monitoring changes in economy wide energy efficiency from energy gdp ratio to composite efficiency index since the 1973 world oil crisis monitoring trends in energy efficiency at the economy wide level has been an important component of energy strategy in many countries to support this effort various energy efficiency related indicators have been developed we examine some classical indicators which are often found in national and international energy studies in the 1970s and 1980s we then describe the recent developments in using the index decomposition analysis to give an economy wide composite energy efficiency index based on a bottom up approach this composite index is superior to the classical indicators as an economy wide energy efficiency measure and has lately been adopted by a growing number of countries for national energy efficiency trend monitoring

economic growth and greenhouse gases in europe a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier analysis abstract energy use has become a topical issue when assessing the economic growth of countries indeed energy use gives rise to greenhouse gas emissions which are undesirable side products of economic growth in this paper we present a non radial multi sector nonparametric production frontier approach specially tailored for addressing this issue our approach is consistent with previous works and in line with recent policy and regulation implementations we also make use of second stage country and sector level regression analyses to investigate how the efficiency results are affected by exogenous factors we apply our method to the case of 10 sectors in 19 european countries our results highlight the need for policy and regulation implementations for each sector individually indeed our efficiency and regression results show that there exists a sector heterogeneity and that the room for increasing economic growth reducing greenhouse gas emissions is clearly different for each sector in every country finally our results highlight two sectors 1 agriculture and 2 electricity gas and water and that the europe 2020 objectives are well set since they target the most inefficient countries sectors

marginal rate of transformation and rate of substitution measured by dea environmental assessment comparison among european and north american nations this study discusses the new use of dea data envelopment analysis environmental assessment to measure mrt marginal rate of transformation and rs rate of substitution among production factors e g inputs desirable and undesirable outputs to measure the degree on mrt and rs this study first examines a concept of disposability from the perspective of economic strategies to combat various environmental issues the strategies are extendable to a policy change for pollution prevention the underlying concept is separated into natural and managerial disposability under managerial disposability it is possible for us to measure an occurrence of desirable congestion or eco technology innovation considering the disposability concept this study discusses how to measure the type and magnitude of mrt and rs a problem of the mrt rs measurement is that these measures usually become unstable e g very large or small in these magnitudes because dea does not assume any functional form for economic activities to overcome such a difficulty this study equips dea environmental assessment with multiplier restriction by utilizing a unique feature on a proposed data treatment the multiplier restriction in dea has been never explored in previous works on environmental assessment in an application this study finds three important economic concerns on europe and north america first western europe outperforms eastern europe and north america in their unified efficiency measures under managerial disposability this study statistically confirms a difference between western and eastern europe but not between western europe and north america this result exhibits that eastern europe is not yet well developed at the level of the other two regions second eastern europe has exhibited mrt estimates that are different from western europe and north america the nations in eastern europe have an economic potential for industrial developments because the level of their industrial pollutions is less than that of the other two regions the potential is also found in their mrt estimates finally an interesting difference can be found in the rs estimate between eastern europe and western europe from 2008 to 2012 they have statistically exhibited a difference between the two regimes but not with north america this is because most nations in both western europe and north america have already attained a high level of economic successes so that they have a limited industrial potential under current production technology and eco technology the situation of the two regions will be changed along with new technology development in contrast eastern europe is different from the other two regions in terms of attaining such a level of social sustainability because of limited capital accumulation and limited opportunity for technology innovation

agent based computational transaction cost economics this article explores the use of agent based computational economics ace for modelling the development of transactions between firms transaction cost economics neglects learning and the development of trust ignores the complexity of multiple agents and assumes rather than investigates the efficiency of outcomes efficiency here refers to minimum cost or maximum profit we model how co operation and trust emerge and shift adaptively as relations evolve in a context of multiple interacting agents this may open up a new area of application for the ace methodology a simulation model is developed in which agents make and break transaction relations on the basis of preferences based on trust and potential profit profit is a function of product differentiation specificity of assets economy of scale and learning by doing in ongoing relations agents adapt their trust in a partner as a function of his loyalty exhibited by his continuation of a relation they also adapt the weight they attach to trust on the basis of realized profit the model enables an assessment of the efficiency of outcomes relative to the optimum as a function of trust and market conditions we conduct a few experiments to illustrate this application of ace

heuristic learning and the discovery of specialization and exchange abstract i develop and calibrate an agent based model of boundedly rational adaptive agents in a two good production and exchange economy to replicate human subject outcomes in the same eight person experimental economy to test agents ability to capture human behavior i extend the model and use its output to make predictions about a second experimental environment in which the group of eight agents is slowly constructed by merging smaller groups this environment improves human subject performance in the specialization and exchange task and commensurate improvement emerges for some parameterizations of the agent based model this iterative process yields incremental improvement of decision level theories about economic discovery

agency relationships in family firms theory and evidence does owner management necessarily eliminate the agency costs of ownership drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held owner managed firms to agency threats ignored by jensen s and meckling s 1976 agency model private ownership and owner management not only reduce the effectiveness of external control mechanisms they also expose firms to a self control problem created by incentives that cause owners to take actions which harm themselves as well as those around them jensen 1994 p 43 thus shareholders have incentive to invest resources in curbing both managerialand owner opportunism we extend this thesis to the domain of the family firm after developing hypotheses which describe how family dynamics and specifically altruism exacerbate agency problems experienced by these privately held owner managed firms we use data obtained from a large scale survey of family businesses to field test our hypotheses and find evidence which suggests support for our proposed theory finally we discuss the implications of our theory for research on family and other types of privately held owner managed firms

measuring energy efficiency in the context of an emerging economy the case of indian manufacturing in recent years the indian economy has achieved a rapid growth rate however one of the challenges facing the economy is the large energy supply that would be needed to sustain this growth path hence attaining energy efficiency is crucial for the economy this paper examines the indian manufacturing sector and utilizes a variant of the directional distance function to obtain comprehensive measures of performance of the major manufacturing states given the joint goals of achieving energy conservation and output growth the results of the empirical application reveal that given the prevailing technology the average manufacturing firm across the states could reduce energy input and increase output simultaneously by an annual average of 3 84 by improving technical efficiency to accommodate a larger simultaneous increase in output and reduction in energy use india should adopt superior technologies so as to shift the efficient frontier outward

between markets and politics organizational responses to reform in china in china s economic transition firms diversify assets through investments in the rapidly expanding service sector in response to organizational uncertainty using data from a random sample of firms in shanghai the author shows that there are two situations that cause this uncertainty economic instability where weak firms struggle to survive in the rapidly changing market system and administrative instability where large firms that were the most protected are now being forced to handle the responsibilities that were previously handled by the state the result is that both types of firm seek stability by spreading out risk through investment in low risk fast return markets revealing much about the economic reforms the overall strategy of a firm reflects at any given point in time important organizational facts any decision to fundamentally alter the deployment of internal resources represents a major structural change these kinds of changes do not occur often when they do they provide us wit

complexity and the character of stock returns empirical evidence and a model of asset prices based on complex investor learning empirical evidence on the distributional characteristics of common stock returns indicates 1 a power law tail index close to three describes the behavior of the positive tail of the survivor function of returns pr r x x a reflection of fat tails 2 general linear and nonlinear dependencies exist in the time series of returns 3 the time series return process is characterized by short run dependence short memory in both returns as well as their volatility the latter usually characterized in the form of autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and 4 the time series return process probably does not exhibit long memory but the squared returns process does exhibit long memory we propose a model of complex self referential learning and reasoning amongst economic agents that jointly produces security returns consistent with these general observed facts and which are supported here by empirical results presented for a benchmark sample of 50 stocks traded on the new york stock exchange the market we postulate is populated by traders who reason inductively while compressing information into a few fuzzy notions that they can in turn process and analyze with fuzzy logic we analyze the implications of such behavior for the returns on risky securities within the context of an artificial stock market model dynamic simulation experiments of the market are conducted from which market clearing prices emerge allowing us to then compute realized returns we test the effects of varying values of the parameters of the model on the character of the simulated returns the results indicate that the model proposed in this paper can jointly account for the presence of a power law characterization of the positive tail of the survivor function of returns with exponent on the order of three for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity for long memory in volatility and for general nonlinear dependencies in returns

willingness to pay for car safety evidence from sweden this study estimates a marginal willingness to pay wtp function for a road mortality risk reduction observed marginal wtp from the swedish car market is used and found to be positively correlated with the baseline risk of the cars no statistically significant relationships between examined owner attributes e g wealth and background risk and marginal wtp are found when comparing the estimated monetary value of a non marginal risk reduction derived from the integral of the marginal wtp function with an estimate based on marginal wtp we find in line with expectations that the difference between the estimates is negligible for smaller risk reductions and small 4 10 also for relatively large risk reductions

equilibrium and reinforcement learning in private information games an experimental study abstract this paper examines the abilities of standard game theoretic solution concepts static nash equilibrium and a simple model of individual learning to describe subject behavior in an experiment involving private information games with mixed strategy nash equilibrium outcomes the experimental data are compared in several ways with the predictions of static nash equilibrium and the quite different predictions of the learning model which is based on the models of roth and erev 1995 games and economic behavior special issue nobel symposium vol 8 pp 164 212 nash equilibrium does not adequately describe subject behavior whereas the learning model performs well in describing aspects of the evolution in behavior over time

a policy approach to the environmental impacts of technological lock in abstract the broadening spectrum of environmental problems the uncertainty regarding their scale and duration and their possible irreversibility in the context of the growing social preference for environmental quality make it necessary to undertake an ex ante approach to the link between productive activity and environmental quality this link lies in technology and the right approach is to understand how the process of technological change can lead towards sustainability the added value of evolutionary economics in the context of environmental policy resides mainly in the fact that it warns that certain inferior environmental technologies may be locked in to the economic system the results of our model show that it would be advisable to undertake policies expressly aimed at the process of sustainable technological change applying an ex ante precautionary approach in a way that is complementary to the conventional equilibrium oriented environmental policies the nature of these policies and how they might be implemented are questions we will address from this novel approach to the concept of sustainable development in short the main objectives of this paper are to understand more fully the dynamics of the process of technological change its role in sustainable development and to assess the implications of this dynamic approach to techno environmental policy to achieve these goals we have developed an agent based model abm using distributed artificial intelligence dai concepts drawn from the general methodology of social simulation

energy use efficiency in the indian manufacturing sector an interstate analysis abstract this paper approaches the measurement of energy efficiency from a production theoretic framework and uses data envelopment analysis to measure energy efficiency in the indian manufacturing sector using data from the annual survey of industries for the years 1998 99 through 2003 04 the study compares the energy efficiency in manufacturing across states based on several models the results show considerable variation in energy efficiency across states comparing the results across our models we find that the relative pricing of energy does not provide the appropriate incentives for energy conservation a second stage regression analysis reveals that states with a larger share of manufacturing output in energy intensive industries have lower energy efficiency also higher quality labor force associates with higher energy efficiency finally the power sector reforms have not yet had any significant impact on achieving energy efficiency

learning by imitation abstract this paper introduces a learning algorithm that allows for imitation in recursive dynamic games the kiyotaki wright model of money is a well known example of such decision environments in this context learning by experience has been studied before here we introduce imitation as an additional channel for learning in numerical simulations we observe that the presence of imitation either speeds up social convergence to the theoretical markov nash equilibrium or leads every agent of the same type to the same mode of suboptimal behavior we observe an increase in the probability of convergence to equilibrium as the incentives for optimal play become more pronounced

china s transition and its implications for international business this paper focuses on institutional change as the central and most consequential contextual aspect of china s transition identification of key characteristics of china s emergent institutions leads to propositions on their relevance for international business practice china s transition also raises issues for theory development including the way that transition is modeled the need to draw upon multiple perspectives and the concomitants of a contextual approach

efficient energy saving targets for apec economies abstract energy saving target ratios estr for 17 apec economies during 1991 2000 are computed in a total factor framework all nominal variables are transformed into real variables by the purchasing power parity ppp at the 1995 price level the data envelopment analysis dea approach is used to find the energy saving target est for apec economies without reducing their maximum potential gross domestic productions gdps in each year energy labor and capital are the three inputs while gdp is the single output our major findings are as follows 1 china has the largest est up to almost half of its current usage 2 hong kong the philippines and the united states have the highest energy efficiency 3 the energy efficiency generally increases for apec economies except for canada and new zealand 4 chile mexico and taiwan have significantly improved their energy efficiency in the last 5 years 5 an inverted u shape relation exists between per capita est and per capita gdp 6 estr has a positive relation with the value added percentage of gdp of the industry sector and a negative relation with that of the service sector

the impact of order and mode of market entry on profitability and market share market share performance and profitability of overseas business activities has long been an important issue in international business in this study we explore the impact of order and mode of market entry into an overseas market we find that early entrants have significantly higher market shares and profitability than late followers we also find that equity joint ventures have a higher profitability than either wholly owned operations or contractual joint ventures a significant interaction exists between order and mode of market entry as expected firm efficiency and size affect the performance of firms these results are based on the business activities of a sample of 14 466 foreign firms in china in 1995

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

dynamics of china s provincial level specialization in strategic emerging industries this paper examines the dynamics of technological specialization in strategic emerging industries seis within each of mainland china s 31 provinces and the likely effectiveness based on the experiences of taiwan and south korea of the provinces strategies for developing these industries grounded in economic decentralization theories the empirical method employed includes analyzing the scores on an sei specialization promotion index per each province alongside several analytics of invention patent data from each province in the seven seis newly designated by the central level government as of 2010 the data is quantitatively analyzed according to four groups of indicators based on the following specialization relevant concepts comparative advantages and technological capabilities economy size and income technological uncertainty and lifecycles and latecomer entry into complex technologies where knowledge is most cumulative the analysis finds that china s system of economic decentralization has partially worked to ensure provincial industrial policymaking is effective whereby a notable number of provinces are seemingly pursuing sei development strategies in terms of sei selection and promotion that may enable catch up however paradoxically at the same time the system appears to sometimes facilitate provincial sei development strategies that are quite risky or even likely ineffective

the soviet transition from socialism to capitalism worker control and economic bargaining in the wood industry analyses oftlze transition from state socialisnz to capitalism pically focus on political impedimerlrs and underesritnate tlle economic obsracles to economic rransformatior1 based or1 a c ase srudy c f the soviet o o d indusrr y we argue tlzur there hill he no economic tr ansition so long as enterprises rerain two hisroric features nanzely anarchy in pr oduction and barqainit g in exrernal r elarions far jtom consrituting a re olution tlze witllerirlg away of the party srate has esaggerared rlle parhologies of rhe old econotnic order barrer has hecome nzo1 e inzpor tant conglonzerates ha1 e strengrhened their monopoly and wrkers 1la1 e greater conrr ol of tlze shop floor if there is a nzolbemenr to sar d a nzar ket economy at all it is to sar da jb1 m ofmerchant capitalisnz rlzut deepens economic under de elol nzet t and lz arts tlze rise of nzodern bourgeois capiralism

the gains from differentiated policies to control stock pollution when producers are heterogeneous we derive optimal input taxes to control stock pollution problems generated by heterogeneous agents the taxes vary over time and in response to differences of asset quality and technology choice we also derive second best policies and compare them to the efficient policy and also among themselves different policies will affect the timing for when and the extent to which conservation technologies are adopted a numerical example based on the california drainage problem shows significant efficiency gains from the optimal policy compared to no intervention but much of the gains are lost with second best interventions the gains from optimal policies do not always increase with the degree of heterogeneity copyright 2008 oxford university press

total factor energy efficiency of coal consumption an empirical analysis of china s energy intensive industries abstract improvement of coal consumption efficiency is very important both for china in solving its problems of energy security and environmental pollution and for the world in addressing the issue of greenhouse gas emissions using a total factor framework this paper employs a data envelopment analysis dea approach to evaluate the coal consumption efficiency of six energy intensive sub industries in china in 2015 coal consumption efficiency is factorized into economic efficiency and environmental efficiency with sulfur dioxide nitrogen oxide and industrial smoke dust and soot emissions treated as undesirable outputs of energy consumptions the results show the following 1 of the six energy intensive sub industries studied two exhibit both dea effective coal economic efficiency and coal environmental efficiency coal economic efficiency is found to be greater than coal environmental efficiency indicating that the benefits of economic efficiency have masked the negative effects of the environmental impact china should therefore pay more attention to the clean utilization of coal 2 low environmental efficiency mainly resulted from the joint effects of pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency therefore enterprises in these industries must engage in management efforts to improve their ability to manage large enterprises 3 the energy intensive industries characterized by coal environmental efficiency that failed to achieve pure technological effectiveness all exhibited input redundancy or output inadequacy of varying degrees while showing a potential for energy conservation and emissions reductions

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

globalizing carbon lock in this paper extends the arguments surrounding carbon lock in elaborated in unruh energy policy 28 2000 817 30 2002 317 to countries currently undergoing industrialization it argues that for numerous reasons industrializing countries are unlikely to leapfrog carbon intensive energy development on the contrary carbon lock in may be globalizing and could further constrain climate change mitigation options it is then argued that many policy recommendations ignore carbon lock in possibly limiting their potential for successful implementation the paper then discusses four policy approaches that appear to have advantages given lock in conditions it is recognized however that relative ease of implementation does not necessarily equate with superiority instead it is merely a path dependent outcome of past development decisions pursuing policies on the basis of relative implementation ease may help address the issue of climate change but could also result in sub optimal outcomes along other dimensions of sustainable development

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

self efficacy beliefs and imitation a two armed bandit experiment abstract it is generally believed that individuals imitate others to gain status minimise regret or simply ameliorate their performance psychology provides a complementary explanation imitation becomes appealing when agents have little faith in their abilities we investigate the extent to which self efficacy beliefs affect agents propensities to imitate others we propose an experimental task which is a modified version of the two armed bandit we measure participants self assessed self efficacy then study individual learning subsequently we measure how individuals use the information they gather observing a randomly selected group leader we find that in stable environments a 1 increase in individual self efficacy reduces the propensity to imitate others by 3

energy efficiency of selected oecd countries a slacks based model with undesirable outputs this paper presents an efficiency assessment of selected oecd countries using a slacks based model with undesirable or bad outputs sbm undesirable in this research sbm undesirable is used first in a two stage approach to assess the relative efficiency of oecd countries using the most frequent indicators adopted by the literature on energy efficiency besides in the second stage glmm mcmc methods are combined with sbm undesirable results as part of an attempt to produce a model for energy performance with effective predictive ability the results reveal different impacts of contextual variables such as economic blocks and capital labor ratio on energy efficiency levels

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

genetic algorithm learning and the cobweb model this paper presents the cobweb model in which competitive firms in a market for a single good use a genetic algorithm to update their decision rules about next period production and sales the results of simulations show that the genetic algorithm converges to the rational expectations equilibrium for a wider range of parameter values than other algorithms frequently studied within the context of the cobweb model price and quantity patterns generated by the genetic algorithm are also compared to the data of experimental cobweb economies it is shown that the algorithm can capture several features of the experimental behavior of human subjects better than three other learning algorithms that are considered

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

reform in eastern europe how can the new governments of eastern europe succeed in moving from centrally planned to freemarket economies this incisive report identifies and describes the major policy choices to be made and discusses what will work and what will not reform in eastern europe provides a comprehensive easily read statement of reform policy that stands in the mainstream of modern western economics based on their experience with stabilization policies in other countries the authors show how eastern europe can reduce unemployment during the painful adjustment process create effective and socially acceptable mechanisms to subject enterprises to market discipline and replace barter trade under cmea with market based international trade

a natural experiment approach to contingent valuation of private and public uv health risk reduction strategies in low and high risk countries we present the results of a natural experiment to test how variations in exogenous risk levels affect resultant willingness to pay wtp for risk reduction the case study presented considers wtp for reductions in the skin cancer risks associated with exposure to solar uv radiation a common design contingent valuation survey is conducted in four countries across which variation in geographical latitude and genetic mix mean that exogenous risks differ substantially survey respondents were presented with both a private and public good route for affecting risk reduction in both cases results confirm that once adjustment had been made for expected relationships with other covariates such as income and risk averting behaviour valuation responses for both goods conformed to expectations with the ordering of values across countries reflecting the ordering of scientifically established health risks this suggests that links between values and objective health risks may be observed within such situations and provides a justification for continuing research into more natural representations of risk and risk reductions in order to yield consistent and robust measures of associated values

escaping carbon lock in this article explores the climate policy implications of the arguments made in understanding carbon lock in unruh 2000 which posited that industrial countries have become locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through path dependent processes driven by increasing returns to scale carbon lock in arises through technological organizational social and institutional co evolution culminating in what was termed as techno institutional complex tic in order to resolve the climate problem an escape from the lock in condition is required however due to the self referential nature of tic escape conditions are unlikely to be generated internally and it is argued here that exogenous forces are probably required

estimating the performance effects of business groups in emerging markets business groups confederations of legally independent firms are ubiquitous in emerging economies yet very little is known about their effects on the performance of affiliated firms we conceive of business groups as responses to market failures and high transaction costs in doing so we develop hypotheses about the effects of group affiliation on firm profitability affiliation could either boost or depress firm profitability and members of a group are likely to earn rates of return similar to other members of the same group using a unique data set compiled largely from local sources we test for these effects in 14 emerging markets argentina brazil chile india indonesia israel mexico peru the philippines south africa south korea taiwan thailand and turkey we find evidence that business groups indeed affect the broad patterns of economic performance in 12 of the markets we examine group affiliation appears to have as profound an effect on profitability as does industry membership yet strategy scholars have a much clearer grasp of industries than of groups moreover membership in a group raises the profitability of the average group member in several of the markets we examine this runs contrary to the wisdom conventional in advanced economies that unrelated diversification depresses profitability overall our findings suggest that the roots of sustained differences in profitability may vary across institutional contexts conclusions drawn in one context may well not apply to another copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

chinese multinationals fast internationalization financial performance advantage in one region disadvantage in another our study reveals the financial performance implications of the speed at which chinese multinational enterprises cmnes expand into intra regional versus inter regional host countries in doing so we propose a framework that integrates internationalization speed and home regionalization literatures using data from 767 publicly listed cmnes from the years 2002 to 2014 we discover that the faster the intra regional internationalization the better the firm s financial performance whereas faster inter regional internationalization demonstrates a poorer financial performance we also find that fast mover cmnes technological and marketing resources are valuable in intra regional host countries but vulnerable in inter regional host countries we discuss the implications of these findings for studies of the uppsala internationalization process model and regional mnes

political economy based institutional industry complex and sustainable development the case of the salt chemical industry in huai an china abstract this article explains how the salt chemical industry may evolve over time from a high energy consumption based industry complex in the local community to a consolidated pro growth pluralist regime at the urban scale the salt chemical industry is resisting to restructure to a sustainable environmental friendly economic system by spilling over in the form of pro growth political economic coalition in local society theories of the logan and molotch s growth machine stone s urban regime together with the extension of unruh s thesis concerning the characteristics of lock in in the technological or institutional economics approach were used to propose an enlarged lock in political economic framework and pro growth institutional industry complex iic it is further used to explain the consensus building of the pro growth governance a study of the salt chemical and new material industry park in the huai an metropolitan area china serves as an illustrative case the article also suggests that the path dependence followed in constructing a pro growth coalition could serve as a program to unlock the pro growth institutional industry complex of salt chemical industry and foster the anti coalition needed

acquisition of costly information an experimental study abstract i study decision making in a situation where subjects can buy information in order to uncover the initially unknown deterministic structure the majority of subjects fail to find the most economical way of choosing between two possible prospects many subjects underestimate the value of information and as a result make avoidable forecasting errors other subjects learn correctly which action is most successful under any given condition but fail to implement this knowledge efficiently they either accept errors for the sake of economizing on small amounts of information costs or they invest in redundant information the measured losses are substantial however in certain settings the fact that half of the economist subjects and one fourth of non economist subjects learn to behave optimally may be sufficient for efficient market functioning the present findings thus help to explain the near competitive outcomes observed in many experimental and actual markets

2 the institutional structure of production 1 prize lecture to the memory of alfred nobel december 9 1991 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

property rights and stratification in socialist redistributive economies in socialist economies work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to ex plain such inequalities in market economies existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power in this paper i sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights the right to derive income from productive assets two aspects of property rights guide the analysis 1 the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of governmentjurisdictions and 2 the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues primarily through taxation extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the out puts of the organization variation in revenue extraction in turn creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees an analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of tianjin china provides provisional support for these ideas s tudents of communist states have had little reason to dispute lenski s 1966 claim that the distribution of rewards in a society is a func tion of the distribution of power p 63 as ex emplified in szelenyi s wedding of elite theory to institutional economics this idea has been de veloped primarily in terms of the power of class es or occupational groups szelenyi 1978 be gan with the observation that planned economies operate according to redistributive rather than market principles however the process of re

decoding urban land governance state reconstruction in contemporary chinese cities in the rapidly growing literature on urban development in china many authors have emphasised the salient features of economic decentralisation and the increasingly significant role of the local state however such arguments neglect a counter trend in which the central state has deterritorialised and rehierarchised some key functions using the case of land governance this paper argues that facing the complication of changing urban conditions there is a resurgence of the state s regulatory power the decentralisation of economic governance is now counter balanced by the rise of state strategies to control the articulation of scales through which a more centrally consolidated power can be achieved the central government still serves as an important level of economic regulation in this sense new interpretations of commoditised urban transformation especially commoditised production of the built environment should be understood by underscoring the interplay between trends of decentralisation and terr

a learning to forecast experiment on the foreign exchange market with a classifier system abstract this paper reports on an experiment of learning and forecasting on the foreign exchange market by means of an artificial intelligence methodology a classifier system which simulates learning and adaptation in complex and changing environments the experiment has been run for two different exchange rates the us dollar d mark rate and the us dollar yen rate representative of two possibly different market environments a fictitious artificial agent is first trained on a monthly data base from 1973 to 1990 and then tested out of sample from 1990 to 1992 its forecasting performance is then compared with the performance of decision rules which follow the prescription of various economic theories on exchange rate behaviour and the performance of forecasts given by var estimations of the exchange rate s determinants

the isomorphism of local development policy a case study of the formation and transformation of national development zones in post mao jiangsu china it is often the case although it has not been well documented that local governments aiming for economic growth tend to formulate and implement very similar or even identical policies this phe

total factor energy efficiency in developing countries this paper uses a total factor framework to investigate energy efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980 2005 we explore the total factor energy efficiency and change trends by applying data envelopment analysis dea window which is capable of measuring efficiency in cross sectional and time varying data the empirical results indicate that botswana mexico and panama perform the best in terms of energy efficiency whereas kenya sri lanka syria and the philippines perform the worst during the entire research period seven countries show little change in energy efficiency over time eleven countries experienced continuous decreases in energy efficiency among five countries witnessing continuous increase in total factor energy efficiency china experienced the most rapid rise practice in china indicates that effective energy policies play a crucial role in improving energy efficiency tobit regression analysis indicates that a u shaped relationship exists between total factor energy efficiency and income per capita

estimating the linkage between energy efficiency and productivity abstract many analyses have referred to industrial productivity benefits associated with energy efficiency that are at least as great or larger than the energy benefits if plants with higher energy intensity also tend to have lower productivity then energy policy needs to consider this this study examines this issue for two segments of the glass industry using plant level data from the census bureau productivity is defined by the difference in best practice production efficiency as measured by data envelopment analysis dea this study uses regression analysis to estimate how differences in plant level electricity and fossil fuel intensity i e energy use per unit of production are attributable to differences in plant level productivity and other economic variables like energy prices and cumulative production in every case productivity differences between plants are statistically significant in explaining differences in plant energy intensity the coefficient that links productivity to energy efficiency yields a less than proportional impact for only one industry and fuel type for others the relationship is implies that a 1 increase in productivity increase energy efficiency by more than 1 this effect is statistically significant for flat glass but not container glass the estimates of the price and learning by doing coefficients seem reasonable but without imposing the assumption that all plants in the industry are equally productive this lends further credence to a significant relationship between productivity and energy efficiency

regional energy efficiency evaluation in china a super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs abstract with the rapid development of global economy the demand for energy has increased significantly therefore energy efficiency improvement is essential for global energy and economic transformation in the chinese context study on the energy efficiency of various provinces can contribute to better understand china s energy utilization status and provide policy implications for improving china s energy utilization efficiency in this study based on the super efficiency slack based measure model with undesirable outputs the energy efficiency of china s 30 provinces in 2013 and 2014 was investigated then the energy efficiency of the eastern central and western china was compared and further discussed finally according to the results the relevant policy implications were put forward the results showed that china s overall energy efficiency had decreased while taking the undesirable outputs into consideration in addition eastern china had the highest energy efficiency and the energy efficiency of western china was relatively low the energy efficiency gap among china s provinces was still large therefore it was necessary to improve china s overall energy efficiency by developing targeted policies considering regional conditions

a comprehensive review of data envelopment analysis dea approach in energy efficiency the main aim of this review article is to review of dea models in regarding to energy efficiency this paper reviewed and summarized the different models of dea that have been applied around the world to development of energy efficiency problems consequently a review of 144 published scholarly papers appearing in 45 high ranking journals between 2006 and 2015 have been obtained to achieve a comprehensive review of dea application in energy efficiency accordingly the selected articles have been categorized based on year of publication author s nationalities scope of study time duration application area study purpose results and outcomes results of this review paper indicated that dea showed great promise to be a good evaluative tool for future analysis on energy efficiency issues where the production function between the inputs and outputs was virtually absent or extremely difficult to acquire

chinese industrial reform accomplishments prospects and implications why has china grown so fast when conditions thought to be necessary for growth were absent nowhere is this dissonance greater than in china s industrial sector which has recorded big gains in output employment and exports in the absence of privatization effective bankruptcy legislation and other policy innovations widely seen as prerequisites for successful reform this essay reviews the accomplishments of chinese industry since the start of reform in 1978 focusing on the internal dynamics of the development process considers the future of partial reform and discusses the implications of china s industrial reform experience

how vulnerable is the emissions market to transaction costs an abms approach abstract the impact of transaction costs on the early emissions trading market is examined by applying an agent based model and simulation abms approach for a realistic model set up bounded rationality stochastic characteristics and learning by doing are considered in our search processes marginal abatement cost parameters are obtained from yoo et al 2010 which is an experimental study on the emissions trading in the korean power sector sensitivity analyses are performed on market performance indices with regard to transaction cost parameters which represent scales and the learning elasticities of transaction costs a total of 960 simulations were run in this sensitivity analysis sensitivity analysis results consistently show that higher transaction costs worsen market performance the most remarkable finding in these results is that welfare performance of all the transactions decreases by up to 50 as the scale parameters of transaction costs increase implying that welfare gain from introducing emissions trading disappears significantly however with learning curve effect welfare performance could be regained by up to 26 in sum although transaction costs significantly encroach upon trade gains at the early stage based on our simulation results the welfare loss by way of transaction costs is lessened as the knowledge of market participants progresses

the development of china s solar photovoltaic industry why industrial policy failed this article studies china s central local government relations in the formation and implementation of an industry policy in china the central government is responsible for policy formation and the local governments are responsible for policy implementation where local governments are allowed ample flexibility in the ways to achieve the policy mandate this arrangement is conducive to local competition but there is no built in mechanism in the system to regulate such competition the system is defective in the execution of an industrial policy in that it fails to discipline the recipients of policy favours and to make efficient exit selections because local competition involves policy resources as well as economic resources the outcome of competition is not necessarily consistent with the comparative advantage of the region the more that policy is emphasised in industrial development the more that competition tends to favour large and rich cities after a certain period of hands off local competition the timing of which is unpredictable but will come when the industry runs into troubles the central government holds the ultimate power to determine the winners the central government typically picks the large and strong firms as the winners which are crowned as a national team and became eligible for further policy support this institutional set up produces a rapidly growing industry which often results in over capacity but not necessarily a competitive industry i use the case of china s solar photovoltaic industry to illustrate these points

governing china s transition to the market institutional incentives politicians choices and unintended outcomes this essay reviews two books that seek to account for china s success in making economic reforms and sustaining rapid growth one perspective explains china s reformist approach in terms of politicians making choices under certain institutional rules the other sees an economic logic of market transition and emphasizes policymakers limited abilities in governing the economy the essay assesses the merits of these competing claims it calls for better specification of the causal linkages between institutional rules and politicians choices and concludes that both the dynamics and dilemmas of china s political economy are explained in terms of increasing market competition finally the essay evaluates the argument that decentralization leads to market segmentation and points to the chinese government s evolving role in dealing with the economy

a social institutional approach to identifying generation cohorts in china with a comparison with american consumers identifying distinctive target segments is a fundamental challenge faced by international marketers this paper describes an approach to understanding consumer market structures in an important international market china and to segmenting chinese consumers by integrating insights from generational cohort and social institutional theories we conduct two empirical studies to verify how china s recent momentous ideological events could give rise to and affect the life experiences of different generation cohorts in the country the results of study 1 support the conceptual framework and establish three distinct cohorts in china red guards modern realists and global materialists study 2 builds on the findings of study 1 it links cohort differences to differences in consumer values materialism and choice behaviors foreign vs local brands and then compares them with parallel consumers in the united states this paper outlines and tests an approach to segmentation that can help international firms identify distinct segments in and design effective marketing strategies for china

china s changing urban governance in the transition towards a more market oriented economy china s changing urban development processes and urban landscapes in the transition towards a more market oriented economy have received extensive research attention in recent years relatively the governing of chinese cities is still underresearched this article aims to analyse the forces released both inside and outside the formal socialist state system and the impacts on phenomenal restructuring of urban governance especially at local levels marketisation has created new elements beyond the reach of state work units that represent the state s hierarchical control the pillars of the socialist governing structure the party state the work units system and household registration are shaken by these forces the changes in the organisation of people capital production materials infrastructure and space fundamentally demand new urban governance territorial organisations such as the municipality urban districts street office and residents committees are reinvented and consolidated to restore a governable society the devolution towards the base level and the reinvention of local communities reflect the state s attempt to reconsolidate its power to create a governable society as well as to cope with practical pressures such as the provision of social assistance to poor and aged residents re employment of laid off workers and the management of floating immigrants the combination of new market elements and decentralised state apparatus has given rise to the entrepreneurial endeavour of china s governance this research highlights the micro foundation of the new urban governance in addition to the globalisation capital mobility city competitiveness thesis

fuzzy inductive reasoning expectation formation and the behavior of security prices abstract this paper extends the santa fe artificial stock market model sfasm studied by lebaron arthur and palmer 1999 journal of economic dynamics and control 23 1487 1516 in two important directions first some might question whether it is reasonable to assume that traders are capable of handling a large number of rules each with numerous conditions as is assumed in the sfasm we demonstrate that similar results can be obtained even after severely limiting the reasoning process we show this by allowing agents the ability to compress information into a few fuzzy notions which they can in turn process and analyze with fuzzy logic second lebaron et al have reported that the kurtosis of their simulated stock returns is too small as compared to real data we demonstrate that with a minor modification to how traders go about deciding which of their prediction rules to rely on when making demand decisions the model can in fact produce return kurtosis that is comparable to that of actual returns data

models of technology diffusion abstract the literature on new technology diffusion is vast and it spills over many conventional disciplinary boundaries this paper surveys the literature by focusing on alternative explanations of the dominant stylized fact that the usage of new technologies over time typically follows an s curve the most commonly found model which is used to account for this model is the so called epidemic model which builds on the premise that what limits the speed of usage is the lack of information available about the new technology how to use it and what it does the leading alternate model is often called the probit model which follows from the premise that different firms with different goals and abilities are likely to want to adopt the new technology at different times in this model diffusion occurs as firms of different types gradually adopt it there are actually many ways to generate an s curve and the third class of models which we examine are models of density dependence popularized by population ecologists in these models the twin forces of legitimation and competition help to establish new technologies and then ultimately limit their take up finally we look at models in which the initial choice between different variants of the new technology affect the subsequent diffusion speed of the chosen technology such models often rely on information cascades which drive herd like adoption behaviour when a particular variant is finally selected

uncertain health and survival effects on end of life consumption this article analyzes the impact of health and survival uncertainty on the saving and consumption decisions of retirees a dynamic programming approach is used to model the household s planning problem the utility parameters are estimated using panel data we find that a fall into poor health raises the marginal utility from consumption simulations are used to indicate the effects of falling into poor health and loss of spouse they reveal a large transfer from the healthy to the sick partner and a strong dependence of saving on the survivor benefits suggesting that concern about the surviving spouse is an important motive for saving

genetic algorithms and inflationary economies abstract this paper studies overlapping generations economies in which agents use genetic algorithms to learn correct decision rules the results of computer simulations show that a genetic algorithm converges to the unique monetary steady state in case of a constant money supply policy and to the low inflation stationary equilibrium in case of a constant real deficit financed through seignorage features of the genetic algorithm adaptation are compared to the performance of other learning algorithms and to the behavior observed in experiments with human subjects in the same olg environments

the structure of ownership and the theory of the firm the separation of ownership from control produces a condition where the interests of owner and of ultimate manager may and often do diverge and where many of the checks which formerly operated to limit the use of power disappear in creating these new relationships the quasi public corporation may fairly be said to work a revolution it has divided ownership into nominal ownership and the power formerly joined to it thereby the corporation has changed the nature of profit seeking enterprise 1

local governments as industrial firms an organizational analysis of china s transitional economy despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies china s rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises kornai s theory of soft budbet constraints born of the failure of earlier hungarian reforms fosters such skepticism but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises and a greater capacity to monitor them in china s vast public sector the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market oriented firm

multi agent simulations to explore rules for rural credit in a highland farming community of northern thailand thanks to recent advances in the field of distributed artificial intelligence agentbased models abm can now be used to run simulations of social phenomena based on their computerized representations and to apply experimental methods in social sciences axelrod 1997 gilbert and troitzsch 1999 jager 2000 in the field of renewable resource management and environmental sciences several abm simulation platforms offer the possibility to explore interactions between social and ecological dynamics costanza and ruth 1998 bousquet et al 1998 lansing 2002 in these complex systems the social and economic dynamics can be viewed as a set of interactions among heterogeneous agents generating aggregate phenomena that are different from the behaviour of groups of average individuals considered in classical economic thinking rouchier and bousquet 1998 such a view was adopted in the research presented here

crises and confidence systemic banking crises and depositor behavior abstract we show that individuals who have experienced a systemic banking crisis are 11 percentage points less likely to use banks in the u s than otherwise similar individuals who emigrated from the same country but did not live through a crisis this finding is robust to controlling for exposure to other macroeconomic events and to various methods for addressing potential bias due to migrant self selection consistent with the view that personal experience plays an important role in decision making the effects are larger for individuals who were older and more likely to have had wealth entrusted to the banking system at the time of the crisis and for people who experienced crises in countries without deposit insurance

impact of spatial differentiation of nitrogen taxes on french farms compliance costs the spatial differentiation of input based pollution fees should in theory decrease compliance costs in the case of nitrate pollution of water bodies from agriculture because both the damage and the compliance costs vary over space however the empirical evidence in the literature does not agree on the extent of the potential savings from differentiation we address this issue in the case of france using a mathematical programming model of agricultural supply aropaj the modeling approach used accounts for the spatial diversity of nitrate pollution and the heterogeneity of farming systems our results reveal the efficiency gains from differentiating pollution fees among polluters and water bodies for instance firm specific and water body specific taxes represent respectively 5 8 and 32 5 of farmers gross margin in terms of compliance costs whereas a uniform policy at the river basin district or national level leads to major economic losses and abandonment of the agricultural activity these results stem from the lower tax rates faced by farmers in less polluted areas for scenarios based on spatial differentiation our estimates suggest that realistic regulation via input based pollution fees should be differentiated in order to significantly reduce the financial burden on farmers of conforming to predefined pollution levels some potential adverse effects related to input based taxation and land use change call for additional fine scale nitrogen pollution regulation e g limitations on crop switching

uniform and non uniform second best input taxes we investigate second best input based taxes foragricultural nonpoint pollution control when marketprices are endogenous and production isheterogeneous theoretically we derive the optimalforms of taxes which take account of heterogeneity non uniform taxes and a tax which does not auniform tax empirically we use a multi factor market equilibrium simulation model to determineoptimal tax rates and associated equity effects particularly differences in landowner gains lossesacross a heterogeneous region when market prices areendogenous second best tax policies result inpecuniary externalities that affect existingenvironmental externalities in particular thepecuniary externalities amplify the effect of producerheterogeneity on determination of sub regionaldifferences in tax rates and returns to land particularly for the uniform policy with endogenousprices the uniform tax rate is considerably higherthan any of the non uniform rates and ironically thenon uniform taxes result in less dispersion oflandowner gains across sub regions than the uniformtax

elite opportunity in transitional economies command economies gave communist era elites administrative control and material privilege but severely restricted money income and private wealth markets and privatization have injected new value into public assets and create unprecedented opportunities for elite insiders these opportunities depend on the extent of regime change and barriers to asset appropriation regime change varies from the survival of the entire party hierarchy to its rapid collapse and defeat in competitive elections barriers to asset appropriation vary with the extent pace and form of privatization and the concentration and liquidity of assets different combinations of such circumstances jointly affect the extent to which prior elites obtain ownership or control of privatized assets use political office to extract larger incomes move into salaried elite occupations or fall out of the elite altogether regime change and barriers to asset appropriation affect change at the national level but outcomes vary across economic sectors because of characteristics of organizations elite positions and assets this elementary theory serves to integrate varied findings from recent research on central europe china and russia and yields predictions for other regions

energy efficiency in india assessing the policy regimes and their impacts in the recent years india has emerged as one of the fast growing economies of the world necessitating equally rapid increase in modern energy consumption with an imminent global climate change threat india will have difficulties in continuing with this rising energy use levels towards achieving high economic growth it will have to follow an energy efficient pathway in attaining this goal in this context an attempt is made to present india s achievements on the energy efficiency front by tracing the evolution of policies and their impacts the results indicate that india has made substantial progress in improving energy efficiency which is evident from the reductions achieved in energy intensities of gdp to the tune of 88 during 1980 2007 similar reductions have been observed both with respect to overall indian economy and the major sectors of the economy in terms of energy intensity of gdp india occupies a relatively high position of nine among the top 30 energy consuming countries of the world c 2009 elsevier ltd all rights reserved