Agreeing on Efficient Emissions Reduction

We propose a simple contest‐based mechanism providing incentives to reduce harmful emissions to their efficient level without infringing upon productive efficiency. Participation in the most stylized form of the scheme is voluntary and individually rational; all rules are mutually agreeable and are unanimously adopted if proposed. The scheme balances its budget and requires no principal. In a perhaps more realistic stochastic output version, which could potentially inform policy decisions, we show that the transfers required by the efficient mechanism create a mutual insurance motive that can serve as an effective rationale for the (gradual) formation of international environmental agreements.     

IS FULL EFFICIENCY ACHIEVABLE? AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF THE BANKING INDUSTRY IN TAIWAN

This paper aims to propose a feasible framework for estimating the efficiency of input factors for banks and the adjustment of these factors necessary to achieve full efficiency in the short and long term. Based on a sample of 39 Taiwanese banks during 1999–2011, the framework recommends a scheme along with a set of adjustments empirically that allow the banks to not only achieve full efficiency but also save 10.3% of the total costs in the short term and 8.8% in the long term. This scheme amounts to short‐term and long‐term savings of NT$3.6 billion and NT$3.1 billion, respectively. (JEL C23, D24, G21)     

京津冀协同发展背景下文化产业资源配置效率评价与对策

为提高京津冀协同发展战略实施效率,利用DEA方法,对京津冀地区文化产业资源配置效率进行了评价。结果表明,京津冀地区文化产业发展不均衡。其中,北京文化产业资源配置效率最高,天津资源配置效率有所波动,而河北省资源配置效率不佳;京津冀整体相比于长三角地区在资源配置效率方面还存在一定差距。在此基础上,提出京津冀协同发展文化产业资源配置目标调整和改进方案。最后,提出了提高京津冀协同发展文化产业资源配置效率的对策建议。     

基于免疫视角的企业产权安全反应模型

参与企业产权安全反应的要素有侵权要素、识别要素和维权要素。它们所产生的行为分别叫做侵权行为、识别行为和维权行为。产权安全反应包括识别反应和维权反应。识别反应就是认识侵权行为,识别反应的结果;维权反应就是直接保护企业权益,将侵权要素逐出企业或进行阻隔。产权安全反应的速度主要由反应体系中能发挥作用的侵权要素、识别要素和维权要素共同决定。当侵权要素的浓度与识别要素的浓度比等于识别要素的平均识别力与侵权要素的平均侵权力之比时,识别要素对侵权要素的识别效率最高,产权保护也最为适度有效。     

基于DEA的城市创新系统创新效率评价分析

城市创新系统对促进城市创新活动的开展具有重要作用,对城市创新活动的创新效率进行评价具有重要现实意义。选取6个创新投入及产出的指标和30个省会城市及直辖市作为决策单元,利用DEA方法对30个城市的创新总体效率、技术效率、规模效率和饱和度作出评价,通过差额变量分析对4个非DEA有效的典型城市提出了对应的调整方案,并分地区对4种有效性进行了分析,最后提出了相应建议。     

Commons as insurance and the welfare impact of privatization

It is shown here that, despite the efficiency gains from privatization, when markets are incomplete, all individuals may be made worse off by privatization, even when the resource is equitably privatized. Such market incompleteness is common in the developing world and can explain the often encountered resistance to efficiency enhancing privatizing reforms, especially in the case of village level landholdings and forests. The advantage of common held property arises because of its superior insurance properties (which tend to provide income maintenance in low states). Sufficient conditions are established under which any feasible insurance scheme under private property cannot ex ante Pareto dominate allocations under the commons.     

Collusion and Price Rigidity

We consider an infinitely repeated Bertrand game, in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed, i.i.d. cost shock in each period. We focus on symmetric perfect public equilibria, wherein any "punishments" are borne equally by all firms. We identify a tradeoff that is associated with collusive pricing schemes in which the price to be charged by each firm is strictly increasing in its cost level: such "fully sorting" schemes offer efficiency benefits, as they ensure that the lowest-cost firm makes the current sale, but they also imply an informational cost (distorted pricing and/or equilibrium-path price wars), since a higher-cost firm must be deterred from mimicking a lower-cost firm by charging a lower price. A rigid-pricing scheme, where a firm's collusive price is independent of its current cost position, sacrifices efficiency benefits but also diminishes the informational cost. For a wide range of settings, the optimal symmetric collusive scheme requires (i) the absence of equilibrium-path price wars and (ii) a rigid price. If firms are sufficiently impatient, however, the rigid-pricing scheme cannot be enforced, and the collusive price of lower-cost firms may be distorted downward in order to diminish the incentive to cheat. When the model is modified to include i.i.d. public demand shocks, the downward pricing distortion that accompanies a firm's lower-cost realization may occur only when current demand is high.     

An efficiency and welfare classification of rationing by waiting in the presence of bribery

Governments often allocate commodities at low prices and on a first-come-first-served basis (rationing by waiting), while bureaucrats who distribute the commodities usually take bribes. A model is developed to classify the efficiency implications of bribery, and socially optimal pricing schemes in rationing by waiting. If the rationed good and individual income spent on other goods (‘other’ income) are ‘complements’, then bribery may enhance allocative efficiency, and a ‘dual pricing’ scheme can augment social welfare. However, if the rationed commodity and ‘other’ income are ‘substitutes’, then bribery may not improve allocative efficiency, and distributing the rationed commodity free is socially optimal.     

Value for money in energy efficiency retrofits in Ireland: grant provider and grant recipients

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) administers the Better Energy Homes scheme to provide a financial incentive for home owners to engage in energy efficiency retrofits. This study analyses data from the scheme and Building Energy Rating data for participants to the scheme to examine the value for money achieved by households. In addition, this research identifies which retrofit combinations provide greatest value for money, in terms of energy efficiency gains, for the grant provider. We utilize an error-in-variables approach to model the variation in benefits accruing to households of varying characteristics. We find that household and grant provider surplus can be maximized in the short term by retrofitting less energy efficient and larger homes, timber or steel frame homes and houses rather and apartments. The types of retrofits leading to the greatest surplus for both household and grant provider include cavity wall insulation paired with either a boiler with heating controls or heating controls only retrofit.     

Cooperation in a fixed-membership labor-managed enterprise

Conditions are examined under which we can ensure efficiency in a fixed-membership labor-managed firm when the preferences of members over labor and income are unknown. The main result is the derivation of a necessary and sufficient condition on technology that ensures that we can find some reward scheme that gives efficient outcomes. Some commonly suggested reward schemes are examined and it is shown that assumptions that have been used to simplify previous analysis are, in fact, critical to many of the results that have been obtained.     

Why is Germany’s energy transition so expensive? Quantifying the costs of wind-energy decentralisation

This paper discusses the efficiency of promotion schemes for renewable energy sources using the example of onshore wind energy in Germany. We analyse whether the scheme incentivised a cost-minimal capacity build-up by developing a model to derive two cost-minimal benchmark scenarios, which are then compared to the historical capacity build-up between 1995 and 2015. The costs of the two cost-minimising benchmark scenarios are significantly lower than those of the historical build-up. The benchmark cost reduction largely stems from greater efficiency—fewer turbines are being constructed overall but they are being placed at better wind sites so the annual production of wind energy remains unchanged. Hence, aggregated turbine land use is also significantly down in these scenarios. Furthermore, we compare costs for consumers, as protecting consumers from price discrimination of producers is sometimes used to justify higher payments for low-wind sites. However, our results show that the efficiency gain from building at high wind sites outweighs the distributional effect, even from a consumer’s perspective.     

Efficiency,incentives, and individual labor supply in the labor-managed firm

Parallels are drawn between the approach to the theory of individual labor supply used by Sen (“Labor Allocation in a Co-operative Enterprise.” Rev. Econ. Stud.33: 361–371, Oct. 1966) and approaches of more recent contributions. The paper considers questions of comparative statics in a general model and attempts to distinguish between behavior in labor-managed firms and profit-maximizing firms. Diagrammatic analysis is used for a simple case where income effects are absent. Questions of efficiency and comparative statics are studied in the short run (membership fixed) and in the medium term (membership variable). Finally an incentive scheme to promote efficiency is described.     

中国省域碳排放权分配——基于环境FCAM

考虑CO_2排放的非期望产出特性,以最大化整体平均效率为目标,构建省域碳排放权分配的环境固定成本分摊模型(FCAM)。对世袭制、平等主义和支付能力三种公平分配原则下的省域碳排放权初始分配结果进行加权组合,从而获得综合公平原则下的省域碳排放权分配方案。以基于环境FCAM的分配方案趋同综合公平原则下的分配方案为目标,构建优化模型,以融合效率和公平。2020年省域碳排放权分配结果表明:最终分配方案在达到效率最优的同时,属于"绝对平均",较好地融合了效率和公平;基于强度减排压力和总量减排压力对30个样本省进行分类的结果基本一致。最后,针对四类省区的具体情况提出了相应的减排建议。     

A time-consistent model for cooperation in international pollution control

In this paper, transnational pollution is formulated as a differential game between sovereign governments. We consider the case when the countries want to cooperate and agree to act so that an international optimum can be achieved. For the cooperative scheme to be upheld throughout the game horizon, both group rationality and individual rationality are required to be satisfied at any point in time along the optimal trajectory. A payment distribution scheme is formulated to guarantee time consistency. We conclude that a payoff transfer is not necessary to ensure cooperation given that the countries are different only in environmental efficiency. However, if the countries differ in terms of damage parameters, a payoff transfer from the country with higher damage parameters to the country with lower damage parameters is required for the time-consistent cooperative solution.     

Responsive pricing

We study the efficiency property of responsive pricing, a scheme that proposes to increase prices as a function of the level of capacity utilization in environments where traditional allocation schemes (e.g. competitive markets, non-linear pricing) cannot be implemented in practice. We show that although responsive pricing implements allocations that are arbitrarily close to full capacity utilization (no wasted capacity and no excess demand), these allocations are not always efficient. We identify conditions under which efficiency occurs and discuss implications for the use of responsive pricing. We would like to thank seminar participants at the LSE, Venezia, Toulouse, and Copenhagen as well as Piero Gottardi, Karel Mertens, Marco Ottaviani, Markus Poschke, Karl Schlag, and Sanne Zwart for useful comments.     

Price-Cap Regulation and Inefficiency in Relative Pricing

The allocative efficiency properties of three price-cap schemes are compared. The scheme that uses lagged quantities in the price index and has a fixed cap works well when the firm is myopic but generates inefficient relative prices otherwise. With myopia prices are efficient and welfare is higher than with equal pricing, but the gain to the firm comes at the expense of lower consumer surplus. When the firm is not myopic pricing can be so inefficient that steady-state welfare is below the no-regulation level.     

Managerial pay adjustments: Decomposition and impact on firm productive efficiency

This paper decomposes managerial pay adjustments and examines their impact on firm productivity based upon Taiwanese firm panel data. Pay adjustments are decomposed into components arising from three sources: a scheme based on the external labour market comparisons, a scheme derived from the changes in firm and manager characteristics, and transitory pay adjustments. The stochastic frontier model is used to test how these pay components affect firm productivity. Empirical results suggest that the pay adjustments based on the comparison between managers' actual pay and their market-clearing pay are positively related to the output and technical efficiency of the firms, whereas this productivity-boosting effect cannot be seen for other components. This paper shows the importance of the external labour market in connecting managerial pay to firm productivity, and provides a model for the research of managerial pay in an environment where the compensation structure does not have apparent stock incentives.     

ENVIRONMENTAL EFFICIENCY OF THE AUSTRALIAN IRRIGATION INDUSTRY IN TREATING SALT EMISSIONS

In this paper, a stochastic translog production function frontier is specified to estimate the input-oriented technical efficiency of 11 major Australian irrigation schemes. The analysis is applied to a panel data set including the years 1998/1999, 1999/2000 and 2000/2001. The environmental efficiency of each sampled irrigation scheme in relation to treating salt emissions is measured. These EE measures are based on estimates of technical efficiency. The potential reduction of the environmentally detrimental salt emissions resulting from the improvement of environmental inefficiency is estimated. The study indicates that the sampled schemes operated at an average of 80.4% (1998/1999), 89.9% (1999/2000) to 95% (2000/2001) of full environmental efficiency. The potential contraction of salt emission is substantial. The paper also reveals that there is a wide range of EE scores in each year suggesting differences in the management performance of the salt emission problem across individual schemes.     

Storable votes

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use; the decision is then taken according to the majority of votes cast. The possibility of shifting votes intertemporally allows agents to concentrate their votes when preferences are more intense, and although the scheme will not achieve full efficiency, storable votes typically lead to ex ante welfare gains over non-storable votes. Welfare gains can be proven rigorously in the case of 2 voters. With more voters, counterexamples can be found, but the analysis suggests that the welfare improvements should continue to hold if one of the following conditions is satisfied: (i) the number of voters is above a minimum threshold; (ii) preferences are not too polarized; (iii) the horizon is long enough.