Search results for "microeconomics"
showing 10 items of 442 documents
The timeline of trading frictions in the European carbon market
2012
We evaluate the quality of prices of EU-ETS, the most active European derivative market for greenhouse gas emissions allowances (EUAs). So far, this market has had two phases, a trial phase (from 2005 to 2007) and a commitment phase (from 2008 to 2012). The true value of a trial-phase EUA at the beginning of 2008 was inevitably zero because it could not be used in the commitment phase to cover emission targets. However, continued rumors of over-allocation of EUAs led to an early collapse of the market by May 2007. We study whether this market breakdown and the subsequent outbreak of the international financial crisis had a persistent effect on the quality of the commitment phase. We provide…
Stable sharing rules and participation in pools of essential patents
2019
Abstract For pools of essential patents I study whether a pool's sharing rule is stable against arbitrage, so that the pool's members have no incentive to trade patents. I show that the only stable rule is the numeric proportional rule, which gives each member a share of the pool's profit equal to its share of the pool's patents. I study how the stable rule affects firms' incentives to participate, and I show that firms with few patents tend to remain outside the pool. I look at the trade off between stability and participation, and I show that as trade dilutes their shares, members prefer the stable rule. I consider individual licenses, stand-alone patents, integration, and R&D. The result…
Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Two Masters
2018
Available online: 05 June 2018 We study common agency problems in which two principals (groups) make costly commitments to incentives that are conditioned on imperfect signals of the agent's action. Our framework allows for incentives to be either rewards or punishments. For our basic model we obtain a unique equilibrium, which typically involves randomization by both principals. Greater similarity between principals leads to more aggressive competition. The principals weakly prefer punishment to rewards, sometimes strictly. With rewards an agent voluntarily joins both groups with punishment it depends on whether severe punishments are feasible and cheap for the principals. We study whether…
Model Based Monte Carlo Pricing of Energy and Temperature Quanto Options
2010
Weather derivatives have become very popular tools in weather risk management in recent years. One of the elements supporting their diffusion has been the increase in volatility observed on many energy markets. Among the several available contracts, Quanto options are now becoming very popular for a simple reason: they take into account the strong correlation between energy consumption and certain weather conditions, so enabling price and weather risk to be controlled at the same time. These products are more efficient and, in many cases, significantly cheaper than simpler plain vanilla options. Unfortunately, the specific features of energy and weather time series do not enable the use of …
Outsourcing and efficiency: the case of Spanish citrus farming
2006
Outsourcing in agriculture has traditionally been seen as a managerial strategy of smaller farms to achieve higher levels of efficiency. In this article, we provide empirical evidence supporting the existence of a positive relationship between outsourcing and efficiency in Spanish citrus farming. Outsourcing is measured by the proportion of outsourced labor and capital in farms' total use of these production factors, i.e., the higher the proportion of outsourced inputs, the higher the degree of outsourcing. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute input-specific reductions required to achieve technical efficiency at the farm level. Our results show that attainment of t…
The relationship between environmental values and income in a transition economy: surface water quality in Latvia
2002
A contingent valuation study measured citizen willingness to pay (WTP) for an improvement in surface water quality in Latvia. The average respondent was willing to pay 0.7 per cent of household income for the environmental improvement, but that amount was much less than needed to finance the required investments in treatment facilities. While the income elasticity of WTP for the average resident was low (0.56), it increases as income increases, reaching 0.9 at an income level double the current average. As real incomes increase in Latvia, the demand for environmental quality by citizens can be expected to increase substantially.
Networked relationships in the e-MID Interbank market: A trading model with memory
2014
Interbank markets are fundamental for bank liquidity management. In this paper, we introduce a model of interbank trading with memory. Our model reproduces features of preferential trading patterns in the e-MID market recently empirically observed through the method of statistically validated networks. The memory mechanism is used to introduce a proxy of trust in the model. The key idea is that a lender, having lent many times to a borrower in the past, is more likely to lend to that borrower again in the future than to other borrowers, with which the lender has never (or has in- frequently) interacted. The core of the model depends on only one parameter representing the initial attractiven…
Do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution? A statistical test
2014
We introduce a new statistical test of the hypothesis that a balanced panel of firms have the same growth rate distribution or, more generally, that they share the same functional form of growth rate distribution. We applied the test to European Union and US publicly quoted manufacturing firms data, considering functional forms belonging to the Subbotin family of distributions. While our hypotheses are rejected for the vast majority of sets at the sector level, we cannot rejected them at the subsector level, indicating that homogenous panels of firms could be described by a common functional form of growth rate distribution.
Why is equity order flow so persistent?
2015
Abstract Order flow in equity markets is remarkably persistent in the sense that order signs (to buy or sell) are positively autocorrelated out to time lags of tens of thousands of orders, corresponding to many days. Two possible explanations are herding, corresponding to positive correlation in the behavior of different investors, or order splitting, corresponding to positive autocorrelation in the behavior of single investors. We investigate this using order flow data from the London Stock Exchange for which we have membership identifiers. By formulating models for herding and order splitting, as well as models for brokerage choice, we are able to overcome the distortion introduced by bro…
How does learning affect market liquidity? A simulation analysis of a double-auction financial market with portfolio traders
2007
We study the relationship between liquidity and prices in an artificial financial market where portfolio traders with limited resources interact through a continuous, electronic open book. We depart from the standard asset pricing framework in two ways. First, we assume that investors have incomplete information about the distribution of returns. Second, we model the portfolio choice problem using prospect-type preferences. We model the utility function in terms of deviations of the portfolio growth rate from a specified target growth rate, and we assume that investors are more sensitive to downside movements. We show that the parameters defining the learning process affect the price dynami…