Scale Economies, Unemployment, and Industry Agglomeration

This paper tries to resolve the paradox raised by Corden and Findlay (1975). In this paper, it is assumed that Manufacture sector has scale economies. Both factor prices and product prices can adjust in a general equilibrium system. In a closed economy, this paper concludes that, with the expansion of capital stock both the unemployment rate and the absolute amount of unemployment will decrease. In an open economy, this paper sets up an asymmetric model, of which only one region has fixed wage rate. It will help us to investigate how the trading cost would affect the unemployment and output of the region, which may give some helpful policy implications.fixed wage rate, unemployment, agglomeration

Environmental Policy in a Linear City Model of Product Differentiation

This paper analyzes how a tax/subsidy policy affects consumers? behavior when choosing between green (pollution free goods) and conventional products and its effects on welfare when some consumers have strong preferences for green goods. We develop a three stage complete information game, using the Hotelling?s linear city model. We show that when products are identical in all respects except in their environmental properties, a tax/subsidy policy performs better than the case without policy. Our efficiency comparisons suggest that under a setting of horizontal product differentiation a tax/subsidy (either on consumers or polluting ?firms) produces higher social welfare than the absence of policy. Moreover, the proportion of consumers who prefer green products affects the welfare gains from a subsidy or tax policy.Green products, environmental policy, horizontal product differentiation

Triplet-Quadruplet Dark Matter

We explore a dark matter model extending the standard model particle content by one fermionic $SU(2)_L$ triplet and two fermionic $SU(2)_L$ quadruplets, leading to a minimal realistic UV-complete model of electroweakly interacting dark matter which interacts with the Higgs doublet at tree level via two kinds of Yukawa couplings. After electroweak symmetry-breaking, the physical spectrum of the dark sector consists of three Majorana fermions, three singly charged fermions, and one doubly charged fermion, with the lightest neutral fermion $\chi_1^0$ serving as a dark matter candidate. A typical spectrum exhibits a large degree of degeneracy in mass between the neutral and charged fermions, and we examine the one-loop corrections to the mass differences to ensure that the lightest particle is neutral. We identify regions of parameter space for which the dark matter abundance is saturated for a standard cosmology, including coannihilation channels, and find that this is typically achieved for $m_{\chi_1^0}\sim 2.4~\mathrm{TeV}$. Constraints from precision electroweak measurements, searches for dark matter scattering with nuclei, and dark matter annihilation are important, but leave open a viable range for a thermal relic.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures. v2: minor revisions to match published versio

Four Market Studies for the Beef and Electric Power Industries

This dissertation targets at studying the cause and implication of empirical grounded industry facts using multiple methodologies, including analytical model, statistical model, and agent-based simulation. Basically, this dissertation investigates two main research objects, the U.S. beef industry and restructured electricity market. Beef is the single largest sector within United States agricultural production, accounting for a fifth of farm market revenues.Unlike other animal products, only a small share of output is produced under vertically integrated arrangements. Beef production also differs from other sectors because of the long production lags and the opportunity to utilize forage from lower quality land. The sector divides between grass-based cow-calf operations during the first year of a beef animal\u27s life and grain-based feeder operations during the months preceding slaughter. The two sub-sectors also differ in regards to financial performance. Empirical data shows that cow-calf sector has strong positive autocorrelation in returns over time while the feeding sector return is close to white noise. Using the notion of Ricardian rent this study extends existing dynamic models of beef market equilibrium to rationalize this dierence. Time series data are tested where preliminary tests provide evidence in favor of the theory proposed by this study. The results are important in explaining why the cattle feeding sector is relatively immune from demand and supply-side shocks whereas cow-calf operations are more exposed. The second part of the dissertation turns focus on the restructured electricity market. In April 2003, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) proposed a new market design for U.S. wholesale power markets. Core features of this design include oversight of operations by some form of Independent System Operator (ISO), a two-settlement system consisting of a day-ahead market supported by a parallel real-time market to ensure continual balancing of supply and demand for power, and management of grid congestion by means of locational marginal pricing. The restructuring of electricity market stays in the layer of wholesale market while the retail market still remains highly regulated by the state government. To alleviate the disconnection between wholesale and retail market, ISO propels demand response program to encourage retail customers join the wholesale market which is supposed to pass wholesale market price signal to the final customers. To investigate the impact of this connecting attempt on current power system performance in terms of both market and physical operation, this dissertation conducts agent-based simulation experiments on three topics that are closely related with demand response and price-sensitive bidding behavior. Specific studied issues include: a close-loop simulation study of two-settlement market with price-sensitive customers and intelligent load serving entity, a multi-agent simulation study of demand response provider baseline inflation behavior and generator company investment decisions under high penetration level of DR resource with a market framework requested by new FERC Order 745, an agent-based simulation study of LSE strategic price sensitive bidding behavior under three different market clearing mechanisms. To carry out this research, a flexible simulation framework is developed independently with a major extension of the AMES wholesale power market test bed to include two-settlement system, Unit Commitment system, smart device, intelligent LSE, multi-task ISO and capacity market

Detecting interactions between dark matter and photons at high energy e+e−e^+e^- colliders

We investigate the sensitivity to the effective operators describing interactions between dark matter particles and photons at future high energy $e^+e^-$ colliders via the \gamma+ \slashed{E} channel. Such operators could be useful to interpret the potential gamma-ray line signature observed by the Fermi-LAT. We find that these operators can be further tested at $e^+ e^-$ colliders by using either unpolarized or polarized beams. We also derive a general unitarity condition for $2 \to n$ processes and apply it to the dark matter production process $e^+e^-\to\chi\chi\gamma$.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure

The Study of Effect of Carbon Tax on the International Competitiveness of Energy-intensive Industries: An Empirical Analysis of OECD 21 Countries, 1992-2008

AbstractCarbon tax as a GHG-emission-reducing measure is strongly recommended by scholars and international organizations. But many countries are concerned about the potential negative impact of carbon tax on their international competitiveness of energy intensive industries. This paper analyzes this issue empirically. Based on the basic gravity model used by Harris, Kónya, and Mátyás (2002) and the World Bank report (2008), this paper improved the model by introducing a set of carbon tax p olicy variables to measure the impact of carbon tax on international competitiveness of energy-intensive industries using data of 21 OECD countries and 9 sample energyintensive industries. The result shows that carbon tax has a statistically negative impact on the international competitiveness of energy-intensive industries. This is particularly true when the focus is on the non-resource based industries, which is possibly because different levels of subsidies and exemptions are granted for different industries affected by the carbon tax