Optimal Emissions Taxation under Imperfect Competition in a Durable Good Industry

This paper investigates optimal emissions taxation under imperfect competition in a durable good industry where products are sold (instead of rented). As a benchmark, attention is paid to the special case of monopoly with exogenously given product durability. In line with previous literature, the optimal emission tax in this benchmark model falls short of marginal damage (underinternalization). Extending the benchmark model either to the case of an oligopolistic market structure and/or to the case of endogenous product durability then provides two cases in which the optimal emission tax overinternalizes marginal damage.     

Competition, Contractibility, and the Market for Donors to Nonprofits

This article investigates theoretically and empirically theeffects of competition for donors on the behavior of nonprofitorganizations. Theoretically, we consider a situation in whichnonprofit organizations use donations to produce some commodity,but the use of donations is only partially contractible. Themain results of the model indicate that an increase in competition(i) decreases the fraction of donations allocated to perquisiteconsumption and (ii) increases the fraction of donations allocatedto promotional expenditures. Moreover, the effects of competitionare magnified by the ability to contract on the use of donations.These hypotheses are tested with data on the expenditures ofnonprofit organizations in a number of subsectors where competitionis primarily local. We use across–metropolitan statisticalareas' variation to measure differences in competition and proxycontractibility by the importance of tangible assets, whichare more easily observed by donors. The estimated effects ofcompetition and contractibility are consistent with our model.     

Who benefits from privileged peers? Evidence from siblings in schools

By comparing siblings attending the same school at different points in time, we investigate whether the effect of peer quality on long-term labor market outcomes varies with parental background. We find that exposure to better peers—who have higher mean parental education—increases lifetime earnings of disadvantaged students, coming from families with low parental education, but penalizes privileged students from better educated families. These results suggest that desegregation policies that allocate disadvantaged students to schools with better peers produce long-term benefits. We discuss mechanisms and show that human capital accumulation, ordinal rank and network effects contribute to explain our findings.     

Mix between Satisfaction and Attributes Destination Choice: A Segmentation Criterion to Understand the Ski Resorts Consumers

This study examined the attributes prioritized by tourists when choosing a winter sports destination and their degree of satisfaction with the services provided by Portugal's only ski resort. Two hundred tourists completed a questionnaire with factor analysis then deployed to extract the data that served as the basis for cluster analysis. Our results report discrepancies between the attributes valued by tourists when choosing winter sports destinations and their degree of satisfaction with the ski resort's services. Moreover, the combination between attributes/motivations prevailing in destination selection and the subsequent satisfaction with the services provided may generate information of relevance to evaluating organizational competitiveness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

News shocks or parametric indeterminacy? An observational equivalence result in linear rational expectations models

This paper studies identification in linear rational expectations models with news shocks. We show that news-driven models and indeterminate equilibrium economies with i.i.d. fundamentals are observationally equivalent. This finding calls for carefully designing empirical investigations of news shocks in estimated DSGE models.     

The Impact of an increasing share of RES-E on the Conventional Power Market — The Example of Germany

The intermittency of wind power has a decreasing effect on day-ahead spot prices. Data from Germany illustrate this effect and explain the underlying relationships. This short-term price effect leads to an adaptation process in the conventional generation capacity mix. In the long-run, a higher peak load plant share is required to cope with the increasing volatility of the residual demand. The result is an adapted merit-order. This merit-order intersects with an increasingly volatile residual demand curve and leads to a higher price volatility in the power market, which is going to trigger further adaptations. Therefore this article concludes with a list of open research questions, which can be derived from the illustrated relationship. These research questions should be investigated as soon as possible in order to induce the required adaptations in time.     

Production Theory: Accounting for Firm Heterogeneity and Technical Change

The paper presents a new framework to assess firm level heterogeneity and to study the rate and direction of technical change. Building on the analysis of revealed short‐run production functions by Hildenbrand ( 1981 ), we propose the (normalized) volume of the zonotope composed by vectors‐firms as indicator of inter‐firm heterogeneity. Moreover, the angles that the zonotope's main diagonal form with the axes provide a measure of the rates and directions of productivity change. The proposed framework also accounts for n‐inputs and m‐outputs and, crucially, the measures of heterogeneity and technical change do not require many of the standard assumptions from production theory.     

Crowding,satiation, and saturation: The days of television series' lives

The performance of firms depends not just on the structure of the industries in which they compete but also on their relative positioning within those industries, in terms of operating within particular niches. We propose that demand for these niches depends endogenously on the historical ecology of the products offered: Niches become saturated—reduced in their ability to support products—as a large number of previous offerings allows the audience to satisfy its desire for products of a particular type. Analyzing the survival rates of television series aired in the United States from 1946 to 2003, we found that the survival rates of future entrants fell with the extensiveness of recent offerings in the niche, and that the negative association between crowding and survival also weakened with this saturation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.