Money,Comfort or Environment? Priorities and Determinants of Energy Efficiency Investments in Irish Households

Energy efficiency is an effective strategy to reduce household energy consumption. Investments in energy efficiency measures (EEMs) result in reduced energy bills and increased comfort for households, while also contributing to national environmental targets. This article examines an energy efficiency scheme in Ireland and investigates the factors that determine investments in energy efficiency measures and the motivations of Irish households to participate in energy saving programs and adopt EEMs. The paper investigates three key research questions: the determination of investments in EEMs, with special focus on motivations and their relative importance; the consistency of motivations over the course of the decision-making process; and the consistency of determinants and motivations for investments in EEMs across different measures. The paper studies the implementation of seven energy efficiency measures in residential houses throughout Ireland. Results indicate that the decision to ultimately apply and invest in EEMs is mainly driven by monetary or economic factors such as gains in energy savings and the private cost of the measures. Comfort gains are found to be a secondary factor and environmental benefits of EEMs are found to be of little concern when making investment decisions. Finally, we suggest focusing on providing information about the benefits of the EEMs on energy savings and improvements in comfort in order to increase the adoption of EEMs by households in Ireland.     

The purchasing department's leadership role in developing and maintaining a preferred customer status

Developing and maintaining a preferred customer status is one of the main objectives of organizations that want to obtain a better access to supplier's information, resources, and innovation. This paper addresses the extent and the nature of the purchasing department's leadership role in the process of developing and maintaining a preferred customer status. A qualitative exploratory approach based on eleven cases has been used in order to take into consideration the context specific to the buyer-supplier relationship in a preferred customer scenario.Our study shows that the purchasing department performs four main categories of roles: (1) identifies and selects the best supplier, (2) structures and segments the supply base, (3) builds close relationships with selected suppliers and (4) develops working relationships, using an effective communication. Each of these roles is related to three key components of the purchasing department's capabilities: boundary, relational, and coordination. These four categories of roles illustrate supply's ability to recognize and understand the specifics of the preferred customer situation. Based on our analysis, the purchasing department should be viewed as extending an organization's resource base, making the organization more competitive.Our analysis also shows that the purchasing managers' leadership is critical for the development and the coordination of activities with selected suppliers, as well as proper communication with them. Specifically, the purchasing manager's transformational leadership generates more internal user and supplier involvement through the creation and articulation of a common vision, by establishing shared goals with other organizational units, and by focusing on activities that benefit the organization; this allows to move from initiative-driven efforts to an “institutionalized preferred customer status management” in the organization.     

Income inequality in the U.S.: The Kuznets hypothesis revisited

Using annual data from 1919 to 2002, the structural transformation hypothesis proposed by Simon Kuznets helps explain the U-shape of U.S. top 1% or 0.01% income share distributions. Flexible autoregressive lag representations are employed and generalized methods of moments reinforce our results. First, as the employment share in goods producing activities falls, income inequality increases in the long run. Second, federal top taxation has only shortterm negative impacts. Third, these major results hold to business cycle controls (linear time trend and real output fluctuations) and to robustness checks of structural changes documented for the U.S. economy around the late 1970s.     

Risk aversion under preference uncertainty

We show that if an agent is uncertain about the precise form of his utility function, his actual relative risk aversion may depend on wealth even if he knows his utility function lies in the class of constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility functions. We illustrate the consequences of this result for optimal asset allocation: poor agents that are uncertain about their risk aversion parameter invest less in risky assets than wealthy investors with identical risk aversion uncertainty.     

Public spending and optimal taxes without commitment

We consider a representative agent, infinite-horizon economy where production requires private and public capital. The supply of public capital is financed through distortionary taxation. The optimal (second best) tax policy of a benevolent government is time inconsistent. We therefore introduce explicitly the constraint that at no point in time the revision of the original tax plan is desirable. We completely characterize the (third best) tax plan that satisfies this constraint, and estimate the difference in tax rate between the second and third best policy for a wide range of parameters. For some of these the difference between the second and third best tax rates is large, and so are the associated rates of economic growth.     

Latin American multinationals: A historical and theoretical approach*

Among the so‐called multinationals from the South, Latin American multinationals are outstanding for being pioneers. Their history goes even back to the end of the 19th century. In this article, we sketch a brief history of Latin American multinationals, but we concentrate on their development and growing importance since the 1980s within the context of economic reforms and globalization. We then apply a theoretical and typological perspective in order to characterize these multinational companies and to identify the elements that will condition their future behavior and development     

Crisis or transformation? Japan viewed from Hungary*

This paper challenges the view that Japan has been in crisis in the past decade. After citing some basic contradictory facts, the author first summarizes his arguments for the prevailing crisis mood by grouping them into ‘superficial’, ‘middle‐of‐the‐scale’ and ‘profound’ reasons. Then, in order to better prove his point that one should speak about the necessary transformation of the Japanese economy and society, rather than about the crisis, he gives a wider than usual coverage of the main areas of transformation.     

Five charges against the precautionary principle

We defend the precautionary principle against five common charges, namely that it is ill-defined, absolutist, and a value judgement, increases risk-taking, and marginalizes science. We argue, first, that the precautionary principle is, in principle, no more vague or ill-defined than other decision principles and like them it can be made precise through elaboration and practice. Second, the precautionary principle need not be absolutist in the way that has been claimed. A way to avoid this is through combining the precautionary principle with a specification of the degree of scientific evidence required to trigger precaution, and/or with some version of the de minimis rule. Third, the precautionary principle does not lead to increased risk-taking, unless the framing is too narrow, and then the same problem applies to other decision rules as well. Fourth, the precautionary principle is indeed value-based, but only to the same extent as other decision rules. Fifth and last, the precautionary principle is not unscientific other than in the weak sense of not being exclusively based on science. In that sense all decision rules are unscientific.     

No-arbitrage, state prices and trade in thin financial markets

We examine how non-competitiveness in financial markets affects the choice of asset portfolios and the determination of equilibrium prices. In our model, potential arbitrage is conducted by a few highly specialized institutional investors who recognize and estimate the impact of their trades on financial prices. We apply a model of economic equilibrium, based on Weretka (, 2007a), in which price effects are determined endogenously as part of the equilibrium concept. For the case in which markets allow for perfect insurance, we argue that the principle of no-arbitrage asset pricing is consistent with non-competitive behavior of the arbitragers and extend the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to the non-competitive setting.