do greens drive hummers or hybrids environmental ideology as a determinant of consumer choice this paper uses several california data sets to test for differences in consumption patterns between greens and browns a person s environmentalism is rarely observed in consumer data sets in california a community s share of green party registered voters is a viable proxy for community environmentalism environmentalists are more likely to commute by public transit purchase hybrid vehicles and consume less gasoline than non environmentalists

towards an attention based view of the firm the central argument is that firm behavior is the result of how firms channel and distribute the attention of their decision makers what decision makers do depends on what issues and answers they focus their attention on what issues and answers they focus on depends on the specific situation and on how the firm s rules resources and relationships distribute various issues answers and decision makers into specific communications and procedures the paper develops these theoretical principles into a model of firm behavior and presents its implications for explaining firm behavior and adaptation 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

behavioural attitudes towards water saving evidence from a study of environmental actions given the growing emphasis being placed on water conservation in and around the home by water companies there is a pressing need to identify the characteristics of the water saver so that policy makers can more accurately target initiatives for water conservation this paper examines the social attitudinal and behavioural composition of water saving activities using a sample of 1600 households from devon the research sought to examine the links between water saving energy conservation green consumerism and waste management in and around the home accordingly the extent to which water saving can be placed within a behavioural context that incorporates different environmental behaviours is discussed the data relating to water saving are then analysed and four different types of individual are defined according to their behavioural characteristics these are examined in the context of their demographic composition and a range of attitudinal factors the policy implications of the research are described throughout the paper

financial incentives to mobilise local citizens as investors in low carbon technologies a systematic literature review abstract mobilising greater levels of private finance through local citizen investment in low carbon technologies can help bridge the capital shortfall to meeting climate objectives while also building societal support for the low carbon transition within this context we undertake a systematic review of literature assessing the impact of technology specific economic and financial incentives promoting greater levels of investment in low carbon technologies from local citizen investors both individuals and community groups we focus in particular on the impact of feed in tariffs compared to quota schemes grants tax incentives and soft loans the analysis suggests that local citizen investors do not necessarily act in an economically rational manner in response to these incentives it underscores the importance of understanding the preferences of target demographics the local context as well as the characteristics of the technologies in question and suggests interventions should be considered as part of wider policy packages while identifying challenges to be overcome through instrument design we find that feed in tariffs grants and tax incentives can be successful in mobilising greater levels of investment from local citizen investors but that soft loans tend to be less effective as a stand alone instrument the review identifies areas meriting further exploration in this emerging field of research

consumers in the green electricity market in finland abstract green electricity i e electricity produced from environmentally less harmful sources and marketed as such has been available to finnish households since 1998 but the demand for it has remained low in this paper we discuss the barriers identified by consumers to purchasing green electricity and contrast these with the interpretation energy sector actors give to consumer passivity the empirical material consists of thematic interviews energy policy actors often assume that consumers passivity signifies their lack of interest or low environmental consciousness this results partly from the failure to differentiate between the roles of consumer and citizen the interpretation the energy sector actors give to consumer passivity and the role they assign to consumers affect the direction of green electricity policy we argue that consumers need more information on both the environmental impact of different electricity products and in particular about the electricity supply and electricity contracts in a liberalised electricity market if they are to become active in the market

policy implications of the purchasing intentions towards energy efficient appliances among china s urban residents do subsidies work incentive policies are always used to sway purchase retail stocking and production decisions toward energy efficient products by many countries or regions so the effectiveness of such subsidies has been of much concern to scholars this research focused on whether or not subsidy policies have guided people s intentions and behaviours we investigated 436 urban residents from 22 provinces in china covering the seven major geographic regions and made an empirical analysis of the factors influencing chinese urban residents purchasing intentions towards energy efficient appliances based on the structural equation model on theoretical aspect we developed the theory of planned behaviour our results show that the variable policy is insignificant which indicates that policy environment and media propaganda in china do not have significant effect on chinese residents willingness to pay for energy efficient appliances while the residents environmental awareness past purchasing experiences social relationships age and level of education all exert a significant influence on chinese residents purchasing intentions finally based on the above research results the corresponding policy suggestions which mainly focus on the time of subsidy the object of subsidy and the method of subsidy are offered for policy makers

agency and optimal investment dynamics agency problems limit firms access to capital markets curbing investment firms and investors seek contractual ways to mitigate these problems what are the implications for investment we present a theory of a firm s investment dynamics in the presence of agency problems and optimal long term financial contracts we derive results relating firms investment decisions current and past cash flows firm size capital structure and dividends among the results optimal investment is increasing in current and past cash flow and optimal investment is positively serially correlated over time after controlling for investment opportunities these results hold for a range of agency problems jel g30 g31 g32 g35 d82 d86 d92 copyright 2007 oxford university press

bank bonuses and bail outs this paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bailouts if there is a risk shifting problem bailout expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more risk taking if there is an effort problem the compensation scheme becomes flatter and effort decreases if both types of agency problems are present a sufficiently large increase in bailout perceptions makes it optimal for a welfare maximizing regulator to impose caps on bank bonuses in contrast raising managers liability can be counterproductive

energy tax credits and housing improvement this paper investigates whether federal and state tax credits allowed to households who make energy saving improvements to their residence lead to an increase in improvement activity a two period utility maximization model of household behaviour is used to determine the theoretical influence of tax credits energy prices and other factors on the optimal magnitude of conservation capital improvement regressions using various qualitative measures of conservation improvement as the dependent variable are estimated using household level energy consumption and improvement data consistent with evidence from earlier surveys the empirical results do not support the hypothesis that energy tax credits lead to more widespread or more extensive energy conservation improvement activity

time varying capital requirements and disclosure rules effects on capitalization and lending decisions we investigate how banks capital and lending decisions respond to changes in bank specific capital and disclosure requirements we find that an increase in the bank specific regulatory capital requirement results in a higher bank capital ratio brought about via less asset risk a decrease in the requirement implies more lending to firms but also less tier 1 capital and higher bank leverage we do not observe differences between confidential and public disclosure of capital requirements our results empirically illustrate a tradeoff between bank resilience and a fostering of the economy through more bank lending using banks capital requirement as policy instrument

life cycle prices and production we use scanner data and time diaries to document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production we document substantial heterogeneity in prices paid for identical goods for the same area and time with older households shopping the most and paying the lowest prices doubling shopping frequency lowers a good s price by 7 to 10 percent we estimate the shopper s price of time and use this series to estimate an elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production of roughly 1 8 the observed life cycle time allocation implies a consumption series that differs markedly from expenditures

energy saving in swedish households the relative importance of environmental attitudes the objectives for energy saving in the housing sector set by recent swedish energy and climate policies are quite demanding this article uses nation wide swedish survey data from 2004 to 2007 to explore the potential for achieving those targets earlier findings that socio economic characteristics such as age housing type and income are strongly linked to higher propensities to save on heating and hot water usage are confirmed by ordered logistic regression models however general environmental attitudes are also found to play a crucial role when assessing the relative importance of socioeconomic factors and environmental attitudes the effect on energy saving is generally greater for the former than the latter in addition important interaction effects are identified in relative terms the effect of environmental attitudes is clearly stronger among households in apartment blocks than among those in detached housing and stronger among households with higher income than among those with lower income we end by discussing the implications for the selection and targeting of policy measures to tap the energy savings potential in the population

what s driving energy efficient appliance label awareness and purchase propensity the eu appliance energy consumption labeling scheme is a key component of efforts to increase the diffusion of energy efficient household appliances in this paper the determinants of consumer knowledge of the energy label for household appliances and the choice of class a energy efficient appliances are jointly estimated using data from a large survey of more than 20 000 german households the results for five major appliances suggest that lack of knowledge of the energy label can generate considerable bias in both estimates of rates of uptake of class a appliances and in estimates of the underlying determinants of choice of class a appliance simulations of the choice to purchase a class a appliance given knowledge of the labeling framework reveal that residence characteristics and in several cases regional electricity prices strongly increase the propensity to purchase a class a appliance but socio economic characteristics have surprisingly little impact on appliance energy class choice

taming systemically important financial institutions we model a systemically important financial institution sifi that is too big or too interconnected to fail without credible regulation and strong supervision the shareholders of this institution might deliberately let its managers take excessive risk we propose a solution to this problem showing how insurance against systemic shocks can be provided without generating moral hazard the solution involves levying a systemic tax needed to cover the costs of future crises and more importantly establishing a systemic risk authority endowed with special resolution powers including the control of bankers compensation packages during crisis periods

dynamic security design convergence to continuous time and asset pricing implications an entrepreneur with limited liability needs to finance an infinite horizon investment project an agency problem arises because she can divert operating cash flows before reporting them to the financiers we first study the optimal contract in discrete time this contract can be implemented by cash reserves debt and equity the latter is split between the financiers and the entrepreneur and pays dividends when retained earnings reach a threshold to provide appropriate incentives to the entrepreneur the firm is downsized when it runs short of cash we then study the continuous time limit of the model we prove the convergence of the discrete time value functions and optimal contracts our analysis yields rich implications for the dynamics of security prices stock prices follow a diusion reflected at the dividend barrier and absorbed at zero their volatility as well as the leverage ratio of the firm increase after bad performance stock prices and book tomarket ratios are in a non monotonic relationship a more severe agency problem entails lower price earning ratios and firm liquidity and higher default risk

factors influencing willingness to pay for the energy star label abstract in the united states nearly 17 of greenhouse gas emissions come from residential energy use increases in energy efficiency for the residential sector can generate significant energy savings and emissions reductions consumer labels such as the us environmental protection agency s energy star promote conservation by providing consumers with information on energy usage for household appliances this study examines how the energy star label affects consumer preferences for refrigerators the results of an online survey of a national sample of adults suggest that consumers are on average willing to pay an extra 249 82 349 30 for a refrigerator that has been awarded the energy star label furthermore the results provide evidence that respondent willingness to pay was motivated by both private energy cost savings and public environmental benefits

distributional impacts of investment subsidies for residential energy technologies abstract this study analyses the distributional impacts of investment subsidies paid to households that install residential energy technologies based on renewable energy sources the subsidies covering a significant part of the total investment play a considerable role in households energy decisions depending on their design support measures may provide the most benefits to certain groups of society and thus may cause increasing inequality the potential distributional impacts of the investment subsidies are determined by the combination of technologies targeted and their costs household income support intensity subsidy design restrictions and the availability of additional measures this study examines the support system for residential renewable energy technologies in the lithuanian case by employing a microsimulation model this analysis of existing measures provides more general results and highlights the policy features that cause distributional impacts therefore the results are applicable in other countries as well the analysis shows that although the support is efficient from an energy point of view it provides the most benefits to households with higher income and thus increases inequality moreover the subsidies fail to reduce energy poverty due to the poorest households low capacity to invest to obtain a flatter distribution of benefits the design of support measures should consider the current situation of lower income households and affordability issues

optimal security design and dynamic capital structure in a continuous time agency model we derive the optimal dynamic contract in a continuous time principal agent setting and implement it with a capital structure credit line long term debt and equity over which the agent controls the payout policy while the project s volatility and liquidation cost have little impact on the firm s total debt capacity they increase the use of credit versus debt leverage is nonstationary and declines with past profitability the firm may hold a compensating cash balance while borrowing at a higher rate through the credit line surprisingly the usual conflicts between debt and equity asset substitution strategic default need not arise in this paper we consider a dynamic contracting environment in which a riskneutral agent or entrepreneur with limited resources manages an investment activity while the investment is profitable it is also risky and in the short run it can generate arbitrarily large operating losses the agent will need outside financial support to cover such losses and continue the project the difficulty is that while the probability distribution of the cash flows is publicly known the agent may distort these cash flows by taking a hidden action that leads to a private benefit specifically the agent may i conceal and divert cash flows for his own consumption and or ii stop providing costly effort which would reduce the mean of the cash flows therefore from the perspective of the principal or investors that fund the project there is the concern that a low cash flow realization may be a result of the agent s actions rather than the project s fundamentals to provide the agent with appropriate incentives investors control the agent s wage and may also withdraw their financial support for the project and force its early termination we seek to characterize an optimal contract in this framework and relate it to the firm s choice of capital structure we develop a method to solve for the optimal contract given the incentive constraints in a continuous time setting and study the properties of the credit line debt and equity that implement the contract as in the discrete time model of demarzo and fishman 2003 the continuous time setting offers several peter m demarzo is from stanford university and yuliy sannikov is from u c berkeley we

the link between social movements and corporate social initiatives toward a multi level theory this article offers a first step toward a multi level theory linking social movements to corporate social initiatives in particular building on the premise that social movements reflect ideologies that direct behavior inside and outside organizations this essay identifies mechanisms by which social movements induce firms to engage with social issues first social movements are able to influence the expectations that key stakeholders have about firms social responsibility making corporate social initiatives more attractive second through conflict or collaboration they shape firms reputation and legitimacy and third social movements ideologies manifest inside the corporations by triggering organizational members values and affecting managerial cognition the essay contributes to the literatures on social movements and csr extends the understanding of how ideologies are manifested in movement business interactions and generates rich opportunities for future research

the missing link between corporate social responsibility and consumer trust the case of fair trade products this paper investigates the link between the consumer perception that a company is socially oriented and the consumer intention to buy products marketed by that company we suggest that this link exists when at least two conditions prevail 1 the products sold by that company comply with ethical and social requirements 2 the company has an acknowledged commitment to protect consumer rights and interests to test these hypotheses we conducted a survey among the clients of retail chains offering fair trade products the results show that socially oriented companies can successfully leverage their reputation to market products with high symbolic values

price premium for high efficiency refrigerators and calculation of price elasticities for close substitutes a methodology using hedonic pricing and demand systems this article uses the hedonic pricing method to estimate the price premium paid for the highest energy efficiency label a in the refrigerators market of the basque autonomous community spain the estimated figure is 8 9 of the final price or about 60 euro which represents one third of the energy savings that a consumer gets during the lifetime of a refrigerator with the highest energy efficiency label this figure is then combined with the linear version of the almost ideal demand system la aids to obtain own and cross price elasticities of demand the information presented here is useful for policy design and analysis the results indicate that the demand for refrigerators with the highest energy efficiency label is highly sensitive to price variations

exploring domestic energy saving the role of environmental concern and background variables abstract the main purpose of this paper is to investigate whether residents environmental concern has any effect on their energy saving curtailments and efficiency investments the novelty of the present work lies in the fact that it seeks to investigate this topic in a multi country setting exploiting data from nine oecd countries australia canada czech republic france italy south korea netherlands norway and sweden and also in that it employs a latent variable model which allows us to examine the conditions necessary for the results to be comparable across different countries novel in this paper is also the focus on the role of environmental concern as a factor of several curtailments and efficiency investments our results suggest that people with higher environmental concern are on average more likely to perform energy saving curtailments and also are more likely to have some energy efficiency retrofits installed in dwellings most of the socio economic and demographic variables have mixed effects on efficiency investments and curtailments however some interesting patterns emerged with respect to the age of respondents household income education and gender of respondents and also the size of household

do subsidies work better in low income than in high income families survey on domestic energy efficient and renewable energy equipment purchase in china abstract domestic energy efficient and renewable energy eere equipment shows a great energy saving potential in household energy consumption two rounds of large scale financial subsidy programs have been developed in china since 2010 to promote the adoption of green equipment however how these subsidies attract chinese families of different income levels is not fully explored given this knowledge gap we conducted a self completion questionnaire survey in 2012 to ask 526 respondents about their purchase of domestic eere equipment we explored the effects of subsidy incentives and family incomes on the purchase attitudes and intentions of individuals toward the seven categories of eere equipment we find that family income positively moderates the relationship between eere equipment purchase attitude and behavioral intention and subsidy incentives positively affect the moderating effect of family income in other words a higher family income and better familiarization with subsidy incentives can promote the transformation of green attitudes into eere equipment purchasing intention the results may indicate that the subsidized prices are still high in the view of the low income families this study contributes to the understanding of the effects of chinese subsidy incentives and of the economic concerns of people about the purchase of domestic eere equipment

subsidies in carbon finance for promoting renewable energy development abstract faced with decreasing exhaustible nonrenewable resources and climate change resulting from the use of fossil energy it is urgent to accelerate the development of renewable energy but the development of renewable energy requires abundant financial support both from banks and governments this article considers bank loans to develop renewable energy and highlights the effects of government subsidies by using a microeconomic model and taking all stakeholders including the government banks and shareholders of the firm into consideration this study finds that government subsidies raise outputs and debt levels of renewable energy firms and improve shareholder value as well more importantly financial debts stimulate firms outputs but decrease the net profit per unit of debt due to the limited liability effects finally subsidy policy plays a critical role in renewable energy development because environmental efficiencies of subsidies decrease with the subsidy degree other valuable conclusions would be achieved if principal agent problem and other corporate governance factors are employed

consumer responses towards home energy financial incentives a survey based study abstract residential energy efficient and renewable energy eere products play an important role in energy conservation and carbon emissions reduction various financial incentive programs have been developed to promote the adoption of these products however their effectiveness in attracting consumers is not very well understood in this study we investigated impacts of financial incentives on homeowner s decision making towards six eere products two forms of incentives tax credits and interest free loans were examined through a household mailing survey in florida the united states results showed that although half of the respondents were interested in eere products the high investment cost was a major concern that hindered their purchase activities homeowners were attracted to financial incentives and valued tax credits much higher than interest free loans the current federal home energy tax credit levels were found to attract only 2 12 percent of homeowners to buy eere products the willingness of participation was especially low for the costly products such as solar panels the participation rate was also very low for lower income i e annual household income below 50 000 families living in older residences this study contributes to the understanding of economic and social aspects of consumer decision making on energy efficiency and alternative energy

too connected to fail inferring network ties from price co movements we use extreme value theory methods to infer conventionally unobservable connections between financial institutions from joint extreme movements in credit default swap spreads and equity returns estimated pairwise co crash probabilities identify significant connections among up to 186 financial institutions prior to the crisis of 2007 2008 financial institutions that were very central prior to the crisis were more likely to be bailed out during the crisis or receive the status of systemically important institutions this result remains intact also after controlling for indicators of too big to fail concerns systemic systematic and idiosyncratic risks both credit default swap cds based and equity based connections are significant predictors of bailouts supplementary materials for this article are available online

subsidies for residential solar photovoltaic energy systems in western australia distributional procedural and outcome justice governments seek to increase renewable energy capacity by providing subsidies to householders opting to install residential solar energy photovoltaic systems the funds used to pay for these subsidies are sourced from tax revenue or electricity tariffs paid by all community members including those on a low income this sees a redistribution of funds from all community members to installers of residential solar energy systems this research compared community attitudes towards distributional justice or the fairness of this redistribution of funds with outcome justice associated with the environmental benefits of renewable energy a randomised survey distributed in four metropolitan and two regional communities in western australian resulted in 295 responses a response rate of 22 33 of community members prioritised distributional justice 30 prioritised outcome justice and 37 indicated that they were unsure about their preference however support for renewable energy was found with 80 of respondents supportive of renewable energy subsidies and 68 supportive of renewable energy taxation including in electricity tariffs qualitative comments indicate that in spite of the preoccupation with distributional justice in the residential solar energy literature community members are concerned with procedural justice issues in this case procedural justice can be interpreted as government commitment to existing policy the expanded scope of renewable energy policy and enhanced regulations

large risks limited liability and dynamic moral hazard we study a continuous time principal agent model in which a risk neutral agent with limited liability must exert unobservable effort to reduce the likelihood of large but relatively infrequent losses firm size can be decreased at no cost or increased subject to adjustment costs in the optimal contract investment takes place only if a long enough period of time elapses with no losses occurring then if good performance continues the agent is paid as soon as a loss occurs payments to the agent are suspended and so is investment if further losses occur accumulated bad performance leads to downsizing we derive explicit formulae for the dynamics of firm size and its asymptotic growth rate and we provide conditions under which firm size eventually goes to zero or grows without bounds

consumer attitudes towards domestic solar power systems the success of the uk policy to reduce carbon emissions is partly dependent on the ability to persuade householders to become more energy efficient and to encourage installation of domestic solar systems solar power is an innovation in the uk but the current policy of stimulating the market with grants is not resulting in widespread adoption this case study using householders in central england investigates householder attitudes towards characteristics of solar systems and identifies some of the barriers to adoption the study utilises diffusion of innovations theory to identify attitudes towards system attributes and isolates the characteristics that are preventing a pragmatic early majority from adopting the technology a group of early adopters and a group of assumed early majority adopters of solar power were surveyed and the results show that overall although the early majority demonstrate a positive perception of the environmental characteristics of solar power its financial economic and aesthetic characteristics are limiting adoption differences exist between the two groups showing support for the concept of a chasm between adopter categories after moore crossing the chasm marketing and selling high tech products to mainstream customers second ed harper perennial new york however if consumers cannot identify the relative advantage of solar power over their current sources of power which is supplied readily and cheaply through a mains system it is unlikely that adoption will follow recommendations concerning the marketing and development of solar products are identified

social sustainability in selecting emerging economy suppliers despite the growing public awareness of social sustainability issues little is known about what drives firms to emphasize social criteria in their supplier management practices and what the precise benefits of such efforts are this is especially true for relationships with international suppliers from the world s emerging economies in asia latin america and eastern europe building on stakeholder theory we address the issue by examining how pressures from customers the government and employees as primary constituencies of the firm determine the extent to which firms consider social aspects in the selection of emerging economy suppliers further we analyze how such socially sustainable supplier selection relates to the capabilities of the firm s suppliers its market reputation and the learning in its supply management organization we test the developed research framework empirically using data from 244 u s and german corporations our findings consistent with our hypothesized model suggest that middle level supply managers as internal stakeholders play a major driving role for firms socially sustainable supplier selection and that strong positive links exist between that selection and the investigated outcomes

communications on energy household energy conservation abstract this study assesses the influence of attitudinal and socio economic factors on household energy conservation actions a household interview survey in regina saskatchewan found that respondents perceive an energy problem although no association with energy conservation actions was determined two attitudinal and five socio economic variables influence household energy conservation energy and monetary savings are available to households through energy conservation public awareness of household energy conservation through the media can reinforce existing energy conservation actions and encourage new actions

durable goods and residential demand for energy and water evidence from a field trial this article describes a household production model in which energy efficient durable goods cost less to operate so households may use them more the model is estimated using household level data from a field trial in which participants received high efficiency clothes washers free of charge the estimation strategy exploits this quasi random replacement of washers to derive precise estimates of the household production technology and a demand function for clothes washing during the field trial households increased clothes washing on average by 5 6 after receiving a high efficiency washer implying a price elasticity of 06 the complete model is used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of recent changes in minimum efficiency standards for clothes washers

forbearance and prompt corrective action this article investigates whether a bank regulator should terminate problem banks promptly or exercise forbearance we construct a dynamic model economy in which entrepreneurs pledge collateral borrow from banks and invest in long term projects we assume that collateral value has aggregate risk over time that in any period entrepreneurs can abscond with the projects but lose the collateral and that depositors can withdraw deposits we show that optimal regulation exhibits forbearance if the ex ante probability of collapse in collateral value is sufficiently low but exhibits prompt termination of problem banks if this probability is sufficiently high copyright 2007 the ohio state university

self regulation taxation and public voluntary environmental agreements an increasingly popular instrument for solving environmental problems is the public voluntary agreement va in which government offers technical assistance and positive publicity to firms that reach certain environmental goals prior papers treat such agreements as a superior low cost instrument that can be used to preempt a threat of traditional inefficient regulation we present a more general model in which public vas may instead be weak tools used when political opposition makes environmental taxes infeasible we explore the conditions under which taxes public vas and unilateral industry actions are to be expected and the welfare implications of the various instruments notably we also show that welfare may be reduced by the introduction of public vas 2002 elsevier b v all rights reserved

income fluctuation and asymmetric information an example of a repeated principal agent problem we examine a simple repeated principal agent model with discounting there are a risk averse borrower with an unobservable random income and a risk neutral lender the efficient contract is characterized it tends to the first best constant consumption contract as the discount factor tends to one and the time horizon extends to infinity if the time horizon is infinite and the contract is legally enforceable the borrower s utility becomes arbitrarily negative with probability one if the borrower has constant absolute risk aversion consumption is transferred between any two states at a constant interest rate which is less than the rate of time preference

an econometric analysis of residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources abstract economic theory suggests that residential expenditures on energy conservation and renewable energy sources will be determined by the ability of households to purchase conservation inputs their incentive to invest in conserving energy the energy efficiency of existing homes and miscellaneous factors such as climate and age of the home owner empirical analyses of energy related expenditures reported on individual income tax returns confirm the importance of household income energy price increases and climate conditions in determining energy conservation investments income tax credits are also found to have stimulated residential spending on conservation and renewable energy

bank recapitalization regulatory intervention and repayment we use prudential supervisory data for all german banks during 1994 2010 to test if regulatory interventions affect the likelihood that bailed out banks repay capital support accounting for the selection bias inherent in nonrandom bank bailouts by insurance schemes and the endogenous administration of regulatory interventions we show that regulators can increase the likelihood of repayment substantially an increase in intervention frequencies by one standard deviation increases the annual probability of capital support repayment by 7 sturdy interventions like restructuring orders are effective whereas weak measures reduce repayment probabilities intervention effects last up to 5 years

on repeated moral hazard with discounting in this paper we analyze optimal contracts in an infinitely repeated agency model in which both the principal and agent discount the future we show that there is a stationary representation of the optimal contract when the agent s conditional discounted expected utility is used as a state variable this representation reduces the multi period problem to a static variational problem which can be analyzed using standard variational techniques this reduction is used to obtain several properties of the contract

estimating energy conservation patterns of greek households abstract this paper develops an empirical model to investigate the main determinants of household energy conservation patterns in greece employing cross section data in the empirical analysis household energy conserving choices models are employed using a discrete and a latent trait variable respectively as a dependent variable the results show that socio economic variables such as consumers income and family size are suitable to explain differences towards energy conservation preferences in addition the results suggest that electricity expenditures and age of the respondent are negatively associated with the number of energy conserving actions that a consumer is willing to adopt finally other variables such as environmental information feedback and consciousness of energy problems are characteristics of the energy saver consumer by evaluating consumer s decision making process with regards to energy conservation measures we are able to formulate and propose an effective energy conservation framework for greece an energy policy framework is among the main prerequisites not only to achieve sustainable development but also to maintain consumers quality of life

m press creditrisk microprudential and macroprudential capital requirements for credit risk under systemic stress m press creditrisk is a novel stress testing approach that can help authorities gauge banks capital adequacy related to credit risk for the first time it combines the assessment of microprudential capital requirements under pillars 1 and 2 and macroprudential buffers in a unified coherent framework its core element is an advanced credit portfolio model systemiccreditrisk built upon a rich nonlinear dependence structure for correlated bank portfolios the model is applied to a sample of 12 systemically important german banking groups and delivers measures for systemic credit risk and the banks contributions to it in both baseline and stress scenarios

do children matter an examination of gender differences in environmental valuation abstract this paper is concerned with the role played by children in a household on choice behaviour related to willingness to pay wtp for environmental goods improvements data from a contingent valuation cvm survey dealing with three environmental improvements are used to examine three hypotheses the first is that after controlling for income individuals with children have higher wtp than childless individuals the second hypothesis is that women with children are willing to pay more for environmental improvements than men with children particularly in the case where there is concern for environmental health risks the third is that childless men and women exhibit significant differences in wtp that arise from greater time constraints faced by women estimated wtp functions are shown to be statistically different for four groups of individuals women with children men with children women without children and men without children parents of either gender are willing to pay more than their childless counterparts valuations of mothers and fathers are statistically different for only one of the three goods being evaluated interestingly it is the fathers mean valuations that are higher this may arise from the fact that these environmental improvements lead to better recreational opportunities and as indicated earlier men are less time constrained further support for this view comes from results that show that valuations of childless men are significantly greater than those for childless women for two goods the paper concludes with some directions for future research in the area

deposit insurance and wealth effects the value of being too big to fail this paper investigates the effect on bank equity values of the comptroller of the currency s announcement that some banks were too big to fail and that for those banks total deposit insurance would be provided using an event study methodology we find positive wealth effects accruing to tbtf banks with corresponding negative effects accruing to non included banks we demonstrate that the magnitude of these effects differed with bank solvency and size we also show that the policy to which the market reacted was that suggested by the wall street journal and not that actually intended by the comptroller the role of deposit insurance has become a topic of increasing debate advocates argue that by removing the incentive to run deposit insurance protects individual financial institutions from instability in the intermediation process thereby providing stability to the financial system as a whole 1 the recent rise in bank failures and the concomitant crises in the s l industry however demonstrate that this stability is not guaranteed moreover critics note that deposit insurance may introduce incentive problems and wealth effects into the financial system both of which can impede the effective functioning of any deposit insurance system these problems have prompted concern about the structure of the current deposit insurance system and have led to numerous proposals regarding its restructuring 2 this paper investigates one aspect of this debate by analyzing the effect on bank equity values of the policy decision to insure completely some banks but not others specifically in september 1984 the comptroller of the currency testified before congress that some banks were simply too big to fail tbtf and that for those banks total deposit insurance would be provided while not explicitly naming the banks the comptroller admitted that this policy would apply to the eleven largest banks using an event study methodology we analyze