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Daily Eastern News: January 18, 2007, Eastern Illinois University

January

No abstract provided.

The George-Anne, Georgia Southern University

The George-Anne

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The Daily Egyptian, January 17, 2007, Daily Egyptian Staff

January 2007

No abstract provided.

Costs Of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Case Study Of India’S Power Generation Sector, Manish Gupta

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

If India were to participate in any international effort towards mitigating CO2 emissions, the power sector which is one of the largest emitters of CO2 in the country would be required to play a major role. In this context the study estimates the marginal abatement costs, which correspond to the costs incurred by the power plants to reduce one unit of CO2 from the current level. The study uses an output distance function approach and its duality with the revenue function to derive these costs for a sample of thermal plants in India. Two sets of exercises have been undertaken. …

A Tale Of Three Countries: Italian, Spanish And Swiss Manufacturing Operations In China, Valeria Gattai

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

In this paper we investigate the choice of FDI versus joint-venture, made by Italian, Spanish and Swiss multinationals in China, as shaped by the risk of Dissipation of Intangible Assets. Probit estimates, based on an entirely new firm-level dataset, constructed by the author, show that FDI is more likely to emerge when know-how easily spills over - namely for firms endowed with more Intangible Assets or belonging to high tech sectors - in line with the theoretical expectations.

Technology Transfers And The Clean Development Mechanism In A North-South General Equilibrium Model, Linda Sahlén Linda Sahlén , Thomas Aronsson, Kenneth Backlund

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This paper analyzes the potential welfare gains of introducing a technology transfer from Annex I to non-Annex I in order to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis is based on a numerical general equilibrium model for a world economy comprising two regions, North (Annex I) and South (non-Annex I). As our model allows for labor mobility between the formal and informal sectors in the South, we are also able to capture additional aspects of how the transfer influences the Southern economy. In a cooperative equilibrium, a technology transfer from the North to the South is clearly desirable from the perspective …

January 16, 2007, James Madison University

The Breeze, 2000-2009

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

Local Networks To Compete In The Global Era. The Italian Smes Experience, Antonia R. Gurrieri, Luca Petruzzellis

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This study is concerned with the factors that influence the cooperation among cluster-based firms. Theorists have consistently demonstrated the role and importance of economic externalities, such as knowledge spillovers, within industrial clusters. Less attention has been paid to the investigation of social based externalities, though it has been suggested that these may also accrue from geographical agglomeration. This study explores the development of cooperation between firms operating in a single industry sector and in close proximity. The results suggest that social networking has a greater influence than geographic proximity in facilitating inter-firm co-operation. A semi-structured questionnaire has been developed and …

Pricing And Hedging Illiquid Energy Derivatives: An Application To The Jcc Index, Matteo Manera, Elisa Scarpa

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

In this paper we discuss a simple econometric strategy for pricing and hedging illiquid financial products, such as the Japanese crude oil cocktail (JCC) index, the most popular OTC energy derivative in Japan. First, we review the existing literature for computing optimal hedge ratios (OHR) and we propose a critical classification of the existing approaches. Second, we compare the empirical performance of different econometric models (namely, regression models in price-levels, price first differences, price returns, as well as error correction and autoregressive distributed lag models) in terms of their computed OHR using monthly data on the JCC over the period …

Transitional Dynamics Towards Sustainability: Reconsidering The Ekc Hypothesis, Giovanni Bella

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis is one of the most debated economic issues. Despite its fascinating appeal for any policy maker, neither theoretical nor certain empirical evidence has been found to clean up all doubt. The aim of this paper is to present an economy where environmental quality and polluting emissions do enter the maximisation problem, and provide a transitional dynamics analysis to pursue a new different version of the EKC, depending on the level of development finally achieved.

Quality Of Available Mates, Education And Intra-Household Bargaining Power, Sonia Oreffice, Brighita Bercea

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This paper further explores the role of sex ratios on spouses’ bargaining power, by focusing on educational attainment in order to capture the qualitative aspect of mate availability. Using Census and Current Population Survey data for U.S. metropolitan areas in year 2000, a quality sex ratio is constructed by education brackets to test the effect on the intra-household bargaining power of couples in the corresponding education bracket. We argue that a relative shortage of suitably educated women in the spouse’s potential marriage market increases wives’ bargaining power in the household while it lowers their husbands’. Additionally, we test the prediction …

Formation Of Segregated And Integrated Groups, Alison Watts

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

A model of group formation is presented where the number of groups is fixed and a person can only join a group if the group’s members approve the person’s joining. Agents have either local status preferences (each agent wants to be the highest status agent in his group) or global status preferences (each agent wants to join the highest status group that she can join). For both preference types, conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of a segregated stable partition where similar people are grouped together and conditions are provided which guarantee the existence of an integrated stable partition …

Environmental Quality In A Differentiated Duopoly, Y. Hossein Farzin, Ken-Ichi Akao

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

In a duopoly industry with environmentally differentiated products, we examine the effects of introducing a mandatory environmental quality standard on firms’ environmental quality choices, profits, and the average environmental quality offered by the industry. We show that at low standard levels, both firms choose to overcomply regardless of the standard level. At intermediate levels, the mandatory standard can reduce the profit of the low-cost firm while increasing that of the high-cost firm, and that it can lower the industry’s average environmental quality below what it would be without the standard.

Lexicographic Preferences In Discrete Choice Experiments: Consequences On Individual-Specific Willingness To Pay Estimates, Danny Campbell, W. George Hutchinson, Riccardo Scarpa

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

In discrete choice experiments respondents are generally assumed to consider all of the attributes across each of the alternatives, and to choose their most preferred. However, results in this paper indicate that many respondents employ simplified lexicographic decision-making rules, whereby they have a ranking of the attributes, but their choice of an alternative is based solely on the level of their most important attribute(s). Not accounting for these simple decision-making heuristics introduces systemic errors and leads to biased point estimates, as they are a violation of the continuity axiom and a departure from the use of compensatory decision-making. In this …

A Bayesian Approach To The Estimation Of Environmental Kuznets Curves For Co2 Emissions, Massimiliano Mazzanti, Antonio Musolesi , Roberto Zoboli

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This paper investigates the EKC curves for CO2 emissions in a panel of 109 countries during the period 1959-2001. The length of the series makes the application of a heterogeneous estimator suitable from an econometric point of view. The results, based on the hierarchical Bayes estimator, show that different EKC dynamics are associated with the different sub samples of countries considered. On average, more industrialized countries show an EKC evidence in quadratic specifications, which are nevertheless probably evolving into an N shape, emerging from cubic specifications. Less developed countries consistently show that CO2 emissions still rise positively with income, though …

Economy-Wide Estimates Of The Implications Of Climate Change: A Joint Analysis For Sea Level Rise And Tourism, Francesco Bosello , Andrea Bigano, Roberto Roson, Richard S.J. Tol

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

Climate change impacts on human life have well defined and different origins, nevertheless in the determination of their final effects, especially those involving social-economic responses, interactions among impacts are likely to play an important role. This paper is one of the first attempts to disentangle and highlight the role of these interactions. It focuses on the economic assessment of two specific climate change impacts: sea-level rise and changes in tourism flows. By using a CGE model the two impacts categories are first analyzed separately and then jointly. Comparing the results it is shown that, even though qualitatively joint effects follow …

Entry And Exit Strategies In Migration Dynamics, Sergio Vergalli

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

This work is devoted to study the role of combined entry and exit strategies in the migration process. We develop a real option model in which the community of immigrants in the host country is described as a club and the immigrants benefits is a U-shaped function, depending on the dimension of the district. There exist two threshold levels: the first one triggers the migration choice, while the second triggers the return to the country of origin. The theoretical results show that the phenomenon of hysteresis is amplified by the existence of a community both in the entry case and …

Eng 3901-001: Language And Linguistics, Buck

Spring 2007

No abstract provided.

The Nontradable Share Reform In The Chinese Stock Market, Bernardo Bortolotti, Andrea Beltratti

Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Working Papers

Nontradable shares (NTS) are an unparalleled feature of the ownership structure of Chinese listed companies and represented a major hurdle to domestic financial market development. After some failed attempts, in 2005 the Chinese authorities have launched a structural reform program aiming at eliminating NTS. In this paper, we evaluate the stock price effects of the actual implementation of this reform in 368 firms. The NTS reform generated a statistically significant 8 percent positive abnormal return over the event window, adjusting prices for the compensation requested by tradable shareholders. Results are consistent with the expectation of improved economic fundamentals such as …

Eng 2901-001-003: The Structure Of English, Buck

Spring 2007

No abstract provided.

Inequality And The Instability Of Polity And Policy, Pushan Dutt, Devashish Mitra

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper, we create alternative measures of political instability, which capture movements only from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa (consistent with the recent theoretical work by Acemoglu and Robinson) but, unlike older, well known measures do not capture government changes that preserve the democratic or dictatorial structure of the country. Our empirical work clearly shows that inequality is positively correlated with our measures of political instability as well as with a well-known measure (used by Alesina and Perotti), but the impact of inequality on the latter is only through components of political instability as captured in our measures. …

From Alps To Alpnet (And Beyond), Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

Nestled in the Wasatch range of the Rocky Mountains in northern Utah lies scenic Utah Valley. Home to Brigham Young University (BYU) and a host of foreign-speaking residents, the setting also served as a hotbed throughout the 1980's for the machine translation (MT) industry. To fully appreciate this narrative the chronologically prior story of BYU's Translation Sciences Institute (TSI)—which has not yet been written— would need to be consulted. When the Church1 withdrew funding for the project, the TSI team disbanded. Some former participants remained at BYU, others left the university to work for industrial corporations, and the majority remained …

Deafdigest: Blue Edition, January 14, 2007, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Blue 2007

No abstract provided.

Volume Cxxiv, Number 10, January 12, 2007, Lawrence University

The Lawrentian

No abstract provided.

How Do We Deal With This Mess? A Primer For State And Local Governments On Navigating The Legal Complexities Of Debris Issues Following Mass Disasters, Ryan M. Seidemann, Megan K. Terrell, Christopher D. Matchett

ExpressO

The devastation wrought by the 2005 hurricane season brought into bold relief the need for comprehensive debris management plans in the United States. As cleanup efforts commenced following Hurricane Katrina, it became abundantly apparent that the local governments were not prepared to deal with the massive scope of the debris problem.

Disasters will occur. It is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. The entire nation is at risk of being struck by some type of disaster at some time. The best way to deal with the outfall from these disasters is to be prepared for them …

Monitor Newsletter January 08, 2007, Bowling Green State University

Monitor

Official Publication of Bowling Green State University for Faculty and Staff

Deafdigest: Blue Edition, January 7, 2007, Barry Strassler

DeafDigest Blue 2007

No abstract provided.

Modern Military Necessity: The Role & Relevance Of Military Lawyers, Michael A. Newton

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Desentralisasi Yang Mengarah Ke Sistem Federal Dan Pengaruhnya Terhadap Pelaksanaan Fungsi Negara, Edie Toet Hendratno

Indonesian Journal of International Law

Article 18 Paragraph (5) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia stipulates that the local administration (regional government) can implement autonomy as wide as possible, except for the administration affairs that are stipulated as the (central) government’s affair. This stipulation contains the principle of the transfer of the reserve of powers of the government to the local administration. The same goes with the decentralization policy in Act 22/1999 on Local Administration, as well as other legislations like the Act on Special Autonomy for Nanggroe Aceh Darusalam and Papua. They contain saome federal arrangement. The decentralization process that leads …

Who Takes Responsibility For Missions The Origin Of The Association Of Lutheran Mission Agencies (Alma) And Its Relationship To Missouri Synod Missions, Annette Frank

Master of Art Theology Thesis

The history of the Association of Lutheran Mission Agencies (ALMA) is an important chapter in the mission history of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS), as well as in the history of Protestant mission efforts in the United States. ALMA is an organization of independent mission agencies affiliated with The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. This relationship with a specific denomination is unique among independent mission organizations.

The development of ALMA and its relation to LCMS missions reflects important changes in mission activity and attitude both within the Synod and outside. This study will show how the changes of the twentieth century influenced …