the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

environmental kuznets curves new evidence on both panel and country level co2 emissions using data on per capita co2 emissions and per capita real gdp from fifteen countries spanning the period 1960 2013 this paper tests the validity of the environmental kuznets curve ekc using both panel based and time series based methodological approaches of cointegration given that the ekc hypothesis postulates an inverted u shaped relationship between emissions and output the study tests for cointegration between per capita co2 emissions per capita real gdp and the squared values of per capita real gdp the evidence from panel cointegration methodologies is mixed this result might arise due to time dependence of cointegrating coefficients the time varying cointegration approaches provide strong evidence in favor of time varying cointegration parameters furthermore based on the quantile cointegration approach the results indicate that the ekc hypothesis holds in 12 out of the 15 countries however even for these three countries the ekc hypothesis seems to hold at certain quantiles

retailing public goods the economics of corporate social responsibility abstract this paper explores the feasibility and desirability of corporate social responsibility csr we identify csr with creation of public goods or curtailment of public bads using a model with profit maximizing firms the paper shows that there is a direct parallel between csr and traditional models of private provision of public goods indeed firms that use csr will produce public goods at exactly the same level as predicted by the standard voluntary contribution equilibrium for public goods we compare csr with government provision and charitable provision discussing when csr by private for profit firms could have a comparative advantage in dealing with public goods provision

do norms on contribution behavior affect intrinsic motivation field experimental evidence from germany abstract this paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals intrinsic motivation we consider the church levy which the catholic church in germany collects as a charitable donation despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax we design a randomized field experiment with treatments informing individuals that the levy is a tax we demonstrate that treatment effects differ across motivational types among weakly intrinsically motivated individuals communicating the legal norm results in a significant crowd out of intrinsic motivation in contrast strongly intrinsically motivated individuals do not show any treatment response

economic insights from internet auctions this paper surveys recent studies of internet auctions four main areas of research are summarized first we survey several studies that document and attempt to explain the frequently observed sniping or last second bidding behavior in these auctions second we summarize several methods proposed to quantify the distortions caused by asymmetric information in these markets most notably due to the winner s curse third we explore research about the role of reputation mechanisms installed to help combat these distortions finally we discuss what internet auctions have to teach us about auction design

environmental degradation economic growth and energy consumption evidence of the environmental kuznets curve in malaysia this paper tests for the short and long run relationship between economic growth carbon dioxide co2 emissions and energy consumption using the environmental kuznets curve ekc by employing both the aggregated and disaggregated energy consumption data in malaysia for the period 1980 2009 the autoregressive distributed lag ardl methodology and johansen juselius maximum likelihood approach were used to test the cointegration relationship and the granger causality test based on the vector error correction model vecm to test for causality the study does not support an inverted u shaped relationship ekc when aggregated energy consumption data was used when data was disaggregated based on different energy sources such as oil coal gas and electricity the study does show evidences of the ekc hypothesis the long run granger causality test shows that there is bi directional causality between economic growth and co2 emissions with coal gas electricity and oil consumption this suggests that decreasing energy consumption such as coal gas electricity and oil appears to be an effective way to control co2 emissions but simultaneously will hinder economic growth thus suitable policies related to the efficient consumption of energy resources and consumption of renewable sources are required

the economic impacts of climate change evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather fisher et al 2012 hereafter fhrs have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper deschenes and greenstone 2007 hereafter dg we acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes we are grateful to fhrs for uncovering them we hope that this reply will also contribute to advancing the literature on the vital question of the impact of climate change on the us agricultural sector fhrs main critiques of dg are as follows i there are errors in the weather data and climate change projections used by dg ii the climate change projections are based on the hadley 2 model and scenarios rather than the more recent hadley 3 model and scenarios iii standard errors are biased due to spatial correlation iv the inclusion of state by year fixed effects does not leave enough weather variation to obtain meaningful estimates of the relationship between agriculture profits and weather v storage and inventory adjustment in response to yield shocks invalidate the use of annual profit data and vi fhrs argue that a better specified hedonic model produces robust estimates unlike the results reported in dg four of these critiques have little basis and we respond to them here in the introduction specifically with respect to ii the more recent daily climate predictions were not available when we wrote dg nevertheless the most important issue is providing the reliable estimates of climate change and in this note we report estimates based on the climate model we used in dg and a more recent one that we gained access to in the meantime iii in the primary table on agricultural profits dg reports two sets of standard errors with the first clustered at the county level and the second based on a variance covariance matrix that accounts for spatial correlation using the method proposed in conley 1999 thus the claim of fhrs 2012 seems overblown nevertheless to ease comparisons of papers in this literature this note will adopt the fhrs convention of reporting estimated standard errors clustered at the county and state levels we find that inference is largely unaffected by the choice between these different assumptions about the variance covariance matrix

white collar crime writ small a case study of bagels donuts and the honor system for more than a decade an mit trained economist has meticulously recorded the results of nearly 75 000 deliveries of bagels and donuts to corporate offices these bagels and donuts are left in workplaces in the morning along with a list of prices and a lockbox office workers purchase the products on the honor system later that day the uneaten goods and the lock box are collected and the relevant data for each office are recorded in a spreadsheet these data provide a unique opportunity for understanding the extent to which individuals behave honestly in this setting and the factors that influence the level of honesty an analysis of the discrepancy between the prices of the goods consumed and the actual payments deposited in the lock box yields a number of insights first the base payment rate is quite high on average payments represent almost 90 percent of the posted price in a model of pure self interest one would expect very low payment rates because there would seem to be many opportunities for individuals to take the products with almost no chance of their nonpayment being detected moderating the tendency to take the products without paying is the fact that low payment rates will increase the probability the delivery company stops serving the company paying for one s bagels and donuts viewed in this light is a public good for other office workers thus one might expect a strong negative relationship between office size and payment rates which is not present in the data rather the data appear more consistent with a model in which there are internal nonpecuniary costs associated with stealing the bagels and donuts i e people overwhelmingly pay for the products because it would be wrong not to do so the observed payment rates are systematically related to a variety of observable factors for instance payment rates fall in response to increases in the posted price this is consistent with the increase in financial costs pushing some marginal consumers to be willing to sustain the moral cost associated with not stealing the goods or paying less than full price payment rates are higher when many of the bagels and donuts go uneaten suggesting that the marginal consumer pays a lower share of the posted price than the inframarginal consumer purchasers of donuts appear to be more likely to pay less than the full price there is a sharp and persistent increase in the payment rate following the september 11 terrorist attacks

the labor market return to academic fraud abstract academic fraud by undergraduate students is pervasive but should it be taken seriously as an economic problem our research suggests so using a unique data set from the caucasus we estimate a large positive effect of academic fraud on the probability of employment econometrically we deal with endogenous selection into academic fraud and possible measurement error in the reporting of academic fraud using partial identification techniques the findings demonstrate that incentives to commit academic fraud are strong and point towards the potentially damaging consequences of academic fraud in broader settings

the environmental kuznets curve economic growth renewable and non renewable energy and trade in tunisia we use the autoregressive distributed lag ardl b ounds testing approach for cointegration with structural breaks and the ve ctor error correction model vecm granger causality approach in order to investigate relationships between per capita co 2 emissions gdp renewable and non renewable energy consumption and international trade exports or imports for tunisia during the period 1980 2009 we show the existence of a short run unidirectional causality running from tra de gdp co 2 emission and non renewable energy to renewable energy our long run estimates show that non renewable energy and trade have a positive impact on co 2 emissions whereas renewable energy impacts weakly and negatively co 2 emission when using the model with exports and this impact is statistically insignificant when using the model wi th imports the inverted u shaped environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is not supported graphically and analytically in the long run this means that tunisia has not ye t reached the required level of per capita gdp to get an inverted u shaped ekc our main policy recommendations for tunisia are the following i to radically reform the subsidies system granted b y the tunisian government for fossil fuels consumption ii to encourage the use of renewable energy and ener gy efficiency by reinforcing actual projects and regulatory frame work iii to locate ports near exporting industrial zones or vice versa to reduce emission of pollution caused by the transport of merchandise iv to elaborate a strategy for maximizing its benefit from renewable energy technology transfer occurring when importing capita l goods v to encourage the creation of renewable energy projects for export to the eu with a proportion of production for national consumption

the bidder s curse traditional explanations for the popularity of auctions are efficiency and revenue maximization we argue that another reason is the potential for overbidding i e buyers bidding above their willingness to pay outside the auction the auction mechanism ensures that even if only few buyers overbid they affect prices and allocations we employ a novel approach to identify overbidding in the field comparing auction prices to simultaneous fixed prices for identical items on the same ebay webpage we argue that fixed prices provide an upper bound for auction bids in a detailed data set of board game auctions we find that the final price exceeds the simultaneous fixed price in 42 percent of the auctions the result is not explained by differences in item quality shipping costs or seller reputation prior auction experience does not eliminate overbidding the finding replicates in a second broad data set of a cross section of auctions 48 percent overbidding the substantial fraction of overbid auctions is induced by a small number of bidders only 17 percent ever bid above the fixed price using a simple model of second price auctions with alternative fixed prices we show that transaction costs of switching between auctions and fixed prices cannot explain the results given that even the expected auction price is higher than the fixed price consistent with limited attention the closer the fixed price is listed relative to an auction the less likely are overbids this effect is strongest for bidders first bids when they are likely to examine the auction and fixed price listings more closely

can indifference make the world greener we test whether people s tendency to stick with the default option can help save resources in a natural field experiment we switch printers default settings from simplex to duplex printing at a large swedish university the results confirm that roughly one third of all printing is determined by the default alternative and hence daily paper consumption drops by 15 percent due to the change the effect is immediate lasts throughout the experimental period and remains intact after six months we also investigate how the more conventional method of encouraging people to save resources performs and find it has no impact recent theoretical and empirical contributions indicate that the default effect works through recommendation depends positively on the number of alternatives in the choice set and is reinforced for difficult decisions we demonstrate that the default option matter in a simple non dynamic decision task with only two alternatives and where people have been explicitly informed about the recommended course of action

honest on mondays honesty and the temporal separation between decisions and payoffs abstract we show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior each of 427 israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit s cadet coordinator for every point reported the soldier received an additional half hour early release from the army base on thursday afternoon soldiers who participated on sunday the first work day of the week are significantly more honest than those who participated later in the week we derive practical implications for eliciting honesty

the impact of global warming on agriculture a ricardian analysis reply we measure the economic impact of climate on land prices using cross sectional data on climate farmland prices and other economic and geophysical data for almost 3 000 counties in the united states we find that higher temperatures in all seasons except autumn reduce average farm values while more precipitation outside of autumn increases farm values applying the model to a global warming scenario shows a significantly lower estimated impact of global warming on u s agriculture than the traditional production function approach and in one case suggests that even without co sub 2 fertilization global warming may have economic benefits for agriculture 16 refs 5 figs 5 tabs

local economic development agglomeration economies and the big push 100 years of evidence from the tennessee valley authority we study the long run eects of one of the most ambitious place based economic development policies in u s history the tennessee valley authority using a rich panel dataset of counties we conduct an evaluation of the dynamic eects of the tva on local economies in the seventy years following the program s inception we nd that the tva led to short run gains in agricultural employment that were eventually reversed while impacts on manufacturing employment continued to intensify well after the program s subsidies had lapsed a pattern consistent with the presence of strong agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector economists have long cautioned that the local gains created by place based policies may be oset by losses elsewhere yielding ambiguous eects on the u s as a whole building on the framework in glaeser and gottlieb 2008 we develop a novel approach to assessing the aggregate consequences of shifting the spatial distribution of manufacturing employment our ndings suggest the aggregate productivity gains associated with relocating manufacturing activity to the tva region were probably minimal

geography depreciation and growth american economic review papers proceedings 2015 105 5 252 256 http dx doi org 10 1257 aer p20151029 geography depreciation and growth by solomon m hsiang and amir s jina any visit to the seashore will confirm that it is more difficult to build a large sandcastle if one locates the project too near the lapping waves of the ocean the sandcastle may grow well ini tially but eventually a rogue wave washes out some portion of the progress it may be possi ble for the sandcastle to grow on net so long as investment in building outpaces losses to the waves but it must be true that identical building effort would lead to a larger castle were con struction sited on a portion of the beach further from the waves beach goers face depreciation of sandcastle investments by waves with an average rate of depreciation that is influenced by their location on the beach we point out here that similar dynamics apply to capital accumulation and thereby economic growth which faces average rates of depreciation that differ by geography it has been previously proposed that geog raphy influences economic growth for many reasons for example geography may affect labor productivity via health and trade costs via ruggedness and landlockedness gallup sachs and mellinger 1999 geography affected agricultural productivity during early stages of development which may have enduring influ ence nordhaus 2006 hornbeck 2012 or geo graphic conditions could influence the nature of persistent economic and political institu tions acemoglu johnson and robinson 2002 rodrik subramanian and trebbi 2004 dell 2010 yet to our knowledge prior work has nei ther suggested nor documented that depreciation varies by location and thus its potential role in influencing the wealth of nations has not been considered nor explored previous analyses of comparative develop ment seem to have sidestepped the question of location dependent depreciation out of necessity because data on depreciation were unavailable for example seminal work by mankiw romer and weil 1992 stated we assume that depreciation rates are constant across countries t here is neither any strong reason to expect depre ciation rates to vary greatly across coun tries nor are there any data that would allow us to estimate country specific depreciation rates we continue to lack generally comprehensive measures of capital depreciation however the construction of new location specific measures of tropical cyclone exposure hsiang 2010 enables us to consider the potential impact of this single source of capital depreciation tropical cyclones henceforth cyclones are the class of destructive storms that include tropical storms hurricanes typhoons and cyclones all of which are the same physical phenomena but differ in name based on their location and intensity to consider how cyclones affect local rates of depreciation we first point out that depreciation rates may change across sequential moments in time holding a location fixed in the b each goers example above there may be moments with no depreciation of a sandcastle when no waves are near and there may be later brief moments of rapid depreciation when a wave is splash ing against the sandcastle similarly depreci ation of capital accelerates dramatically while it is exposed to a cyclone which may damage large portions of buildings roadways farm land and other durable assets that depreciate much more gradually at other moments in time we think most readers will be accustomed to thinking of depreciation as a slow process of capital degradation that does not vary with time such as an iron bridge rusting gradually to hsiang university of california berkeley 2607 hearst avenue berkeley ca 94720 e mail shsiang berkeley edu jina university of chicago 5757 south university avenue chicago il 60637 e mail amirjina uchicago edu go to http dx doi org 10 1257 aer p20151029 to visit the article page for additional materials and author disclo sure statement s

the enduring impact of the american dust bowl short and long run adjustments to environmental catastrophe the 1930 s american dust bowl was an environmental catastrophe that greatly eroded sections of the plains analyzing new data collected to identify low medium and high erosion counties the dust bowl is estimated to have immediately substantially and persistently reduced agricultural land values and revenues during the depression and through at least the 1950 s there was limited reallocation of farmland from activities that became relatively less productive agricultural adjustments such as reallocating land from crops to livestock recovered only 14 to 28 of the initial agricultural cost the economy adjusted predominately through migration rather than through capital inows and increased industry

the determinants of atmospheric so2 concentrations reconsidering the environmental kuznets curve this analysis explores the effects of income and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of sulfur dioxide the results indicate that there is a u shaped relation between income and atmospheric concentration of so2 and an inverted u shaped relation between the spatial intensity of economic activity and so2 concentrations these results suggest that the spatial intensity of economic activity rather than income provides the impetus for policies and technologies that reduce so2 emissions based on this result the atmospheric concentration of so2 in developing nations may decline faster than indicated by previous analyses the potential for this decline depends on the rate at which income grows relative to population the trade off between the effects of income gains and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of so2 is consistent with the notion that some environmental problems can be ameliorated by slowing population growth and increasing income levels

nature versus nurture the environment s persistent influence through the modernization of american agriculture technological innovation in agriculture was substantial during the 20th century is modern technological control of the environment replacing a primitive dependency on natural advantages and disadvantages or has agricultural production remained persistently dependent on the environment this paper estimates how the 20th century modernization of united states plains agriculture changed the impact of environmental characteristics on agricultural land values despite substantial technological innovation and rising land values from 1945 to 2002 counties environmental characteristics largely maintained influence on land values environmental change has become no less costly as technological innovation has not reduced the importance of natural advantages or disadvantages

barbed wire property rights and agricultural development this paper examines the impact on agricultural development of the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the american plains in the late nineteenth century without a fence farmers risked uncompensated damage by others livestock from 1880 to 1900 the introduction and near universal adoption of barbed wire greatly reduced the cost of fences relative to the predominant wooden fences especially in counties with the least woodland over that period counties with the least woodland experienced substantial relative increases in settlement land improvement land values and the productivity and production share of crops most in need of protection this increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers increased ability to protect their land from encroachment states inability to protect this full bundle of property rights on the frontier beyond providing formal land titles might have otherwise restricted agricultural development

is advertising a signal of product quality evidence from the compact disc player market 1983 1992 abstract we study panel data on advertising and pricing in the compact disc player market during 1983 1992 controlling for product features firm heterogeneity and aggregate effects i advertising increases after the player is introduced but at a decreasing rate and ii price falls from the outset and at an accelerating pace these patterns are inconsistent with both the perfect learning in papers by kihlstrom and riordan j polit econ 92 1984 427 and milgrom and roberts j polit econ 94 1986 796 and the imperfect learning in horstmann and macdonald j econ manag strat 3 1994 561 versions of paper by nelson j polit econ 82 1974 729 model of advertising extensions having persistent consumer uncertainty and learning can explain these profiles

price quality and reputation evidence from an online field experiment we examine the link between price quality seller claims and seller reputation in internet auctions after purchasing actual baseball cards and having them professionally graded we find that some buyers in the online graded market are misled by incredible claims of quality they pay higher prices but do not receive better quality and in fact are defrauded more often online seller reputation is effective for identifying good faith sellers but conditional on completed auctions reputable sellers do not provide better quality evidence also suggests that high claim sellers target less experienced buyers we attribute these patterns to two loopholes in the ebay rating system we benefited from the comments of austan goolsbee raphael thomadsen john shea dan vincent david reiley larry ausubel peter cramton v joseph hotz jeff smith jimmy chan vincent crawford mark duggan and attendees at numerous seminars and conferences we are particularly grateful to seth sanders and john list for their constructive advice at the early stage of the research to timothy bresnahan rachel kranton and thomas hubbard for their detailed suggestions in reshaping earlier versions and to editor ariel pakes and two anonymous referees for their careful readings special thanks to eight friends who acted as our agents in purchasing baseball cards in retail markets and to numerous sports card store owners who shared their insights on the sportscard industry excellent research assistance from randy alexander moore and krzysztof fizyta is gratefully acknowledged any remaining errors are ours

honesty on the streets a field study on newspaper purchasing many publishers use an honor system for selling newspapers in the street we conducted a field experiment to study honesty in this market finding that a moral reminder increases the level of honesty in payments whereas the same message has no effect on whether one is honest reminding customers of the legal norm has no effect we argue that these results are consistent with a preference for honesty based on an internalized social norm auxiliary evidence suggests that the moral message remains effective when it is posted for longer periods and even when it is removed again authors abstract

loss aversion and lying behavior abstract we theoretically show that loss averse agents are more likely to lie to avoid receiving a low payoff after a random draw the lower the ex ante probability of this bad outcome the ex ante expected payoff increases as the bad outcome becomes less likely and hence the greater is the loss avoided by lying we demonstrate robust support for this theory by reanalyzing the results from the extant literature and with a new experiment that varies the outcome probabilities and is run double anonymous

environmental kuznets curve in china new evidence from dynamic panel analysis this paper applies a panel of 28 provinces of china from 1996 to 2012 to study the impacts of economic development energy consumption trade openness and urbanization on the carbon dioxide waste water and waste solid emissions by estimating a dynamic panel model with the system generalized method of moments gmm estimator and an autoregressive distributed lag ardl model with alternative panel estimators respectively we find that the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is well supported for all three major pollutant emissions in china across different models and estimation methods our study also confirms positive effects of energy consumption on various pollutant emissions in addition we find some evidence that trade and urbanization may deteriorate environmental quality in the long run albeit not in the short run from policy perspective our estimation results bode well for chinese government s goal of capping greenhouse emissions by 2030 as outlined in the recent china us climate accord while containing energy consumption and harm effects from expanding trade and urbanization remains some environmental challenges that china faces

charity as a substitute for reputation evidence from an online marketplace consumers respond positively to products tied to charity particularly from sellers that are relatively new and hence have limited alternative means for assuring quality we establish this result using data from a diverse group of ebay sellers who experiment with charity by varying the presence of a donation in a set of otherwise matched product listings most of charity s benefits accrue to sellers without extensive ebay histories consistent with charity serving as a quality signal we find fewer customer complaints among charity intensive sellers

honesty and evasion in the tax compliance game conventional models of tax compliance emphasize that taxpayers make strategic tax reports underreporting income to the extent that this behavior is functionally rewarded in contrast to this view considerable empirical evidence suggests that many taxpayers are inherently honest reporting truthfully regardless of the incentive to cheat in this article we build a game theoretic model of tax compliance that includes both honest and potentially dishonest taxpayers we show that including honest taxpayers significantly alters the model leading to much improved empirical predictions and somewhat different and novel policy implications

why do people keep their promises an experimental test of two explanations numerous psychological and economic experiments have shown that the exchange of promises greatly enhances cooperative behavior in experimental games this paper seeks to test two theories to explain this effect the first posits that individuals have a preference for keeping their word the second assumes that people dislike letting down others payoff expectations according to the latter account promises affect behavior only indirectly because they lead to changes in the payoff expectations attributed to others i conduct an experiment designed to distinguish between and test these alternative explanations the results demonstrate that the effects of promises cannot be accounted for by changes in payoff expectations this suggests that people have a preference for promise keeping per se

greenhouse gas emissions energy consumption and economic growth a panel cointegration analysis from canadian industrial sector perspective abstract this paper investigates the long run and the causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions energy consumption and economic growth for canadian industrial sectors over the period 1990 2007 the empirical findings suggest that in the long run equilibrium energy consumption has a positive and statistically significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions whereas a non linear relationship is found between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth consistent with the environmental kuznets curve the short run dynamics conveys that there is a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth to greenhouse gas emissions and a weak unidirectional causality running from greenhouse gas emissions to energy consumption from economic growth to energy consumption in the long run however there seems to be a weak one way causality flowing from energy consumption and economic growth to greenhouse gas emissions

the dynamics of seller reputation evidence from ebay we construct a panel of ebay seller histories and examine the importance of ebay s reputation mechanism we find that when a seller first receives negative feedback his weekly sales rate drops from a positive 7 to a negative 7 subsequent negative feedback ratings arrive 25 more rapidly than the first one and don t have nearly as much impact as the first one we also find that a seller is more likely to exit the lower his reputation is and that just before exiting sellers receive more negative feedback than their lifetime average we consider a series of theoretical models and measure them against these empirical results regardless of which theoretical model best explains the data an important conclusion of our paper is that ebay s reputation system gives way to noticeable strategic responses from both buyers and sellers

investigating the validity of pollution haven hypothesis in the gulf cooperation council gcc countries this study investigated the validity of the pollution haven hypothesis in the gulf cooperation council gcc countries using a multivariate framework to achieve the goal of this study the non stationary panel techniques were used to examine the hypothesis from 1980 to 2009 based on the pedroni cointegration test results it was found that the variables are cointegrated moreover the fully modified ols results showed that energy consumption and gdp growth increase co2 emission while foreign direct investment inflows have a long run negative relationship with co2 emission furthermore based on the short run granger causality test results fdi has no short run causal relationship with co2 emission and energy consumption while energy consumption and gdp growth have a positive causal relationship with co2 emission thus the results of this study indicate that energy consumption and gdp growth are the source of pollution in the gcc countries and not the foreign direct investment inflows thus the study recommended that these countries should utilize policies to encourage inward foreign investment since it plays an important role in stimulating gdp growth

asymmetric information adverse selection and online disclosure the case of ebay motors since the pioneering work of akerlof 1970 economists have been aware of the adverse selection problem that information asymmetries can create in used goods markets the remarkable growth in online auctions of used goods where buyers generally purchase sight unseen therefore poses a puzzle i argue that given a means for credible information disclosure sellers will voluntarily disclose their private information to buyers through online media this limits information asymmetries and adverse selection to test this theory i examine the role of information in a large online used car market ebay motors i nd that sellers selectively disclose information that information asymmetries are reduced by these disclosures and that online media such as photos text and graphics provide a rich environment for information disclosure

tax me if you can an artifactual field experiment on dishonesty in this paper we test whether increased salience of a tax charge increases dishonesty using a version of the die under cup paradigm participants earn money in proportion to the outcome reported and thus have an incentive to over report we find a significant increase in high outcomes in the presence of a tax frame suggesting that participants use the tax as an excuse to rationalize their dishonest act in addition we tested whether adding an explanation for the adoption of the tax would increase honesty we find evidence for reversed dishonesty with participants reporting significantly more low outcomes these results warn policy makers about the non trivial relationship between taxation charges and dishonesty

price and advertising signals of product quality we present a signaling model based on ideas of phillip nelson in which both the introductory price and the level of directly uninformative advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model a second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals

a further inquiry into the pollution haven hypothesis and the environmental kuznets curve abstract empirical research on the relationship between economic growth and its impact on the environment often tests the environmental kuznets curve ekc a hypothesis that rising national output leads to increases in pollution emissions until an economy reaches a certain size and decreases thereafter this paper addresses a branch of ekc literature focused on the role international trade plays in shaping this relationship in particular we test the pollution haven hypothesis which posits that emission reductions observed in developed nations are partly the result of shifting dirty production to developing nations with lax environmental standards we estimate ekcs for seven oft studied pollutants and find little evidence that pollution havens play a significant role in shaping the ekc we also find that confidence intervals around ekc turning points are very wide often including values well above the range of the data this leads us to be skeptical of the optimistic view that economic growth naturally leads to improvements in environmental quality

why do we lie a practical guide to the dishonesty literature over the last decade a massive body of research has been devoted to uncovering human dishonesty in the present paper we review more than a hundred papers from this literature and provide a comprehensive overview by first listing the existing theoretical frameworks and then covering the common empirical approaches synthesizing the demographic and personal characteristics of those who cheat identifying the behavioural mechanisms found that affect dishonesty and finally we finish by discussing how the empirical evidence fit theory overall the review concludes that many people behave dishonestly but also that it is a highly malleable behavior sensitive to elements such as decision contexts behaviour of others state of mind and depletion the review can be used as an overview of the dishonesty literature or as a guide or work of reference for selected topics of interest

does economic growth and energy consumption drive environmental degradation in china s 31 provinces new evidence from a spatial econometric perspective the panel data analysis points to economic and social factors contributing to nox pm2 5 pm10 so2 and vocs in china s 31 provinces the spatial correlation analysis using global and local moran

auditing claims in the insurance market with fraud the credibility issue abstract this paper characterizes the equilibrium of an insurance market where opportunist policyholders may file fraudulent claims we assume that insurance policies are traded in a competitive market where insurers cannot distinguish honest policyholders from opportunists the insurer policyholder relationship is modelled as an incomplete information game in which the insurer decides to audit or not the market equilibrium depends on whether insurers can credibly commit or not to their audit strategies we show that a no commitment equilibrium results in a welfare loss for honest individuals which may even be so large that the insurance market completely shuts down we also show that transferring monitoring costs to a budget balanced common agency would mitigate the commitment problem

the hidden advantage of delegation pareto improvements in a gift exchange game this paper analyzes the effect on performance and earnings of delegating the wage choice to employees our results how that such delegation significantly increases effort levels moreover we observe a pareto improvement as the earnings of both employers and employees increase when employers delegate than when they do not interestingly we also find that the employees performance under delegation is higher than under non delegation even for similar wages while there is strong evidence that behavior reflects strategic considerations this result also holds for one shot interactions a possible non strategic motivation explaining the positive reaction to delegation is a sense of enhanced responsibility

corruption and culture an experimental analysis article i nfo article history why do some people choose corruption over honesty and others not do the social norms and values prevailing in the societies in which they grew up affect their decisions in 2005 we conducted a bribery experiment and found that among undergraduates we could predict who would act corruptly with reference to the level of corruption in their home country among graduate students we could not in 2007 we replicated our result and also found that time spent in the uk was associated with a decline in the propensity to bribe although this does not explain our inability to predict graduate behaviour we conclude that while corruption may in part be a cultural phenomenon individuals should not be prejudged with reference to their country of origin

spatial effects in econometric practice in environmental and resource economics this paper reviews some methodological and practical issues that arise in the use of spatial econometric techniques in empirical research in environmental and resource economics the focus is on four issues that do not always receive sufficient attention in applied work the statistical implications of using spatially interpolated values in the rhs of models the issue of spatial scale and spatial aggregation the conceptualization of spatial variation in a continuous or discrete space and the modeling of dependence as simultaneous or conditional spatial effects in econometric practice in environmental and resource economics introduction recent years have seen a tremendous increase in the application of geographic information systems and spatial analysis in the social sciences in general goodchild et al 2000 and in applied research in environmental and resource economics in particular bockstael 1996 such research is often characterized by the need to combine data obtained from different sources using different sample designs aggregation conventions and reporting frequencies for example economic variables such as house and land values and the type and volume of agricultural production are collected by means of censuses and surveys designed to accurately portray the distribution of the variable in the population of interest this population pertains to economic agents or aggregates thereof which are typically conceptualized as discrete distinct objects but rarely envisaged in an explicit spatial context in contrast environmental characteristics are often obtained from physical measurements that result from an underlying spatial sampling design examples are satellite imagery used to estimate land use and land cover and readings from sensors at fixed air and water quality monitoring stations the sampling design used for these measures may be optimized to estimate the distribution of the physical phenomenon such as air quality as a spatial continuum or field but has little connection to the framework used to collect economic information in addition neither economic nor physical data collection necessarily matches the spatial scale of the phenomenon under study such as the geographic extent of a market this is a level of complexity that goes well beyond the traditional micro macro distinction in economic analysis the scale mismatch and the inherent need to integrate data from various

deception the role of uncertain consequences abstract we study how decisions to lie extend to risky environments we provide experimental evidence from a sender receiver game where there is uncertainty over the amount by which a sender s lie reduces its receiver s payoff which is known only to potential liar even though all reduction amounts are equiprobable ex post beliefs elicited from senders suggest that unlike truth tellers most liars underestimate the extent of the actual reduction in the receiver s payoff and appear to exploit this self serving bias resulting in substantially more lying relative to a baseline treatment without the uncertainty subsequent treatments confirm the bias by either providing additional evidence or by removing possible confounds an intervention treatment nudging senders toward correcting the bias reduces lying

the personal discount rate evidence from military downsizing programs the military drawdown program of the early 1990s provides an opportunity to obtain estimates of personal discount rates based on large numbers of people making real choices involving large sums the program offered over 65 000 separatees the choice between an annuity and a lump sum payment despite break even discount rates exceeding 17 percent most of the separatees selected the lump sum saving taxpayers 1 7 billion in separation costs estimates of discount rates range from 0 to over 30 percent and vary with education age race sex number of dependents ability test score and the size of payment