regionalism ethnic diversity and variation in public good provision by national states this article argues that variation in public good provision is determined by the salience of demographic and economic regionalism conceptualized as the presence of multiple large population centers and distinct economic units within a single country s borders two mechanisms divergent public good preferences and regional self sufficiency underpin this relationship evidence of these mechanisms as central to low public good provision is found in case studies of ecuador and colombia two countries that score high on standard measures of ethnic diversity and that saw little public good provision during the first century after independence a region wide examination of post independence south america and an investigation of change over time in venezuela provide further support for the claim that regionalism affects public good provision a plausible case for this aspect of geography as a cause of low public good provision poses a challenge to the scholarship attributing it to ethnic diversity

national institutions and subnational development in africa we investigate the role of national institutions on subnational african development in a novel framework that accounts both for local geography and cultural genetic traits we exploit the fact that the political boundaries in the eve of african independence partitioned more than two hundred ethnic groups across adjacent countries subjecting similar cultures residing in homogeneous geographic areas to different formal institutions using both a matching type and a spatial regression discontinuity approach we show that differences in countrywide institutional structures across the national border do not explain within ethnicity differences in economic performance as captured by satellite images of light density the average non effect of national institutions on ethnic development masks considerable heterogeneity partially driven by the diminishing role of national institutions in areas further from the capital cities

the origins of ethnolinguistic diversity this study explores the determinants of ethnolinguistic diversity within as well as across countries shedding light on its geographic origins the empirical analysis conducted across countries virtual countries and pairs of contiguous regions establishes that geographic variability captured by variation in regional land quality and elevation is a fundamental determinant of contemporary linguistic diversity the findings are consistent with the proposed hypothesis that differences in land endowments gave rise to location specific human capital leading to the formation of localized ethnicities jel j15 j24 z13

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

on the salience of ethnic conflict ray acknowledges support from the national science foundation under grants 0421852 and 0617827 esteban is a member of barcelona economics xrea and is grateful for support from the generalitat de catalunya and the cicyt sej 2006 00369 this research is part of the polarization and conflict research project cit2 ct 2004 506084 funded by the european commission dg research sixth framework program

the institutional and psychological foundations of natural resource policies abstractthe pressures of political interests which drive the resource curse are well understood but ordinary citizens are usually cast both as the innocent victims of this process and as the potential solution if only governments could be made more accountable to them this paper draws upon recent developments in social psychology to discuss the formation of mass opinions on two aspects of resource ownership one is the spatial assignment of ownership between local and national claims which has been a significant cause of conflict the other is the assignment of revenues between current consumption and future investment which has usually been excessively biased towards the former i suggest why in the absence of an active government communications policy to offset them known psychological biases may interact with resource discoveries to generate mass opinions which contribute to these problems

the induced innovation hypothesis and energy saving technological change we develop a methodology for testing hicks s induced innovation hypothesis by estimating a product characteristics model of energy using consumer durables augmenting the hypothesis to allow for the ine uence of government regulations for the products we explored the evidence suggests that i the rate of overall innovation was independent of energy prices and regulations ii the direction of innovation was responsive to energy price changes for some products but not for others iii energy price changes induced changes in the subset of technically feasible models that were offered for sale iv this responsiveness increased substantially during the period after energy efficiency product labeling was required and v nonetheless a sizable portion of efficiency improvements were autonomous

environmental regulation and competitiveness empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from european manufacturing sectors abstract this paper investigates the weak and strong versions of porter hypothesis ph focusing on the manufacturing sectors of 17 european countries between 1997 and 2009 the hypothesis that well crafted and well enforced regulation would benefit both the environment and the firm was originally proposed by porter 1991 and porter and van der linde 1995 to date the literature has analyzed the impact of environmental regulation on innovation and on productivity mostly in separate analyses and focusing on the usa the few existing contributions on europe study the effect of environmental regulation either on green innovation or on performance indicators such as exports we instead look at overall innovation and productivity impacts first focusing on overall innovative activity allows us to account for potential opportunity costs of induced innovations second productivity impacts are arguably the most relevant indicators for the strong ph as a proxy of environmental policy stringency we use pollution abatement and control expenditures pace one of the few sectoral level indicators available we remedy upon its main drawback namely potential endogeneity by adopting an instrumental variable estimation approach we find evidence of a positive impact of environmental regulation on the output of innovation activity as proxied by patents thus providing support in favor of the weak ph this result is in line with most of the literature on the other front we find no evidence in favor of the strong ph as productivity appears to be unaffected by the degree of pollution control and abatement efforts

post 1500 population flows and the long run determinants of economic growth and inequality we construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500 using this matrix we analyze how post 1500 migration has influenced the level of gdp per capita and within country income inequality in the world today indicators of early development such as early state history and the timing of transition to agriculture have much better predictive power for current gdp when one looks at the ancestors of the people who currently live in a country than when one considers the history on that country s territory without adjusting for migration measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of a country s current population do not predict income inequality as well as measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of the current population s ancestors an even better predictor of current inequality in a country is the variance of early development history of the country s inhabitants with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of agriculture and organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country s income distribution however high within country variance of early development also predicts higher income per capita holding constant the average level of early development

local political business cycles evidence from philippine municipalities abstract this paper establishes the existence of short term political business cycles in the philippines over the period 2003 2009 examining a balanced panel of 1143 municipalities shows that employment levels increase in the two pre electoral quarters and drop sharply in the two quarters following elections further results are consistent with the cycles being generated by incumbents attempts to increase their chances of re election cycles are stronger in sectors that incumbents are more able to influence and when they expect stronger electoral competition evidence suggests that these cycles are detrimental to development

detecting and removing discrimination under equal opportunities policies abstract this paper surveys part of the recent voluminous literature on the economics of discrimination focusing on two key questions first how should discrimination be measured and can in fact unambiguous estimates be derived as the basis for detecting where discrimination is present and setting in train measures to eliminate it second to what extent has the implementation of equal opportunities legislation improved the relative standing of women and minority workers in the labour force this section includes a discussion of the likely effects of recent changes in the law such as the equal value amendment in the uk or the introduction of comparable worth in the usa the survey concludes that our ability to detect discrimination at all precisely is still rudimentary and consequently policy measures are likely to be inefficient for this reason

sex discrimination in labor markets the role of statistical evidence reply correlations between statistically measured wage discrimination and confidential survey reports of discrimination are used to estimate the relative importance of statistical evidence in determining womens self assessed discrimination levels statistical evidence is found to be considerably less important than other nonstatistical evidence assuming courts weigh statistical versus other evidence as individuals do the effects of making statistical evidence admissible are calculated young well educated women are predicted to be the main beneficiaries of this policy copyright 1987 by american economic association

women and affirmative action abstract this paper reviews evidence indicating that as it has been enforced so far affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women s progress in the workplace affirmative action can be modeled as a tax on employers whose female employment growth falls below a certain rate clearly if labor supply shifts result in female employment growth greater than the regulatory standard the tax constraint will not be binding as we shall see this may help explain an affirmative action program that is generally ineffective for women although it has been effective for minorities federal anti bias policies in general and the system of affirmative action goals in particular have been accused of instituting employment quotas this paper reviews evidence on the homogenization of the workplace predicted by the quota theory as well as considering more direct evidence on whether affirmative action goals are really quotas in lambs clothing i shall also review the slim evidence on the most fundamental and co

the impact of ethnic diversity on microenterprise start ups until recently factors determining the decisions made by microfinance institutions mfis to extend loans to business start ups had not been explored recent evidence shows that mfi performance wi

governing community energy feed in tariffs and the development of community wind energy schemes in the united kingdom and germany this paper analyses the development of community energy in the uk by comparing it to germany in relation to decentralisation scales and ownership structures particularly of wind energy varying approaches to energy generation at the community scale provide interesting insights into the impact of policy innovation as well as the capacity of national energy frameworks to foster socially innovative engagement practices beyond the purely technological diffusion of innovations by examining interactions between technological and social innovations with the help of a qualitative analysis opportunities for potential generators not traditionally engaged in energy generation to tap into these innovation systems are analysed this paper suggests that greater commitment to diversification beyond the implementation of policy measures such as the feed in tariff is required to provide communities with the capacity to develop new generation practices in terms of scale and ownership the uk in particular is struggling to protect these new generation practices which allow communities to derive benefits facilitated by specific energy policy measures according to their potential it concludes by indicating areas where niche protection might need to be expanded if community energy is to play a greater role in the uk s ambitious transition to a low carbon economy

isolated capital cities accountability and corruption evidence from us states we show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across us states in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability we then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms newspapers cover state politics more when readers are closer to the capital voters who live far from the capital are less knowledgeable and interested in state politics and they turn out less in state elections we also find that isolated capitals are associated with more money in state level campaigns and worse public good provision jel d72 d73 h41 h83 k42 r23

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

lead markets and regulation a framework for analyzing the international diffusion of environmental innovations abstract environmental regulations are often intended to stimulate the generation and adoption of eco efficient innovations an important argument in the public debate is also the creation of new markets for environmentally benign products processes and services in other countries and the generation as a result of export opportunities for the pioneering country lead markets research on lead markets has not however focused on environmental innovations to date we therefore extend the lead market model to environmental innovations and take particular account of the peculiarities of such innovations in particular the public good character of environmental benefits and the role of regulations this approach is applied to two case studies wind energy and fuel efficient passenger cars in both cases the innovation was initially adopted in one country other countries subsequently adopted the same innovation design favored by the lead market which in turn developed into a large exporter in the wind generation and car industries respectively we discuss the regulations employed and the reasons for the international success of the innovations induced by them our findings demonstrate that when supported by global demand or regulatory trends strict regulation results in the creation of lead markets finally we provide recommendations on how our model could be used for further research and in the development of a coordinated environmental and innovation policy

the political economy of public goods some evidence from india we are interested in how public goods get allocated by a centralized state we use data on public goods and social structure from parliamentary constituencies in rural india to understand the allocation of these goods over the 1970s and 1980s national policies and political agendas during this period emphasized universal access to basic amenities and financed a rapid expansion in rural infrastructure we find evidence of considerable equalization in many of these facilities reflecting perhaps the importance of these commitments among the historically disadvantaged social groups those that mobilized themselves politically gained relative to the others measures of social heterogeneity that have been emphasized in the recent empirical literature on public goods are relevant but not overwhelming in their importance

internal borders ethnic based market segmentation in malawi summary ethnic diversity is associated with poorer economic development but why i argue that market segmentation is one mechanism linking diversity to economic underdevelopment when ethnic groups are geographically segregated and trust is concentrated within groups markets will be tend to be segmented along ethnic lines i evaluate this argument using maize price data from seventy malawian markets over 14 years and combine it with census data on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups i find that maize price differences a key indicator of market segmentation are indeed larger for ethnically dissimilar markets even after taking sub national administrative borders geographic barriers and climatic differences into account these statistical findings are complemented by interview data from farmers and traders in three markets across malawi which highlight the centrality of trust in small scale maize trading as well as a preference for coethnic trading partners together these findings suggest that ethnic diversity and ethnoregional segregation in particular can have a negative impact on market integration an important driver of food security and long term economic development

affirmative action in education evidence from engineering college admissions in india abstract this paper examines an affirmative action program for lower caste groups in engineering colleges in india we study both the targeting properties of the program and its implications for labor market outcomes we find that affirmative action successfully targets the financially disadvantaged the upper caste applicants that are displaced by affirmative action come from a richer economic background than the lower caste applicants that are displacing them targeting by caste however may lead to the exclusion of other disadvantaged groups for example caste based targeting reduces the overall number of females entering engineering colleges we find that despite poor entrance exam scores lower caste entrants obtain a positive return to admission our estimates however also suggest that these gains may come at an absolute cost because the income losses experienced by displaced upper caste applicants are larger than the income gains experienced by displacing lower caste students limited sample sizes in our preferred econometric specifications however prevent us from drawing strong conclusions from these labor market findings

three new empirical tests of the pollution haven hypothesis when environmental regulation is endogenous the validity of existing empirical tests of the pollution haven hypothesis phh is constantly under scrutiny due to two shortcomings first the issues of unobserved heterogeneity and measurement error in environmental regulation are typically ignored due to the lack of a credible traditional instrumental variable second while the recent literature has emphasized the importance of geographic spillovers in determining the location choice of foreign investment such spatial effects have yet to be adequately incorporated into empirical tests of the phh as a result the impact of environmental regulations on trade patterns and the location decisions of multinational enterprises remains unclear in this paper we circumvent the lack of a traditional instrument within a model incorporating geographic spillovers utilizing three novel identification strategies using state level panel data on inbound u s fdi relative abatement costs and other determinants of fdi we consistently find i evidence of environmental regulation being endogenous ii a negative impact of own environmental regulation on inbound fdi in pollution intensive sectors particularly when measured by employment and iii larger effects of environmental regulation once endogeneity is addressed neighboring environmental regulation is not found to be an important determinant of fdi

environmental policy stringency and technological innovation evidence from survey data and patent counts this article uses patent data to examine the impact of public environmental policy on innovations in environment related technology the analysis is conducted using data on an unbalanced panel of 77 countries between 2001 and 2007 drawing upon data obtained from the european patent office epo world patent statistical patstat database and the world economic forum s wef executive opinion survey the results support our hypotheses concerning the positive role of both general innovative capacity and environmental policy stringency on environment related innovation a subsequent two stage model assesses the factors which drive innovation in general and uses the fitted values to estimate environmental innovation while the analysis is conducted on a smaller sample they confirm the findings of the reduced form model

does energy policy hurt international competitiveness of firms a comparative study for germany switzerland and austria this paper investigates the impact of energy policies on the export performance of firms there has been a long policy debate on potentially negative impacts of cost increasing energy policies on international competitiveness we use firm level data from three countries with similar industry structure but different energy policies germany switzerland and austria we rely on firm manager assessments on the relevance of energy policy in terms of taxes regulations standards subsidies and demand stimulation for their firm operation and link data on the adoption and development of new energy technologies regression analyses and matching approaches both show very few impacts of energy policy on export performance suggesting that either policy impacts on firms cost are negligible in the period of study 2012 to 2014 or likely negative impacts are balanced by the adoption of new technology

the impact of labor market regulations the authors investigate the impact of labor market regulations in settings where compliance is incomplete they review some stylized facts about labor market behavior present an analytical model that may explain such behavior and provide a checklist for assessing the distortionary impact of a regulation such as the minimum wage they take as their starting point the limited evidence about the distortionary effects of such regulations and argue that there may be natural limits on the efficiency losses engendered by labor market regulations first the regulations may not be binding at market equilibrium for example minimum wages may be set so low that they are ineffective second even if they are binding the relevant elasticities of supply and demand may be so low that the regulations have little impact on efficiency third even if the regulations are binding and elasticities are sizable compliance may be low the authors argue that the likelihood of compliance will be greatest when the regulations are binding and the relevant elasticities are sizable that is if the distortionary costs of regulations are not rendered insignificant by the first two reasons then the returns to noncompliance will be high and other things being equal employers will evade or avoid the regulations thereby minimizing the imact on efficiency the argument rests on profit maximization subject to a hard budget constraint public enterprises which are not concerned only with profit maximization and often have softer budget constraints than the private sector may be more willing to conform to profit reducing regulations but in this case the authors argue that compliance may reduce already existing efficiency losses

development and utilization of energy related technologies economic performance and the role of policy instruments the present study investigates the effects of energy related technologies on economic performance at firm level we distinguish clearly between adoption and use of energy related technologies process innovation in the broad sense and product innovation in energy related fields we take into consideration four energy related policy instruments and expected demand for energy related new products and services we investigate the possibility of indirect effects of policy on performance via adoption or innovation by interacting adoption and innovation variables with policy instrument dummies we test our hypotheses not only for the pooled data but also separately for the three countries austria germany switzerland that are taken into consideration in this study we find a positive direct effect of investment expenditures for energy related technologies on labour productivity that measure intensity of adoption of energy related technologies and a positive indirect effect of energy taxes via investment in energy related technologies further we find positive direct and indirect effects of regulation standards and voluntary agreements via the adoption of production related technologies and for technologies for the generation of renewal energy sources we find neither direct nor indirect effects of the sales of innovative energy related products that measure product innovation in energy related products on labour productivity no differences among the three countries could be detected with respect to investment in energy related technologies and sales of innovative energy related products the indirect effects of regulation and standards and voluntary agreements can be primarily traced back to german firms

affirmative action as earnings redistribution the targeting of compliance reviews affirmative action may be broadly conceived of as pursuing either the goal of reducing discrimination or that of redistributing jobs and earnings i attempt to infer the ends of affirmative action policy by analyzing the historical record of enforcement optimal enforcement strategies are developed for both the antidiscrimination and the earnings redistribution models and then compared with new data on the actual targeting of affirmative action compliance reviews during the late 1970s i find that establishments with very low proportions of minority or female workers are not significantly more likely to be reviewed but that white collar intensive establishments are more likely to be reviewed this indicates the shortcomings of the antidiscrimination model in explaining the ofccp s behavior and suggests the potential usefulness of the earnings redistribution model

green jobs economic impacts of renewable energy in germany abstract the labor market implications of large investment into renewable energy re are analyzed in this text although a growing re industry can be observed in germany the overall effect of large increases of re based electricity and heat generating technologies on the german economy require a careful model based analysis the applied model panta rhei has been used among others to evaluate the german energy concept in 2010 it takes positive and negative impacts of re into account the paper shows the overall effects under different assumptions for fossil fuel prices domestic installations and international trade the results are sensitive to assumptions on the development of re world markets and german exports to these markets almost all of these scenarios exhibit positive net employment effects under medium assumptions net employment of re expansion will reach around 150 thousand in 2030 only with assumptions for german re exports below today s level net impacts are slightly negative gross employment will increase from 340 thousand in 2009 to between 500 and 600 thousand in 2030

ethnoracial homogeneity and public outcomes the non effects of diversity how does ethnoracial demography relate to public goods provision many studies find support for the hypothesis that diversity is related to inefficient outcomes by comparing diverse and homogeneous communities we distinguish between homogeneity of dominant and disadvantaged groups and argue that it is often impossible to identify the effects of diversity due to its collinearity with the share of disadvantaged groups to disentangle the effects of these variables we study new data from brazilian municipalities while it is possible to interpret the prima facie negative correlation between diversity and public goods as supportive of the prominent deficit hypothesis a closer analysis reveals that in fact more homogeneous afro descendant communities have lower provision while we cannot rule out that diversity is consequential in other contexts our results cast doubt on the reliability of previous findings related to the benefits of local ethnoracial homogeneity for public outcomes

does environmental performance affect financial performance a meta analysis abstract what do we know about the impact of environmental regulations performance on firm performance after more than three decades of theoretical as well as empirical research the results seem to remain inconclusive some papers suggest that regulations harm firms while others claim that regulations may contribute positively and give an impetus to innovations therefore i examine the heterogeneity in financial environmental performance nexus empirically carrying out a meta regression analysis of 64 outcomes from 37 empirical studies to uncover the underlying factors which can influence the observed variation in the empirical results the results suggest both that the empirical method used matters for the nexus and that the likelihood of finding a negative link between environmental and financial performance significantly increases when using simple correlation coefficients instead of more advanced econometric analysis the results also indicate that the portfolio studies tend to report a negative link between environmental and financial performance this likely reflects the omitted factors in portfolio studies the positive link is found more frequently in common law countries than in civil law countries the results also point to the importance of appropriate time coverage to establish a positive link between environmental and financial performance

intra firm diffusion of green energy technologies and the choice of policy instruments environmental benefits only unfold if green environmentally friendly technologies are widely diffused and intensively deployed within a firm we investigate how different types of policies directly and in combination affect the number of different green energy technologies adopted by a single firm intra firm diffusion using data from a dedicated survey on the diffusion of green energy technologies of 1200 swiss firms and applying well identified econometric models we found that energy taxes are a very effective policy instrument for the intra firm diffusion of green energy technologies even more important however are non political measures that show the largest effect among all tested instruments additional analyses show that a time consistency in policy making is more important for energy tax regimes than for regulations and b no evidence for complementarities between the policy types could be identified

renewable energy and employment in germany abstract the positive impacts of an increasing share of renewable energy on the mitigation of climate change as well as on the decrease of the dependency of energy imports are indisputable however one persistent problem for the german economy has been its high level of unemployment in the recent past therefore any policy strategy will be measured also by its net impact on the labor market the paper describes the results of a study that models this impact and is novel within three respects firstly an input output vector for the renewable energy sector was developed based on the results of more than 1000 interviews with an extensive questionnaire secondly gross and net effect of two different policy scenarios for germany until 2030 were calculated and thirdly the approach varies from earlier studies by its explicit modeling of export and foreign trade effects

customer discrimination and affirmative action i introduction beginning with the work of becker 1957 economists have been concerned with the relationship between competitive market forces and the persistence of labor market discrimination 1 a major insight of becker and the literature that followed is that competition could tend to eliminate discriminatory pay differentials if competitive forces do eliminate discrimination then empirical findings of persistent discrimination are either a result of faulty testing or market imperfections economic analysis of the link between competition and discrimination depends on the origins of prejudice becker identified at least three possible sources employers co workers and consumers 2 in each of these instances the group against which prejudice is directed e g women or minorities which will be termed minorities in this paper may be able to escape discrimination first minorities can work for nondiscriminatory employers if there are any moreover stiglitz 1973 shows that with constant returns to scale such employers will take over markets from the discriminators eliminating any pay gap based on prejudice 3 second if there is co worker prejudice then minorities can work in segregated firms which under constant returns to scale may have a cost advantage over integrated or all majority firms again discrimination will be driven away 4 third minorities can theoretically escape customer discrimination by specializing in the production of goods for which there is no contact between producers and consumers a case discussed by cain 1986 while competitive forces may in some cases erode discriminatory wage differentials the rate of decline of race and sex wage differentials has evidently not been rapid enough in the eyes of policymakers u s anti discrimination policy has been guided by two major vehicles title vii of the 1964 civil rights act and the office of federal contract compliance programs ofccp 5 the equal employment opportunity commission eeoc was created to enforce title vii and is empowered to aid plaintiffs or bring suit itself against employers the commission monitors the employment practices of federal contractors not only are contractors barred from discrimination against protected groups these firms are also required to take affirmative action not to discriminate the purpose of this paper is twofold first it demonstrates that in a general equilibrium framework the case of customer discrimination is theoretically distinct from employer or co worker prejudice in particular while constant returns to scale and the existence of nondiscriminatory firms can eliminate the latter two forms of discrimination customer discrimination may persist even under such conditions the persistence of discriminatory wage differentials is shown to depend on consumer demand technology and the relative size of the minority labor force 6 second the general equilibrium framework is then used to evaluate the impact of government anti discrimination policy where customers are the source of discrimination it is shown that if the government requires equal pay and proportional representation for minorities then the resulting allocation of resources will under particular assumptions be the same as if customers did not discriminate i then contrast these theoretical results with the predicted general equilibrium impact of affirmative action when there is employer or co worker prejudice among previous general equilibrium models of affirmative action welch 1976 assumed no discrimination while freeman 1978 did not specify the source of discrimination it is shown here that the source of prejudice markedly affects one s conclusions about affirmative action further even in some cases where segregation has eliminated discriminatory wage differentials the introduction of affirmative action has allocative effects finally evidence from studies evaluating the impact of affirmative action is used to distinguish among the various equilibrium models

genetic diversity and the origins of cultural fragmentation despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored building on the role of deeply rooted biogeographical forces in comparative development this research empirically demonstrates that genetic diversity predominantly determined during the prehistoric out of africa migration of humans is an underlying cause of various existing manifestations of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity further exploration of this uncharted territory may revolutionize the understanding of the effects of deeply rooted factors on economic development and the composition of human capital across the globe

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

economic versus cultural differences forms of ethnic diversity and public goods provision groups between group inequality bgi we show that elf cultural fractionalization cf and bgi measure different things and that the choice between them has an important impact on our understanding of which countries are most ethnically diverse furthermore empirical tests reveal that bgi has a large robust and negative relationship with public goods provision whereas cf elf and overall inequality do not diversity is widely held to make governance more difficult such diversity is associated with low production of public goods poor economic growth and high levels of corruption violence and civil conflict but diversity hardly sentences a country to poor political and economic outcomes latvia for example has better governance indicators than brazil and zambia has better governance indicators than nigeria even though these pairs of countries have similar levels of ethnolinguistic fractionalization elf why then do some countries cope more successfully with ethnic diversity than others this article addresses this question by focusing on the

the effect of court ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police arguably the most aggressive armative action program ever implemented in the united states was a series of court ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments my best estimate of the eect of court ordered armative action on workforce composition is a 14

a tale of two market failures technology and environmental policy abstract market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies these combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives and can be cost effectively harnessed through the use of economic incentive based policy in the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives while environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties a long term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success

inventor networks in renewable energies the influence of the policy mix in germany technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support various policy instruments that can broadly be categorized as technology push demand pull or systemic constitute part of the policy mix for renewable energies our goal is to gain insights into the influence of this policy mix on the intensity and organization of inventive activities for wind power and photovoltaics in germany since the 1980s we examine the effect of different instruments on the size and structure of co inventor networks based on patent data our results indicate notable differences between the technologies the network size for wind power is driven by technology push and systemic instruments while in photovoltaics demand pull is decisive for network growth by and large the instruments complement each other and form a consistent mix of policy instruments the structure of the networks is driven by demand pull for both technologies systemic instruments increase interaction especially in the wind power network and are complementary to demand pull in fostering collaboration

environmental innovations and firm profitability unmasking the porter hypothesis we examine impacts of different types of environmental innovations on firm profits following porter s sci am 264 4 168 1991 hypothesis that environmental regulation can improve firms competitiveness we distinguish between regulation induced and voluntary environmental innovations we find that innovations which do not improve firms resource efficiency do not provide positive returns to profitability however innovations that increase a firm s resource efficiency in terms of material or energy consumption per unit of output have a positive impact on profitability this positive result holds for both regulation induced and voluntary innovations although the effect is greater for regulation driven innovation we conclude that the porter hypothesis does not hold in general for its strong version but depends on the type of environmental innovation our findings rest on firm level data from the german part of the community innovation survey 2008 cis 2008

the social return on investment in the energy efficiency of buildings in germany the german government has developed a variety of policy instruments intended to reduce national co2 emissions these instruments include a programme administered by kfw bank which aims at improving the energy efficiency of buildings it provides attractive credit conditions or subsidies to finance refurbishment measures which improve the energy efficiency of buildings significantly the refurbishment programme leads to a reduction in energy use which benefits private investors by reducing their energy bills in order to estimate whether the programme benefits society as a whole additional effects must be taken into account such as the amount of employment generated and the impact on the public budget the aim of this paper is to evaluate the social benefits of the german co2 refurbishment programme for the years 2005 2007 an extended input output model is used to estimate the effect of the refurbishment works on public revenue via taxes and social security contributions the value of avoided co2 emissions is approximated using a range of marginal damage estimates from the literature from these social benefits the programme cost is deducted the net social benefit thus computed turns out to be positive this finding suggests that the refurbishment programme is a reasonable investment of public funds