Energiesparen: Warum wird Beratung gefördert?

Home renovation is generally asserted to be a highly effective means to increase residential energy efficiency and thereby contribute to climate protection from reduced energy consumption. As part of a larger package of measures in the residential sector, the German government is consequently providing financial support for home audits from recognized energy experts who provide advice on retrofitting options. To date, the question concerning the effectiveness these home audits has largely escaped empirical scrutiny. The present paper fills this void by providing evidence for considerable free-rider effects within the home audit program, yielding serious reservations with respect to both the effectiveness of the program and its fiscal costs. Moreover, given the substantial differences between the gross- and net effects of home audits that are revealed by this analysis, the program’s contribution to climate protection and thereby the central justification for the associated government outlays is called into question. The social benefit of the program emerges only from those retrofits that would not have been undertaken in the absence of the home audit.     

A parsimonious model to forecast financial distress,based on audit evidence

This paper provides evidence that audit reports convey relevant evidence for inferring the existence of underlying, unrevealed, financial imbalances. Unlike previous works, which studied US listed-firms bankruptcy, our research deals with Spanish non-financial SMEs under financial stress. Our results indicate that the audit of distressed SMEs has several distinctive features: higher auditor rotation, more qualified reports, and non-compliance with deadlines to approve and file the annual financial statements. We use this evidence to build and test a parsimonious and reliable forecast model. Several implications for auditors’ independence, information quality, and failure forecast are discussed.     

Evolving China Strategies: How the Japanese Compare

Taking a sceptical view of the ‘Asian miracles’ proposition that government failure is the main culprit behind development failure, this article reviews the Philippine development experience. The Philippine configuration consists of a weak state carrying out industrial promotion and a large private sector whose dynamics depend heavily on state-managed privileges. In the final section, the article proposes an alternative to the rent-seeking model, in which rents defined as returns contingent on political position and rivalry over political position determine private investment behaviour. In such a society, there is limited internal basis for structural change and growth is accidental to external developments.     

GENERAL AND PARTIAL EQUILIBRIA IN A CONSUMPTION ECONOMY

We consider a simple aggregative consumption economy, where there is a market for commodities and four financial markets: for bonds, deposits, credits and some speculative asset. There is a Wicksellian central bank. The existence of temporary equilibrium is discussed by considering partial equilibria in the different markets.     

Local water markets for irrigation in southern Spain: A multicriteria approach

Spanish authorities have recently approved a new legislative framework for the creation of local water markets to improve allocative efficiency for this scarce resource. This paper analyses the potential impacts of the policy. A utility function for three groups of farmers was elicited, using a method that does not require interaction with the decision-makers. Utility was measured as a function of the first two moments of the distribution of total gross margin. The utility functions were then used to simulate farmers' responses to changes in the price of water.     

Technical efficiency in the Spanish agrofood industry

This study estimates frontier production functions with cross-section data lor the Spanish agrofood industry by using deterministic and stochastic parameuic approaches. We compute the individual technical efficiency for each firm, compare the results and explain the relationship between technical efficiency and other relevant quantitative variables. The results indicate that the Spanish agrofood industry has a level of efficiency between 68% and 93%; which means that it is potentially capable of increasing production without increasing its Consumption of inputs. This efficiency level is positively related to factor productivity and unitary labour costs.