how to best ensure remuneration for creators in the market for music copyright and its alternatives the focus of this essay is to examine the market for copyrighted works with a particular emphasis on the sound recording market this market is currently in a state of flux some would say disarray due to the ability of the internet to lower transmission costs for both authorized and unauthorized copies with the latter being at this time far more prevalent in this essay we discuss the intent of copyright the role of copying and file sharing and some alternative production consumption schemes meant to strengthen or to replace copyright

assessing income population and technology impacts on co2 emissions in canada where s the ekc abstract this study investigates the macroeconomic forces underlying carbon dioxide co2 emissions from fossil fuel use in canada in keeping with the relevant literature on environmental degradation three forces are expected to influence co2 emissions gross domestic product per capita gdp capita population and technological change while previous work has employed reduced form models that allow for non linear relationships between co2 and gdp capita it has been common practice to assume linear relationships between co2 and the latter two variables this study tests a more flexible model using a five region panel data set in canada over the period 1970 2000 findings indicate that gdp capita is unrelated to co2 that an inverted u shaped relationship exists with population and that a u shaped relationship exists with technology thus technological and population changes are supported over the commonly hypothesized environmental kuznets curve an inverted u shaped relationship between gdp capita and environmental degradation for affecting co2 emissions from fossil fuel use in canada

endogenous growth and the possibility of eliminating pollution abstract this paper studies the effect on optimal growth of the possibility that at some moment in the future a technology is discovered that eliminates pollution we formalize this possibility as a probability p per unit of time of discovering such a technology we focus on steady state behavior and show that the optimal rate of growth increases with the hope of eliminating pollution for an economy where there is no growth in the steady state of the optimal trajectory when p 0 a positive p may imply positive growth the higher the value of the probability the larger the endogenous rate of growth

pollution abatement and balanced growth the analysis of endogenous growth models with pollution often concentrates on steady state trajectories under the assumption that the steady state is in some sense stable in the present note we provide examples showing that this issue should be dealt with carefully we use the rebelo ak model augmented with a stock of pollutants causing a negative externality it is found that optimal growth is not necessarily balanced contrary to the outcome of the standard rebelo model moreover the existence of the externality may affect long run optimal growth rates

technological vs ecological switch and the environmental kuznets curve we consider an optimal technology adoption ak model in line with boucekkine krawczyk and vallee 2011 an economy caring about consumption and pollution as well starts with a given technological regime and may decide to switch at any moment to a cleaner technology at a given permanent or transitory output cost at the same time we posit that there exists a pollution threshold above which the assimilation capacity of nature goes down featuring a kind of irreversible ecological regime we study how ecological irreversibility interacts with the ingredients of the latter optimal technological switch problem with a special attention to induced capital pollution relationship we find that if a single technological switch is optimal one recovers the environmental kuznets curve provided initial pollution is high enough if exceeding the ecological threshold is optimal then the latter configuration is far from being the rule

beyond the hype intellectual property and the knowledge society knowledge economy this paper explores the debates surrounding whether or not we have now moved into a new knowledge economy andsor knowledge society and if so whether this shift is as significant and as far reaching as the industrial revolution in this possible transformation the place of information communications technologies has been crucial debate has occurred across both economics and sociology with differing emphases as is shown in the ranges of definitions that we review in the paper one consistent factor is the lack of clarity and consistency between them both within and across the disciplines in order to explore the issues that the debates raises in a more grounded way the paper explores them in relation to intellectual property ip and the intellectual commons in the process of innovation growth and economic development the paper is developed through an analysis first of the industrial revolution and the role within this of uncertainty technologies complementarities and elective affinities and the way ip was protected and controlled through patents secrecy being first to the market and copyright the second part of the paper examines definitions of the knowledge economy and society and the role within these of information communication technologies in order to explore whether the ways that ip is protected and controlled have changed in the debate about the knowledge economy and society the role of innovation via human capital with a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities has been emphasized the role of ip thus remains central but is now challenged by the rise of new forms of communication which make its protection harder and move much of the concern with respect to regulation to a global rather than national and local level copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

vector autoregression cointegration and causality testing for causes of the british industrial revolution the existence timing and possible causes of the british industrial revolution are considered by investigating the time series properties of industrial production and various explanatory variables utilising two types of robust cointegration based causality tests we argue that domestic forces notably technological progress shaped the industrial revolution whereas overseas trade expansion was mainly a consequence of industrial growth results from granger type var tests are contrasted with those of toda and phillips working paper 91 07 university of western australia 1991b where the latter manifest some of the potential problems raised by the authors when applied to a data set of this type an understanding of the possible causes of the first industrial revolution may shed more general light on the forces promoting industrialization and growth to the extent that the first industrial revolution offers a template exports appear not to provide a simple pathway to industrialization

is trade good or bad for the environment sorting out the causality we seek to contribute to the debate over globalization and the environment by asking what is the effect of trade on a country s environment for a given level of gdp we take specific account of the endogeneity of trade using exogenous geographic determinants of trade as instrumental variables we find that trade tends to reduce three measures of air pollution statistical significance is high for concentrations of so2 moderate for no2 and lacking for particulate matter although results for other environmental measures are not as encouraging there is little evidence that trade has a detrimental effect on the environment

the fate of easter island the limits of resource management institutions abstract malthus malthus thomas 1798 1970 an essay on the principle of population penguin new york believed that population growth will eventually lead to natural resource depletion economic and social collapse and population decline brander and taylor brander james a taylor m scott 1998 the simple economics of easter island a ricardo malthus model of renewable resource use american economic review 88 119 138 use a predator prey model with an assumption of an open access resource they show that the collapse of easter island could be explained by a malthusian trap combined with technical characteristics of the resources they suggest that institutional change such as assignment of property rights could potentially have averted the collapse of easter island in this paper we show that even if the islanders had complete assignment of property rights and implemented optimal resource management with infinite horizon or equivalently had a social planner that implemented such an optimal plan as in neoclassical welfare economics a similar boom bust cycle would have occurred

does improved environmental policy enhance economic growth the environmental impacts on an economy is studied over time using endogenous growth theory externalities from the environment on production are central in the analysis and we examine whether an optimal path realizes more rapid economic growth the paper focuses mainly on developing countries where production is largely influenced by the environmental quality the result of the analysis indicates that the economic growth rate may not depend on the internalization of the environmental externality but rather on the internalization of the human capital externality the level of economic activity however generally seems to depend on the internalization of both externalities

rent dissipation through electricity prices of publicly owned utilities a public choice model is presented in order to explain the fact that publicly owned electricity utilities rarely price at marginal cost in practice it is shown that if i government revenues are raised through proportional taxes ii median income is less than mean income and iii the share of a consumer s spending on electricity decreases with income then the price resulting from a majority rule and universal voting is below marginal cost the determination of a fixed subscription fee is also considered empirical evidence of our results is obtained from pricing and consumption data for hydro qu6bec

environmental policy and growth when inputs are differentiated in pollution intensity environmental policy affects the distribution of market shares if intermediate goods are differentiated in their pollution intensity when innovations are environment friendly a tax on emissions skews demand towards new goods which are the most productive in this case the tax has to increase along a balanced growth path to keep the market shares of goods of different vintages constant comparing balanced growth paths we find that tightening the policy stance spurs innovation because it increases the market share of recent vintages and promotes environment friendly technological progress as a result the cost of environmental policy in terms of slower growth is weaker

on a clear day you might see an environmental kuznets curve we shed some new light on the environmental kuznets curve ekc and show how it can be viewed as a particular form of equilibrium relationship where technology and preference parameters determine the shape of the curve in contrast to most of the literature on the ekc we estimate a theoretically consistent model on long run data swedish sulfur emission covering the period 1900 2002 furthermore we test and date structural change the model suggests four regimes 1900 1918 1919 1933 1934 1967 and 1968 2002 generating four rather different patterns for pollution over time the policy conclusions are consonant with pearce s general view about the ekc there is no theoretical presumption that it has an inverted u shape nor should any country try to grow out of the environmental problems without analyzing the benefits and costs of so doing

the impact of economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan abstract this paper investigates the relationship between the economic growth and co2 emissions in azerbaijan a cointegration analysis is conducted over the period 1992 2013 for getting more robust results johansen ardlbt dols fmols and ccr methods are employed to explore cointegration and estimate long run coefficients we use cubic quadratic and linear specifications and conclude that the last one is an adequate representation for the impact of the economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan the results from the different cointegration methods are consistent with each other and show that the economic growth has a positive and statistically significant impact on the emissions in the long run implying that the ekc hypothesis does not hold for azerbaijan the income elasticity of co2 emissions using different methods is found to be between 0 7 and 0 8 moreover we find that any short run imbalance can be adjusted towards the long run equilibrium path within less than one year the paper concludes that measures to increase energy efficiency carbon pricing instruments in production and international domestic trade activities and nationwide social awareness programs to instruct about the negative consequences of pollution can be considered as relevant environmental policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions

multiple equilibria in a stochastic implementation of dice with abrupt climate change abstract integrated assessment modeling of global climate change has focused primarily on gradually occurring changes in the climate system however atmospheric and earth scientists have become increasingly concerned that the climate system may be subject to abrupt discontinuous changes on short time scales and that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions could trigger such shifts incorporating this type of climate dynamics into economic or integrated assessment models can result in model non convexity and multiple equilibria and thus complicate policy analysis relative to models with unique globally optimal policies using a version of the nordhaus dice model amended in previous research by keller et al 2004 keller klaus benjamin m bolker david f bradford 2004 uncertain climate thresholds and optimal economic growth journal of environmental economics and management 48 1 723 741 in conjunction with a stochastic global optimization algorithm we generate level sets of solutions which helps identify multiple equilibria resulting from the potential abrupt cessation of the north atlantic thermohaline circulation we discuss the implications of this model geometry for formulating greenhouse gas abatement policy under uncertainty and suggest that this general approach may be useful for addressing a wide range of model non convexities including those related to endogenous technological change

residential energy demand an integrated two levels approach abstract previous studies of residential energy demand in canada have relied on the top down or two levels approach at the first level total energy demand measured in thermal units is made a function of its relative price real income and other explanatory variables at the second level energy market shares depend on energy sources relative prices the aggregate energy price is the link between the two levels the measurement of energy consumption in terms of energy equivalence introduces systematic biases in aggregate energy price and income elasticities in this paper we adopt the two levels approach but abandon measurement of energy use in terms of energy equivalence the presence of an explanatory variable other than energy sources prices in the energy unit cost function brings the integration of the two levels at the estimation stage wood is included as a separate fuel along with electricity oil and natural gas the model is applied to quebec residential sector the main results are as follows first quebec aggregate residential energy demand is found to be price and income inelastic second electricity and oil own price elasticities are less than one however they are above one for natural gas and wood third gross substitution prevails among the four energy sources and fourth the expansion of the national gas distribution network contributed to a lower aggregate energy price

efficient dynamic pollution taxation in an uncertain environment this paper analyzes efficient pollution taxation within a stochastic model of endogenous growth pollution is a by product of production and causes disutility furthermore the productivity which results from environmental quality is uncertain this reflects e g uncertain capital depreciation induced by natural disasters like hurricanes or floods this uncertainty is shown to raise an ambiguous impact on the optimal pollution level as well as on optimal environmental taxation market equilibrium turns out to be suboptimal since the households mis perceive their individual impact on pollution conditions for welfare maximizing pollution taxation are stated and it is shown that a direct pollution tax is not appropriate to yield pareto optimal growth instead a linear capital income tax together with a linear abatement subsidy build an efficient tax scheme if secondarily the governmental budget is balanced moreover an increase in the riskiness of environmental productivity may even lead to an increase in the optimal pollution level and to a decrease in optimal environmental taxation depending predominantly on the preference parameters

the environmental kuznets curve and equilibrium indeterminacy abstract we illustrate that the existence of the environmental kuznets curve ekc could be the result of indeterminacy of equilibria in a simple neoclassical growth model with a single environmental externality in households utility function and with public abatement we characterize the condition on the parameters in preferences and in the pollution technology leading to local indeterminacy of equilibrium estimates of the crucial parameters of the model using data from economies that display the ekc satisfy the theoretical indeterminacy condition we find that the presence of abatement activities is not a necessary condition for indeterminacy equilibria and hence an ekc to arise on the other hand non separability of consumption and pollution in the utility function is crucial

what s in a sign trademark law and economic theory the aim of this paper is to summarize the extant theory as it relates to the economics of trademark and to give some suggestions for further research with reference to distinct streams of literature the proposed line of study inevitably looks at the complex relationship between signs and economics copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

copyright and artists a view from cultural economics most of the standard economic literature on copyright ignores a number of aspects that have considerable significance for cultural production and for artists the primary creators of copyright works the supply of which copyright is supposed to stimulate specifically there is little mention in that literature of moral rights no distinction is made between copyright for authors and neighbouring rights for performers the distributional effects of copyright are barely referred to and the question of how much artists earn from copyright is ignored in this article i survey work that relates copyright and cultural economics showing that cultural economics offers another view to the standard economics of copyright moreover the case for government intervention in the arts and heritage made by cultural economists has resonance for the economic rationale of copyright

carbon capture and storage and transboundary pollution a differential game approach abstract we study the strategic behavior of two countries facing transboundary co2 pollution under a differential game setting in our model the reduction of co2 concentration occurs through the carbon capture and storage process rather than through the adoption of cleaner technologies furthermore we first provide the explicit short run dynamics for this dynamic game with symmetric open loop and a special markovian nash strategy then we compare these strategies at the games steady states and along some balanced growth paths our results show that if the initial level of co2 is relatively high state dependent emissions reductions can lead to higher overall environmental quality hence feedback strategy leads to less social waste

swedish co2 emissions 1900 2010 an exploratory note abstract this paper projects swedish co 2 emissions during the period 2000 2010 based on data covering 1900 1999 swedish climate policy is currently based on the assumption that carbon emissions will increase ceteris paribus by 5 15 relative to the 1990 level this forecast has motivated a number of policy measures including carbon taxes subsidies and an information package we find however that co 2 emissions may well be lower in the future this outcome is broadly consistent with the literature on the environmental kuznets curve which portrays the relationship between emissions and gdp the key contribution of this paper is that our analysis is based on a long time series current literature is invariably based on short panel data sets while we study a single country through several phases of development our analysis also sheds some light on the key importance played by nuclear power for carbon emission projections

impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources a systematic review of the literature this study summarizes the main conclusions from a systematic review of the empirical literature regarding the impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources universities research institutes and knowledge intensive business services with the aim to organize the literature we classify the different works according to the research question addressed i which firms use knowledge external sources ii do firms using knowledge external sources achieve better results and iii which firms benefit the most from using knowledge external sources stylized facts are that larger more r d intensive and high tech firms are more likely to use knowledge external sources and that use of knowledge external sources is associated to firms higher technical results less attention has been paid to the third question and evidence is not conclusive several recommendations for future research emerge first to take in greater consideration methodological issues so that potential biases in the results caused by sample selection and endogeneity are handled properly second to pay more attention to heterogeneous outcomes third to use continuous indicators of depth and breadth of links allowing for non linear relationships and fourth to extend evidence for developing countries and service industries

scarcity growth and r d abstract the limits to economic growth due to resource scarcity can be alleviated only by the development of backstop substitutes this paper combines resource based economic growth with r d to reduce the cost of backstop technologies characterizing the entire dynamics of optimal growth and r d processes we find that an economy s growth prospects depend on its type as determined by its production technology and learning ability and by its knowledge capital endowment a wide variety of growth patterns emerges ranging from cases in which an economy that without r d eventually stagnates converges to a steady state is diverted by r d onto a path of sustained growth to cases in which r d is not warranted resource scarcity is shown to encourage r d due to the increased reliance on the backstop technology

economic development and the energy intensity of human well being evidence from the gcc countries abstract this paper empirically investigates the effect of economic development on the energy intensity of human well being eiwb in the gulf cooperation council gcc during the period 1995 2012 we employ a time series cross sectional prais winsten regression model with panel corrected standard errors pcse we conclude that economic development has had a significant positive impact on eiwb during the period 1995 2012 the results indicate that the stress on the environment had increased in a noticeable manner from 1995 until 2006 however over the period 2007 2012 the stress went back to the level observed in 1995 this observation is unfortunate from the perspective sustainable economics

university research intellectual property rights and european innovation systems this paper surveys the literature on university patenting from the point of view of the economic theory of patents it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme i e they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge in the debate surrounding the so called bayh dole act in the usa it has however been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms the first part of the paper addresses two major questions first what is the economic logic of bayh dole and second what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop in the second part the paper addresses the issue of whether bayh dole like legislation would be beneficial for european countries in a number of european countries a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six european countries an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in europe because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in europe the paper ends with a discussion of how this european practice of university patenting affects public private knowledge transfer in europe and how this compares to the effects of the bayh dole act in the usa

consumption pollution tradeoffs in an environment vulnerable to pollution related catastrophic collapse abstract this paper considers the consequences of an avoidable risk of irreversible environmental catastrophe for society s optimal long run consumption pollution tradeoffs the risk is assumed to be a nondecreasing function of pollution concentration which evolves as a dynamic environmental renewal process the main objective of the paper is to derive qualitative insights regarding the effects of such risk on optimal management

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

output emissions and technology some thoughts abstract the principal goal of this article is to identify the implications of a binding emission constraint on a firm s optimal capital labor ratio and to determine whether it is appropriate to write a firm s production function as an increasing function of its emissions alone i find that even though a firm s supply curve may be written as a positive function of its emissions it is not appropriate to write the production technology as an increasing function of only its emissions except under special circumstances

indigenous knowledge and intellectual property a sustainability agenda the paper argues that the current ways of protecting intellectual property are limited in their scope for recognizing indigenous rights to indigenous knowledge indigenous knowledge is often defined as being holistic and collectively owned and an appropriate protection should allow for maintaining the cultural and physical environment that has generated it after examining the failure of the patent system to recognize indigenous input using examples from the us patent and trademark office the analysis is directed towards alternatives the world s first case of indigenous intellectual accreditation through the partnership between mt romance australian sandalwood company aveda us based multinational cosmetics corporation and the kutkabubba community represented by the songman circle of wisdom is presented the accreditation allows for the indigenous people to be recognized as traditional owners of the land and for their care and knowledge about the sandalwood trees it also gives them a share of the profits made from the contemporary use of the pure sandalwood oil the paper argues that sustainability and indigenous sustainability in particular provides a conceptual framework for a change in the way of protecting intellectual property this implies that appropriate policies should be put in place for businesses to feel responsible towards the community

are there increasing returns to pollution abatement empirical analytics of the environmental kuznets curve in pesticides abstract according to the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis economic growth and the reduction of environmental degradation are compatible goals an inverted u shaped relationship between economic performance and environmental pollution suggests that empirically an economy is associated with smaller levels of pollution after some threshold income point one potential explanation for the empirical evidence of an ekc is increasing returns to pollution abatement where the abatement efficiency rises with an increase in the scale of abatement doubling the clean up efforts more than doubles the abatement of pollution as this efficiency gain makes abatement less expensive pollution might fall as more abatement is undertaken this study tests the hypothesis that there are increasing returns to abating pollution empirical evidence on environmental risks in the us agricultural sector since 1970 support the existence of increasing returns in addition i estimate the productivity of pollution abatement using refined empirical productivity measurement methods and explicitly control the level of technology the results show the importance of including an environmental productivity variable in the ekc framework

a survey of the literature on human capital intensive firms the aim of this paper is to provide an exhaustive survey of the academic research dedicated to the study of human capital intensive firms hcifs we use a bibliometric analysis based on the three widely used databases econlit science direct and wiley over the period 1992 2015 we are adapting a methodology developed in previous works to our specific object of study and we generate a bottom up clustering on keywords titles and abstracts our examination of the data sheds a light on five main clusters of works that respectively focus on 1 critical human resource management 2 intellectual capital assessment 3 funding risk and innovation 4 high skilled employees supporting economic development and 5 internal and external valuable social networks in a critical appraisal of our results we stress that the bibliometric analysis remains silent on how the different clusters are linked with each other based on our own appreciation of the hcifs literature we propose a further step in the identification of a central question linking up these clusters a transversal review of the five clusters reveals that hcifs appear as a network of specialized agents whose complementary human resources are decisive for the value creation process

sustainable growth and the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper develops an endogenous growth model with pollution and both human and physical capital human capital is produced cleanly and physical capital can be used for pollution control economic growth is sustainable in the long run it is optimal for human capital to grow more rapidly than physical capital output and consumption while pollution declines for realistic parameter values our results differ sharply from stokey s result for an ak technology that sustained economic growth is not optimal the model can generate an environmental kuznets curve a pollution tax or a voucher system can implement the pareto efficiency solution

technical progress structural change and the environmental kuznets curve abstract the paper shows that under reasonable assumptions about technical progress a positive sustainable growth rate fails to exist the argument is that a growing part of income has to be spent for continuing technical progress in order to compensate the pollution effects of growth hence in the long run either the sustainability condition will be violated or the growth rate must decline to zero furthermore in finite time the level of wealth will decrease despite growing income and a constant pollution level thus further growth is no longer reasonable similar arguments also hold for the environmental effects of structural change favoring less pollution intensive economic activities an evolutionary change of goods and production technology may shift the limits of growth and is hence a prerequisite for a long run ekc

smooth transition pollution income paths abstract we explore the idea of regime switching as a new methodological approach in the analysis of the emission income relationship the basic idea is that when some threshold is passed the economy could move smoothly to another regime with the emission income relationship being different between the old and the new regime the methodology is applied to a panel dataset of us state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions sulfur dioxide emissions are found to smoothly peak at a relatively late stage of economic development and then smoothly decrease at high levels of income however for the nitrogen oxide emissions environmental pressure tends to rise with economic growth then slows down but does not decline with further growth

the optimal timing of adoption of a green technology we study the optimal timing of adoption of a cleaner technology and its effects on the rate of growth of an economy in the context of an ak endogenous growth model we show that the results depend upon the behavior of the marginal utility of environmental quality with respect to consumption when it is increasing we derive the capital level at the optimal timing of adoption we show that this capital threshold is independent of the initial conditions on the stock of capital implying that capital poor countries tend to take longer to adopt also country specific characteristics as the existence of high barriers to adoption may lead to different capital thresholds for different countries if the marginal utility of environmental quality decreases with consumption a country should never delay adoption the optimal policy is either to adopt immediately or if adoption costs are too high to never adopt the policy implications of these results are discussed in the context of the international debate surrounding the environmental political agenda

towards an integrated framework for development and environment policy the dynamics of environmental kuznets curves abstract environmental kuznets curves ekcs have recently received considerable attention in development and environment policy but little is known on how the interaction between ecological and economic factors may result in an ekc or other qualitatively different outcomes we introduce a restricted class of vector valued differential equations for representing the evolution of socioeconomic and environmental variables which influence or are influenced by the process of economic development our model includes not only the complete path of each variable over time but also the highly critical interactions among multiple variables we demonstrate analytically and numerically that among a multiplicity of possible outcomes an inverted u pattern can only be obtained under specific circumstances and requires attention to the multiple factors which form the economic environmental system rather than a single dominant one

the politics of regulation in the turkish electricity market abstract turkey began reforming the electricity market in 2001 the regulatory reform aimed to liberalize the market however the institutional and political structure was not ready for creating an efficiently working competition the independent regulator did not have both experience and will to direct the industry to a more competitive environment currently the reform has slowed down and political preferences drive the industry this paper studies the reasons for the slowdown in the reform efforts by focusing on the relationships between the government judiciary and the independent regulator we conclude that strategic behaviors of players in the market including the judiciary the government and the regulator have made the introduction of competition to the market more costly

models as usual for unusual risks on the value of catastrophic climate change we study the role of alternative intertemporal preference representations in a model of economic growth stock pollutant and endogenous risk of catastrophic collapse we contrast the traditional discounted utility model which assumes risk neutrality with respect to intertemporal utility with a multiplicative choice model that displays risk aversion in that dimension first we show that both representations of preferences can rationalize the same business as usual economy for a given interest rate and no pollution externality second once we introduce a collapse risk whose hazard rate is a function of the pollution stock multiplicative preferences recommend a much more stringent policy response an illustration in the context of climate change indicates that switching to the multiplicative preference representation has a similar effect in terms of policy recommendations as scaling up the schedule of the hazard rate by a factor of 100

does the new economy measure up to the great inventions of the past abstract during the four years 1995 99 u s productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age of 1913 72 accordingly many observers have declared the new economy to be an industrial revolution even more important than the second industrial revolution of 1860 1900 which made the golden age of productivity growth possible this paper dissects the recent productivity revival subtracts out a cyclical component and concludes that there is no revival of the productivity growth trend in the 88 percent of the private economy lying outside of the durables manufacturing sector the paper explains this surprising finding by pointing to limitations in computers and the internet in comparison with the great inventions of the past

the redistributive roles of unemployment insurance and the dynamics of voting abstract public unemployment insurance is analyzed as the majority voting equilibrium policy of a dynamic stochastic economy abstracting from incentive effects we focus on redistribution some results are because of the distribution of heterogeneous employment opportunities public insurance may be democratically chosen even if complete private markets exist and because of the dynamics even when agents are intrinsically homogeneous the equilibrium benefit level or duration benefit schedule deviates from what has been described as optimal in the literature the effects of differences in the average frequency or duration of unemployment on equilibrium taxes and benefits are investigated with some unanticipated results

climate change and uneven development in this paper using a theoretical model with endogenous capital depreciation we study the effects of climate change and adaptation on long run development we show that climate change affects economic growth depending on climate exposure and adaptation efficiency which are asymmetric between different countries poor countries are likely to be hurt more because of the negative effects of climate change on the rate of depreciation of the assets that represent the engine of growth these asymmetries generally induce growth deficits and unsustainability traps in less developed economies

cross border trade in electricity this paper develops a novel economic theory of two way trade in a homogenous good electricity in this model of reciprocal load smoothing international trade provides insurance as electricity demand is stochastic and correlated across jurisdictions electric utilities can reduce their cost during peak periods by importing cheaper off peak electricity from neighbouring jurisdictions two way trade emerges in the presence of strongly convex marginal costs observed trade between canadian provinces and us states strongly supports the theoretical model reciprocal load smoothing provides an economic rationale for integrating north america s fragmented interconnections into a continental supergrid if technological progress in long distance bulk transmission continues to reduce costs

appropriating signs and meaning the elusive economics of trademark this paper deals with economic analysis of trademark its presence in markets is originally connected with the problem of information asymmetries and the need to provide information for assisting exchanges so as to avert the market failure brought about by adverse selection however this information conveying function is also accompanied by a differentiation effect arising from the power of persuasion that signs can exert on individuals the exploitation of differentiation has given rise to the practice of branding which ties markets and consumption to the realms of meaning and experience branding is so all pervasive in today s economy as to have somehow transfigured it so that the role of persuasion is now pre eminent nonetheless the mainstream economic theory tends to resist acknowledging this change which would to a large extent call into question well established hypotheses and theoretical tools the general response has therefore been to assume that the informational role of trademark predominates and to use this hypothesis to construct models welfare evaluations and policy prescriptions that bear little or no relation to the actual markets the opposing approach in the shadow of the nelson s and arrow s seminal papers on economics of information is recognising the idiosyncratic character of information and therefore drawing conclusions and devising solutions that while still based upon the welfare criterion also incorporate a wider awareness and a deeper representation of the scenario under study the present work attempts to move in this direction showing how different disciplines can provide some key epistemological tools for enabling economists to effectively evaluate the welfare outcomes of the introduction and progressive alteration of a particular intellectual property right within the realm of signs and meanings

the new economy what the concept owes to the oecd abstract in the last two decades concepts have appeared that have influenced and even defined entire science and technology policies in western countries high technology national system of innovation information economy knowledge based economy and the new economy in all these policy developments the oecd acting as a think tank for its member countries has been an important promoter of the concepts turning them into buzzwords this article looks at the concept of the new economy as the culmination of decades of work on technology and productivity and explores the crucial role of the oecd in its dissemination and above all the role statistics have played in shaping science and innovation policies

causality and the first industrial revolution the existence timing and possible causes of the british industrial revolution are considered by investigating the time series properties of industrial production and various explanatory variables utilizing co integration based causality tests this paper argues that domestic forces notably population real wages and technological progress shaped the industrial revolution whereas overseas trade expansion was a consequence of industrial growth the first industrial revolution may shed more general light on the forces promoting industrialization and growth to the extent that the first industrial revolution offers a template exports do not appear to provide a simple pathway to industrialization copyright 1998 by oxford university press

intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and internationally increasing returns this paper examines the relationship between intra industry trade in intermediate products pollution and increasing returns we develop a two country model in which production occurs in two stages final and intermediate good production intermediate goods are produced under monopolistic competition and final good production exhibits increasing returns with respect to the number of varieties of intermediates pollution occurs in the production of the final good when polluting intermediates are used we analyze the effects of international trade in intermediate products on pollution output and welfare under an endogenous tax scenario and with two types of pollution functions the results show that because of increasing returns international trade either leads to lower total pollution in each country or lower pollution per unit of output in at least one country in addition intra industry trade causes countries to import the environmental quality of their trading partners

a tradable permit system in an intertemporal economy it is known that in an intertemporal competitive economy a tradable permit system may not achieve efficiency without setting appropriate permit interest rates i e rewards for holding permits to find the rates however we need to know in advance the path of efficient permit prices which is difficult to obtain this study intends to solve this problem in two ways first we analyze a special case in which the permit interest rates are given by a simple rule for example if the marginal abatement cost of pollution emission is constant then the appropriate rate is to equal the monetary interest rate as is the case for global warming if the damage is caused in the future far beyond the planning period of the environmental program the appropriate rate coincides with the marginal self recovery of environmental stock under certain conditions as a second approach we propose a tradable permit system with a permit bank as a mechanism by which the permit interest rates are generated endogenously without governmental intervention other than the issuance of permits however we also show that this approach raises the problem of indeterminacy of the equilibrium

green attitude and economic growth we analyze the interdependence between green attitude and equilibrium development of environmental quality in an endogenous growth model individuals take only part of their impact on pollution into account hence there is a negative externality of capital accumulation on environmental quality increasing wealth or increasing pollution enhance green attitude and reduce the externality because individuals care more about the environment if their income is higher or if pollution is more obvious the time path of pollution as well as the evolution of equilibrium growth are shown to depend crucially on the determinants of green attitude ongoing growth may lead to complete internalization of the environmental externality if green attitude improves with increasing wealth e g as a consequence of an increase in environmental education in contrast if green attitude is determined exclusively by the level of environmental quality pollution remains at a suboptimally high level the interdependence of wealth and pollution in the determination of environmental awareness implies more complex dynamics capital growth enhances green attitude and thereby decreases pollution improved environmental quality in turn may increase capital growth due to less green attitude and therefore slow down convergence to the sustainable balanced growth path

a tale of two elasticities a general theoretical framework for the environmental kuznets curve analysis abstract we show that a variety of seemingly diverse concepts used to theoretically explaining the ekc have a common origin in two key preference and production elasticities we also prove that they jointly correspond to a unique underlying preference technology theoretical framework

voting for pollution policy the importance of income inequality and openness to trade abstract this paper analyzes how openness and the distribution of factor ownership interact to determine individual and aggregate demand for pollution policy analysis of voter preferences in autarky shows that an increased stake in either the dirty or the clean industry can induce an individual voter to prefer stricter environmental policy similarly the paper shows that poorer voters may be the greener voters within an electorate the model also reveals that the incidence of pollution policy depends upon a country s trade regime with consequences for the direction in which income inequality influences aggregate demand for pollution policy

status concern and the exploitation of common pool renewable resources we examine the impact of social status concern in a common pool renewable resource oligopoly a small number of players share access to a common pool resource and sell their production in a common market where they are oligopolists we depart from the mainstream literature on common pool resource oligopolies by considering that each player cares about her social status we allow for two channels to impact a player s welfare harvest and profits under the first channel a player has a bump in her utility when her harvest is larger than the average harvest of the rest of the players in this case we show that the presence of this channel exacerbates the tragedy of the commons under the second channel a player enjoys a bump in her utility if she manages to earn more profits than the average profits of the other players in this case we show that social status concern may temporarily alleviate the tragedy of the commons it results in a decrease of extraction over an interval of stock sizes