The cost and technological structure of aluminium smelters worldwide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A cost model is developed for the estimation of several technological parameters describing the production process of aluminium smelters worldwide. The model is similar to Baltagi and Griffin's (1988), but, instead of estimating technological change using a panel data set of firms, we estimate, among other things, the vintage effect, using a cross-section of aluminium smelters in operation throughout 1994. The vintage effect is defined as the variable cost differential that may be attributed to the utilization of a specific technical vintage in the production of aluminium in relation to another. Other technological measurements are also discussed: the scale effect or returns to scale and technological characteristic effects, i.e. the variable cost elasticities with respect to pot size and current intensity. The results show that considerable cost reductions may be expected from the change of old technical vintages to more recent ones. Also, results show that for a majority of smelters in the sample, returns to scale seem to be exhausted. Finally, variable costs are very sensitive to pot size in the sense that large cost reductions can be expected from the increase in pot size, an important characteristic of the technology used by smelters. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".