Panel Data Analysis of Japanese Residential Water Demand Using a Discrete/Continuous Choice Approach

Block rate pricing is often applied to income taxation, telecommunication services, and brand marketing in addition to its best-known application in public utility services. Under block rate pricing, consumers face piecewise-linear budget constraints. A discrete/continuous choice approach is usually used to account for piecewise-linear budget constraints for demand and price endogeneity. A recent study proposed a methodology to incorporate a separability condition that previous studies ignore, by implementing a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation based on a hierarchical Bayesian approach. To extend this approach to panel data, our study proposes a Bayesian hierarchical model incorporating the individual effect. The random coefficients model result shows that the price and income elasticities are estimated to be negative and positive, respectively, and the coefficients of the number of members and the number of rooms per household are estimated to be positive. Furthermore, the AR(1) error component model suggests that the Japanese residential water demand does not have serial correlation.Block rate pricing, Bayesian analysis, Panel data, residential water demand

Is a Voluntary Approach an Effective Environmental Policy Instrument? A Case for Environmental Management Systems

Using Japanese facility-level data from an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey, we estimate the effects of implementation of ISO14001 and publication of environmental reports on the facilities’ environmental performance. While most previous studies focused on an index of emissions toxicity, this study examines three areas of impacts, none of which have been explored in the literature: natural resource use, solid waste generation, and wastewater effluent. The study is also unique in that the effectiveness of ISO14001 is considered in relation to environmental regulations. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, both ISO14001 and report publication help reduce all three impacts; the former appears more effective in all areas except wastewater. Second, environmental regulations do not weaken the effect of ISO14001. Third, assistance programs offered by local governments—a voluntary approach—promote facilities’ adoption of ISO14001. These findings suggest that governments can use command-and-control and voluntary approaches concurrently.environmental management systems, ISO14001, environmental reports, voluntary actions, governmental assistance programs, environmental impacts, discrete choice model, endogeneity, GHK simulator

"Bayesian Estimation of Demand Functions under Block-Rate Pricing"

This article proposes a Bayesian estimation of demand functions under block-rate pricing by focusing on increasing block-rate pricing. This is the first study that explicitly considers the separability condition which has been ignored in previous literature. Under this pricing structure, the price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a piecewise-linear budget constraint. Solving this maximization problem leads to a statistical model in which model parameters are strongly restricted by the separability condition. In this article, by taking a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to properly estimate the demand function. We find, however, that the convergence of the distribution of simulated samples to the posterior distribution is slow, requiring an additional scale transformation step for parameters to the Gibbs sampler. These proposed methods are then applied to estimate the Japanese residential water demand function.

"Discrete/Continuous Choice Model of the Residential Gas Demand on the Nonconvex Budget Set"

The discrete/continuous choice approach is often used to analyze the demand for public utility services under block rate pricing, which is a nonlinear price system. Although a consumer's budget set is convex under increasing block rate pricing, a consumer's budget set is nonconvex under decreasing block rate pricing as is the case with the gas supply in Japan and the United Kingdom. The nonlinearity problem, which has not been examined in previous studies, arises under nonconvex budget sets in which the indirect utility function corresponding to the demand function becomes highly nonlinear. To address this problem, this article proposes a feasible, efficient method of demand on the nonconvex budget set and implements a case study using household-level data on Japanese residential gas consumption. The advantages of our method are as follows: (i) the construction of an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm with an efficient blanket based on the Hermite-Hadamard integral inequality and the power-mean inequality, (ii) the explicit consideration of the (highly nonlinear) separability condition, which often makes numerical likelihood maximization difficult, and (iii) the introduction of normal disturbance into the discrete/continuous choice model.

"Bayesian Estimation of Demand Functions under Block Rate Pricing"

This article proposes a Bayesian estimation method of demand functions under block rate pricing, focusing on increasing one, where we first considered the separability condition explicitly which has been ignored in the previous literature. Under this pricing structure, price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a piecewise-linear budget constraint. Solving this maximization problem leads to a statistical model that includes many inequalities, such as the so-called separability condition. Because of them, it is virtually impractical to numerically maximize the likelihood function. Thus, taking a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to properly estimate the demand function. We find, however, that the convergence of the distribution of simulated samples to the posterior distribution is slow, requiring an additional scale transformation step for parameters to the Gibbs sampler. These proposed methods are applied to estimate the Japanese residential water demand function.

"Panel Data Analysis of Japanese Residential Water Demand Using a Discrete/Continuous Choice Approach"

Block rate pricing is often applied to income taxation, telecommunication services, and brand marketing in addition to its best-known application in public utility services. Under block rate pricing, consumers face piecewise-linear budget constraints. A discrete/ continuous choice approach is usually used to account for piecewise-linear budget constraints for demand and price endogeneity. A recent study proposed a methodology to incorporate a separability condition that previous studies ignore, by implementing a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation based on a hierarchical Bayesian approach. To extend this approach to panel data, our study proposes a Bayesian hierarchical model incorporating the random and fixed individual effects. In both models, the price and income elasticities are estimated to be negative and positive, respectively. Further, the number of members and the number of rooms per household have positive relationship to the residential water demand when we apply the model with random individual effects, while they do not in the model with fixed individual effects.

Hardware Implementation of Calibration Data Loading in Device Driver for an SPI Peripheral

As the IoT progresses, various SoCs are being developed. If a SoC is in high demand, the development cost per chip is small, but if the demand is localized, the development cost is large, resulting in more expensive products. To solve this problem, we aim to develop a general-purpose SoC with hardware interfaces for all peripheral devices. Since it is difficult to develop such a SoC due to hardware constraints, the dynamic reconfiguration of FPGA is used to deploy only what is necessary for processing in the reconfiguration unit. In addition, we aim to develop a general-purpose architecture that facilitates the design and development of dedicated hardware interfaces for each peripheral device. This architecture is to achieve a general-purpose SoC by seeking the cooperation of engineers around the world. Toward the development of this architecture, we will first focus on SPI devices. In developing hardware device drivers for SPI devices, RTL description is used for the parts that describe clock-cycle-based operations, and high-level synthesis is used for the parts that describe procedure-based operations. In this study, the BME280, a temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure sensor for SPI devices, is used to convert the device driver functionality to hardware for efficient use. This paper describes the hardware implementation of the part that reads multiple calibration data to correct the sensor data, and evaluates the performance, circuit size, and power efficiency through demonstration experiments using an actual device.journal articl

Introduction to Environmental Economics and Policy in Japan

This textbook demonstrates how economic theories can be used for environmental policy evaluations. A notable feature of this book is that, unlike most textbooks in environmental economics written in English, it draws on examples from Japan’s policy on energy, resource, pollution, and carbon emissions. Policy measures discussed in this book include controls on motor vehicle emissions, pricing of waste disposal, deposit-refund scheme for recycling, carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes. With topics involving transboundary environmental concerns such as climate change, air pollution, and waste management and recycling, the book also integrates international perspectives and provides comparisons of policies across regions and countries. A major objective of this book is to present a concise and accessible introduction to environmental economics as applied to policy evaluations in and beyond Japan. The knowledge available from this book must be very useful for students, policymakers and practitioners who seek environmental policy solutions from an economic point of view. This is an open access book

Health and Environmental Risks: An Empirical Study on the Household Solid Waste Management in Panama

departmental bulletin pape