a regional energy hub for achieving a low carbon energy transition abstract the transition to a low carbon energy economy will remain a cornerstone of national energy policies of countries committed to the climate change accord for decades to come we think that transmission investment is one key policy instrument amongst other to help with this transition we propose an enhanced role for investing in transmission capacity for inter regional trade to allow effective fuel switching among countries through a physically connected market we develop a conceptual framework of regional energy hubs and propose a cost minimization model in support of a transmission investment strategy that integrates i a key geopolitical parameter for countries that are geographically close in a region but under different political jurisdictions judged as stable and receptive to firm trading arrangements ii an economic parameter related to the fuel mix where the differences in a country s supply and demand characteristics are significant enough for allow mutual benefits to be realized through cost reduction iii an environmental parameter linked to a country s carbon intensity that could benefit from the resources of a neighboring jurisdiction with lower intensities and iv a financial parameter for each country within a region capable of attracting investment capital a connected regional energy hub offers large economic and environmental benefit for transition to a low carbon energy economy

the firm in early modern china abstract the chinese shareholding entity had a long history supported by cultural and legal practices pre dating the introduction of european business forms in china in the absence of codified or systematic precedent based private law a culture in which contract was deeply embedded in daily practice and the state enforced private agreements sustained a growing commercial sector kinship practices were adapted to the needs of a merchant community seeking ways to pool capital and sustain firm longevity these institutional developments help to explain chinese adaptability to western practices and the paradoxical persistence of chinese practices after the promulgation of a western style company law

time varying convergence in european electricity spot markets and their association with carbon and fuel prices abstract long run dynamics of electricity prices are expected to reflect fuel price developments since fuels generally account for a large share in the cost of generation as an integrated european market for electricity develops wholesale electricity prices should be converging as a result of market coupling and increased interconnectivity electricity mixes are also changing spurred by a drive to significantly increase the share of renewables consequently the electricity wholesale price dynamics are evolving and the fuel electricity price nexus that has been described in the literature is likely to reflect this evolution this study investigates associations between spot prices from the british french and nordpool markets with those in connected electricity markets and fuel input prices from december 2005 to october 2013 in order to assess the time varying dynamics of electricity spot price series localized autocorrelation functions are used electricity spot prices in the three markets are found to have stationary and non stationary periods when a trend in spot prices is observed it is likely to reflect the trend in fuel prices cointegration analysis is then used to assess co movement between electricity spot prices and fuel inputs to generation the results show that british electricity spot prices are associated with fuel prices and not with price developments in connected markets while the opposite is observed in the french and nordpool day ahead markets

are electricity prices affected by the us dollar to euro exchange rate the spanish case abstract the objective of this paper is to investigate the relationships between spanish electricity spot prices and the us dollar euro usd euro exchange rate during the period 2005 2007 taking into account the study of the association between dollar and oil prices in order to better understand the evolution of the former over time the first finding in this study is that spanish electricity spots prices the usd euro exchange rate and oil prices are cointegrated therefore there is a long run equilibrium relationship between the three variables short run relationships have been detected between oil prices and spanish electricity prices and usd euro exchange rate in the sense that spanish electricity prices and usd euro exchange rate are affected by oil prices in the short run there is a transmission of volatility between usd euro exchange rate and oil prices to spanish electricity prices so although spanish electricity prices are not affected in level by the movements of usd euro exchange rate they are in volatility in this kind of scenario the conclusions confirm that for countries so dependent on external causes as spain one possible solution for guarantying the energy security would be the promotion of the renewable energies therefore we cannot ignore the impact in the internal expenses of the cost of installation and generation of green energies so there must be a balance between the increase in renewables and the reasonable market price of the electricity

greener more integrated and less volatile a quantile regression analysis of italian wholesale electricity prices abstract this paper provides estimates of quantile regression models of the relationship between italian day ahead electricity prices the supply of renewables and the inception of a new cable sapei linking sardinia with the italian peninsula in the 2006 2015 time window the results confirm the merit order effects detected in the existing literature both for photovoltaics and wind power more strongly in market conditions characterised by moderately low price levels and with some implied increase in volatility the new cable has apparently challenged the ability of power generating companies to extract value through price spikes has mitigated volatility and its effects have been complementary with those of renewables effects from photovoltaics are more sensitive to robustness checks differences across zonal markets are nonetheless detected

fiscal transparency political parties and debt in oecd countries abstract many believe and argue that fiscal or budgetary transparency has large positive effects on fiscal performance however the evidence linking transparency and fiscal policy outcomes is less compelling to analyze the effects of fiscal transparency on public debt accumulation we present a career concerns model with political parties this allows us to integrate as implications of a single model three hitherto separate results in the literature on deficit and debt accumulation that transparency decreases debt accumulation at least by reducing an electoral cycle in deficits that right wing governments at least for strategic reasons tend to have higher deficits than left wing governments and that increasing political polarization increases debt accumulation to test the predictions of the model we construct a replicable index of fiscal transparency on 19 country oecd data simultaneous estimates of debt and transparency strongly confirm that a higher degree of fiscal transparency is associated with lower public debt and deficits independent of controls for explanatory variables from other approaches

market integration among electricity markets and their major fuel source markets dynamic price information flows among u s electricity wholesale spot prices and the prices of the major electricity generation fuel sources natural gas uranium coal and crude oil are studied multivariate time series methods applied to weekly price data show that in contemporaneous time peak electricity prices move natural gas prices which in turn influence crude oil in the long run price is discovered in the fuel sources market except uranium as these prices are weakly exogenous in a reduced rank regression representation of these energy prices

interpreting concentration indices in the secondary market for natural gas transportation the implication of pipeline residual rights abstract in 1992 the u s federal energy regulatory commission created a secondary market for natural gas transportation whereby shippers holding firm transportation capacity on interstate natural gas pipelines can compete with the pipeline in the provision of transportation services however if a shipper does not use some of its contracted firm transportation capacity the pipeline can resell that capacity as interruptible transportation that is the pipeline has residual rights with respect to firm transportation capacity contracted for by shippers we demonstrate that these residual rights can have a significant effect on the competitiveness of the secondary market for natural gas transportation a consequence of these residual rights is that the secondary market for natural gas transportation may be considerably more competitive than indicated by measures of concentration like the widely used herfindahl hirschman index

renewables diffusion and contagion effect in italian regional electricity markets assessment and policy implications abstract in the electricity market sudden price jumps occur more frequently than in other markets due to the peculiarity of electricity furthermore the structural spot characteristics of the electricity market determine high price variability all these characteristics have been accentuated by the dramatic increase of renewable energy supply in italy starting in 2010 these features suggest the possibility of contagion effects across italian regional electricity markets considering contagion such as a sudden and significant increase in cross market links arising from a shock to a specific market in this paper we investigate whether such a renewable energy increase has affected the contagion behavior in the italian electricity spot market taking into account both the difference between interdependence and contagion and the direction of the shock we find empirical evidence with significant tests that no changes have occurred in interdependence mechanism nor in contagion effects due to renewable energy sources development in italy

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

the economics of degrowth economic degrowth is ecologically desirable and possibly inevitable but under what conditions can it become socially sustainable how can we have full employment and economic stability without growth what will happen to public spending and to public debt how would production be organised in a degrowing economy and under what plausible socio political conditions could such grand changes happen standard economic theories and models ignore these questions for them economic growth is an axiomatic necessity this article reviews recent contributions in the economics of degrowth and identifies research avenues for ecological economists

elecxit the cost of bilaterally uncoupling british eu electricity trade abstract the uk s withdrawal from the european union could mean that it leaves the eu s internal energy market for electricity elecxit this paper develops methods to study the longer term consequences of this electricity market disintegration especially the end of market coupling before european electricity markets were coupled different market closing times forced traders to commit to cross border trading volumes based on anticipated market prices interconnector capacity was often under used and power sometimes flowed from high to low price areas a model of these market frictions is developed empirically verified on 2009 data before french and british market coupling and applied to estimate the costs of market uncoupling in 2030 a less efficient market and the abandonment of some planned interconnectors would raise generation costs by 700 m a year 2 compared to remaining in the internal energy market this result is sensitive to how the british and french electricity systems develop over the coming decades economic losses are four times greater 2700 m a year if france retains substantial nuclear capacity due to its low marginal costs conversely losses are reduced by two thirds if uk weakens its decarbonisation ambitions as lower carbon prices subsidise british fossil fuel generation allowing electricity prices to converge with those in france a hard elecxit would make british prices rise and french prices fall in three of our four scenarios with the opposite movements in the fourth scenario

testing causal relationships between wholesale electricity prices and primary energy prices we apply the lag augmented vector autoregression technique to test the granger causal relationships among wholesale electricity prices natural gas prices and crude oil prices in addition by adopting a cross correlation function approach we test not only the causality in mean but also the causality in variance between the variables the results of tests using both techniques show that gas prices granger cause electricity prices in mean we find no granger causality in variance among these variables

transmission of prices and price volatility in australian electricity spot markets a multivariate garch analysis this paper examines the transmission of spot electricity prices and price volatility among the five regional electricity markets in the australian national electricity market namely new south wales queensland south australia the snowy mountains hydroelectric scheme and victoria a multivariate generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model is used to identify the source and magnitude of price and price volatility spillovers the results indicate the presence of positive own mean spillovers in only a small number of markets and no mean spillovers between any of the markets this appears to be directly related to the physical transfer limitations of the present system of regional interconnection nevertheless the large number of significant own volatility and cross volatility spillovers in all five markets indicates the presence of strong autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity effects this indicates that shocks in some markets will affect price volatility in others finally and contrary to evidence from studies in north american electricity markets the results also indicate that australian electricity spot prices are stationary

the ultrasocial origin of the anthropocene abstract the current geological epoch has been dubbed the anthropocene the age of humans we argue that the roots of the anthropocene lie in the agricultural revolution that began some 8000 years ago unique human psychological and cultural characteristics were present in our distant hunter gatherer past but in terms of the biophysical impact of our species agricultural represented an unequivocal and decisive evolutionary break with the transition to agriculture human society began to function as a superorganism functioning as a single unit designed by social natural selection to produce economic surplus where environmental conditions were permitted early human agricultural societies followed the same pattern as a few social insects and exhibited explosive population growth complex and detailed division of labor intensive resource exploitation territorial expansion and a social organization favoring the survival and growth of the supergroup over the well being of individuals within the group similar economic forces lie behind ultrasociality in social insects and humans increased productivity from the division of labor increasing returns to scale and the exploitation of stocks of productive resources exploring the evolutionary mechanisms behind ultrasociality offers insights into the growth imperative that threatens the stability of the earth s life support systems

price and volatility dynamics between electricity and fuel costs some evidence for spain abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate the causal linkages between the spanish electricity brent crude oil and zeebrugge belgium natural gas 1 month ahead forward prices following lutkepohl et al 2004 we control for the presence of a structural change in the series and then we use the johansen cointegration test and a vector error correction model vecm to embrace the analysis additionally a multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic garch model is applied to explore volatility interactions between the three markets involved in the study our findings reveal that brent crude oil and zeebrugge natural gas forward prices play a prominent role in the spanish electricity price formation process furthermore causation both in price and volatility runs from brent crude oil and natural gas forward markets to the spanish electricity forward market these results are of practical importance for both the wholesale and retail markets participants as well as the regulator through the established link between the forward contracts price and the spanish tariff of last resort paid by more than 23 million of customers

regime jumps in electricity prices many countries are liberalizing their energy markets participants in these markets are exposed to market risk due to the characteristics of electricity price dynamics electricity prices are known to be mean reverting very volatile and subject to frequent spikes models that describe the dynamics of electricity prices should incorporate these characteristics in order to capture the price spikes many researchers have introduced stochastic jump processes but we argue and show that this specification might lead to potential problems with specifying the true amount of mean reversion within the process in this paper we propose a regime switching model that models price spikes separated from normal mean reverting prices

integration and shock transmissions across european electricity forward markets abstract new results are presented relating to the integration of the french german british dutch and spanish power markets at day ahead week ahead one month ahead and two month ahead lead times overall there is evidence of market integration increasing over time despite an underlying inefficiency in each market with respect to the forward and spot price convergence the spatial analysis on a financial dimension is undertaken using causality tests cointegration and impulse response techniques for both price levels and volatilities in general we find less influence of the size and proximity of neighbouring markets than other studies more integration at baseload than peak and surprisingly less integration in forwards than spot prices

the shallow or the deep ecological economics movement ecological economics and its policy recommendations have become overwhelmed by economic valuation shadow pricing sustainability measures and squeezing nature into the commodity boxes of goods services and capital in order to make it part of mainstream economic financial and banking discourses there are deeper concerns which touch upon the understanding of humanity in its various social psychological political and ethical facets the relationship with nature proposed by the ecological economics movement has the potential to be far reaching however this is not the picture portrayed by surveying the amassed body of articles from this journal or by many of those claiming affiliation a shallow movement allied to a business as usual politics and economy has become dominant and imposes its preoccupation with mainstream economic concepts and values if instead ecological economists choose a path deep into the world of interdisciplinary endeavour they will need to be prepared to transform themselves and society the implications go far beyond the pragmatic use of magic numbers to convince politicians and the public that ecology still has something relevant to say in the 21st century author s abstract

the dynamic linkage effect between energy and emissions allowances price for regional emissions trading scheme pilots in china abstract china s emissions trading scheme cets pilots are emerging and fragmented markets these emissions allowances markets may exhibit a different fundamental price process from the european union s eu and the united states us emissions trading scheme ets the dynamic linkage effects between energy and emissions allowances prices are investigated for regional ets pilots in china using cointegration techniques the empirical results confirm that in the long run coal oil and natural gas prices are the main determinant factors of regional emissions allowances prices except for the second phase beijing ets pilots however their long run cointegration relationships in the beijing and shanghai pilots are not exactly in line with the guangdong and hubei pilots in the short run the changes in oil and natural gas prices in the second phase beijing ets pilot the natural gas prices in the shanghai ets pilot and the coal prices in the hubei ets pilot are found to have significant effects on regional emissions allowances prices in china finally regional energy pricing inefficiency regional emissions trading market overreaction and their inefficient fundaments may provide major obstacles in reducing the effectiveness of the fossil energy price pass through to emissions allowances prices in regional ets pilots

from micro to macro via production networks amodern economy is an intricately linked web of specialized production units each relying on the flow of inputs from their suppliers to produce their own output which in turn is routed towards other downstream units in this essay i argue that the structure of this production network is key in determining whether and how microeconomic shocks affecting only a particular firm or technology along the chain propagate throughout the economy and shape aggregate outcomes therefore understanding the structure of this production network can better inform both academics on the origins of aggregate fluctuations and policy makers on how to prepare for and recover from adverse shocks that disrupt these production chains two recent events have brought to the forefront the importance of interconnections between firms and sectors in aggregate economic performance consider first the 2011 earthquake in japan while the triple tragedy of the earthquake the ensuing tsunami and the near nuclear meltdown at fukushima surely resulted in a significant destruction of human and physical capital its effects would have been largely restricted to the affected areas were it not for the disruption of national

a history of european electricity day ahead prices in this article we examine the development of day ahead prices in five european markets which became more connected over recent years where previous studies examined the convergence of price levels over time we focus on patterns in estimates for the parameters in a switching regimes model this makes it possible to distinguish between prices under normal market conditions and under non normal market conditions those market conditions that can cause extreme price spikes we expect that increased connectivity yields additional supply in the short term and therefore will reduce the impact of price spikes our results indicate that the impact of price spikes and volatility decreased over time that prices behave more random and that the parameter estimates between various connected markets seem to have converged between the belgian dutch french german and nordic day ahead markets over the years 2003 through 2010 these results can be explained by increased connectivity and improved liquidity

market reasoning as moral reasoning why economists should re engage with political philosophy abstract in my book what money can t buy the moral limits of markets 2012 i try to show that market values and market reasoning increasingly reach into spheres of life previously governed by nonmarket norms i argue that this tendency is troubling putting a price on every human activity erodes certain moral and civic goods worth caring about we therefore need a public debate about where markets serve the public good and where they don t belong in this article i would like to develop a related theme when it comes to deciding whether this or that good should be allocated by the market or by nonmarket principles economics is a poor guide deciding which social practices should be governed by market mechanisms requires a form of economic reasoning that is bound up with moral reasoning but mainstream economic thinking currently asserts its independence from the contested terrain of moral and political philosophy if economics is to help us decide where markets serve the public good and where they do

the implications of brexit for the electricity sector in great britain trade offs between market integration and policy influence this paper examines the trade off between the economic gains to great britain gb from being integrated into the eu electricity market on the one hand and a loss of influence over policy and rule making on the other the aim is not to predict how this trade off will be resolved in practice but rather to lay out what is at stake on both sides of the equation since the late 2000s the electricity market in gb has become increasingly integrated with continental european markets through market coupling and increasing interconnection capacity with further integration expected up to the mid 2020s estimates of the economic benefits of this integration range up to the order of several 100 m to 1bn a year representing the economic cost of a reversal of such integration on the other hand maintaining and expanding electricity market integration would require the acceptance of electricity policies and regulations made in european institutions in which uk actors would have little if any voice an intermediate multilateral approach offering the possibility of retaining market integration with less cost in terms of influence is proposed

causal modeling and inference for electricity markets abstract how does dynamic price information flow among northern european electricity spot prices and prices of major electricity generation fuel sources we use time series models combined with new advances in causal inference to answer these questions applying our methods to weekly nordic and german electricity prices and oil gas and coal prices with german wind power and nordic water reservoir levels as exogenous variables we estimate a causal model for the price dynamics both for contemporaneous and lagged relationships in contemporaneous time nordic and german electricity prices are interlinked through gas prices in the long run electricity prices and british gas prices adjust themselves to establish the equilibrium price level since oil coal continental gas and eur usd are found to be weakly exogenous

climate change policy what do the models tell us very little a plethora of integrated assessment models iams have been constructed and used to estimate the social cost of carbon scc and evaluate alternative abatement policies these models have crucial flaws that make them close to useless as tools for policy analysis certain inputs e g the discount rate are arbitrary but have huge effects on the scc estimates the models produce the models descriptions of the impact of climate change are completely ad hoc with no theoretical or empirical foundation and the models can tell us nothing about the most important driver of the scc the possibility of a catastrophic climate outcome iam based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision but that perception is illusory and misleading jel c51 q54 q58

investment options and bargaining power the eurasian supply chain for natural gas we use cooperative game theory to analyze how the architecture of the pipeline network determines the power structure in the supply chain for russian gas if the assessment is narrowly focused on the abilities to obstruct flows in the existing system the main transit countries belarus and ukraine appear to be strong if investment options are accounted for however russia achieves clear dominance we show that options to bypass one of the transit countries are of little strategic importance compared to russia s direct access to its customers through the baltic sea comparing the results of our calibrated model with empirical evidence obtained from transit and import agreements we find that the shapley value explains the power of major transit countries better than the core and the nucleolus

voters as fiscal conservatives voters penalize federal and state spending growth this is the central result of my analysis of voting behavior in presidential senatorial and gubernatorial elections from 1950 1988 the composition of federal spending growth seems irrelevant the vote loss to the president s party from an extra dollar of defense or nondefense spending is the same however in gubernatorial elections expansion of state welfare spending exacts a disproportionate political price deficit financing of federal or state spending does not appear to matter politically i conclude by discussing the obvious question of why government budgets have grown in the face of this voter hostility

the effect of fiscal performance on local government election results in israel 1989 1998 abstract we discuss the circumstances under which voters in local elections will reward fiscal responsibility and suggest that such circumstances evolved in israel in the mid 1990s we present empirical evidence that indeed fiscal performance of mayors substantially affected their reelection probability in the 1998 campaign but not in the 1989 and 1993 campaigns changes in the political environment enforcement of audit and financial reporting requirements tougher imposition of hard budget constraints and the development of local media are proposed as explanations the hypotheses that the fiscal variables reflect the income level at the locality or the mayor s success in extracting resources from the central government are tested and rejected

speculative trading of electricity contracts in interconnected locations abstract we derive an investor s optimal trading strategy of electricity contracts traded in two locations joined by an interconnector the investor employs a price model which includes the impact of her own trades the investor s trades have a permanent impact on prices because her trading activity affects the demand of contracts in both locations additionally the investor receives prices which are worse than the quoted prices as a result of the elasticity of liquidity provision of contracts furthermore the investor is ambiguity averse so she acknowledges that her model of prices may be misspecified and considers other models when devising her trading strategy we show that as the investor s degree of ambiguity aversion increases her trading activity decreases in both locations and thus her inventory exposure also decreases finally we show that there is a range of ambiguity aversion parameters where the sharpe ratio of the trading strategy increases when ambiguity aversion increases

deliverability and regional pricing in u s natural gas markets during the 1980s and early 90s interstate natural gas markets in the united states made a transition away from the regulation that characterized the previous three decades with abundant supplies and plentiful pipeline capacity a new order emerged in which freer markets and arbitrage closely linked natural gas price movements throughout the country after the mid 1990s however u s natural gas markets tightened and some pipelines were pushed to capacity we look for the pricing effects of limited arbitrage through causality testing between prices at nodes on the u s natural gas transportation system and interchange prices at regional nodes on north american electricity grids our tests do reveal limited arbitrage which is indicative of bottlenecks in the u s natural gas pipeline system

the hotelling rule for entropy constrained economic growth abstract lozada gabriel a 1995 xxx ecological economics the entropy change of the solar system between now and its final heat death is fixed the time to the heat death is determined by the rate of entropy increase between now and then if this rate of entropy increase is itself increased by economic activity then economic activity is generating a negative externality by internalizing this a social planner treats the fixed amount of entropy change remaining until the heat death like the stock of an exhaustible resource this leads to an analysis along the same lines as hotelling s neoclassical economics of exhaustible resources forming a partial synthesis between neoclassical economics and nicholas georgescu roegen s ecological economics work on the entropy law

the benefits of integrating european electricity markets this paper builds on and extends work under contract ener b1 491 1 2012 published as newbery et al 2013

political opportunism and countercyclical fiscal policy in election year recessions political budget cycles pbcs have been well documented in the literature albeit not for all circumstances however no work has been done on the impact of economic growth on the magnitude of pbcs the theoretical model argues that a government has an incentive to increase fiscal manipulations when a recession is expected to hit and curtail re election chances this amounts to countercyclical policy for opportunistic rather than keynesian motives very robust evidence for this behaviour is found in portuguese municipalities in election years budget deficits go up even more and significantly so when a recession is expected

new foundations for ecological economics abstract ecological economics has been repeatedly described as transdiciplinary and open to including everything from positivism to relativism i argue for a revision and rejection of this position in favour of realism and reasoned critique looking into the ontological presuppositions and considering an epistemology appropriate for ecological economics to meaningfully exist requires rejecting the form of methodological pluralism which has been advocated since the start of this journal this means being clear about the differences in our worldview or paradigm from others and being aware of the substantive failures of orthodox economics in addressing reality this paper argues for a fundamental review of the basis upon which ecological economics has been founded and in so doing seeks improved clarity as to the competing and complementary epistemologies and methodologies in part this requires establishing serious interdisciplinary research to replace superficial transdisciplinary rhetoric the argument places the future of ecological economics firmly amongst heterodox economic schools of thought and in ideological opposition to those supporting the existing institutional structures perpetuating a false reality of the world s social environmental and economic systems and their operation

voting suffrage and the political budget cycle evidence from the london metropolitan boroughs 1902 1937 we study the opportunistic political budget cycle in the london metropolitan boroughs between 1902 and 1937 under two different suffrage regimes taxpayer suffrage 1902 1914 and universal suffrage 1921 1937 we argue and find supporting evidence that the political budget cycle operates differently under the two types of suffrage taxpayer suffrage where the right to vote and the obligation to pay local taxes are linked encourages demands for retrenchment and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year tax cuts and savings on administration costs universal suffrage where all adult residents can vote irrespective of their taxpayer status creates demands for productive public services and the political budget cycle manifests itself in election year hikes in capital spending and a reduction in current spending

european product market integration after the euro using a detailed data set of prices of consumer goods in european cities from 1990 to spring 2003 we investigate the question of whether the introduction of the euro in january 1999 increased integration of consumer markets as reflected by consumer prices in fact we find no tendency for prices to converge after january 1999 this finding holds even when we control for a number of factors that might affect price dispersion on the other hand we find that there has been a significant reduction in price dispersion throughout the decade of the 1990s suggesting that efforts to reduce economic barriers initiated early in the decade may have in fact had the effect of significantly increasing the integration of consumer markets charles engel and john h rogers

a strategic model of european gas supply gasmod abstract this paper presents a model of the european natural gas supply gasmod which is structured as a two stage game of successive natural gas exports to europe upstream market and wholesale trade within europe downstream market and which explicitly includes infrastructure capacities we compare three possible market scenarios cournot competition in both markets perfect competition in both markets and perfect competition in the downstream with cournot competition in the upstream market eu liberalization we find that cournot competition in both markets is the most accurate representation of today s european natural gas market where suppliers at both stages generate a mark up at the expense of the final customer double marginalization our results yield a diversified supply portfolio with newly emerging lng exporters gaining market shares enforcing competition in the european downstream market would lead to lower prices and higher quantities by avoiding the welfare reducing effects of double marginalization binding infrastructure capacity restrictions strongly influence the results and we identify bottlenecks mainly for intra european trade relations whereas transport capacity in the upstream market is globally sufficient in the cournot scenario

election results and opportunistic policies a new test of the rational political business cycle model the literature on the rational pbc suggests that politicians systematically manipulate economic and fiscal conditions before elections to increase their chances of reelection most tests of this theory look for evidence of pre election distortions in fiscal policy we propose a new test that explores the two way interaction between the magnitude of the opportunistic distortion and the margin of victory the test is implemented using a large panel of portuguese municipalities the results show that opportunism leads to a larger win margin for the incumbent and that incumbents behave more opportunistically when their win margin is small these results are consistent with the theoretical model

price discovery in european natural gas markets we provide the first high frequency investigation of price discovery within the physical and financial layers of europe s natural gas markets testing not only looks at short term return dynamics but also considers each security s contribution to price equilibrium in the longer term results show that uk natural gas futures traded on the intercontinental exchange display greater price discovery than physical trading at various hubs throughout europe

ideas institutions and interests in the politics of cross border electricity interconnection greenlink britain and ireland abstract increasing electricity interconnection is necessary for both closer market integration and facilitating more renewable generation across the european union however progress on the ground has been slow this paper adds to the literature on the politics of interconnection through a case study of a proposed link between ireland and great britain we analyse how the institutional setting for investment has evolved at eu and member state level and how the influence of stakeholders is mediated by the ability of actors to define their interests and by institutional points of entry using this framework we examine the greenwire greenlink project we find first that developments in the institutional context especially the adoption of a new cap and floor regime for merchant investment by the gb regulator have had both positive and negative impacts on the project second we find that regulators and governments in the two markets have found it hard to define their interests in the project and its net social benefit due to informational complexities and changes in information over time third the project has met with local public opposition that is strong but which has little leverage due to a lack of institutional entry points

implicit auctioning on the kontek cable third time lucky implicit auctioning in europe is about eliminating cross border trade inefficiencies by internalizing crossborder trade into the day ahead auction procedures of the power exchanges that are already organizing trade nationally on the kontek cable implicit auctioning has first been implemented with no coupling between the relevant power exchanges followed by a volume coupling implementation and finally a one way price coupling implementation that is still operational today the main contribution of this paper is to compare the theoretical properties of these three implementations and to analyze their performance empirically we find that the third implementation is significantly outperforming the previous two implementations but in this third implementation stakeholders partly abandoned the volume coupling approach they initially believed to be a viable alternative and institutionally easier to implement

the message in north american energy prices how similar is the price behavior of north american natural gas fuel oil and power prices using current state of the art econometric methodology we explore the degree of shared trends across north american energy markets across these markets there appear to be effective arbitraging mechanisms for the price of natural gas and fuel oil but not for the price of electricity

impact of the carbon price on the integrating european electricity market we study the impact of the carbon price on the integrating electricity market in the eu our theoretical framework suggests that the price of carbon has a positive but uneven impact on electricity prices depending on the marginal production plant the carbon price may increase price differences in the short run we apply time series analysis on daily forward data from 2003 to 2011 and investigate whether we can find empirical evidence for our analytical findings our results support the hypotheses that integration in electricity prices has increased over time and that the carbon price has a positive but uneven impact on the integration of prices

the crucial relationship among energy commodity prices evidence from the spanish electricity market the main purpose of this article is twofold to analyze a the long term relation among the commodities prices and between spot electricity market price and commodity prices and b the short term dynamics among commodity prices and between electricity prices and commodity prices data between 2002 and 2005 from the spanish electricity market was used econometric methods were used in the analysis of the commodity spot price namely the vector autoregression model the vector error correction model and the granger causality test the co integration approach was used to analyze the long term relationship between the common stochastic trends of four fossil fuel prices one of the findings in the long term relation is that the prices of fuel and the prices of brent are intertwined though the prices of brent ten to move to reestablish the price equilibrium another finding is that the price of electricity is explained by the evolution of the natural gas series

dynamics and determinants of energy intensity in the service sector a cross country analysis 1980 2005 we present a detailed analysis of energy intensity developments across 23 service sectors in 18 oecd countries over the period 1980 2005 we find that the shift towards a service economy has contributed to lower overall energy intensity levels in the oecd but this contribution would have been considerably larger if the service sector had realized the same degree of energy efficiency improvements as the manufacturing sector in most oecd countries energy intensity levels in services tend to decrease relatively slow especially after 1995 if we control this trend for the impact of structural changes within the services sector by means of a decomposition analysis we find that in about one third of the oecd countries energy intensity levels in services have increased over time the impact of structural changes on aggregate energy intensity dynamics in services has increased considerably after 1995 highlighting a relatively poor energy efficiency performance within a wide range of service sectors we show that the introduction of information and communication technology ict plays a potentially important role here using panel data regression analysis we find a limited role for energy prices in explaining variation in energy productivity while climate conditions clearly impact energy productivity

the impact of wind power generation on the electricity price in germany abstract this paper investigates the relationship between intermittent wind power generation and electricity price behaviour in germany using a garch model i evaluate the effect of wind electricity generation on the level and the volatility of the electricity price in an integrated approach the results show that variable wind power reduces the price level but increases its volatility this paper s results also indicate that regulatory change has stabilised the wholesale price the electricity price volatility has decreased in germany after a modification of the marketing mechanism of renewable electricity this gives confidence that further adjustments to regulation and policy may foster a better integration of renewables into the power system

entropy and economic processes physics perspectives this paper is a contribution to the discussion on the relation between thermodynamics and economic theory with respect to thermodynamic constraints on the economy there are two diametrically opposite positions in this discussion one claims that the constraints are insignificant of no immediate practical importance for modelling and in the intermediate run do not limit economic activity and therefore need not be incorporated in the economic theory the other holds that thermodynamics tells us that there are practical limits to materials recycling which already puts bounds on the economy and therefore must be included in the economic models using the thermodynamic concept of entropy we show here that there are fundamental problems with both positions even in the long run entropy production associated with material dissipation need not be a limiting factor for economic development abundant energy resources from solar radiation may be used to recover dissipated elements with simple quantitative analysis we show that the rate of entropy production caused by human economic activities is very small compared to the continuous natural entropy production in the atmosphere and on the earth s surface further the societal entropy production is well within the range of natural variation it is possible to replace part of the natural entropy production with societal entropy production by making use of solar energy society consumes resources otherwise available for coming generations however future generations need not have less resources available to them than the present generation human industrial activities could be transformed into a sustainable system where the more abundant elements are industrially used and recycled using solar energy as the driving resource an economic theory fit to guide industrial society in that development must not disregard thermodynamics nor must it overstate the consequences of the laws of thermodynamics 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

strategic eurasian natural gas market model for energy security and policy analysis formulation and application to south stream abstract the mathematical formulation of a strategic eurasian natural gas market model is presented the model represents horizontal oligopolistic relationships among producers bilateral market power between producer russia and transit ukraine countries detailed transport constraints and operation decisions over a 20 year time horizon to demonstrate the model s capabilities a financial and market analysis of the proposed south stream gas pipeline from russia via the black sea to south europe is summarized insights obtained include the following first expectations of high demand growth in europe and or transit risks do not justify the construction of the south stream pipeline because under all demand and ukraine transit interruption scenarios the net benefits to the south stream participants are negative the npv ranges from 1 9 billion bn to 7 4 bn second ukraine s perception of high transit market power vis a vis russia may trigger the construction of the otherwise unprofitable south stream project thus under ukraine s high transit market power scenario the npv of south stream ranges between 2 4 bn and 24 5 bn third we find that the south stream investment increases the efficiency of the european gas market under the following conditions i when gas demand in europe grows 2 per year up to 2030 ii when ukraine poses high transit market power or iii under a combination of severe transit risks through ukraine and low demand scenarios in europe it should be noted that the value of south stream to both its project sponsors and the market as a whole is much higher when ukraine exercises transit market power than under the high demand scenario therefore whether ukraine is likely to wield market power is crucial to the success of the south stream project because that is the only scenario in which the project yields both a positive expected npv to its sponsors and the highest value to the market as a whole

cointegration analysis of spot electricity prices insights on transmission efficiency in the western us abstract the us energy policy act of 1992 promoted the development of spot markets for electric power by requiring utilities to open their transmission systems to wholesale power sales in this paper we specify and estimate a vector error correction model using peak and off peak electricity spot prices during 1994 1996 covering 11 regional markets in the western united states and test these prices for evidence of market integration the results show evidence of an efficient and stable wholesale power market

jevons paradox revisited the evidence for backfire from improved energy efficiency beginning with william stanley jevons in 1865 a number of authors have claimed that economically justified energy efficiency improvements will increase rather than reduce energy consumption jevons paradox is extremely difficult to test empirically but could have profound implications for energy and climate policy this paper summarises and critiques the arguments and evidence that have been cited in support of jevons paradox focusing in particular on the work of len brookes and harry saunders it identifies some empirical and theoretical weaknesses in these arguments highlights the questions they raise for economic orthodoxy and points to some interesting parallels between these arguments and those used by the biophysical school of ecological economics while the evidence in favour of jevons paradox is far from conclusive it does suggest that economy wide rebound effects are larger than is conventionally assumed and that energy plays a more important role in driving productivity improvements and economic growth than is conventionally assumed

empirical estimates of the direct rebound effect a review beginning with william stanley jevons in 1865 a number of authors have claimed that economically justified energy efficiency improvements will increase rather than reduce energy consumption jevons paradox is extremely difficult to test empirically but could have profound implications for energy and climate policy this paper summarises and critiques the arguments and evidence that have been cited in support of jevons paradox focusing in particular on the work of len brookes and harry saunders it identifies some empirical and theoretical weaknesses in these arguments highlights the questions they raise for economic orthodoxy and points to some interesting parallels between these arguments and those used by the biophysical school of ecological economics while the evidence in favour of jevons paradox is far from conclusive it does suggest that economy wide rebound effects are larger than is conventionally assumed and that energy plays a more important role in driving productivity improvements and economic growth than is conventionally assumed 2008 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

why europe and the west why not china in the history of technological development why didn t other regions keep up with europe this is an important question as one learns almost as much from failure as from success the one civilization that was in a position to match and even anticipate the european achievement was china china had two chances first to generate a continuing self sustaining process of scientific and technological advance on the basis of its indigenous traditions and achievements and second to learn from european science and technology once the foreign barbarians entered the chinese domain in the sixteenth century china failed both times what explains the first failure i stress the role of the market the fact that enterprise was free in europe while china lacked a free market and institutionalized property rights that in europe innovation worked and paid while the chinese state was always stepping in to interfere with private enterprise as for the second failure china s cultural triumphalism combined with petty downward tyranny made it a singularly bad learner

political business cycles democratization and economic reform the case of africa abstract this paper presents cross country evidence that political business cycles are alive and well in the nascent democracies of the developing world africa provides fertile ground for the study of political business cycles this paper uncovers systematic electorally timed interventions in five monetary and four fiscal policy variables in a panel of african countries these findings are consistent with the predictions of rational opportunistic political business cycle theory if africa s increasingly frequent elections are associated with reversals of fiscal and monetary policy reform there is a potential conflict between political and economic reform

a review of balancing costs in italy before and after res introduction abstract the massive introduction of res in electricity markets is recognized to have induced a merit order effect on wholesale prices while day ahead prices are likely to decline as res e production increases the effects on balancing market sessions are more ambiguous taking into account the northern italian zone characterized by a high solar pv and hydro penetration we provide empirical evidence that balancing quantities decreased while costs increased between two samples associated with low 2006 08 and high 2013 15 res levels we estimate balancing costs for different technologies and compare their dynamics across specific hours we find evidence of increasing balancing prices in particular market conditions that we interpret as a signal of strategic use of real time sessions by conventional producers prone to the merit order effect in the day ahead market we compare our results to those obtained in the german market where on the contrary balancing costs have decreased and postulate that the different market designs may explain these results our findings suggest that the italian policy makers should carefully monitor all trading sessions especially those close to real time to avoid the exercise of market power by few operators allowed to guarantee system security and additionally to promptly adopt a capacity market

long memory and level shifts in the volatility of stock market return indices there has been interest in the possibility of confusing long memory and structural changes in level and studies showed that when a short memory process is contaminated by level shifts the estimate of the fractional differencing parameter is biased upward and the autocovariances decay slowly we analyze the properties of the autocorrelation function the periodogram and the log periodogram estimate of the memory parameter when the level shift component is a mixture model our results explain many findings reported and uncover new features we confront our theoretical predictions using log squared returns as a proxy for the volatility of some assets returns including daily s p 500 returns over the period 1928 2002 the estimates follow patterns that would obtain if the process was short memory with level shifts instead of fractionally integrated a simple test is also proposed which reinforces this conclusion

shifting load through space the economics of spatial demand side management using distributed data centers demand side flexibility dsf in the electricity grid has become an active research area in recent years while temporal flexibility e g load shedding load shifting is already discussed intensively in literature spatial load migration still is an under researched type of dsf spatial load migration allows us to instantly migrate power consuming activities among different locations data centers dcs are power intensive and process information goods since information goods are easily transferable through communication networks power intensive processing of information goods is not necessarily tied to a specific location consequently geographically distributed dcs inherit in theory a considerable potential to globally migrate load we analyze the economics of spatially migrating load to provide balancing power using geographically distributed dcs we assure that neither of the participating electricity grids will be burdened by this mechanism by using historical data to evaluate our model we find reasonable economic incentives to migrate positive as well as negative balancing power in addition we find that current scenarios favor the migration of negative balancing power our research thus reveals realistic opportunities to virtually transfer balancing power between different market areas worldwide

self organization and sustainability energetics of evolution and implications for ecological economics abstract in the 1920s alfred lotka suggested that evolution results both in an increasing total energy flow through the biosphere and in increasing energy efficiency of biological processes later authors attempted to generalize lotka s conjectures and to transform them into general evolutionary laws these laws are derived from the laws of thermodynamics and it is frequently argued that they also apply to the development of economic systems in the present paper an alternative interpretation of the lotka principles is suggested which starts from the self organization of dissipative structures self organization concepts from ecological and evolutionary economics are integrated on this basis energetic regularities in evolutionary processes are interpreted as emergent properties of competitive self organization given the close relationship between energy dissipation in economic processes and various environmental problems thermodynamic effects of economic evolution are of practical policy relevance the evolutionary perspective taken here implies that policy measures toward sustainable development will primarily have to affect the kinds of innovative behavior triggered in competitive processes

causality between energy and output in the long run though there is a very large literature examining whether energy use granger causes economic output or vice versa this literature is fairly inconclusive almost all existing studies use relatively short time series or panels with a relatively small time dimension additionally many recent papers continue to use what seem to be misspecified models we apply granger causality and cointegration techniques to a swedish time series data set on energy and economic growth spanning 150 years to test whether increases in energy use and energy quality have driven economic growth we show that these techniques are very sensitive to variable definition choice of additional variables in the model and sample periods all of the following appear to make a finding that energy causes growth more likely using multivariate models defining variables to better reflect their theoretical definition using larger samples and including appropriate structural breaks however it is also possible that the relationship between energy and growth has changed over time and that results from recent smaller samples reflect this energy prices have a significant causal impact on both energy use and output

an assessment of the danish german cross border auctions abstract this paper presents an analysis of the auction prices at the cross border auction between west denmark and germany and between east denmark and germany the kontek cable monthly and annual transmission capacities appear to be more highly valued than daily transmission capacity on average the two cross border auctions show different trends the auctions between west denmark and germany exhibit a higher level of prices in the southbound direction and between east denmark and germany higher prices in the northbound direction we find a relatively strong correspondence in the pricing of products over different time frames daily monthly and annual auctions between west denmark and germany and a weak correspondence for the products between east denmark and germany in the daily auctions market players can decide whether to use their capacity after the clearing of the day ahead market while in the monthly and annual auctions they must decide whether to use their capacity prior to clearing if they choose not to use their capacity the use it or lose it principle applies the capacity is then subsequently released to the daily market since the daily cross border auctions are free of commitment they should be valued as options likewise in the monthly and annual auctions market players can choose not to nominate their capacity but as this must occur before the clearing of the day ahead market they will not know the directions of the power flows a priori if they nominate the capacity they must use it if the direction turns out to be wrong it is then possible to purchase capacity in the opposite direction in the daily auctions if market players can accurately predict the outcome of the spot markets day ahead the value of monthly and annual capacity should more closely reflect the value of an option thus one would expect the value of the monthly and annual capacity to be between the value of an option and an obligation although this suggests that the average price of daily capacity should be greater than monthly and annual capacity our data do not support this hypothesis the daily monthly and annual capacity auctions do not reflect the value of the underlying asset as specified by the appropriate valuation of the energy price differentials between west denmark and germany and east denmark and germany therefore market players are exposed to substantial variation in fees for congestion management on the cross border we study whether arbitrage improves over time and discern no obvious trend since the explicit auction procedure has not been cost efficient a better approach appears to be the new market coupling arrangement introduced on the kontek cable and on the border between west denmark and germany with the result that market players will pay a congestion management fee i e area price difference equal to the energy price differential resulting from the market coupling mechanism

third degree price discrimination and consumer surplus this paper considers the effects of monopoly third degree price discrimination on aggregate consumer surplus discrimination is likely to reduce surplus relative to that obtained with a uniform price but surplus can rise under reasonable conditions if the ratio of the pass through coefficient to the price elasticity at the uniform price is higher in the market with the higher price elasticity then surplus is larger with discrimination for a large set of demand functions the relatively high pass through coefficient implies a large price reduction in this market with logit demand functions surplus is higher with discrimination if pass through is above 0 5

electricity market integration decarbonisation and security of supply dynamic volatility connectedness in the irish and great britain markets abstract this study investigates the volatility connectedness between the irish and great britain electricity markets and how it is driven by changes in energy policy institutional structures and political ideologies we assess various aspects of this volatility connectedness including static unconditional vs dynamic conditional symmetric vs asymmetric characteristics between 2009 and 2018 we find that the volatility connectedness is time varying and it is significantly affected by important events policy reforms or market re designs such as brexit oil price slump an increasing share of renewables and fluctuations in the exchange rates our asymmetric analysis shows that magnitude of the good volatility connectedness is marginally larger than that of the bad volatility connectedness our result suggests that good volatility levels would be even higher once the irish market adopts the carbon price floor therefore supporting renewable generation by setting an appropriate price of carbon in interconnected wholesale electricity markets will improve market integration

optimal pricing in electrical networks over space and time an electrical system is modelled with a transmission network customers central generators and independent generators the system is subject to stochastic failures and stochastic demand parameters optimal spot prices are derived for the system they vary stochastically with space and time and depend on electrical load flow patterns the price difference between two locations or two voltage levels and the wheeling charge between them will change magnitude and sometimes sign over time as a function of events throughout the network current spatial pricing methods are significantly different from the spot price based methods derived here

how do budget deficits and economic growth affect reelection prospects evidence from a large panel of countries conventional wisdom is that good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected but this has not been tested in a large cross section of countries we test these arguments in a sample of 74 countries over the period 1960 2003 we find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group of countries developed and less developed new and old democracies countries with different government or electoral systems and countries with different levels of democracy in developed countries and in old democracies election year deficits actually reduce the probability that a leader is reelected with similar although smaller negative electoral effects of deficits in the earlier years of an incumbent s term in office higher growth rates of real gdp per capita raise the probability of reelection only in the less developed countries and in new democracies but voters are affected by growth over the leader s term in office rather than in the election year itself and apparently only by growth not attributed to global growth low inflation is rewarded by voters only in the developed countries the effects we find are not only statistically significant but also quite substantial quantitatively we also suggest how the absence of a positive electoral effect of deficits can be consistent with the political deficit cycle found in new democracies

the economic consequences of brexit energy in this paper we raise a number of issues that are important for the uk to consider in the light of its decision to leave the european union eu the first of these is the nature of the eu single market in electricity and gas and the uk s role within this the second is the nature of uk energy policy in the light of brexit and the opportunities for changing this and third we consider some of the key issues to be addressed in a negotiating position with the eu

how competitive are eu electricity markets an assessment of ets phase ii this paper studies the interactions between electricity and carbon allowance prices in the year ahead energy markets of france germany united kingdom and the nordic countries during phase ii of the eu ets var and granger causality methods are used to analyze causal interfaces whereas the volatility of electricity prices is studied with basic and asymmetric ar garch models among the main results the marginal rate at which carbon prices feed into electricity prices is shown to be ca 135 in the eex and nord pool markets where electricity and carbon prices display bidirectional causality and 109 in the uk therefore generators in these markets internalized the cost of freely allotted emission allowances into their electricity prices considerably more than the proportionate increase in costs justified by effective carbon intensity moreover electricity prices in france are found to granger cause the carbon price this study also shows how european electricity prices are deeply linked to coal prices among other factors both in terms of levels and volatility regardless of the underlying fuel mix and that coal was marginally more profitable than gas for electricity generation eu policies aimed at increasing the carbon price are likely to be crucial in limiting the externalities involved in the transition to a low carbon system

a preliminary assessment of the market coupling arrangement on the kontek cable this paper presents a preliminary assessment of the market coupling arrangement on the kontek kt cable between east denmark and germany and an assessment of the original auction mechanism kt the new spot price area was introduced in germany on october 5 2005 to facilitate a market coupling arrangement on the kt cable between east denmark and germany we would expect the kt price to correlate more with the european energy exchange eex price because arbitrage normally levelizes the price however spot prices in late 2005 were both high and volatile because congestion management practices in sweden transferred internal bottlenecks to the cable between sweden and east denmark since spot prices were equal in east denmark and the kt area for a substantial time it implies that some hours had no congestion on the kt cable market players valued the previous monthly auctions for transmission capacity more than the daily auctions compared to the daily auctions market players received smaller payoffs on average for the market coupling arrangement and the smallest payoffs for the monthly auctions

energy growth and evolution towards a naturalistic ontology of economics in recent years new approaches to the integration of economics and thermodynamics have been developed which build on the physics of open non equilibrium systems the so called maximum entropy production principle i review these contributions in the light of the implications for economic ontology i e the question what the fundamental constituents of real world economic phenomena are i argue in favor of the naturalization of economic ontology using the phenomenon of economic growth as my workhorse and i explore the implications for the cross disciplinary foundations of ecological economics the paper shows how economic growth can be conceived as a natural process that is driven by fundamental physical forces the argument proceeds in three steps after a short review of recent research on the linkage between energy and growth i establish the connection with bioeconomic theories about evolution that allow restating the role of lotka s maximum power principle mpp as a property of open non equilibrium flow systems with sufficient degrees of freedom of structural adaptation the mpp is then related to the recent literature on maximum entropy production mep especially as deployed in the earth sciences economic growth can be seen as resulting from evolutionary adaptations of flow gradients in economic systems that increase throughputs of exergy and generation of work and which thereby enhance the capacity of the earth system to maximize entropy production this framework offers fresh perspectives on a number of issues in research and policy which i discuss in the conclusion

information communication technology and electricity consumption in emerging economies abstract this study examines the impact of information communication technology ict on electricity consumption in emerging economies the empirical results obtained from dynamic panel demand models show a positive and statistically significant relationship between ict and electricity consumption when ict is measured using internet connections mobile phones or the number of pcs long run ict elasticities are smaller than income elasticities but because ict growth rates are so much higher than income growth rates the impact of ict on electricity demand is greater than the impact of income on electricity demand one implication of these results is that policies designed to close the digital divide between developed and developing economics by increasing the adoption of ict in developing countries are put at odds with energy policies to reduce ghg emissions

political business cycles in the new keynesian model i know there s the myth of the autonomous fed nixon barked a quick laugh richard nixon talking to arthur burns on october 23 1969 just after burns s nomination to the fed had been announced 1 i d like to see another lowering of interest rates i think there s room to do that i can understand people worrying about inflation but i don t think that s the big problem now george h w bush interview with new york times june 24 1992 i introduction economic conditions before elections affect election outcomes 2 rational politicians who recognize this regularity may therefore be tempted to try to influence the economy in the quarters preceding an election date to maximize their chances of being reelected the literature on political business cycles pbc has developed models that rationalize economic fluctuations induced by political cycles nordhaus 1975 presented a model of opportunistic political cycles the party in power stimulates the economy before elections to improve its reelection probability others have observed that different parties may have different preferences over inflation and output or unemployment outcomes and therefore we should observe partisan political cycles hibbs 1977 was the first to introduce the partisan cycle model in which left wing parties were assumed to have at least one of the following a higher output target a higher inflation target or a higher relative weight on minimizing output rather than inflation deviations from the targets compared with right wing parties several papers test for the existence of opportunistic or partisan cycles in the united states alesina cohen and roubini 1992 and alesina roubini and cohen 1997 find only weak evidence of an opportunistic political cycle looking at m1 growth rates grier 1989 and beck 1987 instead find support for the effect of political variables on m1 growth rates for the 1960 1980 period but not on the mean level of the federal funds rate as discussed in drazen 2000a 2000b there is basically no evidence instead that political cycles matter for macroeconomic outcomes by looking at data on unemployment and output growth grier 2008 is a recent exception and only weak evidence for inflation empirical tests of the partisan cycle model alesina roubini and cohen 1997 faust and irons 1999 find partisan differences in output growth rates but no support for partisan cycles in inflation and monetary policy tests of pbc typically assume monetary policy as the main tool that is exploited by politicians to manipulate the economy these studies usually focus on comparing the level of inflation output money growth rates or interest rates across political cycles or they add a political dummy variable to the relevant regression and test its significance this paper offers a different approach the paper aims to empirically test various political business cycle theories adopting an optimizing new keynesian model with a monetary and fiscal policy mix as the main setting the inclusion of both fiscal and monetary policy is motivated by drazen 2000b 3 the new keynesian model is a baseline setting for the analysis of monetary policy but it has not been widely used to study pbc an advantage of this paper with respect to most of the previous pbc literature lies in the use of a general equilibrium framework this is in fact necessary when testing the importance of politically motivated policy choices to effectively control for differences in the macroeconomic conditions the set of shocks or the private sector expectations that prevail when the policy decision is taken the monetary and fiscal policy rule parameters as well as the parameters that reflect the frequency of price adjustment by firms and the steady state level of inflation are allowed to depend on the observed political regime

long run relations in european electricity prices this paper analyses the interdependencies existing in wholesale electricity prices in six major european countries the results of a robust multivariate long run dynamic analysis reveal the presence of four highly integrated central european markets france germany the netherlands and austria the trend shared by these four electricity markets appears to be common also to gas prices but not to oil prices the existence of a common long term dynamics among electricity prices and between electricity prices and gas prices can be explained by the similarity of the market design across europe and by the same marginal generation technology since standard unit root and cointegration tests are not robust to the peculiar characteristics of electricity prices time series we also develop a battery of robust inference procedures that should assure the reliability of our results copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

economics and the biologists a review of geerat j vermeij s nature an economic history this essay reviews and criticizes vermeij s nature an economic history and places it in the context of evolutionary economics vermeij presents a natural history written in what he considers economic terms and argues that biologists should know more about economics while the exchanges between economics and biology can sometimes be hazardous and misleading quite a bit could be learned by economists from reading this book

multimarket contact and collusive behavior traditional analyses of industrial behavior typically link the exercise of market power in an industry to internalfeatures such as demand conditions concentration and barriers to entry nevertheless some economists have remained concerned that external factors such as contact across markets may also play a significant role in determining the level of competitiveness in any particular industry in this article we examine the effect of multimarket contact on the degree of cooperation that firms can sustain in settings of repeated competition we isolate conditions under which multimarket contact facilitates collusion and show that these collusive gains are achieved through modes of behavior that have been identified in previous empirical studies of multimarketfirms

impact of the regulatory framework for transmission investments on the cost of renewable energy in the eu abstract under the current regulatory frame in the eu transmission planning is done at the national level to maximize national welfare rather than european welfare in this paper we develop a competitive equilibrium model that calculates the impact of this imperfect regulatory framework on the cost of renewable energy we apply the model to a power system with two interconnected zones and find that the impact is case specific but significant we also find that the negative impact of national transmission planning on the cost of renewable energy is more significant in a state of the world in which member states trade renewable energy but that this negative effect is much smaller than the positive effect of renewable energy trade between member states we conclude that the imperfect regulatory framework for transmission investment is a significant cost for renewable energy in the eu but that it should not stop member states from trading renewable energy

markets in china and europe on the eve of the industrial revolution prevailing views suggest the industrial revolution began in europe because markets had gradually become more efficient and by the 18th century the scope of economic activity was far larger than in other parts of the world this paper compares the actual performance of markets in europe and china two regions of the world that were relatively advanced in the pre industrial period but would start to industrialize about 150 years apart the analysis covers economies that account for about two fifths of the world s population in the mid 18th century and it considers some three centuries of data our findings suggest that relative levels of market function in china and europe were similar prior to the industrial revolution higher efficiency in europe is seen only in the nineteenth century when industrialization was already underway moreover these improvements occurred in a dramatic and sudden fashion further casting doubt on an evolutionary view of market development rather than being a key condition for subsequent growth gains in efficiency appeared simultaneously with the turning point of modern growth we discuss the implications of these findings for a number of explanations for long run growth and the industrial revolution

transparency political polarization and political budget cycles in oecd countries we investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance while some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies in contrast we show conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies using a sample of 19 oecd countries in the 1990s we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low er transparency countries while no such cycles can be observed in high er transparency countries furthermore we find in accordance with recent theory that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries

electricity wholesale market prices in europe convergence abstract this paper tests the hypothesis that the ongoing restructuring process in the european electricity sector has led to a common european market for electricity based on a principal component analysis pca of wholesale electricity prices in 2002 2006 we reject the assumption of full market integration for several pairs of countries the weaker hypothesis of bilateral convergence is accepted based on unit root tests kpss and adf and a convergence test based on filtered pairwise price relations this indicates that the efforts to develop a single european market for electricity were so far only partially successful we show that the daily auction prices of scarce cross border transmission capacities are insufficient to explain the persistence of international price differentials empirically our findings confirm the insufficiency of explicit capacity auctions as stated in the theoretical literature

seeing the forest through the trees a meta analysis of political budget cycles despite a vast number of articles the political budget cycle literature contains many conflicting theories and empirical results i conduct the first ever meta analysis of this literature in order to establish whether a link between elections and government budgets exists using data on 1198 estimates across 88 studies published between 2000 and 2015 i find evidence of a statistically significant yet substantively small increase in government expenditures and public debt around elections and reductions in revenues and fiscal balance using meta regression analysis combined with bayesian model averaging i find support for some of the context conditional theories in the literature although the findings of political budget cycles are robust to publication bias as well as some of the methodological and study specific choices authors are forced to make they also shed light on how certain decisions may affect a study s findings this has implications for current and future research on political budget cycles

opportunistic political cycles test in a young democracy setting this paper tests the theory of opportunistic cycles in a decade old democracy russia finds strong evidence of cycles and provides an explanation for why previous literature often found weaker evidence using regional monthly panel data we find that 1 the budget cycle is sizable and short lived public spending shifts toward direct monetary transfers to voters 2 the magnitude of the cycle decreases with democracy government transparency media freedom voter awareness and over time and 3 preelectoral manipulation increases incumbents chances for reelection the short length of the cycle explains underestimation of its size by previous literature because of low frequency data used in previous studies