design and analysis of simulated consumer choice or allocation experiments an approach based on aggregate data the authors integrate concepts in conjoint analysis and discrete choice theory in econometrics to develop a new approach to the design and analysis of controlled consumer choice or resource allocat

parents discount rates for child quality contemporary discussions of economic growth make human capital or knowledge accumulation its primary engine 25 human capital as the lead component of the stock of wealth defines a developed economy becker and murphy 4 show that human capital both increases and is increased by the scope of the market its rate of return rises with the size of its stock 5 human capital also plays significant roles in models of human fertility choice 40 population and environmental degradation 11 34 capital mobility 3 and endogenous technological progress 33 a substantial portion of an adult s human capital is accumulated during childhood children as children however cannot independently contract for the resources required to support investments in this human capital though nearly every society grants parents wide discretion about the nurture they provide their children little is understood about what motivates investment by one generation in another the relative importance of different investment modes or the discount rates which parents apply whatever the motivation and the mode because of the long time span between birth and adulthood parents discount rates potentially exert great leverage upon the investment decisions they make for their children knowledge of these discount rates is a prerequisite to acquiring an improved understanding of the internal decision processes of the household a collective decision unit which economics mostly treats as a black box 1 important policy questions as well as scientific accuracy and logical consistency demand knowledge of the discount rates parents apply to investments in their children healthier better educated and wealthier children have a better chance in life but there is no evident reason to suppose that intrafamily discount rates are socially optimal 2 many of the private reactions and behaviors which reinforce or temper the intended effects of public policies are internal to the household when these intended effects have a substantial temporal dimension parental discount rates will be influential for example increased public investments in children can be neutralized

household preferences of hybrid home heating systems a choice experiment application abstract the residential heating sector presents considerable energy savings potential as numerous heating solutions for reducing electricity consumption and utilizing renewable energy sources are available in the market the aim of this paper is to examine determinants of household heating system choices and to use this information for policy planning purposes this paper investigates residential homeowner attitudes regarding innovative hybrid home heating systems hhhs with choice experiment heating system scenarios are designed to represent the most relevant primary and supplementary heating alternatives currently available in finland the choice sets include six main heating alternatives district heat solid wood wood pellet electric storage heating ground heat pump and exhaust air heat pump that are described by five attributes supplementary heating systems investment costs operating costs comfort of use and environmental friendliness the results imply that hhhss generally appear to be accepted among households however several factors affect perceptions of these technologies the results reveal differing household attitudes toward the main heating alternatives and show that such views are affected by socio demographic characteristics age living environment education etc the results suggest that households view supplementary heating systems especially solar based favorably the other attributes studied also play a significant role in decision making

cooperative and noncooperative r d in duopoly with spillovers contrary to the usual assumption made in most oligopoly models relations among firms are seldom of a wholly cooperative or noncooperative type in many situations they compete in some fields while they cooperate in others an important example is the case of cooperative research efforts bringing fierce competitors together two types of agreement are observed first r d cooperation can take place at the so called precompetitive stage companies share basic information and efforts in the r d stage but remain rivals in the market place 1 a second type of agreement involves an extended collusion between partners creating common policies at the product level the usual justifications of this extension are the difficulties of protecting intellectual property the idea is then to allow partners who have achieved inventions together to also control together the processes and products which embody the results of their collaboration in order to recuperate jointly their r d investments 2 what could be expected from these types of agreement is a reduction in r d expenditures because of less wasteful duplication and a reduction of total production because of more reprinted from the american economic review 78 5 1133 1137 1988 center for operations research econometrics 1348 louvain la neuve belgium we are grateful to jean

the generalized multinomial logit model accounting for scale and coefficient heterogeneity the mixed or heterogeneous multinomial logit mixl model has become popular in a number of fields especially marketing health economics and industrial organization in most applications of the model the vector of consumer utility weights on product attributes is assumed to have a multivariate normal mvn distribution in the population thus some consumers care more about some attributes than others and the iia property of multinomial logit mnl is avoided i e segments of consumers will tend to switch among the subset of brands that possess their most valued attributes the mixl model is also appealing because it is relatively easy to estimate recently however some researchers have argued that the mvn is a poor choice for modelling taste heterogeneity they argue that much of the heterogeneity in attribute weights is accounted for by a pure scale effect i e across consumers all attribute weights are scaled up or down in tandem this implies that choice behaviour is simply more random for some consumers than others i e holding attribute coefficients fixed the scale of their error term is greater this leads to a scale heterogeneity mnl model s mnl here we develop a generalized multinomial logit model g mnl that nests s mnl and mixl by estimating the s mnl mixl and g mnl models on 10 data sets we provide evidence on their relative performance we find that models that account for scale heterogeneity i e g mnl or s mnl are preferred to mixl by the bayes and consistent akaike information criteria in all 10 data sets accounting for scale heterogeneity enables one to account for extreme consumers who exhibit nearly lexicographic preferences as well as consumers who exhibit very random behaviour in a sense we formalize below

modelling the joint determination of household labour supplies and commodity demands in addition to choosing the allocation of total expenditure between commodities households may also be able to make decisions over the allocation of their time between market work and leisure in both theoretical and empirical work it has often been the case that these decisions have been analysed separately in this paper we stress the theoretical attractions of considering the joint determination of the allocation of time between work and leisure and the allocation of total expenditure between commodities in a utility maximising framework using a sample of individual households we attempt to evaluate the empirical importance of the joint determination model over the separate determination of labour supplies and commodity demands our approach follows that of abbott and ashenfelter i976 phlips i978 barnett i979 deaton and muellbauer i980 and atkinson and stern i980 here we pay particular attention to the following four important aspects of household decision making over commodity demand and labour supply the first concerns the commonly assumed restriction on the household s preferences of weak separability between goods and leisure this assumption allows the estimation of commodity demand systems and engel curves that exclude wage rate variables in cross section household budget data with large variation in wage rates across the sample the invalidity of this assumption would involve a serious mis specification any correlation between the excluded wage variable and the included price income and demographic variables would lead to biased parameter estimates and hence biased estimated elasticities similarly this assumption allows the estimation of labour supply curves that exclude relative price variables and its invalidity could produce biased labour supply elasticities a second aspect of household decision making which we wish to highlight arises from the suspicion commonly alluded to in labour economics texts that primary male workers may not be free to choose their hours of work thus we estimate a matched pair of rationed and unrationed systems following the work of neary and roberts i 980 and deaton and muellbauer i 979 the separability restriction is not unrelated to this point since without it we will see that the rationed hours of work enter demand systems in a complex fashion in effect

evaluation and optimization of feed in tariffs abstract feed in tariff program is an incentive plan that provides investors with a set payment for electricity generated from renewable energy sources that is fed into the power grid as of today fit is being used by over 75 jurisdictions around the world and offers a number of design options to achieve policy goals the objective of this paper is to propose a quantitative model by which a specific fit program can be evaluated and hence optimized we focus on payoff structure which has a direct impact on the net present value of the investment and other parameters relevant to investor reaction and electricity prices we combine cost modeling option valuation and consumer choice so as to simulate the performance of a fit program of interest in various scenarios the model is used to define an optimization problem from a policy maker s perspective who wants to increase the contribution of renewable energy to the overall energy supply while keeping the total burden on ratepayers under control numerical studies shed light on the interactions among design options program parameters and the performance of a fit program

the takeover deterrent effect of open market share repurchases this paper examines whether open market share repurchases deter takeovers we model pre repurchase takeover probability as a latent variable and examine its impact on the firm s decision to repurchase shares given specification tests reject the tobit model we turn to the censored quantile regression method of powell 1986 journal of econometrics 32 143 155 we find a significantly positive relation between open market share repurchases and takeover probability and we reconcile empirical findings in previous studies that contradict predictions repurchase activity is inversely related to firm size consistent with smaller firms having greater information asymmetry and is related to temporary but not permanent cash flows

climate treaties and approaching catastrophes abstract if the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs treaties can easily coordinate countries behavior so as to avoid the threshold where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe sustaining only modest cuts in emissions these results are unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of catastrophe by contrast uncertainty about the catastrophic threshold normally causes coordination to collapse whether the probability density function has thin or fat tails makes little difference

the impact of adaptation on the stability of international environmental agreements we examine the stability of international environmental agreements that include clauses pertaining to both adaptation and mitigation measures we assume that adaptation requires a prior irreversible investment and presents the characteristics of a private good by reducing a country s vulnerability to the impact of pollution while mitigation policies produce a public good by reducing the total amount of pollution using a stylized model we show that adaptive measures can be used strategically and that their inclusion in environmental agreements enhances agreement stability and can even lead to full cooperation we examine the robustness of agreements including both adaptation and mitigation measures against renegotiation finally we evaluate how including adaptive measures for climate change in international environmental agreements affects welfare and overall pollution

money not morale the impact of desires and beliefs on private investment in photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives abstract a transition towards renewable energy production is one proposed solution as one means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in this regard photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives are a cornerstone in fostering the diffusion of renewables allowing for active citizen engagement this article investigates the drivers behind people s decision to participate in two selected austrian citizen participation initiatives in the field of photovoltaics based on a survey of 870 potential adopters in addition to commonly used indicators variables assessing both people s desires their goals or preferences with respect to energy autonomy environmental protection financial aspects etc and their beliefs how likely they think their participation in a citizen participation initiative in the field of photovoltaics will help them achieve these goals are also included in the analysis the findings show that people s desires are not decisive in deciding on pv participation and that financial beliefs are the main driver behind joining such an initiative this focus on financial gain clearly poses a risk in any attempted transition towards renewable energy production as it indicates that adopters may withdraw from participation as soon as a more attractive investment opportunity becomes available it also indicates that subsidized feed in tariffs are likely to be essential in any long term transition policy

factors determining participation of the elderly in supplemental security the same low participation rates which plague many welfare programs have been observed among the elderly eligible for supplemental security income ssi a number of hypotheses have been offered to explain the low enrollment but none has attracted universal acceptance in this paper i use the survey of income and program participation sipp to examine the participation of the elderly in ssi because of the high quality of the data i am able to determine eligibility more accurately than in most previous studies in this sample only 56 percent of those whom i determine to be eligible for ssi are presently receiving benefits i model the decision to participate as a probit equation but modify the likelihood function to account for measurement error in the expected benefit the results indicate that participation is primarily determined by the financial situation of the eligible individuals although all those eligible for ssi are poor those with little in the way of other resources are significantly more likely to participate this finding differs from widespread beliefs that eligible individuals are discouraged by the difficulty of the application process or that many are uninformed about the program

distributed photovoltaic power generation possibilities benefits and challenges for a widespread application in the mexican residential sector mexico plans to implement a national program to support the adoption of distributed photo voltaic generation dpvg among qualified households the main objectives of such a program would be to reduce the burden of the substantial federal energy subsidy and increase the share of renewable energy sources used to generate electricity in this paper we assess the current conditions under which the mexican residential electricity sector operates and quantify the potential effects that the massive adoption of dpv systems would have on household expenditure and welfare subsidy reduction pollution and water resource usage based on the positive results in terms of both economic and environmental effects our paper provides a significant support for further design and implementation of a dpvg program

international pollution control cooperative versus noncooperative strategies abstract international pollution control involving two neighboring countries is modeled as a simple two player dynamic game each country produces a good that is consumed by domestic households production of each consumption good results in emissions of pollutants households in each country derive utility from the consumption of the domestically produced good but incur costs through the total stock of pollution stock externality in this setting we characterize cooperative as well as noncooperative pollution control strategies of the governments of the two countries that maximize the discounted stream of net benefits of a representative consumer it turns out that when the governments are restricted to use linear strategies noncooperative behavior results in overall losses for both countries if on the contrary governments use nonlinear markov perfect strategies and the discount rate is small enough a pareto efficient steady state pollution stock can be supported as a differentiable subgame perfect equilibrium thus the emergence of first best solutions cooperative outcomes does not require any institutional arrangements threats retaliation etc but can be brought about through the use of nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategies

motivators for adoption of photovoltaic systems at grid parity a case study from southern germany in some countries photovoltaic pv technology is at a stage of development at which it can compete with conventional electricity sources in terms of electricity generation costs i e grid parity a case in point is germany where the pv market has reached a mature stage the policy support has scaled down and the diffusion rate of pv systems has declined this development raises a fundamental question what are the motives to adopt pv systems at grid parity the point of departure for the relevant literature has been on the impact of policy support adopters and recently local solar companies however less attention has been paid to the motivators for adoption at grid parity this paper presents an in depth analysis of the diffusion of pv systems explaining the impact of policy measures adopters and system suppliers anchored in an extensive and exploratory case study in germany we provide a context specific explanation to the motivations to adopt pv systems at grid parity

a utility based analysis of the wage subsidy program abstract because the poverty line is usually defined in terms of income two families may be classified as having poverty level incomes even though their hours of work and therefore their utilities may be very different this paper compares a government income support program that defines the poverty line in terms of utility with several other support programs that define the poverty line in terms of income through the use of the wage solution of the indirect utility function we find the amount of wage subsidy required to raise a subpoverty line family to the poverty line as defined by the utility function this subsidy is compared with wage subsidies based on directly observable quantities such as income

information power and war ultimatum bargaining models of international interactions suggest that when conflict is costly and the actors are fully informed the probability of conflict goes to zero however conflict occurs with some positive probability when the challenger is uncertain about the defender s reservation value i employ a simple ultimatum game of bargaining to evaluate two traditional power centric theories of world politics balance of power and power transition theory the formal and empirical analyses demonstrate that as states approach power parity information asymmetries are greatest thus enhancing the probability of militarized conflict uncertainty is a central cause of conflict emergence and is correlated with the distribution of observable capabilities recognizing the relationship between the distribution of power and the uncertainty offers a more sophisticated interpretation of power centric explanations of world politics

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

adapting to climate change is cooperation good for the environment we consider the formation of an international environmental agreement focusing on adaptation to climate change members of the agreement fully share their knowledge and determine their investments in r d by maximizing their joint welfare while non members optimize their individual payoffs using a three stage game formalism we obtain that a large coalition is achievable and that total emissions increase with the size of the agreement the welfare implications are parameter dependent

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

the impact of collective bargaining legislation on disputes in the u s public sector no legislation may be the worst legislation this article estimates the impact of collective bargaining legislation on disputes during labor negotiations in the u s public sector we use a large national sample of u s state and local government contracts to compare the incidence and intensity of disputes by similar workers under different forms of collective bargaining legislation the breadth of our data allows us to examine the impact of five different forms of legislation our principal finding is that dispute costs are highest in jurisdictions that provide no explicit framework for bargaining or dispute resolution strikes are as frequent and as long when they are illegal and employers are not required to bargain with employees as when they are legal but employers are required to bargain arbitration is most frequently used when formal institutions for arbitration have been provided

consumer behaviour theory and empirical evidence a survey this survey is designed to emphasize the relationship between empirical a nd theoretical considerations in the analysis of consumer behavior a lthough it focuses primarily on analysis at the individual or micro l evel it tries where possible to draw implications for the estimati on of aggregate relationships the importance of micro level analysis stems from the rapid expansion in available panel and survey data se ts this development has generated its own theoretical and empirical issues many of which are raised in this survey copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the impact of attribute preferences on adoption timing the case of photo voltaic pv solar cells for household electricity generation we are concerned with micro generation individual households generating electricity using a renewable technology we focus on modeling the adoption probability of photo voltaic solar panels by households using data from ontario canada where a generous feed in tariff is available to households generating electricity from solar panels we measure household level preferences for panels and use these preferences along with household characteristics to predict adoption time intentions we use discrete choice experiments to measure household level preferences and establish a causal link between the attributes of the technology and adoption time intentions using discrete time survival mixture analysis significant preferences included lower cost greater energy savings and lower fossil fuel inflation the conditional hazard probability of adoption at a particular time given no previous adoption showed that the attribute preferences had intuitively reasonable effects the hazard probabilities allow us to compute the cumulative probability of adoption over a 10 year period per household technology awareness has a significant effect on the adoption probability reinforcing the need for effective education our approach indicates the level of heterogeneity in preferences particularly high for investment criteria and co2 emissions these findings suggest that education campaigns should explain more about investment criteria feed in tariffs and environmental effects

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

willingness to pay for agricultural land preservation and policy process attributes does the method matter this article examines relationships between willingness to pay for land preservation and policy process attributes the approach departs from traditional welfare assessments in that it does not constrain attributes of the policy process to be utility neutral results indicate policy process attributes may influence utility in some circumstances even after controlling for the influence of land use outcomes often correlated with specific policy techniques results further imply that in some cases even comprehensive specification of land use outcomes by stated preference instruments may be insufficient to prevent systematic shifts in willingness to pay related to unspecified yet assumed policy process attributes

assessment of government support for the household adoption of micro generation systems in korea abstract this paper investigates how korean government support affects household adoption of renewable energy based micro generation systems by analyzing household preferences in relation to the costs and benefits of system installation and different kinds of government support the research adopts a discrete choice experiment approach and focuses on two micro generation technologies solar voltaic and solar thermal our empirical analysis revealed firstly that households prefer micro generation systems that have low installation costs but high energy saving benefits and long warranty periods and secondly that households prefer direct subsidies to low interest loans however we also found that households are reluctant to install photovoltaic or solar thermal systems in reality because they see the cost of system installation as being higher than the benefits they would receive from such installation in short while existing government supports are somewhat effective in promoting household adoption of micro generation systems there also exists the obstacle that the majority of households are unwilling to install such systems despite government support thus several policy improvements which focus on increasing the benefits and decreasing the installation costs of micro generation systems are suggested in this paper

eating drinking smoking and testing the lifecycle hypothesis this paper presents some evidence on expenditure patterns over the lifecycle that has a direct bearing on the question of whether households are significantly credit constrained our particular test looks at the consumption of food alcoholic beverages and tobacco to see whether the consumption of the latter two goods falls as couples have children the latter usually involves a decrease in household current income and an increase in needs if households are not credit constrained they should maintain their consumption of alcoholic beverages and tobacco we find no significant decrease in the consumption of these goods

taxation and the household abstract previous analyses of demand systems and the welfare effects of taxing male and female labour supplies suppress the analysis of household resource allocation by assuming a household utility function to analyse the implications of assuming this is not the case we construct a simple but fairly general model of household resource allocation and use the properties of the equilibrium of this model to characterise the effects of tax policy on individual utilities as determined by the household resource allocation process

economic analysis of flat plate solar collectors fpscs a solution to the unemployment problem in the city of eskisehir abstract this study performs a regional economic analysis of solar energy systems in eskisehir turkey that focuses on production and utilization of fpscs the data is obtained from a locally conducted survey and used for practical estimations both the survey findings and the theoretical predictions give close results and they sustain each other under the condition of free market considering profit maximization to produce 30 fpscs per day in optimum conditions 30 workers would be employed per shift if a company can meet the market demand 450 000 000 turkish liras tl 1 2 85tl with current prices of revenue will be earned from the production of 300 000 fpscs in 30 years are displayed on the other hand this renewable energy system has some costs however once it has been set up the system will produce many ecological advantages that more than offset its costs these effects benefit both the local region in which the system is established and the environment on a global scale in addition the process of collecting and utilizing solar energy can be used together with recycling systems to generate advantages for a local economy and can also benefit the global economy by solving unemployment problems by creating employment opportunities

the feasibility of changing electricity consumption patterns time of day pricing information feedback group metering appliance stocks and demographic variables are examined as a means of synchronizing the demand of residential electricity peak and off peak power were found to be weak substitutes in this 20 month study verbal responses indicated that information feedback served as a reminder to schedule activities and that group metering reduced incentives

taxes and transfers their effects on the decision to end a marriage abstract the transfer system typically has large marriage disincentives while the income tax system is likely to subsidize marriage for many low income families in other words the tax system may offset an increase in transfer benefits associated with marital separation the interaction of the transfer system with the income tax system has largely been overlooked the income tax system has become more relevant for low income families with the recent expansion of the earned income tax credit which filers may be eligible for even if their tax liability is zero this paper uses family level measures of the change in transfer benefits and tax liability associated with a change in family structure to consider the effect of these financial incentives on separation decisions

adaptation and international environmental agreements we study the impact of collective effort in r d in adaptation technologies and also spillover effects on formation and size of stable international environmental agreements ieas our results suggest that it is possible to have more than one size of stable iea we can achieve a superior equilibrium i e the grand coalition if countries manage to keep knowledge spillovers low and arrange a minimum ratification threshold this threshold is defined endogenously we also shed light on the effects of two sided spillover on global welfare and the size of stable ieas

green energy market development in germany effective public policy and emerging customer demand this paper reviews the development of renewable energy in germany from 1973 to 2003 it investigates the relative importance of energy policy and green power marketing in shaping the renewable energy market more than a decade of consistent policy support for renewables under the feed in law streg and its successor eeg has been an important driver for increasing renewable electricity generation to date putting the country in a better position than most of its peers when it comes to achieving european union targets for renewable energy green power marketing driven by customer demand on the other hand is growing but has had limited measurable impact so far we discuss potential intangible benefits of green power marketing and scenarios for future market development the paper concludes with lessons that can be learned from the german case for policy design and market development in other countries

selection criteria for a microeconometric model of labour supply the wide variety of observed behaviour that is displayed in survey data suggests that microeconometric models should allow a reasonable degree of flexibility in specification however since these models are generally used for policy analysis they are required to satisfy some degree of theoretical consistency this requirement has generally led to the adoption of rather simple inflexible models based on additive preferences or linear labour supply responses we estimate and test a sequence of models for the labour supply of married working women emphasizing the importance of testing both the thecretical and statistical assumptions underlying the models

harmonization of renewable electricity feed in laws in the european union this paper focuses on the harmonization of feed in laws in the european union as a support mechanism for the promotion of renewable electricity in particular it proposes a methodology for harmonization based on a feed in law with a modular and transparent premium for renewable electricity producers this premium considers technology costs some grid services political incentives and national priorities the proposed approach includes flexibility mechanisms to update and revise premiums to avoid windfall profits for producers and to share technology innovation benefits with electricity consumers while maintaining incentives for innovation our approach is based on the review of the main features of the german and spanish feed in laws and takes into account other necessary considerations for harmonization such as grid access funding definitions and standards ownership of rights derived from renewables and exceptions for small non commercial producers and energy intensive industries

exploring scale effects of best worst rank ordered choice data to estimate benefits of tourism in alpine grazing commons in many environmental valuation applications standard sample sizes for choice modelling surveys are impractical to achieve one can improve data quality using more in depth surveys administered to fewer respondents we report on a study using high quality rank ordered data elicited with the best worst approach the resulting exploded logit choice model estimated on 64 responses per person was used to study the willingness to pay for external benefits by visitors for policies which maintain the cultural heritage of alpine grazing commons we find evidence supporting this approach and reasonable estimates of mean wtp which appear theoretically valid and policy informative

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

household level innovation diffusion model of photo voltaic pv solar cells from stated preference data we focus on predicting the adoption time probabilities of photo voltaic solar panels by households using discrete choice experiments and an innovation diffusion model the primary objective of this research is cohesively mapping the theory of disruptive innovation into diffusion of innovations to aid policy makers by linking two critical uncertainties of new technology 1 whether households prefer the new attributes of the new technology and how these preferences vary by market segments and 2 when are they going to adopt if at all our study uses recent developments of discrete choice experiments and establishes a causal link between the attributes of the technology attitudinal constructs and socio demographics and adoption time probabilities using the bass diffusion model the data was collected from ontario a province of canada the innovation diffusion model allows us to compute the cumulative probability of adoption over time per household technology awareness and energy cost saving have a significant effect on the adoption probability reinforcing the need for effective education these findings also suggest that campaigns should explain more about investment criteria feed in tariffs and environmental attributes this study findings call for a need to use seeding strategies to accelerate exogenous word of mouth wom for this new technology

supersized votes ballot length uncertainty and choice in direct legislation elections voters in polities that make heavy use of direct democracy are frequently confronted with ballots that contain a multitude of propositions claims that direct legislation elections overwhelm voters with choices they are not competent to make should particularly apply to such demanding settings yet evidence on the effects of lengthy ballots on voting behavior is scant this study reviews theories of decision making under uncertainty and tests their predictions in a mixed heteroscedastic model of vote choice that is fitted to a unique collection of survey and contextual data on swiss referendums increasing ballot length is demonstrated to interfere with the voters ability to translate their political preferences into consistent policy choices

absorptive capacity and connectedness why competing firms also adopt identical r d approaches abstract this paper explores the endogenous determination of r d appropriability through the firms choice of r d approaches whereas identical broad r d approaches connect firms with their r d environment and maximize absorptive capacities the opposite holds for idiosyncratic r d approaches our model shows that competing firms choose identical r d approaches in order to maximize knowledge flows between each other in essence this frees firms from the prisoner s dilemma of aggressive investment in r d our analysis contrasts with kamien and zang s 2000 kamien m zang i 2000 meet me halfway research joint ventures and absorptive capacity international journal of industrial organization 18 995 1012 finding that competing firms chose idiosyncratic r d approaches we demonstrate that their model also yields a nash equilibrium for broad identical r d approaches

the energy efficiency gap what does it mean abstract as renewed attention has been given by policy makers to energy conservation issues it has frequently been asserted that an energy efficiency gap exists between actual and optimal energy use the critical questions is how to define the optimal level of energy efficiency this paper seeks to disentangle some confusing strands of argument that are frequently brought to bear on this question by identifying the major conceptual issues that determine the set of feasible answers we identify five separate and distinct notions of optimality the economists economic potential the technologists economic potential hypothetical potential the narrow social optimum and the true social optimum each of these has associated with it a corresponding definition of the energy efficiency gap our analysis demonstrates that necessary preconditions for identifying the right measure of the energy efficiency gap include understanding and disentangling market failure and non market failure explanations for the gradual diffusion of energy efficient technologies

fertility and the tax benefit system a reconsideration of the theory of family taxation the author examines the simultaneous nature of the decision to have children the decision to spend money on them and the decision to seek employment it will be argued that the children income trade off emphasised by the present paper is more relevant to most family decisions than the income leisure trade off on which much of the policy debate has been centred in order to do that we shall bring together the recently developed economic theory of the family or new home economics with the microeconomic branch of the theory of public finance a model of family choice is developed the main message of the present paper is that if as the evidence suggests parents have some control over the number of children they put into the world then the effect of taxes and subsidies on the familys allocation of time and money will be generally weaker and in some respects the opposite of what it would be if the number of children were physiologically constrained or exogenously given another is that if parents derive utility from having children this has to be taken into account in any welfare calculation fertility may thus affect the design of optimal policy in two ways indirectly through its effect on market behaviour and directly through its effect on welfare excerpt

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

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

enhancing public acceptance of renewable heat obligation policies in south korea consumer preferences and policy implications abstract renewable heat obligation rho policies have continued to attract global attention and the south korean government plans to start enforcing these policies in 2016 to ensure the effectiveness of rho policies various preferences of stakeholders including end users should be considered in policy development because their benefits and costs can vary according to their level of obligation a choice experiment was conducted to analyze the preferences of end users for two types of rho policies one aimed at heat suppliers and the other at building owners the results indicate the necessity to focus on costs when designing rho policies because this element was the most important factor influencing the public s acceptance of these policies and suggest that for rho policies aimed at heat suppliers the government should convince end users of the stability of the heat supply a factor considered to be important by consumers finally the minimum level of the subsidy required to gain public approval of both types of rho was examined the annual government subsidies for the rho for heating suppliers is expected to be krw 330 billion which can be covered by collecting taxes from those consumers not subject to these obligations the results for rhos for building owners indicate krw 900 billion to 1 8 trillion as the amount of subsidy spending required of the government

a household production specification of demographic variables in demand analysis empirical investigations into the expenditure and time allocation decisions of households usually allow the variation in demographic characteristics across households in particular the number and ages of dependent children to affect these decisions the motivation for allowing such demographic effects is two fold first it permits the researcher to pool observations from households with differing demographic characteristics secondly it has been argued that it allows the researcher to construct an index normally called an equivalence scale to show the full income required by a household with some given composition to attain the same level of utility as some reference household and hence permits comparisons of welfare levels across households there are two areas of controversy surrounding this literature which directly relate to its two sources of motivation first what is the appropriate demographic specification second can the estimated parameters be used to undertake welfare comparisons a series of demand studies including barten 1964 blundell 1980 blundell and walker 1982 gorman 1976 muellbauer 1974 1977 hurd and pencavel 1981 pollak and wales 1978 1981 and ray 1983 have attempted to answer the first problem by considering the current allocation of goods and in some cases household time conditional on demographic structure this literature treats demographic variables as exogenous whereas in contrast the neoclassical fertility literature see for example the contributions in schultz 1973 treats the numbers and ages of children as endogenous nonmarket goods within a lifecycle optimising framework the second problem has been raised by pollak and wales 1979 who argue convincingly whether household composition is the result of endogenous decisions or not it is impossible to compare the welfare of households with different compositions using the results of empirical demand analysis since market decisions do not reveal how the households feel about the presence or absence of children thus estimated equivalence scales are necessarily based on the households preferences conditional on their demographic compositions the object of this paper is to suggest a new approach to the problem of demographic specification and to show that this approach both highlights the problem of making welfare comparisons and at least in part resolves it