The Case against Government Intervention in Energy Markets

Many politicians and pundits are panicked over the existing state of the oil and gasoline markets. Disregarding past experience, these parties advocate massive intervention in those markets, which would only serve to repeat and extend previous errors. These interventionists propose solutions to nonexistent problems. This Policy Analysis reviews the academic literature relevant to these matters and argues that the prevailing policy proposals are premised on a misunderstanding of energy economics and market realities. The interventionists do not distinguish between problems that government can remedy and those that it cannot. They ignore lessons that should have been learned from past experience. They embrace at best second- and third-best remedies rather than first-best remedies for the alleged problems. Moreover, they ignore the extreme difficulty associated with ensuring efficient policy response even when it seems to be theoretically warranted. Fear of oil imports is premised on pernicious myths that have long distorted energy policy. The U.S. defense posture probably would not be altered by reducing the extent to which oil is imported from troublesome regions. Fears about a near-term peak in global oil production are unwarranted, and government cannot help markets to respond properly even if the alarm proved correct. Market actors will produce the capital necessary for needed investments; no "Marshall Plans" are necessary. Price signals will efficiently order consumer behavior; energy-consumption mandates are therefore both unwise and unnecessary. Finally, more caution is needed regarding the case for public action to address global warming. The omnipresent calls for more aggressive energy diplomacy are misguided. Economic theory validated by historical experience implies that the diplomatic initiatives are exercises in futility because they seek to divert countries from the wealth maximization that is their goal. Similarly, the search for favorable access to crude oil is futile. Despite their popularity, rules to force reductions in energy use lack economic justification. Attacks on American oil companies and speculators seek to shift blame to those subject to U.S. government control from the uncontrollable foreign oil-producing governments that are truly to blame

Evaluating prediction systems in software project estimation

This is the Pre-print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2012 ElsevierContext: Software engineering has a problem in that when we empirically evaluate competing prediction systems we obtain conflicting results. Objective: To reduce the inconsistency amongst validation study results and provide a more formal foundation to interpret results with a particular focus on continuous prediction systems. Method: A new framework is proposed for evaluating competing prediction systems based upon (1) an unbiased statistic, Standardised Accuracy, (2) testing the result likelihood relative to the baseline technique of random ‘predictions’, that is guessing, and (3) calculation of effect sizes. Results: Previously published empirical evaluations of prediction systems are re-examined and the original conclusions shown to be unsafe. Additionally, even the strongest results are shown to have no more than a medium effect size relative to random guessing. Conclusions: Biased accuracy statistics such as MMRE are deprecated. By contrast this new empirical validation framework leads to meaningful results. Such steps will assist in performing future meta-analyses and in providing more robust and usable recommendations to practitioners.Martin Shepperd was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/H050329

The Intersection of Law and Trade in the WTO System: Economics and the Transition to a Hard Law System

International Relations/Trade,

Assessing the Impact of Stricter Food Safety Standards on Trade: HACCP in U.S. Seafood Trade with the Developing World

Health risks associated with seafood products prompted the introduction of mandatory HACCP in the seafood industry in the United States in 1997. This paper quantifies the trade impact of this introduction by analyzing patterns of seafood imports to the U.S. over the period 1990 to 2004. The results of a gravity model using panel data suggest that HACCP had a negative and significant impact on overall seafood imports from the top 33 developing and developed countries selling into the U.S. For developing countries, the results support the view of "standards-as-barriers" versus "standards-as-catalysts" as the negative HACCP effect was experienced by developing countries, while the effect for developed countries was positive.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Mining software metrics from Jazz

In this paper, we describe the extraction of source code metrics from the Jazz repository and the application of data mining techniques to identify the most useful of those metrics for predicting the success or failure of an attempt to construct a working instance of the software product. We present results from a systematic study using the J48 classification method. The results indicate that only a relatively small number of the available software metrics that we considered have any significance for predicting the outcome of a build. These significant metrics are discussed and implication of the results discussed, particularly the relative difficulty of being able to predict failed build attempts