Does drawing down the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve help stabilize oil prices?

We study the effects of releases from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) within the context of fully specified models of the global oil market that explicitly allow for storage demand as well as unanticipated changes in the SPR. We show that historically SPR policy interventions, defined as sequences of exogenous SPR shocks during selected periods, have helped stabilize the price of oil. Their effect on the price of oil, however, has been modest. For example, the cumulative effect of the SPR releases after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was a reduction of $2 per barrel in the real price of oil after 7 months. Whereas emergency drawdowns tend to lower the real price of oil, we find that exchanges tend to raise the real price of oil in the long run. We also provide a detailed analysis of the benefits of the 2018 White House proposal to sell off half of the SPR within the next decade. We show that the expected fiscal benefits of this plan are somewhat higher than the revenue of $16.6 billion dollars projected by the White House.     

Automated Certification for Compliant Cloud-based Business Processes

A key problem in the deployment of large-scale, reliable cloud computing concerns the difficulty to certify the compliance of business processes operating in the cloud. Standard audit procedures such as SAS-70 and SAS-117 are hard to conduct for cloud-based processes. The paper proposes a novel approach to certify the compliance of business processes with regulatory requirements. The approach translates process models into their corresponding Petri net representations and checks them against requirements also expressed in this formalism. Being based on Petri nets, the approach provides well-founded evidence on adherence and, in case of noncompliance, indicates the possible vulnerabilities.     

Lumpy investment and the monetary transmission mechanism

The lumpy nature of plant-level investment is generally not taken into account in the context of New Keynesian monetary theory (see, e.g., 8 and 32). Our main result shows that if this theory is augmented by a standard model of lumpy investment, monetary policy shocks lead to large but very short-lived impacts on output and inflation, in a way that goes against empirical evidence and the consensus view in the literature.     

On the Aggregate Value of Recreational Activities: A Nested Price Index Approach Using Poisson Demand Systems

An important consideration in the development ofregulations and policies that administer naturalresources in an area is the value of the non-marketactivities supported by those lands. Little attentionhas been paid to the aggregate value of largegeographic areas. This analysis builds autility-theoretic price index and utilizes this indexto estimate an aggregate Poisson demand to valuebackcountry recreational hiking opportunities innorthern California.     

Revisiting the Relevance of International Trade Theory

Probably one of the most controversial contributions to the literature of international trade theory was offered by the late social economist John Culbertson. In his view, low wage competition among corporations in a world characterized by capital mobility and massive trade deficits undermines the foundation trade theory based on David Ricardo’s celebrated notion of comparative advantage. Instead, there are several good reasons to believe that international trade with China, India, Vietnam, etc. will be governed by absolute advantage. The current essay is dedicated to the virtually ignored work of Culbertson, and it is meant as an invitation for social economists to critically evaluate the argument and in the process make an attempt to point out where it goes wrong.     

Information service and integration of cereal markets in Burkina Faso

The cereal market of Burkina Faso was liberalised in 1992. Atthe same time a market information service (SIM) was createdto collect data on the supply and demand conditions and, inparticular, to disseminate weekly the cereal prices of regionalmarkets by radio. The article evaluates to what extent the existenceof this service contributed to the integration of the market.A cointegration analysis, and more precisely a comparison ofthe results for the whole period under study (1990-5) with theresults for the period 'after the SIM' (1992-5), leads to theconclusion that the impact of the diffusion of prices on marketintegration is moderate. In general, SIM does not have a significantinfluence on the integration of cereal markets.     

Ein neuer Zugang zum Konzept des Discounted Cashflow

A lot of papers have been published about the concept of discounted cash flow or DCF. In this paper we will summarize the recent development and review the main results. After showing the main weaknesses of the concept we will make a sketch of some promising ideas that can form the basis to overcome these weaknesses.     

Works council and training effects on satisfaction

This paper investigates the direct and indirect impact of works councils via further training on job satisfaction. Basic estimates on an individual level do not reveal clearly direct effects, but on an establishment level, the existence of a works council increases the average job satisfaction. We also find a positive, weakly significant effect on an individual level accompanied by training under instrumental variables estimation and if we control for personal characteristics.