Download or read book Three Essays Exploring the Impact of Higher Energy Prices on Housing Markets written by Steven Rubenstein Kursh and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Energy Economics written by ERICA CATHERINE. MYERS and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation combines research on three topics in applied energy economics. The first two papers investigate whether consumers are informed about and pay attention to energy costs in residential housing. The first paper explores this issue in the rental housing market, while the second paper focuses on housing purchases. The third paper, based on joint work with AJ Bostian and Harrison Fell, uses a laboratory experiment to test the effects of positive versus negative cost shocks on mulit-unit procurement auction performance. The first paper explores whether there are energy cost information asymmetries between landlords and tenants. If tenants are uninformed about energy costs, landlords cannot capitalize energy efficiency investments into higher rents, leading to under-investment. I exploit variation in energy costs in the form of relative heating fuel price changes in the northeastern United States where some apartment units heat with oil and some units heat with natural gas. I develop a search model to describe the matching of landlords and tenants, and derive predictions about the incidence of relative fuel price changes, tenant turnover, and efficiency investments under both symmetric and asymmetric information. My model predicts that, under symmetric full information, these outcomes will not differ depending on whether landlords or tenants pay for energy. In contrast, under asymmetric information, the demand of uninformed tenants for units that heat with oil rather than gas will not shift when oil prices rise relative to gas prices. In a search model, this leads to different market outcomes when landlords, rather than tenants, pay for energy. I find that the capitalization of energy prices into rents, turnover rates, and energy efficiency investments differ between the two payment regimes in ways that are consistent with asymmetric information. The second paper explores whether home buyers are myopic about future energy costs. I exploit variation in energy costs in the form of fuel price changes in Massachusetts where there is an even distribution of homes that heat with oil and homes that heat with natural gas. I find that relative fuel price shifts cause relative changes in housing transaction prices that are consistent with full capitalization of the present value of future energy cost differences under low discount rates. These findings are consistent with home buyers being attentive to energy costs at point of sale and are not consistent with myopia. The third paper uses a laboratory experiment to test the effects of positive versus negative costs shocks on multi-unit procurement auction performance. Output prices tend to respond more quickly to increases in input prices than to decreases in input prices. While standard economic theory would not predict this pattern, it is found in many market settings. We compare outcomes in uniform price and discriminatory (pay-as-bid) auctions for two different kinds of costs shocks. First we look at ``industry wide'' cost shocks where the cost of a common input changes uniformly for all bidders. We also look at idiosyncratic cost shocks, where bidders' individual costs are changing, but the expected Walrasian price remains fixed. We find evidence for a new explanation of asymmetric passthrough in multi-unit procurement auctions related to the bidding incentives in discriminatory auctions. Discriminatory auctions may be worse than uniform at ``tracking'' shifts in underlying costs, leading to price adjustment asymmetries and production inefficiencies.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three essays on housing market and spatial disamenities written by Lin Cui and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Residential Energy Efficiency Policy Evaluation written by Tianxia Zhou and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation evaluates residential energy efficiency policies using rich datasets including hourly electricity consumption for more than 158 thousand California houses in the serving area of Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). Chapter 1 evaluates the California Building Code (Title 24). In 1978, California adopted building codes designed to reduce the energy used for heating and cooling. Using a rich dataset of hourly electricity consumption for 158,112 California houses, we estimate that the average house built just after 1978 uses 13% less electricity for cooling than a similar house built just before 1978. Comparing the estimated savings to the policy’s projected cost, we conclude that the policy comfortably passes a cost-benefit test. In settings where market failures prevent energy costs from being completely passed through to home prices, building codes can serve as a cost-effective tool for improving residential energy efficiency. Chapter 2 evaluates the air-conditioning units (AC) Energy Efficiency rebate program implemented by SMUD. We have three primary findings. First, the AC Energy Efficiency rebate program is effective in reducing cooling energy use. In the SMUD serving area during 2012-2013, participating households reduced cooling energy use by a considerable amount, averaging 329.50 kWh per household in one summer (1.51 kWh per day in a high-temperature day). Second, there is clear evidence of rebound effects, and the magnitudes of which are significant. The rebound effects from AC units upgrades are 26.77% of direct savings on average. Moreover, such rebound effects can be considerably larger among households who use less electricity in the past years. Chapter 3 explores the heterogeneous treatment effects in the Title 24. This chapter has two contributions. First, we adopt and adapt the Causal Tree model to make it work well with Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) setting. The Causal Tree method uncovers statistically significant differences in the treatment effects among subgroups that are not found using the ad-hoc subgroup definitions. Second, we explore the heterogeneous treatment effects of Title 24 among subgroups of households. We find no strong evidence suggesting the existence of heterogeneous treatment effects. There is absolutely no meaningful pattern displayed in the treatment effects across subgroups (e.g., treatment effects don’t vary systematically with the sizes of premises or the income of households).

Download or read book Three Essays on House Price Inflation written by Ronald Franklin Ferguson and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Environmental and Energy Economics written by Joshua Blonz and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation combines research on three topics in applied Energy and Environmental Economics related to the electricity industry. In the first paper, I study the economic welfare impact of an electricity pricing program that increases the price of electricity for small commercial and industrial customers when the cost of generation is high. The second paper explores an energy efficiency retrofit program that provides free upgrades to low-income households in California. Both of these policy interventions were a result of orders from the California Public Utilities Commission, the energy regulator in California. The final paper examines the cost of air quality regulations on employment in the coal mining sector in Appalachia. These three papers study different important aspects of the electricity sector, from upstream regulation of generation to end use pricing and consumption efficiency. In the first chapter, I study how in electricity markets, the price paid by retail customers during periods of peak demand is far below the cost of supply. This leads to overconsumption during peak periods, requiring the construction of excess generation capacity compared to first-best prices that adjust at short time intervals to reflect changing marginal cost. In this paper, I investigate a second-best policy designed to address this distortion, and compare its effectiveness to the first-best. The policy allows the electricity provider to raise retail price by a set amount (usually 3 to 5 times) during the afternoon hours of a limited number of summer days (usually 9 to 15). Using a quasi-experimental research design and high-frequency electricity consumption data, I test the extent to which small commercial and industrial establishments respond to this temporary increase in retail electricity prices. I find that establishments reduce their peak usage by 13.4% during peak hours. Using a model of capacity investment decisions, these reductions yield $154 million in welfare benefits, driven largely by reduced expenditures on power plant construction. I find the current policy provides of the first-best benefits but that, with improvements in targeting just the days with the highest demand, a modified peak pricing program could achieve 80% welfare gains relative to the first-best pricing policy. In the second chapter, I study energy efficiency retrofits programs, which are increasingly being used to both save on energy bills and as a carbon mitigation strategy. This paper evaluates the California Energy Savings Assistance program, which provides no-cost upgrades to low-income households across the state. I use quasi-experimental variation in program uptake to measure energy savings for a large portion of the treated population in the San Diego Gas & Electric service territory between 2007 and 2012. The results suggest that the overall program is ineffective at delivering energy savings and is not cost-effective. One challenge in implementing efficiency retrofit programs is that each upgrade must be customized to the housing unit on which it is installed. As a consequence, there is a wide range in efficiency upgrade potential across the population of candidate households. To better understand this heterogeneity in measure installation and its potential to drive program outcomes, I use discontinuities in program rules to identify key measure specific savings. This analysis shows that larger upgrades such as refrigerator replacements do provide cost-effective savings when considering the full set of social benefits. Households that do not receive larger upgrades generally see little or no savings. These results suggest that heterogeneity in upgrade potential can drive overall program outcomes when only a small portion of the treated population is eligible for cost-effective efficiency upgrades. In the third chapter, I study the costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act. This regulation put a cap on sulfur emissions from electric power plants, which reduced the demand for high-sulfur coal. Using a quasi-experimental research design, I estimate how coal mine employment and production in high-sulfur coal-producing counties were impacted by the regulation by comparing them to neighboring counties that produced low-sulfur coal. I find that coal production dropped by 20% and coal sector employment dropped by 14%. I find no evidence of spillovers to employment or wages in the non-coal sectors of the high-sulfur coal counties. The results suggest that the coal sector employment costs of Title IV of the Clean Air Act are highly concentrated in the coal industry, and that the decline does not detectably impact the overall regional economy.

Download or read book Essays on Regulation Liberalization and Privatization in Energy Markets written by Carlos Suárez and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The general motivation of this research is to explore the effects of the coexistence of public and private companies on the allocative efficiency of the supply of electricity. In particular, this thesis investigates from an empirical perspective to what extent the distinction between private and public companies is relevant to understand the competition in the wholesale electricity generation markets. I apply several econometric techniques and theory advances in industrial organization branch on data of the firms of the Colombian market. The case of the Colombian electricity market is suitable to study this issues for four reasons: i) It is an oligopoly in which private and public companies compete under the same rules. ii) The most important firms in the Colombian electricity sector are mature organizations, with a conventional business vision. In fact, many of these companies belong to transnational capital that carry out activities in several continents. iii) The market setting have a conventional design similar to other liberalized electricity markets. It operates as a multi-unit uniform-price auction. iv) There is available information with daily and even hourly resolution of the generation market variables. I consider that these are key elements for justifying the external validity of the results. This thesis presents three essays that aim to answer three questions related to the interaction between competition in electricity markets and their ownership structure. Chapter 1 addresses the question: Do the switch from public to private management have impacts in the bidding strategy of specific generation assets? Chapter 2 explores the question: Do public and private generation companies respond the same to the incentives to relax competition? Chapter 3 focuses on the question: Do private companies have a greater propensity to establish coordination relationships in comparison to public firms? In the first chapter of this thesis I evaluate the impact of privatization on the bidding of electricity units participating in a liberalized wholesale electricity market. The results of this evaluation contribute to better understand whether privatization is the right decision in an environment of imperfect competition. In this essay I adopt a policy evaluation approach to estimate the impact of changes from public to private management on the bidding prices of electricity generation units. I use information of bidding prices of the Colombian wholesale electricity market and exploit the changes of management of generation units documented in the period 2006 - 2018. The methodologies and results presented in this thesis contributes to the literature of mixed oligopoly because they place special emphasis on the behavioral differences between private and public companies and studies a field experience in which they compete in the same relevant market. The empirical evidence resultant from the policy evaluation method is aligned with the theoretical predictions of comparative statics arising from the behavioral differences of mixed oligopoly models. The second chapter of this dissertation proposes a methodology in order to find differences between the reactions of private and public firms when they face incentives to exercises unilateral market power. Several common events in the electricity industry such as transmission restrictions, the concentration of generation property within specific areas, the non-storage capacity of electricity and the low elasticity of demand, provide opportunities to exert market power. That is why this issue has been widely studied and discussed theoretically and empirically. The novel element of this essay in relation to this strand of the literature is accounting for the distinction between private and public companies regarding competitive behavior. Chapter 3 investigates from an empirical perspective the role of disclosure information in the stability of informal coordination agreements. Particularly, this chapter focuses in the economic effects of the announcement and the put into effect of a non-transparency policy implemented in the Colombian wholesale electricity market in 2009. We propose an identification strategy for isolating the effect of a coordinating relation from the confusion factors related with unilateral market power. The characteristics of the reform of the transparency policy allow to link the simple announcement of the policy change with the collapse of a coordinated strategy of private firms in a repeated interaction context. We use several empirical tools to assess the impact of the simple announcement of a modification in the transparency conditions on the average bidding price of private firms. We present an empirical analysis of the average bidding price data over August 2008 - July 2009. Overall, the evidence presented in the three essays of this dissertation indicates that the distinction between public and private companies may be a relevant aspect for explaining the functioning of competition in liberalized industries." -- TDX.

Download or read book Urban Mass Transportation Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 940 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Energy Abstracts for Policy Analysis written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Doctoral Dissertations written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Distributional Implications of the Impact of Fuel Price Increases on Inflation written by Mr. Kangni R Kpodar and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the response of consumer price inflation to changes in domestic fuel prices, looking at the different categories of the overall consumer price index (CPI). We then combine household survey data with the CPI components to construct a CPI index for the poorest and richest income quintiles with the view to assess the distributional impact of the pass-through. To undertake this analysis, the paper provides an update to the Global Monthly Retail Fuel Price Database, expanding the product coverage to premium and regular fuels, the time dimension to December 2020, and the sample to 190 countries. Three key findings stand out. First, the response of inflation to gasoline price shocks is smaller, but more persistent and broad-based in developing economies than in advanced economies. Second, we show that past studies using crude oil prices instead of retail fuel prices to estimate the pass-through to inflation significantly underestimate it. Third, while the purchasing power of all households declines as fuel prices increase, the distributional impact is progressive. But the progressivity phases out within 6 months after the shock in advanced economies, whereas it persists beyond a year in developing countries.

Download or read book Energy Research Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Economics of World War I written by Stephen Broadberry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-29 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique volume offers a definitive new history of European economies at war from 1914 to 1918. It studies how European economies mobilised for war, how existing economic institutions stood up under the strain, how economic development influenced outcomes and how wartime experience influenced post-war economic growth. Leading international experts provide the first systematic comparison of economies at war between 1914 and 1918 based on the best available data for Britain, Germany, France, Russia, the USA, Italy, Turkey, Austria-Hungary and the Netherlands. The editors' overview draws some stark lessons about the role of economic development, the importance of markets and the damage done by nationalism and protectionism. A companion volume to the acclaimed The Economics of World War II, this is a major contribution to our understanding of total war.

Download or read book Review of Current Information in the Treasury Department Library written by United States. Department of the Treasury. Library and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Oil written by Gavin Bridge and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-06 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil pulses through our daily lives. It is the plastic we touch, the food we eat, and the way we move. Oil politics in the twentieth century was about the management of abundance, state power and market growth. The legacy of this age of plenty includes declining conventional oil reserves, volatile prices, climate change, and enduring poverty in many oil rich countries. The oil sector is now in need of reform. Yet no one seems at the helm, leaving a vital source of energy at the whim of dictators, speculators and corporate operators, and our societies locked into unsustainable growth models. In this in-depth primer to the world's wealthiest industry, authors Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon take a fresh look at the contemporary geopolitics of oil. Going beyond simple assertions of peak oil and an oil curse, they point to an industry reordered by internationalized state oil companies, Asian consumerism shifting demand, the insecurities and violent assertiveness of declining powers, and the dilemmas of post-oil energy transition. As a new geopolitics of oil emerges, the need for effective global oil governance becomes imperative. Praising the growing influence of civil society and attentive to the institutionalization of producer-consumer cooperation, this book identifies challenges and opportunities to curtail price volatility, curb demand and the growth of dirty oil, de-carbonise energy systems, and improve governance in oil producing countries.

Download or read book Contemporary Movements in Planning Theory written by Patsy Healey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Planning Theory has a history of common debates about ideas and practices and is rooted in a critical concern for the 'improvement' of human and environmental well-being, particularly as pursued through interventions which seek to shape environmental conditions and place qualities. The third and final volume in this series covers Contemporary Movements in Planning Theory and topics include communicative practices and the negotiation of meaning, networks, institutions and relations, and the complexity 'turn'. The articles selected represent the most influential and controversial recent work in planning theory and are supplemented by detailed introductions by the editors.