enterprises compliance with government carbon reduction labelling policy using a system dynamics approach abstract a carbon reduction labelling scheme is an effective policy tool for motivating enterprises or organizations to reduce their life cycle based carbon emissions to benefit the environment this paper uses system dynamics to model enterprises compliance with a combined government policy instrument for a carbon reduction labelling scheme that is government subsidies and economic sanctions a case study of paper enterprises in china is provided to demonstrate the application of the proposed model in which two optional technological plans to reduce the enterprises carbon emissions are examined the technological plans are categorized as a low cost and high cost plan the simulation results show that both the technological plans are vulnerable to the combined policy making and the high cost plan shows superior environmental performance for carbon emissions reduction however the enterprises are more inclined to choose the low cost plan because of superior economic performance the study offers insights to help enterprises select optimal actions on carbon emissions reduction and to inform government of possible sustainable policy design to promote low carbon development the model limitations are discussed as a basis for further improvements in low carbon development

united kingdom inflation targeting and the exchange rate the uk s monetary policy strategy is one of floating exchange rates and inflation forecast targeting with the targeted measure referring to consumer prices we consider whether it is welfare reducing to target inflation in the cpi rather than in a narrower index and the role of the exchange rate in the transmission of monetary policy actions to cpi inflation it is appropriate to model imports as intermediate goods rather than goods consumed directly by households this leads to a simpler transmission mechanism of monetary policy while also offering a sustainable explanation of the weakness of the exchange rate inflation relationship and making consumer price inflation an appropriate monetary policy target

a survey on the impediments to low carbon technology investment of the petrochemical industry in korea abstract responding to the climate change korea has been establishing a domestic policy framework for promoting energy saving and greenhouse gases reduction with the expansion of low carbon technologies for industry as a key area this paper analyzes investment barriers for low carbon technology investment and suggests supportive policies based on a survey to petrochemical companies in korea a total of 35 samples were collected among which 32 companies are targeted by the korean domestic emission trading scheme and represent 63 of the total co 2 emissions of all petrochemical companies under this scheme the analysis result indicates that low carbon technology introduction is not a priority for the sampled companies besides the lack of financial support there exist other impediments to low carbon technology investment e g lower investment priority economic loss during new technology replacement technology uncertainty and less pressure on energy prices in addition technology payback period acceptable for companies was estimated by the multi bounded discrete choice method the acceptable payback period on the part of half samples ranges from 2 4 to 3 6 years the relatively high preference to short term profitability of low carbon technologies may hinder the companies to make the investment decision financial support and information dissemination for low carbon technologies may be useful to facilitate company s investment in low carbon technologies carbon pricing policies such as emission trading scheme is agreed to be supportive by providing the price signal for the investment this analysis enhances the understating of korean company s perception on low carbon technology investment and provides meaningful policy implications for the development and improvement of related policies

elite law firms in the ipo market abstract ipos with underwriters that retain an elite law firm exhibit a lower average first day return this empirical pattern remains after controlling for an extensive set of proxies associated with existing explanations of ipo initial returns we rationalize this finding with a pre ipo pricing model in which underwriters convey their lack of conflicts of interest to the issuer by engaging an elite law firm consistent with this selection channel and our model s predictions we find a lower incidence of elite law firm involvement and a larger difference in average first day return associated with elite law firms during the dot com period we document similar findings with respect to the dispersion of ipo first day returns and a pattern in the issuers re hiring decision of investment banks consistent with our theory

managerial overconfidence and corporate risk management abstract we examine whether managerial overconfidence can help explain the observed discrepancies between the theory and practice of corporate risk management we use a unique dataset of corporate derivatives positions that enables us to directly observe managerial reactions to their speculative gains and losses from market timing when they use derivatives we find that managers increase their speculative activities using derivatives following speculative cash flow gains while they do not reduce their speculative activities following speculative losses this asymmetric response is consistent with the selective self attribution associated with overconfidence our time series approach to measuring overconfidence complements cross sectional approaches currently used in the literature our results show that managerial overconfidence which has been found to influence a number of corporate decisions also affects corporate risk management decisions

the role of the exchange rate in monetary policy rules for a country that chooses not to permanently fix its exchange rate through a currency board or a common currency or some kind of dollarization the only alternative monetary policy that can work well in the long run is one based on the trinity of i a flexible exchange rate ii an inflation target and iii a monetary policy rule while not often put into this threepart format the desirability of such a monetary policy in an open economy is in my view the clear implication of three corresponding strands of recent monetary research i research on fixed exchange rates regimes including the influential 1995 article the mirage of fixed exchange rates by maurice obstfeld and kenneth rogoff and the many analyses of the breakdown of fixed exchange rate regimes in the late 1990 s ii research on the practical success with inflation targeting by ben bernanke et al 1999 and iii research on the benefits of simple monetary policy rules see e g taylor 1999a this clear policy implication however does not end the debate about how exchange rates should be taken into account in formulating monetary policy even if one excludes capital controls and sterilized exchange market intervention from consideration because they are not effective or attractive ways to de link exchangerate movements from the domestic interest rate a crucial question remains how should the instruments of monetary policy the interest rate or a monetary aggregate react to the exchange rate should policymakers avoid any reaction and focus instead on domestic indicators such as inflation and real gdp or is the rule of thumb that a substantial appreciation of the real exchange rate furnishes a prima facie case for relaxing monetary policy as characterized by obstfeld and rogoff 1995 p 93 a better monetary policy rule or perhaps policymakers should heed the obstfeld rogoff warning that substantial departures from ppp purchasing power parity in the short run and even over decades make such a policy reaction to the exchange rate undesirable more generally if one accepts the trinity concept of monetary policy in an open economy then what is the role of the exchange rate in the monetarypolicy rule

the role of corporate reputation and employees values in the uptake of energy efficiency in office buildings although office market actors in the united kingdom show a growing interest in energy efficiency the pace of takeup of energy efficient office features is slow previous studies have highlighted the roles of limited direct financial costs and benefits efficiency gaps and market barriers in limiting the rate of technology adoption this study provides further evidence on the importance of these factors but the primary contribution is focused on the role of corporate reputation and on the importance of individuals values in shaping corporate behaviour the paper presents a theoretical framework to explain environmental decision making in firms and we present qualitative evidence drawing from sixteen semi structured individual and group interviews with office market stakeholders in london glasgow and edinburgh the research finds that companies despite gradually becoming more energy conscious still regard energy costs as a negligible part of their business costs nevertheless an increasingly important driver is the reputational gain obtained by corporate businesses implementing sustainable practices all the interviewees agreed that the pace of change in the office market is slow and that only further policy interventions will accelerate it

does prospect theory explain ipo market behavior we derive a behavioral measure of the ipo decision maker s satisfaction with the underwriter s performance based on loughran and ritter 2002 and assess its ability to explain the decision maker s choice among underwriters in subsequent securities offerings controlling for other known factors ipo firms are less likely to switch underwriters when our behavioral measure indicates they were satisfied with the ipo underwriter s performance underwriters also extract higher fees for subsequent transactions involving satisfied decision makers although our tests suggest that the behavioral model has explanatory power they do not speak directly to whether deviations from expected utility maximization determine patterns in ipo initial returns the primary equity or ipo markets are subject to a variety of well known idiosyncratic patterns not least the tendency for ipos to appear underpriced on the first day of trading the profession has invested heavily in explanations for these patterns see ritter and welch 2002 and jenkinson and ljungqvist 2001 for recent reviews the vast majority of theoretical work in the area builds at least implicitly on the premise that market participants are rational and maximize expected utility subject to the burden of market frictions asymmetric information of one sort or another is the friction most widely examined and there is a substantial body of evidence suggesting that such frictions account for at least some of the cross sectional and time variation in the idiosyncratic patterns and yet the question remains whether we can explain more than a small fraction of variation in the data recent events related to the dot corn bubble of the late 1990s lend weight to this concern and lead ritter and welch 2002 to suggest that shifting the focus of the research agenda will lead to

an optimal ipo mechanism we analyse the optimal initial public offering ipo mechanism in a multidimensional adverse selection setting where institutional investors have private information about the market valuation of the shares the intermediary has private information about the demand and the institutional investors and intermediary collude theorem 1 states that uniform pricing is optimal all agents pay the same price and characterizes the ipo price in terms of conditional expectations theorem 2 states that the optimal mechanism can be implemented by a non linear price schedule decreasing in the quantity allocated to retail investors this is similar to ipo procedures used in the u k and france relying on french ipo data we perform a gmm structural estimation and test of the model the price schedule is estimated and the conditions characterizing the optimal mechanism are not rejected

do investment banks matter for m a returns w e document a significant investment bank fixed effect in the announcement returns of m a deals the interquartile range of bank fixed effects is 1 26 compared with a fullsample average return of 0 72 the results remain significant after controlling for the component of returns attributable to the acquirer our findings suggest that investment banks matter for m a outcomes and contrast earlier studies that show no positive link between various measures of advisor quality and m a returns differences in average returns across banks are also persistent over time and predictable from prior performance clients do not chase past returns which may explain why persistence exists in m a performance while it is absent in mutual funds jel g24 g34 mer gers and acquisitions m a are among the most critical decisions a ceo can make successful mergers can create substantial synergies while misguided acquisitions can lead to misallocation of companies to parents unable to reap their full potential in addition to these large effects on shareholder value a bad acquisition also increases the ceo s risk of being fired lehn and zhao 2006 a prominent example is the departure of carly fiorina from hewlett packard which was widely attributed to her acquisition of compaq the quality of m a transactions is also of great importance to the economy as a whole the total value of m a announced by a u s acquirer in 2007 was 2 1 trillion around 15 of gdp

changes in uk monetary policy rules and discretion in practice abstract in october 1992 following sterling s departure from the exchange rate mechanism britain adopted a new framework for monetary policy that comprised two components first an explicit target for inflation and second institutional changes designed to give greater influence to the bank of england by increasing the transparency and openness of the process by which interest rates are set this paper analyses those changes from the perspective of the debate on rules versus discretion and argues that an appropriate design of institutional arrangements can provide incentives for central bankers to pursue the first best state contingent monetary policy

sticks or carrots optimal ceo compensation when managers are loss averse this paper analyzes optimal executive compensation contracts when managers are loss averse we calibrate a stylized principal agent model to the observed contracts of 595 ceos and show that this model can explain observed option holdings and high base salaries remarkably well for a range of parameterizations we also derive and calibrate the general shape of the optimal contract that is increasing and convex for medium and high outcomes and that drops discontinuously to the lowest possible payout for low outcomes finally we identify the critical features of the loss aversion model that render optimal contracts convex

monetary policy in the uk the authors argue that the institutional dimension of the bank of england monetary policy and the role the uk hm treasury assumes in this framework are both firmly based on the new consensus in macroeconomics ncm this is also the theoretical framework upon which the inflation targeting element of monetary policy is firmly based this paper discusses these aspects of uk monetary policy and then assesses the policy that has been pursued since 1997 with some reference made to the period between 1992 and 1997 when a version of the framework was introduced the strategy has been successful in terms of keeping uk inflation rates within the targets set by hm treasury however a number of problematic issues are highlighted and discussed

the relationship between enterprise efficiency in resource use and energy efficiency practices adoption abstract the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between enterprise efficiency in resource use and the adoption of energy efficiency practices recommended by the us department of energy doe through the industrial assessment center iac using non parametric techniques such as data envelopment analysis dea and parametric techniques like stochastic frontier analysis sfa and corrected ordinary least square cols to measure the efficiency the regression quantile rq is carried out to test the hypothesis that the most efficient companies have adopted a higher level of practice the main conclusion is that when the enterprise operates at increasing returns to scale rts the impact of efficiency on adoption increases positively inversely when the enterprise operates at decreasing rts the impact of efficiency on adoption increases negatively

should central banks target consumer prices or the exchange rate in this article we consider two arguments suggesting that monetary authorities in an open economy should target output price inflation and not consumer price inflation the first suggests that output price inflation corresponds to the distortions caused by price rigidity the second shows how policy rules involving consumer price inflation can induce instability because of the feedback from interest rates to consumer price inflation via the exchange rate we examine both arguments in the context of an open economy which is subject to a range of shocks we show that both arguments remain robust but that there is a case for including a terms of trade or real exchange rate gap term in the authorities welfare function alongside the output gap and output price inflation

determinants of pollution abatement in developing countries evidence from south and southeast asia abstract developing countries pa ticularly those in asia are fast adopting industrial pollution control standards similar to those in developed countries formal regulation has been greatly hampered however by the absence of clear and legally binding regulations limited institutional capacity lack of appropriate equipment and trained personnel and inadequate information on emissions one would predict highly pollution intensive production under such conditions our research however has uncovered strongly contradictory evidence despite weak or nonexistent formal regulation there are many clean plants in the developing countries of south and southeast asia of course there are also many plants which are among the world s most serious polluters what explains such extreme interplant variation this paper reviews evidence drawn from three empirical studies of plant level abatement practices conducted 1992 1994 the analyses test the importance of plant characteristics economic considerations and external pressure in determining environmental performance the results consistently show that pollution intensity is negatively associated with scale productive efficiency and the use of new process technology it is strongly and positively associated with public ownership but foreign ownership has no significant effect once other plant characteristics are taken into account among external sources of pressure community action or informal regulation emerges as a clear source of interplant differences in all three studies the results suggest that local income and education are powerful predictors of the effectiveness of informal regulation they also show that existing formal regulation has measurably beneficial effects even when it is quite weakly developed

a survey study of energy saving activities of industrial companies in the republic of korea abstract this study measures industrial energy saving activities esas in the republic of korea and identifies their determinant factors by a questionnaire survey to the energy intensive companies more than 90 of the samples have practiced the institutional and managerial esas requiring relatively lower costs and efforts although the companies have felt strong pressures from the governmental regulations and recognized the importance of industrial associations the externally coercive normative and mimetic factors still indicate no significant influence on their esas at present as internal factors the willingness for energy saving support from top management and internal training specific for energy saving determine a company s practice level of esas economic incentives like financial subsidies are useful for encouraging the company s involvement in esas korean government shall also provide more technical support to the companies particularly the small and medium sized ones for enhancing their capacities in promptly reacting to the newly initiated mandatory regulations on industrial energy efficiency

the intermediary role of an industry association in policy making processes the case of the dutch paper and board industry in the policy making process concerning energy and environmental issues cooperation between government and firms is a means to create a more efficient energy and environmental policy intermediary organizations can play an important role in this policy making process aim of this study is to get insight into the role of one specific intermediary organization the industry association in this paper we focus on the dutch paper and board industry important policy themes for this industry are waste water waste and energy efficiency we distinguished four types of governmental policy instruments top down regulation interactive regulation negative economic instruments and positive economic instruments we analyzed the role of the industry association in the policy making process for all of these four instruments the results clearly show different relative roles of the industry association in different steps of the policy making processes and for different types of instruments

what weight should be given to asset prices in the measurement of inflation besides the theoretical alchian klein 1973 case for including asset prices in measures of inflation there is also a practical case that some asset prices notably housing are closely associated with the main trends in inflation and via bubbles and busts with output disturbances attempts to use the pure alchian klein methodology in practice give excessive weight to unstable asset prices but there are more appropriate weighting schemes derived either from econometrically measured relationships or from final expenditures either way the statistical treatment of housing is crucial and is being discussed in eurostat

barriers to increasing energy efficiency evidence from small and medium sized enterprises in china abstract this paper analyzes financial informational and organizational barriers to energy efficiency investments for small and medium sized enterprises smes in china its findings are based on a survey of 480 smes in zhejiang province and complemented by semi structured interviews with enterprises contained in the survey sample responses reveal that only a minority of smes in china actively perform energy saving activities at a significant level the survey data suggest further that informational barriers are the core bottleneck inhibiting energy efficiency improvements in china s sme sector financial and organizational barriers also influence a company s energy saving activities with interview based evidence stronger than statistical evidence the interviews point out three additional barriers to energy saving activities the role of family ownership structures lax enforcement of government regulations and the absence of government support as well as a lack of skilled labor more than 40 of enterprises in the sample declared themselves unaware of energy saving equipment or practices in their respective business area indicating that there are high transaction costs for smes to gather assess and apply information about energy saving potentials and relevant technologies one policy implication of the study is that the chinese government could play a more active role in fostering the dissemination of energy efficiency related information in the sme sector

why don t issuers get upset about leaving money on the table in ipos one of the puzzles regarding initial public offerings ipos is that issuers rarely get upset about leaving substantial amounts of money on the table defined as the number of shares sold times the difference between the first day closing market price and the offer price the average ipo leaves 9 1 million on the table this number is approximately twice as large as the fees paid to investment bankers and represents a substantial indirect cost to the issuing firm we present a prospect theory model that focuses on the covariance of the money left on the table and wealth changes our reasoning also provides an explanation for a second puzzling pattern much more money is left on the table following recent market rises than after market falls this results in an explanation of hot issue markets we also offer a new explanation for why ipos are underpriced copyright 2002 oxford university press

capital shortages and persistent unemployment capital shortage charles bean over the last 10 years the rate of investment has been depressed throughout the european community some people believe that as a result there is insufficient capacity to absorb the unemployed in the event of a recovery in real demand i estimate the size of this capital gap and find that investment may need to rise by as much as 20 above the levels experienced during the first half of the 1980s however this represents no more than a return to the investment rates of the early 1970s furthermore firms will respond to capital shortages by installing new capital provided it is profitable thus the required resurgence in investment will arise automatically so that capacity shortages are likely to be a temporary phenomenon at worst the real obstacles to a rapid return to full employment lie elsewhere paticularly in the labour market the presence of such transient capacity shortages during any sustained recovery does not by itself justify policy measures discriminating in favour of investment for there is no obvious market failure involved however a sustained recovery will almost certainly be associated with a significant spurt in investment it is quite appropriate for this to be financed by borrowing from abroad so governments should be willing to see a deterioration in their current accounts and should not adopt deflationary macroeconomic policies to restrain demand

a model of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for new issues this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for the case in which the investment banker is better informed about the capital market than is the issuer and the issuer cannot observe the distribution effort expended by the banker the optimal contract under which the offer price decision is delegated to the better informed banker in order to deal with the adverse selection and moral hazard problems resulting from the informational asymmetry and the observability problem is characterized the model demonstrates a positive demand for investment banking advising and distribution services and provides an explanation of the underpricing of new issues an investment banker performs three functions which may be of value to an issuer of new securities underwriting advising and distribution this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services based on an informational asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and an investment banker ultimately a theory of the organization of the financial intermediary industry is required that would predict which firms would use which types of financial intermediaries for which purposes and which firms would raise capital without engaging the services of a financial intermediary only a limited set of such predictions are developed here in the context of a model of a fixedprice offering under a negotiated contract in which the investment banker is

gain loss asymmetric stochastic differential utility abstract this study examines a gain loss asymmetric utility in continuous time in which the investor discounts their utility gain by more than the utility loss by employing the theory of stochastic differential utility the model allows an endogenously time varying subjective discount rate in addition the model can express various forms of utility functions including a version of the epstein zin utility under the model even if the state variables do not have any jump in their paths the optimal consumption wealth ratio and portfolio weight can change non smoothly

energy demand and supply energy policies and energy security in the republic of korea abstract the republic of korea rok has enjoyed rapid economic growth and development over the last 30 years rapid increases in energy use especially petroleum natural gas and electricity and especially in the industrial and transport sectors have fueled the rok s economic growth but with limited fossil fuel resources of its own the result has been that the rok is almost entirely dependent on energy imports the article that follows summarizes the recent trends in the rok energy sector including trends in energy demand and supply and trends in economic demographic and other activities that underlie trends in energy use the rok has been experiencing drastic changes in its energy system mainly induced by industrial supply security and environmental concerns and energy policies in the rok have evolved over the years to address such challenges through measures such as privatization of energy sector activities emphases on enhancing energy security through development of energy efficiency nuclear power and renewable energy and a related focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions the assembly of a model for evaluating energy futures in the rok rok2010 leap is described and results of several policy based scenarios focused on different levels of nuclear energy utilization are described and their impacts on of energy supply and demand in the rok through the year 2030 are explored along with their implications for national energy security and long term policy plans nuclear power continues to hold a crucial position in the rok s energy policy but aggressive expansion of nuclear power alone even if possible given post fukushima global concerns will not be sufficient to attain the rok s green economy and greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

exploring new ways of assessing the effect of regulation on environmental management abstract studies indicate that while a variety of factors positively influence voluntary environmental management regulatory pressures are among the most important however most research examines samples representing large manufacturers or single industries essentially assuming a level of regulatory constraint using a sample of heterogeneous facilities this study finds that facilities can be classified according to the level of regulatory constraint and that group membership impacts the choice of environmental management strategy when assessed within a utility maximization framework more extensively regulated facilities implement more individual environmental management practices but participate in fewer formal voluntary environmental programs veps compared to other facilities

ipo pricing and share allocation the importance of being ignorant since an underwriter sets an ipo s offer price without knowing its market value investors can acquire information about its value and avoid overpriced deals lemon dodge to mitigate this well known risk the bank enters into a repeat game with a coalition of investors who do not lemon dodge in exchange for on average under priced shares we i derive and test a quantitative ipo pricing rule showing that tech ipos were not excessively underpriced during the boom of the 1990s and ii analyzing a unique multibank data set find strong support for the conjecture that a bank preferentially allocates shares to its coalition do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance igno rance is like a delicate exotic fruit touch it and the bloom is gone

affordability of energy cost increases for korean companies due to market based climate policies a survey study by sector this paper estimates the affordability of energy cost increases for energy intensive companies due to the introduction of market based climate policies in korea data were collected from 62 respondents from iron steel cement and petrochemical industries over 90 of which are under control of the target management scheme an ongoing mandatory system limiting the greenhouse gases ghg emissions of large energy consuming entities the affordable energy cost increase was estimated using the multiple bounded discrete choice mbdc format results of which show that a mean energy cost increase of 2 6 is acceptable for all the entities sampled companies from the three sectors had similar affordability with an average acceptable energy cost increase of 2 5e2 8 the affordable policy induced energy cost in creases equate to carbon prices of 2500e4000 krw t co2 about 2 3e3 5 usd t co2 for the companies surveyed econometric analysis confirmed a strong correlation between energy price level and company ownership with cost affordability with a view to developing carbon tax policy and a domestic ghg emissions trading scheme in korea this research provides a basis from an industrial perspective for carbon pricing

do investors integrate losses and segregate gains mental accounting and investor trading decisions i test whether investors trading decisions are influenced by their preferences for framing gains and losses i find that investors are more likely to bundle sales of losers than sales of winners on the same day consistent with the hedonic editing hypothesis thaler 1985 that individuals prefer integrating losses and segregating gains in addition the extent to which mixed sales of winners and losers are consistent with the hedonic editing hypothesis is greater than what would be expected under random sales of stocks these results suggest that mental accounting is likely to play a significant role in investors trading decisions