causalities between co2 electricity and other energy variables during phase i and phase ii of the eu ets the topic of this article is the analysis of the interplay between daily carbon electricity and gas price data with the european union emission trading system eu ets for co2 emissions in a first step we have performed granger causality tests for phase i of the eu ets january 2005 until december 2007 and the first year of phase ii of the eu ets 2008 the analysis includes both spot and forward markets given the close interactions between the two sets of markets the results show that during phase i coal and gas prices through the clean dark and spark spread impacted co2 futures prices which in return granger caused electricity prices during the first year of the phase ii the short run rent capture theory in which electricity prices granger cause co2 prices prevailed on the basis of the qualitative results of the granger causality tests we obtained the formulation testable equations for quantitative analysis standard ols regressions yielded statistically robust and theoretically coherent results

radicalism versus gradualism an analytical survey of the transition strategy debate academic debate on a transition strategy for former socialist economies continues even a quarter century after the collapse of the communism in central and eastern europe and the former soviet union in this paper through an analytical survey of 137 preceding studies we present an overall picture of the debate and examine the relationship between the debate attitudes and the literature attributes in related studies we found that the radicalists maintain a consistent debate attitude from the viewpoints of time speed and policy sequence of economic transition while the debate attitude of the gradualists is more diversified we also found that there is another group of researchers that stays within the framework of the radicalism versus gradualism debate while at the same time keeping at arm s length from both the radicalists and the gradualists in addition our regression estimation of qualitative selection models provides interesting findings on the relationship between the debate attitudes and the literature attributes

media scrutiny and the quality of public officials i investigate whether attempts by the media to determine a candidate s fitness for office lowers the average quality of public officials what i call the media scrutiny paradox media scrutiny imperfectly signals heterogeneous candidates type but imposes privacy costs and reputational costs on politicians the quality of office holders falls if the selection effect is adverse and outweighs the screening effect a low quality information signal which could result if the media focus on irrelevant aspects of behavior makes the screening effect small and the media paradox more likely to hold individuals of good character might invest more in their reputation and have more at stake from being falsely identified as a rapscallion the actual malice standard established in new york times v sullivan likely increased relatively the cost of candidacy for good people and lowered the quality of officials

speculative and hedging activities in the european carbon market abstract we explore the dynamics of the speculative and hedging activities in european futures carbon markets by using volume and open interest data a comparison of the three phases in the european union emission trading scheme eu ets reveals that i phase ii of the eu ets seems to be the most speculative phase to date and ii the highest degree of speculative activity for every single phase occurs at the moment of listing the contracts for the first time a seasonality analysis identifies a higher level of speculation in the first quarter of each year related to the schedule of deadlines of the eu ets in addition a time series analysis confirms that most of the speculative activity each year occurs in the front contract whereas the hedging demand concentrates in the second to deliver futures contract

strikes and political activism of trade unions theory and application to bangladesh the behavior of bangladeshi trade unions is characterized bypolitical activism and momentous strikes called hartalsthere have played a crucial part in most political changes inthis country we offer a theoretical framework for discussingthis fact and we test empirically its main prediction bybringing out the political cycle that characterizes theoccurrence of strikes in bangladesh

blame game politics in a coalition government abstract delays in the adoption of reforms is an important question in political economics this paper explores this issue in the context of a representative democracy where the government is a coalition and citizens observe neither the decision making process nor politicians preferences for a reform we show that a coalition member who favors a reform may nonetheless choose to veto its adoption thus delaying it until after the next election and let his coalition partners share the blame for the non adoption we refer to this strategy as blame game politics we then identify three reasons for a politician to play the blame game one is to make an issue salient in the next election a second reason is to avoid a split in his electorate which is accomplished by hiding his stance on an issue a third reason is to enhance bargaining power during the formation of the next government

good types in authoritarian elections the selectoral connection in chinese local congresses a new electoral design for subnational congress elections in china allows me to investigate the informational utility of authoritarian elections authoritarian regimes are notoriously bad at solving the moral hazard problem in the voter s agency relationship with politicians borrowing from the literature on political selection i theorize that authoritarian elections can nonetheless solve the adverse selection problem chinese voters can use their electoral power to select good types with personal qualities that signal they will reliably represent local interests i analyze original data from a survey of 4 071 chinese local congressmen and women including voter nominees and communist party nominees i find that voters do in fact overcome coordination difficulties to nominate and elect good types in contacting politicians about local problems after the elections however voters hedge their bets by contacting regime insiders too at these very local levels congressional representation by means of

operations research for green logistics an overview of aspects issues contributions and challenges the worldwide economic growth of the last century has given rise to a vast consumption of goods while globalization has led to large streams of goods all over the world the production transportation storage and consumption of all these goods however have created large environmental problems today global warming created by large scale emissions of greenhouse gasses is a top environmental concern governments action groups and companies are asking for measures to counter this threat operations research has a long tradition in improving operations and especially in reducing costs in this paper we present a review that highlights the contribution of operations research to green logistics which involves the integration of environmental aspects in logistics we give a sketch of the present and possible developments focussing on design planning and control in a supply chain for transportation inventory of products and facility decisions while doing this we also indicate several areas where environmental aspects could be included in or models for logistics

politicians as experts electoral control and fiscal restraints we propose an argument for fiscal restraints that is based on the premise that the services of politicians are credence goods politicians are experts who specialize in observing the true state of the economy budget maximizing politicians are better informed than the electorate about the level of public spending necessary to manage public affairs voters who are able to observe the size of the budget but not the necessary level of spending affect the government s spending behavior via electoral control a fiscal restraint limits the maximum spending a government can choose we identify conditions under which such a fiscal restraint improves voter welfare and discuss the role of the political opposition as a second expert in situations in which the state of the economy requires a level of spending which exceeds the fiscal restraint

local elites and popular support for economic reform in china and india this article analyzes why it is that china an authoritarian political system has managed to generate more popular support for the reform process than india a democracy the authors argue that when local politicians and bureaucrats are more supportive of the reform process there is likely to be greater popular support for economic reform local political elite may be more supportive of reform in an authoritarian than in a democratic system because the level of local elite support for the reform process is influenced by the incentives faced by local elite in china institutional reform changed the incentives faced by local elite whereas in india reforms have not been accompanied by institutional changes that would encourage local elite to support reform to the same extent as in china the argument is based on local elite and mass surveys conducted in china and india in 1990 and 1996 respectively a logit model controlling for a variety of alternative explanations provides evidence that local elite

price volatility trading volume and market depth evidence from futures markets the relations between volume volatility and market depth in eight physical and financial futures markets are examined evidence suggests that linking volatility to total volume does not extract all information when volume is partitioned into expected and unexpected components the paper finds that unexpected volume shocks have a larger effect on volatility further the relation is asymmetric the impact of positive unexpected volume shocks on volatility is larger than the impact of negative shocks finally consistent with theories of market depth the study shows large open interest mitigates volatility

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

patterns of transition from plan to market patterns of transition from plan to market martha de melo cevdet denizer and alan gelb hungary s bankruptcy experience 1992 1993 cheryl w gray sabine schlorke and miklos szanyi why and when do governments initiate public enterprise reform jose edgardo campos and hadi salehi esfahani roads land use and deforestation a spatial model applied to belize kenneth m chomitz and david a gray industrial centralization in indonesia j vernon henderson and ari kuncoro guidlines on searching for a dalton improving tax reform an illustration with data from indonesia shlomo yitzhaki and jeffrey d lewis a new data set measuring income inequality klaus deininger and lyn squire

electoral competition and politician turnover abstract in this paper we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the candidates who run for election we consider a setting with incomplete but symmetric information about the candidates abilities in which electoral campaigns provide voters with additional information about candidates parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election while voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information we first argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability rather than an established good candidate next we establish that the discrepancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate leads to inefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates i e each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters viewpoint

circumstance and choice the role of initial conditions and policies in transition economies the experience of countries in transition from a planned to a market oriented economy has varied greatly the clearest differences are between the east asian countries china and vietnam and the countries of central and eastern europe cee and the former soviet union fsu china and vietnam have contained inflation and benefited from continued high growth in gdp since the beginning of their reforms while all cee and fsu countries have experienced large declines in output and most have experienced hyperinflation but even in cee and the fsu differences are marked some countries have lost over half of their gdp and growth performance in a number of countries is still poor while others are growing strongly some are still suffering from high inflation while others have successfully reduced annual inflation what determines this divergence of outcomes across transition countries no study so far has analyzed the interaction of all factors including initial conditions political change and reforms in a unified framework including cee the fsu china and vietnam the authors examine these broader interactions but focus first on the role of initial conditions such as initial macroeconomic distortions and differences in economic structure and institutions which have been emphasized less in the literature they find that initial conditions and economic policy jointly determine the large differences in economic performance among the 28 transition economies in the sample initial conditions dominate in explaining inflation but economic liberalization is the most important factor determining differences in growth but reform policy choices are not exogenous they depend in turn on both initial conditions and political reform with political reform the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of economic liberalization other findings provide additional insight into these relationships results show that liberalization has a negative contemporaneous impact but a stronger positive effect on performance over time the results also show that macroeconomic and structural distortions are negatively related to both policy and performance regarding the former unfavorable initial conditions discourage policy reforms but do not diminish their effectiveness once they are implemented the authors find some evidence that the influence of initial conditions diminishes over time this is in part because many of the initial conditions are themselves modified in the course of transition monetary overhangs are dissipated through inflation industrial overhang is eroded as plants shut down and market memory returns through experience

export performance in transition economies trade performance export reorientation in the transition we examine export performance in the transition economies of europe and central asia we conclude that early success in exporting required the simultaneous pursuit of stabilization and liberalization neither liberalizing the foreign trade regime alone nor drastic devaluations of domestic currencies will improve trade performance unless domestic prices are decontrolled inflationary expectations lowered and administrative controls over the economy relaxed within the foreign trade regime removing export controls appears a more immediate priority than relaxing import controls export controls induce undervaluation and high levels of protection that insulate domestic producers and consumers from international markets bartlomiej kaminski zhen kun wang and l alan winters

carbon trading thickness and market efficiency abstract this note tests for the efficient market hypothesis emh in the market for co 2 emission allowances in phase i and phase ii of the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets as usually is the case in emerging and non competitive markets such as the eu ets trading often not occurs on a frequent basis this has adverse implications for both the gains from permit trade as well as biases the emh tests variance ratio tests are employed to adjust for the thin trading effect the results indicate that phase i the trial and learning period was inefficient whereas the first period under phase ii shows signs of restoring market efficiency

design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme increase in environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment this paper introduces a mixed integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment lca principles in addition to the traditional material balance constraints at each node in the supply chain indeed the framework distinguishes between solid and liquid wastes as well as gaseous emissions due to various production processes and transportation systems the framework is used to evaluate the tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives under various cost and operating strategies in the aluminum industry the results suggest that current legislation and emission trading schemes ets must be strengthened and harmonized at the global level in order to drive a meaningful environmental strategy moreover the model demonstrates that efficient carbon management strategies will help decision makers to achieve sustainability objectives in a cost effective manner

accountability and incentives of appointed and elected public officials political agency models suggest that elected public officials choose different policies than appointed officials do this paper is the first a to apply a clean empirical design to study whether t

a new view of political accountability for economic performance most political support models imply that in evaluating economic performance voters use a standard that would provide poor predictions of the future and leave the economy vulnerable to manipulation by vote hungry politicians drawing on macroeconomic theory we develop a simple standard of evaluation which encompasses a concern not only for current economic outcomes but also for accurately assessed future consequences of current policies we find that political support for the president can be explained as well by models that assume that voters use this sophisticated standard as by models that assume voter naivete our analysis questions the wisdom of measures typically used to assess voter evaluation of economic performance in a variety of theoretical contexts the results also help to explain the absence of convincing evidence that governments exploit voter ignorance in manipulating the economy

carbon footprint and responsiveness trade offs in supply chain network design concern related to sustainability and greenhouse gases has grown among citizens as well as firms which are increasingly committing to carbon emission reduction targets however firms emissions come from direct and indirect sources and from the different stages of their supply chain therefore comprehensive supply chain approaches are essential to ensure the cost effectiveness of carbon management strategies these approaches should capture operational and environmental trade offs arising from the interaction between different supply chain processes such as procurement manufacturing transport and inventory management considering all these processes we propose a model for supply chain network design that takes demand uncertainty into account and includes decisions on supply chain responsiveness under different carbon policies caps on supply chain carbon footprints caps on market carbon footprints and carbon taxes our model supports the analysis of the effect of different policies on costs and optimal network configuration and allows us to distinguish between different product types functional or innovative products with detailed numerical examples we illustrate the type of analysis and managerial insights that can be derived with our model which include the assessment of supply chains potential for carbon abatement the study of the effect of different carbon policies on supply chain costs and network design the analysis of the impact of various product characteristics the test of an alternative profit maximisation model and the determination of the value of a supply chain carbon tax that should induce specific levels of carbon abatement

dynamic linkages among carbon energy and financial markets a smooth transition approach this article explores how price linkages between carbon allowances and market fundamentals in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets vary over time i adopt a multivariate garch model that allows the conditional correlation between carbon energy and financial prices to change smoothly across regimes governed by functions of two transition variables that explain why price linkages vary i use i time as transition variable to allow for structural changes associated with institutional advances in the eu ets and ii implied volatility to account for heterogeneity in the behaviour of correlations in times of distress compared to calm periods the results point to a new pricing regime with much closer carbon energy price linkages in the second phase of the eu ets furthermore i find that correlations depend on market uncertainty conditions which exposes the link between carbon and financial markets due to common macroeconomic shocks during the current financial crisis

inertial credit and opportunistic arrears in transition in a transition economy enterprise restructuring may exhibit a laffer curve response to tighter credit as a result of rational collective inertia in the presence of a rigid production structure unenforceable contracts and high adjustment costs a contraction in credit finance subtracts more liquidity than enterprises can generate internally because unrestructured firms are forced to extend trade credit to illiquid buyers an increase in their number increases the availability of forced supplier credit in turn increasing the attractiveness of inertial behavior as trade credit cannot be enforced a critical mass of trade and wage arrears causes pressure for a collective bailout thus validating inertial behavior even by reformable firms

ecological deficit tax a tax design and simulation of compensation for ecosystem service value based on ecological footprint in china abstract the expansion of resource tax to the occupation of natural ecological space is an important part of china s tax reform this paper quantifies the occupation of natural ecological space based on the demand for energy water and agriculture resources in terms of an ecological footprint and creatively convert the carbon emissions from energy consumption to occupation of carbon sinks such as woodlands and grasslands to obtain the ecological deficits in various regions of china based on the evaluation of the ecological service value the paper determines the correspondence between consumption projects land types and ecological functions realized the accounting of the economic value of the national ecological deficit as the sum of the regional deficits based on this the ecological deficit is used as an unpaid input factor in the construction of a green social accounting matrix table and a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model is used to analyze the effects of a tax policy on the compensation for the ecological deficit value the simulation results show that the double dividend hypothesis exists in the primary and tertiary industries and employment in the secondary industry that with a high value added labor decreased resulting in decreases in both the labor income of residents and their proportion of the national income the growth rate of gdp decreases in the short term and then gradually increases capital appreciation and net exports contribute greatly to economic growth based on the positive role of taxation schemes in reducing ecological deficits and their negative impacts on economic growth and the income distribution this paper suggests that with the improvement of big data on ecological occupation an ecological deficit tax can be introduced to target the energy sector which has a large ecological footprint in addition household income should be protected through tax cuts transfer payments and earmarked funds among other means to promote economic growth and protect the environment

public support for economic reforms in poland using monthly surveys the author examines the impact of aggregate economic conditions on the dynamic of support for the polish program of economic reforms the balcerowicz plan to highlight the ambiguity of the standard retrospective model the author analyzes the impact of subjective perceptions of economic conditions on postures toward the reform program asking if people were extrapolating the past when forming predictions about the future then the effect of these predictions on the postures toward reform is studied finally the author focuses on the distributional effects substantive conclusions concerning the impact of economic conditions on the support of economic reform programs under democracy close the article

stabilization and growth in transition economies the early experience this paper analyzes the growth and stabilization experience in 26 transition economies in eastern europe the former soviet union and mongolia for the period 1989 1994 inflation rates have declined significantly in most countries following an inflation stabilization program growth resumes after stabilization occurs typically with a lag of about two years reducing inflation thus appears to be a precondition for growth an econometric analysis of the short run determinants of inflation and growth illustrates the key roles of fixed exchange rates improved fiscal balances and structural reforms in spurring growth and lowering inflation and confirms that inflation stabilization programs have been beneficial for growth even after controlling for structural reforms

the hidden cost of raising voters expectations reference dependence and politicians credibility abstract two politicians compete to get elected each politician is characterized by a valence which is unobservable to the electorate and can take one of two values high or low the representative voter prefers politicians with high valence but random shocks may lead him to appoint a low valence politician politicians make statements concerning their valence if the voter is a standard expected utility maximizer politicians statements lack any credibility and no information transmission takes place by introducing reference dependence and loss aversion we show that truthful communication is possible in equilibrium and we characterize the conditions under which it can arise intuitively these behavioral biases introduce a cost of overstating one s valence as overstatements may shift the electorate s preferences toward better skilled opponents

why is fiscal policy often procyclical many countries especially developing ones follow procyclical fiscal policies namely spending goes up taxes go down in booms and spending goes down taxes go up in recessions we provide an explanation for this suboptimal fiscal policy based upon political distortions and incentives for less than benevolent government to appropriate rents voters have incentives similar to the starving the leviathan classic argument and demand more public goods or fewer taxes to prevent governments from appropriating rents when the economy is doing well we test this argument against more traditional explanations based purely on borrowing constraints with a reasonable amount of success

multiple bubbles in the european union emission trading scheme abstract the european union emission trading scheme eu ets is the first large scale co 2 emission trading system in the world carbon allowances are financial assets potentially vulnerable to the behavior of traders and investors in fact the carbon price has been quite volatile since the inception of the market and it has recently hit very low values however to date no work exists to evaluate whether volatility and price spikes are due to episodes of speculation and price bubbles our paper fills this gap we use the recent approaches developed by phillips and yu 2010 phillips et al 2011 and phillips et al 2015a 2015b who propose a recursive right sided unit root approaches to detect and date stamp mildly explosive behaviors and carbon market exuberance we complement this methodology by using the wild bootstrap procedure by goncalves and kilian 2004 to control for the heteroschedasticity of carbon price data analyzing the eu ets front month contract price from 2005 to 2014 we find different episodes of price bubbles these episodes are not explained by similar behavior of the fundamentals but seem related to energy and environmental policy announcements our results can provide insightful policy implications in the context of the actual carbon market reform as well as the implementation of stricter financial regulations rules to co 2 trading

privatization political risk and stock market development in emerging economies this paper investigates whether privatization in emerging economies has a significant indirect effect on local stock market development through the resolution of political risk we argue that a sustained privatization program represents a major political test that gradually resolves uncertainty over political commitment to a market oriented policy as well as to regulatory and private property rights we present evidence suggesting that progress in privatization is indeed correlated with improvements in perceived political risk our analysis further shows that changes in political risk in general tend to have a strong effect on local stock market development and excess returns in emerging economies we conclude that the resolution of political risk resulting from successful privatization has been an important source for the rapid growth of stock markets in emerging economies

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

challenger entry and voter learning we develop a model of strategic interaction between voters and potential electoral challengers to sitting incumbents in which the very fact of a costly challenge conveys relevant information to voters given incumbent failure in office challenger entry is more likely but the threat of entry by inferior challengers creates an incentive for citizens to become more politically informed at the same time challenges to incumbents who perform well can neutralize a voter s positive assessment of incumbent qualifications how a voter becomes politically informed can in turn deter challengers of different levels of competence from running depending on the electoral environment the model permits us to sharpen our understanding of retrospective voting the incumbency advantage and the relationship between electoral competition and voter welfare while pointing to new interpretations of and future avenues for empirical research on elections

causes of the eu ets price drop recession cdm renewable policies or a bit of everything new evidence the price of eu allowances euas in the eu emissions trading scheme eu ets fell from almost 30 tco2 in mid 2008 to less than 5 tco2 in mid 2013 the sharp and persistent price decline has sparked intense debates both in academia and among policy makers about the decisive allowance price drivers in this paper we examine whether and to what extent the eua price drop can be justified by three commonly identified explanatory factors the economic recession renewable policies and the use of international credits capitalizing on marginal abatement cost theory and a broadly extended data set we find that only variations in economic activity and the growth of wind and solar electricity production are robustly explaining eua price dynamics contrary to simulation based analyses our results point to moderate interaction effects between the overlapping eu ets and renewable policies the bottom line however is that 90 of the variations of eua price changes remains unexplained by the abatement related fundamentals together our findings do not support the widely held view that negative demand shocks are the main cause of the weak carbon price signal in view of the new evidence we evaluate the eu ets reform options which are currently discussed

carbon price drivers phase i versus phase ii equilibrium abstract the aim of this paper is to investigate the determinants of the carbon price during the two phases of the european union emission trading scheme eu ets more specifically relying on daily eu allowance futures contracts we test whether the carbon price drivers identified for phase i still hold for phase ii and evolve toward a long run relationship using cointegration techniques and accounting for the 2006 structural break in the carbon market we show that while a cointegrating relationship exists for both phases of the eu ets the nature of this equilibrium relationship is different across the two subperiods with an increasing role of fundamentals in phase ii deriving equilibrium values we show that the carbon price tends to be undervalued since the end of 2009

dynamic government performance honeymoons and crises of confidence we use a formal theoretical framework to explore the interplay between a government s longevity and its performance ministers perform well when their careers are valuable this is so when the government s duration is expected to be long the government s survival depends on its popularity and finally that popularity depends on its ministers performance the feedback loop between performance and longevity means that multiple rational expectations equilibria can arise ministers work hard for a popular government but divert efforts elsewhere if they believe the government is doomed these alternatives are both self fulfilling prophecies however the presence of perhaps small random events that buffet the performance and popularity of a government is sufficient to pin down a unique equilibrium we explore the dynamics that arise a crisis of confidence involving the rapid collapse of a government s performance is sparked when a sequence of negative shocks push the popularity of the government below a unique critical threshold

managing carbon footprints in inventory management abstract there is a broad consensus that mankind must reduce carbon emissions to mitigate global warming it is generally accepted that carbon emission trading is one of the most effective market based mechanisms to curb the amount of carbon emissions this paper investigates how firms manage carbon footprints in inventory management under the carbon emission trading mechanism we derive the optimal order quantity and analytically and numerically examine the impacts of carbon trade carbon price and carbon cap on order decisions carbon emissions and total cost we make interesting observations from the numerical examples and provide managerial insights from the analytical results

environmental safety stock the impacts of regulatory and voluntary control policies on production planning inventory control and environmental performance abstract this paper analyzes the impacts of different pollution control policies on a firm s decisions of production planning and inventory control based on a stochastic model with both demand and environmental uncertainties we derive the optimal policies of production planning and inventory control under both regulatory and voluntary pollution control approaches and investigate their operational and environmental effects we establish that the conventional wisdom which suggests that reduction of environmental waste at the end of a production process also decreases the stock and throughput levels of a production system is not necessarily true rather a regulatory environmental standard that limits the total amount of waste may induce the firm to raise its planned stock level which would lead to a higher expected amount of environmental wastes before the standard is enforced as well as environmental risks at other stages of the production process the additional planned stock level which is termed environmental safety stock can be reversed by using the voluntary control approach that provides the firm with the flexibility to occasionally exceed the environmental standard we also conduct numerical experiments to analyze the effects of different values of model parameters under different control approaches the analytical results provide new insights to the impacts of a firm s production and inventory decisions on the natural environment as well as to the choices of pollution control approaches by decision makers in both the private and public sectors

lame ducks and local fiscal policy quasi experimental evidence from portugal i use the introduction of mayoral term limits in portugal to identify how an exogenous variation in eligibility for office affects policy decisions relying on a quasi experimental difference in differences approach i find that term limited incumbents pursue more conservative fiscal policies than those who are eligible for re election heterogeneous effects show that the treatment effects primarily reflect the behaviour of right leaning term limited incumbents results are in line with a model in which right leaning officeholders try to maintain a good reputation by pleasing an electorate prone to redistribution while they are eligible but adopt policies closer to their true preferences when term limited

building support for taxation in developing countries experimental evidence from mexico abstract drawing on insights from the literature on institutional design how rules shape behavior to achieve desired outcomes this article examines how certain design features of taxes such as allowing for civil society oversight earmark mechanisms that direct tax revenue for a specific purpose and sunset provisions that make the duration of taxes finite affect political support for tax reforms it also evaluates how three important aspects of the fiscal exchange trust in government perceptions of the public good and level of income shape the effect of these design features based on an original survey experiment focusing on the provision of public safety in mexico i find that these design features increase political support for taxation especially among those with low trust in government and low income these findings have important implications not just for mexico but also a number of other countries across latin america that have both low levels of extraction and increased public spending imperatives

political careers or career politicians two main career paths are prevalent among politicians in modern democracies there are career politicians i e politicians who work in the political sector until retirement and political careers i e there are politicians who leave politics before retirement and work in the private sector in this paper we propose a dynamic equilibrium model of the careers of politicians in a political economy with a private sector and a political sector where individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their market ability as well as their political skills we characterize the conditions under which the two career paths emerge in equilibrium and establish a number of comparative statics results with respect to the quality of politicians and their careers

credible communication in dynastic government abstract this paper studies information disclosure in a model of dynastic government when information about past policy choices comes exclusively from the reports of previous administrations each administration has an incentive to choose its suboptimal one shot expenditure policy and then misrepresent its choice to its successor consequently it has been suggested that horizontal accountability i e a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch can ensure credible disclosure of a government s activities this paper suggests a cautious approach to that view the baseline model examines the reporting incentives of an external auditor who can independently verify the information each period even with auditing credible disclosure is shown to be problematic various extensions to this baseline model are examined in one extension liberal i e those prefering larger government expenditures and conservative those prefering smaller expenditures regimes and auditors evolve over time it is shown that conservative liberal auditors are not credible when the current regime is also conservative liberal moreover because information transmission stops when the auditor s and the regime s biases coincide effective deterrents even in the good periods when the auditor s and the administration s biases differ are difficult to construct in all periods the equilibrium requirement of auditor neutrality constrains the dynamic incentives for efficient policy choices these constraints are shown to bind away from optimal policies in standard constructions of equilibrium various ways in which auditing protocols can overcome these problems are discussed

transition to the market economy poland 1989 93 in comparative perspective poland the economic outcomes leszek balcerowicz the principal architect of poland s radical reform strategy in 1990 analyses here its economic outcomes prior to reform the characteristics which distinguished the polish economy from other socialist economies in central europe were the critical nature of the hyperinflation and accompanying macroeconomic crisis in 1989 the magnitude of the country s external debt the particularly strong socio political position of the labour movement in general and of the employees of state enterprises in particular a level of dependence of the ussr which though dramatic was less than that of its neighbours less economic centralization and a greater degree of private ownership in agriculture than elsewhere the last two factors were favorable but the first three most particularly the heavy legacy of hyperinflation were economically unfavorable on balance poland entered reform with a substantial disadvantage nonetheless its macroeconomic performance in the four years which followed reform was relatively better than that of its neighbours the crown jewel of poland s success was the halt of hyperinflation this was not achieved at a relatively greater cost in output cumulative gdp decline was less than elsewhere though after adjustment for the effects of the cmea shock the differences are not large balcerowicz attributes poland s relative success to the salient characteristics of its reform programme it was rapid radical comprehensive and consistent romania for one followed the opposite course of stop go gradualism that country s accelerating inflation and deep decline in output suggests what might have happened to poland had it followed a softer approach

a structural model of electoral accountability this paper proposes a structural approach to measuring the eects of electoral ac countability we estimate a political agency model with imperfect information in order to identify and quantify discipline and selection eects using data on u s governors for 1982 2012 we nd that the possibility of reelection provides a signi cant incentive for incumbents to exert eort we also nd a selection eect although it is weaker in terms of its eect on average governor performance according to our model the widely used two term regime improves voter welfare by 4 2 compared to a one term regime and nd that a three term regime may improve voter welfare even further

trader types and volatility of emission allowance prices evidence from eu ets phase i abstract this paper studies the relation between the trading activity of market participants and the volatility of the european emission allowance price during phase i of the european union emission trading system eu ets we focus on the contrasting roles of different trader types we find evidence of a positive and significant trading activity volatility relation which appears to be stronger when accounting for trader type the positive relation can be mainly attributed to energy providers in contrast industrial companies seem to have traded more frequently when volatility levels were lower finally the non liable players represented by financial intermediaries appear to have acted as a flexible counterparty trading more with the energy sector when volatility was higher and more with the industrial firms when volatility was lower we discuss possible explanations for these contrasted positions understanding the trading activity volatility link is relevant for evaluating the efficiency of the eu ets although the relation is generally positive many players remained often inactive and traded mostly when volatility levels were lower policies targeting the engagement of less active players could lead to a smoother incorporation of information into prices and to an increase in market efficiency

assessing the impact of cost optimization based on infrastructure modelling on co2 emissions traditionally logistics design is driven by a need to reduce costs and improve customer service recently the environmental concerns from transport have been increasingly discussed the traffic levels and associated energy consumption are influenced by supply chain structure modal split and vehicle utilization this paper aims to assess the impact of the traditional cost optimization approach to strategic modelling on overall logistics costs and co2 emissions by taking into account the supply chain structure number of depots and different freight vehicle utilization ratios 90 75 and 60 the simulation model based on a european case study from the automotive industry considers strategic and operational level decisions simultaneously the analysis shows that the optimum design based on costs does not necessary equate to an optimum solution for co2 emissions therefore there is a need to address economical and environmental objectives explicitly as part of the logistics design

economic policy economic performance and elections this paper explores the role of reelection pressures in determining economic policy by assuming that voters are uncertai n as to the efficacy of different policies a reelection process is derived that depends on both a politician s past policies and the level of economic activity during his time in office it is shown th at the less uncertain are voters as to which policy is best the more likely is a politician to manipulate policy for reelection purposes manipulation entails implementing the policy that is more likely to be well received rather than the one that maximizes income copyright 1993 by american economic association

incentive contracts and elections for politicians with multi task problems abstract we consider a model with a politician facing a multi task problem while in office the reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others we show that a combination of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate this inefficiency the incentive contract does not require direct information about the performance of the politician and is self financing across terms

anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption this paper presents a model of intertemporal choice that incorporates savoring and dread i e utility from anticipat ion of delayed consumption the model explains why an individual with positive time preference may delay desirable outcomes or get unpleas ant outcomes over with quickly contrary to the prediction of convent ional formulations of intertemporal choice implications of savoring and dread for savings behavior empirical estimation of discount rate s and public policy efforts to combat myopic behavior are explored the model provides an explanation for common violations of the indepe ndence axiom as applied to intertemporal choice copyright 1987 by royal economic society

london vs leipzig price discovery of carbon futures during phase iii of the ets abstract futures for european carbon emission allowances are currently traded on the ice in london and the eex in leipzig we investigate which of these exchanges dominates price discovery and find that the ice is the price leader

electoral control in new democracies the perverse incentives of fluid party systems how do fiuid party systems that exist in many new democracies affect democratic accountability to address this question the authors analyze a new database of all legislative incumbents and all competitive elections that took place in poland since 1991 they find that when district level economic outcomes are bad voters in that country punish legislators from a governing party and reward legislators from an opposition party as a result electoral control in poland works through political parties just as it does in mature democracies however the authors also find that in contrast to mature democracies legislators from a governing party tend to switch to an opposition party when the economy in their district deteriorates when they do so their chances of reelection are better than those of politicians who remained loyal to governing parties and are no worse than those of incumbents who ran as opposition party loyalists these empirical results suggest that while elections in new democracies function as a mechanism of political control fiuid party systems undermine the extent to which elections promote democratic accountability

the war making state and privatisation states created with the central purpose of defending national independence resist the process of macro economic reform since it appears to limit their power to pursue this aim the states of the former centrally planned economies were marked out by their extreme subordination to the military drive so the resistance to reshaping the war making state into a market facilitating state is considerable the transition tends to be halted where the old structures of central control are ended without markets supplying alternative imperatives a rent seeking state is created these themes are examined in relationship to privatisation of state owned enterprises in four countries russia china vietnam and the ukraine

spatial models of delegation canonical assumptions this approach may be justified on grounds of tractability but the failure to grasp the significance of different assumptions and push beyond specific models has limited our understanding of the incentives for delegation consequently the justifications for delegation that have received recent scrutiny and testing differ from some of the more plausible justifications offered by informal studies of delegation we show that surprisingly few results in the literature hinge on risk aversion and surprisingly many turn on the ignored though equally canonical technological assumption that uncertainty is fixed relative to policies relaxing the key assumptions about dimensionality and functional forms provides a clearer intuition about delegation one that is closer to classical treatments the theory allows us to relate different institutional features commitment specialization costs monitoring multiple principals to delegation s observable properties lthough the practice of delegation dates back to antiquity the book of exodus refers to itonly in the last century has much scholarship examined its causes and effects and only recently has research focused on developing and testing formal theories that explore the logic of delegation 1 despite this recent surge in formal work on delegation scholars have failed to generalize several important properties of the early pathbreaking models instead of revisiting assumptions that were initially imposed for the sake of convenience recent papers tend to maintain and reinforce the cannonical assumptions applying these limited models to ever richer institutional settings although the breadth of understanding about delegation across various settings is impressive this approach has come at a price it has produced an understanding that only partly captures delegation s informational rationale in even the simplest contexts the literature is rich in predictions about delegation in complicated institutional settings when stylized foundational assumptions are satisfied but poor in explanations for and intuitions about why a poorly informed boss chooses to delegate to subordinates with different preferences moreover we lack an understanding of what basic features drive the boss s choice of which agent is given control of policy for example scholars have provided detailed explanations about how separation of power systems affect delegation by legislatures to agencies but the basic question does the informational rationale for delegation hinge on the boss s risk preferences has been ignored despite the analysis of complicated signaling and screening games between bosses with ex post controls and their subordinates we do not yet understand when or why the ally principle the boss picks the most ideologically similar agent as delegatee fails in simple settings we try to put models of delegation on more solid footing by examining a larger more general set of environments we eschew the canonical assumptions of quadratic utility or even risk aversion unidimensional outcome spaces and additive and homogeneous random shocks to policy our analysis focuses first on two basic questions when does delegation occur and to whom does the boss delegate we then consider richer institutionally driven extensions e g the role of commitment and monitoring devices the impact of multiple bosses and the institution in which their preferences are aggregated through a sequence of nested models with varying levels of abstraction the analysis isolates the relations between various assumptions and different findings

politics and the suboptimal provision of counterterror i present a model of interactions between voters a government and a terrorist organization the model focuses on a previously unexplored conceptualization of counterterrorism as divided into tactic specific observable and general unobservable tactics when there is divergence between voters and government preferences strategic substitution among different modes of attack by terrorists and agency problems between the voters and government create a situation in which the politically optimal counterterrorism strategy pursued by the government in response to electoral and institutional incentives is quite different from the security maximizing counterterrorism strategy in particular in response to electoral pressure the government allocates resources to observable counterterror in excess of the social optimum this problem is particularly severe when governments put great weight on rent seeking or care less about counterterror than do voters and when terrorists have a large set of tactics from which to choose voters can decrease the magnitude of the agency problem by increasing the benefits of reelection by for example slackening requirements for nonsecurity related public goods i have received valuable comments and advice from bruce bueno de mesquita randy calvert martin cripps james fearon amanda friedenberg robert powell matthew stephenson and barbara walter i thank the weidenbaum center on the economy government and public policy at washington university for financial support

macropolicies in transition to a market economy a three year perspective countries in transition to market economies have had to implement macroeconoimic stabilization programs at the same time that they were engaged in massive changes of their political institutions and the systemic framework of their economies what has been the interaction of stabilization with economic liberalization and deep institutional reform in the countries of eastern europe in particular the relations among initial conditions political developments reform strategies and outcomes experience in eastern europe suggests that when there is a political breakthrough as in the countries under review a radical stabilization liberalization stragety is probably the least risky approach to reform and will not constrain output or structural reform over the medium term even stabilization that is initially successful in containing inflation will later come under pressure because of social policies and the structural transitions impelled by reform several factors are identified that affect the credibility of reforms and lessons are derived for countries that have stabilized and those that yet face this task

on measuring speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data this article provides a critical assessment of the line of research that measures speculative and hedging activities in futures markets from volume and open interest data it makes several contributions first a detailed theoretical analysis of the measures proposed in the previous literature as proxies for speculative activity clarifies the circumstances in which they fail as well as the assumptions that have to be made when they are used as intended second we propose a new way of combining the volume and the open interest figures which provides additional information regarding the type of trading activity that takes place in the market on a given date finally we analyse empirically the basic statistical properties of all the ratios when they are applied to real data for some of the stock index futures contracts most actively traded in the world this empirical analysis shows the diverse behaviour of the ratios when they are applied to a common sample of real data which confirms our previous the

transitional politics emerging incentive based instruments in environmental regulation abstract this paper proposes a positive theory of environmental instrument choice we study a democratic society that seeks to lower the level of pollution from industrial sources to a pre specified target the target can be implemented by one of three instruments s uniform emission standards p tradeable permits and t emission taxes the conflict of interest between special interests representing polluters and the electorate is resolved by an elected politician we characterize when each of the three policy instruments is chosen in political equilibrium and show that the transition observed in many countries from s to either p or t can be understood as a natural consequence of increasingly ambitious environmental targets

integration of the global carbon markets abstract this paper analyzes the market architecture and common factors of emission reduction instruments in europe and north america spot and futures prices across exchanges in europe are cointegrated but the futures curve beyond the calendar year evolves independently despite narrower spreads political uncertainties about the clean development mechanism have kept eua and cer prices from converging rggi allowances share a common trend with eua and the european markets adjust to the u s price trend a 0 10 shock to rggi prices leads to a one month 0 64 cumulative increase in eua prices the introduction of cap and trade legislation in the u s has broken a cointegrating relationship in voluntary prices voluntary instruments that are convertible into mandatory allowances imply less than a 20 probability of price convergence between the u s and europe by 2013

candidates credibility and re election incentives i study elections between citizen candidates who cannot make binding policy commitments before taking office but who are accountable to voters due to the possibility of re election in each period a representative voter chooses among heterogeneous candidates with known policy preferences the elected candidate chooses the policy to implement and how much rent seeking to engage in when in office as the voter decides both which candidate to elect and subsequently whether the candidate is retained this framework integrates elements of electoral competition and electoral accountability i show that in the best stationary equilibrium when utility functions are concave over policy non median candidates are elected over candidates with policy preferences more closely aligned with the voter in this equilibrium there are two candidates who are elected at some history and the policies these candidates implement in office do not converge this divergence incentivizes candidates to engage in less rent seeking increasing voter welfare copyright 2013 oxford university press

political economy of mechanisms we study the optimal mirrlees taxation problem in a dynamic economy in contrast to the standard approach where the taxation mechanism is operated by a benevolent planner with full commitment power we focus on economies in which policy decisions are made by self interested politicians who cannot commit to policies the society controls politicians using elections we show that the provision of incentives to politicians can be partly separated from redistribution across agents and that political economy constraints can be modeled as introducing additional aggregate distortions in the dynamic mirrlees problem we provide conditions under which the political economy distortions persist or disappear in the long run if the politicians are as patient as the agents the best sustainable mechanism leads to an asymptotic allocation where the aggregate distortions arising from political economy disappear in contrast when politicians are less patient than the citizens positive aggregate labor and capital taxes remain even asymptotically we conclude by providing a brief comparison of centralized

circumstance and choice this article takes an integrated approach to evaluating the interaction of initial conditions political change reforms and economic performance in a unified framework covering 28 transition economies in east asia central and eastern europe and the fsu initial conditions and economic policy jointly determine the large differences in economic performance among transition economies initial conditions dominate in explaining inflation but economic liberalization is the most important factor determining differences in growth political reform emerges as the most important determinant of the speed and comprehensiveness of economic liberalization raising the important question of what determines political liberalization results suggest the importance of the level of development in determining the decision to expand political freedoms

democracy the market and the logic of social choice this article compares the types of knowledge democracy and the market require to rationally allocate resources i argue that high levels of public ignorance and voters inability to compare the effects of different parties policies make it difficult for parties and elections to rationally allocate resources markets mitigate these problems because the simultaneous existence of multiple firms products facilitates comparisons that mimic the conditions of scientific experimentation the economy of knowledge involved in such comparisons indicates there are epistemic advantages to using firms and markets instead of political parties and elections to allocate scarce resources however in contrast to arguments that markets merely provide better information than political decisions i argue markets epistemic advantages are derived from the way they facilitate comparisons that minimize decision makers need for knowledge or understanding