ecosystem services from eye opening metaphor to complexity blinder abstract what started as a humble metaphor to help us think about our relation to nature has become integral to how we are addressing the future of humanity and the course of biological evolution the metaphor of nature as a stock that provides a flow of services is insufficient for the difficulties we are in or the task ahead indeed combined with the mistaken presumption that we can analyze a global problem within a partial equilibrium economic framework and reach a new economy project by project without major institutional change the simplicity of the stock flow framework blinds us to the complexity of the human predicament the ecosystem services approach can be a part of a larger solution but its dominance in our characterization of our situation and the solution is blinding us to the ecological economic and political complexities of the challenges we actually face

reflections on some unsettled problems of irrigation it is instructive to read the article that katharine coman published in the first issue of the american economic review to gain insight into the problems of collective action related to irrigation in the american west one gains further understanding of the problems coman identifies by using a social ecological system ostrom 2007 2009 to organize the diverse variables identified by coman one gains a general lesson from this analysis that changing the formal governance structure of irrigation is not sufficient to ensure efficient investment in facilities or that farmers are able to acquire property and make a reasonable living building knowledge and trust are however essential for solving collective action problems jel b31 n51 q15 q25 katharine coman wrote a fascinating article in the first issue of the american economic review dealing with the challenge of organizing effective irrigation systems in the united states west of the one hundredth meridian in the late nineteenth

rising household diesel consumption in the united states a cause for concern evidence on asymmetric pricing papers in the literature have thus far overlooked the projected increase in u s diesel car share when looking at asymmetries in petroleum pricing this paper addresses this issue by comparing retail gasoline and diesel prices in order to see whether they rise faster than they fall given the price of their upstream input crude oil this phenomenon has been termed in the literature as rockets and feathers we apply the threshold vector error correction model tvecm of hansen and seo 2002 which has not yet been applied in the literature we account for the 2008 structural break to crude oil and petroleum prices by splitting the sample using evidence from the recent structural break unit root test of kim and perron 2009 both markets seem to price symmetrically before the 2008 break but we find evidence of asymmetric pricing after 2008 in diesel prices and not in gasoline prices given that the diesel market is small relative to the gasoline market and therefore more open to price exploitation the ongoing cost increases associated with the policy of switching to ultra low sulphur diesel ulsd from 2006 to 2010 could be at the heart of this asymmetry with this in mind the u s federal trade commission should monitor diesel prices as the market share grows in order to ensure that consumers are not adversely affected c 2012 elsevier b v all rights reserved

equilibrium price dispersion with sequential search abstract the paper studies equilibrium pricing in a product market for an indivisible good where buyers search for sellers buyers search sequentially for sellers but do not meet every seller with the same probability specifically a fraction of the buyers meetings lead to one particular large seller while the remaining meetings lead to one of a continuum of small sellers in this environment the small sellers would like to set a price that makes the buyers indifferent between purchasing the good and searching for another seller the large seller would like to price the small sellers out of the market by posting a price that is low enough to induce buyers not to purchase from the small sellers these incentives give rise to a game of cat and mouse whose only equilibrium involves mixed strategies for both the large and the small sellers the fact that the small sellers play mixed strategies implies that there is price dispersion the fact that the large seller plays mixed strategies implies that prices and allocations vary over time we show that the fraction of the gains from trade accruing to the buyers is positive and nonmonotonic in the degree of market power of the large seller as long as the large seller has some positive but incomplete market power the fraction of the gains from trade accruing to the buyers depends in a natural way on the extent of search frictions

causes for an asymmetric relation between the price of crude oil and refined petroleum products we revisit the issue of asymmetries in the relation between the price of crude oil and refined petroleum products in the united states an econometric analysis of monthly data indicates that the asymmetric relation between the price of crude oil and motor gasoline is generated by refinery utilization rates and inventory behavior the asymmetric relation between the price of crude oil and home heating oil probably is generated by contractual arrangements between retailers and consumers together these results imply that price asymmetries may be generated by efficient markets under these conditions there is little justification for policy interventions to reduce or eliminate price asymmetries in motor gasoline and home heating oil markets

a context based procedure for assessing participatory schemes in environmental planning the efficiency of participatory schemes in environmental planning is an emerging research area and many issues are not solved yet regarding the assessment of such procedures it is essential for decision makers to identify improvement opportunities of participatory schemes we propose an original procedure to address such issue through a bargaining model from the signaling game literature which accounts for participation design as well as for agents preferences beliefs and bargaining power the model is calibrated using qualitative data from surveys in french local communities involved in municipal solid waste management model simulations are used to test for assumptions on the stakeholder dialogue and explore sensitivity of game outcomes to structural parameters we propose a set of performance indicators to identify the most effective participatory schemes in achieving convergence in stakeholder positions regarding environmental and land use planning

market structure and price adjustment in the u s wholesale gasoline markets abstract the issue of sticky prices in u s wholesale gasoline market is re examined allowing for the effect of market structure due to increased market concentration caused by mergers acquisitions and joint ventures which started in the late 1990s in the u s oil industry i investigate the effects of market structure on the pattern of price adjustment based on the notion that increased market concentration leads to downward price stickiness and asymmetric short run price adjustment in the transmission of crude price changes to wholesale gasoline price i find that market concentration has an insignificant asymmetric effect on the speed of price adjustment but a significant asymmetric effect on short run price adjustments in the response of wholesale gasoline prices to crude price shocks in three u s wholesale markets furthermore the signs on the coefficients of market concentration effects on price dynamics in the models support the assertion that increased market concentration leads to downward price stickiness in only one of the three markets examined overall the results indicate that market structure does not have a strong effect on the dynamics of price adjustment

institutions and environmental governance a reconceptualization abstract this article presents the conceptual revisions needed to extend the new institutional approach to environmental governance from its current local and international domains of application to all governance solutions including national environmental and natural resource use policies and multi level governance solutions that are increasingly used to address global environmental change the article suggests that environmental governance is best understood as the establishment reaffirmation or change of institutions to resolve conflicts over environmental resources it also explains why the choice of these institutions is a matter of social justice rather than of efficiency the article suggests a way to understand formal and state centered governance solutions as forms of collective ownership not unlike common property the article demonstrates how institutional analysis can gain resolution by looking at the functional and structural tiers organization of governance functions and formulation of key institutional rules as key aspects of the design of governance institutions

the economic and financial gains from water markets in chile abstract chile is one of the few countries that has encouraged the use of markets in water resource management in order to assess the impact of water markets and transactions costs in chile four river valleys the maipo elqui limari and the azapa were selected as case studies transactions from the elqui and limari valleys during the years 1986 to 1993 were analyzed to determine the gains from trade from market transfers in the economic and financial analysis of water markets crop budgets were used to estimate the value of water in agricultural production the value of water use rights to urban water supply companies was estimated using the avoided cost of an alternative investment in a water storage reservoir the analysis demonstrated that the market transfer of water use rights does produce substantial economic gains from trade in both the elqui and limari valleys these economic gains produce rents for both buyers and sellers but buyers especially farmers growing profitable crops who buy water use rights and individuals buying water use rights for potable water supply receive higher rents then sellers large table grape producers in the limari valley and individuals buying water for human consumption in the elqui valley received the highest rents in the elqui valley net gains from trade per share were within the range of recent transfer prices of us 1000 in the limari valley gains from trade per share are 3 4 times the recent prices of us 3000 for a share of water from the cogoti reservoir where trading was active especially in the limari valley transactions costs have not presented an appreciable barrier to trading nonetheless in the large canal systems with fixed flow dividers in the elqui and maipo valley there have been very few transactions various factors contribute to the lack of trading but the absence of trading in these large canal systems highlights the costs of modifying fixed infrastructure especially for trades between farmers

transitions from home to marriage of young americans the paper examines the impact of income on the transitions between home living independently and first marriage of young americans a matching model is outlined similar to that used in theories of job search to explain the probability of marriage and living alone a multiple state multiple transition model which allows for correlated heterogeneity on the first and subsequent transitions is estimated the results show that income has a strong and significant effect the impact of unobserved heterogeneity is examined in detail the impact of the young person s earnings on the transitions is explored through simulation

some unsettled problems of irrigation 1911 a reprint of the lead article in the inaugural issue of the american economic review some unsettled problems of irrigation by katharine coman who examined the common property resource problem as applied to water in the western united states

search theoretic models of the labor market a survey we survey the literature on search theoretic models of the labor market we show how this approach addresses many issues including the following why do workers sometimes choose to remain unemployed what determines the lengths of employment and unemployment spells how can there simultaneously exist unemployed workers and unfilled vacancies what determines aggregate unemployment and vacancies how can homogeneous workers earn different wages what are the tradeoffs firms face from different wages how do wages and turnover interact what determines efficient turnover we discuss various modeling choices concerning wage determination and the meeting process including recent models of directed search

forest owner perceptions of institutions and voluntary contracting for biodiversity conservation not crowding out but staying out although the concepts of institutions in economics and institutional analysis have been integrated in recent writings about payments for ecosystem services pes their joint operationalization and testing have been limited to tackle this integration challenge we empirically explore how finnish non industrial private forest owners perceptions about voluntary biodiversity conservation contracting correspond with the institutional theories about pes further we test whether the perceptions are related to pes contracting in the past or in the future the results of the explorative factor analyses corresponded with the theoretical considerations of both economics and institutional analysis the logistic regression analyses showed that the factors that related to past contracting differed notably from those that explained future intentions to contract most consistently perceptions about positive ecological impacts were positively related to past contracting while social and moral normative perceptions had a negative effect in other words those who would conserve nature for altruistic reasons tended not to have entered a contract but rather stayed out local and social welfare expectations increased the willingness to contract in the future our analysis highlights the importance of normative conservation justifications as well as the expectations regarding non economic benefits and welfare impacts for pes design and analysis

search at wholesale auto auctions wholesale trade in used cars is conducted by ascending bid auctions with sale subject to the seller s acceptance of the winning bid one out of three times the seller rejects the bid and no trade takes place i model the seller s decision as the outcome of search and thus determined by the winning bid distribution and a reported retail price this market is ideal for testing search theory since all offers whether or not accepted are observed qualitative predictions of the theory in particular the role of the variance are confirmed the quantitative results are more ambiguous

environmental valuation under sustainable development environmentalism has evolved since the 1960 s from a concern with the preservation of wilderness in the american experience to a concern over pollution of human habitat throughout the industrialized world northern anxiety spread to the loss of tropical rainforests and biodiversity in the south where environmentalism evolved further in an encounter with indigenous interpretations conditions and priorities by the late 1980 s climate change emerged as a central issue in a now global discourse on the relationship between environment and development the principle of sustainable development that current needs are to be met as fully as possible while ensuring that the life opportunities of future generations are undiminished relative to present is now widely accepted this paper illustrates that incorporating environmental values per se in decision making will not bring about sustainability unless each generation is committed to transferring to the next sufficient natural resources and capital assets to make development sustainable 11 refs 3 figs

the scope for collective action in a large groundwater basin an institutional analysis of aquifer governance in western australia the gnangara groundwater system in western australia supports multiple ecological systems and human uses and is under unprecedented stress this paper examines some of ostrom s situational variables for the analysis of institutional choice in common pool resources as they relate to the gnangara case the institutional analysis identifies elements of the current governance institutions that could be altered to facilitate collective action we use data from a set of water licensing documents obtained from the state s department of water a number of factors are identified as inhibiting the potential for collective action current arrangements are top down in nature with all rules monitoring and any enforcement supplied by the state level management agency norms and expectations among appropriators appear to be competitive rather than co operative and discount rates appear to be high monitoring and enforcement are under supplied and opportunistic behaviour affects compliance the interactions between user and regulator influence the appropriation of flows and have resulting impacts on the resource stock we conclude that several factors in this case prejudice the development of collective action institutions by appropriator efforts alone the study highlights important aspects of the institutional arrangements in place and their likely effects upon the attitudes and behaviours of appropriators who along with wildlife and ecosystems depend on the common pool resource

lumpy price adjustments a microeconometric analysis based on a reduced form state dependent pricing model with random thresholds we specify and estimate a nonlinear panel data model with an unobserved factor representing the common cost or demand components of the unobserved optimal price using this model we are able to assess the relative importance of common and idiosyncratic shocks in explaining the frequency and magnitude of price changes in the case of a wide variety of consumer products in belgium and france we find that the mean level and variability of the random thresholds are key for explaining differences across products in the frequency of price changes we also find that the idiosyncratic shocks represent the most important driver of the magnitude of price changes supplementary materials for this article are available online

low inflation pass through and the pricing power of firms abstract recently there has been a significant decline in the degree to which firms pass through changes in costs to prices a decline that is frequently characterized as a reduction in the pricing power of firms the decline appears to be associated with the decline in inflation in many countries the decline has important implications for monetary policy because it affects both forecasts of inflation and the effects of changes in monetary policy on inflation some have argued that the decline in pricing power helped to keep inflation low in the face of apparently strong demand pressures in the united states in the late 1990s this paper puts forth the view that the decline in pass through or pricing power is due to the low inflation environment that has recently been achieved in many countries first a microeconomic model of price setting is used to show that lower pass through is caused by lower perceived persistence of cost changes evidence is then presented showing that inflation is positively correlated with persistence of inflation suggesting that the low inflation itself has caused the low pass through an economy wide model consistent with the micromodel is then presented to illustrate how such changes in pricing power affect output and inflation dynamics in favorable ways but can disappear quickly if monetary policy and expectations change

optimal timing of decisions a general theory based on continuation values abstract by extending a methodology dating back to jovanovic 1982 we develop a comprehensive theory of optimal timing of decisions based on continuation value functions and operators that act on them rewards can be bounded or unbounded one advantage of this approach over standard bellman methods is that continuation value functions are smoother than value functions another is that for a range of problems the continuation value function exists in a lower dimensional space than the value function we exploit these advantages to obtain a range of new results on optimality optimal behavior and efficient computation

finite duration of unemployment insurance reservation wages and participation in the job market abstract this paper extends the theoretical analysis of the effects of unemployment insurance on the decisions of unemployed workers regarding employment and participation in the labour market it uses a job search model that considers jobs with uncertain duration and unemployment benefits that are paid only during a finite number of periods after becoming unemployed separating the incentive and disincentive effects of unemployment insurance the analysis permits us to study the impacts of several changes in the scheme of unemployment insurance on the reservation wages of unemployed workers and on their decisions relative to participation in the job market

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

symmetric or asymmetric oil prices a meta analysis approach the analysis of price asymmetries in the gasoline market is one of the most widely studied in energy economics however the great variation in the outcomes reported makes the drawing of any definitive conclusions difficult given this situation a meta analysis serves as an excellent tool to discover which characteristics of the various markets analyzed and which specific features of these studies might account for these differences in adopting such an approach this paper shows how the particular segment of the industry analyzed the characteristics of the data the years under review the type of publication and the introduction of control variables might explain this heterogeneity in results the paper concludes on these grounds that increased competition may significantly reduce the possibility of occurrence of asymmetric behavior these results should be taken into consideration therefore in future studies of asymmetries in the oil industry

the advantage of resource queues over spot resource markets decision coordination in experiments under resource uncertainty farmers have to make key decisions such as which crops to plant or whether to prepare the soil before knowing how much water they will get they face losses if they make costly decisions but do not receive water and they may forego profits if they receive water without being prepared we consider the coordination of farmers decisions such as which crops to plant or whether to prepare the soil when farmers must divide an uncertain water supply we compare ex ante queues pre decision to an ex post spot market post decision post rain in experiments in rural brazil and a university in england queues have greater coordination success than does the spot market

first movers non movers and social gains from subsidising entry in markets for nature based recreational goods abstract the importance of ecosystem services for mankind stresses the issue of identifying different institutional solutions to effectively secure their adequate provision much focus has been on services of the public good type and instruments like payments for environmental services we extend this work to consider the possible social gains from supporting development of new markets for nature based recreational goods which may alleviate negative externalities caused by congestion problems our three main questions are i why is there a lack of market development ii can there be social gains from intervention and supporting the development of such markets and iii if so then how could such intervention be best performed we use a two stage non cooperative bayesian simultaneous move game model and show that in spite of apparent potential first mover advantages in a developing market demand uncertainty and sunk costs may equally well result in widespread presence of non movers on the supplier side we show that social gains can be made from offering a subsidy towards the sunk costs analysing three possible subsidy schemes we show a that fixed costs may make rationing optimal b that sequential rationing does not necessarily dominate strict rationing because c the more subsidies are offered the larger each subsidy must be to induce participation and that d the longer a single agent on the market may keep market information to himself the better a non rationing scheme will perform relative to rationing schemes finally e subsidies for second mover entry may be optimal in some cases

job search stigma effect and escape rate from unemployment this article formulates job search models incorporating certain types of the stigma effect of unemployment it is assumed that the probability of getting a job offer given the unemployment individual contacts the firm is influenced by the duration of unemployment and is justified in a signaling context the optimal search is analyzed for one sector as well as across several independent labor market segments it is shown that there are reasonably general conditions on the search environments for which both the individual reservation wage and escape rate are negative duration dependent a fact observed in empirical studies

bridging theories on environmental governance insights from free market approaches and institutional ecological economics perspectives abstract due to methodological problems and their practical limitations the criticism of neoclassical environmental economics is increasing the goal of this paper is to stress the differences and similarities between the two competing alternative approaches institutional ecological economics and free market approaches to environmental protection to encourage their interactions towards a possible synthesis in the future

transnational markets for sustainable development governance the case of redd summary transnational sustainable development that is sustainable development policy initiatives involving actors in multiple countries often involves donor sponsorship of sustainable development projects similar to matching markets like venture capital employment searches or college admissions these transaction systems also known as matching markets can be seen in a variety of phenomena in transnational development governance including private aid public private sustainable development projects and transnational polycentric governance initiatives in this paper we utilize the matching market framework to develop a new approach to addressing an important question in development studies how do donors understood as donor agencies funds and foundations and firms choose which projects to support beginning with the observation that matching markets in sustainable development governance are heavily constrained by transaction costs in the absence of formal institutions that lower costs of searching monitoring and communicating with potential partners we hypothesize that both donors and project participants are motivated to utilize strategies to lower transaction costs of making connections which results in selection of projects based on the presence of transnational brokers or familiar partners or as part of a strategy of spatial specialization conceptualizing the choices made in this matching market as an affiliation network connecting donors to sponsored projects we utilize exponential random graph models of 91 funders support of 195 reducing emissions from deforestation redd and sustainable forest management pilot projects undertaken between 1989 and june 2012 to test the effects of transaction costs on donors choices of projects to sponsor we find that brokerage prior collaboration with the donor in question and spatial specialization all contribute to the ability of project proponents to attract funder support often outperforming relevant project characteristics such as carbon density and accessibility these findings suggest tensions between local scale project implementation and the transnational search for resource support observed qualitatively in the development studies literature can have significant effects on the overall structure of transnational collaboration on sustainable development

explaining institutional persistence adaptation and transformation in east german recreational fisheries governance after the german reunification in 1990 we investigated the capacity of a natural resource governance system to absorb a disturbance while maintaining its major structures and functions defined as institutional resilience exemplified by east german recreational fisheries governance being disturbed by the german reunification we studied why in five out of six east german states the former centralized governance system persisted while in one state a decentralized governance system was implemented based on resilience thinking and new institutional economics three analytical steps were developed to assess 1 the structure and function of the governance system 2 the attributes of the disturbance and the reorganization process and 3 human motivations the centralized system persisted because leading managers wanted to preserve customary structures and functions minimize transaction costs of change and maintain powerful positions this was possible because of their influential positions in the reorganization process our results suggest that in externally induced fundamental and rapid disturbances decision makers tend to prevent transformations in their governance system however key managers in the sixth state faced the same disturbance but their lack of leadership and an emerging rivalry for fishing rights facilitated a transformation to decentralized governance thus attributes of disturbances can be leveraged by actors motivations in the reorganization process

the problem of the commons still unsettled after 100 years the problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when katharine coman led off the first issue of the american economic review as the us and other economies have grown the carrying capacity of the planet in regard to natural resources and environmental quality has become a greater concern particularly for commonproperty and open access resources the focus of this article is on some important unsettled problems of the commons within the realm of natural resources there are special challenges associated with renewable resources which are frequently characterized by open access an important example is the degradation of openaccess fisheries critical commons problems are also associated with environmental quality a key contribution of economics has been the development of market based approaches to environmental protection these instruments are key to addressing the ultimate commons problem of the twenty first century global climate change jel q15 q21 q22 q25 q54

asymmetric and nonlinear pass through of crude oil prices to gasoline and natural gas prices in this article we use the recently developed nonlinear autoregressive distributedlags nardl model to examine the pass through of crude oil prices into gasoline and natural gas prices our approach allowsus to simultaneously test the short and long run nonlinearities through positive and negative partial sum decompositions of the predetermined explanatory variables it also offers the possibility to quantify the respective responses of gasoline and natural gas prices to positive and negative oil price shocks from the asymmetric dynamic multipliers the obtained results indicate that oil prices affect gasoline prices and natural gas prices in an asymmetric and nonlinear manner but the price transmission mechanism is not the same important policy implications can be learned from the empirical findings

valuing nature lessons learned and future research directions this paper critically reviews the literature on environmental valuation of ecosystem services across the range of global biomes the main objective of this review is to assess the policy relevance of the information encompassed by the wide range of valuation studies that have been undertaken so far published and other studies now cover most ecosystems with aquatic and marine contexts attracting the least attention there is also a predominance of single function valuation studies studies valuing multiple functions and uses and studies which seek to capture the before and after states as environmental changes take place are rare by and large it is the latter types of analyses that are most important as aids to more rational decision taking in ecosystem conservation versus development situations involving different stakeholders local national and global aggregate global scale estimates of ecosystems value are problematic given the fact that only marginal values are consistent with conventional decision aiding tools such as economic cost benefit analysis in general valuation data provide prima facie support for the hypothesis that net ecosystem service value diminishes with biodiversity and ecosystem loss balmford et al 2002 science 297 p 950 future research effort should include complementary research on multiple ecosystem services that seeks to capture the temporal disturbance profile and its causal factors the explicit recognition of multiple interdependent ecosystem services and values poses both conceptual and empirical research challenges it would serve to transform the practice of research in this sub field via the a priori assumption of multiple and inter dependent use instead of independent single use this line of reasoning can then be extended to the institutional arrangements that determine which values are captured new institutional processes and arrangements are probably required in order to best realise benefit streams from multiple ecosystem use and non use provision across a range of different stakeholders

developing post normal technologies for sustainability abstract the last two decades have seen the development of an array of techniques and practices aimed at promoting sustainability for many results have been disappointing there are charges that supposedly new organisational approaches remain embedded in managerialist functionalist and anti dialogic frameworks that are a significant part of the problem similarly the technocratic scientization of public policy is viewed as ill equipped to deal with the social economic and ecological issues currently facing neo liberal societies in this paper we seek to interpret these frustrations and identify pathways that move beyond this specifically we argue that the gap between sustainability rhetoric and sustainability practices can be reconceptualised through the practice of science as post normal and through developing the notion of post normal sustainability technologies pnsts the exponents of post normal science show why stakeholder engagement in sustainability and other scientific issues is critical for the legitimacy and quality of decisions and the admission of complexity in decision making and accountability processes building on this now well established foundation we seek to characterise and give examples of pnsts as tools for achieving this participation wherein stakeholders assume expertise and interact with those possessing more traditional forms of expertise in order to co produce knowledge about sustainability recognition of ideological and value diversity is also central to the post normal sustainability agenda and with pnsts the values based nature of the issues involved is articulated in a way that seeks to bring politics openly into the picture to this end we identify processes that are emerging in the literature and in practice that will enable pnsts these include extended peer communities and multi actor heuristics agonistic processes and new characterisations of citizenship that support moves to sustainability in so doing we believe that pnsts offer clumsy solutions for wicked problems that can be engaged with in both the research and practice arenas as significant contributions to addressing urgent needs

from ecological macroeconomics to a theory of endogenous money for a finite planet abstract this paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics most notably post keynesian to ecological economics with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal monetary and prudential reforms to boost green investments and developed new modeling frameworks to explore the interactions between the financial macroeconomic and biophysical spheres while these proposals open a broader range of possibilities to engage in a socio ecological transition than those offered by the current paradigm of a financialized global economy they paradoxically suffer from similar limitations by placing much faith in green investments they impose a vision of the transition that presents strong technical and institutional limitations the field also fails to revisit its own understanding of macroeconomics and of specific phenomena e g financial instability through a biophysical lens in spite of increasing transdisciplinary evidence supporting this approach we suggest overcoming these limitations through institutionalist perspectives that understand money as a language through which value is created and legitimized those perspectives seem essential to re embed the governance of money within a worldview that acknowledges the finiteness and incommensurable values of earth s life support systems

a review of progress in empowerment of women in rural water management decision making processes abstract the authors of this paper explore the links between water infrastructure water policies processes and protections along with mechanisms for women s leadership and decision making for contributing to rural well being the broad brush strokes approach is our attempt to reveal the breadth and complexity of the interdisciplinary nature of problems which canonly be solved via interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches poor rural women are disproportionally and adversely impacted by domestic and public gendered roles in relation to water accessibility system design and management as well as by the high costs of water distribution the inadequacy of fair water distribution channels is compounded by the growing influence of water privatization advocates the significant changes in climate and global warming also threaten accessibility to safe water and add levels of competitiveness and vulnerability for people in many regions of the world the recommendations proposed in this paper underscore the need for proper management of water resources to prevent and to reduce water conflicts and to increase all dimensions of well being this paper builds upon literature from four interconnected strategies 1 investing in water infrastructure to increase well being 2 establishing policies and legislation to protect the global commons human rights and enhance economic well being 3 embedding gender equality and women s leadership in water management and 4 developing strategic interventions to reduce and mitigate adverse global affects by educating for sustainable development preventing and planning around climate change and enhancing local water management through resisting global privatization approaches

do gasoline prices respond asymmetrically to crude oil price changes the authors test and confirm that retail gasoline prices respond more quickly to increases than to decreases in crude oil prices among the possible sources of this asymmetry are production inventory adjustment lags and market power of some sellers by analyzing price transmission at different points in the distribution chain the authors attempt to shed light on these theories spot prices for generic gasoline show asymmetry in responding to crude oil price changes which may reflect inventory adjustment effects asymmetry also appears in the response of retail prices to wholesale price changes possibly indicating short run market power among retailers

choices without prices without apologies valuing is usually regarded as a process of compressing information about attributes into a single metric armed with this reduced form of compact information the consumer can consider a particular object with a particular price attached or implied and make an informed decision but the process of valuing is less straightforward than we ordinarily suppose when environmental goods and services become the object of information compaction it is possible that important information is lost we comment on the choice problem germane to environmental goods and services and challenge the presumption that environmental choices made without explicit pricing are inferior to those in which hypothetical valuation studies are undertaken

learning about the arrival of sales abstract we analyse optimal stopping when the economic environment changes because of learning a primary application is optimal selling of an asset when demand is uncertain the seller learns about the arrival rate of buyers as time passes without a sale the seller becomes more pessimistic about the arrival rate when the arrival of buyers is not observed the rate at which the seller revises her beliefs is affected by the price she sets learning leads to a higher posted price by the seller when the seller does observe the arrival of buyers she sets an even higher price

analyzing collective action collective action problems pervade all societies as well as ecological systems used by humans substantial evidence has accrued during the last several decades that human actors are able to solve some but definitely not all collective action problems on their own without external rules and enforcement imposed from the outside in this article i review some of the structural variables that have been found to affect the likelihood of collective action then i address the need to base future work on collective action on a more general theory of human behavior than has been used to model collective action over the last five decades in the last section i discuss how structural variables affect the core relationships of reputation trust and reciprocity as these affect levels of cooperation

declining reservation wages and learning empirical studies of job search strongly suggest that the reservation wages of unemployed job seeking individuals decline with the length of their respective unemployment spells previous explanations of this behaviour based on age effects liquidity constraints and limited unemployment benefits are not adequate we provide a new answer to this question based on the reasonable assumption that workers do not have precise knowledge of the distribution of the prevailing wages an individual model of job search and learning is formulated it is shown that the declining trend of reservation wages naturally arises due to the selection process when search costs are not too small the example of a normal wage offer distribution is analysed and the implications are discussed

an institutional analysis of payments for environmental services abstract in this paper the characteristics and functioning of pes is analyzed from an institutional perspective while in theory pes is seen as a market solution to environmental problems as an alternative to state hierarchical and community governance a review of a large amount of case studies shows that pes in practice depends rather fundamentally on state and or community engagement hence pes are foremost a reconfiguration of the roles of public bodies and communities becoming core intermediaries or buyers first to establish pes rights to the land that delivers the environmental service must be clarified this demands public action second transacting over environmental amenities is very costly creating markets for environmental services depends therefore crucially on state and community facilitation hence buyers are often public agencies high transaction costs also influence price setting payments do not follow the market format as intermediaries frequently are setting the price with users often being unaware even of the fact that they pay finally the distinction between payments as incentives and as fair compensations is emphasized while payments may strengthen community relations and simplify action for environmental care they may also introduce a purely instrumental logic and in some cases worsen the environmental status by crowding out environmental virtues for the future greater awareness of these dynamics is warranted

an institutional analysis of methods for environmental appraisal abstract this paper focuses on a set of issues when choosing between methods for environmental appraisal approaches like cost benefit analysis contingent valuation multicriteria analysis and deliberative methods are based on very different assumptions concerning the characteristics of environmental resources the capacities of the individuals involved and the role the methods play in framing the process the present paper views environmental appraisal methods as institutional structures they are seen as rules concerning a who should participate and in which capacity b what is considered data and which form data should take and c rules about how a conclusion is reached specifically the choice of method defines the logic of the appraisal process and next influences the output while cost benefit analysis is based on the assumption of individual rationality deliberative methods assume that individuals can act according to social rationality the first part of the paper is devoted to clarifying what institutions are and their role in the valuation process second the main features of environmental or ecosystem services and the demands they raise for decision making are described a general framework for evaluating appraisal methods is then developed finally this structure is elaborated in more detail as a basis for deciding over the choices of methods in the case of evaluating ecosystem services a set of unresolved issues are identified especially related to how the choice of appraisal methods themselves should be instituted

institutional ecological economics abstract new institutional economics and its forerunners have we argue made important contributions to the evolving agenda of ecological economics the conceptualisation of environmental problems as instances of interdependence and the acknowledgement of positive transaction costs are key insights into the nature of environmental problems we also discuss how plurality of behavioural motivations and limited cognitive capacity have important implications for environmental decision making and its analysis we show how evolutionary and collective action theories offer complementary takes on the choice and change of environmental governance institutions and how the concept of social capital can enrich analyses of environmental governance we conclude that an emerging institutional ecological economics has the greatest relative advantage in analysing the design implementation and effectiveness of environmental governance solutions

constrained by hours and restricted in wages the quality of matches in the labor market this paper examines the explicit loss born by workers who face constraints in their working hours by analyzing differences in actual and desired hours and wages men tend to be underemployed while women are evenly split between over and underemployment losses in surplus are generally small but 10 of underemployed men and women experience losses of more than 34 or 50 of surplus respectively the loss measure is also an important determinant in predicting labor market transitions meaning increases in surplus losses generate a higher probability of changing from workers present jobs or changing the number of hours jel j22 j41

group learning wage dispersion and non stationary offers can differences in equilibrium beliefs among otherwise identical individuals account for a substantial degree of wage inequality this paper shows that this is possible if two conditions are met first people learn about the distribution of wage offers from the experience of their peers and second people believe that wage offers are stationary even though offers that arrive later tend to have higher wages than offers that arrive earlier peer groups can then end up with different stable beliefs that lead to intergroup wage differences the non stationarity of offers is rationalized in a model where firms can either advertise their job openings or not and where advertised ones have more influence on more inexperienced job searchers a statistic is proposed whose application to existing studies suggests that the non stationarity considered here is present in data

shirking or stochastic productivity in major league baseball reply firms produce in an uncertain environment the long literature on the theory of the firm under uncertainty has focused on demand uncertainty 4 18 14 the unanimity question 8 15 or technological uncertainty 23 1 7 regarding the latter an interesting question is how that randomness enters the technology one source might be purely unpredictable factors such as the weather or accidents agricultural output for instance is dependent not only on the quantity of inputs hired but on the amount of rainfall natural disasters and the like a different source of technical uncertainty is variations in the quality and reliability of the input services hired in professional sports for example the performance of an athlete varies from game to game and season to season the reliability of capital a crucial issue in nuclear power generation is another example reflecting the stochastic nature of input productivity one economic consequence of this randomness of productivity is that an employer cannot know a priori the input s value but rather must form an estimate of its expected marginal contribution spence 20 showed how an employer uses signals such as educational attainment to determine if a worker is worth hiring once hired the firm still faces the difficulty of determining if a below average realization of productivity resulted from shirking by the employee or a bad draw from his productivity distribution this agency problem outlined in detail by alchain and demsetz 1 and holmstrom 10 has important implications to our perception of work effort especially in the presence of long term labor contracts allegations of shirking due to long term job security have been associated with seniority rights professional athletes and in the academic institution of tenure

examining the conventions of voluntary environmental approaches in french agriculture in this paper we consider how growing awareness of environmental problems in agriculture has triggered certain interactions between producers and consumers since both public and private actors resort to collective action to address these problems this article will seek to examine the different forms of economic coordination and their dynamics using an adaptation of salais and storper s worlds of production framework 1992 1997 considering that each world of production is a world of conventions we focus on environmental conventions this work is based on an empirical study of agricultural voluntary environmental approaches as these provide a means of ensuring coordination between producers and consumers and enable products to be differentiated according to their environmental quality copyright oxford university press

do gasoline prices exhibit asymmetry not usually previous studies have found evidence of asymmetric price adjustment in u s retail gasoline prices in that gasoline prices rise more rapidly in response to a cost increase than fall in response to a cost decrease by estimating a threshold cointegration model that allows for multiple regimes i am able to test how sensitive this result is to outlying observations in contrast to previous studies i find little evidence of asymmetry for the vast majority of observations and that the asymmetry is being driven by a small number of outlying observations

the build up of local sustainable development politics a case study of company leaders in france abstract the purpose of this study is to examine business leaders perceptions on sustainable development and their expectations about local governments using a questionnaire on a cross section of 32 french business leaders we examine the following questions can issues related to sustainable development extend beyond questions of profit and future economic dynamism the modern global economic crisis in combination with the ongoing ecological one makes regional attractiveness more topical than ever if local governments invest in sustainable development policy it might satisfy not only citizens but also firms in the territory while attracting new ones as well to determine if firms are really interested in such a policy as well as understand their expectations this research undertook interviews with 32 business leaders we found that local governments should act with firms as partners to increase resilience and sustainability the expectations of business leaders and their sensitivity to sustainable development suggest that sustainable development policies could improve the attractiveness of a local economy especially in the context of the current environmental and economic crises

provided and perceived status quo in choice experiments implications for valuing the outputs of multifunctional rural areas this article presents a choice experiment analyzing multifunctional rural development policies targeting conservation and recovery of environmental social and cultural assets in choice experiments a base alternative is usually included in order to estimate the welfare change associated to policy proposals this study is concerned with the much neglected issue of the impact on policy analysis of the definition of a status quo alternative either as an objective assessment by experts or as a self reported perception by respondents convergent validity analysis and prospective policy scenarios show a significant impact of different status quo specifications on individuals preferences and related welfare measures when complex and unfamiliar biophysical systems are involved in policy analysis and evaluation

what determines urban households willingness to pay for co2 emission reductions in turkey a contingent valuation survey abstract this paper explores turkish urban households willingness to pay wtp for co2 emission reductions expected to result from improvements in power production a face to face questionnaire with a contingent valuation cv module prepared using the double bounded dichotomous choice elicitation framework was administered to 2422 respondents representative of urban turkey a developing country with low but rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions the determinants of wtp were identified by considering not only the impact of standard socio economic factors but also the effects of environmental knowledge attitudes and behaviour the relevance of the identity of the collection agent national versus international institutions in terms of trust people have towards them and the degree of perceived participation of others in the realization of the project our study confirms the existing literature in demonstrating that wtp figures reported by young and educated people that are active on environmental issues and who also possess material security and environmental knowledge are more likely to be high however their willingness to make contributions is hampered significantly by their belief that their fellow citizens will not contribute and the general lack of trust in institutions overall this study may be taken as a call to eliminate governance related uncertainties in climate change deals

asymmetries outliers and structural stability in the us gasoline market abstract by using a recently developed nonlinear cointegration methodology and a sample that encompasses more than thirty years of monthly data we investigate whether the transmission of crude oil price variations to gasoline prices in the us market is asymmetric i e depends on the sign of the change in the explanatory variable considering both the long and the short run the model is further extended by taking separately into account the effects of extreme and mild changes in crude oil prices this allows us to verify whether and to what extent the size and shape of any observed asymmetry in pricing is affected by the presence of outliers moreover given the substantial length of the sample considered we test for the possible presence of multiple structural breaks of unknown timing in the cointegrating vector our results indicate that the relationship between the prices of gasoline and crude oil has undergone a single structural break in the late 2008 and that after the break extreme observations have a non negligible role in shaping asymmetry

relative price changes as aggregate supply shocks this paper proposes a theory of supply shocks or shifts in the short run phillips curve based on relative price changes and frictions in nominal price adjustment when price adjustment is costly firms adjust to large shocks but not to small shocks and so large shocks have disproportionate effects on the price level therefore aggregate inflation depends on the distribution of relative price changes inflation rises when the distribution is skewed to the right and falls when the distribution is skewed to the left we show that this theoretical result explains a large fraction of movements in postwar u s inflation moreover our model suggests measures of supply shocks that perform better than traditional measures such as the relative prices of food and energy

asymmetry in retail gasoline and crude oil price movements in the united states an application of hidden cointegration technique abstract there is a common belief that gasoline prices respond more quickly to crude oil price increases than decreases some economists and politicians believe that asymmetry in oil and gasoline price movements is the outcome of a non competitive gasoline market requiring that governments take policy action to address unfair pricing there is no consensus as to the existence or nature of the asymmetric relationship between prices of gasoline and crude oil much of this literature specifies asymmetry in the speed of adjustment and short run adjustment coefficients in contrast granger and yoon s granger c w and yoon g hidden cointegration university of california san diego department of economics working paper 2002 crouching error correction model cecm identifies asymmetry of the cointegrating vectors between components cumulative positive and negative changes of the series applying the cecm to retail gasoline and crude oil prices for the u s we find that there is only evidence of cointegration between positive components of crude oil prices and negative components of gasoline prices in contrast to the literature which attributes asymmetric price movements to market power of refiners these findings suggest that gasoline prices in the long run are more influenced by the technological changes on the demand side than crude oil price movements on the supply side

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

the incremental cost principle and the conservation of globally important habitats a critical examination abstract this paper examines the application of the incremental cost ic principle for the conservation of globally important habitats it first describes the characteristics of the ic and how it became an important financial modality in multilateral conservation efforts the application of the ic is then examined taking into account characteristics of successful collaboration efforts for the global environment the paper finds that as currently applied the ic fails to be a robust financial mechanism for protection of globally important habitats it also heavily skews the bulk of conservation costs from developed to developing countries the paper concludes with a description of suggested changes to make the ic an effective tool in global conservation efforts

common property and collective action in economic development abstract a fundamental issue in many ldcs is the degree to which natural resource mismanagement is caused by common property arrangements this view has led to widespread attempts to privatize forests rangelands and water resources many of these efforts have failed to stop overuse and have contributed to inequality in resource distribution this paper seriously questions this approach and describes a number of reasons why common property may continue to be both efficient and equitable complementing and combining with private rights in a way consistent with the resource endowments of village economies a theoretical approach is outlined showing that the tragedy of the commons is an unsatisfactory model of common property an alternative model is presented together with a call for research into institutional alternatives in resource management

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

the management of common property resources collective action as an alternative to privatisation or state regulation can locally based collective action be a viable way to manage common property resources many writers on collective action and common property are sweepingly pessimistic about the ability of the people who face problems of common property to organize sustainable patterns of use for themselves this paper shows with reference to prisoners dilemma garett hardin s tragedy of the commons and mancur olson s logic of collective action that the analytical basis for this pessimism is weak in many situations of village based common property resource use there can thus be no general presumption that the collective action route to common property resource management will fail any more than there can be a general presumption that it will work the paper suggests a number of general factors to do with the characteristics of the resources the user group and group state relations on which chances of success depend

prospects for a heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability this paper introduces a special issue on heterodox economics of the environment and sustainability at present humanity faces several challenges such as resource scarcity biodiversity loss and climate change and yet we would argue contributions from traditional heterodox schools of thought such as post keynesianism marxism and to a lesser extent institutionalism have had relatively little to say about them instead the economic analysis of environmental issues has been dominated by approaches inspired by neoclassical economics and latterly by ecological economics the special issue is part of an effort to stimulate more heterodox work on the environment and to explore connections between existing groups of scholars particularly between ecological and heterodox economists

testing for short and long run asymmetric responses and structural breaks in the retail gasoline supply chain abstract this research examines the short run and long run relationship between the retail gasoline price the spot gasoline price and the price of west texas intermediate wti crude oil along the gasoline supply chain we find mixed evidence of short run asymmetry in all stages of the retail gasoline supply chain we fail to reject long run symmetry at each stage of the retail gasoline supply chain additionally we find a significant structural break in the crude oil spot gasoline relationship after october 17 2005 there is weak evidence of long run oil price endogeneity after october 17 2005 this structural change reverses the direction of short run asymmetry between these two time series after the break we find no significant structural break in the spot gasoline retail gasoline relationship

deleveraging crises and deep recessions a behavioural approach macroeconomic dynamics are characterized by alternating patterns of periods of relative stability and large swings standard micro founded macro economic models account for these patterns through exogenous and persistent shocks in this paper we develop a fully decentralized and micro founded macro economic agent based model augmented with an opinion model which produces endogenous waves of pessimism and optimism that feed back into firms leverage and households precautionary saving behaviour a major emergent property of our model is precisely the complex successions of stable and unstable macro economic regimes the model is further able to account for a wide spectrum of macro and micro empirical regularities within this framework we analyse a series of macro economic phenomena of key relevance in the current macro economic debate especially the occurrence of deleveraging crises and fisherian debt deflation recessions our analysis suggests that the relative dynamics of prices and wages and the resulting income distribution along a deflation ary path are critical determinants of the severity of the recession and the chances of recovery

transaction costs power and multi level forest governance in indonesia since 2005 there has been considerable international interest in reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation redd a program intended to finance protection of tropical forests through the sale of carbon offsets or from donor funding requiring the collaboration of local and international civil society stakeholders firms and donor and host governments redd is inherently a multi level governance project but to date participation in redd and coordination across governmental levels have been weak combining literature on multi level and polycentric governance of socioecological systems with transaction cost economics we argue that transaction costs structure cross level information sharing and collaboration relationships among organizations engaged in redd policy development at the national and provincial levels in indonesia using an exponential random graph modelling approach with data collected from interviews with over 80 organizations between 2010 and 2012 we find that powerful organizations tend to dominate cross level connections though this effect is somewhat mediated by organizational similarity which reduces transaction costs we suggest that explicit efforts to help local organizations overcome the transaction costs of building cross level relationships will be a central component of building an effective and equitable multi level governance system for redd in indonesia

a framework for evaluating collective action and informal institutional dynamics under a resource management policy of decentralization the decentralization of resource property rights has become an increasingly popular policy in many natural resource dependent communities of the developing world however the success of this policy approach depends on both collective action and institutionalization it is therefore important to evaluate collective action and institutionalization where the process of property rights decentralization is in progress this paper presents a modified version of the institutional analysis and development iad framework designed to analyze the decentralization of property rights and the collective action of community members to obtain these rights it describes a three phased framework for analyzing i the government property right decentralization policy ii the stock of capital assets in the community required to achieve property rights by initiating collective action and iii the development of an informal institution for effective property right distribution in the community finally to demonstrate its utility to collective action research we present a case study application of our modified framework to the fisheries property right decentralization policy of the bangladesh government and the subsequent collective action of a wetland dependent community

real time search in the laboratory and the market the standard model of labor market search posits repeated infinite horizon search from a fixed distribution of wages in a stationary environment under these circumstances the optimal search policy has a reservation wage property i e the decision to accept an offer involves a comparison of the offer with a time invariant constant w which itself is a function of the parameters characterizing the search environment a wage offer greater than or equal to w is accepted while any other is rejected and search is continued some early empirical job search studies however accumulated evidence of a declining trend in reservation wages over the course of an unemployment spell 1 since then several theoretical explanations for the declining reservation wage profiles have emerged all of which relax the stationarity assumption of the standard model for example reuben gronau 1971 assumes searchers have finite lives kenneth burdett 1977 gerard j van den berg 1990 james albrecht and susan vroman 2005 and others model short term unemployment benefits albrecht pieter a gautier and vroman 2006 permit directed search to heterogeneous prospects 2 john p danforth 1979 and silvio rendon 2006 consider general liquidity con strained search and burdett and tara vishwanath 1988 model learning about the job offer distribution behavioral explanations for declining reservation wages have been suggested by braunstein and schotter 1981 schotter and braunstein 1982 and others in this paper we present the results of the first ever to our knowledge real time search laboratory experiment performed in an effort to investigate this falling res ervation wage phenomenon where field studies of unemployed search often rely on strong identifying assumptions to recover searchers unobservable reservation wages in the laboratory we are able to elicit subjects complete reservation wage profiles in an incentive compatible manner 3 further in the laboratory we are able to

institutions and the environment the case for a political socio economy of environmental conflicts this article presents a sympathetic but critical examination of institutional ecological economics iee a heterodox body of work on environmental governance as developed separately by j paavola and a vatn we highlight the theoretical limitations of iee related to two issues the causes of the emergence of environmental conflicts and the logics driving their regulation these limitations are all related to the underlying theories of institutional change in which power and legitimacy based explanations are confusedly combined both authors develop a normative perspective in which legitimacy becomes the main concern we argue that this perspective leads to contradictions in their respective approaches and provides no or only partial insights into the conditions of the emergence and regulation of environmental conflicts we finally highlight the conceptual adjustments inspired from classical marxism and regulation theory that in our view are needed to deal more adequately with these issues

rockets and feathers meet joseph reinvestigating the oil gasoline asymmetry on the international markets abstract we reinvestigate the rockets and feathers effect between retail gasoline and crude oil prices in a new framework of fractional integration long term memory and borderline non stationarity the most frequently used error correction model is examined in detail and we find that the prices return to their equilibrium value much more slowly than would be typical for the error correction model such dynamics is usually referred to as the joseph effect the standard procedure is shown to be troublesome and we introduce two new tests to investigate possible asymmetry in the price adjustment to equilibrium under these complicated time series characteristics on the dataset of seven national gasoline prices we find no statistically significant asymmetry the proposed methodology is not limited to the gasoline and crude oil case but it can be utilized for any asymmetric adjustment analysis

can exchange rate pass through explain the asymmetric gasoline puzzle evidence from a pooled panel threshold analysis of the eu abstract this study contributes to the literature since it tries to link the exchange rate pass through erpt with the rockets and feathers hypothesis using a panel of eu 28 countries allowing for the existence of an endogenous threshold variable our empirical findings indicate that the threshold model is better suited to this analysis than the baseline linear adjustment model this is the case since the latter restricts the threshold to be centered around zero and the dynamic response to cumulative shocks cannot be properly identified the empirical findings reveal that the threshold variable expressed by the trade weighted dollar exchange rate index is statistically significant only in the sample above the threshold high regime this means that for the net eu exporting countries fluctuations in the real effective exchange rate of the us against its major eu trading partners do affect the level of pre tax retail gasoline prices with the relevant elasticity exceeding unity complete erpt moreover all the statistical tests reject the null hypothesis that there is no significant threshold and thus an asymmetric adjustment gasoline mechanism prevails the impulse response functions confirm our empirical findings that erpt can explain asymmetric gasoline pricing within the eu periphery

an equilibrium theory of learning search and wages we propose an equilibrium theory of learning from search in the labor market which addresses the search behavior of workers the creation of jobs and the determination of wages as functions of labor market histories in the model each worker has incomplete information about his job finding ability and learns about it from his search outcomes the theory formalizes a notion akin to discouragement over each uninterrupted unemployment spell unemployed workers update their beliefs about their job finding abilities downward and reduce their desired wages one contribution of the paper is to integrate learning from search into an equilibrium framework by inducing endogenous heterogeneity in workers beliefs learning from search provides a novel explanation for a set of related empirical observations about the labor market including unemployment duration dependence and wage dispersion another contribution is to apply lattice theoretic techniques to analyze learning from experience which is useful because learning generates convex value functions and in principle multiple solutions to a worker s optimization problem

job separation in a non stationary search model a structural estimation to evaluate alternative unemployment insurance systems this paper considers a job search model in which the environment is not constant throughout the unemployment spell and where jobs do not last for ever in this situation reservation wages can be lower than they would be in a model without consideration of such separations but they can initially be higher precisely because of the non constant environment the model is estimated structurally by using spanish data for the period 1985 1996 the main finding is that after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity the unemployment hazard rate is almost flat during the first six months however after this duration the highly decreasing job offer arrival rate comes to be the only significant factor given that acceptance probabilities become equal to one the estimated parameters are used to evaluate different unemployment insurance designs we conclude that a non monotonic pattern in unemployment benefits joint with a tax paid by workers and based on unemployment duration makes this duration 13 2 lower than it currently is in spain copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd