disentangling the college wage premium estimating a model with endogenous education choices this article proposes and empirically implements a structural model of education choices and wage determination to quantitatively evaluate the contributions of productivity enhancement and ability signaling in the college wage premium the model is estimated under various distributional parameterizations using 1990 u s census 5 public use micro sample under these parameterizations i find that college education enhances attendees productivity by about 40 and productivity enhancement accounts for close to two thirds of the college wage premium

increasing consumer participation rates for green pricing programs a choice experiment for south korea abstract this study examines the factors that can increase consumer participation rates in green pricing programs by conducting a choice experiment in south korea estimation results were obtained from a conditional logit conditional logit with interaction terms random parameter logit random parameter logit with correlation and individual level coefficient models a novelty of our analysis was the consideration of monetary and non monetary incentives as factors influencing consumer uptake in green pricing programs the estimation results show that increased consumer participation in green pricing programs is positively linked with green energy sources that produce fewer externalities more jobs and monetary incentives such as tax credits or green mileage however there is an inverted u shaped relationship between participation rates and the share of green electricity in total electricity supply mean willingness to pay for fuel cells is highest followed by solar and wind energy estimation from the random parameter logit with allowing for correlations among random coefficients of attributes reveals that consumers are divided into green pro environment consumers and blue growth oriented consumers green consumers prefer a higher green electricity share solar or fuel cell to wind a greater proximity of green power plants to their homes and green mileage or green parks to tax credits in comparison blue consumers favor a lower green electricity share green power plants that are far from their homes and monetary incentives rather than non monetary incentives the results of this study suggest guidelines for the design of successful green pricing programs green pricing programs that are designed with information on types of green energy sources consider the distance of power plants to consumers residences focus on the share of green electricity and incorporate monetary incentives are likely to have increased consumer participation rates

optimization of manufacturing systems under environmental considerations for a greenness dependent demand abstract in this work we show that the optimization models for manufacturing systems should evolve to consider the environmental impacts of manufacturing activities and to integrate the environmental performance of finished products in particular the selection of manufacturing processes technologies and input items components should be revised with environmental consideration with this scope in mind we develop two optimization models where we consider the selection of production processes and the choice of input products in the first model a single product is offered by the firm and the demand of this product depends on its greenness in the second model the market is segmented between ordinary and green customers and the firm offers a different variety of the output product to each segment in this case both the demand and the price depend on the product greenness in both models the greenness of the output product is a decision variable that is simultaneously determined along with the other decisions in addition the models integrate environmental legislations we conduct numerical experiments on a case study from the textile sector in order to show how the integration of the product greenness impacts on the system profit and decisions

endogenous inequality in integrated labor markets with two sided search we consider a market with red and green workers where labels are payoff irrelevant workers may acquire skills skilled workers search for vacancies while firms search for workers a unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant there are also asymmetric equilibria in which firms search only for green workers more green than red workers acquire skills skilled green workers receive higher wages and the unemployment rate is higher among skilled red workers discrimination between ex ante identical individuals arises in equilibrium and yet firms have perfect information about their workers and strictly prefer to hire minority workers

a target group specific approach to green power retailing students as consumers of renewable energy an extensive body of literature exists on the obstacles that have to be overcome in green power retailing in this article target group specific marketing is evaluated as a strategy to increase the share of residential customers of green power a sample of students in the city of freiburg germany was interviewed in order to assess their awareness of environmental issues their willingness to change to green power products and to better understand individual hindrances in changing the power supplier the analysis shows that students are highly positive towards green power products but for several reasons difficult to reach in marketing campaigns aspects to be considered in addressing this consumer group include the students particular expectations towards green products their living conditions price sensitivity and their perception of the relative effort involved in changing the power provider

consumers in the green electricity market in finland abstract green electricity i e electricity produced from environmentally less harmful sources and marketed as such has been available to finnish households since 1998 but the demand for it has remained low in this paper we discuss the barriers identified by consumers to purchasing green electricity and contrast these with the interpretation energy sector actors give to consumer passivity the empirical material consists of thematic interviews energy policy actors often assume that consumers passivity signifies their lack of interest or low environmental consciousness this results partly from the failure to differentiate between the roles of consumer and citizen the interpretation the energy sector actors give to consumer passivity and the role they assign to consumers affect the direction of green electricity policy we argue that consumers need more information on both the environmental impact of different electricity products and in particular about the electricity supply and electricity contracts in a liberalised electricity market if they are to become active in the market

strike three discrimination incentives and evaluation major league baseball umpires express their racial ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race ethnicity but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment e g fastballs over home plate when they anticipate bias these direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward the results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups behavior generally they imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination

a theory of optimal random crackdowns police often engage in crackdowns on crime which are intermittent periods of high inten sity policing this paper develops a theoretical framework for modeling police monitoring behavior and individuals decisions to engage in crime within this framework we show that there are situations where it will be optimal for a crime minimizing police agency to engage in random crackdowns when they occur crackdowns also provide a way of estimating the deterrence effect of policing we illustrate the application of the model in analyzing a speed

the toxic intensity of industrial production global patterns trends and trade policy this paper exploits a newly developed data set to investigate recent changes in the international distribution of industrial pollution in particular the authors examine three issues 1 the relationship between the toxic intensity of industrial production and the level of economic development 2 the impact of oecd environmental regulation on global changes in toxic intensity and 3 the relationship between trade policy and the toxic intensity of industrial production in ldc s 10 refs

energy savings in nigeria is there a way of escape from energy inefficiency abstract this study estimates the transition probabilities for different energy use states in nigeria using the markov switching regression technique according to the results both energy efficient and energy inefficient states are less persistent but comparatively the energy inefficient state is more persistent thus in nigeria it is much difficult to escape from the energy inefficient state than the energy efficient state several reasons may explain this phenomenon and they include inefficient regulatory system poor institutional structure high corruption proliferation of second hand goods undeveloped markets high incidence of poverty and inefficient pricing in the energy sector pricing policies should be combined with institutional improvement and infrastructural development if nigeria wants to achieve a sustainable energy efficient state in the long term

search profiling with partial knowledge of deterrence consider the choice of a profiling policy where decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of search i pose a planning problem whose objective is to minimise the social cost of crime and search the consequences of a search rule depend on the extent to which search deters crime i study the planning problem when the planner has partial knowledge of deterrence i show how the planner can eliminate dominated search rules and how he can use the minimax or minimax regret criterion to choose an undominated rule

subjective performance and the value of blind evaluation we investigate the incentive and project screening effects of anonymity in a setting of subjective performance evaluation if the review process is blind then the applicant s payoff relevant type is hidden from the reviewer if the process is nonblind or informed then the reviewer observes the applicant s type directly in either case the evaluator receives a noisy signal on the quality of the agent s project and decides whether to accept or reject it we find that if the signal is not verifiable then informed evaluation results in an excessively steep equilibrium acceptance policy the standard applied to low ability applicants is too stringent and the standard applied to high ability applicants is too lenient blind review in which all applicants face the same standard often provides better incentives but it discards valuable information for screening projects we discover that blind review is more likely to be preferred by the evaluator when 1 the applicant pool is skewed toward high ability types 2 the stakes from acceptance are relatively high for applicants 3 both types of errors are relatively less costly or 4 there is little competition among reviewers we also discover that under blind review the evaluator may benefit from a more diverse applicant pool

consumer demand for green power and energy efficiency abstract this article examines reported willingness to pay for electric utility investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency resources using the results of deliberative polls conducted by electric utilities in texas 1 age education and salary tend to affect reported willingness to pay for utility investments in these resources intensive exposure to information about energy resource issues led to an increase in the number of respondents interested in paying a modest premium to support investments in both renewable energy resources and energy efficiency however average reported premiums actually declined following the polls as very high outlier responses moved to more reasonable values following the polls these results support the contention that informed dialogue about energy alternatives will result in broader interest in providing a modest level of support for these resources

environmental kuznets curves real progress or passing the buck abstract recent research has examined the hypothesis of an environmental kuznets curve ekc the notion that environmental impact increases in the early stages of development followed by declines in the later stages these studies have focused on the relationship between per capita income and a variety of environmental indicators results imply that ekcs may exist for a number of cases however the measures of environmental impact used generally focus on production processes and reflect environmental impacts that are local in nature and for which abatement is relatively inexpensive in terms of monetary costs and or lifestyle changes significantly more consumption based measures such co2 emissions and municipal waste for which impacts are relatively easy to externalize or costly to control show no tendency to decline with increasing per capita income by considering consumption and trade patterns the author re examines the concept of the ekc and proposes the use of alternative consumption based measures of environmental impact the author speculates that what appear to be improvements in environmental quality may in reality be indicators of increased ability of consumers in wealthy nations to distance themselves from the environmental degradation associated with their consumption

crime punishment and prejudice abstract we examine the link between the penalties used to punish convicted criminals and judicial prejudice against defendants in our model agents choose to commit crimes if their privately observed utility from doing so is high enough a crime generates noisy evidence and defendants are convicted when the realized amount of evidence is sufficiently strong to establish the probability of guilt beyond a fixed threshold we show that if convicted offenders are incarcerated poorer individuals face a strong prior prejudice in trials and are therefore convicted with less evidence than richer individuals at the same time they commit crimes more frequently penalties such as monetary fines can eliminate this bias but may also reverse it we fully characterize the penalty schedule that guarantees an unbiased equilbrium we extend the model such that agents also differ in characteristics such as race or gender we show biased outcomes targeted at subgroups of the population may still exist even if all members of the population are ex ante alike in their economic characteristics

choosing size of government under ambiguity infrastructure spending and income taxation i examine choice of size of government by a planner who has partial knowledge of population preferences and the productivity of public spending focusing on income tax financed spending for infrastructure i examine scenarios where the planner observes the outcome of a status quo policy and uses various decision criteria to choose policy the analysis shows that the planner can reasonably choose a wide range of spending levels thus a society can rationalise having a small or large government i conclude that to achieve credible conclusions about the desirable size of government we need to improve current knowledge of preferences and the productivity of spending vastly

determinants of emissions growth in oecd countries abstract this paper analyses the sources of growth in energy related greenhouse gas emissions for oecd countries over the period 1982 1997 it employs a decomposition formula that separates out the effects of changes in population economic growth energy intensity of output in aggregate and by sector primary energy use in final energy consumption the share of fossil fuels and the carbon intensity of fossil fuel combustion it is shown that in general growth in emissions depends on how effectively energy use can be changed to offset the effects of economic growth across the oecd as a whole growth in emissions has been mainly due to economic growth both gdp per capita and population growth as well as an increase in primary energy required for final energy consumption offset by falling energy intensities and a declining share of fossil fuels overall the large fall in the energy intensity of oecd economies over 1982 1997 has been driven primarily by falling energy intensities in the services and industry sectors of the usa and the services sector of the european union but these have been offset somewhat by rising energy intensity of services in japan the influence of falling energy intensities and the declining share of fossil fuels weakened in the five year period 1992 1997 resulting in faster emissions growth there were sharp difference between countries with population growth and worsening fuel mix playing a much stronger role in the usa compared to the eu and japan but with the us making much larger reductions in energy use per unit of gdp the analysis suggests that opportunities to reduce emissions are more limited in germany the uk and japan with more opportunities in the usa canada the netherlands and australia

using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime comment previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime possibly due to simultaneity problems this paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrumental variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime the null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected

the contribution of foreign direct investment to clean energy use carbon emissions and economic growth the paper investigates the contributions of foreign direct investment fdi net inflows to clean energy use carbon emissions and economic growth the paper employs cointegration tests to examine a long run equilibrium relationship among the variables and fixed effects models to examine the magnitude of fdi contributions to the other variables the paper analyzes panel data of 19 nations of the g20 from 1971 to 2009 the test results indicate that fdi has played an important role in economic growth for the g20 whereas it limits its impact on an increase in co2 emissions in the economies the research finds no compelling evidence of fdi link with clean energy use given the results the paper discusses fdi s potential role in achieving green growth goals

does the worldwide shift of fdi from manufacturing to services accelerate economic growth a gmm estimation study abstract we examine the effect of manufacturing and service fdi foreign direct investment on their own sector growth the spillover to the other sectors and the overall economy in host countries we identify significant sectoral and inter industry spillover effects with various data classifications and types of fdi flows evidence reveals that growth effect of manufacturing fdi operates by stimulating activity in its own manufacturing sector and is prevalent in latin america caribbean in europe central asia middle to low income countries and economies with large industry share a surge of service fdi is likely to spur growth in service industries but hurt activity in manufacturing industries financial service fdi enhances growth in south east asia and the pacific high income countries and service based economies by stimulating activity in both manufacturing and service sectors however nonfinancial service fdi drains resources and hurts manufacturing industry in the same group of countries we conclude that a shift from manufacturing to service fdi is likely to lead to deindustrialization in certain regions and types of economies if this shift is spearheaded by nonfinancial fdi

speeding terrorism and teaching to the test educators worry that high stakes testing will induce teachers and their students to focus only on the test and ignore other untested aspects of knowledge some counter that although this may be true knowing something is better than knowing nothing and many students would benefit even by learning the material that is to be tested using the metaphor of deterring drivers from speeding it is shown that the optimal rules for high stakes testing depend on the costs of learning and of monitoring incentives need to be concentrated for those whose costs of action are high

public goods and private interests understanding non residential demand for green power this article presents the results of the first large scale mail survey of non residential green power customers in the united states the survey explored the motivations attitudes and experiences of 464 business non profit and public sectorcustomers that have voluntarily opted to purchase and frequently pay a premium for renewable electricity results of this study should be of value to marketers interested in targeting these customer segments to policymakers interested in fostering and understanding non residential demand for green power and to academics pondering the motivations for firms to engage in such voluntary environmental initiatives

simple versus optimal rules as guides to policy this paper compares the performance of different policy rules our comparisons focus on simple feedback rules versus rules which are optimal given knowledge of the correct economic structure and the appropriate loss function for the policymaker first we compare rule performance when the correct model is not known second we compare rule performance with respect to the frequency specific behavior for variables of interest taken as a whole our results indicate how the case for a model specific optimal rule can break down when one relaxes the assumption that the true model is known as well as the assumption that the appropriate loss function is known links are made to the literature on monetary policy

does fdi influence renewable energy consumption an analysis of sectoral fdi impact on renewable and non renewable industrial energy consumption this study examines the link between foreign direct investment fdi and energy demand fdi is a source of financing that allows businesses to grow at the same time fdi can be a source of innovation that promotes energy efficiency existing evidence on the impact of aggregate fdi inflows on energy consumption is scarce and inconclusive in the current study we disaggregate fdi inflows into mining manufacturing total services and financial services components and examine the impact of these fdi flows on renewable and non renewable industrial energy sources for 74 countries for the period 1985 2012 we employ a blundell bond dynamic panel estimator to control for endogeneity and omitted variable biases in our panels the results point broadly to an energy consumption reducing effect with respect to non renewable sources of energy and an energy consumption augmenting effects with respect to renewable energy we find that these effects vary in magnitude and significance by sectoral fdi

passenger profiling imperfect screening and airport security we present a theoretical model of airport searches the model extends previous work in the area in that detection conditional on search is imperfect the hit rates tests for racial bias developed in knowles persico and todd 2001 is shown to apply even in the presence of imperfections in monitoring we then study two channels for improving airport security better targeting and better detection we show that better targeting does not necessarily decrease the overall crime rate although it will decrease crime in the group that is targeted improved detection rates unambiguously decrease crime group speci c improvements in detection do not necessarily increase the number of searches for those groups the analysis is extended to allow for the possibility that criminal passengers disguise themselves as members of low crime groups

the 2009 lawrence r klein lecture diversified treatment under ambiguity this article develops a broad theme about treatment under ambiguity through study of a particular decision criterion the broad theme is that a planner may want to cope with ambiguity by diversification assigning observationally identical persons to different treatments study of the minimax regret mr criterion substantiates the theme the article significantly extends my earlier analysis of one period planning with an individualistic treatment and a linear welfare function i show that mr treatment allocations are fractional in a large class of planning problems with nonlinear welfare functions interacting treatments learning and noncooperative aspects

can foreign direct investment harness energy consumption in china a time series investigation abstract this study assesses the long run relationship and short run dynamics between foreign direct investment fdi and energy consumption in china applying the bounds testing approach to annual data from 1982 to 2012 we find that a stable fdi energy nexus exists in the long run and a 1 increase in fdi reduces energy consumption by 0 21 however this study shows a positive association between fdi and energy consumption in the short run attributing to the dominance of the scale effect our results remain robust to different measurements and estimators it is suggested that the chinese government shall support the inward fdi in the tertiary and energy sectors and strengthen local absorptive capacities to fully internalize fdi related knowledge spillovers in energy conservation

optimal auditing with scoring theory and application to insurance fraud this article makes a bridge between the theory of optimal auditing and the scoring methodology in an asymmetric information setting our application is meant for insurance claims fraud but it can be applied to many other activities that use the scoring approach fraud signals are classified based on the degree to which they reveal an increasing probability of fraud we show that the optimal auditing strategy takes the form of a red flags strategy which consists in referring claims to a special investigative unit siu when certain fraud indicators are observed the auditing policy acts as a deterrence device and we explain why it requires the commitment of the insurer and how it should affect the incentives of siu staffs the characterization of the optimal auditing strategy is robust to some degree of signal manipulation by defrauders as well as to the imperfect information of defrauders about the audit frequency the model is calibrated with data from a large european insurance company we show that it is possible to improve our results by separating different groups of insureds with different moral costs of fraud finally our results indicate how the deterrence effect of the audit scheme can be taken into account and how it affects the optimal auditing strategy

the role of globalization in energy consumption a quantile cointegrating regression approach abstract this paper examines the quantile behavior of the relationship between the nuances of globalization and energy consumption while incorporating capital and economic growth in case of top two most globalized countries netherlands and ireland by employing the recently developed quantile autoregressive distributed lag qardl model of cho et al 2015 the model is estimated using quarterly data over the period 1970q1 2015q4 the results indicate that the relationship is quantile dependent which may reveal misleading results in studies using traditional analyses that address the averages the wald test confirms our findings by rejecting the null hypothesis of parameter constancy for both the netherlands and ireland the changes in energy consumption are more responsive to past levels and past changes in globalization than the adjustment provided by the error correction method ecm interestingly the findings indicate that globalization is positively correlated with energy consumption in the long term for the two countries furthermore globalization shares a robust long term relationship with energy consumption energy consumption is strongly related to globalization in the long term however the short term effects of globalization on energy demand are limited for those countries important policy implications are then suggested based on the empirical results

citizen versus consumer challenges in the uk green power market abstract this paper investigates the potential advantages and disadvantages of green power products as opposed to the traditional fossil fuel levy which was the uk s chosen tax regime as a means of developing renewable energy in the uk willingness to pay for electricity generated from renewables is investigated results indicate that willingness to pay varies with social status and income however results demonstrate that there is a significant minority in full support of some sort of fiscal initiative electricity generated from renewables is a concept supported by the majority however given the stated willingness to pay it is unlikely that any new renewable capacity will result from green tariff schemes in the near term it is concluded that the green citizen must continue to co exist with the green power purchaser if the uk is to make any significant improvement in the contribution of renewable energy to electricity demand the authors would like to acknowledge the support of irene lorenzoni and jane powell of the centre for social and economic research on the global environment university of east anglia leicester energy efficiency advice centre and leicester energy agency

enabling innovations in energy access an african perspective abstract conventional energy technologies and deployment approaches cannot be relied upon to eliminate energy poverty in africa innovations in energy access are necessary previous attempts at introducing and scaling up innovative solutions do not sufficiently address dynamic and structural determinants of success this limits their actual performance as scalable drivers of innovations in technology policy and institutions using technological innovation systems theory we demonstrate a practical approach to assess the sustainability of innovations in energy access and develop a framework to guide energy policy makers clean energy entrepreneurs and energy development researchers

robustness of simple menus of contracts in cost based procurement abstract we consider a model of cost based procurement in which the principal faces knightian uncertainty about the agent s preferences for cost reduction we show that a particularly simple incentive scheme a menu comprising a fixed price contract and a cost reimbursement contract minimizes the maximum expected payment where this maximum is taken over the set of possible agent preferences for some parameters of the problem a range of alternative incentive schemes also satisfy this criterion we show that the simple incentive scheme is not weakly dominated by any of the alternatives there does not exist an alternative mechanism for which the expected payment is no higher for all realizations of the agent s preferences and strictly lower for some realization

regulation induced structural break and the long run drivers of industrial pollution intensity in china abstract this study examines the effect of the regulation induced structural break on the nexus between industrial pollution intensity ipi and energy use structure in china using six industrial pollutants intensity ipi indicator is derived from principal component analysis the study applies three types of time series based approaches including fully modified ordinary least squares canonical cointegrating regression and dynamic ordinary least squares to deal with the problems of serial correlation and endogeneity the results show that while a higher share of coal energy use increases ipi stricter environmental regulation shifts the long run ipi curve downwards when we interact both variables the results reveal that stricter environmental regulation induces a significant structural break in industrial use of coal energy in a manner that reduces the associated emissions furthermore investment in environmental treatment trade liberalization and foreign direct investment reduce ipi in the long run but real gross domestic product increases ipi which suggests the absence of scale economies in the industrial sector to reduce ipi stricter environmental regulations are necessary the government can leverage on the positive environmental benefits of foreign investment international trade and direct investment in environmental treatment

warm glow from green power evidence from australian electricity consumers abstract green electricity products are increasingly made available to consumers in many countries in order to address a number of environmental and social concerns most of the literature on this green electricity market focuses on consumers characteristics and product attributes that could affect participation however the contribution of this environmental consumerism to the overall environmental good does not depend on participation alone the real impact relies on market participation for green consumers the proportion of green consumers combined with the level of green consumption intensity the commitment levels or proportion of consumption that is green we design an online interface that closely mimics the real market decision environment for electricity consumers in western australia and use an error component model to analyze consumers choice of green electricity products and their commitment levels we show that product attributes have limited impact on the choice of green products however there is still great potential for better participation by improving the design of green electricity programs when green products are selected most respondents select the minimum commitment possible and this is insensitive to the premium being charged on green power suggesting that we are largely observing a buy in warm glow for carbon mitigation

probabilistic decision model of wind power investment and influence of green power market this paper presents results from a model of a representative wind power investor s decision making process using a monte carlo simulation of a project financial analysis data in the form of probability distribution functions pdfs for key input variables were collected from interviews with investors and other professionals active in the u s wind power industry using a formal expert elicitation protocol this study presents the first quantitative estimates of the effect of the u s voluntary renewable energy certificate rec market on renewable energy generation the results indicate that the investment decisions of wind power project developers in the united states are unlikely to have been altered by the voluntary rec market the problem with the current voluntary rec market is that it does not offer developers a reliable risk adjusted revenue stream consequently the claims by u s green power retailers and promoters that voluntary market recs result in additional wind power projects lack credibility even dramatic increases in voluntary market rec prices in the absence of long term contracts were found to have only a small effect on investor behavior

environment and development theory and international evidence the environmental effects of economic development have significant implications for a wide array of policy questions facing both low and high income countries today internationally agricultural research centers are considering how to incorporate sustainability issues into their research agendas while international lending institutions are taking a close look at the environmental consequences of industrial projects domestically the north american free trade agreement has brought the relationship between economic development and environmental quality to the forefront of u s public policy debate it is surprising that despite the postwar growth of development economics the genesis of environmental economics and the fusion of ideas from both fields into the theme of sustainable development economists have not made much progress in describing the impacts of long term economic growth on environmental quality yet a vigorous public debate has arisen between individuals who maintain that environmental degradation is a necessary outcome of economic growth and those who believe that economic growth and environmental quality go hand in hand this debate was highlighted at the 1992 united nations conference on environment and development in rio de janeiro in part this debate hinges on the properties of the aggregate demand for and supply of environmental quality if the income elasticity of demand for environmental quality or amenities is high then the increased prosperity engendered by economic growth could lead to significantly higher demand for environmental quality proponents of economic growth believe this demand will translate into a higher realized level of quality as both public and private institutions and organi

an alternative test of racial prejudice in motor vehicle searches theory and evidence we propose a simple model of trooper behavior to design empirical tests for whether troopers of different races are monolithic in their search behavior and whether they exhibit relative racial prejudice in motor vehicle searches our test of relative racial prejudice provides a partial solution to the well known infra marginality and omitted variables problems associated with outcome tests when applied to a unique data set from florida our tests soundly reject the hypothesis that troopers of different races are monolithic in their search behavior but fail to reject the hypothesis that troopers of different races do not exhibit relative racial prejudice

will affirmative action policies eliminate negative stereotypes a key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market the authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers beliefs about the productivity of minority workers they study the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments the authors prove that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers correctly perceive the groups to be unequally productive ex post copyright 1993 by american economic association

a general characterization of optimal income tax enforcement this paper develops a general approach to characterizing optimal income tax and enforcement schemes our analysis clarifies the nature of the interplay between tax rates audit probabilities and penalties for misreporting in particular it is shown that for a variety of objective functions for the principal the optimal tax schedule is in general concave at least weakly and monotonic the marginal tax rates determine the audit probabilities and less harsh penalties lead to higher enforcement costs our results imply that there exists a tradeoff between equity and efficiency considerations in the enforcement context which is similar to that in the moral hazard context for tax policy it is well accepted by now that informational asymmetries generate important constraints on the formulation of economic policy an early and classic example is given by mirrlees 1971 who considers the problem of optimal income taxation when individuals differ in their ability to transform effort into income it is assumed that ability and effort of an individual cannot be observed at any cost whereas income which is the product of these two unobservables is perfectly and costlessly observable taxes can thus depend only on final income under these informational conditions the equity efficiency tradeoffs that constrain the choice of tax policy arise only because of the presence of moral hazard associated with taxation of income if there were no moral hazard i e individual efforts and therefore incomes were exogenous the problem of optimal income taxation would be a trivial one since by assumption individual incomes are perfectly and costlessly observable in much of the recent literature on optimal income taxation in the presence of costly enforcement reinganum and wilde 1985 border and sobel 1987 and others on the other hand individual incomes are treated as exogenous i e there is no moral hazard however informational constraints arise from another important consideration namely an individual s income cannot be directly observed it can only be verified through a costly

foreign direct investment and decoupling between energy and gross domestic product in developing countries on a sample of 20 developing countries we noticed a clear decline in the energy intensity as foreign direct investment increases the reason for that probably is the use of modern technologies that came with foreign direct investment i e a leapfrogging over the old fashioned traditional technologies in use in these countries

co2 gdp and ret an aggregate economic equilibrium analysis for turkey there is a worldwide interest in renewable electricity technologies rets due to growing concerns about global warming and climate change as an eu candidate country whose energy demand increases exponentially turkey inevitably shares this common interest on ret this study using an aggregate economic equilibrium model explores the economic costs of different policy measures to mitigate co2 emissions in turkey the model combines energy demands capital requirements and labor inputs at a constant elasticity of substitution under an economy wide nested production function growing energy demand triggered by economic growth is met by increased supply and initiates new capacity additions investment into ret is encouraged via the incorporation of a endogenous technological learning through which the ret cost declines as a function of cumulative capacity and b a willingness to pay wtp function which imposes the wtp of consumers as a lower bound on ret installation the wtp equation is obtained as a function of consumer income categories based on data gathered from a pilot survey in which the contingent valuation methodology was employed the impacts of various emission reduction scenarios on gdp growth and ret diffusion are explored as expected ret penetration is accelerated under faster technological learning and higher wtp conditions it is found that stabilizing co2 emissions to year 2005 levels causes economic losses amounting to 17 and 23 of gdp in the years 2020 and 2030 respectively

us consumers willingness to pay for green electricity abstract we analyze us consumers demand for environmental attributes of deregulated residential electricity services using results from a survey designed to elicit consumers willingness to pay for such attributes and using results from a hedonic analysis of actual price premiums charged for green electricity in several deregulated markets survey results suggest that many population segments are willing to pay for decreased air emissions even if there is no alteration in fuel source furthermore several groups are willing to pay significantly more when emissions reductions stem from increased reliance upon renewable fuels the hedonic analysis suggests that several product features not considered in the survey help explain real price premiums including fuel mix from newly created renewable generation capacity green e certification brand name and state of offer while survey and hedonic results are not easily compared due to limitations of the survey both point to similar values for key environmental attributes though the survey results are likely to overstate actual willingness to pay in sum the results suggest that consumer driven purchases can in part support the future of renewable generation capacity in the united states though reliance upon other policy alternatives may be needed if energy prices spike

what drives the energy saving role of fdi and industrialization in east africa abstract analysis of the unconditional impacts of foreign direct inflows fdis and industrialization on energy intensity does not show the hidden roles of some economic conditions such as income and trade openness in this study we focused on the conditional impacts of fdis and industrialization on energy productivity using a panel data consisting of thirteen 13 east african countries covering 1980 2011 the baseline result shows that higher income and a well integrated economy are pro energy productive but fdis and intense industrialization are anti energy productive in the sub region this result remains robust even when we exclude the high income group and control for income group effects income significantly promotes energy productivity more in low income group than middle income group intense industrialization and fdis significantly decreases energy productivity only in low income countries trade openness significantly promotes energy productivity only in middle income group we have shown that fdis and income intense industrialization and fdis and intense industrialization and globalization are complementary forces that promote energy productivity in east africa but this is more evident for the middle income group than the low income group in the sub region based on the result we recommend a quadruplet programme called the growth industrial foreign investment and trade programme giftp last our result suggests that unconditional analysis of energy productivity should not be seen as an end in itself but a basis for further analysis

does the private sector help or hurt the environment evidence from carbon dioxide pollution in developing countries abstract how does the nature of enterprise ownership affect the environment in an economy conventional wisdom and theoretical conjectures are split on this important question in this paper we estimate a reduced form random effects model using data from 44 developing countries over nine years 1987 95 to study for any systematic empirical relationship between the relative level of private sector involvement in an economy and the environmental performance of the economy in terms of its emission of industrial carbon dioxide we control for both observed and unobserved crosscountry heterogeneity along various institutional and structural dimensions such as the scope of financial market industrial sector composition and level of foreign direct investment the regression results indicate that the higher the degree of private sector involvement in a developing economy the lower is its environmental degradation in addition its environmental degradation is likely to be further reduced in presence of a well functioning domestic capital market and through increased participation by developed economies in its private sector development

asymmetric impacts of the determinants of energy intensity in nigeria abstract this study analysed the problem of energy intensity determinants in nigeria based on the fully modified ols and canonical cointegration regressions these methods were preferred since they are able to deal effectively with the second order bias problems an often characteristics of time series data the impacts of price of crude oil fdi trade openness and industry structure are asymmetric which suggests the presence of structural effects in parameters the impact of crude oil price is negative but becomes stronger post 1989 saving 126 more in energy consumption relative to pre 1989 also the impacts of fdi and trade openness are negative and significant but become stronger post 1989 saving 11 2 and 0 8 more in energy consumption relative to the baseline respectively for every one percentage point increase in fdi and trade openness the impact of industry value added is positive and significant but weakens after 1989 consuming 1 8 less in energy for every one percentage point increase in industry value added relative to the baseline the energy reducing effect of industry value added post 1989 reflects improvements in the technical characteristics of industrial sector in nigeria last the result showed that the absorptive capability and industry characteristics of nigeria are important determinants of how fdi affects energy intensity this implies that a more integrated fdi programme considering the country characteristics rather than a one fit all programme is preferable

do urbanization and industrialization affect energy intensity in developing countries abstract against a backdrop of concerns about climate change peak oil and energy security issues reducing energy intensity is often advocated as a way to at least partially mitigate these impacts this study uses recently developed heterogeneous panel regression techniques like mean group estimators and common correlated effects estimators to model the impact that income urbanization and industrialization has on energy intensity for a panel of 76 developing countries in the long run a 1 increase in income reduces energy intensity by 0 45 to 0 35 long run industrialization elasticities are in the range 0 07 to 0 12 the impact of urbanization on energy intensity is mixed in specifications where the estimated coefficient on urbanization is statistically significant it is slightly larger than unity the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

green energy market development in germany effective public policy and emerging customer demand this paper reviews the development of renewable energy in germany from 1973 to 2003 it investigates the relative importance of energy policy and green power marketing in shaping the renewable energy market more than a decade of consistent policy support for renewables under the feed in law streg and its successor eeg has been an important driver for increasing renewable electricity generation to date putting the country in a better position than most of its peers when it comes to achieving european union targets for renewable energy green power marketing driven by customer demand on the other hand is growing but has had limited measurable impact so far we discuss potential intangible benefits of green power marketing and scenarios for future market development the paper concludes with lessons that can be learned from the german case for policy design and market development in other countries

energy demand fdi nexus in africa do fdis induce dichotomous paths abstract this study investigates the nexus between energy demand and foreign direct investment fdi in africa using the simultaneous system generalized method of moments estimator and panel data that consists of 27 african countries over the period 2000 2014 specifically the study hypothesizes a non linear relationship between energy demand and fdi which imposes the assumption that conditions such as the level of technology absorptive capacity the level and stage of development and adjustment cost are likely to be heterogeneous across cross section and over time several empirical strategies such as changing the structure of the model set up using different sample groupings and applying different estimators with different assumptions were employed to substantiate the robustness nature of the hypothesized relationship the findings revealed a robust concave effect of fdi on energy consumption this suggests that there are learning and imitation experiences associated with fdi and these experiences produce dichotomous paths in terms of realizing the energy saving benefits of fdi

racial profiling fairness and effectiveness of policing citizens of two groups may engage in crime depending on their legal earning opportunities and on the probability of being audited police audit citizens police behavior is fair if both groups are policed with the same intensity we provide exact conditions under which forcing the police to behave more fairly reduces the total amount of crime these conditions are expressed as constraints on the quantile quantile plot of the distributions of legal earning opportunities in the two groups we also investigate the definition of fairness when the cost of being searched reflects the stigma of being singled out by police

competitive lending with partial knowledge of loan repayment some positive and normative analysis we study a credit market where lenders with partial knowledge of repayment use one of several criteria to make lending decisions supposing that a public authority wants to maximize the social return to borrowing we study interventions that manipulate the return on the safe asset or guarantee a minimum loan return manipulating the return on the safe asset is effective if lender beliefs about the return to lending are not too pessimistic relative to those of the authority guaranteeing a minimum return is effective if lender beliefs are not too optimistic relative to those of the authority

the transition between energy efficient and energy inefficient states in cameroon i use a two state energy efficient inefficient markov switching dynamic model to study energy efficiency in cameroon in a novel manner employing yearly data covering 1971 to 2012 i find that th

the long run price sensitivity dynamics of industrial and residential electricity demand the impact of deregulating electricity prices abstract this study examines the demand side of ghana s electricity sector we test two important related hypotheses 1 deregulation of electricity price does not promote energy conservation and 2 demand price relationship is not an inverted u shaped the stock and watson dynamic ols is used to address the so called second order bias the result showed that deregulation of electricity price in ghana has induced behaviours that are more consistent with energy conservation improvements the demand price relationship is an inverted u which suggests that there is a price range that end users can tolerate further price rise and still increase their consumption of electricity however the degree of price tolerability is higher for residential consumers than industrial consumers the simulation results showed that further economic growth is likely to compromise energy conservation but more in the industrial sector than the residential sector on the other hand future crude oil price is likely to deteriorate energy conservation in the initial years after 2016 but this trend is likely to reverse after the year 2020 pricing mechanisms are potent to induce energy conservation but inadequate the results suggest that they should be complemented with other stringent policies such as a mandatory energy reduction policy investment in renewables and personalization of energy efficiency programs

the impact of financial development on energy consumption in emerging economies abstract financial development is often cited as a very important driver of economic growth in emerging economies and it is thus likely that financial development affects energy demand this study uses generalized method of moments estimation techniques to examine the impact of financial development on energy consumption in a sample of emerging countries several different measures of financial development are examined using a panel data set on 22 emerging countries covering the period 1990 2006 the empirical results show a positive and statistically significant relationship between financial development and energy consumption when financial development is measured using stock market variables like stock market capitalization to gdp stock market value traded to gdp and stock market turnover the implications of these results for energy policy are discussed

decomposition of technical efficiency in agricultural production in africa into transient and persistent technical efficiency under heterogeneous technologies abstract the agricultural sector remains a cornerstone to africa s economic transformation and the achievement of the sustainable development goals sdgs however the sector s performance in terms of productivity growth has been sub optimal when compared with performances in asia america and europe technical efficiency is a major contributor to the growth in agricultural productivity however there is limited research about the sources of technical inefficiency in agricultural production in africa this is critical given that africa has problems with food security and high poverty this study applied a parametric technique to estimate technical efficiency in africa s agricultural sector under heterogeneous technologies while separating unobserved country specific heterogeneities from transient and persistent technical efficiency data consisted of 49 african countries spanning from 1990 to 2016 assuming a homogeneous technology the estimated mean technical efficiency of 38 2 suggests that in africa about 62 of the potential agricultural output is untapped however considering heterogeneity in production technologies the mean estimated technical efficiency value differed between the two classes the numbers suggest that about 59 and 69 of untapped potential agricultural output in class one and class two groups respectively in all cases persistent technical inefficiency hinders technical efficiency an indication that government or regional agricultural policies should be long term oriented with the evidence of conditional convergence in technical efficiency efforts to improve persistent technical efficiency can drive regional targets in food security and poverty alleviation and induce inclusive growth and sustainable development

does higher economic and financial development lead to environmental degradation evidence from bric countries abstract a vast number of studies addressed the environmental degradation and economic development but not financial development moreover as argued by stern 2004 the rise and fall of the environmental kuznets curve world development 32 1419 1439 they present important econometric weaknesses using standard reduced form modeling approach and controlling for country specific unobserved heterogeneity we investigate the linkage between not only economic development and environmental quality but also the financial development panel data over period 1992 2004 is used we find that both economic and financial development are determinants of the environmental quality in bric economies we show that higher degree of economic and financial development decreases the environmental degradation our analysis suggests that financial liberalization and openness are essential factors for the co 2 reduction the adoption of policies directed to financial openness and liberalization to attract higher levels of r d related foreign direct investment might reduce the environmental degradation in countries under consideration in addition the robustness check trough the inclusion of us and japan does not alter our main findings

r d investment strategy for climate change abstract the economic costs of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations over the coming century depend critically on the development of new technologies in the energy sector our research and development r d investment strategy is the control variable for technology availability this paper proposes an analytic framework for determining optimal r d investment allocation and presents some numerical results to demonstrate the implementation of the methodology the value of technological advance in three targeted areas fossil based generation renewables and carbon capture and storage is represented by the increase in expected welfare in the presence of an emissions policy constraint of initially uncertain stringency r d expenditure increases the probability of advance optimal investment is determined by its relationship with success probability which is assumed to exhibit decreasing returns to scale relative to the value of success while the numerical results are speculative the paper offers insights into the nature of an optimal technology strategy for addressing climate change

optimal search profiling with linear deterrence i examine here an aspect of law enforcement that has recently been the subject of debate this is the choice of a profiling policy wherein decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of being searched policies that make search rates vary with personal attributes are variously defended as essential to effective law enforcement and denounced as unfair to classes of persons subjected to relatively high search rates variation of search rates by race has been particularly controversial see e g john knowles et al 2001 nicola persico 2002 jeff dominitz 2003 whereas recent research on profiling has sought to define and detect racial discrimination my concern is to understand how a social planner might choose a profiling policy this paper studies optimal profiling in a simple illustrative setting in related work manski 2004 i consider how a planner might reasonably behave when he does not possess all of the information needed to determine an optimal policy section i poses a utilitarian planning problem whose objective is to minimize the social cost of crime and search search is costly per se and search that reveals a crime entails costs for punishment of offenders search is beneficial to the extent that it deters or prevents crime deterrence is expressed through the offense function which describes how the offense rate of persons with given covariates varies with the search rate applied to these persons prevention occurs when search prevents an offense from causing social harm section ii derives the optimal profiling policy in the tractable case where search deters crime linearly one might think that search should focus on the most crime prone segments of the population however this is not necessarily the case if persons differ in the extent to which search deters crime it may be optimal to search a less crime prone group and not to search a more crime prone group if members of the former group are deterrable and those in the latter group are not sections i and ii consider ex ante search which apprehends offenders before their offenses cause social harm section iii performs parallel analysis for ex post search which apprehends offenders after completion of their offenses whereas ex ante search both deters and prevents crime ex post search only deters the two types of search have different implications for profiling policy although detection of discrimination is not my direct concern the findings reported here do have implications for that inferential problem the models studied in knowles et al 2001 and persico 2002 imply that in the absence of discrimination optimal profiling must equalize the offense rates of persons with different covariates provided that such persons are searched at all the present model differs from theirs and it does not produce their conclusion perhaps the most important difference is in the objective functions assumed for the agencies that make profiling policy they assume that police on the street aim to maximize the probability of successful searches minus the cost of performing searches i assume that a planner wants to minimize a social cost function with three components a the harm caused by completed offenses b the cost of punishing offenders who are apprehended and c the cost of performing searches

affirmative action in a competitive economy abstract we consider a model of endogenous human capital formation with competitively determined wages discrimination is sustainable in equilibrium in the presence of two distinguishable but ex ante identical groups of workers an affirmative action policy consisting of a quota may fail in the sense that there still may be equilibria where groups are treated differently however the incentives to invest for agents in the discriminated group are improved by affirmative action if the initial equilibrium is the most discriminatory equilibrium in the model without the policy the welfare effects are ambiguous it is possible that the policy makes the intended beneficiaries worse off even if the starting point is the most discriminatory equilibrium the expected payoff may decrease for all agents in the target group

whatever the customer wants the customer gets exploring the gap between consumer preferences and default electricity products in germany abstract in liberalized electricity markets residential customers can choose their preferred provider and select among a variety of different electricity products including green power options successful product design and marketing strategies for green electricity may provide electricity providers with a competitive advantage while at the same time contributing to energy policy objectives this requires however a thorough understanding of customer preferences we investigate the relative importance of different product attributes in creating customer value and find that price and electricity mix are the two most important attributes the german electricity customers we surveyed in 2009 expressed an implicit willingness to pay a premium of about 16 for electricity from renewable sources we conclude that consumers are willing to pay a significant price premium for an upgrade from the current default electricity mix in germany to a more environmentally friendly default electricity mix and discuss implications for marketing strategy and energy policy our findings are based on a dataset of 4968 experimental choices made by 414 german residential consumers collected in a stated preference survey

kyoto protocol implementation in serbia as precognition of sustainable energetic and economic development the paper gives reasons for low energy efficiency typical of the serbian economy which is based on outdated and dirty technologies the comparison of selected economic indicators and indicators of energy efficiency in both serbia and the european union points out the benefits of the kyoto protocol implementation due to the growth of competitiveness in the global market serbia has no obligation to reduce ghg emissions the authors point to the proposals whose implementation along with the mechanisms of the protocol can enable serbia the access to markets that trade ghg emissions and the access to dedicated funds self financing or attracting foreign investments to raise energy efficiency which will be accompanied by adequate economic benefits a similar principle can be applied in all countries that are not obliged to reduce ghg emissions the application of different mechanisms aiming to increase energy efficiency in serbia could contribute to the increase of gdp annual growth rate from 5 to 7 which cannot be achieved by any other economic instrument energy efficiency which is actually a question of competitiveness of each economy can finance itself through the mechanisms of the kyoto protocol by selling excess emissions resulting from improved energy efficiency

explaining demand for green electricity using data from all u s utilities abstract green electricity programs enable households to voluntarily contribute to the development of renewable electricity by purchasing green electricity through their local utility using a dataset of all utilities in the united states this paper explores the utility consumer and program characteristics that influence participation levels in green electricity as well as whether a utility chooses to offer a program among other results we find that the key determinants of program participation are the education of the consumer base and the affordability of the green electricity program our results enhance understanding of private provision of environmental public goods and could aid in ex ante evaluations of whether a green electricity program is likely to cover its administrative costs or be a cost effective way of improving environmental quality

green electricity markets as mechanisms of public goods provision theory and experimental evidence utility based green electricity programs provide market opportunities for consumers to reduce the carbon footprint of their electricity use these programs deploy three types of public goods contribution mechanisms voluntary contribution green tariff and all or nothing green tariff kotchen and moore 2007 we extend the theoretical understanding of the all or nothing green tariff mechanism by showing that an assumption of warm glow preferences is needed to explain widespread participation in programs deploying this mechanism we conduct the first experimental test to compare the revenue generating capacity of a pure public good based on the voluntary contribution mechanism and an impure public good based on the green tariff mechanism in experimental play the voluntary contribution mechanism raises 50 more revenue than the green tariff mechanism with the all or nothing green tariff experimental play and regression estimates show that a warm glow preference positively affects participation as predicted by the theory

the residential demand for electricity in australia an application of the bounds testing approach to cointegration this paper reports estimates of the long and short run elasticities of residential demand for electricity in australia using the bounds testing procedure to cointegration within an autoregressive distributive lag framework in the long run we find that income and own price are the most important determinants of residential electricity demand while temperature is significant some of the time and gas prices are insignificant our estimates of long run income elasticity and price elasticity of demand are consistent with previous studies although they are towards the lower end of existing estimates as expected the short run elasticities are much smaller than the long run elasticities and the coefficients on the error correction coefficients are small consistent with the fact that in the short run energy appliances are fixed

green electricity policies in the netherlands an analysis of policy decisions over the last decades fundamental changes can be observed in both market conditions and the national policy framework for green electricity in the netherlands the dutch government has regularly intervened in markets demonstrating fundamental shifts in policy and approach this study aims to analyse the developments in renewable energy policy making in the netherlands it assesses changes in the choice of policy instruments and target groups the role of stakeholders and offers explanations behind policy successes and failures dutch green electricity policy over the last decade can be characterised roughly by three phases in the early 1990s the government negotiated voluntary agreements with the energy distribution sector on targets for green electricity sales which were never met in the second half of the 1990s a regulatory energy tax was introduced from which customers of green electricity were exempt this led to a substantial increase in demand which was largely met by green electricity imports and did not lead to additional domestic renewable energy capacity finally a change in policy has taken place recently 2003 shifting the focus from promotion of demand to the promotion of supply through a system of regulated feed in tariffs despite the renewable energy policies growth of the renewable energy market in the netherlands has been small and targets have not been fully met the dutch government has not yet succeeded in substantially reducing market uncertainties and in building confidence among market parties because the policies have not been stable and policy objectives have frequently been partly ambiguous in addition the influence of stakeholders in renewable energy policy making has been small which has the early acceptance and implementation of alternative policies

foreign direct investment income and environmental pollution in developing countries panel data analysis of latin america abstract effects of foreign direct investment fdi and income on pollution emissions are examined using time series data from 1980 to 2010 for 14 latin american countries specifically we test the validity of pollution haven hypothesis phh and environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for this region results from panel fixed and random effects models that controlled the effects of physical capital energy human capital population density and unemployment rate indicate the validity of both the phh and ekc hypothesis estimating two separate models for high and low income countries does not alter the findings for the phh however the impacts of human capital on pollution emission are found to be different for the two groups of countries policies that focus on attracting clean and energy efficient industries through fdi have potential to improve environmental health while enhancing economic growth in latin america

green power voluntary purchases price elasticity and policy analysis abstract green power schemes offer electricity from renewable energy sources to customers for a higher price than ordinary electricity this study examines the demand characteristics of green power in australia and policies which could increase its sales a sample of 250 pooled time series and cross sectional observations was used to estimate a statistically significant elasticity of demand for green power with respect to price of 0 96 with a 95 confidence interval of 68 the wide variation in market penetration between jurisdictions and between countries for green power and the low awareness of green power found by surveys indicate that green power sales could be increased by appropriate marketing and government policies the most cost effective means to increase sales was found to be advertising campaigns although only one australian example was found in the state of victoria in 2005 it was also found that full tax deductibility of the green power premium to residential customers exemption from the goods and services tax and a tax rebate for green power are all probably less cost effective for promoting sales than direct government purchase of green power in terms of cost per unit of increased sales