Electric and natural gas are the two major sources of energy for residents of Washington State. Several states have adopted a policy whereby utility companies decide on the choice of mixes of resources by incorporating cost effectiveness, conservation and externalities. Externalities could...

This paper employs a VAR-GARCH model to investigate the return links and volatility transmission between the S&P 500 and commodity price indices for energy, food, gold and beverages over the turbulent period from 2000-2011. Understanding the price behavior of commodity prices and the volatility...

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate the resource rent distribution aspect of the Kyoto process. The paper focuses on the “battle for resource rents” with oil consuming countries on one side and oil producing countries on the other. Our analysis is carried out within the framework of a...

In this paper, we first briefly review the recent literature on climate change, resource scarcity and conflict. This is then followed by introducing an agent based computational model based on the theory of production and conflict which is capable of simulating the dynamics of micro-level...

Do food prices cause political unrest? Throughout history, riots appear to have frequently broken out as a consequence of high food prices. This paper studies the impact of food prices on political unrest using monthly data on food prices at the international level. Because food prices and...

The trade off between investing in energy savings in single family houses and investing in more expensive heating technologies with low variable costs has been modelled for a number of building and consumer categories in Denmark. The households have an option to combine their primary heating...

Retail electricity rates have been kept flat for the past century due to the lack of advanced metering technology and infrastructure. The flat-rate structure prevents consumers from responding to the fluctuation of actual costs of electricity generation, which varies hourly (or even...

In transposing EU Directive 73/2009/CE on natural gas infrastructures into Italy’s national legislation, the country opted for a Independent Transmission Operator (ITO) model instead of full ownership unbundling. ITO allows the essential facility to be controlled by a vertically integrated...

The Japanese government initiated a series of regulatory reforms in the mid-1990s. The Japanese urban gas industry consists of various sized private and non-private firms. Numerous previous studies find that deregulation leads to productivity improvements. We extend the literature by analyzing...