THE 200 KM CITY: BRISBANE,THE GOLD COAST,AND SUNSHINE COAST

Since the 1970s, several Southeast Queensland coastal towns in areas marketed as the ‘Gold Coast’ and the ‘Sunshine Coast’ have merged with each other and joined with Brisbane to become one of the world's longest urban coastal strips. The population of this 200 km long city is fast approaching three million. This urban pattern reflects the preferences of many Australians about where and in what type of housing they would like to live. The unplanned nature of this growth raises several policy challenges relating to resource use and traffic congestion.     

区域电力市场的十大障碍及其对策

中国迄今已经在电力改革方面取得了很大进展.目前所处的行业重组阶段,旨在为建立竞争性电力市场奠定必要的基础.尽管最初的省级电力市场试点为提高行业的经济和技术水平创造了条件,但建立区域电力市场以优化资源配置和提高效率的潜力显然更大.但是,建立区域电力市场的难度远大于建立省级电力市场.本文讨论在中国建立区域电力市场的障碍因素及其可以采取的应对措施.     

Collusive Bidding: Lessons from the FCC Spectrum Auctions

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) spectrum auctions use a simultaneous ascending auction design. Bidders bid on numerous communication licenses simultaneously, with bidding remaining open on all licenses until no bidder is willing to bid higher on any license. With full revelation of bidding information, simultaneous open bidding allows bidders to send messages to their rivals, telling them on which licenses to bid and which to avoid. These strategies can help bidders coordinate a division of the licenses, and enforce the proposed division by directed punishments. We examine solutions to mitigate collusive bidding in the spectrum auctions, and then apply these ideas to the design of daily electricity auctions.     

UNEMPLOYMENT, HYSTERESIS AND TRANSITION

In this paper, we quantify the degree of persistence in the unemployment rates of transition countries using a variety of methods benchmarked against the EU. Initially, we work with the concept of linear ‘Hysteresis’ as described by the presence of unit roots in unemployment as in most empirical research on this area. Given that this is potentially a narrow definition, we also take into account the existence of structural breaks and nonlinear dynamics in unemployment. Finally, we examine whether CEECs' unemployment presents features of multiple equilibria, that is, if it remains locked into a new level whenever some structural change or sufficiently large shock occurs. Our findings show that, in general, we can reject the unit‐root hypothesis after controlling for structural changes and business‐cycle effects, but we can observe the presence of a high and low unemployment equilibria. The speed of adjustment is faster for CEECs than the EU, although CEECs tend to move more frequently between equilibria.     

The origins of cultural divergence: evidence from Vietnam

Journal of Economic Growth - Cultural norms diverge substantially across societies, often within the same country. We propose and investigate a self-domestication/selective migration hypothesis,...