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The growing demand for personal mobility is leading to an increase in vehicle use, which is in turn contributing to higher carbon emissions. It is widely acknowledged that emission-free electric vehicles (EVs) will play a pivotal role in the decarbonization process, particularly in the decarbonization of transport systems. The objective of this paper was to present the trends in demand for electric vehicles (EVs) in Poland, together with the identification of market shocks and an assessment of the programs supporting electromobility. The number of imported and domestically purchased new and used electric vehicle (BEV) registrations was analyzed using the TRAMO-SEATS and ARIMA-X-12 seasonal adjustment methods. The rise in sales of electric vehicles in Poland was driven by the government's electromobility support programs and alterations to tax legislation, with no discernible seasonal impact. The number of registrations in Poland increased significantly, exhibiting an upward trajectory. However, this growth is constrained by the inadequate number of charging stations, which are primarily powered by electricity derived from coal. Consequently, while the development of electromobility in Poland is evident, the decarbonization process remains a challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada's inflation rate rose to generational highs in 2022. We explore this rapid surge. Using new methods and detailed household consumption data, we separately identify demand- and supply-driven price increases. We find that the latter account for most of the rise in inflation—especially among energy-intensive and highly traded items. In addition, we find that items with normally transitory price changes or those that are highly sensitive to interest rates account for nearly all of the increase. Our work sheds important new light on recent inflation trends and illustrates new empirical methods that can add value to inflation-monitoring efforts in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's manufacturing industry is facing multiplex changes both in domestic and foreign demand under the new pattern of “Dual Circulation”. In order to study how to successfully realize the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry and to raise the country's manufacturing power during the period of rapid demand transformation, we analyzed the theoretical mechanism of investment's impact on manufacturing upgrading under demand shocks based on the machine-substitution model, and then constructed a two-equation model that investment affects the proportion of capital and labor and productivity to test the mechanism of corporate investment on manufacturing upgrading under different demand shocks by using a big data of listed companies. Findings indicate that corporate investment has a significant role in promoting manufacturing upgrades. When the demand shocks gradually strengthen, the promotion effect of investment on the upgrading of the manufacturing industry gradually weakens, and the negative demand shocks are more conducive to stimulating the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry. When distinguishing ownership, we found that investment is more likely to promote state-owned enterprises to increase the capital-labor ratio, while the promotion of productivity improvement of non-state-owned enterprises is more obvious under same demand shocks. Therefore, the paper puts forward some policy suggestions for enterprises to realize technological innovation, transformation and upgrading during the period of demand dip and expansion so as to realize precise policies under the extreme demand changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of people are displaced by natural disasters each year, yet little is known about how evacuees affect host communities. We analyze the migratory effects of the most destructive fire in California history, the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed over 18,000 structures and displaced roughly 50,000 people. By merging geospatial information on the fire's footprint with Zillow's housing transaction data, we estimate both the spatial and temporal effects of the fire on real estate prices at a granular level. A number of important insights emerge. First, within 25 miles of the fire's footprint, home prices increased by 13 percent in the six-week aftermath of the fire. Effects decay with distance and are statistically insignificant beyond 100 miles. Second, effects are detected within two weeks of the fire, fully materialize within four weeks, and are persistent up to ten months (which exhausts our period of consideration). Results are consistent with the relocation decisions of evacuees and are robust to a variety of specifications and modeling assumptions. • The 2018 Camp Fire is the most destructive fire in California state history, having displaced roughly 50,000 people. • We study the migration of Camp Fire evacuees and the effect they had on neighboring housing markets. • Homes within 25 miles of the fire's footprint experienced a fairly sudden 13% increase in price. • Effects on real estate markets reach as far away as 100 miles, and are persistent (lasting up to at least 10 months after the fire). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We find that Chinese consumers responded strongly to government restrictions during the COVID‐19 crisis. Our event‐study framework shows that emergency declarations raised average food prices by as much as 7.8 standard deviations of the price change distribution, with a much larger effect on non‐perishable vegetable prices (e.g., 17.0 standard deviations for Chinese cabbage prices). The effects of lockdowns were smaller but longer‐lasting. These results suggest that consumers panic bought non‐perishables under emergency declarations while under lockdowns there was a sustained increase in demand for non‐perishables. Such consumer behavior likely caused sizable losses in consumer welfare, especially among poor households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the prices and quantities of face masks when the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was particularly serious to understand the impact of demand shocks on the cost of living index (COLI). Using a recently developed index number formula that is exact for the constant elasticity of substitution utility function with variable preferences, we quantified the degree of demand shock caused by the pandemic. Our empirical analysis revealed that shifts in preferences during the pandemic were so large that the COLI with variable tastes became very different from the standard superlative indexes. While the prices of face masks decreased in the Fisher index in May 2020 by 0.76% per week, the COLI increased by 1.92% per week. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diewert and Fox (2022) examine various implications of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic for constructing consumer price indexes. The authors state that the pandemic caused major changes in consumption expenditures and shares which makes fixed basket index number formulae inapplicable. They emphasize the need for more frequent surveys of consumer expenditure which will enable compilation of the Fisher index which is considered superior to the traditional Laspeyres or Young indexes. In addition, Diewert and Fox discuss the use of various "new" technologies such as web scraping, scanner data, and information from transactions through credit cards to estimate consumption expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the dynamic impact of geopolitical risks (GPRs) on real oil returns for the period February 1974 to August 2017, using a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregressive (TVP-SVAR) model. Besides the two variables of concern, the model also includes growth in world oil production, global economic activity (to capture oil-demand), and world stock returns. We show that GPRs (based on a tally of newspaper articles covering geopolitical tensions), in general, has a significant negative impact on oil returns, primarily due to the decline in oil demand captured by the global economic activity. Our results, thus, highlight the risk of associating all GPRs with oil supply shocks driven by geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and hence, ending up suggesting that higher GPRs drive up oil prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the symmetry of demand and supply shocks affecting Polish voivodeships and to assess the risk of asymmetric shocks in the future. The study employs the SVAR-based Blanchard and Quah (1989) decomposition as modified by Bayoumi and Eichengreen (1992), and uses a new method of estimating quarterly GDP by voivodeships. The results point to a relatively high symmetry of shocks and a rather low risk of their occurrence. Shock asymmetry does not appear to be strongly related to differences in production structures, which is claimed in most theoretical approaches, including the Optimum Currency Areas Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Incorporates the effect of sudden demand shocks on the rail transit line development in a commuter corridor. • Develops a dynamic stochastic model for jointly optimizing rail transit investment timing and length choice. • It can be suboptimal to immediately introduce a new mode even if positive cumulative savings are expected. • Closely related investment timing and sizing decisions can behave differently for the same parameter change. This paper is motivated by the inadequate treatment of uncertainty in public transit infrastructure investments. As observed in the past, rare but dramatic events can heavily disrupt public transit system operations and negatively affect the transit riders. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an 80%-90% transit demand decline in March 2020 in the U.S. However, the existing transit infrastructure planning studies have not modeled such sudden demand shocks. We thus improve the modeling realism of uncertain transit demand by formulating demand evolution as a jump-diffusion process, which is a combination of continuous-time Brownian motion and a discrete counting process, namely Poisson process, and present analytical optimization models for the development of a rail transit line under such uncertainty. We jointly optimize two related decisions, namely the timing for introducing rail transit to a commuter corridor and length choice for the rail line. We refute a misconception that investment in a project should always start immediately if a positive cost saving over the planning horizon is expected. We also find that investment timing and sizing decisions are closely related and behave quite differently for the same change in some parameters, such as the infrastructure construction period. The developed modeling and analysis framework should be transferable to other civil infrastructure development and investment problems under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two degrees of demand uncertainty can be discerned: demand variation and demand shock. Demand shocks, being much larger in scale than demand variations, represent significant risk to capacity investment in many high-tech industries wherein equipment has short and finite lifetime. However, in the literature, demand shocks are usually treated as part of demand variations and are not adequately addressed. The objective of this paper is to determine whether or not demand shock and demand variation should be distinguished in capacity planning. This paper starts with an analysis of demand variations and shocks by using data of a major high-tech manufacturing firm. A model of demand shock on growth trend is proposed. Simulation is then used to compare the performance of a shock-conscientious model and a variation-conscientious model of capacity expansion by using stylized industry data. Two important findings are drawn from simulation results. Demand shock and demand variation have the opposite effects on the optimal capacity level. They are best treated as separate elements of the uncertainty. It is also found that the recovery rate after a demand shock is a major aspect of the shock that should be taken into consideration in capacity planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We analyze the impact of a freeway interchange collapse in the San Francisco Bay Area on the difference in airfare quotes for travel into the area’s main airports. The incident temporarily made Oakland airport a less attractive choice for traveling to San Francisco, so we hypothesize that fares for travel into Oakland will be relatively lower while the freeway interchange was out of service. We test our contention using a sample of fare quotes collected on-line, and find the expected effect of a magnitude of 6–7%. Our results imply the following important conclusions. First, the demand-side shock was well absorbed by the supply side. Second, adjustment of prices and return to the status quo once the shock vanished was swift. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]