innovation in the energy sector lessons learnt from r d expenditures and patents in selected iea countries abstract long time series of the iea and international patent offices offer a huge potential for scientific investigations of the energy innovation process thus this paper deals with a broad literature review on innovation drivers and barriers and an analysis of the knowledge induced by public research and development expenditures r d and patents in the energy sector the cumulative knowledge stock induced by public r d expenditures in 14 investigated iea countries is 102 3 bn eur in 2013 nuclear energy has the largest share of 43 9 bn eur followed by energy efficiency accounting for 14 9 bn eur fossil fuels with 13 5 bn eur and renewable energy with 12 1 bn eur a regression analysis indicates a linear relation between the gdp and the cumulative knowledge with each billion eur of gdp leading to an additional knowledge of 3 1 mil eur however linearity is not given for single energy technologies further the results show that appropriate public r d funding for research and development associated with a subsequent promotion of the market diffusion of a niche technology may lead to a breakthrough of the respective technology

indirect effects of an aid program how do cash transfers affect ineligibles consumption cash transfers to eligible households indirectly increase the consumption of ineligible households living in the same villages this effect operates through insurance and credit markets ineligible households benefit from the transfers by receiving more gifts and loans and by reducing their savings thus the transfers benefit the local economy at large looking only at the effect on the treated underestimates the impact one should analyze the effects of this class of programs on the entire local economy rather than on the treated only and use a village level randomization rather than selecting treatment and control subjects from the same community

the pricing of options on assets with stochastic volatilities one option pricing problem that has hitherto been unsolved is the pricing of a european call on an asset that has a stochastic volatility this paper examines this problem the option price is determined in series form for the case in which the stochastic volatility is independent of the stock price numerical solutions are also produced for the case in which the volatility is correlated with the stock price it is found that the black scholes price frequently overprices options and that the degree of overpricing increases with the time to maturity one option pricing problem that has hitherto remained unsolved is the pricing of a european call on a stock that has a stochastic volatility from the work of merton 12 garman 6 and cox ingersoll and ross 3 the differential equation that the option must satisfy is known the solution of this differential equation is independent of risk preferences if a the volatility is a traded asset or b the volatility is uncorrelated with aggregate consumption if either of these conditions holds the risk neutral valuation arguments of cox and ross 4 can be used in a straightfoward way this paper produces a solution in series form for the situation in which the stock price is instantaneously uncorrelated with the volatility we do not assume that the volatility is a traded asset also a constant correlation between the instantaneous rate of change of the volatility and the rate of change of aggregate consumption can be accommodated the option price is lower than the blackscholes b s 1 price when the option is close to being at the money and higher when it is deep in or deep out of the money the exercise prices for which overpricing by b s takes place are within about ten percent of the security price this is the range of exercise prices over which most option trading takes place so we may in general expect the b s price to overprice options this effect is exaggerated as the time to maturity increases one of the most surprising implications of this is that if the b s equation is used to determine the implied volatility of a near the money option the longer the time to maturity the lower the implied volatility numerical solutions for the case in which the volatility is correlated with the stock price are also examined the stochastic volatility problem has been examined by merton 13 geske 7 johnson 10 johnson and shanno 11 eisenberg 5 wiggins 16 and

critical evaluation of financial supporting schemes for wind based projects case study greece after a long stagnating period during the second half of the 1990s the market of wind energy in greece was described by remarkable but unstable growth rates that resulted in the operation of 1 gw of wind power by the end of 2009 still though penetration of wind energy is not the one anticipated on the other hand national targets regarding the renewable energy sources res contribution and existence of excellent wind potential areas across greece challenge new wind energy investments acknowledging the unsteady development rates of wind power in greece efficiency of the state support mechanisms is currently investigated based on an analytical evaluation model the investigation undertaken is extended to provide a detailed cost benefit analysis of several wind energy case studies including mainland and island applications as well as comparison with both conventional power stations and photovoltaic plants for this purpose the financial support provided by the state is directly compared with benefits accruing from the operation of wind parks considering also the avoidance of social costs deriving from thermal power stations based on the results obtained the beneficial characteristics of wind energy applications for the greek society are clearly demonstrated especially in the case of non interconnected island grids

demand pull technology push and government led incentives for non incremental technical change abstract rising expectations about future demand for new technologies increase the incentives for investments in innovation by enlarging payoffs to successful innovations how well does this notion of demand pull apply to non incremental technological change when demand is largely attributable to actions by governments in this case inventors of the most important inventions did not respond positively to strong demand pull policies filing of highly cited patents declined precipitously just as demand for wind power created a multi billion dollar market three explanations for this apparent inconsistency with the demand pull hypothesis played a role 1 the rapid convergence on a single dominant design limited the market opportunity for non incremental technical improvements 2 even though the policies implemented were stringent enough to stimulate demand uncertainty in their longevity dampened the incentives for inventions that were likely to take several years to pay off and 3 alternative explanations such as declining r d funding and weakening presidential engagement on energy appear to have been important

tempered stable and tempered infinitely divisible garch models abstract in this paper we introduce a new garch model with an infinitely divisible distributed innovation this model which we refer to as the rapidly decreasing tempered stable rdts garch model takes into account empirical facts that have been observed for stock and index returns such as volatility clustering non zero skewness and excess kurtosis for the residual distribution we review the classical tempered stable cts garch model which has similar statistical properties by considering a proper density transformation between infinitely divisible random variables we can find the risk neutral price process thereby allowing application to option pricing we propose algorithms to generate scenarios based on garch models with cts and rdts innovations to investigate the performance of these garch models we report parameter estimates for the dow jones industrial average index and stocks included in this index to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model we calculate option prices based on the index

testing for the presence of some features of increasing returns to adoption factors in energy system dynamics an analysis via the learning curve approach the purpose of this paper is to explain the sources of energy system lock in it presents a comparative analysis of the respective contributions of some features of increasing returns to adoption factors i e learning by doing learning by searching and returns to scale effects in explaining the technological change dynamics in the energy system the paper is technically based on a critical analysis of the learning curve approach econometric estimation of learning and scale effects inherent to seven energy technologies were performed by the use of several learning curve specifications these specifications permit to deal with some crucial issues related to the learning curve estimation which are associated with the problem of omitted variable bias the endogeneity effects and the choice of learning indicators results show that dynamic economies from learning effects coupled with static economies from scale effects are responsible for the lock in phenomena of the energy system they also show that the magnitude of such effects is correlated with the technology life cycle maturity in particular results point out that 1 the emerging technologies exhibit low learning rates associated with diseconomies of scale which are argued to be symptomatic of the outset of the deployment of new technologies characterized by diffusion barriers and high level of uncertainty 2 the evolving technologies present rather high learning rates meaning that they respond quickly to capacity expansion and r d activities development 3 conventional mature technologies display low learning rates but increasing returns to scale implying that they are characterized by a limited additional diffusion prospects

supplementing an emissions tax by a feed in tariff for renewable electricity to address learning spillovers abstract in the presence of learning spillovers related to renewable energy technologies an optimal strategy to mitigate climate change should complement an emissions tax by a subsidy for renewables this article addresses the question how such subsidy should be designed it is shown that the widely used approach of a revenue neutral fixed feed in tariff can yield an optimal outcome under restrictive conditions only it has to be adapted continuously as the electricity price changes moreover funding the tariff by a surcharge on the electricity price has important implications for the design of the emission tax the optimal tax rate has to be below the pigovian level differentiated across fossil fuels and adapted over time as the patterns of technological development change these requirements may pose a formidable challenge for practical decision making however it is important to point out that the eventual choices made with respect to the design and funding of a feed in tariff have to be based on a careful and more comprehensive policy assessment including inter alia economic effects beyond the electricity sector and existing institutional constraints

what should we expect from innovation a model based assessment of the environmental and mitigation cost implications of climate related r d abstract this paper addresses two basic issues related to technological innovation and climate stabilization objectives can innovation policies be effective in stabilizing climate to what extent can innovation policies complement carbon pricing taxes or permit trading and improve the economic efficiency of a mitigation policy package to answer these questions we use an integrated assessment model with multiple externalities and an endogenous representation of the technical progress in the energy sector we evaluate a range of innovation policies both as stand alone and in combination with other mitigation policies our analysis indicates that innovation policies alone are unlikely to stabilize global concentration and temperature as for the benefits of combining climate and innovation policies we find efficiency gains of 10 6 usd trillions in net present value terms for a stringent climate policy and 30 3 usd trillions for a milder one however such gains are reduced when more plausible sub optimal global innovation policy arrangements are considered

informal insurance arrangements with limited commitment theory and evidence from village economies recent work on consumption allocations in village economies finds that idiosyncratic variation in consumption is systematically related to idiosyncratic variation in income thus rejecting the hypothesis of full risk pooling we attempt to explain these observations by adding limited commitment as an impediment to risk pooling we provide a general dynamic model and completely characterise efficient informal insurance arrangements constrained by limited commitment and test the model using data from three indian villages we find that the model can fully explain the dynamic response of consumption to income but that it fails to explain the distribution of consumption across households

renewable energy certificate mechanism in india a preliminary assessment abstract the indian national action plan for climate change napcc envisages several measures to address global climate change one of the important measures identified involves increasing the share of renewable energy in total electricity consumption in the country this would mean napcc envisages renewable energy to constitute approximately 15 of the energy mix of india by 2020 to achieve the target set by the napcc indian ministry of power launched renewable energy certificate rec mechanism in november 2010 however participation in the rec markets is low and recs have failed to attract significant investment so far in this study a preliminary attempt has been made to assess the performance of existing rec mechanism in india after highlighting the salient features of the indian renewable energy policy framework a brief description of renewable purchase obligation rpo and source specific rpos for different states is discussed along with an overview of rec market in india to date the performance of indian rec mechanism is evaluated by cost competiveness decentralized distributed generation and renewable energy portfolio diversity and their effectiveness has also been measured on the basis of the available data although it is difficult to make any conclusive remark on the success or failure of rec mechanism due to its short experience this study examines the process to date to come out with some recommendations which can be used to fine tune the functioning of existing rec market in india for instance rec price bounds should be revised because it has been not explicitly supporting cost competiveness by offering 60 33 higher average price than the existing average feed in tariff fit it is also observed that state wise contribution in registered capacity is skewed towards few states like tamil nadu 27 maharashtra 23 and uttar pradesh 22 which puts pressure on policy makers to restructure the existing rec mechanism

a review of uncertainties in technology experience curves abstract the use of log linear experience curves or learning curves relating reductions in the unit cost of technologies to their cumulative production or installed capacity has become a common method of representing endogenous technical change in energy economic models used for policy analysis yet there are significant uncertainties in such formulations whose impact on key model results have been insufficiently examined or considered this paper reviews the major types of uncertainty in log linear experience curves and their effect on projected rates of cost reduction uncertainties are found not only in the learning rate parameter of a log linear model but also in the functional form that determines the shape of an experience curve evidence for alternative forms such as an s shaped curve is reviewed along with case studies that demonstrate the uncertainties associated with cost increases during early commercialization of a technology a phenomena that is widely recognized but rarely quantified or incorporated in learning models additional factors discussed include the effects of learning discontinuities institutional forgetting and the influence of social economic and political factors we then review other models of causality which aim to improve modelers ability to explain and predict the influence of other underlying processes that contribute to technology cost reductions in addition to learning ignoring other types of underlying mechanisms can create a false sense of precision and overestimate the true contribution of learning currently however uncertainties in such multi factor models remain large due to the difficulties of estimating key parameters such as private sector r d investments and extending models of a specific technology to a broader suite of technologies and cost projections pending the development and validation of more robust models of technological change we suggest ways to significantly improve the characterization and reporting of current learning model uncertainties and their impacts on the results of energy economic models to help reduce the potential for drawing inappropriate or erroneous policy conclusions

effects of technological learning and uranium price on nuclear cost preliminary insights from a multiple factors learning curve and uranium market modeling this paper studies the effects of returns to scale technological learning i e learning by doing and learning by searching and uranium price on the prospects of nuclear cost decrease we use an extended learning curve specification named multiple factors learning curve mflc in a first stage we estimate a single mflc in a second stage we estimate the mflc under the framework of simultaneous system of equations which takes into account the uranium supply and demand this permits not only to enhance the reliability of the estimation by incorporating the uranium price formation mechanisms in the mflc via the price variable but also to give preliminary insights about uranium supply and demand behaviors and the associated effects on the nuclear expansion results point out that the nuclear cost has important prospects for decrease via capacity expansion i e learning by doing effects in contrast they show that the learning by searching as well as the scale effects have a limited effect on the cost decrease prospects conversely results also show that uranium price exerts a positive and significant effect on nuclear cost implying that when the uranium price increases the nuclear power generation cost decreases since uranium is characterized by important physical availability and since it represents only a minor part in the total nuclear cost we consider that in a context of increasing demand for nuclear energy the latter result can be explained by the fact that the positive learning effects on the cost of nuclear act in a way to dissipate the negative ones that an increase in uranium price may exert further results give evidence of important inertia in the supply and demand sides as well as evidence of slow correlation between the uranium market and oil market which may limit the inter fuels substituability effects that is nuclear capacity expansion and associated learning by doing benefits

risk and insurance in a rural credit market an empirical investigation in northern nigeria credit contracts play a direct role in pooling risk between households in northern nigeria repayments owed by borrowers depend on realizations of random shocks by both borrowers and lenders the paper develops two models of state contingent loans the first is a competitive equilibrium in perfectly enforceable contracts the second permits imperfect information and equilibrium default estimates of both models indicate that quantitatively important state contingent payments are embedded in these loan transactions but that a fully efficient risk pooling equilibrium is not achieved the research is based on a year long survey in zaria nigeria conducted by the author

formal and informal risk sharing in ldcs theory and empirical evidence in village economies limited commitment models have been proposed as theoretical alternatives to the complete markets hypothesis and have been shown to be empirically relevant yet village institutions might be able to enforce some contracts we construct a theoretical model which shows how households can insure through both formal and informal contracts when some verifiable production takes place in an environment of incomplete markets this theoretical setting nests the case of complete markets when all risks can be insured by formal contracts because all states of nature would be verifiable and the case where only informal agreements are available agreements specifying informal transfers that needs to be self enforceable we derive two equations of interest the income equation which is partially determined by the formal contract and an euler type equation where consumption growth is affected by lagged consumption instead of being a martingale using semi parametric specifications we derive testable restrictions of our model we estimate both equations using data of village economies in pakistan empirical results are consistent with the model the estimation and allows to show that the incentive constraints due to selfenforcement bind and that formal contracts are used to reduce the probability of binding the constraint

household production and the excess sensitivity of consumption to current income empirical research on the permanent income hypothesis pih has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income this finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the pih we propose an explanation for apparent excess sensitivity that is based on a quantitative equilibrium model of household production in which permanent income consumers respond to shifts in sectoral wages and prices by substituting work effort and consumption across home and market sectors although the pih is true this mechanism generates apparent excess sensitivity because market consumption responds to predictable income growth

innovation policy for directing technical change in the power sector this paper discusses policy instruments for redirecting technical change within the electricity sector to mitigate climate change first we unravel the mechanism behind directed technical change explaining why markets may underprovide innovations in expensive renewable technologies in comparison to innovations in energy efficient fossil fuel generators subsequently we characterize technical change in electricity generation technologies stressing the heterogeneity of knowledge spillovers both within and between clean electricity generation technologies we argue that there exists a rationale for a portfolio approach to innovation in the electricity sector i e optimal innovation policies are neither fully generic nor fully specific and they need to be adapted in response to new information learned by the government the existing innovation literature does not however provide a clear cut answer for designing such a policy we compare policy instruments and argue that public r d support to clean technologies either in the form of subsidies or prizes seems to be the prime candidate for implementing non generic innovation policy

technological learning and renewable energy costs implications for us renewable energy policy abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between current renewable energy technology costs and cumulative production research development and demonstration expenditures and other institutional influences combining the theoretical framework of learning by doing and developments in learning by searching with the fields of organizational learning and institutional economics offers a complete methodological framework to examine the underlying capital cost trajectory when developing electricity cost estimates used in energy policy planning models sensitivities of the learning rates for global wind and solar photovoltaic technologies to changes in the model parameters are tested the implications of the results indicate that institutional policy instruments play an important role for these technologies to achieve cost reductions and further market adoption

systems option for sustainable development effect and limit of the ministry of international trade and industry s efforts to substitute technology for energy the global environmental consequences of co2 discharge resulting from energy use are causing increasing concern regarding the sustainability of our development future despite the fragile nature of its energy structure japan successfully overcame two energy crises in the 1970s and managed to maintain economic growth which resulted in a dramatic improvement in its industrial technology the success of these efforts can be attributed to the substitution of an unconstrained production factor technology for a constrained production factor energy a process similar to that seen in an ecosystem the ministry of international trade and industry s miti industrial technology policy functioned well in stimulating such substitution thereby inducing the vitality of industry for this substitution given the two sided nature of co2 emissions and energy consumption japan s experience can provide informative suggestions for addressing current worldwide concern regarding global warming particularly with respect to post kyoto countermeasures nevertheless following the relaxation of energy constraints and the succeeding bubble economy and its bursting miti s ability to induce substitution efforts by industry has weakened leading to a fear that japan may again face the prospect of energy and environmental constraints this paper attempts to analyze a systems option for sustainable development by introducing a comprehensive systems approach with a detailed description of energy and non energy technologies in an energy economic model by utilizing this approach miti s efforts to induce industry initiatives and subsequent efforts to overcome the two energy crises by substituting technology for energy are reviewed in addition sources of the current fear concerning energy and environmental constraints and the effectiveness of miti s industrial technology policy in view of this fear are analyzed

is there a relationship between public expenditures in energy r d and carbon emissions per gdp an empirical investigation abstract energy innovation plays a crucial role in the reduction of carbon emissions in order to design climate and energy policies that promote the development deployment and diffusion of new energy technologies policy makers not only require a theoretical understanding of the energy innovation system but also empirical evidence of the effects that policy actions have had this paper focuses on public energy r d a traditional and controversial option among the various climate technology policies and empirically analyses its relationship with carbon emissions per gdp i e carbon intensity and its two components energy intensity and the carbon factor evidence of the causality links that have prevailed in 13 advanced economies over the 1980 2004 period has been obtained through dynamic panel models our findings confirm that government r d spending is not sufficient by itself to boost the energy innovation process public energy r d has been successful in improving energy efficiency at country level but it has failed to have a significant impact on the carbon factor and carbon intensity at the same time the formation of energy r d budgets is found to be significantly affected by carbon trends

quantitative study on long term global solar photovoltaic market abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between the declines in solar photovoltaic pv module costs and cumulative production silicon prices supply demand imbalance and the presence of lower cost chinese products in global pv market using learning curve model state of market development and its connection with learning is also examined results indicate that learning effect is best measured when supplementing output with silicon prices in the analysis learning rate lr diminishes over the time periods examined thereby suggesting the declining of progress as market reaches maturity the outcomes from the learning curve analysis are subsequently applied to project future uptake of pv worldwide module and electricity costs till 2035 demand for pv is anticipated to remain robust with cumulative installed capacity worldwide projected to reach 659 gw by 2035 at the same time module cost is estimated to decline from 3 8 w in 2006 to 1 78 w in 2035 a reduction of over 50 relative to 2006 level unit cost of electricity from pv is predicted to be in the range of 0 13 kwh to 0 17 kwh by 2035 for the three scenarios analyzed

financial market models with levy processes and time varying volatility abstract asset management and pricing models require the proper modeling of the return distribution of financial assets while the return distribution used in the traditional theories of asset pricing and portfolio selection is the normal distribution numerous studies that have investigated the empirical behavior of asset returns in financial markets throughout the world reject the hypothesis that asset return distributions are normally distribution alternative models for describing return distributions have been proposed since the 1960s with the strongest empirical and theoretical support being provided for the family of stable distributions with the normal distribution being a special case of this distribution since the turn of the century specific forms of the stable distribution have been proposed and tested that better fit the observed behavior of historical return distributions more specifically subclasses of the tempered stable distribution have been proposed in this paper we propose one such subclass of the tempered stable distribution which we refer to as the kr distribution we empirically test this distribution as well as two other recently proposed subclasses of the tempered stable distribution the carr geman madan yor cgmy distribution and the modified tempered stable mts distribution the advantage of the kr distribution over the other two distributions is that it has more flexible tail parameters for these three subclasses of the tempered stable distribution which are infinitely divisible and have exponential moments for some neighborhood of zero we generate the exponential levy market models induced from them we then construct a new garch model with the infinitely divisible distributed innovation and three subclasses of that garch model that incorporates three observed properties of asset returns volatility clustering fat tails and skewness we formulate the algorithm to find the risk neutral return processes for those garch models using the change of measure for the tempered stable distributions to compare the performance of those exponential levy models and the garch models we report the results of the parameters estimated for the s p 500 index and investigate the out of sample forecasting performance for those garch models for the s p 500 option prices

a model based assessment of the impact of revitalised r d investments on the european power sector abstract this paper presents an analysis of the effect of enhanced research and development r d efforts for a set of low carbon power technologies on the development of the european energy sector it applies a methodology using the concept of two factor learning which quantitatively links trends in technology cost to both accumulated r d investments and production volumes the impacts of the latter on the energy sector are then simulated in a consistent manner with the poles global energy model on this basis it compares the total system costs of an assumed increase in worldwide r d investments that for the eu are in line with proposals made in its european strategic energy technology plan to a baseline development it finds that an increase in research efforts at a global level will contribute to reducing the costs of currently less mature low carbon technologies thus accelerating their market entry when comparing two scenarios that both fulfil the eu s 2020 energy and climate objectives and differing only in their r d investment levels the reduced technology costs allow eu support policies for renewables and carbon values to be reduced and the cumulative discounted benefit of the accelerated research efforts is positive in the long term

the corporate social performance content of innovation in the u k this article investigates the influence of innovation on the relationship between corporate strategy and social issues specifically we employ firm level data for a large sample of u k companies drawn from a diverse range of industrial sectors to investigate given innovation the determinants of both the probability that the innovation brings reduced environmental impacts and or improved health and safety and the strength of this effect in this connection we find evidence of a dichotomy between product and process innovations and roles for firm size industrial sector a foreign market presence access to various information sources e g universities and government research organisations and the extent to which activities are constrained by regulation furthermore we find a tendency for the influences of many of these factors to vary between older and newer firms

creative destruction or mere niche support innovation policy mixes for sustainability transitions recently there has been an increasing interest in policy mixes in innovation studies while it has long been acknowledged that the stimulation of innovation and technological change involves different types of policy instruments how such instruments form policy mixes has only recently become of interest we argue that an area in which policy mixes are particularly important is the field of sustainability transitions transitions imply not only the development of disruptive innovations but also of policies aiming for wider change in socio technical systems we propose that ideally policy mixes for transitions include elements of creative destruction involving both policies aiming for the creation of new and for destabilising the old we develop a novel analytical framework including the two policy mix dimensions creation and destruction by broadening the technological innovation system functions approach and specifically by expanding the concept of motors of innovation to motors of creative destruction we test this framework by analysing low energy policy mixes in finland and the uk we find that both countries have diverse policy mixes to support energy efficiency and reduce energy demand with instruments to cover all functions on the creation side despite the demonstrated need for such policies unsurprisingly destabilising functions are addressed by fewer policies but there are empirical examples of such policies in both countries the concept of motors of creative destruction is introduced to expand innovation and technology policy debates to go beyond policy mixes consisting of technology push and demand pull instruments and to consider a wider range of policy instruments combined in a suitable mix which may contribute to sustainability transitions

a garch option pricing model with α stable innovations we develop an option pricing model which is based on a garch asset return process with stable innovations with truncated tails the approach utilizes a canonic martingale measure as pricing measure which provides the possibility of a model calibration to market prices the garch stable option pricing model allows the explanation of some well known anomalies in empirical data as volatility clustering and heavy tailedness of the return distribution finally the results of monte carlo simulations concerning the option price and the implied volatility with respect to different strike and maturity levels are presented

nuclear reactors construction costs the role of lead time standardization and technological progress this paper provides the first comparative analysis of nuclear reactor construction costs in france and the united states studying the cost of nuclear power has often been a challenge owing to the lack of reliable data sources and heterogeneity between countries as well as the long time horizon which requires controlling for input prices and structural changes we build a simultaneous system of equations for overnight costs and construction time lead time to control for endogeneity using expected demand variation as an instrument we argue that benefits from nuclear reactor program standardization can arise through short term coordination gains when the diversity of nuclear reactors technologies under construction is low or through long term benefits from learning spillovers from past reactor construction experience if those spillovers are limited to similar reactors we find that overnight construction costs benefit directly from learning spillovers but that these spillovers are only significant for nuclear models built by the same architect engineer a e in addition we show that the standardization of nuclear reactors under construction has an indirect and positive effect on construction costs through a reduction in lead time the latter being one of the main drivers of construction costs conversely we also explore the possibility of learning by searching and find that contrary to other energy technologies innovation leads to construction costs increases

peasant household behaviour with missing markets some paradoxes explained a model of peasant household behavior under varying degrees of household specific food and labor market failures is constructed to show that these structural features can explain several well known patterns of peasant response which have often been attributed to peculiar motives presumed specific to peasants the model explains sluggish response to cash crops prices and high instability in perceived food and labor scarcities the key role of manufactured consumer goods prices in stimulating peasants effort in cash crops production the effectiveness of taxation as opposed to incentives in stimulating cash crops production and the key role of technological change in food production to enhance cash crop production results are obtained analytically in the case of one market failure and by numerical simulation with more than one

risk sharing between and within families this paper uses the panel study of income dynamics to test whether risk sharing is complete between or within american families the tests accommodate a wide variety in the configuration and availability of family data the test results reject inter as well as intra family full risk sharing even assuming that leisure is endogenous or that leisure and consumption are nonseparable

technological learning in energy environment economy modelling a survey abstract this paper aims at providing an overview and a critical analysis of the technological learning concept and its incorporation in energy environment economy models a special emphasis is put on surveying and discussing through the so called learning curve both studies estimating learning rates in the energy field and studies incorporating endogenous technological learning in bottom up and top down models the survey of learning rate estimations gives special attention to interpreting and explaining the sources of variability of estimated rates which is shown to be mainly inherent in r d expenditures the problem of omitted variable bias the endogeneity relationship and the role of spillovers large scale models survey show that despite some methodological and computational complexity related to the non linearity and the non convexity associated with the learning curve incorporation results of the numerous modelling experiments give several new insights with regard to the analysis of the prospects of specific technological options and their cost decrease potential bottom up models and with regard to the analysis of strategic considerations especially inherent in the innovation and energy diffusion process in particular the energy sector s endogenous responses to environment policy instruments top down models

a review of learning rates for electricity supply technologies a variety of mathematical models have been proposed to characterize and quantify the dependency of electricity supply technology costs on various drivers of technological change the most prevalent model form called a learning curve or experience curve is a log linear equation relating the unit cost of a technology to its cumulative installed capacity or electricity generated this one factor model is also the most common method used to represent endogenous technical change in large scale energy economic models that inform energy planning and policy analysis a characteristic parameter is the learning rate defined as the fractional reduction in cost for each doubling of cumulative production or capacity in this paper a literature review of the learning rates reported for 11 power generation technologies employing an array of fossil fuels nuclear and renewable energy sources is presented the review also includes multi factor models proposed for some energy technologies especially two factor models relating cost to cumulative expenditures for research and development r d as well as the cumulative installed capacity or electricity production of a technology for all technologies studied we found substantial variability as much as an order of magnitude in reported learning rates across different studies such variability is not readily explained by systematic differences in the time intervals geographic regions choice of independent variable or other parameters of each study this uncertainty in learning rates together with other limitations of current learning curve formulations suggests the need for much more careful and systematic examination of the influence of how different factors and assumptions affect policy relevant outcomes related to the future choice and cost of electricity supply and other energy technologies

risk sharing with limited commitment and preference heterogeneity structural estimation and testing in order to analyze the role of limited commitment and preference heterogeneity in explaining the consumption allocation i propose a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate and evaluate a risk sharing model where insurance transfers have to be self enforcing and the coefficient of relative risk aversion may depend on observable household characteristics i compare this model to benchmark models with full commitment and or without preference heterogeneity using data from three indian villages i find that the limited commitment model with heterogeneous preferences outperforms the benchmark models in a statistical sense and in terms of i explaining the dynamic response of consumption to idiosyncratic income shocks ii accounting for the variation of consumption unexplained by household and time effects and iii capturing the variation of inequality across time and villages and predicting changes in inequality i also use the estimated models to predict the effects of a counterfactual tax and transfer policy on the consumption allocation the limited commitment model with preference heterogeneity predicts larger benefits to the poor than its homogeneous counterpart

bending the learning curve abstract the aim of this paper is to improve the application of the learning curve a popular tool used for forecasting future costs of renewable technologies in integrated assessment models iams first we formally discuss under what assumptions the traditional ols estimates of the learning curve can deliver meaningful predictions in iams we argue that the most problematic of them are the absence of any effect of technology cost on its demand reverse causality and the ability of iams to predict all determinants of cumulative capacity next we show that these assumptions can be relaxed by modifying the traditional econometric method used to estimate the learning curve the new estimation approach presented in this paper is robust to the two problems identified but preserves the reduced form character of the learning curve finally we provide new estimates of learning curves for wind turbines and pv technologies which are tailored for use in iams our results suggest that the learning rate should be revised upward for solar pv our estimate of learning rate for wind technology is almost the same as the traditional ols estimates

what can explain the apparent lack of international consumption risk sharing recent research in international business cycles finds that international consumption comovements do not match the risk sharing predictions of standard complete markets models in this paper i ask whether two different types of explanations can help explain this result 1 nonseparabilities between tradables and nontradable leisure or goods and 2 the effects of capital market restrictions on consumption risk sharing i find that risk sharing cannot be resolved by either explanation alone however when i allow for both nonseparabilities and certain market restrictions risk sharing among unrestricted countries cannot be rejected this evidence suggests that a combination of these two effects may be necessary to explain consumption risk sharing across countries

innovation in the energy sector the role of fossil fuels and developing economies abstract this paper analyzes the effects of fossil fuel rents on r d expenditures and patent grants in the field of energy related technology we argue that an increasing share of fossil fuel rents lessens the innovation of new energy technologies we consider a sample of countries beyond the common selection of oecd members and investigate innovation efforts in the energy sector of 116 countries from 1980 to 2012 we observe the gradually growing influence of resource abundant countries on global r d expenditures and find that increasing fossil fuel rents have a negative effect on patent grants this study contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the potential effects of resource abundance more importantly it increases our understanding of innovation activities within the energy sector and further underscores the need to extend future research to countries that have not been taken into account thus far

consumption and real exchange rates in dynamic economies with non traded goods abstract we examine the possibility that non traded goods may account for several striking features of international macroeconomic data large persistent deviations from purchasing power parity small correlations of aggregate consumption fluctuations across countries and substantial international real interest rate differentials a dynamic exchange economy is used to show that non traded goods in principle can account for each of these phenomena in the theory there is a close relation between fluctuations in consumption ratios and those in bilateral real exchange rates but we find little evidence for this relation in time series data for eight oecd countries

technological learning in offshore wind energy different roles of the government offshore wind energy is a promising source of renewable electricity even though its current costs prevent large scale implementation technological learning has improved the technology and its economic performance already and could result in significant further improvements this study investigates how technological learning takes place in offshore wind energy and how technological learning is related to different policy regimes offshore wind energy developments in denmark and the united kingdom have been analysed with a technology specific innovation systems approach the results reveal that the dominant forms of learning are learning by doing and learning by using at the same time learning by interacting is crucial to achieve the necessary binding elements in the technology specific innovation system generally most learning processes were performed by self organizing entities however sometimes cultural and technical barriers occurred excluding component suppliers and knowledge institutes from the innovation system danish policies successfully anticipated these barriers and removed them therefore the danish policies can be characterized as pro active british policies shaped stable conditions for learning only therefore they can be characterized as active in the future barriers could hinder learning by interacting between the oil and gas industry the offshore wind industry and academia based on this study we suggest national and international policy makers to design long term policies to anticipate these barriers in order to contribute to technological learning

comprehensive effectiveness assessment of renewable energy generation policy a partial equilibrium analysis in china abstract in order to stimulate renewable energy and control carbon dioxide emissions the chinese government has already introduced lots of renewable energy generation policies under this background it is of great significant to figure out the economic environmental and social effectiveness of these polices firstly this paper systematically studied the framework and content of renewable energy generation policies secondly this paper built a basic partial equilibrium model to calculate the equilibrium state of electricity market and carbon emissions on this base the effectiveness of seven renewable energy generation policies was analyzed by introducing policies into the basic model and comparing relevant indicators in different policy scenarios with that in basic scenario further an empirical analysis was made to estimate the actual benefits of these policies in china this paper proposed an analysis method for evaluating the mechanism effectiveness and efficiency of renewable energy generation policies all the results and discussions in this paper can provide specific suggestions for chinese government to shape a blueprint for implementing different kinds of policies

the impact of r d on innovation for wind energy in denmark germany and the united kingdom this paper examines the impact of public research and development r d support on cost reducing innovation for wind turbine farms in denmark germany and the united kingdom uk first we survey the literature in this field the literature indicates that in denmark r d policy has been more successful than in germany or the uk in promoting innovation of wind turbines furthermore such studies point out that subsidy induced capacity expansions were more effective in the uk and denmark in promoting cost reducing innovation than in germany the second part of the paper describes the quantitative analysis of the impact of r d and capacity expansion on innovation this is calculated using the two factor learning curve 2flc model in which investment cost reductions are explained by cumulative capacity and the r d based knowledge stock time series data were collected for the three countries and organized as a panel data set the parameters of the 2flc model were estimated focusing on the homogeneity and heterogeneity of the parameters across countries we arrived at robust estimations of a learning by doing rate of 5 4 and a learning by searching rate of 12 6 the analysis underlines the homogeneity of the learning parameters enhancing the validity of the 2flc formulation

risk and insurance in village india comment the protection of poor households in high risk agrarian economies from shocks to their incomes has often been seen as a compelling motive for various forms of policy intervention including transfers of cash or food credit subsidies and public employment schemes for a survey see lipton and ravallion 1995 the desirability of such safety net policies clearly depends on how well pre existing risk sharing arrangements work while it is commonly thought that without effective policy intervention rural households are vulnerable to village wide shocks such as adverse prices or poor rains it is less clear to what extent risk sharing institutions within the village mitigate the effects of idiosyncratic income risk stemming for instance from ill health or localized crop damage 2 several recent papers have used household level data to implement tests of risk sharing that might inform such concerns 3 these tests are based on the proposition that with perfect risk sharing consumption at the household level should be insured against idiosyncratic risks and thus depend solely on the realization of the aggregate risk wilson 1968 diamond 1967 townsend 1994 tests this implication of perfect intra village risk sharing using longitudinal household data on consumptions and incomes for three villages in india he reports that the full insurance hypothesis provides a surprisingly good benchmark in that household consumptions co move and do not appear to be much influenced by contemporaneous own income our aim here is to examine the robustness of this potentially important finding we have two main concerns the first is that the specification townsend adopts potentially biases his test towards the null hypothesis of full insurance because it yields inconsistent estimates of the key test parameter under a plausible alternative we therefore estimate a different specification that generates consistent estimates under both the null and the alternative our second concern is that a particular form of measurement error in the consumption data townsend uses may have further biased his results toward the null hypothesis of full insurance to address this concern we use an instrumental variables procedure when we implement the test of consumption insurance with townsend s consumption data we also re estimate the test equations with a measure of consumption derived from the same underlying primary data by an alternate method finally townsend reports 1discussions with robert townsend stimulated our interest in this investigation the staff of the

emission path planning based on dynamic abatement cost curve abstract global climate change is one of the most serious environmental problems that has attracted an unprecedented global attention the scientific community has recognized that human activity is mostly responsible for global climate warming therefore states participating in the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc have initiated a series of negotiations on how to develop their own emission reduction targets however the realization of these targets is at the expense of economic development to a great extent therefore an abatement plan is necessary to decide how and when to implement emission reduction targets a marginal abatement cost curve macc often used as an important quantitative tool to estimate abatement burden or evaluate abatement performance should be considered carefully in this paper we enrich the traditional macc by introducing the concept of an immediate unit marginal abatement cost to describe its intrinsic incremental abatement difficulty this cost is proved to be agreed with the actual situation in many ways and is therefore very suitable for practical use two factor learning curve are considered in the model which can go some way in improving the performance of the revised macc using a parameterization method the original problem can be converted into a tractable nonlinear programming problem we use an algorithm to search for the approximate global optimal solution the effectiveness and the efficiency of the algorithm are discussed respectively in the results we find that the abatement path distinguishes largely under different abatement targets some plausible reasons and policy advices are given

nonparametric tests of alternative option pricing models using all reported trades and quotes on the 30 most active cboe option classes from august 23 1976 through august 31 1978

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

wind power costs expected to decrease due to technological progress abstract the potential for future cost reductions in wind power affects adoption and support policies prior analyses of cost reductions give inconsistent results the learning rate or fractional cost reduction per doubling of production ranges from 3 to 33 depending on the study this lack of consensus has we believe contributed to high variability in forecasts of future costs of wind power we find that learning rate can be very sensitive to the starting and ending years of datasets and the geographical scope of the study based on a single factor experience curve that accounts for capacity factor gains wind quality decline and exogenous shifts in capital costs we develop an improved model with reduced temporal variability using a global adoption model the wind learning rate is between 7 7 and 11 with a preferred estimate of 9 8 using global scenarios for future wind deployment this learning rate range implies that the cost of wind power will decline from 5 5 cents kwh in 2015 to 4 1 4 5 cents kwh in 2030 lower than a number of other forecasts if attained wind power may be the cheapest form of new electricity generation by 2030 suggesting that support and investment in wind should be maintained or expanded

inventor networks in renewable energies the influence of the policy mix in germany technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support various policy instruments that can broadly be categorized as technology push demand pull or systemic constitute part of the policy mix for renewable energies our goal is to gain insights into the influence of this policy mix on the intensity and organization of inventive activities for wind power and photovoltaics in germany since the 1980s we examine the effect of different instruments on the size and structure of co inventor networks based on patent data our results indicate notable differences between the technologies the network size for wind power is driven by technology push and systemic instruments while in photovoltaics demand pull is decisive for network growth by and large the instruments complement each other and form a consistent mix of policy instruments the structure of the networks is driven by demand pull for both technologies systemic instruments increase interaction especially in the wind power network and are complementary to demand pull in fostering collaboration

the learning curve and pricing in the chemical processing industries data on 37 chemical products are used to test a number of hypotheses about the learning curve and industrial price behavior the results document a strong and consistent learning effect learning is found to be a function of cumulated industry output and cumulated investment rather than calendar time standard economies of scale appear significant but small in magnitude relative to the learning effect variations in the slope of the learning curve are linked to differences in r d expenditures and capital intensity market concentration is found to be a strong influence on price flexibility and the timing of learningrelated price changes

incorporating experience curves in appliance standards analysis the technical analyses in support of u s energy conservation standards for residential appliances and commercial equipment have typically assumed that manufacturing costs and retail prices remain constant during the projected 30 year analysis period there is however considerable evidence that this assumption does not reflect real market prices costs and prices generally fall in relation to cumulative production a phenomenon known as experience and modeled by a fairly robust empirical experience curve using price data from the bureau of labor statistics and shipment data obtained as part of the standards analysis process we present u s experience curves for room air conditioners clothes dryers central air conditioners furnaces and refrigerators and freezers these allow us to develop more representative appliance price projections than the assumption based approach of constant prices these experience curves were incorporated into recent energy conservation standards for these products the impact on the national modeling can be significant often increasing the net present value of potential standard levels in the analysis in some cases a previously cost negative potential standard level demonstrates a benefit when incorporating experience these results imply that past energy conservation standards analyses may have undervalued the economic benefits of potential standard levels

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

risk sharing in private information models with asset accumulation explaining the excess smoothness of consumption we study testable implications for the dynamics of consumption and income of models in which first best allocations are not achieved because of a moral hazard problem with hidden saving we show that in this environment agents typically achieve more insurance than that obtained under self insurance with a single asset consumption allocations exhibit excess smoothness as found and defined by campbell and deaton 1989 we argue that excess smoothness in this context is equivalent to a violation of the intertemporal budget constraint considered in a bewley economy with a single asset we also show parameterizations of our model in which we can obtain a closed form solution for the efficient insurance contract and where the excess smoothness parameter has a structural interpretation in terms of the severity of the moral hazard problem we present tests of excess smoothness applied to u k microdata and constructed using techniques proposed by hansen roberds and sargent 1991 to test the intertemporal budget constraint our theoretical model leads us to interpret them as tests of the market structure faced by economic agents we also construct a test based on the dynamics of the cross sectional variances of consumption and income that is in a precise sense complementary to that based on hansen roberds and sargent 1991 and that allows us to estimate the same structural parameter the results we report are consistent with the implications of the model and are internally coherent

industrial electricity demand and energy efficiency policy the role of price changes and private r d in the swedish pulp and paper industry abstract the objective of this paper is to analyze electricity demand behaviour in the swedish pulp and paper industry in the context of the increased interest in so called voluntary energy efficiency programs in these programs tax exemptions are granted if the participating firms carry out energy efficiency measures following an energy audit we employ a panel data set of 19 pulp and paper firms and estimate both the own and cross price elasticities of electricity demand as well as the impact of knowledge accumulation following private r d on electricity use the empirical results show that electricity use in the swedish pulp and paper industry is relatively own price insensitive and the self reported electricity savings following the voluntary so called pfe program support the notion of important information asymmetries at the company level however the results display that already in a baseline setting pulp and paper firms tend to invest in private r d that have electricity saving impacts and our model simulations suggest that up to about one third of the industry sector s self reported electricity savings in pfe could be attributable to pure baseline effects future evaluations of voluntary energy efficiency programs must increasingly recognize the already existing incentives to reduce energy use in energy intensive industries

global energy transitions and political systems abstract transitioning from one form of energy to another has led to social change in areas such as production methods quality of life and labor productivity in addition there is a relationship between this social change and the emergence of different types of political systems surprisingly there are not many studies on the relationship between energy transitions and changes in political systems the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the transition from one form of energy to another has historically determined the type of political system and that this causal relationship has evolved through the ages a three stage approach was used in this study to examine this relationship in the past and present and to predict coming changes in the future the main finding is that from the foraging period to the oil age energy has been a factor in determining political systems however with the expansion of energy trade between nations and the emergence of new technology options the situation has been reversed political systems have now become a determinant of energy transitions also even democratic countries have been unwilling to transition to new forms of energy preferring instead to maintain fossil fuel based energy systems

decreasing relative risk aversion and tests of risk sharing the relative risk aversion rra coefficient of a household whose consumption is close to the subsistence level may be very high for example if consumption is exactly at the subsistence level the household may not be willing to bear any risk if this is the case then the rra coefficient must be a decreasing function of wealth for poor households therefore we should allow the possibility of decreasing rra drra in testing the full risk sharing hypothesis however existing tests in the empirical literature are derived using preferences that exhibit either increasing or constant rra even when they are applied to data containing low income households we therefore use a hyperbolic absolute risk aversion hara utility which implies increasing constant and decreasing rra as special cases to test full risk sharing hypothesis using the international food policy research institute ifpri and the international crops research institute of the semi arid tropics icrisat household level data sets we find evidence in support of the drra hypothesis along with evidence favoring full risk sharing hypothesis at the village level and evidence against the hypothesis at the inter village level when rra is restricted to be constant we replicate the previous results in the literature reject the full risk sharing hypothesis at both levels our tests however reject this restriction and favor drra in almost all cases these results suggest that it is important to allow for drra in testing the full risk sharing hypothesis when data containing low income households are investigated this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

political competition and renewable energy transitions over long time horizons a dynamic approach abstract climate change mitigation requires sustainable energy transitions but their political dynamics are poorly understood this article presents a general dynamic model of renewable energy policy with long time horizons endogenous electoral competition and techno political path dependence we calibrate the model with data on the economics of contemporary renewable energy technologies in doing so we discover transition dynamics not present in economy energy models which ignore politics or in formal political economy models which ignore long term technological dynamics we show that the largest effects of partisan ideology on policy occur when the competing parties disagree on the importance of energy policy in these cases the less ideological party appeases the more ideological one while the more ideological party attempts to appease the electorate the results demonstrate that political dynamics could have large effects on the development of renewable energy and carbon dioxide emissions over time influencing the ability of countries to reach various climate mitigation trajectories

effective climate energy solutions escape routes and peak oil abstract many well intended climate energy strategies are ineffective in the absence of serious environmental regulation this holds among others for direct support of clean energy voluntary energy conservation technical standards on a limited set of products unilateral stringent carbon pricing and awaiting peak oil as a climate strategy all of these suffer from escape routes that indirectly increase co2 emissions and thus make the original strategy ineffective on the other hand environmental regulation alone may lead to a myopia bias stimulating early dominance of cost effective technologies and a focus on incremental innovations associated with such technologies rather than on radical innovations although adopting a partial viewpoint keeps the analysis simple we urgently need a more inclusive systems perspective on climate solutions this will allow the formulation of an effective climate policy package that addresses the various escape routes

consumption risk sharing in social networks we develop a model of informal risk sharing in social networks where relationships between individuals can be used as social collateral to enforce insurance payments we characterize incentive compatible risk sharing arrangements and obtain two results 1 the degree of informal insurance is governed by the expansiveness of the network measured by the number of connections that groups of agents have with the rest of the community relative to group size twodimensional networks where people have connections in multiple directions are su ciently expansive to allow very good risk sharing we show that social networks in peruvian villages satisfy this dimensionality property thus our model can explain townsend s 1994 puzzling observation that village communities often exhibit close to full insurance 2 in second best arrangements agents organize in endogenous risk sharing islands in the network where shocks are shared fully within but imperfectly across islands as a result network based risk sharing is local socially closer agents insure each other more

self production friction and risk sharing against disasters evidence from a developing country summary this paper uses a unique household data set collected in vietnam to empirically test the necessary conditions for an extended version of the consumption risk sharing hypothesis the test explicitly incorporates self production and uses natural disasters such as avian influenza droughts and floods to identify the effectiveness of market and non market risk sharing mechanisms with these additional treatments full risk sharing within each commune cannot be rejected which suggests the presence of omitted variable and endogeneity biases in existing studies that reject full risk sharing we also find that credit constraints have a significant impact although limited commitment is not necessarily serious

socially just support mechanisms for the promotion of renewable energy sources in greece abstract although development of renewable energy sources res projects is essential for the greek national economy to revive cut downs of public spends in greece may equally well extend to affect res support mechanisms in this context an integrated cost benefit analysis is currently undertaken concerning res investments in the greek electricity sector more specifically social support compared with financial benefits accruing from such energy stations reveals hidden imbalances that urge for the reform of the current support status examination of representative case studies currently provided considers the three most widespread res i e wind energy hydropower and solar energy with special emphasis given on the determination of break even feed in tariffs fits and the comparison of life cycle electricity production cost between res and conventional power stations

risk sharing and information in village economies arrangements for achieving efficient risk sharing vary depending on the information available to agents in the economy the usual euler equation restricts efficient allocations in an economy which obeys the permanent income hypothesis while efficient allocations in an economy with private information and long term contracts satisfy a symmetric restriction but not the euler equation full insurance arrangements are unique in that they satisfy both restrictions we look at an environment in which it seems likely that long term contracts play a role in mitigating the effects of private information three village economies in south india the evidence that consumption allocations satisfy the private information restriction is quite strong for households in two of the three villages the evidence for the third village suggests that while consumption for some households satisfies the private information restrictions other households consumption obey the permanent income hypothesis

unraveling the photovoltaic technology learning curve by incorporation of input price changes and scale effects in a large number of energy models the use of learning curves for estimating technological improvements has become popular this is based on the assumption that technological development can be monitored by following cost development as a function of market size however recent data show that in some stages of photovoltaic technology pv production the market price of pv modules stabilizes even though the cumulative capacity increases this implies that no technological improvement takes place in these periods the cost predicted by the learning curve in the pv study is lower than the market one we propose that this bias results from ignoring the effects of input prices and scale effects and that incorporating the input prices and scale effects into the learning curve theory is an important issue in making cost predictions more reliable in this paper a methodology is described to incorporate the scale and input prices effect as the additional variables into the one factor learning curve which leads to the definition of the multi factor learning curve this multi factor learning curve is not only derived from economic theories but also supported by an empirical study the results clearly show that input prices and scale effects are to be included and that although market prices are stabilizing learning is still taking place

debt constrained asset markets we develop a theory of general equilibrium with endogenous debt limits in the form of individual rationality constraints similar to those in the dynamic consistency literature if an agent defaults on a contract he can be excluded from future contingent claims markets trading and can have his assets seized he cannot be excluded from spot markets trading however and he has some private endowments that cannot be seized all information is publicly held and common knowledge and there is a complete set of contingent claims markets since there is complete information an agent cannot enter into a contract in which he would have an incentive to default in some state in general there is only partial insurance variations in consumption may be imperfectly correlated across agents interest rates may be lower than they would be without constraints and equilibria may be pareto ranked

gender differences in risk behavior an analysis of asset allocation decisions in ghana abstract within a developing country context little is known about gender differences in risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions much of the empirical literature within development studies on risk and investment in assets centers on risk coping and risk management strategies of households with some exceptions this literature primarily focuses on household and household level outcomes previous experimental studies have explored gender differences in risk preferences in developing countries with inconclusive results using unique national representative sex disaggregated data with self reported asset ownership and wealth information of individuals within households in ghana from a multi country project the gender asset gap project this paper explores men and women s risk preferences as reflected in asset allocation decisions through a decomposition method typically used to explore gender differences in wage employment the study finds that although women hold significantly fewer risky assets than men in absolute terms and as a proportion of their wealth in the sample men and women do not have systematically different risk preferences the results in this paper differ from the results in many empirical studies in developed countries where women are often found to be more risk averse than men as the first study to look at gender differences in risk aversion in terms of asset allocation with in the developing country context the results from this study provide evidence that gender differences in risk attitudes may vary by cultural context as the growing experimental literature in developing countries suggests

consumption smoothing migration and marriage evidence from rural india a significant proportion of migration in low income countries particularly in rural areas is composed of moves by women for the purpose of marriage we seek to explain these mobility patterns by examining marital arrangements among indian households in particular we hypothesize that the marriage of daughters to locationally distant dispersed yet kinship related households is a manifestation of implicit interhousehold contractual arrangements aimed at mitigating income risks and facilitating consumption smoothing in an environment characterized by information costs and spatially covariant risks analysis of longitudinal south indian village data lends support to the hypothesis marriage cum migration contributes significantly to a reduction in the variability of household food consumption farm households afflicted with more variable profits tend to engage in longer distance marriage cum migration the hypothesized and observed marriage cum migration patterns are in dissonance with standard models of marriage or migration that are concerned primarily with search costs and static income gains