This paper summarizes the lessons learned from implementing a realistic, game-based simulation of California’s electricity market with a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and fixed-price forward financial contracts for energy. Sophisticated market participants competed to maximize their returns under stressed (high carbon price) market conditions. Our simulation exhibited volatile carbon prices that could be influenced by strategic behavior of market participants.
This paper offers a close analysis of the key challenges facing the foreign aid sector in Yemen, and presents recommendations to the government of Yemen and the international donor community to make aid to Yemen more effective.
The Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) came to power in 2009 with a commanding majority, ending fifty years of almost uninterrupted Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rule. Then, in 2012, just over three years later, the DPJ lost power in an equally stunning landslide loss to the LDP. This volume examines the DPJ’s remarkable ascendance, its policies once in power, and its dramatic fall.
On July 8th, 2013, the United States and the European Union started negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), which is to create a free trade area. In this working paper, Tim Josling and Christophe Crombez study the prospects for such a transatlantic free trade area, starting with the background behind why the T-TIP is on the agenda now and what areas of trade are being negotiated. They analyze who stands to benefit from such a trade and investment agreement, how long it might take to reach such an agreement, and what factors might influence its acceptab
Transparency in the multilateral trade system is fundamental. Monitoring the compliance of WTO members with their obligations is an important part of that transparency, and timeliness in the notification of compliance is crucial. In the case of domestic support to agriculture, the notifications of compliance with obligations has been slow and opaque. But another database exists that could both illuminate the extent to which policy instruments are correctly notified and provide a convenient way to ensure timely ‘pre-notifications’ in the event that delays occur in the future.
In our current era, the advent of digital technologies and accelerating globalization is driving ever-faster commoditization of firms and products. With rapidly improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools, manufacturing is decomposed with finer granularity, and corporate functions can be outsourced and offshored more than ever before. Services can be unbundled into activities that can be taken apart, reconfigured, and transformed with the application of algorithms. Overall, firms are experiencing accelerating shifts in the sweet-spot for markets and business models in
The University of Virginia's Christopher Jon Sprigman and CISAC's Jennifer Granick reveal how foreigners living in the United States do not have the same privacy protections as U.S. citizens, and are frequently subjected to legal wiretapping of e-mail, phone calls, and other electronic activity. They argue that amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reworded language to allow for surveillance of any foreigner as long as it relates to foreign affairs.
CISAC Faculty Member and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William J. Perry tells the story of how he became a nuclear weapons abolitionist. He recounts six personal experiences that led him to turn away from his lifelong career of developing and managing nuclear weapons, and pursue the goal of eliminating them.
On Friday, June 7, President Obama will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a series of talks to address major issues between the two countries. The talks offer a rare, informal opportunity to discuss heightened concerns about North Korea and a growing U.S. military presence in Northeast Asia.
Scott Sagan, in this piece for Foreign Policy, remembers his longtime friend and colleague Kenneth Waltz. Waltz passed away on May 13. Sagan praised his work, noting that the realist perspective on the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons struck a chord with international experts and strategists, even though his views were not popular in the United States. Waltz's contributions to the debate about nuclear weapons have left an enguring legacy.
Using novel data on 50,000 Norwegian men, we study the effect of wealth on the probability of internal or international migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1913), a time when the US maintained an open border to European immigrants. We do so by exploiting variation in parental wealth and in expected inheritance by birth order, gender composition of siblings, and region. We find that wealth discouraged migration in this era, suggesting that the poor could be more likely to move if migration restrictions were lifted today.
Following Pakistan's historic elections held in May 2013, CISAC Visiting Scholar Rifaat Hussein discusses next steps for Islamabad's foreign policy, particularly in relations with India, a new nuclear policy shift, and a more stable presence in South Asia.
The lost decades for China in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s look remarkably like the lost decades of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Poor land rights, weak incentives, incomplete markets and inappropriate investment portfolios. However, China burst out of its stagnation in the 1980s and has enjoyed three decades of remarkable growth. In this paper we examine the record of the development of China’s food economy and identify the policies that helped generate the growth and transformation of agriculture.
We live in a period of unprecedented scope of immigration and globalization, facing great numbers of peoples, and also cultural and social difference and strains on welfare economies. Recent headlines in the U.S.
"Old while not affluent" situation, together with an unsustainable high investment rate and high dependency on foreign trade, spurs hot debates on the challenges of a fast-aging population and the exploitation of the second demographic dividend in today’s China. Literature related to elderly health in countries other than China often starts with medical concepts and then dwells on economic issues, mainly focusing on socioeconomic, behavioral, and environmental factors and their effects on the health of the elderly.
When seeking to build high quality and cost-effective infrastructure in rural villages, a fundamental question is: Who is better at doing so? Should the village leadership or a government agency above the village finance and/or manage the construction of the infrastructure project? To answer this question, we surveyed all rural road projects in 101 villages in rural China between 2003 and 2007 and measured the quality and per kilometer cost of each road. According to our analysis, road quality was higher when more of the project funds came from the government agency above.
This report by scholars and policy experts at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is based in part on (1) their research for a Yonhap News Agency-sponsored symposium on Northeast Asia security in Seoul in early February, when they also held meetings with then-President Lee Myung-bak and President-elect Park Geun-hye and her chief foreign policy advisers, as well as with leading South Korean progressive intellectuals; and (2) a workshop on North Korea policy at Stanford University on February 14–15, supported by the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, which included top current and former U.S., South Korean, and UN officials and leading academic experts on the Korea problem.
The publication of "The North Korea Problem" was made possible by the generosity of the Koret Foundation of San Francisco, CA.
Qatar has become an Arab country with a high international profile and an ambitious foreign policy, particularly as a result of its role in the Arab Spring. It has cultivated a reputation as a political mediator and a key source of foreign aid. Following the Libyan uprising, Qatar demonstrated further political adaptability in leading regional action against the Gaddafi regime.
Successful adaptation of agriculture to ongoing climate changes would help to maintain productivity growth and thereby reduce pressure to bring new lands into agriculture. In this paper we investigate the potential co-benefits of adaptation in terms of the avoided emissions from land use change. A model of global agricultural trade and land use, called SIMPLE, is utilized to link adaptation investments, yield growth rates, land conversion rates, and land use emissions.
CISAC Affiliate Anja Manuel discusses the legacy that Hillary Clinton left as secretary of state, and places Clinton's achievements and failures in context with other domestic and foreign forces.
CISAC Faculty Member Amy Zegart discusses the confirmation hearings of CIA Director nominee John Brennan. Brennan has been subjected to increased scrutiny due to a leaked Obama administration paper concerning drone strikes. Zegart called Brennan's performance a "masterpiece of political maneuvering."
Rapid population growth, urbanization and rising incomes will present an unprecedented opportunity for growth of commercial agriculture and agribusiness in coming years. The value of food consumed in urban areas is set to expand by four times to 2030, but given evidence of a continuing decline in competitiveness much of this could be sourced from imports even in countries with an apparent comparative advantage in agriculture.
This paper analyzes the causes, responses, and consequences of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident (March 2011) by comparing these with Three Mile Island (March 1979) and Chernobyl (April 1986). We identify three generic modes of organizational coordination: modular, vertical, and horizontal. By relying on comparative institutional analysis, we compare the modes' performance characteristics in terms of short-term and long-term coordination, preparedness for shocks, and responsiveness to shocks.
