China is appraised to have the world's largest exploitable reserves of shale gas, although several legal, regulatory, environmental and investment-related issues will likely restrain its scope. China's capacity to successfully face these hurdles and produce commercial shale gas will have a...

The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...

In this paper we investigate crude oil and products price dynamics. We present a comparison among ten price series of crude oils and fourteen price series of petroleum products, considering four distinct market areas (Mediterranean, North Western Europe, Latin America and North America) over the...

This paper re-examines the issue of asymmetries in the transmission of shocks to crude oil prices onto the retail price of gasoline. Relative to the previous literature, the distinguishing features of the present paper are: i) use of updated and comparable data to carry out an international...

I study the coexistence of formal and informal finance in underdeveloped credit markets. While weak institutions constrain formal banks, shallow pockets hamper informal lenders. In such economies, informal finance has two effects. By increasing the investment return it decreases borrowers'...

In this paper we review the existing empirical literature on price asymmetries in commodities, providing a way to classify and compare different studies which are highly heterogeneous in terms of econometric models, type of asymmetries and empirical findings. Relative to the previous literature,...

The existing literature on price asymmetries does not systematically investigate the sensitivity of the empirical results to the choice of a particular econometric specification. This paper fills this gap by providing a detailed comparison of the three most popular models designed to describe...

We analyze the welfare consequences of an increase in the commissions charged by the organizer of an auction. Commissions are similar to taxes imposed on buyers and sellers and the economic problem that results looks similar to the question of tax incidence in consumer economics. We argue,...

We analyzed the effects of 10,748 weather events on attention to climate change between December 2011 and November 2014 in local areas across the United States. Attention was gauged by quantifying the relative increase in Twitter messages about climate change in the local area around the time of...

The behaviour of future policy-makers substantially influences future greenhouse gas emissions. Uncertainty about the motives of future policy-makers may thus strongly influence the climate policy strategies of current policy-makers. Analytical and numerical analyses in this paper confirm this...