taking account of governance implications for land use dynamics food prices and trade patterns deforestation mainly caused by unsustainable agricultural expansion results in a loss of biodiversity and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions as well as impinges on local livelihoods countries governance performance particularly with respect to property rights security exerts significant impacts on land use patterns by affecting agricultural yield related technological investment and cropland expansion this study aims to incorporate governance factors into a recursive agro economic dynamic model to simulate governance impacts on land use patterns at the global scale due to the difficulties of including governance indicators directly into numerical models we use lending interest rates as discount rates to reflect risk accounting factors associated with different governance scenarios in addition to a reference scenario three scenarios with high low and mixed divergent discount rates are formed to represent weak strong and fragmented governance we find that weak governance leads to slower yield growth increased cropland expansion and associated deforestation mainly in latin america sub saharan africa south asia and southeast asia this is associated with increasing food prices particularly in sub saharan africa and southeast asia by contrast strong governance performance provides a stable political and economic situation which may bring down deforestation rates stimulate investment in agricultural technologies and induce fairly strong decreases in food prices

corruption trade and resource conversion abstract recent evidence suggests that special interest groups significantly affect tropical deforestation through lobbying we develop an open economy model in which resource conversion is determined by a self interested government that is susceptible to the influences of the political contributions it receives from the profit maximizing economic agent responsible for land conversion we investigate the effects of lobbying on the cumulative level of resource conversion and examine how trade policy influences the distortions created by political corruption we derive testable predictions that are analyzed through a panel analysis of cumulative agricultural land expansion over 1960 99 for low and middle income tropical countries our findings suggest that increased corruption and resource dependency directly promote land conversion whereas rising terms of trade reduce conversion

the economics of tropical deforestation and land use an introduction to the special issue this paper both introduces the special issue on the economics of tropical deforestation and land use and conducts a synthesis crosscountry analysis of tropical agricultural land expansion agricultural development is the main factor determining land expansion but institutional factors have an important influence income effects vary from region to region and do not always display an ekc relationship the case studies comprising this special issue provide further case study insights into tropical deforestation and land use through spatial analysis of locational factors cge modeling of policy scenarios assessing external market impacts on land clearing and modelling state interventions and taxation

environmental depletion governance and conflict t he link between natural resource dependence and internal conflict has been approached from a variety of angles in a large and growing interdisciplinary literature while there is an expanding consensus as to what matters the most for such intra state violence episodes the feasibility discontent dichotomy still appears to characterize a disciplinary divide between economists and political scientists this paper attempts to help bridge the gap by allowing for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of potential rebels simple non cooperative bargaining yields a nonlinear impact of regulatory quality on the likelihood of conflict and shows that corruption and resource depletion jointly affect the outcome the empirical analysis that follows looks at the effect of environmental depletion and government corruption on the emergence of civil conflicts using a large panel dataset resource depletion the quality of governance and their interaction are found to be significant determinants of civil conflict incidence results are robust to several steps taken to address potential endogeneity concerns

unemployment insurance and male unemployment duration in canada a model of unemployment duration is estimated with weekly micro data on canadian men entitlement provisions in the unemployment insurance program and demand conditions are found to have a significant effect on the probability of leaving unemployment the probability of a worker leaving unemployment declines with the duration of unemployment holding unemployment insurance entitlement constant when entitlement is allowed to vary the probability of leaving first falls and then generally rises with unemployment duration these results are robust with respect to allowing for person specific unobserved heterogeneity and alternative specifications of duration dependence

governance and timber harvests resource economics theory implies that risks associated with weak governance have an ambiguous impact on extraction with the net impact depending on the relative strengths of depletion and investment effects previous empirical studies have found that improved governance tends to reduce deforestation but to raise oil production here we present evidence that the marginal impact of improved governance on timber harvests in developing countries during 1984 2006 was nonmonotonic it tended to raise harvests in countries with weaker governance but to reduce harvests in countries with stronger governance this nonmonotonic impact occurred for both an index of governmental integrity corruption bureaucracy quality law and order and an index of governmental stability a simulation of hypothetical increases in these governance indices to the maximum 2006 values observed in the sample predicted that improved governance would reduce harvests in most countries but could raise harvests in some with large increases occurring in countries with the weakest governance

bayesian semiparametric estimation of discrete duration models an application of the dirichlet process prior this paper proposes a bayesian estimator for a discrete time duration model which incorporates a non parametric specification of the unobserved heterogeneity distribution through the use of a dirichlet process prior this estimator offers distinct advantages over the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator of this model first it allows for exact finite sample inference second it is easily estimated and mixed with flexible specifications of the baseline hazard an application of the model to employment duration data from the canadian province of new brunswick is provided copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

an empirical analysis of forest transition and land use change in developing countries abstract deforestation is a major environmental issue in developing countries and agricultural land expansion is its main cause the objective of this paper is twofold 1 to identify the macroeconomic determinants of ending deforestation and 2 to explain cumulative deforestation and other land uses to do this we first study the probability of a turning point for deforestation i e the switch from decreasing to expanding forest areas based on the forest transition hypothesis second we adapt a land use model to explain the trade off between forest and agriculture during development to take the link between both phenomena into account we estimate a dynamic panel seemingly unrelated regression sur model along with a switching regression model applied to a dataset of 57 developing countries observed over four time periods the estimation results reveal that economic development and institutions play a significant role in long term deforestation our results also suggest that after the first development stage agriculture and forest are not always competing land uses these results provide new insights into public policies such as redd

employment spells and unemployment insurance eligibility requirements in this paper we examine whether the requirements that workers must satisfy to qualify for unemployment insurance ui benefits in any succeeding period of joblessness affect the duration of employment spells this behavioral consequence of a ui system has been neglected in empirical research which has instead focused on the effects of ui parameters on the actions of the unemployed the effect is identified by a unique change in the eligibility requirements of the canadian ui system in 1990 which increased the weeks of employment required to establish ui eligibility we provide a variety of estimates of this behavioral effect in our preferred set of results we find a significant increase in the employment hazard in the week that an individual satisfies the eligibility requirement in many regions of the country in the spirit of feldstein s 1976 study of temporary layoffs the results provide new evidence of the impact of ui system parameters on the actions of employers and workers

how does the benefit effect vary as unemployment spells lengthen summary this paper investigates how the effect of income while unemployed on the probability of an individual leaving unemployment varies with the length of time that the individual has been unemployed we examine this question in the context of a variety of alternative econometric models we extend the proportional hazards model with unrestricted baseline hazard to one in which there are unrestricted effects of a subset of the explanatory variables and also consider models that can be estimated as series of binary response models the proportional hazard restrictions are rejected for the sample of british unemployed men analysed and in the binary sequence framework logit and probit models based on symmetric distributions dominate in likelihood terms the extreme value form model implied by extension of the proportional hazards formulation logit models with a flexible form for the duration dependence which also incorporate unobserved heterogeneity in a flexible way are estimated the results for all formulations indicate a rapidly declining effect of unemployment income as a spell lengthens with no significant effect for the long term unemployed the preferred specifications which allow for omitted heterogeneity indicate no significant effect after about 5 months and this result is robust to the inclusion or exclusion of previous labour market experience variables and to the choice of mixing distribution

high school completion and future youth unemployment new evidence from high school and beyond in this paper i provide new evidence from high school and beyond hsb on the effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion and future youth unemployment i develop bayesian estimation approaches to the simultaneous equation model with ordered probit and two limit censored regression and the bivariate duration model accounting for the heterogeneity in returns to education and the nonlinearity in the effects of compulsory attendance i find substantial variability in returns to education across schools and evidence of diminishing marginal effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion the simulation results suggest that increasing the compulsory attendance age raises the probability of completing high school and reduces the proportion of time the individuals are unemployed these effects are much more pronounced for disadvantaged students but less pronounced for advantaged students suggesting the potential effects of compulsory attendance on reducing the inequality in education and employment copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

defining spatial housing submarkets exploring the case for expert delineated boundaries although there are numerous reasons for real estate analysts to construct spatial housing submarkets there is little clarity about how this might best be done in practice the existing literature offers a variety of techniques including those based on principal components analysis cluster analysis and a range of other statistical procedures this paper asks whether given their market expertise and their role in disseminating information shaping search patterns and informing bid formation real estate agents might offer an effective but less data intensive method of submarket construction the empirical research is based on an experiment that compares the predictive of different sets of submarket boundaries constructed by using either standard statistical methods or through consultation with real estate agents and other market analysts the analysis draws on housing transactions data from istanbul turkey while the results do not demonstrate the outright superiority of any single method they do suggest that expert defined boundaries tend to perform at least as well as alternative construction techniques importantly the results suggest that agent based methods for delineating submarket boundaries might be used with a degree of confidence by real estate analysts and planners in market contexts where rich micro datasets are not readily available this has been one of the constraints internationally on wider adoption of submarket boundaries as an analytical tool

unemployment insurance and job duration in canada we use data from the canadian 2 year longitudinal labour market activity survey of 1986 87 to estimate the effect of the unemployment insurance ui system on job duration particular attention is focused on the entrance requirements of the ui system which relate eligibility for ui benefits to an individual s recent employment history the article makes operational the ui entrance requirement provisions which take into account variations in the regional unemployment rate controlling for many personal and job characteristics we find evidence that a significant number of jobs terminate when they have reached the duration that would permit a ui claim

the political economy of trade liberalization and environmental policy a pressure group model where environmental and industry lobby groups offer political support in return for favorable pollution tax policies is used to explain and predict the equilibrium pollution tax in sectors protected by tariffs the political economy effects of trade liberalization are investigated the pollution tax is shown to decrease if the lobbying effort by the environmental lobby decreases more rapidly than by the industry lobby ceteris paribus the level of political conflict falls with trade liberalization pollution may increase because of a reduction of the pollution tax and tax revenues may fall simultaneously as pollution increases the global trading system is currently undergoing another round of multilateral trade liberalization and regional economic integration is occurring in several parts of the world the trade environment link has become an important part of trade liberalization talks it is commonplace for industry representatives to argue that less stringent environmental regulations give less developed countries ldcs a comparative advantage in pollution intensive goods and that industries with high abatement costs will migrate to ldcs environmentalists argue that international differences in environmental laws and regulations may be reduced to their lowest common denominator through political pressure this is not a fear of trade liberalization itself but of the effects of lower trade barriers on the political determination of environmental regulation

a bayesian semiparametric competing risk model with unobserved heterogeneity this paper generalizes existing econometric models for censored competing risks by introducing a new flexible specification based on a piecewise linear baseline hazard time varying regressors and unobserved individual heterogeneity distributed as an infinite mixture of generalized inverse gaussian gig densities nesting the gamma kernel as a special case a common correlated latent time effect induces dependence among risks our model is based on underlying latent exit decisions in continuous time while only a time interval containing the exit time is observed as is common in economic data we do not make the simplifying assumption of discretizing exit decisions our competing risk model setup allows for latent exit times of different risk types to be realized within the same time period in this setting we derive a tractable likelihood based on scaled gig laplace transforms and their higher order derivatives we apply our approach to analyzing the determinants of unemployment duration with exits to jobs in the same industry or a different industry among unemployment insurance recipients on nationally representative individual level survey data from the us department of labor our approach allows us to conduct a counterfactual policy experiment by changing the replacement rate we find that the impact of its change on the probability of exit from unemployment is inelastic copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

corruption and the political economy of resource based development a comparison of asia and sub saharan africa we model how the supply and demand for bribes affects resource use by an economy and the reinvestment of resource rents in other assets this requires adjusting the world bank s measure adjusted net savings for any rent dissipation due to corruption the impacts of corruption on long run changes and periodic growth in the adjusted net savings rate are estimated across african and asian economies from 1970 to 2003 corruption rather than resource dependency per se affects negatively the ability of african countries to reinvest resource rents in the short term but for asian countries corruption is less important than point resources corruption influences long run growth in adjusted net savings rates in all countries and is also the pathway through which this growth is affected by patterns of resource use trade and abundance

when the weak win the role of investment in environmental lobbying abstract old and environmentally damaging industries often lobby effectively for less stringent regulations and are slow to adopt new and cleaner technologies this paper explains the lobbying success of these industries in terms of the strategic role of investment as a credible commitment device it is demonstrated that if governments are predisposed to special interest groups underinvestment in new technology enables firms to lobby more effectively such industries are shown to be better placed to extract policy concessions despite contributing less to the government in political donations the analysis therefore suggests that political considerations may provide a significant incentive for firms to reject environmentally beneficial investments even when these lower production costs

cleaning up while cleaning up pollution abatement interest groups and contingent trade policies this paper analyzes the political economy of environmental policy formation in a trading economy with established rules for administered protection we argue that the social costs associated with the adoption of an inefficient environmental regime are likely to be compounded by induced restrictions on trade when the effected industries are import competing the preferences of interest groups for alternative environmental regimes tend to be linked to the legal institutional setting in which trade policy is conducted under existing rules and practices in the area of administered protection there is reason to believe that interest group preferences for an inefficient approach to pollution control will be strengthened because the adoption of such a regime is more likely to lead to a concomitant increase in trade barriers

deforestation and agricultural productivity in the cote d ivoire an optimal control model is used to determine the optimal steady state forest stock in the cote d ivoire this stock is shown to increase with increases in the forestry returns relative to those in agriculture technological progress in agriculture and increases in the social discount rate serve to lower the optimal steady state forest stock based on an estimated aggregate yield function the optimal forest stock is shown to be most sensitive to changes in the social rate of discount assuming current 1985 technology deforestation appears socially optimal only for values of the discount rate greater than 8

the effects of public policy on strike duration hazard function estimates are utilized to analyze the effect of numerous public policy variables on strike duration based on 7 546 strikes in canada between 1967 and 1985 we find that only the mandatory strike vote substantially reduced conditional duration however the policy variables generally had a more favorable effect on reducing strike incidence so that on net they tended to reduce unconditional duration incidence times conditional duration specifically reduced unconditional duration was associated with the existence of conciliation and the requirement of a mandatory strike vote but the prohibition on replacement workers had a perverse effect