Economics

The motivations for this case study are recent developments in the U.S. broiler chicken industry involving allegations of an illegal exercise of buyer market power by the five largest broiler chicken processors in the country in the market for broiler grow-out services. This case study introduces economic, business, and legal issues related to the alleged input price-fixing cartel of the five largest broiler processors. The case study describes the broiler processors’ conduct and presents a theoretical framework that may explain market and price effects of the alleged input price-fixing cartel. In addition, the case study introduces a comprehensive analysis of a sample broiler production a..

The war in Ukraine and the associated 2022 energy crisis has had far-reaching effects with seaborne prices for coal and gas reaching multiples (5-6x) of their historic averages. While Europe was the epicentre, countries as far away as Australia were impacted. As a major exporter of coal and gas, domestic markets are linked to seaborne prices. Consequently, forward prices for 2023 delivery in Australia’s National Electricity Market surged from ~$48 in 2021 to $156/MWh in 2022 at one point peaking at $247/MWh. Household electricity tariffs were set to in-crease by 11% in 2023 and 35% in 2024. In late-2022, the Commonwealth Government intervened by setting fuel price caps of $125/t and $..

This reports aims to assist the Sino-Australian bilateral relationship adapt to meet China’s new policies and to facilitate a smoother transition to a low carbon future. Southwest University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE), Chengdu, China and the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia held a workshop at SWUFE to develop a guide to China’s low-carbon policies and their implications for the Sino-Australian energy trade and sectors. This report results from the workshop. Chapter 3 contains the guide to China’s low emission policies and discusses market-based experiments within China’s command-and-control electricity sector. Chapter 4 discuses Australia’s poorly implemented neo..

This reports aims to assist the Sino-Australian bilateral relationship adapt to meet China’s new policies and to facilitate a smoother transition to a low carbon future. Southwest University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE), Chengdu, China and the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia held a workshop at SWUFE to develop a guide to China’s low-carbon policies and their implications for the Sino-Australian energy trade and sectors. This report results from the workshop. Chapter 3 contains the guide to China’s low emission policies and discusses market-based experiments within China’s command-and-control electricity sector. Chapter 4 discuses Australia’s poorly implemented neo..

Readiness is a cornerstone of military service. Military readiness includes cognitive and physical abilities to train and execute missions. Previous studies among civilians demonstrate that food security is associated with cognitive function and body mass index. Therefore, food security is vital to maintaining military readiness. While no analyses have been conducted on the prevalence of food insecurity for a representative sample of the active duty U.S. military, studies of individual military installations have demonstrated food insecurity rates between 15 and 33 percent. The authors compared food insecurity among the U.S. military and civilian adult populations, using data from the 2018 a..

Due to surges in gas and electricity prices in Europe, many households will struggle to heat their homes this winter. This paper provides high-level guidance on designing a relief policy in a way that optimally trades off equity and efficiency. We argue that, contrary to conventional economic intuitions, an optimal policy may involve directly controlling prices. Because governments do not have perfect information about households' needs, price controls could improve the targeting of relief through screening out the most vulnerable by offering them discounts for reducing consumption. This could be achieved by “threshold price caps" that lower the price of all energy units below some con..

In recent years, the Indian e-waste sector has undergone a process of formalisation through the implementation of E-waste Management Rules (2016), leading to the creation of what I call recycling regime. The upper and middle classes, along with NGOs and industry actors, are frontrunners in thinking about e-waste policies. They were prompted by a twofold motive: the desire for a “world-class”, clean, and pollution-free city; and seizing business opportunities by extracting value from e-waste. Rather than replacing the State, they co-opted the State so that it would legislate to safeguard the environment, and address toxicity and health problems associated with e-waste. Recycling regime re..

We provide a selective overview of the literature on the linkages between interstate conflict and international trade, paying special attention to how trade openness (i) affects arming incentives, (ii) the channels through which its effects travel, and (iii) its consequences for the emergence of war (or peace) as an equilibrium outcome. We also discuss how restrictive trade policies may interact with national security concerns and what they imply for welfare.

We develop a framework for quantifying delay propagation in airline networks that combines structural modeling and machine learning methods together to estimate causal objects of interest. Using a large comprehensive data set on actual delays and a model-selection algorithm (elastic net) we estimate a weighted directed graph of delay propagation for each major airline in the US and derive conditions under which the estimates of the propagation coefficients are causal. We use these estimates to decompose the airline performance into “luck” and “ability.” We find that luck may explain about 38% of the performance difference between Delta and American in our data. We further use these e..

We develop a framework for quantifying delay propagation in airline networks that combines structural modeling and machine learning methods together to estimate causal objects of interest. Using a large comprehensive data set on actual delays and a model-selection algorithm (elastic net) we estimate a weighted directed graph of delay propagation for each major airline in the US and derive conditions under which the estimates of the propagation coefficients are causal. We use these estimates to decompose the airline performance into “luck” and “ability.” We find that luck may explain about 38% of the performance difference between Delta and American in our data. We further use these e..

We develop a framework for quantifying delay propagation in airline networks that combines structural modeling and machine learning methods together to estimate causal objects of interest. Using a large comprehensive data set on actual delays and a model-selection algorithm (elastic net) we estimate a weighted directed graph of delay propagation for each major airline in the US and derive conditions under which the estimates of the propagation coefficients are causal. We use these estimates to decompose the airline performance into “luck” and “ability.” We find that luck may explain about 38% of the performance difference between Delta and American in our data. We further use these e..

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have slowed down worldwide since 2023, and this trend has continued throughout 2024, fueling concerns that EV demand has plateaued. Yet, this slowdown seems limited specifically to battery electric vehicles (BEVs), as sales of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are surging. This suggests that the overall march toward electrification is proceeding, but may be taking a more circuitous route. In South Korea, HEV sales have been growing rapidly as PHEV sales remain flat and BEV sales crash. This leaves the Korean EV market far more vulnerable to a reverse pivot to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles than its global count..

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have slowed down worldwide since 2023, and this trend has continued throughout 2024, fueling concerns that EV demand has plateaued. Yet, this slowdown seems limited specifically to battery electric vehicles (BEVs), as sales of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are surging. This suggests that the overall march toward electrification is proceeding, but may be taking a more circuitous route. In South Korea, HEV sales have been growing rapidly as PHEV sales remain flat and BEV sales crash. This leaves the Korean EV market far more vulnerable to a reverse pivot to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles than its global count..

Electric vehicle (EV) sales have slowed down worldwide since 2023, and this trend has continued throughout 2024, fueling concerns that EV demand has plateaued. Yet, this slowdown seems limited specifically to battery electric vehicles (BEVs), as sales of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are surging. This suggests that the overall march toward electrification is proceeding, but may be taking a more circuitous route. In South Korea, HEV sales have been growing rapidly as PHEV sales remain flat and BEV sales crash. This leaves the Korean EV market far more vulnerable to a reverse pivot to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles than its global count..

This paper examines the relationship between hospital quality and the share of foreign doctors in the English NHS. Baseline findings suggest that heart attack mortality is higher in hospitals with greater shares of foreign doctors practising relevant specialties. Robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses indicate that this association is specific to Acute Myocardial Infraction (AMI) treatment and is driven by hospitals that are smaller, of lower-quality, and ill-equipped to provide optimal care. When explicitly considering for treatment type, AMI mortality does not vary with the share of foreign AMI specialists in hospitals capable to access certain treatment technologies within 150 min. O..

Contexte Les pays dits du Sud sont des terrains d'innovations sociales et environnementales majeurs en dépit de leurs grandes difficultés à aborder aujourd'hui les défis environnementaux et climatiques. A côté d'une vision dominante de l'économie et du développement axée sur l'énergie fossile et l'intégration dans les chaines de valeur globales, des voix et des approches différentes se sont depuis longtemps faites entendre. Ces dernières se trouvent à la fois du côté des chercheurs et penseurs critiques en économie du développement (Ignacy Sachs, François Perroux, Albert Otto Hirschman…) et du côté des pratiques (agroécologie, économie familiale et locale, communs lo..

This article examines the links between accounting tools, affects and neoliberalism. To explain how accounting tools participate in the affective life of neoliberalism, we conducted longitudinal qualitative research on the health and social care sector in Quebec and examined the links between accounting tools and affects in a context of a neoliberal reform. We use the concept of atmosphere -collective affects present in a given space- to address the collective and spatial dimensions of affects linked to accounting tools. Our study shows that the omnipresence of accounting tools in spaces nurtures the atmosphere of measurement presented here. In this atmosphere, tools are viewed as consumable..

Bessel’s correction adjusts the denominator in the sample variance formula from n to n −1 to produce an unbiased estimator for the population variance. This paper includes rigorous derivations, geometric interpretations, and visualizations. It then introduces the concept of “bariance, †an alternative pairwise distances intuition of sample dispersion without an arithmetic mean. Finally, we address practical concerns raised in Rosenthal’s article [1] advocating the use of n-based estimates from a more holistic MSE-based viewpoint for pedagogical reasons and in certain practical contexts. Finally, the empirical part using simulation reveals that the run-time of es..

The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to business ownership in the UK which affects a generation of entrepreneurs and their employees. Nonetheless, the impact remains poorly understood. This is because research on capital accumulation has typically lacked high-quality, individualized, population-level data. We overcome these barriers to examine who benefits from economic crises through a computationally orientated lens of firm creation. Leveraging a comprehensive cache of administrative data on every UK firm and all nine million people running them, combined with probabilistic algorithms, we conduct individual-level analyzis to understand who became Covid entrepreneurs. Using t..

This study examines the relationship between women directors and the cost of equity (COE). Investigating the French firm's sample, we find a significant negative effect of women directors on the cost of equity. Our results also document that the effect of women directors on reducing the cost of equity is significant for firms that have a critical mass of at least four women directors. Using the difference-in-difference (DID) and propensity score matching (PSM) approach, we find that the relationship between female directors and lower equity costs is significant for the period following the Copé–Zimmermann gender quota law. The results show that women directors' presence on corporate board..

Motivated by the increasingly common technology for collecting data, like cellphones, smartwatches, etc, functional data analysis has been intensively studied in recent decades, and along with it, functional regression models. However, the majority of functional data methods in general and functional regression models, in particular, are based on the fact that the observed datapresent the same domain. When the data have variable domain it needs to be aligned or registered in order to be fitted with the usual modeling techniques adding computational burden. To avoid this, a model that contemplates the variable domain features of the data is needed, but this type of models are scarce and its e..

We consider firms' choices between a clean technology that benefits, and a dirty technology that harms, the environment. Green firms are more suited to the clean technology and brown firms are more suited to the dirty technology. We use a model derived from complexity theory that takes account of true uncertainty and increasing returns to technology adoption. We examine theoretically, the properties of the long-run equilibrium, and provide simulated time paths of technology adoption, using plausible dynamics. The long-run outcome is an 'emergent property' of the system, and is unpredictable despite there being no external technological or preference shocks. We describe the role of taxes and ..

This paper studies the structure of the set of steady-state competitive equilibria defined in a quite generalized von Neumann economic model. First, it is shown that in any von Neumann production economy, there exists an admissible domain of non-negative interest rates such that for every interest rate within the domain, there exists an associated steady state equilibrium. Second, for almost all interest rates within the domain, the associated steady state equilibrium is indeterminate. Thus, in summary, for any von Neumann production economy, there is a dense subset of the admissible domain over which the set of steady state equilibria consists of a finite number of one-dimensional continuum..

We build and embed an endogenous growth mechanism into an otherwise standard New Keynesian DSGE model to investigate the transmission of monetary policy. Endogenous growth is determined by the R&D expenditures of monopolistically competitive firms and monetary policy, through its effects on these expenditures, can have supply-side effects in addition to its usual demand-side effects. After solving the model and estimating it with a Bayesian methodology, we find that R&D activity amplifies the responses to monetary policy shocks. An empirical investigation that uses firm-level COMPUSTAT data supports this result. Specifically, we find that monetary policy transmission operates more strongly t..

Electric autonomous vehicles, including Autonomous Electric Buses (AEBs), offer significant societal benefits such as fewer accidents, reduced pollution, and enhanced driving efficiency, presenting a promising alternative to public transportation. While research on this subject exists in developed countries like Europe, China, and Germany, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of the acceptance of AEBs in emerging economies. Our study investigated the adoption factors of AEBs in a medium-sized Brazilian city by surveying 554 respondents. In our structural model, we adopted a hybrid approach that integrates elements from the modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Theory of..

This paper provides a novel axiomatic analysis of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour, derives an empirical exploitation index at the individual level, and estimates its distribution in the US in 1975-2022. We show that, among possible definitions of exploitation, only one satisfies a small set of formally weak and normatively salient axioms. From this definition, we derive an individual-level exploitation intensity index which provides a new measure of well-being and inequality, complementary to existing ones and able to jointly take into account the distributions of income and work time. In US data, exploitation intensity provides additional information compared with standard in..

Climate change affects mountain tourism and summer glacier skiing, a highly vulnerable activity. This paper explores the complex dynamics affecting summer glacier skiing in Swiss Alpine destinations. The methodology involved conducting 26 semi-structured interviews followed by three workshops with tourism stakeholders. Applying systems thinking, this research highlights the challenges faced by summer glacier skiing destinations and the ongoing commitment required amid evolving cryosphere dynamics. Sustaining summer glacier skiing touches on vulnerability factors in climatic and socioeconomic dimensions. The disappearance of the activity has implications for the cable car companies, the hospi..

Electric autonomous vehicles, including Autonomous Electric Buses (AEBs), offer significant societal benefits such as fewer accidents, reduced pollution, and enhanced driving efficiency, presenting a promising alternative to public transportation. While research on this subject exists in developed countries like Europe, China, and Germany, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of the acceptance of AEBs in emerging economies. Our study investigated the adoption factors of AEBs in a medium-sized Brazilian city by surveying 554 respondents. In our structural model, we adopted a hybrid approach that integrates elements from the modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Theory of..