Green Public Procurement: A Neglected Tool in the European Green Deal Toolbox?

Intereconomics - Public procurement amounts to around 14% of European Union GDP and, given this size, could well represent an important tool to foster the green transition. However, green public...     

Networked innovation and coalition formation: the effect of group-based social preferences

In this paper, we study the production and dissemination of public knowledge goods, such as technological knowledge, generated by a network of voluntarily cooperating innovators. We develop a private-collective model of public knowledge production in networked innovation systems, where group-based social preferences have an impact on the coalition formation of developers. Our model builds on the large empirical literature on voluntary production of pooled public knowledge goods, including source code in communities of software developers or data provided to open access data repositories. Our analysis shows under which conditions social preferences, such as ‘group belonging’ or ‘peer approval’, influence the stable coalition size, as such rationalising several stylized facts emerging from large-scale surveys of open-source software developers, previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, heterogeneity of social preferences is added to the model to study the formation of stable but mixed coalitions.     

Analysis of the effect of charging infrastructure design on electric taxi driving profiles: A case study approach on the example of Singapore

Replacing conventional vehicle taxis with electric vehicles would be an efficient measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Due to the limited range and long charging times of current battery electric vehicles, it is of utmost importance to provide sufficient charging facilities. This article analyses the impact of the placement and charging power of charging stations on potential mileage and revenue of electric taxis on the example of Singapore. Therefore, we developed an agent-based electric taxi simulation model to investigate electric taxis’ driving profiles with respect to different vehicle types and charging infrastructure designs. This model is also capable of simulating conventional taxi driving profiles. The validation of these simulation results with real taxi data showed that the model is reproducing taxi driving profiles with high accuracy in great detail. We found out that electric taxis could reach the same mileage and revenue as conventional taxis if charging with a power of 160?kW is possible. Furthermore, we discovered that waiting times for available charging stations have a stronger effect on revenue than the length of detours to reach charging stations. Based on these findings, we concluded that it is more important to reduce waiting times by placing sufficient numbers of charging stations at each location before expanding the charging network by installing small numbers of charging stations at many locations.     

Are Chinese nationals’ attitudes to wildlife tourist attractions different from those of other nationalities?

Many wildlife tourist attractions (WTAs) have negative impacts on animal welfare and species conservation. In the absence of regulation, raising standards requires tourists to create market pressure by choosing to attend WTAs with benefits for wildlife. We surveyed respondents from five countries – China, Australia, Canada, UK, and USA – to quantify how attitudes to captive animals, and towards WTAs’ outputs and standards, may vary with nationality. Our aim was to provide a firm basis for behaviour change interventions to alter current patterns of tourist consumption of WTAs. All respondents agreed on the importance of conservation and animal welfare, but Chinese respondents were twice as likely to believe that WTAs would not be allowed to exist if they were bad for animals, and that WTAs’ promotional materials were reliable indicators of welfare and conservation standards. These findings indicate Chinese respondents had fundamentally similar attitudes to those from the other countries, but differed in how those attitudes were likely to be applied. Chinese tourists may experience more barriers to aligning their actions with their values with respect to WTAs. Removing these barriers may require information campaigns to highlight the lack of regulation, and the unreliability of some WTAs’ promotional materials and tourists’ reviews.     

Stock market volatility forecasting: Do we need high-frequency data?

The general consensus in the volatility forecasting literature is that high-frequency volatility models outperform low-frequency volatility models. However, such a conclusion is reached when low-frequency volatility models are estimated from daily returns. Instead, we study this question considering daily, low-frequency volatility estimators based on open, high, low, and close daily prices. Our data sample consists of 18 stock market indices. We find that high-frequency volatility models tend to outperform low-frequency volatility models only for short-term forecasts. As the forecast horizon increases (up to one month), the difference in forecast accuracy becomes statistically indistinguishable for most market indices. To evaluate the practical implications of our results, we study a simple asset allocation problem. The results reveal that asset allocation based on high-frequency volatility model forecasts does not outperform asset allocation based on low-frequency volatility model forecasts.     

Unemployment durations and local labour market conditions

ABSTRACT

Unemployment durations vary across local authority districts in the UK. We explore the extent to which this variation is explained by differences in local labour demand as opposed to composition, business cycle and regional effects. We use seventeen waves of the British Household Panel Survey to identify the determinants of the duration of unemployment spells. Once we adjust for individual-level, business cycle and regional controls, we do not find evidence that living in a local authority district with relatively high unemployment is associated with longer spells of unemployment. This indicates that differences in labour demand operate at larger geographic scales, such as between large regions. Our findings have implications for the design of policies to help high unemployment districts.     

Effectiveness of harvest strategies in achieving multiple management objectives in a multispecies fishery

Fisheries management is characterised by multiple objectives, some of which may be complementary, while others may require trade‐offs between outcomes. Balancing these objectives is made more complex in the case of multispecies and multigear fisheries. In this paper, we develop a bioeconomic model that captures the key elements of such a fishery to test a range of potential harvest strategies to provide insights into how economic target reference points could lead to both desirable and undesirable management outcomes (e.g. discards). The model is developed as a long‐run optimisation model to identify target reference points to achieve multispecies maximum economic yield, and a dynamic recursive optimisation model, which includes more realistic representation of fishers’ behaviour, such as discards and trading of under‐caught species quotas. The potential economic, social and ecological impacts are evaluated using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The results suggest that the use of proxy target reference points can result in short‐term economic benefits at the cost of slower stock recovery and higher discarding. Limiting the number of species subject to quota controls may also prove beneficial in multispecies fisheries, while ensuring quota markets are efficient is likely to produce benefits irrespective of the harvest strategy adopted.     

REPORTING GUIDELINES FOR META-ANALYSIS IN ECONOMICS

Meta-analysis has become the conventional approach to synthesizing the results of empirical economics research. To further improve the transparency and replicability of the reported results and to raise the quality of meta-analyses, the Meta-Analysis of Economics Research Network has updated the reporting guidelines that were published by this Journal in 2013. Future meta-analyses in economics will be expected to follow these updated guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta-analysis should deviate from them.