The supply of non‐renewable resources

There exists no formal treatment of non‐renewable resource (NRR) supply, systematically deriving quantity as function of price. We establish instantaneous restricted (fixed reserves) and unrestricted NRR supply functions. The supply of a NRR at any date and location depends not only on the local contemporary price of the resource but also on prices at all other dates and locations. Besides the usual law of supply, which characterizes the own‐price effect, cross‐price effects have their own law. They can be decomposed into a substitution effect and a stock compensation effect. We show that the substitution effect always dominates: a price increase at some point in space and time causes NRR supply to decrease at all other points. Our new—although orthodox—setting takes into account not only NRR supply limitations but also the heterogeneity of NRR deposits, and the endogeneity of their development and opening. Our analysis extends to NRRs the partial‐equilibrium analysis of demand and supply policies. Thereby, it provides a generalization of results about policy‐induced changes on NRR markets.     

Perspectives on the Formal Authority Between Project Managers and Change Managers

Project management and change management both contribute to the management and delivery of changes to organizations; however, they are based on distinct bodies of knowledge, and practitioners of these disciplines have disparate views on how change should be managed. There is a lack of consensus about how these disciplines should work together to deliver organizational change projects, which may result in conflict. This research delves into practitioners’ perspectives on formal authority, the reporting relationship between these disciplines, and also reveals the fundamental differences in how practitioners of these disciplines view the practice of organizational change.     

Bankable emission permits under uncertainty and optimal risk-management rules

This article proposes a theory of banking of emission permits under conditions of regulatory uncertainty. Based on a two-period partial equilibrium framework, we examine the effects of increasing risk–in the sense of a mean preserving spread–regarding a future permit allocation at the firm level. We also examine the role of an agency to pool risks by re-allocating permits for a group of firms. Our results are twofold. First, an increase in risk may lead to changes in a firm’s banking strategy, depending on the third partial derivative of its production function with respect to pollution. Second, we define an optimal risk-sharing rule between agents to respond to political decision changes. Our results overall suggest that the bankability of permits may be used as a risk-management tool.     

Comparing Investments in New Transport Infrastructure: Roads versus Railways?

This paper contributes to the debate on investment in transport infrastructure and the allocation of public funds between road and railway projects. We model the two options and provide a consistent framework to appraise investment in typical new inter–urban road and rail projects. Our results suggest that road improvements have substantially higher returns than railway schemes. These findings cast doubt on the rationale of the new transport policy for the UK, which proposes to allocate more public funds to the (private) railways than total new investment in strategic roads.     

6. The capital and industrial output sub-system

The World 3 model has an acknowledged sensitivity to the capital sector. It predicts catastrophe. But the great weakness of the capital sub-system is that it assumes inflexible relationships and constants throughout which make overshoot and collapse typical modes of behaviour of the model. It excludes the possibility of adaptive flexible response to changing circumstances—one of the main characteristics of real world behaviour of the economy.