Most Popular Books by Ron Chan

Boys being boys. Idiots being idiots. Buddies being buddies. Roy''s Boys is one comic by two artists. Follow along as best buddies Roy and Shane take turns forming one semi-autobiographical look into their sad little lives. This book collects the third and final year of the twice-weekly webcomic (www.roysboyscomic.com). Share in the jubilation, the heartbreak, the violence, and the dick and fart jokes, all over again, or for the very first time! Warning! Roy''s Boys contains crude humor and foul language!

This paper examines the effect of energy costs on industry export competitiveness. Most studies in the literature use direct energy consumption (energy consumption at the final stage of production) and domestic energy prices to compute energy costs faced by domestic industries. Using multi-country input-output information, this study measures the effect of aggregate energy costs on export performance, where aggregate energy costs include not only direct energy costs, but also indirect energy costs passed on through the upstream supply chain. This study develops a theoretical trade model that incorporates tradable intermediate goods to inform its empirical strategy. It then estimates a reduced-form model using a panel data for 10 manufacturing sectors in 43 countries from 1991 to 2012. The analysis finds that ignoring input-output relationships can lead to significant over- or underestimates of the effect of energy price shocks on exports, depending on intermediate factor intensities and trade relationships. Using estimated trade elasticities, the study simulates the economic consequences of energy cross-subsidies and carbon taxes. The results show that energy cross-subsidies that raise energy tariffs on industry to support lower rates for households and farmers in India could reduce the country''s net manufacturing exports by.

This study quantifies the cost savings from the Acid Rain Program (ARP) compared with a command-and-control alternative and also examines the impact of trading under the ARP on health damages. To quantify cost savings, we compare compliance costs for non-NSPS (New Source Performance Standards) coal-fired Electricity Generating Units (EGUs) under the ARP with compliance costs under a uniform performance standard that achieves the same aggregate emissions. We do this for the year 2002, the third year of Phase II of the program. We find annual cost savings of approximately $240 million (1995$). To examine the health effects of trading, we compute the health damages associated with observed sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions from all units regulated under the ARP in 2002--approximately 10.2 million tons--and compare them with damages from a No-Trade counterfactual in which each unit emits SO2 at a rate equal to its allocation of permits for the year 2002, plus any drawdown of its allowance bank. Damages under the ARP are $2.4 billion (2000$) higher than under the No-Trade. This reflects the transfer of allowances from EGUs west of the Mississippi River to units in the eastern US with higher exposed populations.

We introduce a new numerical method called the complex Fourier series (CFS) method proposed by Chan (2017) to price options with an early-exercise feature -- American, Bermudan and discretely monitored barrier options -- under exponential Lévy asset dynamics. This new method allows us to quickly and accurately compute the values of early-exercise options and their Greeks. We also provide an error analysis to demonstrate that, in many cases, we can achieve an exponential convergence rate in the pricing method as long as we choose the correct truncated computational interval. Our analysis indicates that the CFS method is computationally more efficient than the methods currently available. Finally, the superiority of the CFS method is illustrated with real financial data by considering the Standard & Poor''s depositary receipts (SPDR) exchange-traded fund (ETF) on the S&P 500 R index options, which are American options traded from November 2017 to February 2018.

There are a range of private financial benefits of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) installation, such as a reduced electricity bill, tax incentives and a feed-in tariff for generated electricity. To empirically analyze how rising electricity prices affect household adoption decisions, we use the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster as a natural experiment. The shutdown of nuclear power plants across Japan led to a sizable increase in electricity prices that varied by region, allowing us to identify the effect of electricity prices on household PV system adoption. We find that higher electricity prices are significantly more influential on PV adoption on existing homes than on newly-built homes. Our estimated electricity price elasticity of PV systems ranges from 0.9 to 1.2 for existing homes and is much smaller and statistically insignificant for newly-built homes. We discuss behavioral mechanisms explaining this difference and implications for policies stimulating residential adoption of renewables.