Search results for "Opportunity cost"

Household skills and low wages

2008

Originally published in the journal Journal of Population Economics, Springer http://www.springerlink.com/content/100520/ Household skills provide job skills when tasks in jobs and household production are similar and jobs produce substitutes for home-made services. Opportunity costs of higher education are foregone earnings during schooling and foregone household production while studying and later in life. I show that individuals in jobs requiring household skills accept lower wage rates than traditional human capital theory predicts, and that individuals with low household skills tend to enter higher education. According to these results, declining household skills may have contributed t…

Opportunity costs and efficiency of investments in mega sport events

2009

Economic analyses of mega sport events usually focus on the positive effects and legacies while ignoring opportunity costs and the efficiency of using scarce resources. Event opponents argue that decisions to invest public resources should also consider alternative uses of the money. This paper aims to clarify some of the issues surrounding the opportunity costs of mega sport events. By using the measure ‘efficiency’ (output/input) of alternative investments it will become clear that the decision to stage a mega sport event cannot be taken in isolation and that there are many factors that need to be considered. The argument put forward is based on a stakeholder’s perspective and a spatial d…

Feasibility studies for water reuse projects: an economical approach

2006

Usually the methodologies used to analyse the feasibility of water reuse projects are focused on the internal costs. The aim of this paper is to show a methodology to assess the feasibility of a water reuse project taking into account not just the internal impact, but also the external impact (environmental and social, for example) and the opportunity cost derived from the project. Internal benefit is obtained from the difference between internal income and internal costs. Internal income is obtained by multiplying the selling price of reclaimed water and the volume obtained. Internal costs are made up of the sum of investment costs, operating costs, financial costs and taxes. While some of…

Opportunity Costs of Ensuring Sustainability in Urban Water Services

2011

This paper assesses technical performance in the water industry in the Southern European region of Andalusia, while accounting for sustainability in the management of water. This allows the opportunity cost of producing sustainability to be evaluated. Given the low cost of raw water in Spain in relation to the estimated opportunity cost of saving this natural resource, wasting water becomes a profitable strategy for utility managers from a private perspective. However, this managerial strategy has a huge social cost in an area of Europe where the sustainable management of water is a pressing need. The conclusion is that environmental policy aimed at discouraging this wasteful behaviour is u…

Simulation versus Optimization in the assessment of the resource opportunity cost in complex water resources systems.

2009

Does service quality matter in measuring the performance of water utilities?

2008

Abstract Quality is a dimension of water services that has been repeatedly omitted in the study of performance of water utilities. In this paper, Data Envelopment Analysis techniques are used to compute both conventional quantity-based and quality-adjusted scores of technical efficiency for a sample of Spanish water utilities. The key assumptions are that a lack of quality (bad quality) can be regarded as a bad output and the existence of a trade-off between quantity and quality. Our main results indicate that quality matters in measuring technical efficiency, the difference between conventional and quality-adjusted evaluations representing the opportunity cost of maintaining quality. Avera…

Access to Secondary Education in Albania: Incentives, Obstacles, and Policy Spillovers

2006

When judged either by educational attainment of adult population or by secondary and tertiary enrollment rates, by 2002 Albania compared very unfavorably to most European countries, including its neighbors. This study examines the determinants of secondary enrollment applying unobserved family effect probit model to data from Living Standards Measurement Survey 2002- 2003. The focus of the paper is to investigate the importance of access to school and to further education for enrollment. We find that both absence of a secondary school in the community and the distance from the residence location to a secondary school have strong negative effect on enrollment, controlling for family backgrou…

A Cost–Benefit Based, Parametric Procedure to Screen Existing Irrigation and Municipal Supply Reservoirs for Wind Energy Storage

2018

Pumped hydro storage (PHS) is one of the more suitable energy storage technologies to provide bulk storage of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) such as wind. Since the main limiting factors to the expansion of this mature technology are environmental and financial concerns, the use of an existing reservoir can help mitigate both types of impacts. In addition, the high number of reservoirs for municipal and irrigation supply in many areas of the world makes the idea of using PHS as a relatively diffuse, open-market, technology for RES management attractive. These arguments in favor of PHS must, however, be convincing for investors and regulators from an economic standpoint. To this…