Environmentally aware households

The rising environmental awareness induces a changing landscape for policymakers and real economic prospects. We examine the properties of a general equilibrium model with endogenous household preferences (for labor, consumption, and environmental quality) and a negative environmental externality. The endogeneity of labor creates an additional channel of substitution between environmental quality and labor, besides the channel of substitution between environmental quality and consumption. We show that a key requirement for improved output following a positive shock in the weight of environmental quality (household environmental awareness) is that environmental awareness trades off the weight on labor and not the weight on consumption. An interesting feature of the model is that the existence of the environmental externality gives a non-zero capital tax in the long run.     

Race to burn the last ton of carbon and the risk of stranded assets

A cap on global warming implies a tighter carbon budget which can be enforced with a credible second-best renewable energy subsidy designed to lock up fossil fuel and curb cumulative emissions. Such a subsidy brings forward the end of the fossil fuel era but accelerates fossil fuel extraction and global warming in the short run. A weaker fossil fuel oligopoly implies that anticipation of a given global carbon budget induces fossil producers to deplete reserves more voraciously and accelerate global warming. This race to burn the last ton of carbon is more intensive for the feedback than open-loop Nash equilibrium, so that the Green Paradox effect of a renewable energy subsidy is stronger. There is an intermediate phase of limit pricing to keep renewable energy producers at bay, which becomes much more relevant when a cap on global warming is enforced. A stronger fossil fuel oligopoly lengthens the period of limit pricing and typically brings forward the carbon-free era. Finally, the mere risk of a cap on global warming being enforced at some unknown, future date makes fossil fuel extraction more voracious and accelerates global warming.     

Airport curfew and scheduling differentiation: Domestic versus international competition

This study investigates the strategic flight departure scheduling on domestic and short-haul international routes from regional airports in Korea. Airport-level data were constructed for non-stop routes from 2010 to 2018. This study examines the effects of changes in scheduling constraints induced by airport night curfews on domestic and international routes through competition intensity. The empirical findings suggest that competition leads to less differentiated flight departure times on domestic routes from the two regional airports. However, competition leads to more differentiated flight departure times on international routes from Daegu airport, which has a new night curfew, while a clustered departure pattern is found for international routes from Cheongju airport. An obvious pattern of differentiated departure times is found after the easing of night curfews in 2014, along with the expansion in LCCs.     

A practice-centered analysis of environmental accounting standards: integrating agriculture into carbon governance

Standards for carbon accounting are a core element of environmental governance. We study the production of standards as situated and practical action, which is shaped by opportunities, resource constraints, and existing infrastructure. Careful observations of this work reveals what people do and how they organize their actions relevant to the particular questions, conventions, and resources at hand. We apply this practice-centered, ethnomethodological approach to study the creation of an accounting protocol for nitrous oxide emissions from corn production, an effort within the broader project of enlisting agriculture in carbon markets. We find that efforts to create a far-reaching, rigorous, and efficient standard were frustrated by lack of data, contestation of knowledge claims, and the challenges of collapsing real-world heterogeneity into a model and a set of tidy decision rules. In this sense, carbon accounting standards should be understood as provisional, and potentially unstable, compromises.     

Cadastral data as a source for 3D indoor modelling

Despite the rapid development of indoor spatial data acquisition technology, there are currently no solutions that enable large-scale indoor spatial data acquisition due to several limiting factors that characterize the indoor space. This fact, together with the rapidly growing need for indoor models, is the main motivation for our research. The focus is on the study of the appropriateness of existing cadastral data for 3D indoor modelling. Within the study, a framework for 3D indoor modelling has been developed, comprising a chain of processes, starting from initial cadastral data and ending with the OGC IndoorGML compliant document. The process chain is divided into three parts, which are described individually and supported by UML activity diagrams. The Slovenian Building Cadastre data represents the basis for the framework design and data assessment. The IndoorGML standard is used for final outputs, as it provides a standardized data model for the representation and exchange of indoor spatial information designed for indoor navigation and location-based services. The data storage options using a spatially enabled database are presented for storing 2D and 3D geometries. The stored data enables fully automatic IndoorGML document generation on request, while also taking advantage of all spatial database functionalities. The proposed approach is software independent and can be implemented with various spatially enabled software packages. In addition to 3D indoor data modelling, the framework represents a comprehensive method for assessing the usability of input data for the purpose of 3D indoor modelling. The assessment is done for the case of the Slovenian Building Cadastre. The assessment of the cadastral data suitability for 3D indoor modelling can be used for decisions regarding future steps towards a multi-purpose 3D real property cadastre. The presented concept can be applied in many countries worldwide that have a similar condominium registration system.     

创新内含碳中和目标的结构性货币政策

2020年9月,我国提出努力争取2060年前实现碳中和,宣示了向低碳经济转型的战略。在实现碳中和目标过程中,货币政策起着极其重要的金融稳定、风险防控、融资引导作用,也将在其间经历相应调整。本文归纳总结了目前国内外对结构性货币政策的理论探讨和政策实践,分析了构建与碳中和一致的结构性货币政策的必要性,提出在碳中和目标下货币政策应采取更为积极的立场主动促进经济低碳转型,走向包含碳中和目标的结构性货币政策。本文同时讨论了构建与碳中和一致的结构性货币政策框架面临的理论和政策挑战,并提出了相关政策建议。     

Reducing revisions in hedonic house price indices by the use of nowcasts

National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) must balance between timeliness and accuracy of the indicators they publish. Because some of the house sales transactions are reported several months after they occur, many countries that include Israel, publish provisional house price indices (HPIs) that are subject to large revisions as further transactions are reported. This happens because the late-reported transactions behave differently from the transactions reported on time. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to minimize the size of the revisions, with illustrations from Israel, but the method can be applied to other countries with appropriate modifications. The proposed methodology consists of nowcasting three types of variables at a subdistrict level and adding them as input data to an extended hedonic model used for the computation of the HPI: (1) the average characteristics of the late-reported transactions such as the average number of rooms and the area size of the sold apartments; (2) the average price of the late-reported transactions; and (3) the number of late-reported transactions. The three variables are nowcasted based on models fitted to data from previous months. Evaluation of our methodology shows more than 50% reduction in the magnitude of the revisions.     

The impact of policy,political and economic uncertainty on corporate capital investment in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Turkey

This paper examines the impact of policy, political, and economic uncertainty on firm-level capital investment in Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Our results indicate an insignificant relationship between uncertainty and investment in these countries. This finding is robust to six different uncertainty measures, including time-series uncertainty indices that track either local or global uncertainty and country-level electoral activities. The results are also robust to two different proxies for measuring corporate investment. Overall, the real-option mechanism in which firms delay irreversible investment in uncertain times does not hold in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Turkey.     

Dynamic spillover effects among green bond,renewable energy stocks and carbon markets during COVID-19 pandemic: Implications for hedging and investments strategies

This study has been inspired by the emergence of socially responsible investment practices in mainstream investment activity as it examines the transmission of return patterns between green bonds, carbon prices, and renewable energy stocks, using daily data spanning from 4th January 2015 to 22nd September 2020. In this study, our dataset comprises the price indices of S&P Green Bond, Solactive Global Solar, Solactive Global Wind, S&P Global Clean Energy and Carbon. We employ the TVP-VAR approach to investigate the return spillovers and connectedness, and various portfolio techniques including minimum variance portfolio, minimum correlation portfolio and the recently developed minimum connectedness portfolio to test portfolio performance. Additionally, a LASSO dynamic connectedness model is used for robustness purposes. The empirical results from the TVP-VAR indicate that the dynamic total connectedness across the assets is heterogeneous over time and economic event dependent. Moreover, our findings suggest that clean energy dominates all other markets and is seen to be the main net transmitter of shocks in the entire network with Green Bonds and Solactive Global Wind, emerging to be the major recipients of shocks in the system. Based on the hedging effectiveness, we show that bivariate and multivariate portfolios significantly reduce the risk of investing in a single asset except for Green Bonds. Finally, the minimum connectedness portfolio reaches the highest Sharpe ratio implying that information concerning the return transmission process is helpful for portfolio creation. The same pattern has been observed during the COVID-19 pandemic period.     

The contribution of (shadow) banks and real estate to systemic risk in China

We empirically evaluate how accounting and financial variables affect the level of systemic risk in traditional and shadow banks, and in real estate finance services in China over the period 2006–2019. We also conduct some stability analysis by evaluating the impact of crisis sub-periods. We find that systemic risk increases in the Size of large financial institutions, particularly shadow entities, while it is insensitive to the Size of real estate finance services. Real estate finance services are instead particularly sensitive to Maturity Mismatch and Leverage. Finally, systemic risk differs across state and non state owned banks.