strategic demand side response to wind power integration this paper explores the effects of allowing large price responsive consumers to provide reserves in a power system with significant penetration of wind energy a bilevel optimization model represents the utility maximization problem of a large consumer subject to a stochastic day ahead co optimization of energy and reserves that a system operator would solve to clear the market while considering wind power uncertainty an examination of the market outcomes from both an illustrative and a large scale study using this model allows analysis of a the effects of the type of behavior of the large consumer i e strategic vs competitive b limits on the amount of reserves it is allowed to provide and c variability and accuracy of characterization of wind power uncertainty

evaluating the impacts of priority dispatch in the european electricity market this paper compares the impact of the nodal pricing and european market coupling organizations on different economic agents of the power system under two main wind policies under the priority dispatch policy transmission system operators tsos must accommodate all wind energy produced which thus has the priority over energy produced by conventional plants in the no priority dispatch policy tsos can decide not to inject all potential wind power in the grid in order to limit congestion problems the effects of these two wind policies are measured by developing simple stochastic programming models that consider cases with different wind penetration levels existing capacities and endogenous investments as well as assumptions on the eu ets our computational experiments show that when there is priority dispatch nodal pricing and market coupling evolve in a similar way as long as wind penetration is not too high in contrast a significant increase of wind penetration causes the collapse of the market coupling organization while nodal pricing continues to perform well on the other hand no priority dispatch removes most of the problems resulting from market coupling which still exhibits a slightly lower efficiency than nodal pricing these outcomes do not depend on the contextual assumptions fixed capacities vs investment eu ets vs non eu ets that characterize the several cases analyzed this suggested that our policy conclusions are robust furthermore our models overestimate the flexibility of conventional plants which means that these conclusions would likely be reinforced with a more detailed model

returns to regionalism the past decade has witnessed a renewed interest in regional trade agreements with many policymakers and academics seeming to believe that these provide more than the traditional gains from trade this article examines several possible benefits that regional trade agreements may confer on their partners including credibility signaling bargaining power insurance and coordination it assesses the necessary conditions for each possible channel to work gives stylized examples of specific types of policy where the benefit might be applicable examines cases where the explanation might be relevant and discusses their overall plausibility it concludes by examining the north american free trade agreement and the europe agreements

europe vs america institutional hysteresis in a simple normative model we show how the differences in us and european institutions can arise in a normative model the paper focuses on the labor market and the government s decision to set unemployment benefits in response to an unemployment shock the government balances insurance considerations with the tax burden of benefits and the possibility that they introduce adverse incentive effects whereby benefits increase unemployment it is found that when an adverse shock occurs benefits should be increased most when the adverse incentive effects of benefits are largest adjustment costs of changing benefits introduce hysteresis and can help explain why post oil shock benefits remained high in europe but not in the us desirable features of the model are that we obtain an asymmetry out of a symmetric environment and that the mechanism yielding hysteresis is both simple requires the third derivative of the utility function to be non negative and self correcting empirical evidence concerning the role of corporatism is discussed

profits and politics coordinating technology adoption in agriculture abstract this paper examines the political economy of government led coordination of economic activity in a simple two sector model in which individuals choice of agricultural technology affects industrialization we demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria the economy is either characterized by the use of a traditional agricultural technology and a low level of industrialization or the use of a mechanized technology and a high level of industrialization relative to the traditional technology use of the mechanized technology increases output but leaves some population groups worse off we show that the distributional implications of choosing the mechanized technology restrict the possibility of pareto improving coordination by an elected policy maker even when we allow for income redistribution

coordinated price maker operation of large energy storage units in nodal energy markets in this paper a new optimization framework is proposed to coordinate the operation of large price maker and geographically dispersed energy storage battery systems in a nodal transmission constrained energy market the energy storage units are assumed to be investor owned and independently operated seeking to maximize their total profit various design factors are taken into consideration such as the location size efficiency and charge and discharge rates of the energy storage units as well as the joint impact of the energy storage operations on the locational marginal prices while the formulated optimization problem is originally nonlinear and hard to solve nonlinearities are tackled both in the objective function and in the constraints and the problem is transformed into a tractable mixed integer linear program for which the global optimal solutions are found for the charge and discharge schedules of each energy storage unit both deterministic and stochastic design scenarios are addressed various case studies are presented it is observed that transmission line congestion is often but not always desirable for the coordinated storage systems locational diversity practice of arbitrage robust design self scheduling versus economic bidding and the overall power system performance are also investigated

the need for enemies we develop a model where some politicians have an edge in undertaking a task and this gives them electoral advantage creating an incentive to underperform in the task we test the empirical implications in the context of fighting against insurgents using colombian data the main prediction is that large defeats for the insurgents reduce the probability that these politicians fight them especially in electorally salient places we find that after the largest victories against farc rebels the government reduced its counterinsurgency efforts especially in politically important municipalities politicians need to keep enemies alive in order to maintain their political advantage

a stochastic model of the 2007 russian duma election in this paper we consider the nature of local nash equilibrium lne for a model of the 2007 duma election in russia using estimates of valence obtained from sociodemo graphic variables we then extend this sociodemographic valence model by including institutional valences the approval by voters of the various institutions including the president the prime minister the state duma and the federation council we show by simulation that the vote maximizing lne of this general stochastic model were not at the electoral origin the dominant feature of the election was the influence of approval or disapproval of president putin on each voter s political choice

market clearing with stochastic security part i formulation the first of this two paper series formulates a stochastic security constrained multi period electricity market clearing problem with unit commitment the stochastic security criterion accounts for a pre selected set of random generator and line outages with known historical failure rates and involuntary load shedding as optimization variables unlike the classical deterministic reserve constrained unit commitment here the reserve services are determined by economically penalizing the operation of the market by the expected load not served the proposed formulation is a stochastic programming problem that optimizes concurrently with the pre contingency social welfare the expected operating costs associated with the deployment of the reserves following the contingencies this stochastic programming formulation is solved in the second companion paper using mixed integer linear programming methods two cases are presented a small transmission constrained three bus network scheduled over a horizon of four hours and the ieee reliability test system scheduled over 24 h the impact on the resulting generation and reserve schedules of transmission constraints and generation ramp limits of demand side reserve of the value of load not served and of the constitution of the pre selected set of contingencies are assessed

blame game politics in a coalition government abstract delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics this paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision making process nor politicians preferences for a reform we show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption thus delaying it until after the next election and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non adoption we refer to this strategy as blame game politics we then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame game one is to make an issue salient in the next election a second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue a third reason is to enhance bargaining power during the formation of the next government

reciprocated unilateralism in trade reforms with majority voting this paper shows how unilateral liberalization in one country can increase the voting support for reciprocal reduction in trade barriers in a partner country when trade policies are determined simultaneously in the two countries we show the possibility of multiple political equilibria one in which the countries are both protectionist and another in which they trade freely with each other starting with trade protection in both countries a unilateral reform in one country is shown to bring about a free trade equilibrium that obtains majority support in both countries

credible commitment and success with public enterprise reform abstract this paper studies why some efforts at public enterprise reform fail and why others succeed economic reforms are intended to increase efficiency and thus help sustain long term growth yet many governments have had difficulty sustaining the reforms they initiated and have reintroduced rigid controls over markets and enterprises this is because either in the process of implementation the government discovers that the costs of carrying the reform further are greater than the expected efficiency gains or the public is skeptical that the new policies can be sustained and does not take the actions necessary for the gains to be realized this paper develops a new institutionalist framework and employs various measures of policy commitment and net gain from continued reform to analyze these issues the paper suggests ways in which the potential success or failure of a reform can be assessed with implications for the steps that reformers might take to increase the chances of success

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

geographic diffusion and the transformation of the postcommunist world since the collapse of communism the states of postcommunist europe and asia have defined for themselves and have had defined for them two primary tasks the construction of viable market economies and the establishment of working institutions of representative democracy the variation in political and economic outcomes in the postcommunist space makes it without question the most diverse region in the world what explains the variation all of the big winners of postcommunism share the trait of being geographically close to the former border of the noncommunist world even controlling for cultural differences historical legacies and paths of extrication the spatial effect remains consistent and strong across the universe of postcommunist cases this suggests the spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms resources and institutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and market economies in the postcommunist era the authors develop and adduce evidence for the spatial dependence hypothesis test it against rival hypotheses and illustrate the relationships at work through three theoretically important case studies

the role of uncertainty and learning for the success of international climate agreements abstract transnational externalities e g transboundary pollution trade contagious diseases and terrorism warrant coordination and cooperation between governments but this proves often difficult one reason for the meager success is the public good character of many of these economic problems encouraging free riding another reason one might suspect is uncertainty surrounding most environmental problems and in particular climate change this provides often an excuse for remaining inactive paradoxically some recent papers have concluded just the opposite the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of international environmental cooperation in this paper we explain why and under which conditions this can be true however we argue that those conditions are the exception rather than the rule most important we suggest a mechanism for those conditions where learning has a negative effect on the success of cooperation which removes this effect or even turns it into a positive effect our results apply beyond the specifics of climate change to similar problems where cooperation generates positive externalities

endogenous trade policy through majority voting an empirical investigation abstract the median voter approach to trade policy determination within a heckscher ohlin framework as in mayer am econ rev 74 5 1984 970 predicts that an increase in inequality holding constant the economy s overall relative endowments raises trade barriers in capital abundant economies and lowers them in capital scarce economies we find support for this prediction using cross country data on inequality capital abundance and diverse measures of protection we perform certain robustness checks that include controlling for the effects of political rights and schooling as well as using alternative datasets on factor endowments

incumbent employees resistance to implementing privatization policy abstract the recent anti privatization trend in latin america france and south africa is a reminder that employees resist privatization because pre privatization firms tend to be over manned and to pay excessive wages we study the effect of employees resistance on the successful implementation of privatization in a stylized model in which the government interacts with employees of an unknown type the analysis clarifies some of the difficulties associated with the implementation process furthermore although common sense dictates that the government negotiates with the employees before finding an outside buyer we show that sometimes it is better off contacting an investor first

what does export diversification do for growth an econometric analysis it is frequently suggested that export diversification contributes to an acceleration of growth in developing countries horizontal export diversification into completely new export sectors may generate positive externalities on the rest of the economy as export oriented sectors gain from dynamic learning activities due to contacts with foreign purchasers and exposure to international competition vertical diversification out of primary into manufactured exports is also associated with growth since primary export sectors generally do not exhibit strong spillovers yet there have been remarkably few empirical investigations into the link between export diversification and growth this paper attempts to examine the hypothesis that export diversification is linked to economic growth via externalities of learning by doing and learning by exporting fostered by competition in world markets the diversification led growth hypothesis is tested by estimating an augmented cobb douglas production function on the bas

stochastic security for operations planning with significant wind power generation in their attempt to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation several countries are committed to install wind power generation up to and beyond the 10 20 penetration mark however the large scale integration of wind power represents a challenge for power system operations planning because wind power 1 cannot be dispatched in the classical sense and 2 its output varies as weather conditions change this warrants the investigation of alternative short term power system operations planning methods capable of better coping with the nature of wind generation while maintaining or even improving the current reliability and economic performance of power systems to this end this paper formulates a short term forward electricity market clearing problem with stochastic security capable of accounting for nondispatchable and variable wind power generation sources the principal benefit of this stochastic operation planning approach is that when compared to a deterministic worst case scenario planning philosophy it allows greater wind power penetration without sacrificing security

stochastic unit commitment with uncertain demand response although demand response dr encourages customers to voluntarily schedule electricity consumption based on price signals the response from the consumer side could be uncertain due to a variety of reasons in this letter we study the stochastic unit commitment problem with uncertain demand response to enhance the reliability unit commitment process for independent system operators isos we use a stochastic representation of dr by scenario and each scenario corresponds to a price elastic demand curve contingency constraints are considered and in addition a chance constraint is applied to ensure the loss of load probability lolp lower than a pre defined risk level finally a sample average approximation saa method is applied to solve the problem

income distribution human capital and economic growth in colombia abstract colombian income distribution has followed a clear path during the last two decades in the second half of the 1970s human capital accumulation reduced the dispersion of income distribution and lead to a period of stagnation between 1983 and 1990 when mobility declined after the structural reforms a skill bias technological change the wage differential for skilled workers increased inequality by a polarization in the bi modal distribution of income these topics are discussed in the paper along some dynamic aspects of income and educational mobility in colombia

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

government interventions in a dynamic market with adverse selection we study government interventions in a dynamic market with asymmetric information we show that if the government can only carry out budget neutral policies introducing a short tax exempt trading window followed by short lived positive taxes creates a pareto improvement in the market under a su cient condition on the shape of the gains from trade and the distribution of asset values we show that even when not requiring budget neutrality it is optimal to subsidize trades only at time zero while imposing prohibitively high taxes afterwards subsidies can greatly enhance welfare but they can also be detrimental if they are provided with delay

leviathan resists the endogenous relationship between privatization and firm performance using a panel dataset of privatized cement firms in turkey this paper models and finds support for the simultaneous relationship between privatization and firm performance it is found that favorable short run performance weak market potential higher employment lower socio economic development concentrated voter preferences and weaker representation of right wing parties in the firms locality delay the timing of privatization the paper also finds that privatization increases output in the medium term by reducing the labor stock and promoting the adoption of more advanced technology such that production shifts from constant to decreasing returns to scale

the vp function a survey of the literature on vote and popularity functions after 25 years vp functions explain the support for the government at votes and polls by economic and political variables most studies analyze macro time series we also cover studies of individual voters socio economic groups and regional cross sections the theory starts from the responsibil ity hypothesis voters hold the government responsible for economic conditions it works in two party block systems but not else voters in most countries are found to be sociotropic egotropic voting also occurs voters myopia is well established voting is retrospective as expectations are static it costs the average government almost 2 of the vote to rule

clientelism and polarized voting empirical evidence one must take country specific institutional features into account when analyzing former communist countries transformation process to new political institutions we do so for post communist albania where the regional and cultural polarization that has existed for centuries has evolved to clientelism in the new democracy we show how clientelistic parties give rise to very particular voting patterns these reveal major differences across regions not only in party choice but also in voters responses to government policies these responses depend on the party in government and on the region concerned this is in sharp contrast with results obtained when applying the same model to a large number of more advanced democracies with similar electoral institutions a proper evaluation of democratization in albania thus requires looking beyond the formal institutions governing elections and taking clientelism and its effect on voter behavior into account

rational citizens against reform poverty and economic reform in transition economies the debate on the political obstacles to economic reform in postcommunist countries has centered around two interrelated theories adam przeworski argues that short term negative distributional consequences can stall economic reform joel hellman contends that industry insiders and political elites have incentives to stall economic reform although both sets of theories contend that the distributional aspects of economic transition affect reform important differences remain in their interpretation of the relationship between the rising levels of poverty and income inequality in transition economies this article empirically examines the relationship between the pretransition levels of poverty and income inequality in 17 postcommunist transition economies using cross sectional regressions the central finding in this article is that countries with large spans of the population hovering above poverty are less likely to achieve high levels of economic reform lending support to theory that adverse socioecon

compensations as signaling devices in the political economy of reforms we propose an explanation for why efficient reforms are not carried out when losers can block their implementation and compensations are feasible in our model a government tries to sequentially implement two efficient reforms by bargaining with interest groups the organization of interest groups is endogenous compensations are distortionary and different governments care differently about distortions governments use low compensations to discourage losers who just want to receive transfers from organizing this comes at the cost of reforms being blocked by interest groups with relatively high losses resulting in a bias against payment of compensations and the implementation of reforms

on the market impact of wind energy forecasts this paper presents an analysis of how day ahead electricity spot prices are affected by day ahead wind power forecasts demonstration of this relationship is given as a test case for the western danish price area of the nord pool s elspot market impact on the average price behaviour is investigated as well as that on the distributional properties of the price by using a non parametric regression model to assess the effects of wind power forecasts on the average behaviour the non linearities and time variations in the relationship are captured well and the effects are shown to be quite substantial furthermore by evaluating the distributional properties of the spot prices under different scenarios the impact of the wind power forecasts on the price distribution is proved to be considerable the conditional price distribution is moreover shown to be non gaussian this implies that forecasting models for electricity spot prices for which parameters are estimated by a least squares techniques will not have gaussian residuals hence the widespread assumption of gaussian residuals from electricity spot price models is shown to be inadequate for these model types the revealed effects are likely to be observable and qualitatively similar in other day ahead electricity markets significantly penetrated by wind power

a stochastic two settlement equilibrium model for electricity markets with wind generation incentives to encourage the uptake of renewable energy generation have fostered wind energy in many power systems these incentives usually take the form of market instruments e g feed in tariff or premium that are not directly amenable to optimization representations of the market in this paper we propose an equilibrium model of the short term market to address the impact of wind operation under different structural assumptions the model is formulated for several price taking risk averse firms in competition it accounts for wind generation uncertainty and embeds a representation of the day ahead and balancing mechanisms the consumer is modeled by a linear inverse demand function we focus on feed in premium as the incentive to wind as this is the instrument most favored today in european discussions the model is formulated as a stochastic equilibrium problem where the karush kuhn tucker kkt conditions from the optimization problem of each firm are simultaneously solved together with market clearing conditions on energy capacity for reserve and energy for reserve the problem for each firm consists of a two stage stochastic optimization problem with a recourse function based on the conditional value at risk cvar as a risk measure due to price taking assumptions the model is a single stage complementarity problem it is implemented and solved using the software gams an example based on a stylized simplification of the spanish power market and motivated by the impact of wind penetration on the revenue of conventional plants is used to illustrate the proposed approach

three or two stage stochastic market clearing algorithm as the power industry considers moving from a deterministic paradigm to a stochastic one to clear the day ahead market in systems with significant stochastic production the following question arises how should a stochastic clearing algorithm be formulated our analyses indicate that a three stage stochastic approach is clearly superior to a two stage one to show this we propose a model that includes three stages the first one represents the day ahead market the second stage the intraday market and the third one the real time operation the objective is to clear the day ahead market but with a prognosis of the future the intraday market and the real time operation to assess the impact of the intraday market on the day ahead outcomes we compare the results obtained from the proposed model with those of a simpler but more common two stage model which represents the day ahead market and the real time operation

capital flight and political risk abstract this paper provides the first serious attempt to examine the relationship between political risk and capital flight for a large set of developing countries the outcomes of the analysis show that in most cases political risk variables do have a statistically robust relationship to capital flight once domestic and international macroeconomic circumstances are added at least when the robustness test as proposed by sala i martin is applied we conclude that on the basis of the analysis in this paper we have found support for the hypothesis that political risk leads to increased capital flight

redistributive politics and economic efficiency the political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses we find that a dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome to achieve economically efficient outcomes it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices not be given offsetting transfers but the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market we identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics and are therefore immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices

towards an equilibrium level of market reform how politics affects the dynamics of policy change in this article we examine the dynamics of economic reforms that are implemented by incumbent policy makers interested in maintaining their political power we use a sample of 86 countries over a time period going from 1980 to 2001 and find that the achievement of an equilibrium level of market liberalization is highly costly our results are robust to endogenity and model specification

trade liberalization through asset markets abstract political economy expositions of trade policy have traditionally described asset or factor ownership as not subject to change asset markets however allow individuals to change the composition of income sources we consider an economy with stochastic productivity to show how the equilibrium composition of asset portfolios influences individual attitudes toward free trade the model links financial market completeness and trade liberalization in the second half of the 20th century and provides a contributing answer to why governments in poorer countries without well developed financial markets have failed to liberalize trade

a single settlement energy only electric power market for unpredictable and intermittent participants we discuss a stochastic programming based method for scheduling electric power generation subject to uncertainty such uncertainty may arise from either imperfect forecasting or moment to moment fluctuations and on either the supply or the demand side the method gives a system of locational marginal prices that reflect the uncertainty and these may be used in a market settlement scheme in which payment is for energy only we show that this scheme is revenue adequate in expectation

insider ownership human resource strategies and performance in a transition economy researchers and potential investors in transition economies need to understand the human resource management hrm strategies of target firms since human resources are arguably their most valuable assets understanding is difficult however because hrm strategies help to determine firms performance but are in turn influenced by corporate governance particularly insider ownership this paper employs a structural equation modeling methodology to examine the relations between governance hrm strategies and performance in the context of a novel dataset of ukrainian industrial firms it is found that insider ownership is positively associated with high commitment hrm strategies and negatively with low commitment cost cutting hrm strategies cost cutting hrm strategies are in turn associated with weaker firm performance these outcomes correspond broadly with theoretical expectations

why and when do governments initiate public enterprise reform initiating public enterprise reform is a complex decision influenced by economic factors as well as the ideological biases and personalities of political leaders nevertheless the use of a contracting framework yields important generalizations about what drives the decision this article argues that the decision depends fundamentally on the potential efficiency gains from the reform and its associated transactions costs costs arise because of asymmetries in information and opportunism problems that usually plague contract negotiations the article identifies observable variables that may affect either the potential gains or the transactions costs uses them to construct a simple probit decision making model and tests the model using data from fifteen developing countries over a twenty year period

stages of diversification this paper studies the evolution of sectoral concentration in relation to the level of per capita income we show that various measures of sectoral concentration follow a u shaped pattern across a wide variety of data sources countries first diversify in the sense that economic activity is spread more equally across sectors but there exists relatively late in the development process a point at which they start specializing again we discuss this finding in light of existing theories of trade and growth which generally predict a monotonic relationship between income and diversification

the political economy of transition the overriding importance of political constraints in the transition process has led to developments of the theory of the political economy of reform what are the main insights from that theory how does it reflect the transition reality what have we learned and what do we still need to learn the present article will attempt to answer those questions

a comparison between economic systems with an application to transition abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium theory of endogenous firm and class formation under non contractibility with heterogeneous individuals a collectivist economy a private ownership economy and a mixed economy are compared on the basis of identical economic fundamentals methodological symmetry each economic system generates specific inefficiencies so that none dominates the others in general the main trade off is between the welfare loss associated with risk taking in the private ownership economy and the informational problems in the collectivist economy we then use this framework to study the political economy of transition between economic systems and provide detailed welfare results

exploring the political economy of labour market institutions labour markets how reforms took place many economists argue that the european unemployment problem relates to large labour market rigidities this paper argues that many of those inflexibilities and the underlying institutional regulations can be understood as the outcome of political influence by incumbent employees this is because many policies that increase unemployment actually benefit these insiders an empirical investigation of the determinants of labour market institutions demonstrates that the observations are consistent with this view the findings imply 1 higher exposure of the employed to unemployment facilitates a reduction in the level of employment protection 2 unemployment benefits are lower the more employment reacts to wages 3 a higher level of unemployment and the existence of a right wing government slow down the growth rate of the minimum wage giles saint paul

econometrics and presidential elections this paper discusses an econometric equation that explains votes for president as a function of economic events and incumbency information the history of the equation is reviewed the update after the 1992 election is discussed and a prediction for the 1996 election is made conditional on an economic forecast

the dilemma of cheap food and self sufficiency the case of wheat in iran self sufficiency in wheat has been one of the major goals of iranian agricultural policies since the revolution of 1979 even so the country failed to achieve this goal by the early 2000s despite a satisfactory growth in wheat production this paper addresses this failure and the political difficulties in introducing reforms that would reduce the need for import first the production and consumption of wheat are examined the conclusion is that the cheap bread policy has mainly been responsible for the imbalances between domestic supply and demand and the continued reliance on wheat imports moreover the paper argues that the subsidy program is an expensive safety net for the needy and shows that the iranian government has intended to reform the program since the early 1990s however subsidy reforms are politically sensitive especially in developing countries where subsidies are considered very important both for supporting the poor and for political stability an analysis of the iranian attempts at subsidy reform suggests that they have not yet succeeded mainly due to such political considerations

rain emotions and voting for the status quo abstract do emotions affect the decision between change and the status quo we exploit exogenous variation in emotions caused by rain and analyze data on more than 870 000 municipal vote outcomes in switzerland to address this question the empirical tests are based on administrative ballot outcomes and individual postvote survey data we find that rain decreases the share of votes for political change our robustness checks suggest that this finding is not driven by changes in the composition of the electorate and changes in information acquisition in addition we provide evidence that rain might have altered the outcome of several high stake votes we discuss the psychological mechanism and document that rain reduces the willingness to take risks a pattern that is consistent with the observed reduction in the support for change

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

tax reform and the political economy of the tax base abstract this paper studies the political prospects for reform in a model where the tax base and statutory rate are separate instruments of tax policy the model suggests that large changes in the tax code may be easier to enact than marginal reforms the tax base faces a tipping point where even the beneficiaries from tax exemptions support reform at this tipping point tax reform is pareto improving politically feasible tax reform occurs when fiscal needs are large but may nonetheless involve reductions in marginal tax rates there is strategic complementarity in lobbying for tax exemptions resulting in multiple equilibria the model s main predictions are consistent with recent tax reforms in oecd countries

assessing environmental economic and reliability impacts of flexible ramp products in miso s electricity market abstract increased variability and uncertainty of net electrical load due to high penetration of wind and solar power augments the need for dispatching conventional generators with sufficient ramping capability rc needed to balance demand with supply having sufficient rc reduces the need of last minute dispatch schedule modifications which cause cost reliability and environmental outcomes that reduce the benefits of renewables the midcontinent independent system operator miso has modified its unit commitment and economic dispatch algorithms to account for the economic value of provisioning adequate rc levels this paper explores the outcomes of this modified market clearing process by simulating 10 minute operations of a scaled miso test system for three representative months under low and high wind penetration scenarios changes in system performance are quantified by comparing system costs scarcity events pricing energy prices generation fuel mix wind power curtailment and co 2 emissions between the conventional market clearing algorithm and one with flexible rc products results indicate that adding rc products lowers co 2 emissions and system costs facilitates wind integration and improves reliability these benefits are robust to changes in the market clearing algorithm parameters such as over under generation penalties and reserve scarcity prices

the political economy of food subsidy reform the case of egypt abstract this paper examines the political economy of food subsidy reform efforts in egypt egypt provides a case of a country with a large food subsidy program that has been relatively effective as a social safety net but a program that is also expensive and poorly targeted to the needy policy discussions about strategies to improve the system s performance run into the extreme political sensitivity of the issue of food subsidies in egypt food subsidies are perceived to be important in promoting political stability and providing some legitimacy to a political system where civil liberties are limited egypt therefore illustrates the dilemmas facing policymakers and others contemplating food subsidy reform in developing countries where there are concerns that reform may spark political unrest this paper argues that even in cases where food subsidy reform is a highly politicized issue there are still a number of pragmatic policy steps that can be taken that meet the twin goals of reforming the system in ways that better target the poor while functioning more efficiently

the optimal speed of transition a general equilibrium analysis we present a benchmark model for the optimal speed of transition from a state owned to a private market economy based on the consumption savings decision in a closed economy we abstract from frictions to focus on the macroeconomic conditions for accumulation of private capital and closure or restructuring of state owned enterprises it is shown that hard budget constraints compensate for too slow speed of enterprise closure but that an excess speed of closure may slow down transition because of output contraction effects this will especially be the case if such a deviation occurs at early stages of transition

do the vietnamese support the economic doi moi abstract each reform implies social and economic changes after experiencing war and reunification today vietnam is implementing a comprehensive and deep process of renovation doi moi but a revolution needs the support of the population to be successful this article investigates whether the vietnamese are supportive of some of the main features of a market economy in particular the preferences for competition ownership of firms either private or public and income inequality as an incentive to productivity are studied here the data allow us to conclude that the doi moi is not at risk but the population tend to contrast income inequality

economic reform and political transition in africa the quest for a politics of development the 1980s were bracketed by crises in africa as protracted economic malaise was succeeded by a wave of political reform analysts have sought to understand the sources of economic decline as well as the political requisites for recovery in the region neoclassical and structuralist analyses have been challenged by state centric views of economic change the latter perspective emphasizes the need for capable developmental states as a basis for long term adjustment but a political theory of economic change is still lacking such a theory must address the institutional foundations of growth as well as the shifting basis of social coalitions in african regimes political liberalization suggests the possibility of a new setting for economic reform though the effects of political reform on institutions and coalitions remain ambiguous and democratization cannot be regarded as a panacea for the region s developmental failure future research must look more closely at the interests and structures in transitional regimes and scholars should adopt a more comparative vantage on africa s challenges of reform

political support for reforms economics of voting in transition countries i analyze the relationship between economics and politics across eight parliamentary elections in four transition countries the czech republic hungary poland and slovakia i argue that support for reform reflects the balance between positive and negative effects of the reform accordingly i identify economic groups that support or oppose the reform the former are private entrepreneurs white collar workers and university educated voters the latter are the unemployed retirees and blue collar and agricultural workers this general pattern holds both within countries and across countries and across tenures of different governments in contrast with the responsibility hypothesis voters in the transition countries are found to be forward looking not retrospective

dynamic commitment and incomplete policy rules considering the dynamics of commitment highlights some neglected features of time inconsistency problems we modify the standard rules versus discretion question in three ways 1 a government that does not commit today retains the option to do so tomorrow 2 the government s commitment capability is restricted to a class of simple rules and 3 the government s ability to make irrevocable commitments is restricted three results stand out first the option to wait makes the incumbent regime rules or discretion relatively more attractive second the option to wait means that increased uncertainty makes the incumbent regime more attlwactive third because the commitment decision takes place in real time policy choice displays hysteresis when monetary policy is subject to dynamic inconsistencies optimal policy requires some precommitment by the central bank despite a proliferation of mechanisms designed to address this problem work in this area has continued to assume a once and for all choice between rules and discretion this paper asks two closely related questions first what happens if commitment decisions are made in real time so that failure to commit today does not rule out the possibility of commitment tomorrow second if governments can make only commitments that are difficult but not impossible to reverse what determines the dynamics of commitment and reversal the assumption of once and for all choice enforces simplistic dynamics on the policy process if the standard models are interpreted literally for example the commitment problem for u s monetary policy is moot having been resolved with the founding of the federal reserve system in 1914 if not at the constitutional convention of 1789 much of the interest in dynamic inconsistency however arises pre

economic valuation of reserves in power systems with high penetration of wind power this paper proposes a methodology to determine the required level of spinning and nonspinning reserves in a power system with a high penetration of wind power the computation of the required reserve levels and their costs is achieved through a stochastic programming market clearing model spanning a daily time horizon this model considers the network constraints and takes into account the cost of both the load shedding and the wind spillage the methodology proposed is illustrated using an example and a realistic case study some conclusions are finally drawn

the option to wait in collective decisions and optimal majority rules abstract we consider a model in which voters over time receive more information about their preferences concerning an irreversible social decision voters can either implement the project in the first period or they can postpone the decision to the second period we analyze the effects of different majority rules individual first period voting behavior may become less conservative under supermajority rules and it is even possible that a project is implemented in the first period under a supermajority rule that would not be implemented under simple majority rule we characterize the optimal majority rule which is a supermajority rule in contrast to individual investment problems society may be better off if the option to postpone the decision did not exist these results are qualitatively robust to natural generalizations of our model

a reform dilemma in polarized democracies abstract we study the feasibility and efficiency of policy reforms in democracies we develop a simple election model where i reforms are costly for voters and politicians and these costs increase with the extent of policy change and ii politicians differ in their ability to carry out reforms efficiently we identify a so called reform dilemma which manifests itself in two variants from a static perspective low reform ability politicians are elected when political parties are polarized who then impose high costs on citizens for each reform step this property of elections arises as low reform ability is a substitute for policy commitment from a dynamic perspective incumbents may choose socially undesirable policies to align the social need for reform with their own reform ability and are thus re elected regardless of their reform ability

learning about the prospects for mobility economic and political dynamics following fundamental policy reform abstract the political left turn in latin america which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior this paper generalizes the forward looking voter model to a broad range of dynamic possibly non concave income processes under full information the model implies support for redistributive policies materializes rapidly if few prospects of upward mobility are present in contrast modeling voters evolving beliefs about an unknown income dynamic process shows a slow and polarizing shift toward redistributive preferences simulation using fitted income dynamics suggests that this imperfect information perspective accounts for latin america s right to left political shift and offers additional insights about political dynamics in the face of economic polarization

support for foreign ownership and integration in eastern europe economic interests ideological commitments and democratic context western models of popular support for economic integration usually stress costs and benefits this article suggests that one cannot ignore the predominance of socialist economic values in east central europe consequently it is argued and supported that a individual level support for foreign ownership is best explained by ideological commitments to market ideals b publics in more economically liberal countries more strongly support the idea of foreign ownership and c citizens who reside in democratic countries which experience greater controversy over foreign ownership are less likely to accept the idea of foreign ownership just as they have a more negative image of the european union theoretically the study documents the limited applicability to eastern europe of western based models practically it helps explain opposition to foreign ownership and more generally increasing controversy over the eu in first wave accession states

endogenous choice of trade policy instruments abstract recently developed theories of endogenous trade policy formation have attempted to explain tariffs as the result of economic interest seeking by individuals or groups this note demonstrates that tariffs will not emerge as a policy choice if income is redistributed solely through trade policy induced factor price changes a production tax cum subsidy will be adopted as both gainers and losers are better off than with a tariff

gradualism versus big bang speed and sustainability of reforms a beneficial reform may be blocked by a majority if it is implemented by a big bang but the same reform may succeed with an optimally designed gradualist approach a gradualist approach can sometimes split opposition force and is in this sense more politically sustainable on the other hand if both approaches are politically preferred to no reform a big bang is often preferred to gradualism in terms of both political support as well as economic efficiency

learning dynamics and support for economic reforms why good news can be bad support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics many reforms that began successfully lost public support this paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement this concept challenges the conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing reform winners it may also lead to situations in which reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support will still not come to completion the framework can be used to explain why gradual reforms worked well in china where successes in special economic zones facilitated further reform whereas this was much less the case for latin american and central and eastern european countries

loss aversion in politics we study how loss aversion affects the political equilibrium in a simple majority voting model first we show a status quo bias which leads to path dependence second loss aversion implies a moderating effect on the most extreme voters third in a dynamic setting the effect of loss aversion diminishes with the length of the planning horizon of voters however in the presence of a projection bias majorities are partially unable to understand how fast they will adapt to a new policy this makes changes less likely and induces time inconsistency policy changes are timid at the beginning while in later periods they are made progressively more radical fourth in a stochastic environment loss aversion yields a significant distaste for risk but also a smaller attachment to the status quo the application of these results to a model of redistribution leads to empirically plausible implications

export diversification what s behind the hump hy should export diversification be taken as a policy objective per se there are two reasons that it should not first according to ricardo countries should specialize not diversify second the heckscher ohlin model implies that export patterns are largely determined by endowments so if anything we should worry about factor accumulation not diversification yet export diversification is a constant preoccupation of policymakers in developing countries as de ferranti et al 2002 note a recurrent preoccupation of latin american policymakers is that their natural riches produce a highly concentrated structure of export revenues which then leads to economic volatility and lower growth p 38 the notion that export patterns are fully determined by endowments is of course naive the relationship of endowments trade and growth is a complex and imperfectly understood one intra industry trade models showed long ago that many factors other than endowments including market failures and policies can affect trade patterns more recently hausmann hwang and rodrik 2007 argued that export patterns can display path dependence in the presence of externalities

economic and environmental implications of different approaches to hedge against wind production uncertainty in two settlement electricity markets a pjm case study abstract this paper examines the economic and environmental outcomes of four two settlement electricity market clearing designs the first design corresponds to a deterministic market clearing dmc similar to the mechanism currently used in organized wholesale electricity markets in the united states the other three designs account for the day ahead da wind power production uncertainty into the da market mechanisms either implicitly or explicitly an augmented deterministic market clearing admc design introduces da ramp capability products these products ensure adequate and ramp feasible electricity generation capacity commitments in the da stage to cope with the real time realization of wind power generation a hybrid deterministic market clearing hdmc design augments admc by explicitly integrating a characterization of wind power production uncertainty into the residual unit commitment ruc process which is run after the da market is closed using stochastic programming the last design referred to as stochastic market clearing smc uses stochastic optimization to explicitly account for wind power production uncertainty in the da market clearing mechanisms i e da unit commitment and economic dispatch the four market clearing designs are assessed by simulating the electricity market operations of a test system and comparing their results in terms of operating costs prices costs and revenues of different types of producers consumer s payments integration of wind power and air emissions the test system has 12 of the capacity of pjm s fossil fired power generation fleet and uses data on coincident demand and wind power production from the bonneville power administration bpa system during years 2010 2014 the simulations are performed hourly for a whole year results show that smc is superior as its costs reductions are more than two times the improvements attained by admc and hdmc also smc results in electricity prices that are better aligned with operation costs cuts the spread between the day ahead and real time prices by 40 reduces out of market short term revenue sufficiency payments by 58 reduces co2 emissions by 3 52 and decreases power plants cycling hdmc is a distant second best market design relative to dmc it achieves a reduction in total costs that is less than half the reduction achieved by smc a reduction in out of market payments that is 80 of the reduction attained by smc and an increase in wind power integration that is

is free trade passe abstract if there were an economist s creed it would surely contain the affirmations i understand the principle of comparative advantage and i advocate free trade yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publication of ricardo s principles of political economy and this is due to changes that have recently taken place in the theory of international trade while new developments in international trade theory may not yet be familiar to the profession at large they have been substantial and radical in the last ten years the traditional constant returns perfect competition models of international trade have been supplemented and to some extent supplanted by a new breed of models that emphasizes increasing returns and imperfect competition these new models call into doubt the extent to which actual trade can be explained by comparative advantage they also open the possibility that government intervention in trade via import restrictions export subsidies

the effects of discretionary federal spending on parliamentary election results i introduction three compelling reasons to expect that discretionary federal spending will have a different impact on incumbent majority and opposition candidates in the canadian parliamentary system of government are only the prime minister and his appointed cabinet may propose spending or taxing initiatives the electorate only votes directly for their local member of parliament mp and if the prime minister declares a vote of confidence all majority party mps must vote with the prime minister or leave the party these three characteristics combined with the fact that the opposition does not have enough votes to successfully prevent passage of legislation make it very difficult for opposition mps to influence discretionary spending if the electorate is aware of this situation majority party candidates regardless of incumbency stand to reap the electoral benefits of additional federal discretionary spending furthermore opposition incumbents will lose votes as a consequence if majority candidates receive additional votes to some extent this must be at the expense of votes for opposition incumbents the purpose of this paper is to empirically test these two hypothesis the idea that discretionary spending can be used to influence election outcomes verges on the trite mass media discussions are rife with accusations of pork barrel politics this idea is implicitly contained the entire interest group theory of political decision making and it is formally modeled in papers such as weingast shepsle and johnsen 1981 despite the general agreement on the electoral motivations of discretionary spending empirical findings have been relatively unsuccessful in documenting either important or significant effects of discretionary spending or various other district level explanatory variables typical of this literature jacobson 1978 finds a negative and small effect of incumbent campaign spending and johannes and mcadams 1981 find no effect of case work on election outcomes as explained by fiorina 1981 rivers and fiorina 1989 and stein and bickers 1994 the presence of a simultaneous equation system has biased the empirical estimates since politicians are apt to shift resources towards those electoral districts where the election is expected to be closest ordinary least squares will underestimate the true effect stein and bickers demonstrate a negative correlation between the closeness of elections and the amount of pork barrel spending in congressional races in a more recent article case 2001 finds that federal block grants are negatively influenced by the expected closeness of the election in albania despite the recognition of a simultaneity bias attempts to overcome the problem have generally been unsuccessful a notable exception is that of levitt and snyder 1997 who uses spending outside of a district but inside a state as an instrument for spending in the district levitt and snyder find a positive and significant impact of discretionary spending on the share of the vote for incumbents in u s house elections this paper contributes to the discretionary spending and election literature in two ways using a newly created data set of canadian federal spending at the electoral district level the analysis of discretionary spending can be extended beyond the u s border and presidential system of government to a parliamentary system additionally the results contained herein provide a robustness check of levitt and snyder s methodology using instruments similar to those proposed by nagler and leighley 1992 and levitt and snyder 1997 consistent estimates indicate that increases in federal government spending and national gross domestic product gdp per capita have positive and significant effects on the share of the vote received by majority incumbents yet insignificant effects on opposition incumbents the sign of the point estimates are negative

the ideological determinants of liberal economic reform the case of privatization ollowing the collapse of the communist regimes in eastern europe one of the first priorities of the reform governments was to transform the system of ownership the new governments overwhelm ingly chose to pursue a broad program of sweeping privatization trans ferring the bulk of state property to the private sector given that most property was controlled and owned by the state and that there was no historical precedent for privatization on an economy wide scale policy makers had to design from scratch a program to transfer the wealth of the state to private hands with few exceptions east european priva tization officials appointed to this task concluded that it would be too slow and unwieldy to rely on the piecemeal sale of enterprises to pri vate investors as was typical in west european privatization more commonly they developed programs to transfer the ownership of state enterprises to private individuals and groups through mass distribution programs to be followed by or supplemented with piecemeal sales as one can imagine these policymakers and technocrats could de sign the mass privatization program in ways that held different distri butional consequences for society such that some groups would benefit more than others for example citizens over foreigners one former elite group over another managers over labor and so on in the czech re public the government designed a mass privatization program in which there were no special privileges for any particular groups in society the author wishes to express her gratitude for the helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts from andrew barnes thomas callaghy margaret hanson meredith el nems steven fish denise powers and peter rutland in addition the author wishes to acknowledge the woodrow wil son center and the kennan institute for advanced russian studies for their generous support the opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the institutions or individuals acknowledged above responsibility for any errors is assumed entirely by the author

public employees as swing voters empirical evidence on opposition to public reform reform offers economic gains for society atlarge but can represent a threat to theinterests of public employees publicsector reform faces opposition from votersemployed in public sector norwegian dataallow for an analysis this interpretation survey data show that public employeesprefer less reform than the rest of thepopulation the voting behavior of publicemployees is more sensitive to reform thanis that of other voters the swing voterhypothesis and hence shares of publicemployees in a local jurisdiction have anegative impact on the probability ofreform

environmental economics and ecological economics where they can converge abstract environmental economics and ecological economics share the common objective of understanding the human economy environment interaction in order to redirect the economies towards sustainability in pursuing this objective these two perspectives utilise different types of analytical framework and are opposed to each other on many of the fundamental theoretical and methodological issues while the environmental economics has progressed within a narrowly but sharply focused neoclassical analytical approach the ecological economics has expanded by adopting a diversified approach which led to widen the gap between the two this article makes an attempt to highlight the divergence between these two perspectives on different issues and identifies certain research avenues that would potentially bring convergence between these two perspectives