Modelling a mixed system of air pollution fee and tradable permits for controlling nitrogen oxide: a case study of Taiwan

A mixed-integer non-linear programming model that minimises the total regulatory costs of controlling nitrogen oxide is used to investigate how a newly proposed permit trading scheme in Taiwan, which incorporates the features of banking and a nonone- to-one trading ratio, may affect firms’ emission reduction strategies and permit trading decisions. Compared to the previous regulation where only an air pollution fee is used, the new regulation that requires a reduction in emissions by 10 per cent from the emission level in the year 2000 for a 5 year period will increase the costs by 77 per cent, which is equivalent to US # 9.87 million. The design of banking and the increasing returns to scale characteristic of pollution control among firms might lead to an uneven reduction in emissions in each year. Setting a lower reservation rate for banking would, however, help maintain a more stable environmental quality without a significant loss to the government in terms of air pollution fee revenue.air pollution fee, banking, mixed-integer non-linear programming, nitrogen oxide, tradable permits, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE EMISSION REDUCTION MARKET SYSTEM IN CHICAGO

A mixed-integer programming model is used to investigate economic impacts of the permit trading market in Chicago and determine the equilibrium price. Unlike previous studies, the model determines unit pollution abatement cost endogenously depending on firms' technology adoption decisions. A sequential trading process is used to simulate firms' behavior under incomplete information. The results show that average shadow prices, a counterpart of conventional shadow prices in discrete problems, slightly underestimate the equilibrium prices. Moreover, the model predicts an over-supply of permits for the first two trading seasons.mixed-integer programming, ERMS, average shadow price, pollution permit, Environmental Economics and Policy,

EFFICIENCY LOSS AND TRADABLE PERMITS

This research presents a price endogenous mathematical programming model that incorporates the independent, optimizing behavior of individual participants to estimate the possible efficiency loss of a newly developed permit trading market for nitrogen oxides (NOx) control in southern Taiwan. The result shows that when control equipment decisions are indivisible, an efficiency loss may arise due to over-investment. The efficiency loss found here is not because of a bilateral trading process and/or insufficient information for finding trading partners, but it is due to not having full control ability of the installed equipment.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Flavor Violating Transitions of Charged Leptons from a Seesaw Mechanism of Dimension Seven

A mechanism has been suggested recently to generate the neutrino mass out of a dimension-seven operator. This is expected to relieve the tension between the occurrence of a tiny neutrino mass and the observability of other physics effects beyond it. Such a mechanism would inevitably entail lepton flavor violating effects. We study in this work the radiative and purely leptonic transitions of the light charged leptons. In so doing we make a systematic analysis of the flavor structure by providing a convenient parametrization of the mass matrices in terms of independent physical parameters and diagonalizing them explicitly. We illustrate our numerical results by sampling over two CP phases and one Yukawa coupling which are the essential parameters in addition to the heavy lepton mass. We find that with the stringent constraints coming from the muon decays and the muon-electron conversion in nuclei taken into account the decays of the tau lepton are severely suppressed in the majority of parameter space. There exist, however, small regions in which some tau decays can reach a level that is about 2 orders of magnitude below their current bounds.Comment: v1: 25 pages, 8 figures; v2: proofread version for PRD. Included muon-electron conversion in nuclei at the referee's suggestion and added relevant refs accordingly; main conclusion not changed but bounds on tau lepton decays becoming more stringent; linguistic and editing corrections also mad

State-Centric or State-in-Society: National Identity and Collective Memory in the Linkage Politics of Chinese Foreign Relations

This dissertation, with a standpoint of disentangling China\u27s diplomacy inside-out, explores the Chinese state-society relationship in domestic-foreign-policy interaction. With its analytic focus resting on the collective memory of national humiliation in modern Chinese history and the derived national identity, this project delves into the linkage between the ideational impetus of the diplomatic decision-making of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the way that the authoritarian regime claims its internal and external legitimacy. In the state legitimation, collective memory and national identity are instrumentalized to enact the moral justification of the CCP\u27s political authority and to justify China\u27s persistent quest to regain a rightful place in the international arena. In the belief system of Chinese foreign policy ideas, these historical institutions shape the conception of the state interests and the goals of national foreign policy. The normative and purposive meanings and the affective dimension of these ideational factors have given ground to the ethical agenda of China\u27s diplomacy. The CCP\u27s policy calculation in its external legitimation can go against the moral standards by which domestic audience assesses its diplomatic performance. In the interrogation of the discrepancy between the state\u27s foreign policy behavior and the CCP\u27s role playing claimed for its memory-based legitimacy, the scripts of Chinese diplomatic drama derived from historical institutions have empowered the agency of the Chinese populace to contend with the authoritarian state

Electronic structures of [111]-oriented free-standing InAs and InP nanowires

We report on a theoretical study of the electronic structures of the [111]-oriented, free-standing, zincblende InAs and InP nanowires with hexagonal cross sections by means of an atomistic $sp^{3}s^{*}$, spin-orbit interaction included, nearest-neighbor, tight-binding method. The band structures and the band state wave functions of these nanowires are calculated and the symmetry properties of the bands and band states are analyzed based on the $C_{3v}$ double point group. It is shown that all bands of these nanowires are doubly degenerate at the $\Gamma$-point and some of these bands will split into non-degenerate bands when the wave vector $k$ moves away from the $\Gamma$-point as a manifestation of spin-splitting due to spin-orbit interaction. It is also shown that the lower conduction bands of these nanowires all show simple parabolic dispersion relations, while the top valence bands show complex dispersion relations and band crossings. The band state wave functions are presented by the spatial probability distributions and it is found that all the band states show $2\pi/3$-rotation symmetric probability distributions. The effects of quantum confinement on the band structures of the [111]-oriented InAs and InP nanowires are also examined and an empirical formula for the description of quantization energies of the lowest conduction band and the highest valence band is presented. The formula can simply be used to estimate the enhancement of the band gaps of the nanowires at different sizes as a result of quantum confinement.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1502.0756

Topological energy gaps in the [111]-oriented InAs/GaSb and GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires

The [111]-oriented InAs/GaSb and GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires have been studied by the $8\times 8$ Luttinger-Kohn $\vec{k}\cdot\vec{p}$ Hamiltonian to search for non-vanishing fundamental gaps between inverted electron and hole bands. We focus on the variations of the topologically nontrivial fundamental gap, the hybridization gap, and the effective gap with the core radius and shell thickness of the nanowires. The evolutions of all the energy gaps with the structural parameters are shown to be dominantly governed by quantum size effects. With a fixed core radius, a topologically nontrivial fundamental gap exists only at intermediate shell thicknesses. The maximum gap is $\sim 4.4$ meV for GaSb/InAs and $\sim 3.5$ meV for InAs/GaSb core-shell nanowires, and for the GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires the gap persists over a wider range of geometrical parameters. The intrinsic reason for these differences between the two types of nanowires is that in the shell the electron-like states of InAs is more delocalized than the hole-like state of GaSb, while in the core the hole-like state of GaSb is more delocalized than the electron-like state of InAs, and both features favor stronger electron-hole hybridization. Since similar features of the electron- and hole-like states have been found in nanowires of other materials, it could serve as a common rule to put the hole-like state in the core while the electron-like state in the shell of a core-shell nanowire to achieve better topological properties.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure

Extrapolative bubbles and trading volume

We propose an extrapolative model of bubbles to explain the sharp rise in prices and volume observed in historical financial bubbles. The model generates a novel mechanism for volume: because of the interaction between extrapolative beliefs and disposition effects, investors are quick to not only buy assets with positive past returns but also sell them if good returns continue. Using account-level transaction data on the 2014–2015 Chinese stock market bubble, we test and confirm the model’s predictions about trading volume. We quantify the magnitude of the proposed mechanism and show that it can increase trading volume by another 30%

Radiative Neutrino Mass in Type III Seesaw Model

The simplest type III seesaw model as originally proposed introduces one lepton triplet. It thus contains four active neutrinos, two massive and two massless at tree level. We determine the radiative masses that the latter receive first at two loops. The masses are generally so tiny that they are definitely excluded by the oscillation data, if the heavy leptons are not very heavy, say, within the reach of LHC. To accommodate the data on masses, the seesaw scale must be as large as the scale of grand unification. This indicates that the most economical type III model would entail no new physics at low energies beyond the tiny neutrino masses.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figure; v2: added 3 sentences in sec 4 for clarifications, version published on 7 Apr 2009 in PR D79, 073003 (2009