Nodal pricing of electricity: how much does it cost to get it wrong?

Economists know how to calculate optimal prices for electricity transmission. These are rarely applied in practice. This paper develops a 13-node model of the transmission system in England and Wales, incorporating losses and transmission constraints. It is solved with optimal prices, and with uniform prices for demand and for generation, re-dispatching when needed to take account of transmission constraints. Moving from uniform prices to optimal nodal prices could raise welfare by 1.3% of the generators’ revenues, and would be less vulnerable to market power. It would also send better investment signals, but create politically sensitive regional gains and losses.      

Why do parents who usually vaccinate their children hesitate or refuse? General good vs. individual risk

This study examines vaccination hesitancy or refusal following the 2013 polio outbreak in Israel, based on two theoretical models. The first is Sandman’s theoretical model, which holds that risk perception is comprised of hazard plus outrage. The second model is the affect heuristic that explains the risk/benefit confounding. It aims to expose the barriers that inhibited parental compliance with OPV vaccination for their children. The study employed mixed methods – a questionnaire survey (n = 197) and content analysis of parents’ discussions in blogs, Internet sites, and Facebook pages (n = 2499). The findings indicate that some parents who normally give their children routine vaccinations decided not to give them OPV due to lack of faith in the health system, concerns about vaccine safety and reasons specific to the polio outbreak in Israel. Some vaccinated due to a misunderstanding, namely, they believed that OPV was supposed to protect their children, when it was actually for overall societal well-being. This study highlights the difficulty of framing the subject of vaccinations as a preventive measure, especially when the prevention is for society at large and not to protect the children themselves. The findings of this study are important because they provide a glimpse into a situation that can recur in different places in the world where a disease considered to have been ‘eradicated’ returns, and the public is required to take measures which protect the public but which might put individuals at risk. The conclusions from the analysis of the findings of this study are that the public’s risk perception is based on a context-dependent analysis, which the communicating body must understand and respect.     

Tackling the undeclared economy in the European Union: an evaluation of the tax morale approach

To evaluate a new approach towards tackling the undeclared economy, which views participants as social actors rather than rational economic actors, this article reports evidence from 27,563 face‐to‐face interviews conducted across the European Union during 2013. Multilevel logistic regression analysis reveals a strong association between participation in undeclared work and the level of tax morale. Finding that higher tax morale (and thus a lower propensity to engage in undeclared work) is strongly correlated with greater levels of state intervention but also with individual‐level characteristics such as gender, age, education and employment status, the article concludes not only by confirming a political economy approach and refuting modernization and neo‐liberal explanations and remedies, but also by revealing for the first time the importance of solutions not so far considered, including improving educational attainment, older citizens mentoring for younger people and improving women's participation in the labour force.     

The Declining Volume of Workers’ Training in Britain

The conventional focus on the training participation rate, rather than training volume, in official statistics and research has obscured a radical transformation in workers’ training in Britain. To obtain a picture of the trend in training volume, we synthesize a narrative through a new analysis of multiple surveys. The duration of training fell sharply with the result that the training volume per worker declined by about a half between 1997 and 2012. This fall is hard to reconcile with optimistic rhetoric surrounding the knowledge economy. Potential explanations are discussed. We conclude with recommendations to improve the collection of training statistics.     

Time lags in the pass-through of crude oil prices: big data evidence from the German gasoline market

This article investigates the pass-through of global Brent oil notations to fuel prices across the oligopoly of retail majors in Germany. We assemble a high-frequency panel data set that encompasses millions of price observations and allows us to distinguish effects by brand. Upon establishing a cointegrating relationship between fuel and crude oil prices using daily data, we estimate an ECM and find that (1) the pass-through of oil prices critically depends on the number of time lags included in the ECM; (2) strict adherence to classical information criteria for determining lag length yields extremely long pass-through durations and (3) the estimated impulse response functions are virtually identical across brands, irrespective of the lag count, suggesting a high degree of competition among brands.     

THE ANALYSIS OF CAUSE MAPS

Cause maps are coded following many different conventions. It is therefore arguable that there can be no general approach to their analysis. Indeed the interpretation and meaning of the analysis can only be undertaken in relation to both the purpose of the research and the theoretical basis of the form of representation to be analysed, be it a cause map, network, or any other graphical picture. Given these reservations, this article outlines a number of techniques for the analysis of cause maps. In order to make the arguments about cause-map analyses concrete, the article suggests what the various analyses described might imply for an understanding and evaluation of cognitive complexity. It does not address the difficult issue relating to the status of cognitive complexity as measured in these ways but rather simply notes that they are each as plausible or more plausible than many others that are often used. Ultimately the measures are to be taken as a portfolio of indicators of the complexity of the map itself.     

A Resource-Centred Interpretation of Export Performance

Consistent with Mahoney and Pandian's (1992) vision of the resource-based view as the emergent language for conversations within strategic management, this paper has employed a resource-based framework in integrating and interpreting identified influences on export performance. Aggregate evidence suggests the critical importance of several resource-related factors, including having top management staff with relevant experiential, orientational and attitudinal resources; ‘co-locating’ within resource-supporting clusters; possessing organisational-wide capabilities in export-related knowledge development and planning, product innovation, and quality service delivery; and leveraging strategically-relevant resources embodied in external partners. The theoretical, managerial, policy, and future research implications of these findings are discussed.     

THE INTERSUBJECTIVITY OF ISSUES AND ISSUES OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

This paper describes research concerned with assisting groups in organizations handle their complex, ill-structured policy issues in ways which we believe are significantly different from many typical policy analysis projects. It is our belief that many systems research, operational research and management science projects have concentrated on 'objective', usually quantitative data at the expense of losing their clients' interest and commitment. Our work is concerned with taking account of intersubjectivity in policy analysis and evaluation. It is orientated to the construction of models that will be owned by our clients because they recognize as legitimate, and explicitly take account of, the subjective and particular knowledge of individuals within organizations. They also explicitly take account of the interaction of shared and individual knowledge as a group comes to define an intersubjective group issue.     

Agricultural Efficiency Gains in Centrally Planned Economies

This paper estimates the growth of agricultural production efficiency in nine centrally planned economics over two time periods, 1965-1977 and 1978-1989. The second time period was one of agricultural policy reform for most of the nine countries. Our major finding is that production efficiency improved in the second time period, helping to check a fall in growth of agricultural output. Gains in production efficiency were as large in Central and Eastern Europe as the gains in China, even though economic reforms were deeper in China, where production was privatized. The slowdown in growth of agricultural production in the 1980′s was not due to production inefficiencies, but rather due to slower growth of inputs, particularly fertilizer. The implication of our results is that privatization of farming may be unnecessary in order to achieve high production efficiency gains. J. Comp. Econom., June 1994, 18(3), pp. 000-000, University of California, Davis, California 95616.