Renewable Energy Policy Instruments and Market Power

Markets for green certificates allow generators with market power to squeeze the margins of their competitors, as a generator that is vertically integrated into network activities might do. We analyze this issue in a stylized electricity industry in which a dominant producer of both conventional and renewable energy is facing a competitive fringe of renewable‐energy producers. We demonstrate that whether or not a dominant firm is vertically integrated into network activities, it can disadvantage the fringe producers by distorting certificates prices, thereby inducing cost inefficiency in the generation of renewable energy. We compare green certificates to a system of feed‐in tariffs, where a similar margin squeeze is not possible.     

Incentives to (not) disclose energy performance information in the housing market

Disclosure of energy performance certificates (EPCs) is often incomplete, which hampers their effectiveness in relieving information asymmetries between landlords and tenants in the housing market. Even when a certificate is available, landlords do not always disclose it. This contradicts the unraveling result, according to which all landlords should disclose quality information unless it is costly to do so. We leverage a cross-sectional dataset of residential rental advertisements from the Belgian region of Brussels to empirically evaluate incentives to disclose an EPC. We find that two fundamental assumptions for the unraveling result are not confirmed in our setting: tenants do not necessarily value energy performance of rental property and do not appear to rationally adjust their expectations when faced with dwellings that withhold their EPC. The paper formulates specific policy advice for reforming EPC mechanisms to increase disclosure rates.     

The Impact of Green Building Labels on the Price of Housing: Evidence from China

This paper focuses on the willingness to pay for green housing in China. First, we introduce green building related labels in China and briefly discuss the consumers’ incentives to buy this kind of building. Second, with the available transaction data in Shanghai, a hedonic regression model is applied to investigate whether or not a price premium in the residential market exists. Furthermore, we use the nonparametric matching model under a treatment framework to see the robustness of our results. The empirical result shows there exists a significant price premium in China. However, the premium does not increase with quality certification tiers. That may imply that homebuyers in China are not sensitive to the differences among green buildings although they are willing to pay a higher price for this newly emerging energy-saving building. And we also give the explanation why this has happened.     

POTENTIALS FOR AND BARRIERS TO BUILDING ENERGY CONSERVATION IN CHINA

China is distinct among developing countries in that it has significant heating loads over much of the country. Because nearly half of the urban residential buildings are located in climates colder than that of Washington state, the already large demand for space heating will skyrocket if the current building boom continues. Space heating energy use, excluding that for hotels and offices catering to foreigners, is constrained by mandated coal allocations resulting in partially heated buildings with indoor temperatures significantly below design conditions.
This underheating, to a significant extent, masks the energy savings obtained from more energy-efficient boilers and building designs. Even so, computer simulations show that such conservation strategies can reduce current energy use by 40 percent, while dramatically raising indoor temperatures. Economic calculations comparing energy savings with increased construction costs are skewed by the unmet heating loads as well as by government-subsidized coal prices that are below actual costs. From the perspective of building owners and managers, building energy conservation still is economically attractive in the cold Northeast– where the cost of conserved coal is half that of the subsidized coal price – but is difficult to justify in terms of economic payback in Beijing or Shanghai.     

Do environmental benefits matter? Evidence from a choice experiment among house owners in Germany

Residential buildings strongly contribute to global CO₂ emissions due to the high energy demand for electricity and heating, particularly in industrialised countries. Within the EU, decentralised heat generation is of particular relevance for future climate policy, as its emissions are not covered by the EU ETS. We conducted a choice experiment concerning energy retrofits for existing houses in Germany. In the experiment, the approximately 400 sampled house owners could either choose a modern heating system or an improved thermal insulation for their home. We used standard and mixed logit specifications to analyse the choice data. We found environmental benefits to have a significant impact on choices of heating systems. However, they played no role in terms of insulation choices. Based on the estimated mixed logit model, we further obtained willingness-to-pay (WTP) measures for CO₂ savings.     

The nascent market for “green” real estate in Beijing

In recent years, formal certification programs for rating and evaluating the sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings have proliferated around the world. Developers recognize that such “green labels” differentiate products and allow them to charge a price premium. China has not formally adopted such rating standards. In the absence of such standards, developers are competing with each other based on their own self-reported indicators of their buildings’ “greenness”. We create an index using Google search to rank housing complexes in Beijing with respect to their “marketing greenness” and document that these “green” units sell for a price premium at the presale stage but they subsequently resell or rent for a price discount. An introduction of a standardized official certification program would help “green” demanders to acquire units that they desire and would accelerate the advance of China’s nascent green real estate market.     

Eco-labeling in commercial office markets: Do LEED and Energy Star offices obtain multiple premiums?

This paper investigates the effect of eco-labeling on rental rates, sale prices and occupancy rates. The consensus emerging from previous studies appears to be that investors in and occupiers of eco-labeled buildings obtain a bundle of benefits related to lower operating costs, reputation benefits and productivity higher. In this study, a hedonic model is used to test whether the presence of an eco-label has a significantly positive effect on rental rates, sale prices and occupancy rates of commercial office buildings in the US. The results suggest that office buildings with Energy Star or LEED eco-labels obtain rental premia of approximately 3-5%. Dual certification produces an additive effect with rental premia estimated at 9%. Respective sale price premia for Energy Star and LEED labeled office buildings are 18% and 25%. The sale price premium for dual certification is estimated at 28-29%. An occupancy premium could not be confirmed for LEED labeled office buildings and only a small positive occupancy premium was found for Energy Star.     

Monopoly Power and Distribution in Fragmented Markets: The Case of Groundwater

This paper examines monopoly power in the market for groundwater (irrigation water extracted by private tubewells), a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation. In Pakistan's Punjab region, groundwater and tenancy contracts are often interlinked, with share-tenants gaining access to water through the use of their landlord's tubewell. An analysis of groundwater transactions shows that tenants of tubewell owners are charged lower prices than other customers. Tubewell owners and their tenants also use considerably more groundwater on their plots than other farmers. Using detailed price and quantity data, the efficiency and distributional implications of this monopoly power are explored.     

绿色建筑需求端经济激励政策的博弈分析

当前的房地产住宅市场上绿色建筑与普通建筑的价格并没有明显的区分,主要原因是市场规范度不够。对绿色建筑需求端实施经济激励政策可以达到规范市场、推动绿色建筑发展的目的。建立了政府和消费者群体之间的非对称博弈模型,并根据演化博弈论的方法,对其相互作用时的策略选择行为进行分析,然后对双方分别提出了最优策略建议。     

矿业安全与健康供给的社会管制研究

以行政问责、矿产资源整合、区域性停产整顿等方式遏制矿难,见效不大。矿主是安全物品供给主体,但缺乏强迫矿主为矿工提供安全与健康物品的制度安排。只生产矿产品不生产安全与健康物品,让矿工承担成本而矿主增加收入属于市场失灵,市场失灵时的政府管制应定性为保护矿工基本人权的社会管制,必须通过社会管制强迫矿主供给矿工享用的集体物品而阻止矿主的不当收入。     

绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书机制研究

我国建筑业资源的消耗水平远高于世界平均水平,控制建筑产品资源消耗对于保护环境、促进经济的可持续发展具有重要意义。受可交易排污许可制度的启发,探讨了可交易证书机制在绿色建筑规制中的应用可行性,从绿色建筑的节水、节能、节材、节地等方面入手,设计了绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书体系;并根据建筑产品开发建设的特点,设计了绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书规制政策,讨论了影响绿色建筑产品相关可交易证书机制的四个核心环节,认为只要标准设定、审核认证、证书交易与监督惩罚四个核心环节合理而有效,即可确保可交易证书机制的顺利实施。     

Behavioral responses of green builders to discontinuous certification schemes

I study behavioral responses to the green building certification system developed by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program (LEED). LEED provides four different certification levels (Certified, Silver, Gold, and Platinum) that are all defined by a specific threshold. Using micro data on LEED-certified buildings, I document bunching of buildings at or slightly above the different cutoffs. The findings are robust to different specifications, observed for different versions of LEED. Using the methods from the public finance literature, which studies bunching responses to ‘kinks’ and ‘notches’ in tax systems (e.g., Kleven and Waseem, 2013, Chetty et al., 2011), I quantify the bunching mass at each threshold and for different US states to explain variance in observed bunching. Using cross-sectional variation in bunching across different states of the US, I find a significant negative relationship between the bunching estimators and energy prices. This finding suggests that higher energy prices provide investors with incentives to compare the detailed product features and in turn reduces the building developers’ incentive to situate right at the certification cutoff.     

不同质量能力企业的质量信号选择偏好分析

质量能力提升与质量信号传递是新常态下制造业企业提高产品质量,实现市场需求的重要途径。基于2015年中国企业-员工匹配调查数据,运用Oprobit模型对不同质量能力企业的产品质量信号选择偏好进行研究。结果表明,质量战略能力强的企业更倾向于选择强制性标准或市场性价格作为质量信号传递的载体,质量运营能力强的企业更倾向于选择自愿性商标或强制性标准作为质量信号传递的载体,而质量管控能力对质量信号选择倾向的作用不显著,质量竞争能力强的企业并不认可除品牌外的质量信号作为产品质量能力的效用。基于此,建议加大对标准信息缺失或造假的监管力度,鼓励企业进行第三方认证,降低第三方认证成本,同时鼓励企业进行质量战略能力及品牌能力的建设与提升。     

Space-time approach to commercial property prices valuation

There exists three ways of approaching real estate prices: the cost approach, the market data approach and the income capitalization approach. In this article, we propose an improvement of the market data approach that takes into account the spatial component. In particular, we propose a modified market data approach based on interpolation, being the structure of the spatial correlation between the prices of properties the main factor to obtain the weights. Interpolation methods have been widely used for estimating real estate prices, but they do not take into account the structure of their spatial dependence. Although this drawback is overcome by kriged estimation, in the case of the prices of commercial properties, they do not provide good estimates because the scarceness of the market information. This is why auxiliary information is needed and cokriging methods are used to obtain estimates that are more accurate. The aim of this article is the comparison of cokriged estimation of premises prices in two different temporal moments in the emblematic old part of Toledo city (Spain), using housing prices as an auxiliary random function due to their strong correlation with the main one. Cokriging, kriging and inverse distance weighting results are compared.     

Land Tenure Insecurity and Formalizing Land Rights in Madagascar: A Gender Perspective on the Certification Program

This contribution examines Madagascar's land tenure reform – aimed at reducing land tenure insecurity – from a gender perspective. In particular, it investigates the certification program issuing formal land title deeds (land certificates) to landholders. Drawing on a household survey with gender-disaggregated asset data conducted in the rural municipality Soavinandriana, the analysis suggests that the certification program has strengthened both men's and women's formal claims to individually held land. However, the lack of gender equality principles and, in particular, of mechanisms to ensure that couples’ jointly held land is jointly secured, seems to have reinforced primary ownership of land by male household heads, at the expense of women's land rights. Furthermore, the land tenure reform does not address some of the most important threats to tenure security such as colonial titles and commercial pressure on land, and large parts of the country are still not covered by the certification program.     

ISO 14001 Environmental Certification: A Sign Valued by the Market?

The main purpose of this work is to analyse whether ISO 14001 certification is interpreted by the capital market as a sign of environmental responsibility, modifying long-term efficiency expectations and the profitability of firms. Under competing assumptions that ISO 14001 certification is adopted by firms either proactively or reactively, we test competing hypotheses about how this certification affects the market value of firms. The analysis is based on a sample of 80 environmental certifications of the plant systems or processes of large Spanish firms which traded on the continuous market of the Madrid Stock Exchange from 1996 to 2002. Using event study methodology, we found that ISO 14001 certification has a negative effect on the market value of certain firms. Specifically, the results obtained seem to show that the market negatively views the allocation of resources to ISO 14001 certification in the case of less polluting and less internationalised firms. On the other hand, the results obtained do not suggest clear evidence that the economic impact of ISO 14001 certification is negative for more polluting and more internationalised firms.     

HOUSEWORK: PRICELESS OR VALUELESS?

Two ways of estimating the value of housework are currently used. One is the opportunity cost approach, which sets the value of work done at home equal to the income the person could earn in the labor market. The other is the market cost approach, which uses the cost of hiring someone to do the housework to determine its value. In this study we use data on earnings of female clerical workers with various patterns of labor force participation to obtain estimates of the opportunity cost of hometime for such women. We find that potential market earnings do not provide an acceptable estimate of the value of housework, and suggest that using the wages of general household workers is a better approach.     

Insecurity of property rights and social matching in the tenancy market

This paper shows that insecurity of property rights over agricultural land can have large efficiency and equity costs because of the way it affects matching in the tenancy market. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord's decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land to the tenant and when contract enforcement is decreasing in social distance with the tenant. These effects are quantified for the case of local land rental markets in the Dominican Republic. Results show that insecure property rights lead to matching in the tenancy market along socio-economic lines, severely limiting the size of the rental market and the choice of tenants for landlords, both with efficiency costs. Social segmentation reduces access to land for the rural poor, with high equity costs. Simulations suggest that improving tenure security would increase rental transactions by 21% and the area rented to the poor by 63%. Increased property rights security is hence beneficial not only to asset owners, but also to those with whom they might interact in the market.     

Firm-specific cost savings and market power

Summary. We report a policy experiment that illustrates a potential problem of using historical pass-through rates as a means of predicting the competitive consequences of projected firm-specific cost savings in antitrust contexts, particularly in merger analysis. The effects of cost savings on welfare can vary vastly, depending on how the savings affect the industry supply schedule. In a capacity-constrained price-setting oligopoly, we observe that cost savings can overwhelm behaviorally salient market power incentives when the savings affect marginal (high cost) units. However, cost savings of the same magnitude on an infra-marginal unit leave market power unchanged.     

COMMERCIAL REVITALIZATION IN LOW‐INCOME URBAN COMMUNITIES: THE HOLDUP PROBLEM AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT POLICY

A commercial development model, based on Fujita's monopolistic competition model of spatial agglomeration, addresses firms' decisions to enter urban communities. The model focuses on commercial developers and large department stores, and identifies a potential holdup problem in the commercial development market arising because developers incur costs before negotiating with anchor tenants over profit sharing; the holdup problem is more likely to occur in low‐income communities where the profitability of commercial projects is small. The model predicts that direct incentives to developers are preferred to general tax incentives for addressing this market failure. (JEL R58, H50, H76)