This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four papers, which relate to environmental policy in the presence of transboundary environmental damage. Paper [I] concerns public policy in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. Each jurisdiction is assumed large in the sense that its government is able to infuence the world-market producer price of the externality-generating good. This gives rise to additional incentives of relevance for national public policy in the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium. With the uncoordinated equilibrium as the reference case, the welfare effects from coordinated changes in public policy variables are analyzed. Paper [II] analyses welfare effects of coordinated changes in environmental and capital taxation in the presence of transboundary environmental externalities and wage bargaining externalities. In the wage bargaining between frms and labor unions, firms use the threat of moving abroad to moderate wage claims, which means that domestic policy infuences wage formation abroad. The specific framework implies welfare effects of policy coordination that correspond to each of the respective international interaction mentioned above. In paper [III], national governments face political pressure from environmental and industrial lobby groups, while pollution taxes are determined in an international negotiation. It is shown that a general increase in the environmental concern and the weight the governments attach to social welfare both tend to increase the pollution tax. However, allowing for asymmetries between the countries means that a general increase in the environmental concern has the potential to reduce the pollution tax. Paper [IV] studies national environmental policies in an economic federation characterized by decentralized leadership. The federal government sets emission targets for each member country, which are implemented by the national governments. Although all national governments have commitment power vis-à-vis the federal government, one of them also has commitment power vis-à-vis the other member countries. This creates incentives to act strategically toward the federal government, as well as toward other members.

La presente tesis estudia la correlación negativa entre inflación y precios reales de las acciones. En primer lugar, muestro evidencia de que la inflación impone costos reales en la economía, en particular al disminuir los beneficios de las empresas, tal como sugiriera originalmente Miton Friedman. Segundo, sugiero que la inflación decrece los precios reales de las acciones dado que la probabilidad de sufrir estanflación en el futuro crece con la tasa de inflación (premio evento-extremo). Tercero, testeo si la evidencia macroeconómica respalda la relación positiva entre inflación e incertidumbre, y la relación entre inflación y el precio del riesgo (avesión relativa al riesgo). Cuarto, presento un estudio histórico, Alemania entre 1870 y 1935, para mostrar que es el premio por evento-extremo, y no illusion monetaria, lo que conlleva la correlación negativa entre inflación y precios reales de acciones. El último capítulo discute contagio en países emergentes.

It is well established that stock market volatility has a memory of the past, moreover it is found that volatility correlations are long ranged. As a consequence, volatility cannot be characterized by a single correlation time in general. Recent empirical work suggests that the volatility correlation functions of various assets actually decay as a power law. Moreover it is well established that the distribution functions for the returns do not obey a Gaussian distribution, but follow more the type of distributions that incorporate what are commonly known as fat–tailed distributions. As a result, if one is to model the evolution of the stock price, stock market or any financial derivative, then standard Brownian motion models are inaccurate. One must take into account the results obtained from empirical studies and work with models that include realistic features observed on the market. In this thesis we show that it is possible to derive the path integral for a non-Gaussian option pricing model that can capture fat–tails. However we find that the path integral technique can only be used on a very small set of problems, as a number of situations of interest are shown to be intractable. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1378473 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2010

Despite the extent of a theoretical framework in financial market studies, a vast majority of the traders, investors and computer scientists have relied only on technical and timeseries data for predicting future prices. So far, the forecasting models have rarely incorporated macro-economic and market fundamentals successfully, especially with short-term predictions ranging less than a month. In this investigation on the predictability of certain financial markets, an attempt has been made to incorporate a un-exampled and encompassing set of parameters into an Artificial Neural Network prediction system. Experiments were carried out on three market instruments ??? namely currency exchange rates, share prices and oil prices. The choice of parameters for inclusion or exclusion, and the time frame adopted for the experimental sets were derived from the market literature. Good directional prediction accuracies were achieved for currency exchange rates and share prices with certain parameters as inputs, which consisted of predicting short-term movements based on past movements. These predictions were better than the results produced by a traditional least square prediction method. The trading strategy developed based on the predictions also achieved a higher percentage of winning trades. No significant predictions were observed for oil prices. These results open up questions in the microstructure of the markets and provide an insight into the inputs required for market forecasting in the corresponding time frame, for future investigation. The study concludes by advocating the use of trend based input parameters and suggests ways to improve neural network forecasting models.

It is well established that stock market volatility has a memory of the past, moreover it is found that volatility correlations are long ranged. As a consequence, volatility cannot be characterized by a single correlation time in general. Recent empirical work suggests that the volatility correlation functions of various assets actually decay as a power law. Moreover it is well established that the distribution functions for the returns do not obey a Gaussian distribution, but follow more the type of distributions that incorporate what are commonly known as fat–tailed distributions. As a result, if one is to model the evolution of the stock price, stock market or any financial derivative, then standard Brownian motion models are inaccurate. One must take into account the results obtained from empirical studies and work with models that include realistic features observed on the market. In this thesis we show that it is possible to derive the path integral for a non-Gaussian option pricing model that can capture fat–tails. However we find that the path integral technique can only be used on a very small set of problems, as a number of situations of interest are shown to be intractable. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1378473 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, 2010

This thesis is motivated by the impacts of contemporary political and economic issues such as microeconomic reform and regulatory control on the Australian wheat industry. Firstly, the suggestion of whether the AWB (International) Ltd commands market power and secondly, that the objectives of the AWB Ltd have changed since semi-privatisation of the Australian Wheat Board under the Wheat Marketing Act, 1989. The AWB (International) Ltd’s ability to price discriminate is a key component to the retention of the single desk regulatory arrangement for the export of Australian wheat. Due to data restrictions the market power of the AWB (International) Ltd has not been determined within this thesis. To complement this traditional approach, a more novel proposal is developed to determine the effect of microeconomic reform on the Australian wheat industry. Conceptualising the change of the AWB Ltd’s objectives as a shift from revenue maximization to profit maximization, this study examines the impact of such a change on the pricing policies of a multi- market price-setting firm. More specifically, this study investigates, for two hypothetical objective functions, a risk averse firm’s price-setting behaviour in an “overseas” and a “domestic” market, given differing costs of supply, uncertain demand functions and differing price elasticities of demand in each market. The aim is to generate empirically testable hypotheses relating to the impact of a change of objectives on pricing behaviour.

Diss. (sammanfattning). Umeå : Sveriges lantbruksuniv. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Sveriges lantbruksuniv., 2006. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

No description available.

This thesis investigates to what extent coal prices differed globally during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whether those differences mattered for economic development. The backbone of my empirical investigation is a new dataset of annual coal prices spanning the years 1840 to 1960 for, on average, over 30 globally distributed ports. This dataset is complemented by pithead prices for all major coal-producing countries. My analysis includes all major steam coals and I eliminate quality differences by accounting for differences in their carbon content. I construct my argument by examining two major drivers of differences in coal prices. First, I examine trade costs for Welsh steam coals, which were shipped to most regions of the world. Secondly, I estimate the effect of the spread of coal mining, for example to India, on local coal prices by initating competition between coals from different origins. While trade costs declined most during the late nineteenth century, the spread of coal mining led to continued price convergence in the interwar period. And yet, global coal price differences remained significant, especially between producing and importing countries. Arguably, my most interesting finding is on the effect of those coal price differences. More specifically, I calculate the ratio of coal prices to wages, and explore whether countries where this ratio was closer to the British ratio were in the best position to use the most advanced steam technology. My econometric results indeed show that countries with a low coal price/wage ratio experienced higher manufacturing output growth during the period 1870 to 1940. This finding of my thesis highlights one potential way in which different levels of coal prices may have contributed to varying degrees of technology adoption between countries and ultimately economic growth.