wind power regional development and benefit sharing the case of northern sweden this paper addresses the question of how investments in wind power can promote regional development and employment as well as how different benefit sharing instruments e g community funds etc

who receives the college wage premium assessing the labor market returns to degrees and college transfer patterns using data from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth we estimate wage models in which college educated workers are classified according to their degree attainment college type and college transfer status the detailed taxonomy produces modest improvements in explanatory power relative to standard specifications and reveals considerable heterogeneity in the predicted wages of college educated workers we find that transfer students receive an indirect wage benefit insofar as changing colleges allows them to earn a degree some transfer students receive an additional direct wage benefit presumably because switching schools increases their skill investment opportunities

wind power price trends in the united states struggling to remain competitive in the face of strong growth the amount of wind power capacity being installed globally is surging with the united states the world leader in terms of annual market share for three years running 2005 2007 the rapidly growing market for wind has been a double edged sword however as the resulting supply demand imbalance in wind turbines along with the rising cost of materials and weakness in the u s dollar has put upward pressure on wind turbine costs and ultimately wind power prices two mitigating factors reductions in the cost of equity provided to wind projects and improvements in project level capacity factors have helped to relieve some of the upward pressure on wind power prices over the last few years because neither of these two factors can be relied upon to further cushion the blow going forward policymakers should recognize that continued financial support may be necessary to sustain the wind sector at its current pace of development at least in the near term though this article emphasizes developments in the u s market for wind power those trends are similar to and hold implications for the worldwide wind power market

labor market returns to two and four year college the paper examines labor market returns to a two and four year college education analysis of the 1972 national longitudinal survey of youth observation that the average person who attended a two year college earned about 10 percent more than those without any college education comparison with the wages of those who attended a four year college education

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

the long term effect of renewable electricity on employment in the united kingdom abstract assessment of the employment impact of renewable electricity technologies is generally implemented through either complex and data intensive methods such as computable general equilibrium models or simplistic approaches normally focused on specific energy generation technologies such as employment factors in contrast this article proposes a transparent and easily reproducible econometric methodology based on the vector error correction model that uses aggregated and widely available data the model is applied to the power generation sector in the united kingdom using annual data from 1990 onwards and provides evidence that the long term employment impact of renewable technologies is much higher than the impact arising from deploying nuclear or natural gas technologies the impulse response function analysis indicates that a permanent 1 gigawatt hours increase in annual electricity supply generated by renewable technologies creates 3 5 jobs in the long term period finally this study derives the implications of the findings in the context of decarbonisation scenarios for the power sector in the united kingdom and assesses the extent to which decarbonisation pathways based on renewable electricity contribute to stimulating employment in the generation sector

affirmative action in higher education how do admission and financial aid rules affect future earnings this paper addresses how changing the admission and financial aid rules at colleges affects future earnings i estimate a structural model of the following decisions by individuals where to submit applications which school to attend and what field to study the model also includes decisions by schools as to which students to accept and how much financial aid to offer simulating how black educational choices would change were they to face the white admission and aid rules shows that race based advantages had little effect on earnings however removing race based advantages does affect black educational outcomes in particular removing advantages in admissions substantially decreases the number of black students at top tier schools while removing advantages in financial aid causes a decrease in the number of blacks who attend college

a major in science initial beliefs and final outcomes for college major and dropout taking advantage of unique longitudinal data we provide the first characterization of what college students believe at the time of entrance about their final major relate these beliefs to actual major outcomes and provide an understanding of why students hold the initial beliefs about majors that they do the data collection and analysis are based directly on a conceptual model in which a student s final major is best viewed as the end result of a learning process we find that students enter school quite optimistic about obtaining a science degree but that relatively few students end up graduating with a science degree the substantial overoptimism about completing a degree in science can be attributed largely to students beginning school with misperceptions about their ability to perform well academically in science copyright 2014 oxford university press

supply capacity acquisition and allocation with uncertain customer demands we study a class of capacity acquisition and assignment problems with stochastic customer demands often found in operations planning contexts in this setting a supplier utilizes a set of distinct facilities to satisfy the demands of different customers or markets our model simultaneously assigns customers to each facility and determines the best capacity level to operate or install at each facility we propose a branch and price solution approach for this new class of stochastic assignment and capacity planning problems for problem instances in which capacity levels must fall between some pre specified limits we offer a tailored solution approach that reduces solution time by nearly 80 over an alternative approach using a combination of commercial nonlinear optimization solvers we have also developed a heuristic solution approach that consistently provides optimal or near optimal solutions where solutions within 0 01 of optimality are found on average without requiring a nonlinear optimization solver

on the simple economics of advertising marketing and product design we propose a framework for analyzing transformations of demand such transformations frequently stem from changes in the dispersion of consumers valuations which lead to rotations of the demand curve in many settings profits are a u shaped function of dispersion high dispersion is complemented by niche production and low dispersion is complemented by mass market supply we investigate numerous applications including product design advertising marketing and sales advice and the construction of quality differentiated product lines we also suggest a new taxonomy of advertising distinguishing between hype which shifts demand and real information which rotates demand

will the locals benefit the effect of wind power investments on rural wages abstract an important and poorly understood question when communities consider wind power investments is whether the local population will benefit financially i examine the effect of wind power investment on wages in rural counties in the us i combine quarterly panel data on wages with data on all wind power plant investments larger than 1 megawatt mw using a bayesian multilevel model estimated by mcmc i estimate a significant positive effect with a magnitude consistent with a 2 permanent increase in wages following an investment in a large wind farm of 400 mw however this effect has large geographic and socioeconomic variation counties with low employment tend to see little impact on wages from wind power potentially because slack in the labor market prevents wages from rising from a policy perspective these results are most relevant for local regulators and planners who seek to balance the benefits and costs of wind farms to the community this research indicates that wind farms can provide on average a modest boost to local wages with some areas seeing an out sized effect

evolution of gender differences in post secondary human capital investments college majors although women in the united states now complete more college degrees than men the distribution of college majors among college graduates remains unequal with women about two thirds as likely as men to major in business or science we develop and estimate a dynamic overlapping generations model of human capital investments and labor supply we allow for specific college major choices instead of aggregating these choices to the education level results show that changes in skill prices higher schooling costs and gender specific changes in home value were each important to the long term trends abstract from author

determinants of college major choice identification using an information experiment this article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major specific characteristics students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability we estimate a rich model of college major choice using the panel of beliefs data while expected earnings and perceived ability are a significant determinant of major choice heterogeneous tastes are the dominant factor in the choice of major analyses that ignore the correlation in tastes with earnings expectations inflate the role of earnings in college major choices we conclude by computing the welfare gains from the information experiment and find positive average welfare gains

economics coursework and long term behavior and experiences of college graduates in labor markets and personal finance i introduction if economics is a unique way of thinking as many economists like to claim some level of coursework in economics may provide enough specific knowledge and skills to lead students to make different choices in their adult roles as consumers workers and voters citizens of course the same could be claimed for training in business and other areas even though or perhaps because it could be argued that most content and training in business courses is more applied and pragmatic than what is presented in economics courses some empirical evidence though not really a great deal suggests that training in economics and business is associated with different adult behaviors and outcomes for example golec 1996 finds that mutual funds perform better if mutual fund managers have an mba and chevalier and ellison 1999 also report a positive correlation between mutual fund performance and the educational background of mutual fund managers black sanders and taylor 2003 found that economics majors earn almost 20 more than graduates in other social science majors and about 10 more than those who major in business administration in fields with large numbers of graduates they find that only engineering majors earn more than economics majors similarly hecker 1995 reported that males majoring in economics had median earnings 3 higher than all majors for the age cohort of 25 34 and 53 more than average for the cohort aged 35 44 craft and baker 2003 find that lawyers with an undergraduate major in economics earn 13 more than otherwise comparable lawyers with other undergraduate majors and economics is the only major with a statistically significant effect on earnings 1 hamermesh and donald 2008 however find that higher earnings by economics majors are partly due to economics majors working more hours than others the relationship between financial literacy knowledge and adult behavior and outcomes in financial markets has been addressed in several recent studies many sponsored by federal reserve banks hilgert hogarth and beverly 2003 and braunstein and welch 2002 find that knowledge about credit saving and investment is significantly related to recommended financial practices in cash flow management credit management saving and investment unfortunately there is also evidence of widespread financial illiteracy in u s households and particularly among elderly women see lusardi and mitchell 2007 2008 employee education programs have been found to affect workers savings retirement and investment behaviors bayer bernheim and scholz 2009 bernheim and garret 2003 state mandates for precollege education in personal finance appear to succeed in at least exposing students to more information and sources on financial education and students from states with such mandates report higher levels of savings and net worth as adults bernheim garrett and maki 2001 tennyson and nguyen 2001 much less research exists linking college coursework or majoring in economics to personal finance outcomes 2 but christiansen joensen and rangvid 2008 find that those trained in economics in college courses or employee education programs are more likely to invest in stocks than those who receive training in other areas guiso and jappelli 2005 report that among college graduates having a degree in economics is positively associated with knowledge about financial assets chert and volpe 1998 107 concluded that business majors had better knowledge about personal financial literacy than other students but that in general college students were not knowledgeable about personal finance 3 in this paper we use a large and unique data set to investigate the relationships between taking college coursework in economics or majoring in economics with long term labor market and personal finance behaviors and outcomes our information on long term behaviors and outcomes is drawn from a detailed questionnaire we mailed in january 2003 to over 25 000 graduates who attended four public universities in 1976 1986 or 1996

measuring investment in education historic debates about the measurement of capital are even more complicated in the case of education and human capital as extensive research demonstrates education resources are not consistently related to student performance in existing elementary and secondary schools this inefficiency in public schools implies that spending and resource measures do not accurately capture variations in school quality this finding then has clear implications for both education policy and economic research because school inputs are poor policy instruments an alternative policy focus that appears much more productive is performance incentives related to student achievement

growth and renewable energy in europe a random effect model with evidence for neutrality hypothesis this is an empirical study on the causal relationship between economic growth and renewable energy for 27 european countries in a multivariate panel framework over the period 1997 2007 using a random effect model and including final energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and employment as additional independent variables in the model empirical results do not confirm causality between renewable energy consumption and gdp although panel causality tests unfold short run relationships between renewable energy and greenhouse gas emissions and employment the estimated cointegration factor refrains from unity indicating only a weak if any relationship between economic growth and renewable energy consumption in europe suggesting evidence of the neutrality hypothesis which can partly be explained by the uneven and insufficient exploitation of renewable energy sources across europe

subject of degree and the gender wage differential evidence from the uk and germany abstract we show that controlling for subject of degree explains a significant part of the male female gender wage differential amongst graduates using data from the labour force surveys of the united kingdom and germany we find similar results in these two countries subject of degree explains about 2 4 higher wages of male over female graduates after controlling for age industry region part time and public sector employment this is a significant part between 8 and 20 of the overall male female gender wage gap and an even larger amount of the part explained by factors entered into wage equations at around 24 30 of the explained component

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

outsourcing and capacity planning in an uncertain global environment firms employing offshore outsourcing strategies may face both exchange rate and demand uncertainties in this paper we show that the firms may benefit from operational option to switch production by keeping capacities with both domestic and foreign suppliers the value of the operational option increases as the exchange rate uncertainty or demand uncertainty increases in addition when the firms become risk averse they may use domestic capacity to hedge against offshore capacity as a result the firms may choose to hold local capacity even if it exhibits negative marginal contribution to the profit furthermore risk averse firms may keep more total capacity than risk neutral firms

renewable energy an efficient mechanism to improve gdp abstract this article analyzes the effects of renewable energy on gdp for 116 economies in 2003 through structural equation modeling sem approach in order to decipher the mechanism of how the use of renewables improves macroeconomic efficiency we decompose gdp by the expenditure approach although previous theory predicts positive effects of renewables on capital formation and trade balance the sem results show that renewables have a significant positive influence on capital formation only the result that renewables do not have a significant impact on trade balance implies that renewables do not have an import substitution effect thus we confirm the positive relationship between renewable energy and gdp through the path of increasing capital formation but not for the path of increasing trade balance

college wage premiums and skills a cross country analysis workers with a college degree earn substantially more than workers with no such degree using recent data from 22 oecd organization for economic cooperation and development countries we estimate this college wage premium at 28 per cent for male full time working employees on average ranging from 18 per cent in sweden to 50 per cent in the slovak republic this premium is largely explained by the higher skill levels of graduates from higher education combined with their use of these skills at work as well as the match with job requirements for this skill proficiency and skill use we find no effect of labour market institutions e g the employment protection legislation or the coverage rate on cross country differences in the college wage premium however we find that cross country variation in this premium is related to the relative supply of higher educated workers moreover we find evidence that cross country differences in the college wage premium are related to the degree to which educational credentials signal skills

do economic effects justify the use of fiscal incentives the community of location this presumption serves as the basis for the granting of lucrative economic development incentives to footloose businesses this article examines whether large mobile firms generate significant net benefits for the region of location panel data and nonrandom estimation techniques are applied to a primary database of large firms that made location decisions in the 1980s to explore the impact of location on regional economic performance the empirical analysis explores different treatment regions both effects within the county and the metropolitan statistical area msa of location and different control regions the results show that large firms fail to produce significant net benefits for their host communities calling into question the high stakes bidding war over jobs and investment

evaluating the economic impact of wind power development on local economies in china abstract given that wind power has received so much public financial support it is important not only to understand its overall impact but also who receives the benefits and who bears the costs one important aspect is to quantitatively evaluate the potential impact of wind power development on local economies this study conducts an ex post econometric assessment of the effect of wind power installation on local economy in china using a national county level dataset between 2005 and 2011 we find that installed wind power capacity has a small and statistically significant positive effect on gdp but negatively affect local fiscal income based on our results an additional 1 mw wind power installation per capita would bring 2246 rmb increase in gdp per capita over the year 2005 and 2011 the annual benefits is about 321 rmb 45 increase in gdp per person which is much lower than the estimates for u s case we further explore why china s wind power development did not benefit local economy as much as the case of u s

the importance of revenue sharing for the local economic impacts of a renewable energy project a social accounting matrix approach allan g mcgregor p and swales k the importance of revenue sharing for the local economic impacts of a renewable energy project a social accounting matrix approach regional studies ambitious renewable energy targets are requiring investments in new renewable capacity in areas where acceptance could be affected by the potential economic benefits to the locality at the same time new renewable energy projects primarily for onshore wind capacity might offer a route by which peripheral economic development policies can be supported the economic impacts of these projects are difficult to quantify using input output techniques but can be more appropriately handled within a social accounting matrix sam framework a social accounting matrix for the shetland islands off the north coast of mainland scotland is used to evaluate the potential local economic and employment impacts of a large proposed onshore wind energy project sensitivity analysis reveals the relative importance of the level of commu

the shape of advertising response functions revisited a model of dynamic probabilistic thresholds prior work in marketing has suggested that advertising threshold effects levels beneath which there is essentially no sales response are rarely encountered in practice because advertising policies settle into effective ranges through early trial and error thresholds cannot be observed directly and arguments for their existence must be based primarily on a statistical footprint that is on relative fits of a range of model types to detect possible threshold effects we formulate a switching regression model with two regimes in only one of which advertising is effective mediating the switch between the two regimes is a logistic function of category specific dynamic variables e g order of entry time in market number of competitors and advertising levels nesting a variety of alternative formulations among them both standard concave and s shaped responses a sequence of comparisons among parametrically related models strongly suggests that threshold effects exist that market share response to advertising is not necessarily globally concave that superior fit cannot be attributed to model flexibility alone and that dynamic environmental competitive and brand specific factors can influence advertising effectiveness these effects are evident in two evolving durables categories suvs and minivans although not in the one mature nondurable category liquid detergent studied

export sectors and rural development the export base hypothesis is that a region s growth is led by export demand given perfectly elastic factor supplies it is a rationale for sector based rural development policies and it is formalized by input output models but it is contested by modern trade migration and growth theories and there is little research about its empirical relevance we investigate the hypothesis for contemporary u s rural development by estimating the influence of export sector employment on subsequent rural development outcomes the results reject the hypothesis that emphasizing traditional export employment results in rural growth reject the assumption of perfectly elastic factor supply and support alternative explanations copyright 2009 oxford university press

who benefits from transshipment exogenous vs endogenous wholesale prices this paper studies how transshipments affect manufacturers and retailers considering both exogenous and endogenous wholesale prices for a distribution system where a single manufacturer sells to multiple identical cost retailers we consider both the manufacturer being a price taker and the manufacturer being a price setter in a single period setup under multivariate normal demand distribution in the case of the manufacturer being a price taker we provide several analytical results regarding the effects of key parameters on order quantities and profits in the case of the manufacturer being a price setter we characterize the stackelberg game that arises and provide several insights into how the game dynamics are affected by transshipments specifically we find that risk pooling makes retailers order quantities less sensitive to the wholesale price set by the manufacturer hence in general the manufacturer benefits from retailers transshipments by charging a higher wholesale price while retailers are often worse off the paper captures the effect of demand correlation and the effect of the number of retailers throughout and it illustrates the findings by a numerical example we also provide an interactive web page for numerical experiments

university quality and labour market outcomes this paper uses proxies for university quality derived from the research assessment exercise and the teaching quality assurance agency to assess the impact of university quality on the labour market outcomes of a cohort of uk graduates the impacts on job quality and earnings were mainly limited to graduates in particular disciplines or those obtaining poor degrees from good universities the results suggest that after controlling for pre entry qualifications labour market outcomes for most graduates depended more on the subject studied and degree classification awarded than on the university attended

investment over the business cycle insights from college major choice this paper examines the relationship between individuals personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital focusing on bachelor s degree recipients we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling years select majors that earn higher wages that have better employment prospects and that more often lead to work in a related field much of this switching behavior can be considered a rational response to di erences in particular majors labor market prospects during a recession however higher unemployment leads to other meaningful changes in the distribution of majors conditional on changes in lifetime expected earnings recessions encourage women to enter male dominated fields and students of both genders pursue more dicult majors such as stem fields these findings imply that the economic environment changes how students select majors possibly by encouraging them to consider a broader range of possible degree fields finally in the absence of this compensating behavior we estimate that the average estimated costs of graduating in a recession would be roughly ten percent larger jel e32 i23 j22 j24

integrated demand and procurement portfolio management with spot market volatility and option contracts abstract the newsvendor problem aims to optimally choose a level of order quantity to respond to a known demand distribution with the objective of maximizing expected return in practice the decision maker is often challenged with more complex settings involving multiple decisions and uncertainties for instance firms may benefit from choosing the set of customer orders to satisfy it may also be worthwhile for many firms to select a supply portfolio instead of relying on a single procurement mode this paper provides novel optimization models and solution techniques that can help businesses to achieve the maximum performance from a given production system by optimally selecting customer demands procurement quantity spot market purchase and option contract usage we specifically focus on the special case of normally distributed random variables and provide an exact solution method when the primary procurement quantity is not a decision variable the problem becomes a version of a stochastic knapsack problem for this case we present an efficient heuristic solution algorithm based on properties of an optimal solution and empirically show that it provides high quality solutions we also provide a broad numerical study to examine the sensitivity of integrated procurement and demand selection strategies to key problem parameters

education decisions and labour market outcomes the financial return to a college degree is an increasing concern amid rising tuition costs and stagnant wages using the education longitudinal study of 2002 els 2002 i analyse the effect of po

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

accounting for race and gender differences in college wage premium changes much recent research has been devoted to the rapid rise in the college wage premium during the 1980s 3 5 10 13 14 murphy and welch 13 estimated that between 1979 and 1986 the college wage premium for all age groups increased almost 20 percentage points while the college wage premium for workers with one to five years of experience grew by 38 percentage points while the size of the college wage premium increase is impressive especially among recent graduates there is substantial disparity in this change among individual race gender groups 2 4 coleman 4 found that the wage premium increase for graduates with one to five years of experience was 45 percentage points for white men 30 percentage points for white women and 27 percentage points for black men while the wage premium decreased by 3 percentage points for black women

ex post analysis of economic impacts from wind power development in u s counties wind power development has surged in recent years in the united states policymakers and economic development practitioners to date have typically relied upon project level case studies or modeled input output estimates to assess the economic development impacts from wind power often focusing on potential local state wide or national employment or earnings impacts building on this literature we conduct an ex post econometric analysis of the county level economic development impacts of wind power installations from 2000 through 2008 in a large wind rich region in the country taking into account factors influencing wind turbine location we find an aggregate increase in county level personal income and employment of approximately 11 000 and 0 5 jobs per megawatt of wind power capacity installed over the sample period of 2000 to 2008 these estimates appear broadly consistent with modeled input output results and translate to a median increase in total county personal income and employment of 0 2 and 0 4 for counties with installed wind power over the same period

gender and ethnicity differentials in school attainment and labor market earnings in ecuador summary indigenous people in ecuador are most likely to be disadvantaged and live in poverty this paper reports on the findings of an econometric analysis which explores the extent to which lower educational attainment and labor market discrimination contribute to these disparities the analysis utilizes a proportional hazard regression model to examine which factors raise the probability of early school departure it also employs a classic regression model to explore the relationship between low educational attainment and earnings together with an oaxaca decomposition which parses out the extent to which earning differentials can be attributed to differences in human capital or to discrimination

the impact of production tax credits on the profitable production of electricity from wind in the u s a spatial financial model using wind data derived from assimilated meteorological condition was developed to investigate the profitability and competitiveness of onshore wind power in the contiguous u s it considers not only the resulting estimated capacity factors for hypothetical wind farms but also the geographically differentiated costs of local grid connection the levelized cost of wind generated electricity for the contiguous u s is evaluated assuming subsidy levels from the production tax credit ptc varying from 0 to 4 kwh under three cost scenarios a reference case a high cost case and a low cost case the analysis indicates that in the reference scenario current ptc subsidies of 2 1 kwh are at a critical level in determining the competitiveness of wind generated electricity compared to conventional power generation in local power market results from this study suggest that the potential for profitable wind power with the current ptc subsidy amounts to more than seven times existing demand for electricity in the entire u s understanding the challenges involved in scaling up wind energy requires further study of the external costs associated with improvement of the backbone transmission network and integration into the power grid of the variable electricity generated from wind

managing an available to promise assembly system with dynamic short term pseudo order forecast we study an order promising problem in a multiclass available to promise atp assembly system in the presence of pseudo orders a pseudo order refers to a tentative customer order whose attributes such as the likelihood of an actual order order quantity and confirmation timing can change dynamically over time a unit demand from any class is assembled from one manufactured unit and one inventory unit where the manufactured unit takes one unit of capacity and needs a single period to produce an accepted order must be filled before a positive delivery lead time the underlying order acceptance decisions involve trade offs between committing resources production capacity and component inventory to low reward firm orders and reserving resources for high reward orders we develop a markov chain model that captures the key characteristics of pseudo orders including demand lumpiness nonstationarity and volatility we then formulate a stochastic dynamic program for the atp assembly system that embeds the markov chain model as a short term forecast for pseudo orders we show that the optimal order acceptance policy is characterized by class prioritization resource imbalance based rationing and capacity inventory demand matching in particular the rationing level for each class is determined by a critical value that depends on the resource imbalance level defined as the net difference between the production capacity and component inventory levels extensive numerical tests underscore the importance of the key properties of the optimal policy and provide operational and managerial insights on the value of the short term demand forecast and the robustness of the optimal policy this paper was accepted by martin lariviere operations management

the expansion of renewable energies and employment effects in germany the promotion of electricity produced from renewable energy is a high priority of the european union as well of its member states the german government wants to increase the share of renewable energies from about 5 to 12 by 2010 to attain this goal the german government has introduced compulsory compensation schemes for electricity produced from renewable energy fed into the public grid this paper examines the economic impact of this policy employing an econometric model particular emphasis was given to employment effects in general we distinguish two effects 1 an expansive effect resulting from additional investments and 2 a contractive effect resulting from an increase in the production cost of power the first effect will dominate during the first years and lead to an increase in employment of approximately 33 000 new jobs however the contractive effect will offset these gains and lead to a slightly negative employment balance by 2010

why are the returns to schooling higher for women than for men many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males despite the fact that females tend to earn less both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics this study investigates possible reasons for this effect using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 one explanation is that education appears to have a double effect on the earnings of women it increases their skills and productivity as it does with men and in addition it appears to reduce the gap in male and female earnings attributable to factors such as discrimination tastes and circumstances the latter appear to account for about half of the differential in the returns to schooling

policies and market factors driving wind power development in the united states abstract in the united states there has been substantial recent growth in wind energy generating capacity with growth averaging 24 percent annually during the past five years about 1700 mw of wind energy capacity was installed in 2001 while another 410 mw became operational in 2002 during 2003 development activity has remained strong with an estimated 1600 mw of capacity installed with this growth an increasing number of states are experiencing investment in wind energy projects currently about half of all states host at least one wind power project this paper explores the key factors at play in the 12 states in which a substantial amount of wind energy capacity has been developed or planned some of the factors that are examined include policy drivers such as renewable portfolio standards rps federal and state financial incentives as well as market drivers such as consumer demand for green power natural gas price volatility and wholesale market rules

the inverse newsvendor problem choosing an optimal demand portfolio for capacitated resources the classical newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a level of capacity to respond to a known demand distribution the inverse newsvendor problem is one of optimally choosing a demand distribution with fixed capacity the applications of the inverse problem include industrial settings where demand management is relatively less costly than capacity adjustments demand distributions are chosen from an opportunity set which reflects the set of market opportunities for the firm we analyze the firm s profit as a function of these demand alternatives provide solution methods and insights and identify inefficient and dominated distributions we provide results when the opportunity set is known or only partially known we extend the results to cases in which there are multiple prioritized customer classes that share the firm s productive capacity this paper was motivated by an industrial application in a firm selling a semicommodity product into three prioritized industrial sectors we review the application of our methods to this setting

requirements planning with pricing and order selection flexibility past requirements planning research has typically assumed that the firms demands are determined prior to production planning in contrast we explore a single stage planning model that implicitly decides through pricing decisions the demand levels the firm should satisfy in order to maximize contribution to profit we briefly discuss solution methods and properties for these problems when production capacities are unlimited the key result of this work is a polynomial time solution approach to the problem under time invariant finite production capacities and piecewise linear and concave revenue functions in price

renewable energy and employment in germany abstract the positive impacts of an increasing share of renewable energy on the mitigation of climate change as well as on the decrease of the dependency of energy imports are indisputable however one persistent problem for the german economy has been its high level of unemployment in the recent past therefore any policy strategy will be measured also by its net impact on the labor market the paper describes the results of a study that models this impact and is novel within three respects firstly an input output vector for the renewable energy sector was developed based on the results of more than 1000 interviews with an extensive questionnaire secondly gross and net effect of two different policy scenarios for germany until 2030 were calculated and thirdly the approach varies from earlier studies by its explicit modeling of export and foreign trade effects

a typology and assessment of multi sector regional economic impact models loveridge s 2004 a typology and assessment of multi sector regional economic impact models reg studies38 305 317 this paper provides a summary and critical review of the types of multi sector models with inter sectoral linkages commonly used to predict the total impact of an event plant opening closing or policy change on the regional economy the following model types are included economic base input output social accounting matrix integrated econometric input output and computable general equilibrium models appropriate uses of the various modelling approaches are presented along with some general operating principles and ethical considerations the paper concludes with directions for future research loveridge s 2004 une typologie et un bilan des modeles des impacts economiques regionaux multi sectoriels reg studies38 305 317 cet article cherche a faire le resume et la critique des typologies de modeles multi sectoriels qui ont des liens intersectoriels et dont on se sert frequemm

target market selection and marketing effort under uncertainty the selective newsvendor abstract we consider a firm that markets procures and delivers a good with a single selling season in a number of different markets the price for the good is market dependent and each market has an associated demand distribution with parameters that depend on the amount of marketing effort applied given long procurement lead times the firm must decide which markets it will serve prior to procuring the good we develop a profit maximizing model to address the firm s integrated market selection marketing effort and procurement decisions the model implicitly accounts for inventory pooling across markets which reduces safety stock costs but increases model complexity the resulting model is a nonlinear integer optimization problem for which we develop specialized solution methods for the case in which budget constraints exist we provide a novel solution approach that uses a tailored branch and bound algorithm our approach solves a broad range of 3000 test instances in an average of less than 2 seconds significantly outperforming a leading commercial global optimization solver

the role of amenities and quality of life in rural economic growth a structural model of regional economic growth is estimated using data for 2243 rural u s counties five indices designed to capture specific amenity and quality of life characteristics are constructed using fifty four separate indicators results suggest that amenity characteristics can be organized into consistent and meaningful empirical measures that move beyond ad hoc descriptions of amenities in addition to insights into the influence of local characteristics ranging from tax burdens to income distribution on regional economic growth results suggest that predictable relationships between amenities quality of life and local economic performance exist

gainfully employed assessing the employment and earnings of for profit college students using administrative data we draw on population level administrative data from the u s department of education and the internal revenue service to quantify the impact of for profit college attendance on the employment and earnings of more than one million students using a matched comparison group difference in differences design we find that certificate seeking students in for profit institutions are 1 5 percentage points less likely to be employed and conditional on employment have 11 percent lower earnings after attendance than students in public institutions these results hold for both men and women and for seven of the top ten fields of study we find that earnings and employment outcomes are particularly poor for students attending for profit colleges that offer the majority of their courses online and for multicampus chains we find that for profit students experience small statistically insignificant gains in annual earnings after attendance compared to a matched end page 342 control group of young individuals who do not attend college a back of the envelope comparison of these earnings gains to average debt burdens suggests that for profit certificate programs do not pay off for the average student abstract from author

the impact of wind power on the brazilian labor market abstract wind power is an important source of renewable energy beyond the environmental dimension the wind energy may contribute to the local development due to its weather conditions brazil emerges as one of the leading countries in the generation of wind power this study estimates the impact of wind farms on the brazilian labor market through the exploration of the staggered nature of the sequential process of wind farm implantation between 2004 and 2016 we estimate the treatment effect parameters using a difference in differences did approach with i multiple time periods ii variation in treatment timing and iii dynamic treatment effects through an event study design we aggregate information from several data sources into a panel and we analyze the impact on employment and wages by considering economic sectors educational levels firm sizes and types of jobs direct or indirect jobs our findings suggest that wind farms increase employment in the industry agriculture and construction and increase the wages in all economic sectors and we find evidence that this effect occurs on indirect jobs additionally we find positive effects on the employment and wages of less educated workers and of small and medium sized firms the impact of this intervention can last for up to two years after the implementation of wind farms in the municipalities our results suggest that wind power may generate significant social impacts through the labor market by contributing to local development and increasing social welfare in developing economies

safe port in a storm the impact of labor market conditions on community college enrollments the paper examines the impact of the business cycle on enrollments and finances at individual community colleges between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s we find that 1 percent increases in the unemployment rates of recent high school graduates and of all adults are associated with rises in full time attendance of about 0 5 percent and 4 percent respectively part time enrollment exhibits similar anticyclical patterns this link carries over in large part to degrees obtained in contrast state and local appropriations per student are procyclical we interpret this funding pattern as a failure to integrate education policy sufficiently closely with labor market policy

the effect of the production tax credit on wind energy production in deregulated electricity markets abstract this letter estimates the asymmetric influence of the production tax credit on wind energy production i find that states with deregulated electricity markets were more responsive to the tax incentive than their regulated counterparts excluding any external benefits from wind production this dissimilarity amounts to a monthly difference of up to 464 450 in federal benefits

where they go what they do and why it matters the importance of geographic accessibility and social class for decisions relating to higher education institution type degree level and field of study this article considers the impact of geographic accessibility and social class on school leavers when making decisions relating to higher education institution hei type degree level and field of study using a novel and comprehensive irish data set we consider a number of joint decisions facing school leavers in relation to where and what to study and employ a range of bivariate choice models which allows us to control for correlations in these decisions we find that geographic accessibility and social class play an important role in determining outcomes relating to hei type degree level and field of study we argue that these decisions are important in terms of future labour market and other outcomes for school leavers and that current policy in ireland does not go far enough in mitigating the impact of distance and socio economic barriers on these outcomes

changes in college skills and the rise in the college wage premium the college wage premium for new labor market entrants rose sharply during the 1980s we ask how much of this change arose from changes in the skill level of the typical college graduate we find that skills attained prior to college as measured by standardized test scores and high school grades had no effect on the change in the college wage premium for men in contrast the returns to math ability rose considerably for women failing to account for math skills thus substantially overstates the growth in the female college wage premium skills acquired in college as reflected in the distribution of students across majors had important effects on the relative wages of men the trend away from low skill subjects such as education and toward high skill subjects such as engineering accounts for one fourth of the rise in the male college wage premium

the newsvendor problem review and directions for future research in this paper we review the contributions to date for analyzing the newsvendor problem our focus is on examining the specific extensions for analyzing this problem in the context of modeling customer demand supplier costs and the buyer risk profile more specifically we analyze the impact of market price marketing effort and stocking quantity on customer demand how supplier prices can serve as a coordination mechanism in a supply chain setting integrating alternative supplier pricing policies within the newsvendor framework and how the buyer s risk profile moderates the newsvendor order quantity decision for each of these areas we summarize the current literature and develop extensions finally we also propose directions for future research

omitted ability bias and the increase in the return to schooling over the 1980s there were sharp increases in the return to schooling estimated with conventional wage regressions we explore whether the relationship between ability and schooling changed over this period in ways that would have increased the schooling coefficient in these regressions our empirical results reject the hypothesis that an increase in the bias of the schooling coefficient due to a change in the relationship between ability and schooling has contributed to observed increases in the return to schooling we also find that the increase in the schooling return has occurred for workers with relatively high levels of academic ability

the demand for and return to education when education outcomes are uncertain this article treats education as a sequential choice that is made under uncertainty a simple model is used to explore the effects of ability high school preparation preferences for schooling the borrowing rate and ex post payoffs to college on the probability of various post secondary college outcomes and the ex ante return to starting college the model motivates an empirical method of accounting for uncertainty about educational outcomes and for nonlinearity in the relationship between years of education and earnings when estimating the expected return to the first year of college

predicted future earnings and choice of college major using data from the national longitudinal survey of young men the author of this paper examines the relationship between predicted future earnings for five broad fields of study and college students choice of major conditional logit models of major choice that incorporate alternative predicted earnings variables are specified and estimated the results indicate that holding family background characteristics constant individuals are likely to choose majors offering greater streams of future earnings rather than as some have argued majors with higher beginning earnings at the time of the choice it is also found that earnings profiles corrected for self selection bias have flattened for more recent graduates in business liberal arts and education the life cycle earnings in these disciplines appear to be more severely depressed than those in science and engineering

us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective rey s j and montouri b d 1999 us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective reg studies 33 143 156 this study reconsiders the question of us regional economic income convergence from a spatial econometric perspective recently developed methods of exploratory spatial data analysis provide new insights on the geographical dynamics of us regional income growth patterns over the 1929 94 period strong patterns of both global and local spatial autocorrelation are found throughout the study period and the magnitude of global spatial autocorrelation is also found to exhibit strong temporal co movement with regional income dispersion a spatial econometric analysis of the familiar baumol specification reveals strong evidence of misspecification due to ignored spatial error dependence because of this dependence shocks originating in one state can spillover into surrounding states potentially complicating the transitional dynamics of the convergence process rey s j et montouri

the growing importance of social skills in the labor market the labor market increasingly rewards social skills between 1980 and 2012 jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the u s labor force math intensive but less social jobs including many stem occupations shrank by 3 3 percentage points over the same period employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills to understand these patterns i develop a model of team production where workers trade tasks to exploit their comparative advantage in the model social skills reduce coordination costs allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently the model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations which i investigate using data from the nlsy79 and the nlsy97 using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves i find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s

what blows in with the wind the shift toward renewable forms of energy for electricity generation in the electricity generation industry has clear implications for the spatial distribution of generating plant traditional forms of generation are typically located close to the load or population centers while wind and solar powered generation must be located where the energy source is found in the case of wind this has meant significant new investment in wind plant in primarily rural areas that have been in secular economic decline this article investigates the localized economic impacts of the rapid increase in wind power capacity at the county level in texas unlike input output impact analysis that relies primarily on levels of inputs to estimate gross impacts we use traditional econometric methods to estimate net localized impacts in terms of employment personal income property tax base and key public school expenditure levels while we find evidence that both direct and indirect employment impacts are modest significant increases in per capita income accompany wind power development county and school property tax rolls also realize important benefits from the local siting of utility scale wind power although peculiarities in texas school funding shift localized property tax benefits to the state

college advising and gender this paper uses a field experiment to identify college advising gender biases five hundred and thirty surveys are randomized over a national sample of practicing advisors such that student gender is the treatment of the experiment i find that advisors discount the ability of female students relative to males by statistically significant magnitudes in both mathematics and english additionally male advisors recommend mathematics with much greater likelihood than do female advisors jel i2 j16

the varied economic returns to postsecondary education new evidence from the class of 1972 this paper estimates the returns to postsecondary education using the national longitudinal survey of the class of 1972 with earnings measured at about age 32 the results are based on transcripts rather than self reports about the amount of education allowing postsecondary education to be more precisely described than usual the results confirm the well known returns to b a degrees other credentials associate degrees and certificates for women also lead to higher earnings and wage rates though indirectly these credentials gain individuals access to jobs where they accumulate more experience and on the job training but provide no further advantage once experience and ojt are controlled most individuals who enroll in postsecondary education but fail to complete credentials have no higher earnings than high school graduates the effects of experience high school achievement and family background are familiar the results indicate a fundamental difference between labor markets for college graduates and the sub baccalaureate labor market

post secondary fees and the decision to attend a university or a community college abstract this paper examines the effect that post secondary fees have on a potential student s decision to start his or her college education at a university or a community college a theoretical model demonstrates that the student s decision follows a natural ordering that depends on his or her probability of graduation based on this natural ordering ordered probit is used to estimate the effect of interstate variation in fees on student attendance the results indicate that the own price effects of fee increases are negative while the cross price effects are positive

the evolution of wage gaps between stem and non stem graduates in a technological following economy based on the assumption that the set of skills characterizing different fields of study do not match the new technologies in the same way we focus on the evolution of wage gaps between university