Hee Seon Jang

Using a large-scale pilot test on time-of-use (TOU) pricing for residential customers, this study analyzes the effects of TOU pricing on the load patterns of residential customers and on producer surplus in South Korea . We estimate the difference in the electricity demand functions of residential customers across peak, intermediate, and off-peak periods before and after TOU pricing. In addition, we assess the supply curve in the wholesale electricity market and calculate the changes in electric

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which provides incentives for landowners to idle erodible and marginal farmland, faced new challenges as record-high commodity prices significantly affected landowners’ interests in the program in recent years. We develop and estimate an empirical structural model to examine the manner in which productivity, market conditions, and CRP payment affect landowners’ land use decisions. The model carefully controls for the endogeneity of CRP payment and landowne

Texas has experienced a rapid development of wind power over the last 20 years. Since wind power was developed mostly in desolate areas that are remote from urban centers due to its nature conditions, Texas implemented the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) project, the goal of which is to integrate the wind supply regions with the large demand centers. The objectives of this paper are two-fold. The first is to investigate the impact of the CREZ project on market price convergence. Specif

Using patent counts and citation data from 1977 to 2011, we explore the determining factors of innovative activities of the U.S. biofuel industry.We take into account both demand-side factors— such as crude-oil price, government R&D expenditure on biofuel, and federal-level support policies—and supply-side factors, represented by constructed knowledge stocks, to quantify the effects on biofuel-related innovations. The citation generation process is quantified using patent citation records an

We estimate production technologies of major dairy producing regions in the U.S. The simultaneity and sample selection biases are carefully corrected following the recent development in the literature. The commonly applied control function approaches are found to be misleading in correcting for biases of coefficient estimates on flexible and quasi-fixed input variables. We show that the emerging dairy regions have relatively higher aggregate productivity than traditional regions. Dynamic decompo

This paper uses a standard non-cooperative sequential game with two homogeneous players to analyze investment options of groundwater development project in South Korea’s Jeju island. The model is constructed as an option game taking the uncertainty of water price and the irreversibility of investment into account. The results show that the threshold water price of follower increases with the investment scale of both the leader and the follower while the threshold water price for the leader decre

The general population is exposed to numerous environmental pollutants, and it remains unclear which pollutants affect the brain, accelerating brain aging and increasing the risk of dementia. The Environmental-Pollution-Induced Neurological Effects study is a multi-city prospective cohort study aiming to comprehensively investigate the effect of different environmental pollutants on brain structures, neuropsychological function, and the development of dementia in adults. The baseline data of 3,7

This paper analyzes economic performances of cooperatives relative to other types of ownership in the US electric power industry. Specifically, the paper uses a panel data of electric utilities over 2001–2013 to analyze economic performances of cooperatives relative to for-profit firms and to investigate the sources of performance differences under a model of cost minimization. The results show that investor-owned utilities are more profitable than cooperatives, but there are no significant diff

Employing the patent data over 1977-2011, this study explores the factors determining innovative activities in the US ethanol industry. We take into account both demand-side and supply-side factors, the latter of which is represented by constructed knowledge stocks, to quantify the effects of price- and policy-induced innovations. We quantify the citation generation process using patent citations and construct the simple and weighted stocks of knowledge with weights of patent productivity. We co