Using Narratives, Humor, and Social Navigation: An Inspection of two systems

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An Even Sterner Review: Introducing Relative Prices into the Discounting Debate

The Stern Review has had a major influence on the policy discussion on climate change. One reason is that the report has raised the estimated cost of unmitigated climate damages by an order of magnitude compared to most earlier estimates, leading to a call for strong and urgent action on climate change. Not surprisingly, severe criticism has been levied against the report by authors who think that these results hinge mainly on the use of a discount rate that is too low. Here we discuss the Ramsey rule for the discount rates and its implications for the economics of climate change. While we find no strong objections to the discounting assumptions adopted in the Stern Review, our main point is that the conclusions reached in the review can be justified on other grounds than by using a low discount rate. We argue that nonmarket damages from climate change are probably underestimated and that future scarcities that will be induced by the changing composition of the economy and climate change should lead to rising relative prices for certain goods and services, raising the estimated damage of climate change and counteracting the effect of discounting. We build our analysis on earlier research (Hoel and Sterner 2007) that has shown that the Ramsey discounting formula is somewhat modified in a two-sector economy with differential growth rates. Most importantly, such a model is characterized by changing relative prices, something that has major implications for a correct valuation of future climate damages. We introduce these results into a slightly modified version of the DICE model (Nordhaus 1994) and find that taking relative prices into account can have as large an effect on economically warranted abatement levels as can a low discount rate.discounting, relative prices, Ramsey, climate damage

Have Countries with Lax Environmental Regulations a Comparative Advantage in Polluting Industries?

We aim to study whether lax environmental regulations induce comparative advantages, causing the least-regulated countries to specialize in polluting industries. The study is based on Trefler and Zhu’s (2005) definition of the factor content of trade. For the econometrical analysis, we use a cross-section of 71 countries in 2000 to examine the net exports in the most polluting industries. We try to overcome three weaknesses in the empirical literature: the measurement of environmental endowments or environmental stringency, the possible endogeneity of the explanatory variables, and the influence of the industrial level of aggregation. As a result, we do find some evidence in favor of the pollution-haven effect. The exogeneity of the environmental endowments was rejected in several industries, and we also find that industrial aggregation matters.comparative advantage, environmental regulation, trade, pollution haven, Porter hypothesis

Numerical modelling of heat transfer in a tube furnace for steel wire annealing

In order to relieve stresses from cold drawing and to regain ductility, steel wires are annealed in furnaces under prolonged exposure to an appropriate temperature termed as ‘soaking’. This ensures the attainment of the required product quality. Literature suggests that the annealing processes are still determined by trial and error approach due to a lack of standards and also due to the proprietary nature of furnace designs. This paper investigates the heat transfer mechanism in a 12-metre long tube furnace filled with an inert gas and through which a cold-rolled steel wire travels at a specified speed. The length of the furnace is divided into three regions i.e. heating zone, soaking zone and cooling zone of which the heating and the cooling zones are given special attention. The methodology involves the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics by coupling both solid (steel wire) and gaseous zones (Hydrogen or Nitrogen). Radiation has been incorporated via a suitable model and convection taken care of by considering laminar flow of gases. The results suggest that the time needed in the heating zone is influenced by the choices of the surrounding atmosphere, speeds of gas and of the wire. These factors have an impact on the wire drawing speed and eventually on the overall productivity. It is also implied that the proposed numerical method may be used to shorten the ‘soaking’ time and hence to reduce energy consumption. The work demonstrates the usefulness of CFD in understanding and optimisation of the transfer process as well as highlights the challenges associated with numerical results

Education-Occupation Mismatch: Is There an Income Penalty?

This paper adds to the small literature on the consequences of education-occupation mismatches. It examines the income penalty for field of education-occupation mismatches for men and women with higher education in Sweden and reveals that the penalty for such mismatches is large for both men and women. In fact, it is substantially larger than has been found for the US. Controlling for cognitive ability further establishes that the income penalty is not caused by a sorting by ability, at least for Swedish men. The income penalty for men decreases with work experience which is an indication that education-specific skills and work experience are substitutes to some extent. There is no evidence, though, that the mismatched individuals move to a matching occupation over time. Thus, for some, the income penalty seems to be permanent.salary wage differentials, rate of return, human capital, educational economics

Context-aware adaptation in DySCAS

DySCAS is a dynamically self-configuring middleware for automotive control systems. The addition of autonomic, context-aware dynamic configuration to automotive control systems brings a potential for a wide range of benefits in terms of robustness, flexibility, upgrading etc. However, the automotive systems represent a particularly challenging domain for the deployment of autonomics concepts, having a combination of real-time performance constraints, severe resource limitations, safety-critical aspects and cost pressures. For these reasons current systems are statically configured. This paper describes the dynamic run-time configuration aspects of DySCAS and focuses on the extent to which context-aware adaptation has been achieved in DySCAS, and the ways in which the various design and implementation challenges are met