This paper estimates the vintage capital model of energy demand and examines operational and investment responses to energy prices at disaggregate level using data from five OECD manufacturing industries. Applying the model to less aggregate level data helps avoiding the distortions from...

This paper attempts to assess the social welfare impact of the restructuring and privatisation of the electricity market in Peru. The target companies, Electrolima and Electro Sur Medio, account for 64 per cent of the total distribution market and 100 per cent of the privatised distribution...

The supply function equilibrium provides a game-theoretic model of strategic bidding in oligopolistic wholesale electricity auctions. This paper presents an intuitive account of current understanding and shows how welfare losses depend on the number of firms in the market and their asymmetry....

The residential demand for energy has been growing steadily in tact with the societies’ increasing economic affluence. As a result, the household sector accounts for a significant share of total energy use and economic welfare in modern economies. The residential energy demand is expected to...

There has been a wide discussion on the different properties between carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes and hybrid instruments such as cap-and-trade schemes with price floors and ceilings. There has been less discussion on the incentives to investment that each of these instruments may provide....

This study specifies and estimates a gravity model for inter-provincial migration in Indonesia. Using panel data for Indonesia’s 26 provinces for 5 survey years between 1930 and 2000 we show that throughout the twentieth century economic factors were more important in the explanation of...

High crude oil prices and the eventual decline of conventional oil production raise the issue of alternative fuels such as non-conventional oil. The paper describes a simple probabilistic model of the costs of synthetic crude oil (SCO) produced from Canadian oil sands. Synthetic crude oil is...

Confirmation bias refers to cognitive errors that bias one towards one's own prior beliefs. A vast empirical literature documents its existence and psychologists identify it as one of the most problematic aspects of human reasoning. In this paper, we present three related scenarios where...

Favoritism is the act of offering jobs, contracts and resources to members of one’s social group in preference to outsiders. Favoritism is widely practiced and this motivates an exploration of its origins and economic consequences. Our main finding is that individuals have an interest to trade...

Rational herd behavior and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe the conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding and...