how quantitative easing works evidence on the refinancing channel we document the transmission of large scale asset purchases by the federal reserve to the real economy using rich borrower linked mortgage market data and an identification strategy based on mortgage market segmentation we find that central bank qe1 mbs purchases substantially increased refinancing activity reduced interest payments for refinancing households led to a boom in equity extraction and increased aggregate consumption relative to qe ineligible jumbo mortgages qe eligible conforming mortgage interest rates fell by an additional 40 bp and refinancing volumes increased by an additional 56 during qe1 we estimate that households refinancing during qe1 increased their durable consumption by 12 our results highlight that the transmission of unconventional monetary policy to the real economy depends crucially on the composition of assets purchased and the degree of segmentation in the marke

preferences for energy efficiency vs renewables how much does a ton of co2 emissions cost concerns about climate change are growing and so is the demand for information about the costs and benefits of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions this paper seeks to estimate the benefits of climate change mitigation as measured by the public s willingness to pay for such policies we investigate the preferences of italian and czech households towards climate change mitigation policy options directly related to residential energy use we use discrete choice experiments which are administered in a standardized fashion to representative samples in the two countries through computer assisted web interviews our preferred estimates of the willingness to pay per ton of co2 emissions avoided is 133 for the italians and 94 euro for the czech respondents at 2014 purchasing power parity we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity in wtp driven by income the two samples differ in their within sample income elasticities of wtp but comparison across the two countries suggests an income elasticity of wtp of one or even greater than one for certain mixed logit specifications

theory of the firm and structure of residual rights abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model with consumer producers economies of specialization and transaction costs to investigate the emergence of firms from the division of labor and the function of a structure of residual rights it is shown that the institution of the firm can be used to get intangible intellectual property involved in the division of labor while avoiding its direct pricing and marketing so that the division of labor can be promoted by saving on transaction costs

consumer support for environmental policies an application to purchases of green cars this paper focuses on how consumer motivation can be tapped in order to encourage the adoption of cleaner technologies consumers are heterogeneous they may be guided by intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation while information provision policies such as the energy label for cars may be effective in encouraging certain consumers to adopt green cars financial incentive schemes such as subsidies or fines may be more persuasive for extrinsically motivated consumers we develop a dynamic theory of adoption of environmental innovations in which information provision policies are followed by financial incentives first carrot then stick incentives analysis of a survey dataset of swiss households observes considerable heterogeneity in terms of support of information provision or financial incentive policies in line with our conjectures our results will be of particular interest to policymakers interested in guiding consumers towards cleaner technologies

economic development and the division of production between households and markets a model is presented in which scale economies give market production a cost advantage over household production but in which market production is limited by the extent of the market the production process is viewed as a series of stages each further refining and specializing the product of the previous stage as processing proceeds the number of intermediate goods increases and markets thin out firms specialize in the early stages of production and house holds in the later stages as an economy grows production shifts out of households and into the market several other changes associated with economic development are also accounted for

social and political responses to ecological tax reform in europe an introduction to the special issue this paper introduces the special issue on the policies for ecological tax reform assessment of social responses petras project about responses to ecological tax reform etr in europe although etr is widely accepted to be a policy with desirable effects its implementation has been limited by problems of political acceptability the project aimed to address the question of how to make such a policy more acceptable it is the first study to examine in depth the thinking of members of the general public about the etr policies and is also the first international comparative study of the thinking of ordinary business people about etr policies the petras project methodology was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them a number of issues emerged relating to awareness trust understanding of the purpose visibility incentives regressivity levels of taxation terminology communication about etr and the use of alternative instruments together with these similarities a pattern of differences between the countries can also be seen the final section of this paper introduces the national studies described in the following papers

public acceptance for environmental taxes self interest environmental and distributional concerns abstract while strongly recommended by economists it has often been politically difficult to impose taxes on externalities there is a substantial literature on public attitudes towards environmental taxes there has however been few comprehensive attempts to understand attitudes towards environmental taxes the main research question in this paper is which factors influence support for fuel taxation we propose a model of attitudes towards fuel taxation and test this model as well as more specific hypotheses using data from a representative survey of the adult norwegian population our results suggest that support for fuel taxation is best predicted by beliefs about environmental consequences followed by beliefs about consequences to others beliefs about consequences to self self interest is the factor that explains the least variation in support for fuel taxation the academically interesting result that support cannot be well explained without capturing a broad range of motivational factors is also highly policy relevant it implies that there is no magic formula for increasing public support for environmental taxes there are however some issues which can be addressed trust in how well the government spends the revenue and the perception that taxation does very little to change behaviour and thus to reduce environmental problems

green taxes in a post paris world are millions of nays inevitable turning the paris agreement s greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments we address the question of the acceptability of cost effective climate policy in a real voting setting first we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes rejected in switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value added tax we examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes along with the perception of ineffectiveness most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes second at the same time of the ballot we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the swiss population survey respondents are informed about environmental distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design these impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model this original setting generates a series of novel results providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs e g social cushioning or recycling via lump sum transfers the case of lump sum recycling is particularly striking it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature we show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists prescriptions and the preferences of the general public

the division of labor local markets and worker organization the model developed here explains differences in the degree of the division of labor across local markets for example the typical doctor in one local market may treat a wider range of patients problems than his counterpart in another local market the extent of the division of labor depends on variables affecting the local demand for services two different forms of worker organization cooperation and noncooperation yield divergent results for example specialization increases with the local number of producers under cooperation but may decrease under noncooperation with the number of producers constant local demand variables affect individual specialization under noncooperation but not under cooperation

a ricardo model with economies of scale abstract this paper extends the analysis of the classical n good two country ricardo model of international trade to the case where the production functions have economies of scale it addresses the technical difficulties inherent in economies of scale by new integer programming and linear programming methods the analysis reveals the existence of a well defined region which fills in solidly with equilibrium points as the number of goods becomes large new economic conclusions follow from the ability to analyze these large models among them that in the presence of economies of scale considerable conflict exists between the interests of the two trading partners journal of economic literature classification numbers c61 c62 c68 f12

quantitative easing in the 1930s during the 1934 39 recovery from the u s great depression overnight interest rates were usually at a lower bound meanwhile american monetary authorities followed policies related to today s debates on quantitative easing they tried to stabilize yields on treasury bonds with open market operations they created rapid growth in high powered money and they allowed transitory factors to affect high powered money effects of these policies on bond yields reveal a portfolio effect of short duration asset supply on term premiums this portfolio effect helps explain why high powered money growth was associated with recovery of real activity over 1934 39

specialization and human capital incentives for specialization trade and the production of comparative advantage through investment are shown to arise from increasing returns to utilization of human capital indivisibilities imply fixed cost elements of investment that are independent of subsequent utilization hence the rate of return is increasing in utilization and is maximized by utilizing specialized skills as intensively as possible identically endowed individuals have incentives to specialize their investments in skills and trade with each other for this reason even if production technology exhibits constant returns to scale

ecological tax reform in germany handling two hot potatoes at the same time combining environmental with employment objectives ecological tax reform etr envisages a double dividend while research has mainly focused on the socio economic and environmental impacts of etr there is less literature on the social responses this paper gives an overview and history of german etr as well as investigating the understanding of perceptions and attitudes towards etr of those being subject to tax the research is based on qualitative social research methods as with the other petras papers interviews were conducted with policy makers and business leaders and focus groups were formed with lay persons the results show that responses of policy makers and business leaders are modest although some criticisms about the specific design of the german etr remain complaints towards etr are settled attitudes appear influenced by more fundamental convictions such as economic interest or altruistic views in contrast etr appears to politicise common people attitudes are influenced by the overall comprehension of the etr concept the expected impacts perceived information deficits as well as a general distrust in politics our data show that the linking of environmental and employment objectives is not understood and not welcomed in order to increase social acceptance the paper discusses refocusing etr on environmental objectives modestly increasing the share of etr revenue spent for environmental purposes removing inconsistencies in the etr design and improving information policy

the effect of transaction size on off the run treasury prices this paper examines intra day trading data from the inter dealer broker market for u s treasury securities and measures the degree of price pressure in the off the run treasury market as is well known securities that would appear to be very close substitutes i e on the run and off the run treasury bonds behave as if there is some degree of market segmentation this is the first systematic study of the off the run treasury note and bond market focused entirely on a price pressure effect using intra day data the paper analyzes price pressure through matched pairs of securities that differ only in liquidity

general equilibria in large economies with endogenous structure of division of labor abstract we study a general equilibrium model with specialization and division of labor the market coordinates all individuals decisions in choosing their patterns of specialization in order to utilize positive network effects of division of labor net of transaction costs we establish the equilibrium existence theorem the first and second welfare theorems and the core equivalence for a family of general equilibrium models with both possible increasing returns and transaction costs using an analytical framework with consumer producers economies of specialization and transaction costs we resurrect the spirit of the classical economics of the division of labor in a modern body of mathematical formalism

attitudes towards carbon taxes across europe the role of perceived uncertainty and self interest abstract while using carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may well be effective this has recently proved too unpopular to put into practice in a number of countries yet at a time when governments across the world are preparing their nationally determined contributions to the paris agreement our knowledge of whether and why people oppose these taxes originates from a single or small number of cases drawing on the european social survey n 44 387 this article provides evidence on public attitudes towards increasing taxes on fossil fuels to reduce climate change from 23 countries most of which have never featured in the literature before the results point to a widespread aversion to carbon taxes on the one hand this worsens with the perceived costs of taxes such as the case among consumers who depend highly on energy on the other it improves with political trust and external political efficacy factors that help ease the uncertainty around policy proposals our estimations suggest that the effect of changes in these factors alone would be large enough to reverse the public resistance to carbon taxes in some countries these results are robust to a number of alternative specifications and various checks

earmarking conservation further inquiry on scope effects in stated preference methods applied to nature based tourism abstract the way people assign value to nature conservation policies has important implications for management choices economic valuation surveys are affected by individual behavioural patterns that are not exhaustively explained by traditional sources of bias such as embedding flagship species fixed budget commodity misspecification and warm glows through a contingent valuation study of alpine wildlife we use an external scope test to evaluate the difference in willingness to pay among tourists for conservation policies targeted either to the ibex alone or to the four ungulates populating the gran paradiso national park in northwest italy ibex red deer roe deer chamois we find that park users are willing to contribute significantly more to policies protecting one of the four ungulates than all four of them a result that we argue should be ascribed to pure aversion to less specific policy objectives i e to a preference for punctual earmarking of resources devoted to conservation

tobin s imperfect asset substitution in optimizing general equilibrium in this paper we present a dynamic optimizing model that allows explicitly for imperfect substitutability between different financial assets this is specified in a manner which captures tobin s 1969 view that an expansion of one asset s supply affects both the yield on that asset and the spread or risk premium between returns on that asset and alternative assets our estimates of this model on u s data confirm that some of the observed deviations of long term rates from the expectations theory of the term structure can be traced to movements in the relative stocks of financial assets the richer aggregate demand and asset specifications imply that there exists an additional channel of monetary policy our results suggest that central bank operations exercise a modest influence on the relative prices of alternative financial securities and so exert an extra effect on long term yields and aggregate demand separate from their effect on the expected path of short term rates

ecological tax reform in denmark history and social acceptability abstract despite the long term and positive experience with ecological tax reform etr the petras study indicates that awareness about the principles behind etr is low among both businesses and the general public in denmark as well as the lack of awareness of etr attitudes towards environmental taxation appear negative when explaining the political intentions behind etr attitudes seem to improve somewhat but they still remain overall sceptical based on the history and the results of the petras project the article will describe some of the main impediments for further development of environmental tax and etr policies in denmark the article concludes that the main reason why the etr policy has been met with such apparently low social acceptability in denmark is that the green of the green tax reform has been somewhat oversold on this basis it recommends the pursuit of a courageous government strategy of openly and repeatedly stressing the revenue purposes of environmentally related taxes over the environmental purposes in an effort to redirect public discussions towards relevant issues like the pros and cons of environmentally related taxation compared with other types of taxation and the connection between the overall tax burden and demands for government spending such a bold government confession to the obvious revenue purposes of the environmentally related taxes could make them if not popular then at least a bit more acceptable to businesses and the general public

using changes in auction maturity sectors to help identify the impact of qe on gilt yields this article uses a novel way of identifying part of the impact of quantitative easing qe on gilt yields using natural experiments associated with bank of england announcements about changes in the maturity distribution of future gilt purchases we find that changes in expected qe purchases had a significant effect on gilt yields following each announcement in march 2009 august 2009 and february 2012 the local supply effects we identify appear to be important they may account for around half of the total impact on gilt yields in these events and are passed through to yields of related assets

the provision of collective goods through a social division of labour abstract we develop a general equilibrium framework in which a wide range of collective economic configurations are provided through specialised professionals as part of an endogenously emerging social division of labour we extend the theory of value to this setting bringing together a model of an economy with collective goods with the model of a private goods market economy with an endogenously emerging social division of labour natural applications are the presence of non tradables in production the effects of education on productive abilities and the market system itself as an implementation of the price mechanism for an appropriately generalised notion of valuation equilibrium we prove the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics under very general conditions notably allowing for incomplete non monotonic and non transitive preferences we also incorporate adam smith s principle of increasing returns to specialisation and establish that there emerge well structured social divisions of labour in equilibrium

flow effects of large scale asset purchases how large scale asset purchase lsap programs affect financial markets is an important question for policy makers that face the zero lower bound while so called stock effects that is persistent shifts in asset prices observed as the result of an lsap program are relatively well documented in the literature there has been little study of flow effects that may occur at the time of lsap transactions using security level transaction data related to four distinct programs over a period of roughly four years we test for the presence of flow effects in both price and liquidity of treasury securities we show that flow effects in security prices were present during early lsaps by the federal reserve but they were of little economic significance alternatively we find no evidence for systematic liquidity flow effects in any of the lsap programs

flow effects of central bank asset purchases on sovereign bond prices evidence from a natural experiment we estimate the response of sovereign bond prices to net supply shocks caused by purchase operations under the ecb s public sector purchase programme pspp to avoid simultaneity bias in the estimated relationship between prices and purchases we exploit a pspp feature that renders securities temporarily ineligible for reasons unrelated to their prices using these purchase restrictions as an instrument to identify exogenous variation in purchase volumes we find that pspp causes statistically significant and economically relevant upward price impacts the impacts are short lived and concentrated in securities issued by higher yield jurisdictions and characterized by higher maturity and lower liquidity

the role of budgetary information in the preference for externality correcting subsidies over taxes a lab experiment on public support the potential of taxes to correct environmental externalities has long been recognized among economists yet this welfare enhancing policy commonly faces strong opposition by citizens conversely externality correcting subsidies frequently enjoy high public support we conduct a lab experiment to explore public support for pigouvian taxes and subsidies in an experimental market with a negative externality participants vote on the introduction of pigouvian taxes and subsidies under full or reduced information concerning how the tax revenues will be spent and the subsidy paid for theoretically the two instruments should produce identical outcomes however we find substantially greater support for subsidies than for taxes this can partially be explained by the participants expectation that the subsidy will increase their own payoffs more than a tax but not because it is expected to be more effective in changing behavior furthermore we find that with greater uncertainty the preference for subsidies is even stronger a result which is consistent with loss aversion

history and social responses to environmental tax reform in the united kingdom abstract this paper gives a short history of fuel taxation and the climate change levy in the uk the research described was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them interviews were conducted with selected policy makers and companies focus groups were conducted with quota samples of the general public the research shows that the problem that etr faces in terms of public acceptance is not so much outright hostility to environmental taxation as conceptual problems with the design similar conceptual problems were also found in the interviews with business people these can be summarised as lack of trust about use of the revenues difficulty in understanding the purpose of a tax shift and a desire for incentives for good behaviour as well as perceived penalties for bad behaviour

liquidity monetary policy and the financial crisis a new monetarist approach a model of public and private liquidity integrates financial intermediation theory with a new monetarist monetary framework nonpassive fiscal policy and costs of operating a currency system imply that an optimal policy deviates from the friedman rule a liquidity trap can exist in equilibrium away from the friedman rule and there exists a permanent nonneutrality of money driven by an illiquidity effect financial frictions can produce a financial crisis phenomenon that can be mitigated by conventional open market operations working in an unconventional manner private asset purchases by the central bank are either irrelevant or they reallocate credit and redistribute income jel e13 e44 e52 e62 g01 liquidity is a class of assets that is useful in exchange some of these liquid assets are government liabilities federal reserve notes treasury bills and treasury notes some are private liabilities the deposit liabilities of banks and some asset backed securities for example conventional wisdom holds that the main role of a central bank is to manage public liquidity in a manner that controls inflation and enhances the provision of private liquidity and credit however the mechanism by which central bank actions work to perform this role still appears to be poorly understood as has been highlighted by the financial crisis and the ensuing policy responses the purpose of this paper is to build a model of public and private liquidity that captures the features of modern economies essential to the analysis of monetary policy and that can be used to shed light on some current monetary policy problems and questions what is a liquid asset and what roles do privately provided and publicly provided liquid assets play in exchange in a model where we capture these roles for liquid assets what are the implications for monetary policy under what circumstances can a liquidity trap occur how does monetary policy work when there is a positive quantity of excess reserves held by banks what does a financial crisis do to the supply of private liquidity and what should monetary policy do in response

development structural changes and urbanization abstract this paper constructs an equilibrium model by formalizing a trade off between the gains from trade based on increasing returns to specialization and transaction costs the relationship between development structural changes and urbanization is investigated in addition the function of a free market in searching for the efficient market structure is explored

a choice experiment on fuel taxation and earmarking in norway abstract pigouvian taxes are efficient but unpopular among voters and hence often politically infeasible earmarking of revenues has been widely reported to increase public support for taxes but earmarking is generally not the most efficient use of the revenues this trade off between efficiency and political feasibility is the motivation for our primary research objective to quantify the effect of earmarking on support for fuel tax rises our secondary research objective is to investigate why earmarking increases support using data from a representative sample of the norwegian voter population n 1147 we estimate models of voter preferences for fuel taxes using logistic regression models our results show that in the absence of earmarking the majority of voters would like to reduce fuel taxes but earmarking the revenues for environmental measures has a substantial effect on voter support for fuel tax increases garnering a majority for increases of up to 15 above present levels further analysis indicates that a prime reason why earmarking for environmental measures is popular is that it increases the perceived environmental effectiveness of the tax and hence its legitimacy as an environmental rather than a fiscal policy instrument

do the economies of specialization justify the work ethics an examination of buchanan s hypothesis buchanan 1991 1994 proposes an interesting hypothesis explaining the prevalence of an ethic encouraging more work economies of specialization mean that more division of labour may increase productivity if everyone works more it increases the extent of the market which enables higher degree of division of labour and hence higher productivity individual choice between leisure and work thus results in a sub optimal level of work one way to counteract this is to maintain a work ethic this chapter examines the validity and significance of this hypothesis in the yang ng framework of inframarginal analysis a simultaneous artificial decrease in preference for leisure by all individuals decreases intrinsic utility evaluated at the original preference however using a more realistic model allowing for both home and firm market production developed by ng and zhang 2005 and discussed in chapter 9 a strong support is provided for buchanan s hypothesis as a shift in preference by everyone from leisure to market goods produced under increasing returns average cost pricing increases utility even if evaluated in accordance with the original preference buchanan s thesis probably has more relevance in ancient times when the work ethics originated but is less significant in the current world of global trade where the billions of individuals involved is sufficient to sustain specialization without artificial encouragement of additional work effort on the contrary the competition for relative standing the materialistic bias caused by our accumulation instinct and advertising and the environmental disruption of material production and consumption suggest that the discouragement of long working week may be more conducive to welfare

public preferences for carbon tax attributes the impacts of climate change are already visible throughout the world recognizing the threats posed by climate change the durban platform the 17th session of the conference of parties cop 17 underscores that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation and ambitious action by all countries a crucial starting point for the design of effective and publicly acceptable policies is to explore public preferences for climate policy instruments using a choice experiment this study investigates public preferences for carbon tax attributes in a developing country context the results account for heterogeneity in preferences and show that turkish people prefer a carbon tax with a progressive cost distribution rather than one with a regressive cost distribution the private cost has a negative effect on the probability of choosing the tax earmarking carbon tax revenues increases the public acceptability of the tax moreover there is a preference for a carbon tax that promotes public awareness of climate change

pollution tax heuristics an empirical study of willingness to pay higher gasoline taxes economists widely agree that in concept pollution taxes are the most cost effective means of reducing pollution with the advent of monitoring and enforcement technologies the case for pollution taxation is generally getting stronger on the merits despite widespread agreement among economists however pollution taxes remain unpopular especially in north america some oppose pollution taxes because of a suspicion that government would misspend the tax proceeds while others oppose pollution taxes because they would impose economic hardships upon certain individuals groups or industries and there is no pollution tax more pathologically hated as the gasoline tax this is unfortunate from an economic perspective as a gasoline tax is easy to implement and is a reasonable pigouvian tax scaling proportionately with the harms of consumption surprisingly there is a dearth of theory explaining this cleave between economists and virtually everybody else drawing on behavioralist literatures this paper introduces several theories as to why people and governments so vehemently oppose pollution taxes using the example of gasoline taxes we provide some empirical evidence for these theories we also show that revenue recycling the use of tax proceeds to reduce other taxes is an effective means of reducing opposition to gasoline taxes

policy v individual heterogeneity in the benefits of climate change mitigation evidence from a stated preference survey abstract we use stated preference methods to investigate the public s preferences for decarbonization policies we ask three research questions first does the willingness to pay wtp for each ton of co2 emissions reductions depend on the policies and on individual characteristics of the respondents second how extensive is the variation associated with these factors third what factors affect support for or opposition to a carbon tax based on the responses to discrete choice experiments from a sample of italians we find that the wtp per ton of co2 ranges between zero and 230 the variation associated with the policy instrument is approximately of the same order of magnitude as that associated with individual characteristics of the respondents

public attitudes toward climate policies the effect of institutional contexts and political values abstract this study contributes to the literature on public responses to climate policies in two ways we investigate the effect of institutional contexts on attitudes toward policies and we examine the relevance of political values for these effects institutional theory suggests that the institutional context influences whether individual rationality ir or social rationality sr frames choices to investigate the effects of such contexts and political values on attitudes toward policies aimed at reducing private car use we conducted a survey experiment involving 1500 car owners in oslo norway one group of respondents received a text emphasizing the individual health gains from reducing local air pollution ir context a second group received a text emphasizing the social responsibility for avoiding climate change sr context and a control group received no such text we found effects of the contexts on attitudes toward emission reducing policies and found that the effects vary across individuals with different political values the sr context yielded higher support for an increase in petrol prices among non individualists only the ir context yielded higher support for a decrease in space for cars among both non individualists and individualists ways forward regarding expanding this field of research are discussed

a microeconomic mechanism for economic growth this paper constructs a dynamic general equilibrium model in which economic growth is explained by the evolution of the division of labor the relationships among the accumulation of human capital the evolution of the division of labor endogenous comparative advantage trade dependence the market structure and economic growth are investigated

impact of cap and trade policies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions on u s households abstract proposals being considered by the u s congress would establish a cap and trade system to cut greenhouse gas ghg emissions approximately 2 annually through 2050 past cap and trade policies for other pollutants have distributed allowances free to the regulated companies leaving consumers uncompensated for passed through costs needed to achieve the required reductions social equity concerns were not a major issue because the total costs were relatively small however americans currently spend about 1 trillion year on energy directly and indirectly via the goods and services they consume if a cap on carbon emissions results in significant increases in energy prices social equity concerns could quickly dominate the debate over climate policy this paper confirms earlier studies that a traditional cap and trade policy is regressive and would cause the cost of reducing ghg emissions to fall disproportionately on low income households this paper explores ways to ameliorate those effects using highly disaggregated data available on consumer expenditures and energy input output analyses of the u s economy emissions are estimated based on direct and embodied energy use at the household level social equity concerns are taken into account and the consequences of cap and trade policies are assessed by quantifying the extent to which the expenditure patterns of the poor are significantly more energy intensive than those of the rich

the demand for earmarking results from a focus group study abstract environmental taxes might be efficient but plans to impose new taxes are often met with fierce public resistance in order to design environmental taxes that are both efficient and acceptable to the public so that they can be politically feasible it is important to understand public attitudes towards environmental taxes we conduct a focus group study in norway to extend the current knowledge on this issue we find less general resistance to taxation as a policy instrument and seemingly more trust in government than what has been reported in similar studies from other countries the participants are however very skeptical and do not see the point of using the revenues from an environmental tax to reduce other taxes such as the payroll tax instead they express a very strong preference for earmarking the revenues for environmental purposes they also call for more information about environmental taxes in particular on how the revenues are spent providing more information including what the revenues are spent on irrespective of whether they are earmarked or not would seem to provide a relatively cheap and possibly effective way to increase the public acceptability of new or increased environmental taxes

the rise and fall of french ecological tax reform social acceptability versus political feasibility in the energy tax implementation process the french government has a 10 year history of negotiations with industry resulting in voluntary agreements on energy consumption when implemented these voluntary agreements produced very few results in terms of global reduction of greenhouse emissions politiques et management public 11 4 1993 47 hence the idea of an energy tax became increasingly attractive for many french decision makers ecological environmental tax reform etr should have been one of the major political decisions and successes of the past leftwing coalition government instead it became one of its major failures as the constitutional court decided to terminate the energy tax project in december 2000 through insights gleaned from focus groups and interviews with business people and decision makers an attempt is made to understand the failure of the energy tax project firstly decision makers lacked crucial information about public and business opinions and secondly there were conflicts between the relevant administrations the fuel revolts of 2000 ended any hope of resolving the conflicts and implementing etr which was ultimately found unconstitutional this paper examines the political controversies raised by the etr project and the reasons for its eventual collapse in the hope of contributing new understanding to the body of knowledge on the political difficulties of introducing environmental policy instruments

the financial market impact of uk quantitative easing after outlining some of the monetary developments associated with quantitative easing qe we measure the impact of the uk s initial 2009 10 qe programme on bonds and other assets first we use a macro nance yield curve both to create a counterfactual path for bond yields and to estimate the impact of qe directly second we analyse the impact of individual qe operations on a range of asset prices we nd that qe signi cantly lowered government bond yields through the portfolio balance

price pressure in the government bond market what determines the term structure of interest rates standard economic theory links the interest rate for maturity t to the willingness of a representative agent to substitute consumption between times 0 and t the standard model contrasts sharply with a more informal view based on investors preferred habitat proposed by john culbertson 1957 and franco modigliani and richard sutch 1966 according to the preferred habitat view there are investor clienteles with preferences for specific maturities and the interest rate for a given maturity is influenced by the demand of the corresponding clientele and the supply of bonds with that maturity for example the typical clientele for long term bonds are pension funds an increase in their demand would be expected to raise prices of long term bonds and thus lower long term interest rates in short preferred habitat implies that there is price pressure in the bond market while the preferred habitat view has intuitive appeal it has not entered into the academic mainstream typically being relegated to a paragraph in mba level textbooks one reason for this is the mixed findings in early empirical studies of the term structure specifically between 1962 and 1964 the us treasury and federal reserve raised the supply of short term government debt while simultaneously lowering the supply of long term debt this program known as operation twist aimed to raise shortterm interest rates and so improve the balance of payments while also lowering long term rates to stimulate private investment a number of papers evaluated operation twist and while they reached different conclusions none found strong evidence that the operation was effective in flattening the term structure e g modigliani price pressure in the government bond market

the federal reserve s large scale asset purchase programmes rationale and effects we provide empirical estimates of the effect of large scale asset purchases lsaps on longer term us treasury yields within a framework that allows for several transmission channels including the scarcity channel associated with the preferred habitat literature and the duration channel associated with interest rate risk we also clarify lsaps role in the broader context of historical monetary policy strategy results indicate that lsap style operations mainly impact longer term rates via the nominal term premium within that premium the response is predominantly embodied in the real term premium the scarcity and duration channels both seem to be of considerable importance

earmarked taxation and political competition abstract although tax earmarking constitutes a voluntary constraint for government s policymaking it is widely used in the real world this paper investigates the electoral dimension of earmarking in a model of political competition with ideological parties its main contribution is to derive new insights on the relationship between earmarking and parties probability of winning the elections we find that the electoral pressure may favor the existence of tax earmarking equilibria but that it sometimes creates a tendency against earmarked taxation even when as shown by brett and keen 2000 brett c keen m 2000 political uncertainty and the earmarking of environmental taxes journal of public econonomics 75 315 340 incumbent governments have strong incentives to use earmarking rules to constrain future policymakers

a high frequency assessment of the ecb securities markets programme policy impact studies often suffer from endogeneity problems consider the case of the european central bank ecb securities markets programme if eurosystem interventions were triggered by sudden and strong price deteriorations looking at daily price changes may bias downward the correlation between yields and the amounts of bonds purchased simple regressions of daily changes in yields on quantities often give insignificant or even positive coefficients and therefore suggest that securities markets programme smp interventions have been ineffective or worse counterproductive we use high frequency data on purchases of the ecb securities markets programme and sovereign bond quotes to address the simultaneity and endogeneity issues we propose a vector autoregressive var framework estimated at several frequencies to better measure the smp impact and its persistence our results show that smp interventions have been effective in reducing yields of government bonds for the countries under the program

labor specialization and the extent of the market this paper presents an analytical model of labor specialization workers make human capital investment decisions on the depth and the breadth of their skill given that firms have diverse job requirements and increasing returns to scale workers invest more for the depth of their human capital and less for the breadth as the size of the labor market increases also the larger the size of the market the more varieties of job requirements are used so that the average match between a worker and a firm improves

the division of labor coordination costs and knowledge this paper considers specialization and the division of labor a more extensive division of labor raises productivity because returns to the time spent on tasks are usually greater to workers who concentrate on a narrower range of skills the traditional discussion of the division of labor emphasizes the limitations to specialization imposed by the extent of the market we claim that the degree of specialization is more often determined by other considerations especially emphasized are various costs of coordinating specialized workers who perform complementary tasks and the amount of general knowledge available