violence during democratization and the quality of democratic institutions abstract this paper investigates the impact of violent civil conflicts during the process of democratization on the institutional quality of the emerging democracies we propose a theory of endogenous regime transition in which violent conflict can arise in equilibrium peaceful transitions lead to a social contract that provides all groups with political representation and leads to better protection of civil liberties than violent transitions empirical evidence from the third wave of democratization based on a difference in difference methodology supports the theoretical predictions the findings suggest that compared to peaceful transitions violent conflicts during the democratic transition have persistent negative effects on the institutional quality of the emerging democracies

revealing rival marginal offer prices via inverse optimization we consider a strategic producer that trades its energy in a multi period network constrained electricity pool and for strategic reasons is interested in identifying its rival producers offer prices considering industry practice we assume that the strategic producer has knowledge of the daily market outcomes i e energy quantities sold bought and resulting locational marginal prices lmps for each time period and all nodes of the network using this information we formulate an inverse optimization problem that allows estimating the rival producers offer prices that have been marginal at any of the time periods under study such problem is well behaved effectively identifies rival offer prices and can be efficiently solved the effectiveness of the proposed technique is illustrated through a simple example and a realistic case study

financial risk management in a competitive electricity market this paper proposes solutions for electricity producers in the field of financial risk management for electric energy contract evaluation the efficient frontier is used as a tool to identify the preferred portfolio of contracts each portfolio has a probability density function for the profit for important scheduling policies closed form solutions are found for the amount of futures contracts that correspond to the efficient frontier production scheduling must consider resource constraints it is found that without resource constraints the portfolio with the highest expected profit can be preferred even for a risk averse decision maker when resource constraints are present portfolios not corresponding to the maximum expected profit criteria will more frequently be preferred

determination of network rental components in a competitive electricity market the locational marginal pricing lmp based settlement results in a surplus collected by the system operator from the consumers the nonlinear transmission losses and the constrained operation of the power system due to operating limits such as power flow limits on transmission lines cause the accumulation of this surplus this accumulated revenue referred to as the network rental in this paper has two main components loss rental and constraint rental this paper develops a method to calculate these different rental components paid by each consumer by combining the power flow tracing and kkt optimality conditions this yields quantitative determination of how each consumer has overpaid in the form of loss rental and constraint rental which in turn can be used to get a better insight of how the rental is accumulated simple three and four bus systems are used to demonstrate the proposed method

partisan competition growth and the franchise we present an argument for changes in the franchise in which an elite split along economic interests uses the suffrage to influence implemented policies through the influence of these policies on the character of industrialization we analyze the effects of franchise changes on economic growth we identify in the social structure of society an explanation for the connection between enfranchisement and growth when 1 there exists an economic conflict among the elite 2 landed classes are not politically strong and 3 there exists a critical mass of industrial workers we observe both growth and democratization the lack of conditions 1 or 2 resolves in stagnant autocracies while the absence of condition 3 drives growth deterring democratic expansions we provide historical support for our argument by analyzing the experience of eleven countries

optimal alliance strategies among retailers under energy deviation settlement mechanism in china s forward electricity market an energy deviation settlement eds mechanism has been proposed to settle the deviation between consumption and energy contracts in china s forward electricity market due to high eds costs of electricity retailers a deviation mutual insurance dmi mechanism is put forward representing an option for electricity retailers to reduce the deviation through contract transfer given this background an optimal alliance strategy is proposed to maximize the utility of different types of individual electricity retailers the alliance income model considers the eds cost reduction and the cooperation cost analyzed based on transaction cost theory tct an improved income allocation method which considers distribution indexes selected by game theory and resource dependence theory rdt is proposed to ensure the comprehensive and reasonable allocation of alliance income considering the expected income and financial risk an evaluation model using conditional value at risk cvar as the financial risk assessment indicator is presented to measure the stability of alliances simulations based on data from a provincial electricity market in china illustrate that the eds costs of retailers can be reduced by selecting appropriate partners for alliance in addition the proposed alliance income allocation method is more reasonable and more targeted than the cooperative game based methods

the economic effects of democratic participation abstract considerable concern has been expressed in recent years about declines in voter participation rates in the united states and in several other major democratic countries some feel low participation rates introduce a class bias into the political process and thereby worsen the outcomes from it little empirical work exists however that measures the effects of lower participation on the welfare of a country this paper begins to fill this void it presents cross national evidence that high levels of democratic participation are associated with more equal distributions of income the paper s results also imply however that this reduction in income inequality comes at a cost high participation rates are related to larger government sectors which in turn lead to slower economic growth we also present evidence of the capture of government by upper income groups in latin and central american countries

inequality democracy and the protection of property rights motivated by the observed relevance of institutional quality such as strong property rights for economic performance this research considers the emergence of property rights protection as a political outcome it argues that the support for such protection is greater the more equal income distribution and the smaller political bias when these conditions initially hold the politically influential rich elite may prefer to relinquish its power through democratisation in order to commit future policy makers to the enforcement of property rights thus ensuring larger investment and faster growth along the transition path in a very unequal economy however such democratisation will not take place

economic performance of contracts in electricity markets a fuzzy and multiple criteria approach in competitive electricity markets consumers and suppliers are exposed to price risk quantity risk as well as other risks such as credit risk these risks can be managed through an adequate portfolio of contracts the goal of the approach proposed is to help a market player to appraise portfolios of contracts from the point of view of the economic performance that measures the potentiality of gains and the potentiality of losses taking into account the multidimensional aspect of risk the vagueness and nuances of the decision maker s preferences and the different kinds of uncertainties the three steps proposed are portfolio construction portfolio evaluation and portfolio ranking this requires modeling of uncertainties contracts and decision maker s preferences the example of a large consumer of electric energy and a comparison with the value at risk system are presented the proposed approach is applied to appraise different strategies for a swiss utility

optimal price and quantity determination for retail electric power contracts considering the viewpoint of a retailer this paper analyzes the problem of setting up contracts on both the supplier and end user sides to maximize profits while maintaining an acceptable level of settlement risk the proposed stochastic optimization model can assist retailers with these efforts and guide them in their contractual arrangements a realistic example illustrates the capabilities of the methodology proposed

market equilibrium under incomplete and imperfect information in bilateral electricity markets in contrast to the centralized pool model bilateral markets present a decision making situation in which information plays a major role along with the physical and operative constraints of the network we propose a model that includes network constraints for competitive bilateral electricity markets based on an evolutionary bipartite complex network in which the nodes and weighted links represent the players and transactions respectively the strong stable equilibrium of the network is applied to detect possible market equilibria obtained through a dynamic game with incomplete and imperfect information in which the players form an evolutionary network while trying to maximize their own utilities the model is conceptually illustrated with a four bus test system and then applied to the ieee30 test system to analyze the impact of the transmission network and information on the equilibria and market performance

why did the elites extend the suffrage democracy and the scope of government with an application to britain s age of reform a new rationale is presented for why an elite may want to expand the franchise even in the absence of threats to the established order expanding the franchise can turn politicians away from particularistic politics based on ad personam redistribution within the elite and foster competition based on programs with diffuse benefits if these programs are valuable a majority of the elite votes in favor of an extension of the franchise despite the absence of a threat from the disenfranchised we argue that the evolution of public spending and of political competition in nineteenth century britain is consistent with our model i introduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century in most countries narrow elites had a disproportionate influence on public affairs even in england where parliament was an influential institution suffrage was mostly the privilege of the wealthy and some members of parliament were elected in boroughs with as few as 100 voters while cities such as manchester did not have any representative a century later most western countries had universal male suffrage with female suffrage to arrive shortly thereafter what brought about this democratic revolution in many cases the elites were forced out of power after violent revolutions however there are important examples such as england where democratization took the form of gradual extensions of the suffrage and these were accompanied by little overt violence it is the peculiar pride of england that the record of social and political reform is to be found on the statute book not in the annals of revolution cheyney 1931 p vii such peaceful democratizations are difficult to rationalize within the benchmark political economic models in those models extending the franchise dilutes the elite s power to influence policy and results

experience with pjm market operation system design and implementation this paper outlines the fundamental features of the pjm day ahead energy market and real time energy market the day ahead market is based on a voluntary least cost security constrained unit commitment and dispatch with several fundamental design features that ensure the market is robust and competitive this market offers market participants the option to lock in energy and transportation charges at binding day ahead prices the flexibility of the day ahead market rules provide all participants with equal access to the day ahead market through consistent price signals and by providing all participants with the ability to submit virtual demand bids and virtual supply offers these mechanisms promote liquidity in the markets economic incentives drive the convergence of the day ahead and real time market prices the real time energy market is based on security constrained economic dispatch and is cleared based on the actual system operating conditions the lmp based markets support reliable grid operations through efficient price signals

evolution toward standardized market design the evolution toward the standardized market design smd is presented in this paper with references to the market developments in new zealand australia pjm iso ne and ercot in the development of market designs two main objectives market liquidity facilitating bilateral trading and pricing efficiency facilitating congestion management have been pursued the efforts to balance the seemingly conflicting objectives led to most markets designed with a uniform or zonal pricing model introduction of locational marginal pricing and evolution of transmission rights from physical to financial form made it possible to harmonize the potentially conflicting goals in a market design the close coupling between energy and ancillary services requires that markets for these commodities be carefully coordinated different operational practices and reliability standard requirements have led to major differences in ancillary service market designs

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

financial bilateral contract negotiation in wholesale electricity markets using nash bargaining theory bilateral contracts are important risk hedging instruments constituting a major component in the portfolios held by many electric power market participants however bilateral contract negotiation is a complicated process as it involves risk management strategic bargaining and multi market participation this study analyzes a financial bilateral contract negotiation process between a generation company and a load serving entity in a wholesale electric power market with congestion managed by locational marginal pricing nash bargaining theory is used to model a pareto efficient settlement point the model predicts negotiation outcomes under various conditions and identifies circumstances in which the two parties might fail to reach an agreement both analysis and simulation are used to gain insight regarding how these negotiation outcomes systematically vary in response to changes in the participants risk preferences and price biases

democracy collective action and intra elite conflict we analyze a model where there is uncertainty about the future power of two ex ante symmetric elites to appropriate surplus and ex ante surplus sharing agreements are not binding we show that in an oligarchy the stronger elite appropriates the entire available surplus whereas a democracy results in a more balanced surplus allocation between the two elites in a democracy the newly enfranchised non elite organize to act collectively so that the weaker elite can credibly threaten to form a coalition with the organized non elite against the stronger elite such a threat ensures that the more balanced surplus sharing proposal chosen by majority voting is renegotiation proof therefore sufficiently risk averse elites unanimously choose democracy as a form of insurance against future imbalances in relative power we emphasize that franchise extension to and low cost of organizing collective political activity for the non elite are both necessary features of a democracy our formal analysis can account for the stylized facts that emerge from a comparative analysis of indian and western european democracies

deliverable robust ramping products in real time markets the increasing penetration of variable energy resources has led to more uncertainties in power systems flexible ramping products frp have been adopted by several electricity markets to manage the uncertainties we reveal that neglected line congestion for frp may not only cause infeasibility but also result in a failure of cost recovery to address the deliverability issues on frp this paper proposes a new concept deliverable robust ramping products drrp in real time markets the drrp includes generation ramping reserve and generation capacity reserve the drrp is deliverable and immunized against any predefined uncertainty it also fully addresses the bid cost recovery issue caused by the line congestion in existing frps the prices of drrp are derived within the affine adjustable robust optimization aaro framework these prices can be used to identify valuable reserves among available reserves and quantify the values of flexible resources that provide reserves this paper also proposes a general approach to obtaining the time decoupled prices for drrp and generation which can be used for the market settlement of the first interval only in real time markets simulations on a 3 bus system and the ieee 118 bus system are performed to illustrate the concept of drrp and the advantages of drrp compared to existing frp

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

a comparison of the labor supply findings from the four negative income tax experiments between 1968 and 1982 the united states federal government sponsored four negative income tax experiments this paper provides a set of consensus estimates of the labor supply responses to these experiments it is found that despite the wide range of treatments and evaluation methodologies the results are remarkably consistent on average husbands reduced labor supply by about the equivalent of two weeks of full time employment wives and single female heads reduced labor supply by about the equivalent of three weeks of full time employment youth reduced labor supply by about the equivalent of four weeks of full time employment estimated income and substitution effects are quite similar to those obtained from nonexperimental studies

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

dynamic stability and reform of political institutions abstract this paper examines endogenous institutional change in a class of dynamic political games the political aggregation rules used at date t 1 are instrumental choices under rules at date t effectively rules are players who can strategically delegate future policy making authority to different rules a political rule is stable if it selects itself a reform occurs when an alternative rule is selected the stability of a political rule is shown to depend on whether its choices are dynamically consistent for instance simple majority rules can be shown to be dynamically consistent in many common environments where wealth weighted voting rules are not the result extends to political rules that incorporate private activities such as extra legal protests threats or private investment the approach is one way of understanding various explanations of institutional change proposed in the literature a parametric model of public goods provision gives an illustration

negotiating bilateral contracts in electricity markets in mixed pool bilateral electricity markets participants can sign forward bilateral contracts several months in advance of its delivery in addition generators may sell to and loads may buy from the pool at the spot price through the day ahead or balancing markets forward bilateral contracts have the advantage of price predictability in comparison with the uncertain spot price however the risk is that such a contract commits the partners to a price that may be disadvantageous compared to the spot price here we propose a systematic negotiation scheme through which a generator and load can reach a mutually beneficial and risk tolerable forward bilateral contract either physical or financial under this approach the generator and load respond rationally to a stream of bilateral bids counter bids and offers counter offers considering their respective benefits while accounting for the risks incurred by the prediction uncertainty in the pool spot price and other market parameters over the length of the contract each negotiating party can choose its own definition of risk which can be influenced by regret value at risk or dispersion from the mean numerical tests show that this flexible negotiating approach can be readily put into practice

weekly self scheduling forward contracting and pool involvement for an electricity producer an adaptive robust optimization approach abstract this paper addresses the optimization under uncertainty of the self scheduling forward contracting and pool involvement of an electricity producer operating a mixed power generation station which combines thermal hydro and wind sources and uses a two stage adaptive robust optimization approach in this problem the wind power production and the electricity pool price are considered to be uncertain and are described by uncertainty convex sets to solve this problem two variants of a constraint generation algorithm are proposed and their application and characteristics discussed both algorithms are used to solve two case studies based on two producers each operating equivalent generation units differing only in the thermal units characteristics their market strategies are investigated for three different scenarios corresponding to as many instances of electricity price forecasts the effect of the producers approach whether conservative or more risk prone is also investigated by solving each instance for multiple values of the so called budget parameter it was possible to conclude that this parameter influences markedly the producers strategy in terms of scheduling profit forward contracting and pool involvement these findings are presented and analyzed in detail and an attempted rationale is proposed to explain the less intuitive outcomes regarding the computational results these show that for some instances the two variants of the algorithms have a similar performance while for a particular subset of them one variant has a clear superiority

combined pool bilateral dispatch i performance of trading strategies this three paper series deals with the dispatch of power networks under mixed pool bilateral trading the major questions examined are i to what degree does the relative level of pool versus bilateral trading influence performance in terms of individual power levels costs prices revenues and expenditures ii what is the comparative performance of mixed trading with firm and nonfirm bilateral contracts under various curtailment strategies and iii is the revenue derived from the pool and bilateral trading consistent with the corresponding unbundled costs the above issues are sequentially addressed in each of the three parts the eventual goal of these results is to help generator and load serving entities choose appropriate relative levels of pool versus bilateral trades while considering risk economic performance as well as physical constraints this paper proposes a one step optimal power flow model that dispatches the pool in combination with the privately negotiated bilateral contracts while minimizing cost and accounting for both losses and congestion in part i notions of pool bilateral demand and generation as well as a number of technical and economic performance measures for each competing entity are defined this dissection of total and individual financial measures according to pool or bilateral trading allows the market participant to evaluate the profitability of each component of its chosen pool bilateral mix a number of simulation results illustrate the effect of varying the relative levels of pool bilateral trading on the values of individual performance measures

the nature of the farm abstract using a model based on a trade off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small family based firms into large factory style corporate firms nature is both seasonal and random and the interplay of these qualities generates moral hazard limits the gains from specialization and causes timing problems between stages of production by identifying conditions in which these forces vary we derive testable predictions about the choice of organization and the extent of farm integration to test these predictions we study the historical development of several agricultural industries and analyze data from a sample of over 1 000 farms in british columbia and louisiana in general seasonality and randomness so limit the benefits of specialization that family farms are optimal but when farmers are successful in mitigating the effects of seasonality and random shocks to output farm organizations gravitate toward fa

transaction analysis in deregulated power systems using game theory the electric power industry is in transition to a deregulated marketplace for power transactions in this environment all power transactions are made based on price rather than cost a regional power pool is noted as the most straightforward path to a deregulated electricity marketplace however many questions remain unanswered regarding the economics of power pool participation in a deregulated energy marketplace participants are interested in maximizing their own profits regardless of the system wide profits it is perceived that competition will reduce the price of electricity for retail customers however the key issue for participants is related with the price definition to remain competitive in this paper the authors use game theory to simulate the decision making process for defining offered prices in a deregulated environment the outcome of this study may be used by power pool coordinators to discourage unfair coalitions a modified ieee 30 bus power system is used as a deregulated power pool to illustrate the main features of the proposed method

natural resources education and economic development economic growth since 1965 has varied inversely with the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries four main channels of transmission from abundant natural resources to stunted economic development are discussed a the dutch disease b rent seeking c overconfidence and d neglect of education public expenditure on education relative to national income expected years of schooling for girls and gross secondary school enrolment are all shown to be inversely related to the share of natural capital in national wealth across countries natural capital appears to crowd out human capital thereby slowing down the pace of economic development

does high income promote democracy the authors construct a statistical model with which to test whether the regularity that democracy is more commonly found among wealthy countries stems from a democratizing effect of high income or is due entirely to other factors such as the historical context various features of the institutional setting and simultaneity with the process of leadership change even after correcting for these many other influences the democratizing effect of income remains as a statistically significant factor promoting the emergence of democratic political institutions the authors go on to find that leaders risks of losing power rise during their time in office and that these risks are higher in more democratic countries the authors confirm the finding by burkhart and lewis beck that the democracy promoting effect of income is stronger among the european countries they suggest that high income has a more powerful democratizing effect among the southern european countries because it interacts with pressure from major trading partners to democratize this suggests a revaluation of policies designed to foster the replacement of authoritarian regimes by democratic ones through free trade

an agent based simulation of power generation company behavior in electricity markets under different market clearing mechanisms deregulated electricity markets are expected to provide affordable electricity for consumers through promoting competition yet the results do not always fulfill the expectations the regulator s market clearing mechanism is a strategic choice that may affect the level of competition in the market we conceive of the market clearing mechanism as composed of two components pricing rules and rationing policies we investigate the strategic behavior of power generation companies under different market clearing mechanisms using an agent based simulation model which integrates a game theoretical understanding of the auction mechanism in the electricity market and generation companies learning mechanism results of our simulation experiments are presented using various case studies representing different market settings the market in simulations is observed to converge to a nash equilibrium of the stage game or to a similar state under most parameter combinations compared to pay as bid pricing bid prices are closer to marginal costs on average under uniform pricing while gencos total profit is also higher the random rationing policy of the iso turns out to be more successful in achieving lower bid prices and lower genco profits in minimizing gencos total profit a combination of pay as bid pricing rule and random rationing policy is observed to be the most promising

strong formulations for multistage stochastic self scheduling unit commitment with the increasing penetration of renewable energy into the power grid system the volatility of real time electricity prices increases significantly this brings challenges for independent power producers to provide optimal bidding strategies the traditional approaches of only attending the day ahead market might not be profitable enough without taking advantage of real time price volatility in this paper we study the optimal bidding strategies for the independent power producers utilizing self scheduling strategies to participate in the real time market considering real time electricity price volatility with the objective of maximizing the total expected profit considering the correlations of renewable energy generation outputs among different time periods the correlations of real time prices are captured in our modeling framework in which we explore a multistage stochastic scenario tree to formulate the price uncertainties accordingly the derived multistage stochastic self scheduling unit com

confiscation by the ruler the rise and fall of jewish lending in the middle ages he power to confiscate is a mixed blessing a ruler who is truly absolute can confiscate from his subjects at will in practice however no ruler is as absolute as the term implies for example a ruler may have to forgo investment projects that would otherwise increase his wealth because his subjects fearing confiscation are reluctant to deal with him and because he is not absolute enough to costlessly force subjects to do so this problem is especially acute when the ruler stands to gain by borrowing from his subjects as bulow and rogoff show a debtor who cannot be penalized for repudiating his debt will repudiate 1 obviously the same applies to an absolute ruler as veitch points out however he will not necessarily repudiate at his first opportunity 2 as long as he expects his future borrowing to exceed his interest payments he gains by waiting what veitch fails to realize is that no lender can operate indefinitely on such a basis and consequently that the ruler will repudiate when the present value of his debt is maximized since repudiation is inevitable it might seem that an absolute ruler would be unable to find willing lenders loans are often repudiated for the more prosaic reason that borrowers lack adequate resources at repayment time lenders may try to avert this outcome by lending only to borrowers who demonstrate that they will be

impact of data quality on real time locational marginal price the problem of characterizing impacts of data quality on real time locational marginal price lmp is considered because the real time lmp is computed from the estimated network topology and system state bad data that cause errors in topology processing and state estimation affect real time lmp it is shown that the power system state space is partitioned into price regions of convex polytopes under different bad data models the worst case impacts of bad data on real time lmp are analyzed numerical simulations are used to illustrate worst case performance for ieee 14 and ieee 118 networks

pricing electricity in pools with wind producers this paper considers an electricity pool that includes a significant number of wind producers and is cleared through a network constrained auction one day in advance and on an hourly basis the hourly auction is formulated as a two stage stochastic programming problem where the first stage represents the clearing of the market and the second stage models the system operation under a number of plausible wind production realizations this formulation co optimizes energy and reserve and allows deriving both pool energy prices and balancing energy prices these prices result in both cost recovery for producers and revenue reconciliation a case study of realistic size is used to illustrate the functioning of the proposed pricing scheme

sample attrition and labor supply response in experimental panel data sample attrition is a potentially serious problem for analysis of panel data particularly experimental panel data in this article a variety of estimation procedures are used to assess the importance of attrition bias in labor supply response to the seattle and denver income maintenance experiments sime dime data from social security administration earnings records and the sime dime public use file are used to test various hypotheses concerning attrition bias the study differs from previous research in that data on both attriters and nonattriters are used to estimate the experimental labor supply response although not conclusive the analysis suggests that attrition bias is probably not a serious enough problem in the sime dime data to warrant extensive correction procedures the methodology used in this study could be applied to other panel data sets

coordination commitment and enforcement the case of the merchant guild we interpret historical evidence in light of a repeated game model to conclude that merchant guilds emerged during the late medieval period to allow rulers of trade centers to commit to the security of alien merchants the merchant guild developed the theoretically required attributes secured merchants property rights and evolved in response to crises to extend the range of its effectiveness contributing to the expansion of trade during the late medieval period we elaborate on the relations between our theory and the monopoly theory of merchant guilds and contrast it with repeated game theories that provide no role for formal organization

a comparison of the effect of welfare programme features on welfare participation one and two parent families the effect of welfare programme characteristics on the decision to enter the welfare system is modelled as a binary discrete choice latent variable model dependent upon an underlying index function the two chief classes of welfare beneficiaries in the us welfare system are analysed two parent families and single female headed families the data set is a large recent non experimental multiyear cross sectional pooled data set derived from the us census bureaus current population survey behavioural impacts from a range of economic variables are consistent in sign with predictions made by economic theory newly estimated comprehensive descriptive statistics of the entire welfare system for both single female household heads and married couples with children are employed to characterize the welfare system statistically significant estimates of substantial magnitude are obtained for the impacts on welfare participation for the welfare guarantee level the effective tax rate on earned income and the effec

risk assessment in energy trading this paper provides a state of the art summary of risk assessment in energy trading techniques from financial engineering are needed by electric energy companies to manage price risk these tools are needed by suppliers distributors and traders in a competitive electric power marketplace tools that have been adapted to the specific environment of the electric power system include portfolio analysis and hedging instruments this paper provides a comprehensive critical literature survey of what has been applied to date in the power markets and which areas continue to need additional research one example market scenario is used throughout the paper to demonstrate the usefulness of the risk assessment methods

the origins of democracy a model with application to ancient greece abstract this paper seeks to provide an improved understanding of the origins of democracy it begins by developing a theoretical model to demonstrate how exogenous economic conditions can influence the incentives to establish democratic institutions the model predicts that democratic institutions will expand where they mitigate important time inconsistency problems and therefore encourage investment exogenous conditions determine the magnitude of those time inconsistency problems and hence the likelihood of democracy a comparison of ancient greek city states suggests that the conditions under which democracy first emerged support the model other potential applications are discussed

reverse auction with buyer supplier negotiation using bi level distributed programming this study presents a framework for solving a sealed bid multi issue and multi sourcing reverse auction problem in which negotiation takes place between the buyer and the suppliers during the bidding process the problem is formulated as a bi level distributed programming model in which the buyer is the upper level decision maker while suppliers at the lower level make decisions independent of each other the negotiation process between the buyer and the suppliers is facilitated via the iterative exchange of decision information between the upper and lower levels of the model the outcome of the sealed bid auction is determined using an algorithm designed to establish the optimum quantity allocation and delivery time at the upper level and the corresponding optimized production plans at the lower level the feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated via an illustrative example

optimal self scheduling of thermal units during commissioning this paper addresses the problem of the self scheduling of thermal generating units during commissioning a 0 1 mixed integer linear formulation is presented which allows an accurate and realistic modeling for the scheduling of the commissioning tests that should be performed once the construction of the thermal unit has been completed and prior to entering its commercial operation a flexible contract between the producer and the contractor regarding the performing period of the commissioning tests is proposed the model presented can be used by a producer with thermal units in commissioning who acts either as a price taker or a price maker in the day ahead energy market test results on a medium scale real test system address the effect that the implementation of the proposed model has on the producer profits as well as on the day ahead market clearing prices

is there a politically optimal level of judicial independence independent courts render current policy more durable by raising the cost of future policy changes but may also engage in policy making of their own this paper asks is there an optimal level of judicial independence from the perspective of incumbent officials in the other branches to answer that question the paper develops a model of strategic institutional choice and tests it on the judicial institutions of the american states consistent with the model s predictions the most independenceenhancing institutions are found where political competition between rival parties is tightest and differences between party platforms are largest

why did the west extend the franchise democracy inequality and growth in historical perspective during the nineteenth century most western societies extended voting rights a decision that led to unprecedented redistributive programs we argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by the political elite to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution political transition rather than redistribution under existing political institutions occurs because current transfers do not ensure future transfers while the extension of the franchise changes future political equilibria and acts as a commitment to redistribution our theory also offers a novel explanation for the kuznets curve in many western economies during this period with the fall in inequality following redistribution due to democratization i introduction the nineteenth century was a period of fundamental political reform and unprecedented changes in taxation and redistribution britain for example was transformed from an oligarchy run by an elite to a democracy the franchise was extended in 1832 and then again in 1867 and 1884 transferring voting rights to portions of the society with no previous political representation the decades after the political reforms witnessed radical social reforms increased taxation and the extension of education to the masses moreover as noted by kuznets inequality which was previously increasing started to decline during this period the gini coefficient for income inequality in england and wales had risen from 0 400 in 1823 to 0 627 in 1871 but fell to 0 443 in 1901 two key factors in the reduction in inequality were the increase in the proportion of skilled workers williamson 1985 and the redistribution of income toward the poorer segments of the society for example taxes rose from 8 12 percent of national product in 1867 to 18 8 percent by 1927 and the progressivity of the tax system increased substantially see lindert 1989

hedging with futures contracts in a deregulated electricity industry this paper is a statistical study of direct and cross hedging strategies using futures contracts in an electricity market a comparison of the strategies is based on the standard deviation or risk of the values of the hedging positions results indicate that the use of electricity futures contracts is superior to using other related futures contracts such as crude oil

an international review of the implications of regulatory and electricity market structures on the emergence of grid scale electricity storage abstract energy storage systems ess have the potential to make a significant contribution to planning and operation practises in power systems while ess can be used to provide multiple benefits in the power sector widespread use has been restricted by high technology costs lack of deployment experience and the barriers and uncertainties caused by the present electricity market and regulatory structures that were designed for conventional electricity systems this paper reviews countries with high renewable targets and with significant current or planned ess deployments to ascertain the common problems affecting the use of ess on the grid and to establish where changes have been made or proposed to the electricity market and regulatory frameworks three major problems were identified as the undetermined asset class for ess and unbundled electricity system limiting stakeholders from determining and realising multiple ess benefits low electricity market liquidity and changing market conditions and a lack of common standards and procedures for evaluating connecting operating and maintaining ess based on the established barriers recommendations to update or create policies regulation and market arrangements to increase the viability and wider use of grid level ess are discussed the three key regulatory and policy recommendations were identified as an alignment of renewable policies to that of ess creating a separate asset class for ess and associated rules for regulated and competitive operations and standardising assessment frameworks connection and operational procedures for the use of ess finally three main electricity market recommendations include updating rules to support simultaneous ess operation across wholesale ancillary services and capacity markets updating market rules to allow compensation for flexible and highly accurate responsive demand and generation technologies such as ess and updating market ancillary services energy requirements

combined pool bilateral dispatch part ii curtailment of firm and nonfirm contracts this paper deals with the dispatch of power networks under mixed pool bilateral trading the major questions that are examined are the following 1 to what degree does the relative level of pool versus bilateral trading influence performance in terms of individual power levels costs prices and revenues 2 what is the comparative performance of mixed trading with firm and nonfirm bilateral contracts under various curtailment strategies 3 is the revenue derived from the pool and bilateral trading consistent with the corresponding unbundled costs the above questions are sequentially addressed in separate parts of this three part paper the eventual goal of these results is to help generator and load serving entities choose appropriate relative levels of pool versus bilateral trades while considering risk economic performance and physical constraints in part ii two types of bilateral contracts firm and nonfirm are introduced together with their respective curtailment and noncurtailment bids the optimal power flow problem from part i is now modified to accommodate this new type of operation technical and economical performance measures defined in part i namely generation revenues from bilateral and pool sales pool demand payments plus generation and load expenditures to cover transmission loss and congestion management attributed to bilateral exchanges are also used here together with revenues from contract curtailment and expenditures due to noncurtailment bidding simulation results illustrate the effects of firm and nonfirm contracts and their bidding strategies on the relative levels of pool bilateral trading as well as on economic performance of market participants

is democracy a normal good evidence from democratic movements 1 introduction is democracy a normal good in other words do people desire higher levels of democracy more participation in government as their incomes increase this paper uses the existence of a democratic movement to solve a missing variable problem in the current literature works such as barro 1996 huntington 1991 and lipset 1959 provide evidence of a strong positive correlation between levels of democracy and income this is frequently interpreted as evidence that higher incomes lead people to demand more democracy i address this issue in a more literal sense specifically if our goal is to infer what causes people to demand democracy we cannot ignore the persuasive evidence that citizens of countries like south africa under apartheid burma or china countries with low levels of democracy that have experienced widespread movements for democracy demand democracy instead of democracy levels i use the existence of a democratic movement as evidence of countries demand for democracy in this paper i define democratic movements as widespread public demonstrations that are explicitly pro democracy i e participants demands must include either democracy or direct elections and in which participants express these views physically some of the wellknown democratic movements that are included are the chinese student demonstrators in tiananmen square in 1989 the work of the african national congress and others in south africa to end the nondemocratic system of apartheid and the 1986 people power demonstrations in the philippines that forced ferdinand marcos to concede victory to corazon aquino the main goal of the paper is to use a new data set on democratic movements to estimate the relationship between income and democracy testing more directly than has previously been done whether democracy is a normal good a secondary goal is to investigate the conditions under which democratic movements are most likely to occur in an authoritarian country footnote 1 this excludes boycotts of elections and voting against a proposed authoritarian constitution unless those events are accompanied by physical demonstrations protests or strikes

changes in household size and composition due to financial incentives tax and transfer programs inevitably create incentives relating to the size and composition of households examples of such incentives are the marriage penalty dependents exemptions and the eligibility rules for categorical welfare programs this paper notes that changes in transfer program parameters may encourage recipient households to import nonwage earning individuals especially children and to export wage earners several hypotheses regarding the nature of such responses are derived and supporting evidence is obtained using data from three experimental income maintenance programs the geographic focus is on the united states excerpt

reported vs actual job search by unemployment insurance claimants this study compares self reported job search contacts of unemployment insurance recipients with independently verified job search contacts for the total sample reported contacts averaged 2 61 per week compared with actual contacts of only 1 78 per week nearly one fifth of the sample made no job contacts for the single weeks analyzed the separate equations estimated for reported and actual job contacts suggest that systematic misreporting may distort the conclusions particularly for the impact of unemployment insurance benefits on search intensity that would result from analyzing reported rather than actual contacts some implications of the findings for reported unemployment rates also are explored

power system expansion planning under uncertainty a methodology is described for expansion planning of power systems under uncertainty in factors such as demand growth fuel cost delay in project completion and financial constraints the approach draws upon three classes of techniques decomposition and stochastic optimization provide the basic framework and allow an implicit representation of alternative investment strategies decision analysis is used to represent the dynamic aspects of decision making as uncertainties are resolved over time and hedging objectives from tradeoff analysis help select flexible and resilient expansion strategies case studies within the brazilian system are presented and discussed

impact of unit failure on forward contracting a generating unit can sell its production in the pool facing the financial risk inherent to volatile pool prices alternatively it can sell its production through the futures market at comparatively stable but smaller average prices unlike the pool forward contracts involve an obligation to sell during a specified time period and if the unit fails it should buy energy from the pool to meet its futures market commitments hence taking into account its forced outage rate the unit should determine the appropriate mix of pool and futures market involvement so that its expected profit is maximized for a prespecified risk level on profit variability within this context this paper analyzes the impact of the degree of unavailability of the generating unit on its forward contracting decisions a detailed case study illustrates the analysis performed

labour supply impacts of effective welfare programme parameters a reanalysis we quantify the impact of effective welfare programme parameters on the labour supply of single female household heads the primary group of welfare recipients in the usa our panel of data is derived from the us census bureau s current population survey for the years 1979 to 1990 inclusive behavioural impacts from a range of economic variables are consistent in sign with predictions made by economic theory we find that effective welfare gurantee levels and the effective tax rate on earned income both significantly decrease labour supply the marginal effects of these welfare programme parameters are economically small a us 1000 increase in the expected welfare guarantee level reduces annual labour supply by about 36 hours a 10 percentage point increase in the effective tax rate on earned income reduces annual labour supply by about 7 5 hours

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

influence of price responsive demand shifting bidding on congestion and lmp in pool based day ahead electricity markets this paper investigates the influence of price responsive demand shifting bidding on congestion and locational marginal prices in pool based day ahead electricity markets the market dispatch problem of the pool based day ahead electricity market is formulated as to maximize the social welfare of market participants subject to operational constraints given by real and reactive power balance equations and security constraints in the form of apparent power flow limits over the congested lines the social welfare objective function of the day ahead market dispatch problem maximizes the benefit of distribution companies and other bulk consumers based on their price responsive demand shifting bids and minimizes the real and reactive power generation cost of generation companies the price responsive demand shifting bidding mechanism which has been recently introduced in the literature is able to shift the price responsive demand from the periods of high price to the periods of low price in day ahead electricity markets the comparisons of the price responsive demand shifting bids with conventional price responsive and price taking bids are presented by solving hourly market dispatch problems on five bus ieee 30 bus realistic up 75 bus indian and ieee 118 bus systems for 24 h scheduling period it has been demonstrated that the proposed approach leads to reduction in congestion and locational marginal prices as compared to price responsive and price taking bids and meets the energy consumption targets of distribution companies bulk consumers

on ex post pricing in the real time electricity market this paper proposes a new framework in calculating the ex post prices for the spot electricity market the proposed method finds a set of prices that are as consistent as possible with the actual outputs of resources correctly following their dispatch instructions two alternative consistency metrics are proposed in the paper one measures the difference between the actual performance of an individual resource and its bid based profit maximizing response to the ex post prices in a perfectly competitive market another measures the difference between the ex post price and the price that supports the actual response of an individual resource compared to the existing approaches adopted in the real time electricity markets in the u s the proposed method solves the ex post energy and ancillary service prices directly and simultaneously it does not require heuristics that are hard to justify and has a much clear definition for the pricing problem than the existing approaches do moreover the proposed approach is flexible in the price control required by the market operators numerical examples are presented to further demonstrate the validity of this approach

demand side management for regulation service provisioning through internal pricing we develop a market based mechanism that enables a building smart microgrid operator smo to offer regulation service reserves and meet the associated obligation of fast response to commands issued by the wholesale market independent system operator iso who provides energy and purchases reserves the proposed market based mechanism allows the smo to control the behavior of internal loads through price signals and to provide feedback to the iso a regulation service reserves quantity is transacted between the smo and the iso for a relatively long period of time e g a one hour long time scale during this period the iso follows shorter time scale stochastic dynamics to repeatedly request from the smo to decrease or increase its consumption we model the operational task of selecting an optimal short time scale dynamic pricing policy as a stochastic dynamic program that maximizes average smo and iso utility we then formulate an associated nonlinear programming static problem that provides an upper bound on the optimal utility we study an asymptotic regime in which this upper bound is shown to be tight and the static policy provides an efficient approximation of the dynamic pricing policy equally importantly this framework allows us to optimize the long time scale decision of determining the optimal regulation service reserve quantity we demonstrate verify and validate the proposed approach through a series of monte carlo simulations of the controlled system time trajectories