the sustainable supply chain network competition with environmental tax policies abstract this paper captures different environmental tax policies in a multi tiered supply chain network competition context we derive the governing equilibrium conditions for the noncooperative game theory models for each firm and provide the equivalent variational inequality formulations the numerical examples investigate the impacts of emission tax policies and product differentiation on the competing firms and compare the effects of different environmental policies flat emission tax rates progressive emission taxes and the government command and control regulations with emission standards on equilibrium product demands prices total emissions and overall profits the computational results indicate that the implementation of environmental tax policies along with an increase in consumers environmental concerns can not only motivate the firms to perform sustainable operations but also reduce the total carbon footprint furthermore the low cost progressive emission tax policies can be as effective as the high flat emission tax rate in terms of reduction in carbon footprint therefore the model developed in this paper can be used by the policymakers and the firms to evaluate the effects of different environmental tax policies in a supply chain competition context

saving puzzles and saving policies in the united states in the past two decades the widely reported personal saving rate in the united states has dropped from double digits to below zero first we attempt to account for the decline in the national income and product accounts nipa saving rate the macroeconomic literature suggests that 40 50 per cent of the drop since 1988 can be attributed to households spending stock market capital gains another 30 per cent is accounting transfers from personal saving into government and corporate saving because of the way pensions and capital gains taxes are treated in the nipa second while nipa saving measures are well suited to measuring the supply of new funds for investment and capital accumulation it is not clear that they should be the target of government saving policies finally we emphasize that the nipa saving rate is not useful in judging whether households are preparing for retirement or other contingencies many households have accumulated significant wealth primarily through retirement saving vehicles and capital gains even as the saving rate slid there remains a segment of the population who save little and whose behaviour appears untouched either by the stock market boom or the slide in personal saving we explore reasons and policy options for their puzzling low saving rate copyright 2001 oxford university press

financial decision making and cognition in a family context in this paper we studied the association of cognitive traits and in particular numeracy of both spouses on financial outcomes of the family we found significant effects particularly for numeracy for financial and non financial respondents alike but much larger effects for the financial decision maker in the family we also examined who makes these financial decisions in the family and why once again cognitive traits such as numeracy were an important component of that decision with larger effects of numeracy for husbands compared to wives

the strategic bequest motive although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete we develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries actions the model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers we present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries

the estate tax and inter vivos transfers over time the strong dislike evidenced by the american public towards the estate tax suggests that the wealthy wish to transfer resources to their heirs tax free and would thus exploit mechanisms allowing them to reduce the tax burden whenever possible however i find strong evidence that the wealthy fail to utilize what is perhaps the simplest method of tax avoidance that of making transfers to eventual heirs up to the annual exclusion instead they transfer far less than the amount permitted by the tax code whether measured in cross section or over time in failing to give more they forgo significant tax savings

does wealth explain black white differences in early employment careers in this article i inquire about the effects initial wealth has on black white differences in early employment careers i set up a dynamic model in which individuals simultaneously search for a job and accumulate wealth and fit it to data from the national longitudinal survey 1979 cohort regime changes and decompositions of racial differences reveal that differences in the labor market environment and in preferences account fully for racial gaps in wealth and in wages persisting several years after high school graduation differences in initial wealth partially explain differences in early employment careers

financial knowledge and financial literacy at the household level there is evidence of a relation between numeracy and wealth held outside of pensions and social security with pensions and social security accounting for half of wealth at retirement and evidence that those with pensions save more in other forms one would expect to find knowledge of pensions and social security influencing retirement saving yet we find no evidence that knowledge of pensions and social security is related to nonpension non social security wealth to numeracy or that it plays an intermediate role in the numeracy wealth relation our findings raise questions about policies that would enhance numeracy to increase retirement saving

inter vivos transfers and bequests in three oecd countries reforms reducing the generosity of pensions have distributional effects on future generations if individuals care about their descendants welfare but only affect elderly individuals if bequests are the unintentional result of precautionary savings and safety net programmes such as unemployment insurance may displace sources of private help such as that provided by living parents to their children in need this paper provides comparable measures of how expected bequests and transfers vary with cumulated parental earnings in the united states west germany and the united kingdom the strength of bequest motives is empirically very weak in the available data private inter vivos transfers which appear to depend on the recipients economic situation are partly crowded out by public unemployment insurance programmes together involuntary bequests and intentional inter vivos transfers appear to be an important channel of intergenerational inequality transmission and strengthen substantially the relationship between an individual s and his parents economic status ernesto villanueva

racial disparities in life insurance coverage we evaluate the extent to which there are racial disparities in life insurance coverage using multiple years of the survey of income and program participation between 2001 and 2010 we find that african americans hold significantly more life insurance after controlling for other factors especially employer sponsored and whole life insurance we demonstrate that our findings diverge from prior work because we examine all households instead of focusing exclusively on married and cohabitating households the findings on life insurance coverage and composition imply that earnings shocks due to mortality are not a contributing factor to racial disparities in wealth

locus of control and savings abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between individuals locus of control and their savings behavior i e wealth accumulation savings rates and portfolio choices locus of control is a psychological concept that captures individuals beliefs about the causal relationship between their own behavior and life events we find that households with an internal reference person a main respondent who believes that he she can generally control relevant aspects of life save more in terms of levels and in some cases as a percentage of their permanent incomes although the locus of control gap in savings rates is largest among rich households the gap in wealth accumulation is particularly large for poor households finally our findings indicate that households with an internal reference person are in a better position to save in forms that are harder to access such as pension wealth than otherwise similar households with an external reference person

an econometric model of the two part decision process in the demand for health the decision to contact a physician and the decision about how often to contact a physician are determined by different decisionmakers we introduce a negative binomial distributed hurdle model that specifies the two stages of the decisionmaking process as different stochastic processes while at the same time taking care of the discrete nature of the data empirical results are based on a cross section of the west german socioeconomic panel specification tests reveal that the two stages of the process need to be treated as two distinct processes this in turn implies that ignoring this distinction leads to serious misinterpretation

new ways of looking at old issues inequality and growth abstract the paper uses new cross country data on income and asset land distribution to show that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset distribution and long term growth ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor but not for the rich and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the kuznets hypothesis policies that increase aggregate investment and facilitate acquisition of assets by the poor might thus be doubly beneficial for growth and poverty reduction

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

what makes a landlord ownership of real estate by us households households supply about three quarters of us rental housing the paper examines the real estate investment decision and the proportion of wealth invested in real estate hypotheses drawn primarily from the real estate finance literature about the role of wealth expected inflation human capital income tax rates race health risk aversion and inheritance are tested against data from the health and retirement study wealth has a powerful non linear effect on ownership of real estate but ownership is negatively associated with human capital marginal tax rates race and property gifts affect real estate investment poor health risk aversion and expected inflation do not seem to

who is more rational we report on the results of a large scale field experiment that enables us to test for consistency with utility maximizing behavior and to investigate the correlation between individual behavior and demographic and economic characteristics we conducted the experiment with the centerpanel a representative sample of over 2 000 dutch households using procedures similar to those used by choi et al 2007b in a setting with risk we find a high level of consistency in the individual level decisions there is also considerable heterogeneity in subjects consistency scores high income and high education subjects display greater levels of consistency men are more consistent than women and young subjects are more consistent than those who

exploring utopia limited with a companion for economic development the central importance of commercial law private enterprise and public infrastructure are undeniable yet trying to transplant such in situations when they are foreign can add political turmoil to economic stagnation drawing on the elgar companion to development studies 2006 this dilemma is explored with implications for the appropriate definition of institutions the meaning of property rights and the mechanisms of conflict resolution

why does the law of one price fail an experiment on index mutual funds we conduct an experiment to evaluate why individuals invest in high fee index funds in our experiments subjects allocate 10 000 across four s p 500 index funds and are rewarded for their portfolio s subsequent return subjects overwhelmingly fail to minimize fees we can reject the hypothesis that subjects buy high fee index funds because of bundled non portfolio services search costs for fees matter but even when we eliminate these costs fees are not minimized instead subjects place high weight on annualized returns since inception fees paid decrease with financial literacy interestingly subjects who choose high fee funds sense they are making a mistake

emission policies and their analysis for the design of hybrid and dedicated closed loop supply chains abstract government legislation and consumer awareness on carbon emissions have required industries to seek alternative ways to reorganize their supply chains therefore industries have to consider not only the activities in the forward supply chain but also in the reverse supply chain an integrated supply chain that combines the activities of both the forward and reverse supply chains is referred to as the closed loop supply chain clsc there are two main types of clsc structures hybrid and dedicated in this research we analyze the effect of carbon emissions consideration on the design of both hybrid and dedicated clscs in particular we develop a set of integrated mixed integer linear programming milp models to quantify and compare both of the environmental and economic impacts of carbon emissions policies carbon cap carbon tax and carbon cap and trade and market factors scale effect product return rate and the customer demand on the design of clscs with respect to both clsc structures our analysis shows that when market conditions are considered total cost and total emissions are more sensitive to customer demand than to the scale effect and the product return rate when an industry faces fluctuation on the quantity of the returned products adopting a dedicated clsc would lead to a lower total cost under cap and trade policy dedicated clsc can produce less total emissions we also observe that dedicated clsc is more cost efficient under carbon cap policy and hybrid clsc is more emissions efficient when the carbon tax is introduced

the effect of means tested income support for the elderly on pre retirement saving evidence from the ssi program in the u s abstract we attempt to draw inferences about behavioral responses to means tested income support for the elderly by examining the effects on saving of the supplemental security income ssi program for the aged in the u s part of this program provides payments to the poor elderly operating as a means tested public retirement program we exploit state level variation in ssi benefits to estimate the effects of ssi on saving using data from the 1984 survey of income program participation we find evidence that high ssi benefits reduce saving among households with heads who are approaching the ssi eligibility age and are likely participants in the program

racial and ethnic differences in wealth in the health and retirement study this paper examines wealth data in the health and retirement study hrs in comparison with asset data in other major surveys the quality of hrs asset data is high missing asset data does remain a problem however to which future hrs analysts must remain sensitive evidence is presented showing that it is no accident that asset data are missing and solutions for imputing missing data are developed finally racial and ethnic wealth disparities are large these minority wealth disparities are due in part to differential inheritances and desired bequests as inequities perpetuate themselves across generations the disparities are also due to lower minority incomes poorer health and an excessively narrow definition of wealth that excludes social security and employer pensions authors

does everyone use probabilities the role of cognitive skills what is the role of cognitive skills in decision making under uncertainty we address this question by examining the relationship between responses to survey questions about subjective probabilities of stock market returns and stock holding decisions based on data from the health and retirement study hrs we find that for individuals with lower cognitive skills the association between measured probabilities and decisions is weaker than for individuals with higher cognitive skills additional evidence suggests that individuals with lower cognitive skills are more likely to give heuristic answers to questions about stock return probabilities a likely explanation is that individuals with lower cognitive skills have a fuzzier mental representation of stock returns that cannot be captured by a unique well defined probability distribution in contrast individuals with higher cognitive skills are more likely to act as if subjective probabilities are meaningful measures of uncertainty we discuss whether or not the behavior of the latter can be seen as more rational

car ownership and the labor market of ethnic minorities we show how initial wealth differences between low skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor market outcomes this even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against ethnic minorities or exogenous differences in distance to jobs because of the initial wealth difference minorities cannot afford to buy a car while whites can car ownership allows whites to reach more jobs per unit of time which gives them a better bargaining position in the labor market as a result in equilibrium ethnic minorities end up with both higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites furthermore we also show that it takes more time for minorities to reach their jobs even though they travel less miles when employed those predictions are consistent with the data better access to capital markets or better public transportation will reduce the differences in labor market outcomes

the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transport by pooling supply chains it is well known that freight consolidation is an effective way to improve the utilization of logistics resources in fact today this policy is locally and fragmentally implemented at the operational level we propose here to explore the environmental impact of pooling of supply chains at the strategic level merging supply chains with real data from two main french retailers and through an optimization model we compute co2 emissions for two transport modes road and rail as regards the general dependency of the emissions produced by the modes of transport on their loads the emissions functions of the two modes are both piecewise linear and discontinuous functions the supply network pooling proposed here is an efficient approach to reducing co2 emissions even if the attention is focused on the emissions the transportation costs are also studied and analyzed

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

the eu 20 20 2020 targets an overview of the emf22 assessment three computable general equilibrium models are used to estimate the economic implications of a stylized version of eu climate policy if implemented at the lowest possible cost the 20 emissions reduction would lead to a welfare loss of 0 5 2 0 by 2020 second best policies increase costs a policy with two carbon prices one for the ets one for the non ets could increase costs by up to 50 a policy with 28 carbon prices one for the ets one each for each member state could increase costs by another 40 the renewables standard could raise the costs of emissions reduction by 90 overall the inefficiencies in policy lead to a cost that is 100 125 too high the models differ greatly in the detail of their results the ets non ets split may have a negligible impact on welfare while the renewables standard may even improve welfare the models agree however that the distortions introduced by total eu package imply a substantial welfare loss over and above the costs needed to meet the climate target the marginal total and excess costs reported here are notably higher than those in the impact assessment of the european commission

the transition to home ownership and the black white wealth gap this paper analyzes differences in the likelihood that black and white families become homeowners by following a sample of black and white renters over time we are able to separately study racial differences in the likelihood of applying for a mortgage and in the likelihood that a mortgage application is accepted although its effect on the race gap in housing transitions is small we find strong evidence that black applicants are almost twice as likely as comparable white households to be rejected even when credit history proxies and measures of household wealth are accounted for we show that the housing transition gap exists primarily because blacks are less likely to apply for mortgages in the first place the analysis suggests that differences in income family structure and in the ability and willingness of parents to provide down payment assistance are the primary reasons for this applications gap we speculate that the portion of the gap that remains unexplained after controlling for income d

do newly retired workers in the united states have sufficient resources to maintain well being a current policy issue is the extent to which savings are sufficient to sustain economic well being in retirement we compare annuitized wealth at retirement to three preretirement consumption estimates about one half of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable the full maintenance of estimated preretirement consumption in retirement and about 40 fail to meet the 0 7 of earnings standard that is used in many studies using standards reflecting social poverty norms we find a less serious problem about 5 25 of new retirees have insufficient resources to enable an above poverty near poverty level of living during retirement jel j14 j26

closed loop supply chain network design with multiple transportation modes under stochastic demand and uncertain carbon tax abstract we optimize the design of a closed loop supply chain network that encompasses flows in both forward and reverse directions and is subject to uncertainty in demands for both new and returned products the model also accommodates a carbon tax with tax rate uncertainty the proposed model is a three stage hybrid robust stochastic program that combines probabilistic scenarios for the demands and return quantities with uncertainty sets for the carbon tax rates the first stage decisions are facility investments the second stage concerns the plan for distributing new and collecting returned products after realization of demands and returns and the numbers of transportation units of various modes are the third stage decisions the second and third stage decisions may adjust to the realization of the carbon tax rate for computational tractability we restrict them to be affine functions of the carbon tax rate benders cuts are generated using recent duality developments for robust linear programs computational results show that adjusting product flows to the tax rate provides negligible benefit but the ability to adjust transportation mode capacities can substitute for building additional facilities as a way to respond to carbon tax uncertainty

carbon pricing versus emissions trading a supply chain planning perspective abstract carbon pricing taxes and carbon emissions trading are two globally practiced carbon regulatory policy schemes this paper presents an analytical supply chain planning model that can be used to examine the supply chain performance at the tactical operational planning level under these two policy schemes model implementation and analyses are completed using actual data from a company operating in australia where these environmental regulatory policies are practiced numerical results provide important managerial and practical implications and policy insights in particular the results show that there are inflection points where both carbon pricing and trading schemes could influence costs or emissions reductions an erratic nonlinear emissions reduction trend is observed in a carbon pricing scheme as the carbon price increases steadily whereas emissions reduction in a carbon trading scheme follows a relatively linear trend with a nonlinear cost increase overall a carbon trading mechanism although imperfect appears to result in better supply chain performance in terms of emissions generation cost and service level even though a carbon tax may be more worthwhile from an uncertainty perspective as emissions trading costs depend on numerous uncertain market conditions

black white differences in wealth and asset composition using data from the 1976 and 1978 national longitudinal surveys of young men and young women this study examines racial differences in the magnitude and composition of wealth and the reasons for them on average young black families hold 18 percent of the wealth of young white families and hold their wealth in proportionately different forms even after controlling for racial differences in income and other demographic factors as much as three quarters of the wealth gap remains unexplained we speculate on the causes for this concluding that racial differences in intergenerational transfers and to a lesser extent barriers to the accumulation of business and home equity most likely play a role

the impact of carbon pricing on a closed loop supply chain an australian case study concerns about industrial and supply chain implications on our natural environment have existed for decades climate change and greenhouse gas emissions have caused countries to implement various instruments ranging from taxes permits and voluntary incentives to required regulatory policies given this environment we develop a unified optimization model for a closed loop supply chain in which the carbon emission is expressed in terms of dollar carbon cost this study is one of the first to evaluate the forward and reverse supply chain influences on the carbon footprint a comparative analysis is completed with a decomposition of cost and environmental influences across supply chain functions we utilize data from a company located in australia where the government is currently introducing a carbon pricing scheme we find that variations in cost and environmental impacts occur over ranges of carbon pricing characteristics and patterns of the numerical results over these ranges provide insights for corporate key strategies and potential additional government policies these results and implications are analyzed along with limitations and directions for future research

cognitive ability and bidding behavior in second price auctions an experimental study behavioral biases are more pronounced for individuals with lower cognitive abilities this paper examines what connection if any there is between cognitive ability and bidding strategy in second price auctions despite truthful revelation being a weakly dominant strategy previous experiments have consistently observed overbidding which makes use of such auctions for inferring homegrown value problematic examining the effect of cognitive ability is important as it may help identify when one can reliably recover values from bids the results indicate that more cognitively able subjects behave in closer accordance with theory and that cognitive ability partially explains heterogeneity in bidding behavior

match bias in wage gap estimates due to earnings imputation about 30 of workers in the current population survey have earnings imputed wage gap estimates are biased toward zero when the attribute being studied e g union status is not a criterion used to match donors to nonrespondents an expression for match bias is derived in which attenuation equals the sum of match error rates attenuation can be approximated by the proportion with imputed earnings union wage gap estimates with match bias removed are presented for 1973 2001 estimates for recent years are biased downward 5 percentage points bias in gap estimates accompanying other non match criteria public sector industry etc is examined

saving risk sharing and preferences for risk saving decisions are made jointly by household members who generally earn risky incomes consequently to interpret saving patterns it is crucial to analyze the relationship between intrahousehold risk sharing and intertemporal choices to that end in this paper the household is characterized as a group of agents with possibly heterogeneous preferences making efficient decisions two results are obtained first it is shown that risk sharing can increase the amount saved by the household second i find that an increase in risk aversion and prudence of an individual member can reduce household risk aversion and prudence these results are consistent with the empirical evidence collected using the hrs

for richer for poorer assortative mating and savings preferences do couples share the same values the social sciences have mainly concentrated on comparing the socioeconomic characteristics of spouses but rarely consider their attitudes to risk and time in this paper we use conventional measurements and an original method of scoring we find that spouses are very similar in their savings preferences even when we control for the individual characteristics our results suggest that most of this relationship comes from marital sorting these conclusions are decisive in explaining the decision process within households and its implications for wealth inequalities between households since homogamy causes a divide in the population

north s institutionalism and the prospect of combining theoretical approaches the distinction between new and old institutional economics may be unhelpful in depicting those theorists who defy clear categorisation one such writer is douglass north who is associated with the new institutionalism but who deviates from the neoclassical principles which supposedly form the foundations of this school the paper analyses his work to show how he combines both mainstream and alternative ideas in attempting to reconcile individual agency with social structure north suggests that institutions provide the constraints under which decisions are made but that individuals and organisations can alter those constraints while his work is an attempt to advance interdisciplinary research it fails to provide a fully integrated theoretical approach

how does household portfolio diversification vary with financial literacy and financial advice household investment mistakes are an important concern for researchers and policymakers alike portfolio underdiversification ranks among those mistakes that are potentially most costly however its roots and empirical importance are poorly understood i estimate quantitatively meaningful diversification statistics and investigate their relationship with key variables nearly all households that score high on financial literacy or rely on professionals or private contacts for advice achieve reasonable investment outcomes compared to these groups households with below median financial literacy that trust their own decision making capabilities lose an expected 50 bps on average all group differences stem from the top of the loss distribution