targeting jobs to local people the british urban policy experience the paper compares the effectiveness of a number of employment generating schemes in terms of the proportion of jobs created going to locally resident unemployed workers whilst the paper establishes that considerable leakages do occur a wide range of experience is identified which may in part be due to the differing methodologies used by the policy analysts concerned this is due to the often inadequate attention paid to the study of local labour market institutions and dynamics some categories of workers continue to be systematically discriminated against and policies which are currently being developed may help some of these workers overcome obstacles but without identifying and dismantling labour market barriers

nonrenewable resource scarcity nonrenewable resource theory often is summarized by hotelling s rule this paper reviews theoretical extensions and empirical investigations of resource extraction models observed data are often inconsistent with the hotelling rule suggesting that other characteristics of nonrenewable resource supply including exploration heterogeneous ore quality technological progress and capital investment are important determinants of the dynamic behavior of resource prices given the persistent recurrence of concern about nonrenewable resource scarcity measures of nonrenewable resource scarcity and the empirical evidence for the time trends of those measures are reviewed finally the implications of nonrenewable resource scarcity for economic growth are examined

natural resource prices will they ever turn up abstract natural resource theory predicts that natural resource rents should increase over time however technical progress in resource extraction environmental constraints or great natural abundance could result in stagnant or declining product prices thus there is no theoretical reason to believe that product prices will rise in the near future the prediction of product prices by time series methods is shown to depend critically upon whether the series are modeled as difference or trend stationary dickey fuller and lagrange multiplier tests are used to show that the series are difference stationary long and short sample series are tested trend stationary modeling strongly predicts rising resource prices the result from difference stationary modeling is that there is only a weak supposition that natural resource prices will rise

a model of exhaustible resource exploitation with ricardian rent abstract the question of the optimal rate of development of an exhaustible resource such as a mine has long been a concern of resource economists however with few exceptions in the literature it has been implicitly assumed that orebodies are of uniform quality readily distinguished from their surroundings or else that the mining firm is able to choose the order of mining from sections of the mine which may vary in quality e g grade of ore while such simplifying assumptions have led to a rich array of conclusions they stand in contrast to the varying conditions facing the mining engineer in making cut off grade decisions this paper models a situation where because of orebody configurations the firm cannot choose to mine in order of grade an optimal cut off grade is obtained for each point of time of the mine s life in the case of a socially optimizing firm then in a special case the effects of monopoly and various types of mineral taxation are considered for the cut off grade decision and for ultimate recovery

job search and the effect of urban structure on unemployment and married female participation rates a model of urban job search is presented concentrating on the skill level of the seeker the implications for the effect of urban structure on intra urban unemployment and married female participation rate differentials are examined it is found using census data for greater london that urban structure represented by the intra urban distribution of jobs per worker as derived from the job search model has the predicted effects on unemployment and participation rates after allowing for other determinants of these rates the paper concludes with some implications for urban manpower policy

reserve and land prices with exploration under uncertainty abstract arrow and chang j econom environ manag 9 1 10 1982 analyze an exploration extraction model with uncertainty about the distribution of deposits reserve prices do not exhibit any rising trend when the unexplored land area is big but in order to know what happens when the unexplored area is smaller a probabilistic analysis not yet performed ibid p 10 is required their conjecture of a rising trend at less than the discount rate is confirmed however land prices can be expected to grow faster than reserve prices which helps discriminate between arrow and chang s and other rationalizations of the failure of resource prices to rise at the discount rate

environmental quality competition and eco labeling abstract a three stage game of investment environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the firms incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure when firms are identical with respect to fixed costs both firms will always invest but if one firm is more efficient in investing then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive but lower than in the duopoly solution in the absence of environmental externalities the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low while environmental externalities increase the possibility low quality dispersion that is too low within the market solution finally and importantly ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing environmental quality that is too low

testing for common features in north american energy markets abstract using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics we explore the strength of shared trends and shared cycles between north american natural gas and crude oil markets in doing so we use daily data from january 1991 to april 2001 on spot u s henry hub natural gas and wti crude oil prices the results show that there has been decoupling of the prices of these two sources of energy as a result of oil and gas deregulation in the united states we also investigate the interconnectedness of north american natural gas markets and find that north american natural gas prices are largely defined by the u s henry hub price trends

statistical measures of unsustainability abstract statistical measures are needed to reveal at a glance how far or near various countries are to meeting the conditions of long run sustainability and how conditions are changing on a year to year basis i e whether sustainability is being approached or not the scheme proposed in this paper presents numerical comparisons of energy and materials use in the real world vis a vis an ideal case where all of the identifiable criteria for sustainability are satisfied apart from population stabilization five general but quantifiable criteria for sustainability are suggested including 1 stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere 2 stabilization of acidity ph in rainfall 3 reduction of dissipative uses and wastes of heavy metals to natural mobilization rates or lower 4 elimination of agriculture based on pumping fossil water from non renewable aquifers and 5 elimination of loss of arable land because of salination or erosion other criteria such as preservation of biodiversity and socio economic equity between countries and generations might be added to the list they introduce more difficult measurement problems however which are not considered further in the paper having fixed the list of criteria the next step is to identify measures that either go to zero or unity as the system approaches more and more closely to sustainability at least in the limited sense defined above various types of measures of sustainability unsustainability can be developed viz i measures of relative dependence of the economy on non renewable sources of energy and materials ii measures of the productivity of energy and materials consumed by the economic system and iii measures of dissipative loss especially of toxic and hazardous substances specific examples of each type are discussed

eco labeling and horizontal product differentiation this paper investigates the impact of eco labels on the abatement of emissions in a market with horizontal product differentiation a distinction is made between an end of pipe abatement method and a clean technology approach in the former case underinvestment is likely to occur even if the marginal willingness to pay for abatement of consumers is equal to the social marginal benefit of abatement the level of abatement depends on the number of firms and on the number of consumers for a large market with few firms overinvestment in abatement is also possible clean technology abatement achieves a first best level regardless of market size if all consumers have a marginal willingness to pay for abatement equal to its social benefit

on the prevalence of trends in primary commodity prices abstract this paper applies new time series procedures to examine the prebisch singer hypothesis of a secular deterioration in relative primary commodity prices specifically we allow for up to two structural breaks in 24 price series covering the 1900 98 period for the majority of commodities it is shown that the trend is not well represented by a single downward slope but instead by a shifting trend that often changes sign over the sample period unlike some recent work that has also allowed for structural breaks these results provide much less support for the prebisch singer hypothesis

cycles in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the frequency domain abstract a model is derived that relates price cycles to investment behavior in the mineral industries and predicts that these cycles will be roughly twice as long as the investment period the period between the investment decision and the project completion spectral techniques are used to estimate the principal cycles in metal and fuel prices for the metals the estimated cycle lengths reinforce the model predictions however no significant cycles are found in the prices of the fuels the lead lag relationships between prices of different commodities are also investigated and are found to be significant for those that are jointly produced

a note on mining with investment in capital one of the principal predictions of the theory of the extractive firm is that its rate of output will decline steadily throughout time recently in this journal campbell 1980 presented an interesting analysis suggesting that this behaviour may be altered if one accounts for the fact that firms must invest in some level of fixed capital which is needed in combination with variable inputs to extract the resource in the campbell analysis the fixed capital places a constraint on the maximum rate of extraction it is shown that this constraint is binding and that extraction is therefore constant over some initial period of the mine when the firm behaves optimally this note demonstrates that the campbell result is due to a fixed proportions technology assumption in particular when a neoclassical technology is assumed one finds that the constraint imposed by the level of fixed capital is never binding and that the optimal extraction rate is strictly monotonically declining as a function of time i to demonstrate this an informal argument will suffice let k be the level of fixed capital chosen by the firm let lt be the amount of the variable factor employed in period t assume that the rate of extraction et is given by the production function2

unemployment equilibria and input prices theory and evidence from the united states the paper develops an efficiency wage model where input prices affect the equlibrium rate of unemployment we show that a simple framework based on only two prices the real price of oil and the real rate of interest is able to explain the main post war movements in the rate of u s joblessnss the equations do well in forecasting unemployment many out of sample and provide evidence that the oil price spike associated with iraq s invasion of kuweit appears to be a component of the mystery recession which followed

geometric brownian motion and structural breaks in oil prices a quantitative analysis the purpose of this paper is to present a quantitative analyses of oil price s path we try to argue that despite its parsimony and simplicity geometric brownian motion can perform well as a proxy for the movement of oil prices and for a state variable to evaluate oil deposits we base our argument on evidences of very low speed of mean reverting or long half life since unit root tests only can reject its null hypothesis in a sample longer than 100 years on the other hand we reject the null hypothesis of unit root with two endogenous breaks showing that the usual rejection can be attributed to omitted structural breaks we conclude that the average half life of oil price between 4 and 8 years depending on the model chosen is long enough to allow a good approximation as a geometric brownian motion

policy review section in this policy review section gerry stoker of the institute of local government studies presents a critical review of the role of urban development corporations udcs in comparing the experience of the udcs consideration is given to the varying nature of the land and property market in each udc area to the relationship with local authorities and other local bodies and the regeneration strategies pursued by the udcs this is followed by an assessment of the impact of the udcs in economic social and political terms in the second article john britton of the university of toronto examines the theoretical case for interventionist public policies to assist the innovation process in small and medium sized enterprises these arguments are supported by a review of the experience of various national support programmes introduced in the uk in particular the manufacturing advisory service introduced in 1978 and the design advisory service launched in 1982

unemployment and urban labour markets two quite distinct views on how metropolitan labour markets work have co existed for over three decades both claim empirical support and after a brief period of confrontation they continue to co exist today giving quite conflicting signals to policy makers according to the first model the urban labour market consists of a number of spatially defined sub markets so that local unemployment exists primarily because of deficiencies in highly localised demand for labour by this argument unemployment rates remain high in the absence of a renewed supply of appropriate jobs within short commuting distances of the jobless the solution according to this model is to attract private and public sector production into such areas in contrast a second model views the city as a single market in which transactions between labour and capital take place regardless of the location of residence and employment sites according to this perspective the spatial incidence of unemployment simply reflects the residential

do oil price shocks matter evidence for some european countries this paper analyzes the oil price macroeconomy relationship by means of analyzing the impact of oil prices on inflation and industrial production indexes for many european countries using quarterly data for the period 1960 1999 first we test for cointegration allowing for structural breaks among the variables second and in order to account for the possible non linear relationships we use different transformation of oil price data the main results suggest that oil prices have permanent effects on inflation and short run but asymmetric effects on production growth rates furthermore significant differences are found among the responses of the countries to these shocks

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

economic indicators of resource scarcity a critical essay abstract the theoretical arguments of the conceptual and empirical literature on economic indicators of long run resource scarcity are logically flawed if resource allocators were informed of the nature of resource scarcity their behavior and the economic indicators it generates would reflect the scarcity but if they were so informed we could simply ask them if resources were scarce if they are not informed their behavior and economic indicators are as likely to indicate their ignorance as the reality unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether they are informed or not unless we already know whether resources are scarce

substantive issues in the definition of localities evidence from sub group local labour market areas in the west midlands coombes m g green a e and owen d w 1988 substantive issues in the definition of localities evidence from sub group local labour market areas in the west midlands reg studies 22 303 318 local labour market areas llmas are now widely accepted as the most appropriate areal units for analyses of spatial patterns of employment and unemployment the most commonly used set of llmas in britain are the travel to work areas ttwas of the department of employment these areas are increasingly being used for locality studies that encompass not only labour and demand trends but also their social and political implications however ttwas are defined on the basis of aggregate commuting patterns which generalize substantial differences in the journey to work behaviour of different sections of the workforce this paper compares the ttwas as revised in 1984 with llmas defined using the same methodology for four sub groups of the labour force with differing skill levels in the west midlands the numb

unemployment duration in the recession the local labour market area scale green a e 1985 unemployment duration in the recession the local labour market area scale reg studies 19 111 129 this paper examines spatial variations in the duration of uncompleted unemployment spells using median lower and upper quartile duration measures within a local labour market area llma framework regional hierarchical and functional differentials in unemployment duration during the recession are investigated using a nineteen fold llma classification it is discovered that pre existing spatial differentials in unemployment duration experience were largely maintained with longer durations recorded in the north than in the south around provincial conurbations than in the london metropolitan region at higher than at lower levels of the urban hierarchy and in llmas with a manufacturing employment base than in those with a service or commercially oriented employment structure

price expectations ore quality selection and the supply of a nonrenewable resource abstract economic models of depletion imply that the present value price of a resource and the quality of extracted ore should be directly related the empirical evidence is that in the short run the average quality of extracted ore and in some cases metal output decline in response to a price increase this paper examines a model of extraction with heterogeneous ore quality within a deposit and revised price expectations in which this seemingly paradoxical supply response is rationalized as the outcome of ore quality selection which maximizes the present value of the mine

urban rural variations in the structure of manufacturing production this paper demonstrates that recent attempts to explain manufacturing shifts to nonmetropolitan areas can be synthesised into a capital vintage model of production the result is a set of systematic differences between urban and rural production methods which are consistent with the locational implications of the manufacturing process cycle theory the model is supported by the first comprehensive estimation of separate production functions for smsas and nonmetropolitan areas using census data for the us from 1977 only smsas are shown to possess the significant agglomeration economies needed for product development and process innovation cost competitive nonmetropolitan areas show much greater variation in input proportions due to spatial factor price differentials

trends in natural resource commodity prices deterministic or stochastic abstract the type of trend be it stochastic or deterministic exhibited by the price of a resource commodity should play a critical role in the development and empirical verification of theories which may explain its long run behavior the nature of the trend however can only be discerned through empirical testing to this end we present a menu of unit root testing procedures for characterizing observed trends in any economic time series including natural resource commodity prices we examine the prices of 11 resource commodities the evidence suggests that five price series exhibit stochastic trends while the remaining six price series appear to be stationary around a deterministic trend

fossil fuel prices exchange rate and stock market a dynamic causality analysis on the european market abstract the article investigates causality between fossil fuel prices exchange rates and the german stock index dax the analysis is conducted dynamically with the use of rolling var methodology on the basis of weekly data from the period october 2001 june 2012 the results obtained show that the relationship between the variables changed over time depending on the level of volatility in financial markets

modelling natural resource scarcity using the error correction approach an error correction framework is used to test the long run hypothesis that prices of natural resources commodities in the united states exhibit scarcity properties from the late nineteenth century to 1988 in the sense that real resource commodity prices have been increasing or following a u shaped pattern introduced by m e slade 1982 the model is formulated to test the validity of the deflation procedure itself along with the scarcity properties results indicate that the model works well as a description of the long term behavior of resources prices and supports the u shaped version of the scarcity hypothesis in a majority of cases an error correction framework is used to test the long run hypothesis that prices of natural resources commodities in the u s exhibit scarcity properties from the late nineteenth century to 1988 in the sense that real resource commodity prices have been increasing or following a u shaped pattern slade 1982 the model is formulated to test the validity of the deflation procedure itself along with the scarcity properties results indicate that the model works well as a description of the long term behaviour of resources prices and supports the u shaped version of the scarcity hypothesis in a majority of cases

a framework for housing market area delineation principles and application a review is presented of the requirements of a framework for the delineation of housing market areas hmas in the context of undertaking a housing market assessment this prompts adoption of a methodology that features an iterative application of information obtained from estate agents to identify hma cores and a functional regionalisation of 2001 census interward migration flows the approach is demonstrated using data for north west england the concluding section explores some implications of the hma framework for policy and future research

young people job search and local labour markets the example of belfast in debates about employability the role of area perceptions in shaping the labour market behaviour of individuals has been neglected this paper sets out to gain an understanding of what relatively disadvantaged young people in belfast know about the geography of labour market opportunities in the city and the locations where they are prepared to work using secondary data analysis and primary research methods it is shown that most young people have a highly localised outlook factors of limited mobility lack of confidence and religion intertwine in complex ways to limit perceived opportunities it is concluded that geography does play a role in shaping access to employment and training opportunities

net national product as an indicator of sustainability net national product nnp can potentially serve several objectives among others to measure value added and to be an indicator of welfare in the aftermath of the world commission on environment and development however it also seems important to investigate whether the concept of nnp can serve as an indicator of sustainability my point of departure following hicks 1946 ch 14 is therefore to require that nnp should measure what can be consumed in the present period without reducing future consumption possibilities and in line with this to argue that the nnp should equal the maximum per capita consumption level that can be sustained if sufficiently many facilitating assumptions are made then a concept of nnp that serves as an exact indicator of sustainability can easily be constructed for instance for a closed economy with a constant population a stationary technology and with only one capital good it follows that the present does not reduce future consumption possibilities if and only if it does not decrease the stock of the single capital good hence under the assumption that the one capital good k is identical to the one consumption good x nnp defined as y x k measures the maximal sustainable consumption at time t because then x y is equivalent to k the purpose of this note is to establish that with multiple capital goods it is not in general possible to construct an exact indicator of sustainability on the

the economic impact of the coal boom and bust in this paper we examine the impact of the coal boom in the 1970s and the subsequent coal bust in the 1980s on local labour markets in kentucky ohio pennsylvania and west virginia we address two main questions in our analysis how were non mining sectors affected by the shocks to the mining sector how did these effects differ between sectors producing local goods and those producing traded goods we find evidence of modest employment spillovers into sectors with locally traded goods but not into sectors with nationally traded goods

the behavior of foreign exchange rates comment the distributors of foreign exchange rates are important for model building and empirical analysis for example many studies have examined foreign exchange market efficiency and currency portfolio management under the assumption that foreign exchange rates are normally distributed the statistical tests in these studies and thus their conclusions may not be reliable if the foreign exchange rates follow non normal distributions realizing the importance of the distribution of exchange rates professors calderon rossell and ben horim 1982 hereafter c b have conducted a study analyzing these distributions based on the skewness of the distribution c b have classified foreign currencies into three groups in the first group the skewness statistic was not significantly different from zero for all currencies and subperiods in the second group the distribution of changes in the foreign exchange rates was close to symmetric except for at least one subperiod in the third group the skewness statistic suggests strongly that all the distributions were asymmetric their results reveal that

the production of eco labels eco labeling is a market based technique for conveying information about consumers demands for environmental protection most criticisms of eco labeling have concentrated on demand side issues the potential for firms or countries to use eco labels to manipulate market power and the difficulty of creating credible labels in this paper we argue that fundamental problems also arise on the production side specifically we argue that both increasing returns to scale and complexities in production imply that it will be possible to market only a small percentage of environmental attributes through the use of eco labels we present evidence for our hypotheses from a detailed survey of 100 randomly selected consumer products

the effects of environmental quality misperception on investments and regulation abstract this paper analyzes whether consumers misperception on the quality of the product influences firms investment choices we examine a setup with horizontal and vertical green differentiation where consumers are heterogeneous in the exogenous perception of environmental quality demands true qualities and profits are increasing in the perception of higher quality while the investment in green quality is high for high and low degrees of product substitutability we further consider the introduction of either an emission tax or an environmental standard both interventions increase the investment in green quality we show that for low marginal damages the environmental standard increases quality while taxation is more effective when the environmental damage is large

breaks trends and unit roots in spot prices for crude oil and petroleum products abstract this study examines the trend properties in energy price series using weekly spot price data for crude oil heating oil and regular gasoline in particular the procedures proposed by perron and yabu 2009b are employed to test for a one time break in the trend function of each price series with no prior knowledge of whether the noise component is stationary or has an autoregressive unit root based on the results of the break estimate the unit root test developed by kim and perron 2009 is performed to examine the stationarity of the prices finally we extend the one break analysis to the case with multiple breaks by employing the break test proposed by kejriwal and perron 2010 and the unit root test of carrion i silvestre et al 2009 the results consistently demonstrate evidence of structural breaks and reject the unit root null hypothesis for all the price series suggesting that energy prices are persistently influenced by long term economic fundamentals instead of temporal policy changes

cost specification and firm behaviour in a hotelling model of resource extraction in applied resource economics much attention has been focused on the ability of the hotelling model to explain observed firm behavior in this paper a preliminary specification search is performed to determine the appropriate cost function parameterization for the firms in the sample before proceeding to the estimation of the euler equation once a cost function specification is chosen the corresponding euler equation is estimated via the generalization method of moments gmm which allows for better estimates of the euler equations than in previous studies even with the preliminary specification search and the use of gmm estimation the behavior of the panel of fourteen canadian copper mining firms in the data set examined does not seem to be consistent with the basic hotelling model used

grade selection under uncertainty least cost last and other anomalies abstract grade selection rules for heterogeneous resource deposits with increasing marginal extraction costs are derived it is shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom it can be optimal to extract the least cost deposits last there are a number of rules that are compatible with dynamic profit maximization under certainty nevertheless none explains empirical regularities in actual extraction patterns when uncertainty about future price is introduced however the theoretical model conforms closely not only to observed grade selection patterns but also to observed mineral industry price paths

the impact of energy prices on the volatility of ethanol prices and the role of gasoline emissions abstract the contribution of renewable energy resources is vital for a country s economic growth by providing high efficiency in energy as well as an effective tool for the confrontation of climate change in particular concerning the eu an increase in the consumption of renewable energy resources as a proportion of the total energy consumption by its member states was set as an objective until 2020 ethanol has been widely used as a substitute to conventional energy like gasoline and oil the present paper surveys the role of alternative energy prices and gas emissions in the formation of the ethanol prices the results of the empirical survey confirmed the existence of a sole relationship among the variables employed according to the results obtained an increase in the volume of emissions or in gasoline prices results in an increase in ethanol prices while the opposite is confirmed in the case of crude oil he elasticity of ethanol prices to the increase of the emissions is another result worth mentioning indicative of the significant role of the emissions in the formation of ethanol prices

examining green consumerism motivational drivers does premium price and demographics matter to green purchasing environmental deterioration caused by consumers non sustainable consumption pattern is putting a strain on the environment and is hindering sustainable development in order to impede this effect and promote a more sustainable economy one solution is to reduce or shift consumption from conventional products to green products the unfortunate reality indicates that inadequate information on how to promote consumers green behavioral intention is slowing the growth of green markets such inadequacy appears as a prevailing obstacle facing firms while developing segments and communicating strategies for effectively promoting green products the mentioned impact is more prevailing and most experienced in countries like malaysia hence consumers behavioral intentions must be better understood in order to strengthen knowledge about fostering green purchases this study aims to determine the motivational factors that influence green purchasing intention and simultaneously assess the moderator roles of the premium price and demographic characteristics given that consumers degree of greenness varies a survey was administered and a total of 405 usable questionnaires were obtained structural equation modeling sem was applied to test the hypotheses results indicate that environmental attitude eco label and cultural value man nature orientation significantly influence the green purchase intention the result also indicates that the premium price has no moderating effect denying its role as one of the main barriers for consumers to walk their talk as it has previously been reported by studies and opinion polls in addition the findings revealed that education level and gender have a significant positive moderation effect this suggests that green purchase intentions motivational factors are greater among highly educated individuals especially with female consumers in particular this study contributes to the understanding of the main factors that motivate consumers intention to purchase green products in malaysia it also offers insights and discusses implementations for manufacturers marketers and policy makers concerned with the drivers that motivate consumers green purchasing intentions which require different marketing plan and strategy than conventional products

are the crude oil markets becoming weakly efficient over time a test for time varying long range dependence in prices and volatility this paper analyzes the efficiency of crude oil markets brent and west texas intermediate by means of estimating the fractal structure of these time series we test for time varying degrees of long range dependence using the rescaled range hurst analysis and find evidence that this market has become more efficient over time these results are robust for controlling for short term autocorrelation by means of a shuffling procedure

the changing urban and regional system in the united kingdom cooke p 1986 the changing urban and regional system in the united kingdom reg studies 30 243 251 the uk space economy has been subject to important structural shifts of late the north has a disproportionately large amount of old capital stock and associated industry and labour shedding in response to international competition has been massive the south is increasingly the location for newer more buoyant economic activity but there are localities within each area which do not conform to the stereotype research on localities enables the finer grained impact of economic restructuring to be more clearly understood preliminary findings from a representative set of seven uk localities suggest that significant change is taking place in the structure of local labour markets the organization of work local social structure politics and policies being pursued locally many of the processes characterizing spatial development in the 1960s and 1970s such as decentralization in manufacturing services

sectoral supply of minerals of varying quality in this sectoral model of mineral production investment in capacity and variation in orebody grade and volume help explain some stylized facts more than one grade of ore may be exploited simultaneously mine exhaustion but not necessarily entry occurs in declining order of grade the price may rise or fall but is likely to fall initially young industry and must eventually rise at less than the interest rate unless demand expands rapidly these trends exhibit fluctuations due to entry and exhaustion of deposits resource price cyclicality is reinforced because mines keep producing at capacity when the price is falling

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

end of pipe or cleaner production how to go green in presence of income inequality and pro environmental behavior in this paper we consider a vertically differentiated duopoly model in which a green producer competes with a brown rival in a market in which consumers are environmentally concerned in particular consumers are assumed to value not only the intrinsic quality of a certain product but also its environmental impact this environmental valuation has a positional content consumers attach a positive attribute to the green product while penalizing the brown one in this context we consider the choice of the green firm between cleaner and end of pipe abatement efforts we find that the interplay between the intensity of market competition consumers income disparity and environmental concern can play a crucial role in directing the green producer towards one or the other technological choice more precisely the adoption of cleaner production technologies can be discouraged by low average income and by tough competition while it can be spurred by the moral social incentive towards pro environmental behavior

trends in world energy prices the correct identification of the time series path of non renewable energy resources has far reaching consequences for economists and policymakers alike this study builds on the existing literature by employing a data series that includes a sample period of institutional change and recently developed unit root testing procedures besides crude oil natural gas and coal prices are also examined aiming to further the knowledge of non renewable energy resource time paths in order to inform future research and update the conclusions of past studies the unit root tests allow for structural breaks and are based on the procedures developed by zivot and andrews 1992 lumsdaine and papell 1997 and lee and strazicich 2003 finally we investigate whether the trend changes signs in the regimes which are bounded by the structural breaks and quantify the prevalence of the trends over the sample period considered the results show that the trend is not well represented by a single positive or negative trend the variability of the trend suggests that forecasting energy prices should not typically occur about a single trend

eco labels trade and protectionism eco labels are suspected to serve protectionist purposes we analyze the choice between an environmental standard and a voluntary eco label scheme in a partial trade model with one domestic firm and one foreign firm the environmental standard will only apply to the domestic firm while both firms can adopt the eco label pollution is production related and domestic consumers demand products that are produced in an environmentally friendly way our results show that it may be optimal for the domestic government to introduce an eco label and get both firms to adopt the label instead of setting an environmental standard however to what extent this policy serves protectionist purposes is ambiguous in particular if the willingness to pay for green products is sufficient to cover the pollution abatement costs of the foreign firm foreign firm profit will increase while domestic firm profit will decrease compared to the outcome with a domestic environmental standard on the other hand if the willingness to pay for green products is insufficient the foreign firm would be better off with a domestic environmental standard

why women work closer to home this paper analyzes the extent to which differences in labor force status in household composition and in household roles account for sex differences in workplace residence separation modelling work trip length as the outcome of the choice of household residential and individual job locations equilibrium work trip length is estimated empirically as a function of labor market housing and household characteristics for male and female employees in seven different household categories data from the 1976 panel survey of income dynamics are used the study concludes that while sex differences in job tenure work hours and wages are in themselves sufficient to fully account for observed sex differences in workplace residence separation sex differences in household roles i e responses to spouses characteristics are of even greater importance in influencing women to work closer to home

job shortfalls in british local labour market areas a classification of labour supply and demand trends 1971 1981 owen d w gillespie a e and coombes m g 1984 job short falls in british local labour market areas a classification of labour supply and demand trends 1971 1981 reg studies 18 469 488 using data from the censuses of population for 1971 and 1981 this paper applies the labour market accounts methodology to the analysis of change in labour demand and supply over the decade in local labour market areas llmas a cluster analysis of the components of demand and supply change is performed and llmas with similar characteristics identified an attempt is then made to explain the spatial distribution of these clusters by reference to the size functional status and regional location of their members

exogenous oil supply shocks how big are they and how much do they matter for the u s economy abstract the paper proposes a new measure of exogenous oil supply shocks the timing the magnitude and the sign of this measure may differ greatly from current state of the art estimates it is shown that only a small fraction of the observed oil price increases during oil crisis periods can be attributed to exogenous oil production disruptions exogenous oil supply shocks cause a sharp drop of u s real gdp growth after five quarters rather than an immediate and sustained reduction in economic growth and a spike in cpi inflation after three quarters overall exogenous oil supply shocks made remarkably little difference for the evolution of the u s economy since the 1970s although they did matter for some historical episodes

non linearities in the dynamics of oil prices abstract examining stationarity is of particular importance and represents the first step in empirical time series research non stationarity invalidates many of the results obtained from standard techniques and therefore requires special treatment because oil prices play an important role in affecting economic variables this paper examines the stationarity of real oil prices brent dubai wti and the world over the period 1973 2 2011 2 real oil prices are expressed in the currencies of seven asian countries indonesia japan korea malaysia the philippines singapore and thailand and in the u s dollar while using linear unit root tests without structural breaks shows no evidence of stationarity allowing for breaks shows very limited evidence of stationarity we argue that these results are attributed to the presence of nonlinearities in the behavior of oil prices testing for nonlinearity shows significant evidence of nonlinearity in all the cases with evidence of exponential smooth transition autoregression estar nonlinearity type in most cases applying unit root tests that account for two types of nonlinearities smooth transition and nonlinear deterministic trends reveals evidence of stationarity in all the cases

the definition of housing market areas and strategic planning the purpose of this paper is to develop the concept of a housing market area thereby provide insights into our understanding of the sub regional structures of the housing system and hence propose a framework for strategic planning research in the housing market to tackle this task it is first necessary to consider the criteria for a local housing market area the paper begins by reviewing previous definitions by both academics and planners and their underlying assumptions based on the principle of spatial arbitrage a local housing market area is defined by reference to criteria linked to migration self containment parallels are drawn with the principles that have been applied to define a system of spatial labour markets using travel to work areas this spatial arbitrage definition is tested empirically by developing a system of housing market areas for west central scotland using data derived from the land registry finally the paper draws together the empirical findings to discuss the nature of s

option value under income and price uncertainty abstract we present a rigorous examination of the sign of option value under income and price uncertainty we state and prove three theorems on the sign of option value when preferences are state independent if income is uncertain the sign of option value is opposite the sign of the income elasticity of the good in question the analysis of price uncertainty is in two parts one covers the case of own price uncertainty and the other the case where the price of some other good is uncertain in both cases the sign of option value is generally ambiguous

optimal exploration for and exploitation of heterogeneous mineral deposits abstract we model exploration for and production from a multiple deposit nonrenewable resource exploration is viewed as a bayesian process involving learning about undiscovered reserves and is undertaken both to improve the quality of and to replenish known reserves known reserves are not physically defined but depend on the realizations of discrete episodes of exploration elsewhere and on decisions at each instant about the margin between ore to be mined and low grade material to be rejected the appropriate measure of resource scarcity the sustainable level of the contribution of the resource and the treatment of depletion in the national accounts are considered

green business and blue angels this paper presents a model of a monopolist svoluntary overcompliance with legal environmentalstandards under asymmetric information about thefirm s environmental impacts the key assumptions are the existence of quality premia for environmentalsoundness a positive but imperfect degree ofmonitoring and adaptive consumer expectations conditions necessary for overcompliance to arise in aprofit maximizing equilibrium are derived the effectsof a third party eco labeling system are analyzed itis shown that the existence of an independent labelingauthority increases the likelihood of overcomplianceto be profit maximizing moreover firms might have anincentive to lobby for the introduction of such asystem the effect of consumers risk preferences andan instrument for preventing greenwash companieslying about their environmental performance is alsodiscussed

on the welfare significance of green accounting as taught by parable abstract green nnp is a national accounting concept that subtracts off from gnp not just depreciation of capital but also depletion of environmental assets for a time autonomous technology green nnp has a rigorous welfare interpretation as an exact measure of the economy s future power to consume the present paper extends the standard framework to cover the case of labor augmenting technological progress for this special case of time dependence a powerful conceptual parable applies it is as if the conclusion from a simple minded welfare story told by the standard neoclassical one sector growth model covers a far more general situation involving any number of different types of capital any convex production possibilities set and fully optimizing behavior implications and applications are discussed

the taxation of nonreplenishable natural resources revisited abstract the theory of nonreplenishable resource extraction has been extended to allow for extraction costs which increase as deposits are increasingly depleted in these cases profit maximization may result in the cessation of extraction before reserves are totally exhausted the effect of various taxation policies on optimal extraction patterns in these models are derived with a few exceptions the results are that the imposition of a tax will cause operators to extract at faster rates over shorter periods of time and to reduce the total amount of ore extracted the analysis allows for an output price which increases over time

a test of the hotelling valuation principle time series tests of the hotelling r percent rule for natural resource prices have not been strongly supportive but the tests and the data are subject to serious difficulties we propose here an alternative testing strategy based on another but less widely known implication of the hotelling model we test this implication which we call the hotelling valuation principle by regressing the market values of the reserves of a sample of u s domestic oiland gas producing companies on their estimated hotelling values we find that the estimated hotelling values account for a significant portion of the observed variations in market values and that the hotelling measures are better indicators of the market values of petroleum properties than two widely cited publicly available alternative appraisals

information and exhaustible resources a bayesian analysis abstract we develop a continuous time bayesian model of investment in information about an exhaustible resource because of the way that information affects expectations the deterministic hotelling rule turns out to be more appropriate as a description of how resource owners forecast the value of their stocks than as a predictor of observed changes in the resource price a flow of information generates both unanticipated changes in expectations which cause the mean rate of change in the resource price to deviate systematically from the deterministic hotelling rule and reductions in uncertainty which do not affect the hotelling prediction

the industrial structure and labour market segmentation urban and regional implications danson m w 1982 the industrial structure and labour market segmentation urban and regional implications reg studies 16 255 65 we argue that dualism in the industrial structure as suggested by averitt 1968 and galbraith 1967 determines stratification and segmentation in the labour market as suggested by kerr 1954 piore 1973 and friedmann 1977 in recognizing this the urban and regional economist has greater understanding of the processes of change of the last fifty years in particular government and corporate policy by replacing the pre 1914 centre industries of steel shipbuilding and engineering with branch and other peripheral plants and firms has led to a deterioration in the relative position of the inner cities and regions

unit root properties of crude oil spot and futures prices in this article we examine whether wti and brent crude oil spot and futures prices at 1 3 and 6 months to maturity contain a unit root with one and two structural breaks employing weekly data over the period 1991 2004 to realise this objective we employ lagrange multiplier lm unit root tests with one and two endogenous structural breaks proposed by lee and strazicich 2003 minimum lagrange multiplier unit root test with two structural breaks review of economics and statistics 85 1082 1089 2004 minimum lm unit root test with one structural break working paper no 04 17 department of economics appalachian state university we find that each of the oil price series can be characterised as a random walk process and that the endogenous structural breaks are significant and meaningful in terms of events that have impacted on world oil markets

testing the efficiency of the futures market for crude oil in the presence of a structural break the efficiency of the futures market for crude oil has been the subject of significant study with the basis regression representing a popular methodology however the parameters of this model are subject to a structural break casting doubt on any conclusion regarding the efficiency of the futures market to address this problem this article employs a simple generalization which is capable of testing the efficiency of a futures market in the presence of a structural break using this approach strong evidence of inefficiency is found in the one month futures contract for west texas intermediate for the period between 1985 and 2013 which is otherwise not detected

hotelling confronts capm a test of the theory of exhaustible resources a model of pricing of natural resource commodities that integrates financial and product markets is derived and tested the model unifies two strands of the economic and financial literature one that builds on the hotelling model of pricing of exhaustible resources and the other that extends the capital asset pricing model of pricing risky assets tests of the predictions make use of a cost function that was estimated from a panel of small canadian copper mines young 1992 the authors tests fail to reject the theoretical restrictions that are implied by the hotelling capital asset pricing model

intergenerational resource rights efficiency and social optimality the discipline of economics is generally defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources between competing social objectives given an initial distribution of resources between economic agents how would they behave so as to improve their welfare according to the pareto criterion the agents would exchange commodities until the opportunities for fruitful exchange were fully exhausted and no agent could be made better off without rendering at least one other agent worse off pareto efficiency is a powerful concept in microeconomic analysis provided that the initial distribution of property rights is equitable allocative efficiency gives rise to the best of all possible worlds acknowledging that the assumptions of perfect competition are often violated firms are monopolistic information is incomplete and externalities exist economists have argued for the modification of institutions so that economic reality will conform more closely to the assumptions of the model that yields such gratifying results but microeconomic theory has always maintained that allocative efficiency is in itself insufficient to maximize social welfare bator 1957 a social welfare function is required to discriminate a social optimum among the array of efficient allocations that correspond to alternative assignments of property rights though economists have posited alternative functional forms for the sake of pursuing conceptual arguments welfare functions have remained elusive constructs for well known theoretical and practical reasons consequently a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between questions of efficiency the province of economics and equity the principal focus of ethical and political discourse in resource economics however the line demarcating efficiency and equity is often crossed the term optimal depletion appears regularly where only efficient depletion is meant while political debates about resource exploitation over time are laden with questions of the proper distribution of our natural patrimony between generations resource economists have predominantly espoused particular use rules that guarantee efficiency but overlook potential improvements in social welfare achievable through the reassignment of property rights across generations we document the evolution and current status of the misuse of the term optimal depletion in section ii we develop a simple two generation three period general equilibrium model in section iii to illustrate how alternative distributions of resource rights between generations relate to alternative pareto efficient solutions in section iv we demonstrate how different social welfare functions affect the optimal solution and associated assignment of resource rights between generations

the spatial interaction of housing and labour markets commuting flow analysis of north west england the consideration of housing and labour market interaction is a relatively recent development in an academic and policy debate which has traditionally considered home and work in isolation this pa

world crude oil and natural gas a demand and supply model abstract this paper examines world markets for crude oil and natural gas over the period 1918 1999 it analyzes the time series properties of output and prices and estimates demand and supply elasticities during 1918 1973 and 1973 1999 oil and gas prices were stable during the first period they became volatile afterwards reflecting deep changes in the market structure following the oil shock in 1973 demand price elasticities were too low however demand income elasticities were high supply price elasticities were also too low the elasticity estimates help to explain the market power of the oil producers and price volatility in response to shocks and corroborate elasticity estimates in energy studies

non renewable resource prices deterministic or stochastic trends in this paper we examine temporal properties of 11 natural resource real price series from 1870 to 1990 recent studies by ahrens and sharma trends in natural resource commodity prices deterministic or stochastic j environ econom manage 33 1997 59 74 berck and roberts natural resource prices will they ever turn up j environ econom manage 31 1996 65 78 and slade grade selection under uncertainty least cost last and other anomalies j environ econom manage 15 1988 189 205 among others find that many non renewable resource prices have a stochastic trend we revisit this issue by employing a lagrangian multiplier unit root test that allows for two endogenously determined structural breaks with and without a quadratic trend contrary to previous research we find evidence against the unit root hypothesis for all price series our findings support characterizing natural resource prices as stationary around deterministic trends with structural breaks we additionally show that both pre testing for unit roots with breaks and allowing for breaks in the forecast model can improve forecast accuracy overall the results in this paper are important in both a positive and normative sense without an appropriate understanding of the dynamics of a time series empirical verification of theories forecasting and proper inference are potentially fruitless