The Internalization of Externalities in The Production of Electricity: Willingness to Pay for the Attributes of a Policy for Renewable Energy

This paper investigates the willingness to pay of a sample of residents of Bath, England, for a hypothetical program that promotes the production of renewable energy. Using choice experiments, we assess the preferences of respondents for a policy for the promotion of renewable energy that (i) contributes to the internalization of the external costs caused by fossil fuel technologies; (ii) affects the security of energy supply; (iii) has an impact on the employment in the energy sector; (iv) and leads to an increase in the electricity bill. Responses to the choice questions show that our respondents are in favour of a policy for renewable energy and that they attach a high value to a policy that brings private and public benefits in terms of climate change and energy security benefits. Our results therefore suggest that consumers are willing to pay a higher price for electricity in order to internalize the external costs in terms of energy security, climate change and air pollution caused by the production of electricity.Non Market Valuation, Choice Experiments, Willingness to Pay, Renewable Energy, Energy Security, Greenhouse Gases Emissions

Why Do Western European Firms Issue Convertibles Instead of Straight Debt or Equity?

Unlike their US counterparts, European convertible debt issuers tend to be large companies with small debt- and equity-related financing costs. Therefore, it is a puzzle why these firms issue convertibles instead of standard financing instruments. This paper examines European convertible debt issuer motivations by estimating a security choice model incorporating convertibles, straight debt, and equity. We find that European convertibles are used as sweetened debt, not as delayed equity. This motivation is also reflected in the highly debt-like design of most European convertible issues. In addition, we show that economy-wide and country-specific factors have a significant incremental impact on the convertible debt choice.Western Europe;Convertible Debt;Security Choice;Security Design

Social Security and Household Portfolio Allocation

The entitlement to social security retirement benefits is a major component of aggregate household wealth. This paper focuses on the impact of social security annuities on household portfolio allocation, extending existing optimizing models of portfolio allocation to explicitly consider the role of social security. The model is implemented using cross-section data. The partial equilibrium impacts of changes in social security benefits on portfolio choice and composition are small but precisely measured. The general equilibrium impacts on asset markets of a social security policy change (focusing onlinks between social security and dynamic wealth accumulation and between social security benefits and private pension benefits) are generally much larger.

Key Findings: California Young Adult Workforce Survey

Presents survey results on the views of the state's youth on the economy, job security, employment prospects, and influences on job choice, as well as their attitudes toward work in the healthcare sector

On The Endogenous Sustainability of the Non-funded Social Security System

The paper describes the effects of the non-funded social security systems over fertility rate and labor supply(typically family choice variables). We show that changes on fiscal policy may induce subsequent changes on family choices which produce an endogenous problem of sustainability over the social security system.

Compositional closure for Bayes Risk in probabilistic noninterference

We give a sequential model for noninterference security including probability (but not demonic choice), thus supporting reasoning about the likelihood that high-security values might be revealed by observations of low-security activity. Our novel methodological contribution is the definition of a refinement order and its use to compare security measures between specifications and (their supposed) implementations. This contrasts with the more common practice of evaluating the security of individual programs in isolation. The appropriateness of our model and order is supported by our showing that our refinement order is the greatest compositional relation --the compositional closure-- with respect to our semantics and an "elementary" order based on Bayes Risk --- a security measure already in widespread use. We also relate refinement to other measures such as Shannon Entropy. By applying the approach to a non-trivial example, the anonymous-majority Three-Judges protocol, we demonstrate by example that correctness arguments can be simplified by the sort of layered developments --through levels of increasing detail-- that are allowed and encouraged by compositional semantics

Food Security, Gender and Occupational Choice among Urban Low-Income Households

Rising urban poverty and food insecurity are serious concerns in developing countries today. Urban livelihoods and coping strategies remain poorly understood however. This paperexamines the response of female and male household members in marginalized urban (predominantly squatter) areas to the risk of food shortage in terms of occupational choice. More specifically, we use probit analyses to investigate whether household vulnerability or the need to provide self-insurance for food security, alongside gender roles, influence a worker's choice of enterprise activity. We focus our investigation on self-employed women and men using a data set drawn from the 1496 individual sample in 14 urban squatter communities in Bolivia, Ecuador, Philippines and Thailand. Our findings show that selfemployed women in households facing higher risk of food insecurity are likely to engage in food-related enterprise activities and this is especially true in Philippines and Thailand. This suggests the role of occupational choice in in helping urban squatter households in mitigating the risk of food shortage through the selection of an income-generating activity that allows the direct use of unsold inventories for food consumption.food security, self-employment, occupational choice, urban informal secto