Events

Keynes and the Crisis of the Welfare State — May 17 at 4:30 p.m.

John Maynard Keynes is the father of modern macroeconomics, and Keynesian economics and the welfare state have been inextricably linked in the public mind since the postwar era. Indeed, he is widely believed to have provided the analytical, economic underpinnings for the welfare state. Bradley Bateman, a recognized scholar of Keynsian thought, examines Keynes’s contributions with the backdrop of the recent financial calamities and the widespread fiscal crises of state and national governments.

Please join us for Professor Bateman’s talk, which is part of the Lawrence Senior Experience in the Department of Economics.

Bradley W. Bateman is the Provost and a Professor of Economics at Denison University. He is the author of Keynes’s Uncertain Revolution and co-author of Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes.

More at the Lawrence homepage.

Anglo-Dutch Auctions 300 years ago

On May 22nd at 4:30 in Steitz 102, Dan Quint will speak on the subject in the title, closing this year’s inaugural Economics Colloquium series with a bang. He is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. His work on auctions and bargaining has appeared in leading economic theory journals.His undergraduate degree is from Harvard University (Mathematics), and he received his PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Professor Quint will present his work on an interesting auction format used in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. He will focus both on the historical facts and the auction theoretic analysis. Abstract for his paper is below the fold.  

Abstract:

This paper studies Anglo-Dutch premium auctions used in the secondary market for financial securities in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, Europe’s financial capital at the time. An Anglo-Dutch premium auction consists of an English auction followed by a Dutch auction, with a cash premium paid to the winner of the first round regardless of the second-round outcome. To rationalize the introduction and continued use of this auction format, we need to determine whether bidding behavior was consistent with equilibrium play. We model this auction format theoretically, and show that the likelihood of a bid in the second round should be higher when there is greater uncertainty about the value of the security being sold. We then test this prediction on data from 16,854 securities sold at auction on 469 days over an 18-year period in the late 1700s; using several different proxies for the uncertainty of a given security’s value, we find support for this theoretical prediction.

Economics Colloquium, May 15 at 11:10

Prospects for US Electricity Generation: Carbon Capture &/or Natural Gas

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 David Gerard

Lawrence University

What will be the technology of the future for US electricity generation? Although  carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has the potential for steep reductions in CO2 emissions, CCS faces many potential regulatory hurdles and public acceptance issues. Moreover, the technology is expensive – both in terms of additional capital costs and the additional fuel needed to capture, compress and transport the CO2.  I talk through some of my recently published work that assesses the decision to build new natural gas and coal-fired plants given future market and regulatory uncertainty, particularly uncertainty about future natural gas and carbon prices. I conclude that  CCS will not be commercially viable without beaucoup public financial support or outright mandates. I finish with some speculation on how the current fracking boom will affect energy and electricity markets. It appears that it will be natural gas all the way down as the principal source of new added generation capacity.

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Tuesday, May 15

Steitz Hall 102

 11:10 a.m.

The talk will draw heavily on:

Fischbeck, P. S., Gerard, D. and McCoy, S. T. (2012), Sensitivity analysis of the build decision for carbon capture and sequestration projects. Greenhouse Gas Sci Technol, 2: 36–45. Available at  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ghg.1270/full

Morgan et al., (2009) “Commercial Considerations,” Chapter 9 in Carbon Capture and Sequestration: Framing Issues for Regulation. An Interim Report of the CCSReg Project. Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University. Available at: http://www.ccsreg.org/pdf/CCSReg_3_9.pdf

Gerard D., Wilson E.J. (2009) Environmental bonds and the challenge of long-term carbon sequestration, Journal of Environmental Management, 90(2):1097-1105. Available at https://www2.hhh.umn.edu/publications/2159/document.pdf