forecasting day ahead electricity load using a multiple equation time series approach the quality of short term electricity load forecasting is crucial to the operation and trading activities of market participants in an electricity market in this paper it is shown that a multiple equation time series model which is estimated by repeated application of ordinary least squares has the potential to match or even outperform more complex nonlinear and nonparametric forecasting models the key ingredient of the success of this simple model is the effective use of lagged information by allowing for interaction between seasonal patterns and intra day dependencies although the model is built using data for the queensland region of australia the method is completely generic and applicable to any load forecasting problem the model s forecasting ability is assessed by means of the mean absolute percentage error mape for day ahead forecast the mape returned by the model over a period of 11 years is an impressive 1 36 the forecast accuracy of the model is compared with a number of benchmarks including three popular alternatives and one industrial standard reported by the australia energy market operator aemo the performance of the model developed in this paper is superior to all benchmarks and outperforms the aemo forecasts by about a third in terms of the mape criterion

the effect of unions on the structure of wages a longitudinal analysis this paper studies the effects of unions on the structure of wages using an estimation technique that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status and potential correlations between union status and unobserved productivity the econometric model is estimated separately for five skill groups using a large panel data set formed from the u s current population survey the results suggest that unions raise wages more for workers with lower levels of observed skills in addition the patterns of selection bias differ by skill group among workers with lower levels of observed skill unionized workers are positively selected whereas union workers are negatively selected from among those with higher levels of observed skill despite a large and sophisticated literature there is still substantial disagreement over the extent to which differences in the structure of wages between union and nonunion workers represent an effect of trade unions rather than a consequence of the nonrandom selection of unionized workers over the past decade several alternative approaches have been developed to control for unobserved heterogeneity between union and nonunion workers 2 one method that has been successfully applied in other areas of applied microeconometrics is the use of longitudinal data to measure the wage gains or losses of workers who change union status unfortunately longitudinal estimators are highly sensitive to measurement error even a small fraction of misclassified union status changes can lead to significant biases if the true rate of mobility between union and nonunion jobs is low this sensitivity led lewis 1986 to essentially dismiss the longitudinal evidence in his landmark survey of union wage effects in this paper i present some new evidence on the union wage effect based on a longitudinal estimator that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status the estimator uses external information on union status misclassification rates along with the reduced form coefficients from a multi variate regression of wages on the observed sequence of union status indicators to isolate the causal effect of unions from any selection biases introduced by a correlation between union status and the permanent component of unobserved wage heterogeneity recognizing that unions may raise wages more or less for

short term load forecasting based on a semi parametric additive model short term load forecasting is an essential instrument in power system planning operation and control many operating decisions are based on load forecasts such as dispatch scheduling of generating capacity reliability analysis and maintenance planning for the generators overestimation of electricity demand will cause a conservative operation which leads to the start up of too many units or excessive energy purchase thereby supplying an unnecessary level of reserve on the other hand underestimation may result in a risky operation with insufficient preparation of spinning reserve causing the system to operate in a vulnerable region to the disturbance in this paper semi parametric additive models are proposed to estimate the relationships between demand and the driver variables specifically the inputs for these models are calendar variables lagged actual demand observations and historical and forecast temperature traces for one or more sites in the target power system in addition to point forecasts prediction intervals are also estimated using a modified bootstrap method suitable for the complex seasonality seen in electricity demand data the proposed methodology has been used to forecast the half hourly electricity demand for up to seven days ahead for power systems in the australian national electricity market the performance of the methodology is validated via out of sample experiments with real data from the power system as well as through on site implementation by the system operator

the impact of renewable energy forecast errors on imbalance volumes and electricity spot prices abstract this paper contributes to the general consideration of whether a policy of incentivising system operators to improve the quality and market availability of forecasts for renewable energy outputs would be beneficial using data from the german electricity market we investigate the effect of wind and solar energy forecasts errors on imbalance volumes and subsequent spot electricity prices we use ordinary least squares regression quantile regression and autoregressive moving averages to identify these relationships using variables that have a quarter hourly data granularity the results show that higher wind and solar forecast errors increase the absolute values of imbalance volumes and that these can pass through into higher spot prices we find that wind forecast errors in germany impact spot prices more than solar forecasting errors policy incentives to improve the accuracy and availability of renewable energy forecasts by the system operators should therefore be encouraged

forecasting quantiles of day ahead electricity load accurate load forecasting plays a crucial role in the decision making process of many market participants but probably is most important for the dispatch planning of an electricity market operator despite the competitive forecast accuracy achieved by existing point forecast models point forecasts can only provide limited information relating to the expected level of future load to account for the uncertainty of future load and provide a more complete picture of the future load conditions for dispatch planning purposes quantile forecasts can be useful this paper proposes a computationally efficient approach to forecasting the quantiles of electricity load which is then applied to forecasting in the national electricity market of australia the proposed model performs competitively in comparison with one industry standard and two recently proposed quantile forecasting methods one of the main advantages of the proposed approach is the ease with the number of covariates can be expanded this is a particularly important feature in the context of load forecasting where large numbers of important drivers are usually necessary to provide accurate load forecasts

probabilistic forecasts of the magnitude and timing of peak electricity demand adequate capacity planning requires accurate forecasts of the future magnitude and timing of peak electricity demand electricity demand is affected by the day of the week seasonal variations holiday periods feast days and the weather a model that provides probabilistic forecasts of both magnitude and timing for lead times of one year is presented this model is capable of capturing the main sources of variation in demand and uses simulated weather time series including temperature wind speed and luminosity for producing probabilistic forecasts of future peak demand having access to such probabilistic forecasts provides a means of assessing the uncertainty in the forecasts and can lead to improved decision making and better risk management

the causal effect of faculty unions on institutional decision making the author s goal in this article is to estimate the causal effect of unionization on institutional decision making using a national survey of presidents and faculty senate leaders to measure the level of shared governance at 341 public universities in 15 different areas to handle the endogeneity of faculty unionization an index of state employee collective bargaining rights is used as an instrument for unionization findings indicate that unionization greatly increases faculty influence over institutional decision making both in compensation and in areas outside of compensation abstract from author

administrative procedures and political control of the bureaucracy administrative procedure the notice and comment process in the context of medicare physician payment reform a fundamental restructuring of the way in which the medicare program pays for physician services i find contrary to the deck stacking thesis that the health care financing administration hcfa was more responsive to physicians expecting reductions in fees than to the intended beneficiaries of the new payment system although these results do not necessarily imply that congress exerted little influence over hcfa decision making they suggest that certain administrative procedures do not operate as instruments of political control d elegation of policymaking authority from elected officials to unelected bureaucrats is a fact of contemporary american politics it does not however necessarily imply abdication as officeholders possess instruments that potentially limit bureaucratic discretion presidents for example fill many high level agency posts with appointees whose preferences closely resemble those of the chief executive members of congress regularly conduct oversight hearings which are proceedings designed to monitor and if necessary redirect agency activity the presence

negative returns to seniority new evidence in academic markets recent research has suggested that the long observed negative association between seniority and pay among college faculty largely reflects below average research productivity of senior faculty a possibility that most earlier studies did not examine overlooked in both waves of studies however is match quality because the higher quality of the faculty institutional match implied by higher seniority should all else equal result in higher salaries failure to account for match quality inflates the estimated returns to seniority indeed that positive bias the authors find is roughly equal in magnitude to the negative bias caused by failure to account for research quantity and quality when they account for both match quality and faculty research productivity in an analysis of data on economics faculty at five research universities over a 21 year period the authors estimate that holding experience and other factors constant the penalty for twenty years of seniority is 16 of salary

adaptive signal processing hierarchy and budgetary control in federal regulation control over agency budgets is a critical tool of political influence in regulatory decision making yet the causal mechanism of budgetary control is unclear do budgetary manipulations influence agencies by imposing resource constraints or by transmitting powerful signals to the agency i advance and test a stochastic process model of adaptive signal processing by a hierarchical agency to address this question the principal findings of the paper are two first presidents and congressional committees achieve budgetary control over agencies not by manipulating aggregate resource constraints but by transmitting powerful signals through budget shifts second bureaucratic hierarchy increases the agency s response time in processing budgetary signals limiting the efficacy of the budget as a device of political control i also show that the magnitude of agency response to budgetary signals increased for executive branch agencies after 1970 due to executive oversight reforms i conclude by discussing the limits of budgetary manipulations as a device of political control and the response of elected authorities to adaptive signal processing by agencies

short term load forecasting methods an evaluation based on european data this paper uses intraday electricity demand data from ten european countries as the basis of an empirical comparison of univariate methods for prediction up to a day ahead a notable feature of the time series is the presence of both an in traweek and an intraday seasonal cycle the forecasting methods considered in the study include arima modeling periodic ar modeling an extension for double seasonality of holt winters exponential smoothing a recently proposed alternative exponential smoothing formulation and a method based on the principal component analysis pca of the daily demand profiles our results show a similar ranking of methods across the 10 load series the results were disappointing for the new alternative exponential smoothing method and for the periodic ar model the arima and pca methods performed well but the method that consistently performed the best was the double seasonal holt winters exponential smoothing method

the joint determination of union status and union wage effects some tests of alternative models the problems of estimation and interpretation of union wage differentials are examined the properties of cross section and longitudinal estimators are compared estimates are presented and those in the literature summarized conflicting results are obtained longitudinal estimators typically produce results smaller than those of ols while cross section methods instrumental variables or inverse mills ratio raise the estimate the paper offers a reconciliation of these results it supports a more optimistic conclusion than that reached in reviews by freeman and lewis who argued that little has been learned from attempts to deal with the endogeneity issue comparisons between estimators are used to throw light on the process governing union status and to suggest interpretations of union differentials consistent with the current evidence

bureaucratic discretion or congressional control regulatory policymaking by the federal trade commission this paper extends stigler and peltzman s approach to regulation by incorporating a legislature the model yields comparative statics results and hence testable implications the paper then tests between two opposing approaches about regulatory agency behavior the first assumes agencies operate independently of the legislature and hence exercise discretion the second assumes that congress controls agency decisions the recent behavior of the federal trade commission provides the empirical setting substantial evidence is found for the specific predictions of the model including the hypothesis of systematic congressional influence over ftc decisions

short run electricity load forecasting with combinations of stationary wavelet transforms short term forecasting of electricity load is an essential issue for the management of power systems and for energy trading specific modeling approaches are needed given the strong seasonality and volatility in load data in this paper we investigate the benefit of combining stationary wavelet transforms to produce one day ahead forecasts of half hourly electric load in france first we assess the advantage of decomposing the aggregate load into several subseries with a wavelet transform each component is predicted separately and aggregated to get the final forecast one innovation of this paper is to propose several approaches to deal with the boundary problem which is particularly detrimental in electricity load forecasting second we examine the benefit of combining forecasts over individual models an extensive out of sample evaluation shows that a careful treatment of the border effect is required in the multiresolution analysis combinations including the wavelet predictions provide the most accurate forecasts this result is valid with several assumptions about the forecast error in temperature and for different types of hours peak normal off peak different days of the week and various forecasting periods

wage differentials across labor markets and workers does cost of living matter wage differentials studies rarely account for interarea differences in cost of living owing both to data limitations and theoretical ambiguity this study develops a price index for 185 metropolitan areas comprising about 70 of the u s labor force current population survey data for 1985 95 and data on sitespecific amenities are used to estimate earnings differentials based on nominal wages wages fully adjusted for measured cost of living and a simple approximation of real wages with partial adjustment for pricelevel differences dispersion in approximate real wages across 185 labor markets and differentials by region and city size are substantially lower than dispersion in nominal or full adjustment wages estimates of racial and ethnic differentials display moderate sensitivity to choice of a wage measure whereas other standard differentials do not both nominal wages and wages fully adjusted for cost of living may provide misleading estimates of real wage differentials absent data on interarea prices and amenities researchers should include detailed controls for region and city size in nominal wage equations jel j31 r23

a nonuniform pricing model of union wages and employment unlike implicit contracts models the nonuniform pricing model of unions assumes that firms can always shut down ex post to avoid any payments to the union under this restriction employment can differ from a first best even if both workers and firms are risk neutral in general the union chooses to offer quantity discounts on labor and needs to use a seniority rule that regulates the order in which workers are hired to implement these discounts unions lower almost all workers employment probabilities and increase the cyclical volatility of employment and the union nonunion average wage differential will move countercyclically workers preferences over union wage profiles conditional on their seniority exhibit within limits a convenient unanimity property

modeling special day effects for forecasting intraday electricity demand abstract we propose and apply a novel approach for modeling special day effects to predict electricity demand in korea notably we model special day effects on an hourly rather than a daily basis hourly specified predictor variables are implemented in the regression model with a seasonal autoregressive moving average sarma type error structure in order to efficiently reflect the special day effects the interaction terms between the hour of day effects and the hourly based special day effects are also included to capture the unique intraday patterns of special days more accurately the multiplicative sarma mechanism is employed in order to identify the double seasonal cycles namely the intraday effect and the intraweek effect the forecast results of the suggested model are evaluated by comparing them with those of various benchmark models for the following year the empirical results indicate that the suggested model outperforms the benchmark models for both special and non special day predictions

the effect of collective bargaining on salaries in higher education using data from a 1977 survey of faculty from 158 u s colleges and universities the author estimates that the proportional salary advantage to unionized faculty members was typically less than two percent that differential varied considerably however with the length of time the institution had been organized in addition unionization increased the return to seniority and decreased the return to several measures of merit including number of publications and general post degree experience

short term electricity trading for system balancing an empirical analysis of the role of intraday trading in balancing germany s electricity system abstract previous studies have noted that unexpectedly germany s dramatic expansion of wind and solar energy coincided with a reduction of short term balancing reserves this observation has been dubbed the german balancing paradox this paper provides further and updated evidence since 2011 wind and solar energy have nearly doubled while both reserve requirements and reserve use have declined by 50 the paper quantitatively explores one reason for reduced balancing needs increased and improved short term wholesale electricity trading on the intraday market trading is now commonly done around the clock and based on quarter hour rather than full hour contracts the shift to quarter hourly products alone explains a decrease in balancing energy by 17 there is also strong evidence that market parties respond efficiently to imbalance charges suggesting that incentive based approaches to electricity balancing work

economic reform and comparative advantage in agriculture in the newly independent states in this paper i examine whether the newly independent states nis of the former soviet union fsu could have a comparative advantage in agriculture after successful economic reform the analysis has two steps first using empirical estimates i examine comparative production costs of the fsu s main imported goods in the 1980s second i discuss how reform could change the goods relative productivity and costs thereby altering the structure of profitable agricultural trade analysis and estimates are for the aggregate fsu vis a vis the world market

modelling interregional links in electricity price spikes abnormally high price spikes in spot electricity markets represent a significant risk to market participants as such a literature has developed that focuses on forecasting the probability of such spike events moving beyond simply forecasting the level of price many univariate time series models have been proposed to dealwith spikes within an individual market region this paper is the first to develop a multivariate self exciting point process model for dealing with price spikes across connected regions in the australian national electricity market the importance of the physical infrastructure connecting the regions on the transmission of spikes is examined it is found that spikes are transmitted between the regions and the size of spikes is influenced by the available transmission capacity it is also found that improved risk estimates are obtained when inter regional linkages are taken into account

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

labor union objectives and collective bargaining we consider a model oflabor union behavior in which workers make decisions about wages and employment by simple majority rule we show that under general conditions such a union has a well behaved objective function different from those previously postulated in the literature we then show that the union s majority preferences generally lack a von neumann morgenstern utility representation and thus cannot be inserted into traditional bargaining models we then develop and characterize the solutions to a new bargaining model that is consistent with the structure of union preferences several comparative statics results are presented

are there gender differences in the job mobility patterns of academic economists labor economic theory posits that job mobil ity should affect worker salaries the degree to which this holds for academic faculty has received considerable attention prior empirical studies have estimated log wage regressions that control for both years of total work experience and years of seniority at the current institution in an effort to determine whether negative returns to seniority exist in academic labor markets for example bernt bratsberg james ragan and jim warren 2003 and william moore robert turnbull and geoffrey newman 1998 for aca demic economists michael ransom 1993 kevin hallock 1995 and emily hoffman 1976 for specific institutions debra a barbezat and michael r donihue 1998 and barbezat 1989 for

temperature and seasonality influences on spanish electricity load abstract deregulation of the spanish electricity market in 1998 and the possible listing of electricity or weather derivative contracts have encouraged the study of the relationship between electricity demand and weather in spain in this paper a transfer function intervention model is developed for forecasting daily electricity load from cooling and heating degree days the influence of weather and seasonality is proved and is significant even when the autoregressive effects and the dynamic specification of the temperature are taken into account the estimated general model shows a high predictive power the results and information presented in this paper could be of interest for current users and potential traders in the deregulated spanish electricity market

industrial profitability and trade among the former soviet republics the break up of the soviet union claudia senik leygonie and gordon hughes this article looks at profitability and trade in the republics of the former soviet union looking at individual industries republic by republic there emerges a picture of some highly profitable sectors along with others with negative value added the most profitable industries mostly associated with oil and gas extraction are the least protected the least intensive in labour and already the most developed the least efficient industries include food processing and light industry and are the most protected ones trade patterns both within the former soviet union and with the rest of the world are unrelated to comparative advantage consequently sizable gains from trade are potentially available and the relevant industries are identified when the single trade balance constraint is replaced by constraints at the republic level it is clear that russia stands to benefit from not having to cover with its surpluses the deficits of the other republics russia again along with kazakhstan and ukraine should benefit from a shift to market based terms of trade

the endogeneity of union status an empirical test an unsettled issue in the literature relating to the relative wage effect of unions is the appropriate treatment of union status in a wage determination model in the context of a three equation model determining union membership and union and nonunion sector wage rates this paper presents an instrumental variables iv procedure for estimating the parameters of the wage equations and a test of the exogeneity of union status using the hausman specification test an advantage of our iv procedure in comparison to the widely used inverse mill s ratio procedure is that our procedure is a distribution free estimator whereas the inverse mill s ratio estimator hinges in the assumption that the error term of the choice equation is normally distributed using data for a sample of middle aged white workers we estimate the parameters of the union and nonunion wage equations with both procedures on the key question of the endogeneity of union status the hausman test decisively rejects the null hypothesis of exo

econometric modeling of regional electricity spot prices in the australian market abstract wholesale electricity markets are increasingly integrated via high voltage interconnectors and inter regional trade in electricity is growing to model this we consider a spatial equilibrium model of price formation where constraints on inter regional flows result in three distinct equilibria in prices we use this to motivate an econometric model for the distribution of observed electricity spot prices that captures many of their unique empirical characteristics the econometric model features supply and inter regional trade cost functions which are estimated using bayesian monotonic regression smoothing methodology a copula multivariate time series model is employed to capture additional dependence both cross sectional and serial in regional prices the marginal distributions are nonparametric with means given by the regression means the model has the advantage of preserving the heavy right hand tail in the predictive densities of price we fit the model to half hourly spot price data in the five interconnected regions of the australian national electricity market the fitted model is then used to measure how both supply and price shocks in one region are transmitted to the distribution of prices in all regions in subsequent periods finally to validate our econometric model we show that prices forecast using the proposed model compares favorably with those from some benchmark alternatives

comparative dis advantage in russian agriculture the economic reform that began in russia in the early 1990s has spurred major changes in the structure and volume of the country s agricultural production and trade this paper examines whether russia has a comparative advantage in agricultural outputs compared to agricultural inputs and whether it has a comparative advantage in bulk crops versus meat the paper also investigates whether the changes in russia s agricultural production and trade during transition have been consistent with the country s agricultural comparative advantage as indicated by the empirical results

unions without rents the curious economics of faculty unions we show that canadian faculty unions have had no effect on university revenues only a small positive effect on earnings a negative effect on research output and lead to earnings redistributions across disciplines and ranks we argue that faculty unions have a negligible positive and often negative effect on average faculty wages because a union that promotes the median faculty member s welfare negotiates wage redistributions and more onerous teaching conditions despite the negative impact these changes have on research output average wages may rise but only because non unionized universities trade off wages against the non pecuniary benefits from research and teaching jel classification i20 j51 j54 syndicats sans rentes l economie singuliere des syndicats de professeurs d universite les auteurs montrent que les syndicats canadiens de professeurs d universite n ont pas eu d effet sur les revenus des universites ont eu seulement un petit effet positif sur les gains un effet negatif sur la production de recherche et qu ils ont entraine une redistribution des gains entre disciplines et entre les professeurs de divers rangs on suggere que les syndicats de professeurs ont eu un effet negligeable positif mais souvent negatif sur le salaire moyen des professeurs parce qu un syndicat qui s attache a promouvoir le mieux etre du professeur median negocie des redistributions de salaires et des t ches d enseignement plus lourdes meme si ces changements ont un effet negatif sur la production de resultats de recherche les salaires moyens peuvent croitre mais seulement parce que les universites non syndiquees negocient des avantages non pecuniaires portant sur la recherche et l enseignement en compensation pour des salaires moindres

is there really a faculty union salary premium studies of the effects of unions on collegiate faculty salaries are inconclusive some estimate a significant union premium but such estimates suffer from endogeneity between unions and wages non random measurement error and failure to adjust for local cost of living differences by using data from the national study of postsecondary faculty nsopf 1988 2004 as well as other sources to identify institution specific factors omitted from previous studies the authors estimate significantly smaller union premia than those found by other researchers

governmental structure trustee selection and public university prices and spending multiple means to similar ends estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending i find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems

electoral competition in the american states electoral competition is a concept that has played a central role in much of the state politics literature one commonly used indicator of competition in the states is the ranney index we offer an alternative indicator of competition one based on district level outcomes of state legislative elections after evaluating both indicators in terms of validity and reliability the analysis suggests that the district level indicator is both empirically and intuitively superior as a measure of electoral competition the implications of this finding are discussed

university challenges explaining institutional change in higher education higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in oecd states over the past two decades some states have introduced tuition fees others have massively increased public funding for higher education and still others remain in stasis retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era this article develops the argument that higher education policy in the oecd is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment the degree of subsidization and the overall public cost of higher education the author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma noting the importance of partisan politics existing enrollment tax structure and access these propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty two oecd countries and through case histories of higher education reform in england sweden and germany

academic pay in the united kingdom and the united states the differential returns to productivity and the lifetime earnings gap this paper estimates earnings functions for two samples of u k and u s academic economists despite significant differences in compensation schemes a comparably specified human capital earnings model does a good job explaining earnings variations for academic economists in both countries our estimates suggest that rewards for research are more immediate and direct in the united states because of the national salary scale the payoffs to experience and seniority are greater and the payoffs to research are lower in the united kingdom than in the united states after adjusting for productivity and demographic factors we find that u s economists are paid approximately 40 more than otherwise equivalent economists in the united kingdom simulating career age earnings profiles for both markets we find that the earnings gap widens with experience for relatively productive research economists and may even narrow with age for relatively less productive research economists nevertheless the cumulative lifetime earnings foregone are substantial for research and nonresearch economists in the united kingdom

the evolution of male female earnings differentials in canadian universities 1970 2001 the evolution of academic salaries and the gender earnings gap in canadian universities is analysed using a unique statistics canada data set containing detailed information on all full time teachers at canadian universities over the period 1970 through 2001 male salaries declined across cohorts while female salaries remained stable consequently male female earnings differentials have narrowed recent years have also seen increasing variation in academic salaries for both men and women a gender earnings gap remains the bulk of which can be explained by differences in men s and women s rank and field the unexplained earnings gap has decreased over time on analyse l evolution des salaires et l ecart entre hommes et femmes dans les universites canadiennes entre 1970 et 2001 a l aide d une base de donnees unique de statistiques canada qui contient des renseignements detailles sur tous les professeurs a temps plein des universites canadiennes les salaires des hommes ont decline au fil des cohortes pendant que ceux des femmes demeuraient stables ce qui fait que les differentiels de salaires se sont amenuises au cours des annees recentes on a observe une variabilite croissante des salaires academiques tant pour les hommes que les femmes un ecart entre hommes et femmes persiste qui est attribuable aux differences dans les rangs et dans les champs d activites des hommes et des femmes l ecart qui demeure inexplique a diminue dans le temps

forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures using intraday data abstract we use the information in intraday data to forecast the volatility of crude oil at a horizon of 1 66 days using a variety of models relying on the decomposition of realized variance in its positive or negative semivariances part and its continuous or discontinuous part jumps we show the importance of these decompositions in predictive in sample regressions using a number of specifications nevertheless an important empirical finding comes from an out of sample analysis which unambiguously shows the limited interest of considering these components overall our results indicates that a simple autoregressive specification mimicking long memory and using past realized variances as predictors does not perform significantly worse than more sophisticated models which include the various components of realized variance

private and public choices in public education an investigation of trustee effects the paper applies the concepts of the horizon problem agency costs monitoring and special interest incentives to trustee management of public schools and higher education we examine whether south carolina s 1984 education improvement act a major restructuring of educational organization and spending in south carolina is related to the ratio of pupils in private versus public schools we employ 30 years of county level data in south carolina and we uncover several things there is no statistically credible relation between public school expenditures per pupil and the private school public school enrollment ratio however we do find that the directed changes in rules organizational structure and incentives mandated by the 1984 educational improvement act are associated with a reduction in the relative number of children attending private school we interpret this to mean that the features of the law requiring better accountability and the like were perceived by parents to make for better education while the increased money spent was only a transfer to teachers or some other groups we find that organization matters more than money

old school ties financial aid coordination and the governance of higher education abstract this paper analyzes the role of financial aid coordination among the group of top northeastern colleges and universities known as the overlap group members of the overlap group met annually to tailor financial aid packages so that the out of the pocket contribution of parents to their children s education was the same regardless of the school the students chose to attend i argue that the practices and stability of the overlap group are difficult to reconcile with traditional cartel theory and that financial aid coordination was a solution to organizational problems encountered in the education industry particularly to matching and externality problems arising in the allocation of elite students among educational institutions

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor marke t experience in contrast the results of this paper indicate that higher seniority is associated with lower salaries for university professors the author documents this finding for national surveys a nd individual institutions and explains it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers copyright 1993 by american economic association

a market based evaluation of the election versus appointment of regulatory commissioners this paper examines the elected versus appointed commissioner dichotomy from a market value perspective previous empirical analysis tends to concentrate on rates rather than examining the impact on shareholders wealth we examine life insurance industry data during the period surrounding the passage of california s proposition 103 the primary impact of the referendum on life insurers is to change the method of commissioner selection from appointment to popular vote we find that this change significantly reduced the value of life insurers doing business in california this result is consistent with the recent findings of boyes and mcdowell 1989 and smartt 1994 using alternative evaluation procedures for firms in other regulated industries this implies that the change to a popular election of commissioners either increases the level of risk and or decreases the expected cash flows of regulated firms

taxes fringe benefits and faculty the growth of employee benefits in academe has closely paralleled their economy wide growth this study estimates a complete system describing the demand for benefits and wages using panel data on 1477 institutions of higher learning the demand for benefits is very responsive to changes in real income and the tax price of benefits these conclusions are robust with respect to varying definitions of the tax price treating it as endogenous and accounting for unmeasured individual effects on demand simulations suggest that the tax reform act of 1986 sharply reduced the demand for benefits extrapolating the impact to the entire economy the annual flow of compensation shifted away from benefits by at least 15 billion copyright 1992 by mit press

seniority and distribution in a two worker trade union unlike existing models that rely heavily on assumptions regarding unions distributional preferences we present a simple model in which union seniority layoff rules and rising seniority wage profiles result from optimal price discrimination against the firm surprisingly even when cash transfers among union members are ruled out unions optimal seniority wage profiles are likely to be completely unaffected by their distributional preferences because of a kink in the utility possibility frontier this suggests that the simple technology of price discrimination may play a key role hitherto unappreciated in explaining union policies that affect the relative well being of different union members

modeling and short term forecasting of new south wales electricity system load this article employs bayesian semiparametric regression methodology to model intraday electricity load data and obtain short term load forecasts the role of such forecasts in the new south wales wholesale electricity market is discussed and the method applied to new south wales system load data the semiparametric regression model used identifies daily periodic weekly periodic and temperature sensitive components of load each component is decomposed as a linear combination of basis functions with a nonzero probability mass that the corresponding coefficients are exactly zero three possible models for the errors are also considered including independent autoregressive and first differenced autoregressive models a moving window of data is used to overcome the slow time varying nature of the temperature and periodic effects the entire model is estimated using a bayesian markov chain monte carlo approach and forecasts are obtained using a monte carlo sample from the joint predictive distribution o

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market comments this paper further explores the work of both michael ransom and emily hoffman who have written on monopsony in the academic labor market using data from university of massachusetts at amherst umass from 1989 this comment has three principal findings i the return to seniority at umass is positive at least for low levels of seniority which is contrary to ransom s results ii faculty hired with tenure have significantly higher salaries which supports the ransom monopsony hypothesis and iii sex discrimination as described by hoffman is much lower in 1989 than it was 15 years prior

density forecasting for long term peak electricity demand long term electricity demand forecasting plays an important role in planning for future generation facilities and transmission augmentation in a long term context planners must adopt a probabilistic view of potential peak demand levels therefore density forecasts providing estimates of the full probability distributions of the possible future values of the demand are more helpful than point forecasts and are necessary for utilities to evaluate and hedge the financial risk accrued by demand variability and forecasting uncertainty this paper proposes a new methodology to forecast the density of long term peak electricity demand peak electricity demand in a given season is subject to a range of uncertainties including underlying population growth changing technology economic conditions prevailing weather conditions and the timing of those conditions as well as the general randomness inherent in individual usage it is also subject to some known calendar effects due to the time of day day of week time of year and public holidays a comprehensive forecasting solution is described in this paper first semi parametric additive models are used to estimate the relationships between demand and the driver variables including temperatures calendar effects and some demographic and economic variables then the demand distributions are forecasted by using a mixture of temperature simulation assumed future economic scenarios and residual bootstrapping the temperature simulation is implemented through a new seasonal bootstrapping method with variable blocks the proposed methodology has been used to forecast the probability distribution of annual and weekly peak electricity demand for south australia since 2007 the performance of the methodology is evaluated by comparing the forecast results with the actual demand of the summer 2007 2008

developing an early warning system to predict currency crises abstract the purpose of this paper is to develop an early warning system to predict currency crises in this study a data set covering the period of january 1992 december 2011 of turkish economy is used and an early warning system is developed with artificial neural networks ann decision trees and logistic regression models financial pressure index fpi is an aggregated value composed of the percentage changes in dollar exchange rate gross foreign exchange reserves of the central bank and overnight interest rate in this study fpi is the dependent variable and thirty two macroeconomic indicators are the independent variables three models which are tested in turkish crisis cases have given clear signals that predicted the 1994 and 2001 crises 12 months earlier considering all three prediction model results turkey s economy is not expected to have a currency crisis ceteris paribus until the end of 2012 this study presents uniqueness in that decision support model developed in this study uses basic macroeconomic indicators to predict crises up to a year before they actually happened with an accuracy rate of approximately 95 it also ranks the leading factors of currency crisis with regard to their importance in predicting the crisis

an econometric model of a public university s income and enrollments abstract an econometric model of a public organization s income and outputs is applied to a public university and contains equations representing legislative demand for enrollments students attendance demand and university supply the results support the hypotheses that supply and the two demands determine the university s instructional funding and enrollments and that interest groups affect legislative demand while per student legislative funding for high cost graduate and professional students was not found to exceed that of undergraduates evidence is presented that these enrollments are financed by the estimated discretionary funds resulting from the legislature s high cost of controlling academic activities

the selection of public utility commissioners a re examination of the importance of institutional setting the result of a great many studies is that it makes no difference to the rate level whether the public utility commission is appointed or elected nevertheless the typical response to an inquiry regarding the effect of appointment versus election is that a difference in resulting rate structure should exist in this paper we have reconciled these views and more carefully examined the issue of whether institutional setting does matter in the setting of regulated electricity prices we suggest that one should not necessarily expect elected pucs to behave differently than appointed ones instead different behavior should be expected from pucs that are closer to their constituents than those more isolated irrespective of whether the puc is elected or appointed the results of an empirical examination based on a large sample of utilities operating during the period of 1981 83 support this view the more narrowly defined is the consumer voter group everything else the same the lower is the rate set by the puc