Market Failures in Real-Time Metering

Policies to promote real-time metering (RTM) require more than showing benefits from more timely responses to variations in cost. They require positive externalities to imply that too few meters would be installed through private transactions. RTM presents no systematic externalities when utilities must serve peak period users, and may present negative externalities under some conditions. Positive externalities are likely when electricity is rationed through blackouts. RTM may or may not increase welfare when peak period wholesale markets are not competitive; a prohibition on RTM might be appropriate in such situations even if metering itself were costless.     

Missing Markets and Redundant Reservoirs

This paper uses a two-sector, two-period,spatial model of groundwater usage withstochastic surface water supply to illustratethe potential for the suboptimal management ofthe timing of groundwater uses. A ``timeprofile externality' is said to exist when thetiming of groundwater extraction by one set ofusers impacts on the time profile of wateravailability to another set of users. Theexistence of the time of use externalitydepends on the presence of importantdifferences in the preferences between thecontrol and non-control sectors. It alsodepends on the absence of the markets thatwould internalise these differences. Oneimportant implication of the existence of suchexternalities is that they can inducesub-optimal insurance investments in the formof water storage capital, i.e., unnecessarysurface water reservoirs.     

广东本地服装品牌的市场培育

本地原创品牌的发展塑造需要坚持,也需要本地市场的支持。品牌经营者必须充分了解市场需求,有针对性地进行市场培育,同时结合自身条件进行品牌营销,才能在市场上取胜。文章基于服装品牌消费者层次分析,提出以差异性的品牌推广方式来培育忠诚顾客的若干策略,从而提升原创品牌的市场竞争力。     

Understanding the Large Negative Impact of Oil Shocks

This paper offers a plausible explanation for the close link between oil prices and aggregate macroeconomic performance in the 1970s. Although this link has been well documented in the empirical literature, standard economic models are not able to replicate this link when actual oil prices are used to simulate the models. In particular, standard models cannot explain the depth of the recession in 1974–75 and the strong revival in 1976–78 based on the oil price movements in that period. This paper argues that a missing multiplier-accelerator mechanism from standard models may hold the key.     

Bureaucratic integration and regional specialization in China

Fiscal decentralization introduced as part of China's economic reform since 1979 has unleashed strong incentives for China's local governments to pursue economic development, but the same incentives have also led to local protectionist policies inhibiting the process of regional specialization. This paper focuses on the constraints or freedom with which local governments can implement their protectionist policies. Using a panel data of 29 China's regions over the time period of 1985–1997, we find that China's political system of bureaucratic integration (specifically, concurrent appointment of local government officials in the central government) imposes constraints on the local governments from practicing protectionism. We also find that the effectiveness of local protectionist policies is limited by market competition, specifically, competition from foreign-invested firms operating in China and foreign imports. Our results on the role of local protectionism remain robust to controls for the regional variations in the size of the economy and the stage of economic development.     

Ecosystems,externalities, and economies

This paper incorporates an ecosystem model into a model of a simple economy. The decisionmaking agents in the ecosystem are individual organisms aggregated to the species level. A species may provide utility directly to humans, or it may provide utility indirectly because it is used either as a raw material in goods fabrication or as sustenance for other species. We describe a comparative static equilibrium of the ecosystem where species' demands for other species are equal to the supplies of those other species, and energy is conserved. The ecosystem is then embedded in the economy so that the effects of human intervention can be traced through both the ecosystem and the economy. Human intervention creates ecosystem externalities such that ecosystem equilibria are shifted and the new equilibria affect the utility or the production processes of other humans. This framework allows us to describe in principle which ecosystem services can be efficiently usurped by humans, which waste flows can be efficiently allowed into ecosystems, and which ecosystem organisms and physical attributes can be efficiently maintained.     

Progressive stress accelerated life tests under finite mixture models

In this paper, progressive stress accelerated life tests are considered when the lifetime of a product under use condition follows a finite mixture of distributions. The experiment is performed when each of the components in the mixture follows a general class of distributions which includes, among others, the Weibull, compound Weibull, power function, Gompertz and compound Gompertz distributions. It is assumed that the scale parameter of each component satisfies the inverse power low, the progressive stress is directly proportional to time and the cumulative exposure model for the effect of changing stress holds. Based on type-I censoring, the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of the parameters under consideration are obtained. A special attention is paid to a mixture of two Rayleigh components. Simulation results are carried out to study the precision of the MLEs and to obtain confidence intervals for the parameters involved.     

Sources of Sectoral Growth in an Economy Wide Context: The Case of U.S. Agriculture

Growth in U.S. agriculture is linked to the non-farm economy through domestic terms of trade and factor market adjustments. With almost stable input growth, the relatively large contributions from growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) are passed on to intermediate and final consumers in the form of declining real prices for primary farm products. The resulting net growth in the real value of farm output (GDP) is relatively low (0.25% per annum). The decomposition of TFP suggests that public agricultural stock of knowledge and infrastructure are robustly associated with TFP growth, while spill-overs from private agricultural and economy wide research and development (R and D) are positive but, relatively small.     

A semiparametric GARCH model for foreign exchange volatility

A semiparametric extension of the GJR model (Glosten et al., 1993. Journal of Finance 48, 1779–1801) is proposed for the volatility of foreign exchange returns. Under reasonable assumptions, asymptotic normal distributions are established for the estimators of the model, corroborated by simulation results. When applied to the Deutsche Mark/US Dollar and the Deutsche Mark/British Pound daily returns data, the semiparametric volatility model outperforms the GJR model as well as the more commonly used GARCH(1,1) model in terms of goodness-of-fit, and forecasting, by correcting overgrowth in volatility.     

从外部性控制策略分析主要环境经济手段的异同

随着世界经济的发展,环境污染问题日益严峻。环境污染是最典型的负外部行为。本文分析了西方经济理论中关于控制环境方面负外部性两种策略的分歧,对比了以这两种策略为理论渊源的排污收费制度和排污权交易制度的异同及各自的适用条件。