The demand for gasoline: a two stage approach

The demand for gasoline has typically been estimated using a reduced-form equation model. The simplicity of the approach is attractive, but has proven to be costly in terms of the insights lost as to the nature of the processes governing the interdependence between fuel efficiency and the overall demand for gasoline. On the other hand, disaggregating the overall demand for gasoline into all of its components produces an enormous amount of detail and many insights, but increases commensurately the complexity of the system and reduces its usefulness in forecasting.A two stage simple demand equation is used which first involves an estimation of the level of fuel efficiency of the fleet stock in terms of price induced technical change. In the second stage, the first equation is coupled with other typical demand variables to determine the overall demand for gasoline. The procedure provides an excellent forecasting equation of both the short-and long-term demand for gasoline.     

Competitive location strategies for two facilities

In this paper we present the problem of locating a facility when competition from another facility is taken into consideration. Two problems are addressed here. One is the location of a new facility that will attract the most buying power from an existing facility. The other is the location of a facility that will secure the most buying power againts the best location of competing facility to be set up in the future.     

Integrating uncertain user-generated demand data when locating facilities for disaster response commodity distribution

This paper presents a new facility location problem variant with application in disaster relief. The problem is unique in that both verified data and unverified user-generated data are available for consideration during decision making. The problem is motivated by the recent need of integrating unverified social data (e.g., Twitter posts) with data from more traditional sources, such as on-the-ground assessments and aerial flyovers, to make optimal decisions during disaster relief. Integrating social data can enable identifying larger numbers of needs in shorter amounts of time, but because the information is unverified, some of it may be inaccurate. This paper seeks to provide a “proof of concept” illustrating how the unverified social data may be exploited. To do so, a framework for incorporating uncertain user-generated data when locating Points of Distribution (PODs) for disaster relief is presented. Then, three decision strategies that differ in how the uncertain data is considered are defined. Finally, the framework and decision strategies are demonstrated via a small computational study to illustrate the benefits user-generated data may afford across a variety of disaster scenarios.     

The industrial demand for energy

This paper uses a constant elasticity of substitution production function to examine the extent of factor substitutability in the production of industrial goods. Subsequently, the degree of interfuel substitution is estimated and it is demonstrated that all energy sources are substitutable. Finally, the stability of the demand for various energy sources is empirically tested for and it is concluded that over the period of investigation the demand has in fact remained unaltered.     

The derived demand for faculty research

Estimation of the demands for many services supplied by government and charitable organizations are hampered by two practices common to the supply of these services. The suppliers often employ non‐price rationing of these services, and they price discriminate. The supply of college training, for example, is rationed on the basis of academic ability as well as willingness to pay, and more able students are typically quoted lower net prices (associated with scholarships) than less able students. This paper suggests a method for dealing with both practices in the analysis of cross‐sectional data. This methodology is used to investigate the question of why university faculty members are expected to do research as well as teach. One answer supported by our empirical work is that the customers (e.g., the students) demand it. Thus, controlling for price and non‐academic features, better students will choose to attend a university where more scholarly research is performed. Moreover, our empirical findings also support a strong negative link between faculty time devoted to teaching and the supply of research. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The demand for season of birth

We study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20–45 in the USA, using birth certificate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete‐choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring first birth is significantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC (Women, Infants & Children) food benefits during pregnancy, prepregnancy obesity, and the mother working in “education, training, and library” occupations; whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certificate, all our findings are muted. A summer first birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the USA. Among married women aged 20–45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade‐off 560 grams of birth weight in the normal range to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp (percentage points) increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth.     

论道德需要对法的影响

道德需要是将社会客观需要与法相联系的中间环节。道德需要是决定法产生的主观因素,其影响着法的发展和演变,法的实现与其密切相关。     

The demand for and supply of assurance

Consumers want products and services that are safe and of good quality. Corresponding to such demand is the demand for assurance , before the fact, that the quality and safety will be as promised. his demand for assurance creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to profit by providing assurance - and they do so in a wide and largely unappreciated variety of ways. The essential dialectic of the free enterprise system does apply to assurance. Governments'quality and safety restrictions on the freedom of contract, known to be so costly, are, therefore, unredeemed and should be repealed.     

The impact of consumer health information on the demand for health services

This paper empirically examines whether consumers use health information, from non-physician information sources, as a substitute or complement for health services – namely for physician visits and emergency room (ER) visits. An indicator of patient trust in physicians is developed and used as a proxy for potential unobserved heterogeneity that may drive both consumers’ propensity to seek information and to use physician services. The results, after correcting for sample selection bias and controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, concur with the literature, that consumer health information increases the likelihood of visiting a physician as well as the frequency of visits on average. However, low-trust consumers tend to substitute self-care through consumer health information for physician services. Further, better-informed consumers make significantly fewer ER visits suggesting that information may be improving efficiency in the market.     

The demand for M3 in the euro area

In this paper, an empirically stable money demand model for M3 in the euro area is constructed. Starting with a multivariate system, three cointegrating relationships with economic content are found: (i) the spread between the long‐term and the short‐term nominal interest rates, (ii) the long‐term real interest rate, and (iii) a long‐run demand for broad money M3. There is evidence that the determinants of M3 money demand are weakly exogenous with respect to the long‐run parameters. Hence, following a general‐to‐specific modelling approach, a parsimonious conditional error‐correction model for M3 money demand is derived which can be interpreted economically. For the conditional model, long‐run and short‐run parameter stability is extensively tested and not rejected. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal advertising for selling a product with a nondifferentiable demand function

We consider a firm which seeks the maximum profit by selling a product and assume that the firm can advertise its product in order to improve the firm goodwill and affect the product demand positively. In particular the good demand is zero when the goodwill is less than a fixed threshold. The problem is formulated in terms of optimal control theory. We show that there exists a unique optimal solution and sketch an algorithm to determine it.     

Estimating a complete set of state demand equations for planning: The Rhode Island experience

The objectives of this paper are twofold: one is to estimate a complete set of twenty consumer demand equations at the state level: and the other is to investigate all the possible lag structures for real personal disposable income and relative price, and to choose that set of consumer demand equations with the best lag structures by an iterative algorithm. The extremely high coefficient of determination and other merits seem to suggest the worthiness of this approach.     

The effect of a large expansion of pre-primary school facilities on preschool attendance and maternal employment

We provide evidence on the impact of a large-scale construction of pre-primary school facilities in Argentina. We estimate the causal impact of the program on pre-primary school attendance and maternal labor supply. Identification relies on a differences-in-differences strategy where we combine differences across regions in the number of facilities built with differences in exposure across cohorts induced by the timing of the program. We find a sizeable impact of the program on pre-primary school participation among children aged between 3 and 5. In fact, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of a full take-up of newly constructed places. In addition, we find that the implicit childcare subsidy induced by the program appears to increases maternal employment.     

The impact of nicotine replacement therapies on cigarette demand

Over the past 20 years, several nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) have been approved for use as smoking cessation aids, with over-the-counter use of these products approved beginning in 1996. To date, only one econometric study has examined the impact of NRT on cigarette demand, providing limited evidence that the availability of these products has reduced cigarette demand. This paper adds to this limited literature by examining the impact of NRT availability, pricing, and use on U.S. cigarette demand, concluding that NRT is a substitute for cigarettes and that the elasticity of cigarette demand with respect to NRT sales is-0.06. Support for this research has been provided by GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare. We thank Stavros Tsipas, Tomas Rinkunas, and Kenneth Jackson for excellent research assistance.     

The demand for housing in developing countries: The case of Korea

This paper presents the results of an analysis of urban housing demand for Korea taking into account the most recent findings of housing demand analysis concerning specification and aggregation biases. In order to obtain correctly specified demand functions, a procedure based on a model of the housing market originally proposed by Muth is used. Drawing on the detailed land information available in Korea, this procedure permits the calculation of an individual price per unit of housing services for each household. The results show conclusively that both the income and price elasticity of the demand for housing services in Korea are comparable to those found in the United States: the income elasticity is smaller than one and the price elasticity is negative and smaller than one in absolute value. Given the number of countries found within the per capita income range between Korea ($700) and the United States ($7800), the finding that these two countries have comparable demand elasticities is of major significance: in the absence of good national estimates, the order of magnitudes found here would be used for other country analyses.     

The dynamic Laurent flexible form and the demand for money

I derive the dynamic full Laurent model to estimate economic models that assume a dynamic process. The application in this paper is to use the dynamic full Laurent to estimate a system of dynamic asset demand equations. The main results are that the dynamic full Laurent rejects its static version and the estimated elasticities are variable over time. Results from a Monte Carlo analysis, using a dynamic data-generating process, show that the prediction errors from the dynamic full Laurent are much smaller than those from the static version. Thus when the data are generated by a dynamic process, inferences from the static full Laurent model can be severely biased. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The demand for retailer-financed instalment credit: An econometric analysis

During the mid- to late 1980s the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer has attempted to reduce the volume of consumer credit extended by increasing interest rates rather than by re-introducing terms controls. This paper presents estimates of demand functions for new credit extended by retailers which was financed by them and repaid by instalments. Following earlier papers, a stock-adjustment model is presented that is extended to allow for credit rationing. The results suggest that the demand for such new credit extended is related negatively to terms control and positively to personal disposable income and expectations. Demand was not found to be related to (a proxy for) the nominal interest rate charged by retailers (although it was found to be positively related to the real rate). The former finding is consistent with questionnaire evidence that consumers are unaware of the interest rate that they pay for credit. Elasticities of demand are presented.     

The industrial and commercial demand for electricity under time-of-use pricing

In this paper we have developed and estimated the demand for electricity by an industrial (commercial) firm subject to time-of-use (TOU) pricing of electric power. In the application we use a quadratic production function and directly incorporate into the production process the restrictions that some inputs cannot vary over the day. We show that the TOU structure implies a unique set of parameter restrictions across the demand functions for inputs.