atheoretical macroeconometrics a critique abstract the spurious nature of the restrictions used to identify many macroeconometric models has led some researchers to advocate a style of econometric inquiry that is less dependent on prior theoretical restrictions of the sort that were central to the approach of the cowles commission this development which we call atheoretical macroeconometrics is summarized and evaluated in the current paper it is contrasted with an updated version of the cowles commission approach we conclude that while some of the exercises of atheoretical macroeconometrics are valid those that have attracted the most attention and appear the most innovative exogeneity testing impulse response analysis and policy analysis using estimated vector autoregressions are based on incorrect analysis

the economic consequences of debilitating illness the case of multiple sclerosis the economic consequences of debilitating illness are defined and then estimated for one such illness multiple sclerosis economic losses are defined as the consumption losses to the affected household because of illness these losses are measured as the change in earnings of all family members plus the increase in gross not out of pocket medical costs earnings models are specified and estimated and gross medical costs calculated for multiple sclerosis the average annual loss to the multiple sclerosis household is 5 336 per year in 1976 dollars the estimated aggregate decline in consumption for the year 1976 was 0 656 billion lifetime costs discounting by 0 06 total 207 200 per multiple sclerosis household and 25 50 billion for society as a whole for the current 1976 pool of multiple sclerosis patients and 30 45 billion for all future multiple sclerosis patients copyright 1987 by mit press

energy and economic growth in the usa a multivariate approach abstract this paper examines the causal relationship between gdp and energy use for the period 1947 90 in the usa the relationship between energy use and economic growth has been examined by both biophysical and neoclassical economists in particular several studies have tested for the presence of a causal relationship in the granger sense between energy use and economic growth however these tests do not allow a direct test of the relative explanatory powers of the neoclassical and biophysical models a multivariate adaptation of the test vector autoregression var does allow such a test a var of gdp energy use capital stock and employment is estimated and granger tests for causal relationships between the variables are carried out although there is no evidence that gross energy use granger causes gdp a measure of final energy use adjusted for changing fuel composition does granger cause gdp

energy growth conundrum in energy exporting and importing countries evidence from heterogeneous panel methods robust to cross sectional dependence abstract this article uses the panel methods for energy exporting and importing countries that discuss the heterogeneity and cross sectional dependence in investigating the linkages between energy consumption and economic growth the findings of the study suggest that the energy consumption is an important input not only in the energy importing but also in energy exporting countries furthermore the results of the present paper suggest that the policy options should be different for the different countries in the back drop of heterogeneous slope coefficients

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

the relationship between energy and gnp further results this paper reexamines the casuality between gnp and energy consumption by using updated us data for the period 1947 1979 as a secondary contribution we investigate the causal relationship between energy consumption and employment applying sims technique we find no causal relationship between gnp and energy consumption we find further that there is a slight unidirectional flow running from employment to energy consumption economic interpretations of the empirical results are also presented

giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles this brief summarizes the giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles in uruguay for the period 1995 the author study the effect of pre primary education on children s subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the uruguayan household survey ech that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre primary places using a within household estimator we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that get magnified as children grow up by age 15 treated children have accumulated 0 8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their untreated siblings instrumental variables estimates that attempt to control for non random selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results pre primary education appears as a successful and cost effective policy to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences in low income countries

differentiated products and supply controls in the analysis of agricultural policy reform the case of tobacco abstract with a multi market model of the u s tobacco and cigarette industries we analyze the impact of a reduction in the assistance to u s tobacco producers by relaxing production quotas with nonbinding price support and by lowering tariffs on tobacco imports the results show the importance of incorporating differentiated product and supply control assumptions into agricultural policy analysis

causal relationship between energy consumption and gdp growth revisited a dynamic panel data approach abstract this paper uses the panel data of energy consumption and gdp for 82 countries from 1972 to 2002 based on the income levels defined by the world bank the data are divided into four categories low income group lower middle income group upper middle income group and high income group we employ the gmm sys approach for the estimation of the panel var model in each of the four groups afterwards the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is tested and ascertained we discover a in the low income group there exists no causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth b in the middle income groups lower and upper middle income groups economic growth leads energy consumption positively c in the high income group countries economic growth leads energy consumption negatively after further in depth analysis of energy related data the results indicate that in the high income group there is a great environmental improvement as a result of more efficient energy use and reduction in the release of co2 however in the upper middle income group countries after the energy crisis the energy efficiency declines and the release of co2 rises since there is no evidence indicating that energy consumption leads economic growth in any of the four income groups a stronger energy conservation policy should be pursued in all countries

great expectations and hard times the argentine convertibility plan this paper studies the process that led to the argentine crisis the analysis concentrates on the sequence of public and private decisions together with the varying perceptions and policy incentives that motivated them in the 1990s argentina searched for a new growth trend during much of the period the behavior of agents seemed to be based on the anticipation that current and future incomes could sustain a value of domestic spending much higher than in the past in both real and dollar terms the government was motivated to reinforce those expectations for signaling and political economy reasons the monetary regime not only provided a very visible nominal anchor but also operated as a basic framework for financial contracts mostly denominated in dollars dollar contracting implicitly presumed that the dollar value of incomes would support the servicing of debts despite precautionary actions on the part of the government and the private sector over time an increasing mass of decisions and contracts came to rely on the sustainability of the real exchange rate in the late 1990s exports stopped rising and the foreign supply of credit tightened the economy contracted in the face of these constraints and the solvency of the government was called into question the financial system was vulnerable both in the event of devaluation and in the event of a large deflation cum adjustment convertibility proved to have very large exit costs as was implicit in its design and management

energy consumption economic growth and prices a reassessment using panel vecm for developed and developing countries this paper reinvestigates the energy consumption gdp growth nexus in a panel error correction model using data on 20 net energy importers and exporters from 1971 to 2002 among the energy exporters there was bidirectional causality between economic growth and energy consumption in the developed countries in both the short and long run while in the developing countries energy consumption stimulates growth only in the short run the former result is also found for energy importers and the latter result exists only for the developed countries within this category in addition compared to the developing countries the developed countries elasticity response in terms of economic growth from an increase in energy consumption is larger although its income elasticity is lower and less than unitary lastly the implications for energy policy calling for a more holistic approach are discussed c 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the effects of excise taxes and regulations on cigarette smoking abstract we estimate a generalized linear model to examine adult and teenage cigarette demand our analysis focuses on the extent to which exice taxes and regulations restricting smoking in public places affect cigarette consumption the adult results indicate that the price elasticity of demand is unstable over time ranging from 0 06 in 1970 to 0 23 in 1985 these estimates are lower than most found in previous studies the teenage price elasticity does not differ statistically from the estimates for adults additionally regulations restricting smoking in public places have a significant effect on both adult and teenage cigarette demand

cigarette taxes and smoking restrictions impacts and policy implications the effects of recently proposed increases in cigarette excise taxes and smoking restrictions on tobacco prices and quantities quota lease rates and revenues to tobacco producing areas are analyzed the price elasticity of demand for u s cigarette exports is estimated proportionally similar increases in smoking restrictions or cigarette taxes are shown to have effects of similar magnitude on cigarette consumption a policy of reducing price instead of the quantity produced is found to minimize the impact of increased taxes and smoking restrictions on revenues to tobacco producing areas

economic growth and energy consumption revisited evidence from linear and nonlinear granger causality the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is considered as an imperative issue in energy economics previous studies have ignored the nonlinear behavior which could be caused by structural breaks in this study both linear and nonlinear granger causality tests are applied to examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for a sample of asian newly industrialized countries as well as the u s this study finds evidence supporting a neutrality hypothesis for the united states thailand and south korea however empirical evidence on philippines and singapore reveals a unidirectional causality running from economic growth to energy consumption while energy consumption may have affected economic growth for taiwan hong kong malaysia and indonesia policy implications are also discussed

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

effects of an increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes the economic impact of a cigarette tax increase on the cigarette and tobacco industries depends on market forces and on the u s tobacco program this study uses a log linear equilibrium displacement model parameter estimates from prior studies and recent data to indicate quantitative effects international trade implies that the effect of the tax increase on the price of domestic tobacco will be small even in the case of fixed tobacco quotas however the effects on tobacco producers revenue quota lease rates and producer economic rents can be significant depending on the response of u s tobacco policy to a tax change

adjustment costs and dynamic factor demands for u s cigarette manufacturing abstract following the approach of berndt fuss and waverman a dynamic model for u s cigarette manufacturing is developed and factor demands estimated tobacco and capital stocks are treated as quasi fixed inputs the results indicate that there are significant adjustment costs associated with adjusting tobacco stocks but not with adjusting the capital stock short run intermediate run and long run output constant elasticities are estimated for inputs in cigarette production demand for u s tobacco by u s cigarette manufacturers is found be more inelastic than shown by previous studies using static models cigarettes produced for export appear to differ in their marginal cost of production from cigarettes produced for the sale in the u s market

born on the first of july an un natural experiment in birth timing abstract it is well understood that government policies can distort behavior but what is less often recognized is that the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions we study one such introduction effect using evidence from a unique policy change in australia in 2004 the australian government announced that children born on or after july 1 2004 would receive a 3000 baby bonus although the policy was only announced seven weeks before its introduction parents appear to have behaved strategically in order to receive the benefit with the number of births dipping sharply before the policy commenced on july 1 2004 more australian children were born than on any other single date in the past thirty years we estimate that over 1000 births were moved so as to ensure that their parents were eligible for the baby bonus with about one quarter being moved by more than one week most of the effect was due to changes in the timing of induction and cesarean section procedures we find evidence to suggest that babies who were shifted into the eligibility period were more likely to be of high birth weight two years later on july 1 2006 the baby bonus was increased and we find that this again caused births to be moved from june to july these birth timing events represent an opportunity for health researchers to study the impact of planned birthdays and hospital management issues

efficient equitable and sustainable energy policy in a small open economy concepts and assessments abstract this study aims to develop three broadly defined concepts of designing and evaluating energy policy of a small open economy namely efficiency equity and sustainability which are applied to singapore by analysing the historical energy and economic data and examining energy policies and programs implemented this study finds that 1 energy intensity improves over time and three strategies employed to improve energy efficiency tariffs deregulation and setting energy standards are found to have some positive effects 2 a utility rebate programme is implemented and revised continuously to achieve equity in energy consumption across singapore households 3 by the weak concept of sustainability singapore is considered marginally sustainable institutional technological and market based approaches are being implemented to increase energy efficiency improve energy equity and secure sustainability

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

public child care and mothers labor supply evidence from two quasi experiments abstract public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life yet empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive we exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in germany which was contingent on day of birth cut off dates and resulted in a marked increase in kindergarten attendance of three year olds in the following years instrumental variable and difference in differences estimations on two individual level data sets yield positive effects of public child care on maternal employment a set of placebo treatment tests corroborate the validity of our identification strategies

social cost of the tobacco program redux economists do not often get the chance to make long run checks on their own predictions fifteen years ago the senior author johnson analyzed the welfare effects of the flue cured tobacco program as it then was operating the somewhat surprising conclusion of that study was that the program s social cost was essentially zero the fact that the united states faced a less than perfectly elastic foreign demand function produced gains to offset the usual welfare triangle loss and the rather large efficiency loss from restricting an input land rather than output at that time the author made several long run predictions a the elasticity of foreign demand would increase as foreign output increased b institutional rigidities that fostered the u s monopoly position would erode c inefficiency losses would increase all of these would put financial and political pressure on the support

substitutability for farm commodities the demand for u s tobacco in cigarette manufacturing a generalized leontief cost function and system of factor demand functions for the domestic cigarette industry is estimated we strongly rejected fixed proportions both imported tobacco and other inputs are substitutes for u s tobacco the estimated output constant price elasticities are combined with the output effect calculated from cost shares and time series estimates of the cigarette demand elasticity and an export demand elasticity from previous studies to consider the effects of reducing the u s price support competition from foreign tobacco implies that a u s price decline would increase significantly the quantity of u s tobacco demanded

childcare effects on maternal employment evidence from chile abstract using a randomized experiment this study examines whether offering afterschool care for children aged between 6 and 13 has an impact on labor market outcomes for women in chile the results show that program participation increases employment by 5 and labor force participation by 7 while the intervention also generates substantial childcare substitution the results also suggest that the provision of afterschool care for older children triggers the use of free daycare for young ineligible children

energy income causality in oecd countries revisited the key role of capital stock abstract this paper applies a recent advance in panel analysis to estimate the panel cointegration and panel vector error correction models for a set of 22 oecd countries using annual data covering the period 1960 2001 we investigate the relationship between energy consumption and income using an aggregate production function and controlling for the capital stock as well as by exploring the dynamic directions of the causality among these three variables we firstly obtain solid and convincing evidence of a fairly strong long run equilibrium relationship among them secondly it is found that the capital stock is much more productive than energy consumption third it is observed that neglecting the impact of the capital stock on income tends to overestimate the effect of energy consumption finally the panel causality test shows bi directional causal linkages exist among energy consumption the capital stock and economic growth overall the findings reveal that the capital stock plays a critical role in realizing the dynamic relationship between energy and income

economic rents under supply controls with marketable quota we analyze the distribution of economic rent between owners and renters of marketable production quotas and examine how this distribution changes with increases in marginal costs while quota owners unambiguously lose because of a marginal cost increase quota renters may gain depending on whether the marginal cost shift is divergent parallel or convergent using output and input prices county production quotas and quota rental rate data we estimate a marginal cost function for north carolina flue cured tobacco to demonstrate how wage increases affect owners and renters welfare

cointegration and dynamic time series models abstract this paper provides a survey of some of the recent developments in the field of econometric modelling with cointegrated time series in particular we describe the testing and estimation procedures which have become increasingly popular in the recent applied literature in addition to the two stage procedure proposed by engle and granger we consider extensions to the modelling of dynamic models with cointegrated variables such as the estimation of models with multiple cointegration vectors simultaneous systems models with seasonally integrated and cointegrated variables furthermore we illustrate the practical application of the techniques describes in the paper by means of a tutorial data set

declining u s tobacco exports to australia a derived demand approach to competitiveness the loss of competitiveness of u s tobacco leaf exports to australia is empirically investigated using industry level time series market data tobacco relative prices market structure scale australian market distortions and changing characteristics of cigarettes are accounted for in the investigation a decomposition analysis reveals that a switch to lighter cigarettes and changes in the australian domestic tobacco content policy are the major contributors to the decline of u s tobacco exports tobacco price differences between the u s and its competitors alone cannot explain the loss of competitiveness of u s tobacco in australian cigarette manufacturing

impact of domestic content requirement on the us tobacco and cigarette industries abstract using a log linear equilibrium displacement model we quantify the impact of the recent domestic tobacco content requirement on us cigarette manufacturing we investigate effects on us growers and manufacturers and competing tobacco imports the policy increased domestic use of us grown tobacco but induced a small negative output effect tobacco imports decreased substantially the paper also discusses the political economic incentives for us manufacturers to comply with such policies the political cooperation between us growers and manufacturers decreases the opposition of the latter to protectionist policies championed by the former

domestic content and compensatory export requirements protection of the motorvehicle industry in the philippines the motor vehicle industry in the philippines is protected by a virtual embargo on the importation of new vehicles but operates under the burden of domestic content and compensatory export requirements that protect philippine producers of automotive components this article develops a model to assess the net impact of this complicated protective regime estimates indicate substantial benefits to the assembly and components industries and losses to vehicle purchasers reform of the system to eliminate the embargo as well as the domestic content and compensatory export restraints at current tariff rates would benefit vehicle purchasers but would increase the effective rate of protection to assembly operations by decreasing prices of components reform measures to eliminate the domestic content and compensatory export requirements should be accompanied by simultaneous reductions in tariffs on assembled vehicles

energy human capital and economic growth in asia pacific countries evidence from a panel cointegration and causality analysis this paper examines the cointegration and causal relationship between energy consumption and economic development in 16 asia pacific countries over the period 1970 2011 using the augmented production function which considers not only physical capital and labor but also human capital this is likely among the first of the energy growth nexus literature to include human capital in the multivariate framework using recently developed panel unit root test and cointegration test that allow for cross sectional dependence this paper finds a long run cointegrating relationship between these variables continuously updated fully modified cup fm estimates are subsequently compared with panel heterogeneous fully modified ordinary least squares fmols results to confirm the importance of accounting for interdependence across countries the bootstrap panel granger causality test results find economic growth granger cause energy use in the region but the relationship varies for individual countries

money growth volatility and the macroeconomy this study analyzes the effects of variability in money growth on the macroeconomy for the period 1961 1 1984 4 within the context of a vector autoregressive model that contains variables typically included in a small macro model variance decompositions and historical decompositions are used to assess the impact of money growth variability the variance decompositions suggest substantial effects of money growth variability on the long term interest rate output and the price level historical decompositions for 1979 4 1984 4 suggest substantial effects of money growth variability on the interest rate and output but smaller effects on the price level are found copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

preschool and maternal labour market outcomes evidence from a regression discontinuity design in developing countries employment rates for mothers with young children are relatively low this study analyzes how maternal labor market outcomes in argentina are affected by the preschool attendance of their children using pooled household surveys we show that 4 year olds with birthdays on june 30 have sharply higher probabilities of preschool attendance than children born on july 1 given enrollment age rules regression discontinuity estimates using this variation suggest that preschool attendance of the youngest child in the household increases the probability of full time employment and weekly hours of maternal employment we find no effect of preschool attendance on maternal labor outcomes for children who are not the youngest in the household

the economics of administering import quotas with licenses on demand in agriculture a nash equilibrium is determined for licenses on demand import quotas where licenses are allocated on a prorated basis inefficiency is incurred because licenses are allocated to high cost firms the ability to overbid exacerbates the inefficiency due to proportionate reductions in licenses quota expansion causes high cost firms to decrease their bids but reduces inefficiency the entry of a new firm causes all incumbent firms to increase bids or bid the quota not penalizing firms for the non use of licenses increases inefficiency the inefficiency impacts of tariff reductions license fees limits per firm and imperfect information are also addressed

early kindergarten maternal labor supply and children s outcomes evidence from italy abstract we analyze a reform that introduced early access to subsidized childcare for 2 year old children in italy exploring the effects on several measures of maternal labor supply and on children s cognitive outcomes our identification strategy exploits discontinuities in the eligibility rules and the staggered implementation of the reform we find that the policy increased mothers participation in the labor market and lowered the reservation wage of the unemployed thus increasing their likelihood of finding a job at the same time the newly introduced childcare arrangement did not affect children s cognitive development irrespective of their family background