Using economic instruments to address emissions from air transport in the European Union

Air transport has become a vital component of the global economy. However, greenhouse-gas emissions from this sector have a significant impact on global climate, being responsible for over 3.5% of all anthropogenic radiative forcing. Also, the accrued visibility of aircraft emissions greatly affects the public image of the industry. In this context, incentive-based regulations, in the form of price or quantity controls, can be envisaged as alternatives to mitigate these emissions. The use of environmental charges in air transport, and the inclusion of the sector in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), are considered under a range of scenarios. The impacts of these measures on demand are estimated, and results suggest that they are likely to be minimal-mainly due to the high willingness to pay for air transport. In particular, in the EU ETS scenario currently favoured by the EU, demand reductions are less than 2%. This may not be true in the longer run, for short trips, or if future caps become more stringent. Furthermore, given current estimates of the social Cost Of CO2 as well as typical EU ETS prices, supply-side abatement would be too costly to be encouraged by these policies in the short term. The magnitude of aviation CO2 emissions in the EU is estimated, both in physical and monetary terms; the results are consistent with Eurocontrol estimates and, for the EU-25, the total social cost of these emissions represents only 0.03% of the region`s GDP. It is concluded that the use of multisector policies, such as the EU ETS, is unsuitable for curbing emissions from air transport, and that stringent emission charges or an isolated ETS would be better instruments. However, the inclusion of aviation in the EU ETS has advantages under target-oriented post-2012 scenarios, such as policy-costs dilution, certainty in reductions, and flexibility in abatement allocation. This solution is also attractive to airlines, as it would improve their public image but require virtually no reduction of their own emissions, as they would be fully capable of passing on policy costs to their customers.

Qualitative assessment of stock prices listed on the Sao Paulo stock exchange: An approach from the perspective of homogeneity analysis

The stock market suffers uncertain relations throughout the entire negotiation process, with different variables exerting direct and indirect influence on stock prices. This study focuses on the analysis of certain aspects that may influence these values offered by the capital market, based on the Brazil Index of the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa), which selects 100 stocks among the most traded on Bovespa in terms of number of trades and financial volume. The selected variables are characterized by the companies` activity area and the business volume in the month of data collection, i.e. April/2007. This article proposes an analysis that joins the accounting view of the stock price variables that can be influenced with the use of multivariate qualitative data analysis. Data were explored through Correspondence Analysis (Anacor) and Homogeneity Analysis (Homals). According to the research, the selected variables are associated with the values presented by the stocks, which become an internal control instrument and a decision-making tool when it comes to choosing investments.

Adjusting prices in the multiple-partners assignment game

Starting with an initial price vector, prices are adjusted in order to eliminate the excess demand and at the same time to keep the transfers to the sellers as low as possible. In each step of the auction, to which set of sellers should those transfers be made is the key issue in the description of the algorithm. We assume additively separable utilities and introduce a novel distinction by considering multiple sellers owing multiple identical objects and multiple buyers with an exogenously defined quota, consuming more than one object but at most one unit of a seller`s good and having multi-dimensional payoffs. This distinction induces a necessarily more complicated construction of the over-demanded sets than the constructions of these sets for the other assignment games. For this approach, our mechanism yields the buyer-optimal competitive equilibrium payoff, which equals the buyer-optimal stable payoff. The symmetry of the model allows to getting the seller-optimal stable payoff and the seller-optimal competitive equilibrium payoff can then be also derived.