87,016 research outputs found
Environment, trade, political economy and imperfect information: a survey
No full textThe last ten years have seen an upsurge in interest in the nexus of trade and environmental policies. In part this reflects the need to deal with major global pollution problems, and in part a concern that globalisation may have adverse impacts on the environment. Environmentalists worry that globalisation may trigger a race-to-the bottom in environmental standards. While they would like tosee upward harmonisation in environmental standards, they are sceptical about the ability of supra-national agencies to achieve this. Industrialists also raise concerns about the need for a 'level playing field' in environmental regulations because of fears about the impact of environmental regulations on competitiveness. On the other hand, developing countries question whether disputes over differences in environmental regulations simply reflect a covert form of 'green protectionism'. In this paper we review what light recent developments in economic analysis (conceptual and empirical) can shed on these concerns. We begin with conventional trade models in which government bodies have perfect information and are welfare maximisers, and show that this analysis does not provide much support for the concerns or proposed policy recommendations. We then turn to models of political economy and imperfect information to see whether they provide a better explanation for the concerns and policy recommendations
Environmental regulation, multinational companies and international competitiveness
No full textConcerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies (“environmental dumping”) to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms, that these incentives are particularly strong in industries where plants may be relatively footloose, so that governments are concerned to prevent “capital flight”, and that footloose plants are particularly associated with multinational firms. It is then often suggested that appropriate policy responses would be to seek to harmonise environmental regulations or impose minimum standards for environmental regulations. In this paper we set out these concerns in terms of a number of more precisely made claims and then review recent developments in economic analysis (including some of our own work) and empirical evidence to show that the claims cannot be generally sustained and that the suggested policies may be harmful. However, devising more appropriate policies is by no means straightforward
An infinite-horizon model of dynamic membership of international environmental agreements
Full text linkMuch of the literature on international environmental agreements uses static models, although most important transboundary pollution problems involve stock pollutants. The few papers that study IEAs using models of stock pollutants do not allow for the possibility that membership of the IEA may change endogenously over time. In this paper we analyse a simple infinite-horizon version of the Barrett (1994) model, in which unit damage costs increase with the stock of pollution, and countries decide each period whether to join an IEA. We show that there exists a steady-state stock of pollution with corresponding steady-state IEA membership, and that if the initial stock of pollution is below (above) steady-state then membership of the IEA declines (rises) as the stock of pollution tends to steady-state. As we increase the parameter linking damage costs to the pollution stock, initial and steady-state membership decline; in the limit, membership is small and constant over time
Environment, trade, political economy and imperfect information: a survey
Full text linkThe last ten years have seen an upsurge in interest in the nexus of trade and environmental policies. In part this reflects the need to deal with major global pollution problems, and in part a concern that globalisation may have adverse impacts on the environment. Environmentalists worry that globalisation may trigger a race-to-the bottom in environmental standards. While they would like to see upward harmonisation in environmental standards, they are sceptical about the ability of supra-national agencies to achieve this. Industrialists also raise concerns about the need for a 'level playing field' in environmental regulations because of fears about the impact of environmental regulations on competitiveness. On the other hand, developing countries question whether disputes over differences in environmental regulations simply reflect a covert form of 'green protectionism'. In this paper we review what light recent developments in economic analysis (conceptual and empirical) can shed on these concerns. We begin with conventional trade models in which government bodies have perfect information and are welfare maximisers, and show that this analysis does not provide much support for the concerns or proposed policy recommendations. We then turn to models of political economy and imperfect information to see whether they provide a better explanation for the concerns and policy recommendations. <br><br> Keywords; trade and environment, environmental dumping, green protectionism,harmonisation, asymmetric information, political economy, lobbying, environmental policy coordination
Personality functioning: the influence of stature
No full textBackground: The Wessex Growth Study has monitored the psychological development of a large cohort of short normal and average height control participants since school entry. Aims: To examine the effect of stature on their personality functioning now that they are aged 18–20 years. Methods: This report contains data from 48 short normal and 66 control participants. Mean height SD score at recruitment was: short normals -2.62 SD, controls -0.22 SD. Final height SD score was: short normals -1.86, controls 0.07. The Adolescent to Adult Personality Functioning Assessment (ADAPFA) measures functioning in six domains: education and employment, love relationships, friendships, coping, social contacts, and negotiations. Results: No significant effect of recruitment height or final height was found on total ADAPFA score or on any of the domain scores. Socioeconomic status significantly affected total score, employment and education, and coping domain scores. Gender had a significant effect on total score, love relationships, coping, and social contacts domain scores. Salient aspects of daily living for this sample were identified from the interviews (prevalence%): consuming alcohol (94%), further education (63%), love relationships (55%), current drug use (29%), experience of violence (28%), parenthood (11%), and unemployment (9%). Stature was not significantly related to behaviour in any of these areas. Conclusions: Despite previously reported links between short stature and poorer psychosocial adaptation, no evidence was found that stature per se significantly affected the functioning of the participants in these areas as young adults
Legal uncertainty, competition law enforcement procedures and optimal penalties
Full text linkIn this paper we make three contributions to the literature on optimal Competition Law enforcement procedures. The first (which is of general interest beyond competition policy) is to clarify the concept of “legal uncertainty”, relating it to ideas in the literature on Law and Economics, but formalising the concept through various information structures which specify the probability that each firm attaches – at the time it takes an action – to the possibility of its being deemed anti-competitive were it to be investigated by a Competition Authority. We show that the existence of Type I and Type II decision errors by competition authorities is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of legal uncertainty, and that information structures with legal uncertainty can generate higher welfare than information structures with legal certainty – a result echoing a similar finding obtained in a completely different context and under different assumptions in earlier Law and Economics literature (Kaplow and Shavell, 1992). Our second contribution is to revisit and significantly generalise the analysis in our previous paper, Katsoulacos and Ulph (2009), involving a welfare comparison of Per Se and Effects- Based legal standards. In that analysis we considered just a single information structure under an Effects-Based standard and also penalties were exogenously fixed. Here we allow for (a) different information structures under an Effects-Based standard and (b) endogenous penalties. We obtain two main results: (i) considering all information structures a Per Se standard is never better than an Effects-Based standard; (ii) optimal penalties may be higher when there is legal uncertainty than when there is no legal uncertainty
Environmental liability and the capital structure of firms
No full textA number of countries have recently introduced legislation which holds polluters liable for the costs of cleaning up environmental damage they have caused. While in principle this gives polluters appropriate incentives to reduce the risk of environmental damage, these incentives are weakened if polluters enjoy limited liability and can avoid paying large damages through bankruptcy. A solution which has been suggested is to extend liability also to lenders such as banks. This in turn leads to fears that holding banks liable for environmental risks could substantially reduce the use of bank debt by firms. In this paper we analyse both theoretically and empirically the impact of different environmental liability regimes on the capital structure of firms, and in particular how much bank debt they will use. We use US industry-level data to estimate a reduced-form model of bank borrowing by polluters. We show that the introduction of environmental liability only on firms caused bank borrowing to increase, but when liability was extended to banks, borrowings returned to a level only slightly higher than with no liability. Our findings suggest that extending environmental liability to banks does not have drastic consequences for bank lending to firms
Optimal incentives for income-generation in universities: the rule of thumb for the Compton tax
No full textIn this paper we propose a novel framework to model one of the key links between universities and industry—the undertaking of applied research. We postulate that a basic objective of universities is to undertake fundamental research and that they receive public funding to do so. Nevertheless, faced with tight budget constraints, universities may have incentives to allow their staff to devote some of their time to income-generating activities such as applied research or consultancy. This opens up two channels by which universities can ease their budget constraint: (i) by allowing academics to supplement their income, universities may be able to hold down academic salaries; (ii) universities can effectively ‘tax’ the income that academics raise through applied research or consultancy—for example, through the imposition of ‘overhead charges’. By easing their budget constraint, universities may be able to take on sufficient extra staff to more than offset the time that existing staff are spending on non-fundamental research and thus increase the amount of fundamental research that they can achieve with a given public budget. We develop a model of this link between universities and firms and use it to determine the optimal ‘tax’ that universities should impose on applied-research income. The Compton tax, used at MIT in the 1930s, is an early example of the use of this instrument
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
The stability likelihood of an international climate agreement
Full text linkClimate change modelling, International environmental agreements, Non-cooperative game theory, Uncertainty, C79, H87, Q54,
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