Las entidades sub-nacionales en Norteamérica y la lucha contra el cambio climático: desarrollo normativo y vinculación de sistemas de comercio de derechos de emisión

[spa] Mientras que en Europa la interdependencia y la dimensión transfronteriza de las cuestiones ligadas al cambio climático ha facilitado una cierta"continentalización" de la gestión de este fenómeno, favorecida por el carácter intergubernamental de las medidas que se adoptan en el marco de la Unión Europea, al otro lado del Atlántico la transversalidad de este mismo fenómeno explica la necesidad de que, ante las limitaciones del marco regional, se pongan en marcha mecanismos que faciliten la intervención no sólo estatal sino también de las entidades sub-nacionales. En este sentido, la ausencia de la acción federal tanto en Estados Unidos como en Canadá ha comportado un mayor desarrollo de la acción de las entidades sub-nacionales, que han tomado el liderazgo en la lucha contra el cambio climático. Son estas medidas las que se han visualizado en el escenario internacional. Ello ha favorecido el establecimiento de mecanismos de coordinación de la acción de estas entidades sub-nacionales en el seno de redes transnacionales, que han ido adquiriendo una mayor relevancia en la implementación del Convenio Marco sobre el Cambio Climático y del Protocolo de Kyoto, particularmente en relación a uno de sus instrumentos, el comercio de los derechos de emisión de gases de efecto invernadero. En este contexto, la futura vinculación de los sistemas de comercio de derechos de emisión de gases de efecto invernadero en Norteamérica con el sistema de la Unión Europea presenta diversos retos de carácter material y formal.

General equilibrium with asymmetric information: a dual approach

We study markets where the characteristics or decisions of certain agents are relevant but not known to their trading partners. Assuming exclusive transactions, the environment is described as a continuum economy with indivisible commodities. We characterize incentive efficient allocations as solutions to linear programming problems and appeal to duality theory to demonstrate the generic existence of external effects in these markets. Because under certain conditions such effects may generate non-convexities, randomization emerges as a theoretic possibility. In characterizing market equilibria we show that, consistently with the personalized nature of transactions, prices are generally non-linear in the underlying consumption. On the other hand, external effects may have critical implications for market efficiency. With adverse selection, in fact, cross-subsidization across agents with different private information may be necessary for optimality, and so, the market need not even achieve an incentive efficient allocation. In contrast, for the case of a single commodity, we find that when informational asymmetries arise after the trading period (e.g. moral hazard; ex post hidden types) external effects are fully internalized at a market equilibrium.

Comparison of recent toll road concession transactions in the United States and France

Recent concessions in France and in the US have resulted in a dramatic difference in the valuation placed on the toll roads; the price paid by the investors in France was twelve times current cash flow whereas investors paid sixty times current cash flow for the U.S. toll roads. In this paper we explore two questions: What accounts for the difference in these multiples, and what are the implications with respect to the public interest. Our analysis illustrates how structural and procedural decisions made by the public owner affect the concession price. Further, the terms of the concession have direct consequences that are enjoyed or borne by the various stakeholders of the toll road.

Cross-section data, disequilibrium situations and estimated coefficients: evidence from car ownership demand

The objective of this paper is to analyse to what extent the use of cross-section data will distort the estimated elasticities for car ownership demand when the observed variables do not correspond to a state equilibrium for some individuals in the sample. Our proposal consists of approximating the equilibrium values of the observed variables by constructing a pseudo-panel data set which entails averaging individuals observed at different points of time into cohorts. The results show that individual and aggregate data lead to almost the same value for income elasticity, whereas with respect to working adult elasticity the similarity is less pronounced.

Cross-country polarisation in CO2 emissions per capita in the European Union: changes and explanatory factors

In this study, we analyse the degree of polarisation-a concept fundamentally different from that of inequality-in the international distribution of CO2 emissions per capita in the European Union. It is analytically relevant to examine the degree of instability inherent to a distribution and, in the analysed case, the likelihood that the distribution and its evolution will increase or decrease the chances of reaching an agreement. Two approaches were used to measure polarisation: the endogenous approach, in which countries are grouped according to their similarity in terms of emissions, and the exogenous approach, in which countries are grouped geographically. Our findings indicate a clear decrease in polarisation since the mid-1990s, which can essentially be explained by the fact that the different groups of countries have converged (i.e. antagonism among the CO2 emitters has decreased) as the contribution of energy intensity to between-group differences has decreased. This lower degree of polarisation in CO2 distribution suggests a situation more conducive to the possibility of reaching EU-wide agreements on the mitigation of CO2 emissions.

Growth in a Cross-Section of Cities: Location, Increasing Returns or Random Growth?

This article analyzes empirically the main existing theories on income and population city growth: increasing returns to scale, locational fundamentals and random growth. To do this we implement a threshold nonlinearity test that extends standard linear growth regression models to a dataset on urban, climatological and macroeconomic variables on 1,175 U.S. cities. Our analysis reveals the existence of increasing returns when per-capita income levels are beyond $19; 264. Despite this, income growth is mostly explained by social and locational fundamentals. Population growth also exhibits two distinct equilibria determined by a threshold value of 116,300 inhabitants beyond which city population grows at a higher rate. Income and population growth do not go hand in hand, implying an optimal level of population beyond which income growth stagnates or deteriorates

Flexible employment and cross- regional adjustment

Employment flexibility is commonly associated to greater labour mobility and thus faster cross-regional adjustments. The literature however offers very little hard evidence on this and quite limited theoretical guidance. This paper examines empirically the relationship between employment flexibility and cross-regional adjustment (migration) at the regional and local levels in the UK. Employment flexibility is associated to higher labour mobility (but only at a rather localised scale) and at the same time seems to reduce the responsiveness of migration to unemployment. This suggest that rising flexibility may be linked to higher persistence in spatial disparities, as intra-regional adjustments are strengthened while extraregional adjustments weakened. Keywords: Employment flexibility, regional migration, labour market adjustment JEL Codes: R11, R23, J08, J61

Is real GDP stationary? Evidence from a panel unit root test with cross-sectional dependence and historical data

We use historical data that cover more than one century on real GDP for industrial countries and employ the Pesaran panel unit root test that allows for cross-sectional dependence to test for a unit root on real GDP. We find strong evidence against the unit root null. Our results are robust to the chosen group of countries and the sample period. Key words: real GDP stationarity, cross-sectional dependence, CIPS test. JEL Classification: C23, E32

Exploring Cross-layer power management for PGAS applications on the SCC platform

Technological limitations and power constraints are resulting in high-performance parallel computing architectures that are based on large numbers of high-core-count processors. Commercially available processors are now at 8 and 16 cores and experimental platforms, such as the many-core Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) platform, provide much higher core counts. These trends are presenting new sets of challenges to HPC applications including programming complexity and the need for extreme energy efficiency.In this work, we first investigate the power behavior of scientific PGAS application kernels on the SCC platform, and explore opportunities and challenges for power management within the PGAS framework. Results obtained via empirical evaluation of Unified Parallel C (UPC) applications on the SCC platform under different constraints, show that, for specific operations, the potential for energy savings in PGAS is large; and power/performance trade-offs can be effectively managed using a cross-layerapproach. We investigate cross-layer power management using PGAS language extensions and runtime mechanisms that manipulate power/performance tradeoffs. Specifically, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of such a middleware for application-aware cross-layer power management of UPC applications on the SCC platform. Finally, based on our observations, we provide a set of recommendations and insights that can be used to support similar power management for PGAS applications on other many-core platforms.

Failure mechanism under tensile loads in CFRP 0-90º cross-ply laminates containing voids

The failure mechanism of a voided CFRP 0-90° cross-ply laminate under tensile loads applied in one direction was studied in this Final Degree Project. For this purpose, voided coupons were manufactured for being tested and a FEA was done. In both investigations, voids were placed in 90º and 0º direction, in order to understand the void location influence. On the one hand, the behaviour of the voided laminates was investigated through a FEM in order to preview the stress distribution within the material. On the other hand, voided specimens where manufactured by applying blowing agent in between the inner layers. These specimens were tested by a quasi-static step wise tensile test where data showing its real behaviour was collected. Specimens were X-rayed after each step of the test in order to investigate the failure mechanism of the composite. Data from the test was studied so that relations such as strength of the laminates, crack density per stress, void length per first crack at the void and void area per first crack at the specimen could be characterized

Do Fiscal and Political Decentralization Raise Students’ Performance? A Cross-Country Analysis

The low quality of education is a persistent problem in many developed countries. Parallel to in the last decades exists a tendency towards decentralization in many developed and developing countries. Using micro data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) referred to 22 countries, we test whether there exists an impact of fiscal and political decentralization on student performance in the areas of mathematics, reading skills and science. We observe that fiscal decentralization exerts an unequivocal positive effect on students’ outcomes in all areas, while the effect of political decentralization is more ambiguous. On the one hand, the capacity of the subnational governments to rule on its region has a positive effect on students’ performance in mathematics. On the other hand, the capacity to influence the country as a whole has a negative impact on mathematics achievement. As a general result, we observe that students’ performance in Mathematics is more sensible to these exogenous variations than in Sciences and reading skills. Keywords: School outcomes, PISA, fiscal decentralization, political decentralization JEL codes: H11, H77, I21

Contagion or Interdependence in the recent Global Financial Crisis? An application to the stock markets using unconditional cross-market correlations

We consider stock market contagion as a significant increase in cross-market linkages after a shock to one country or group of countries. Under this definition we study if contagion occurred from the U.S. Financial Crisis to the rest of the major stock markets in the world by using the adjusted (unconditional) correlation coefficient approach (Forbes and Rigobon, 2002) which consists of testing if average crossmarket correlations increase significantly during the relevant period of turmoil. We would not reject the null hypothesis of interdependence in favour of contagion if the increase in correlation only suggests a continuation of high linkages in all state of the world. Moreover, if contagion occurs, this would justify the intervention of the IMF and the suddenly portfolio restructuring during the period under study.