the assessment of households recycling costs the role of personal motives abstract this paper analyzes households perceptions of recycling activities in a municipality in northern sweden pitea the purpose of the paper is to analyze whether moral motives matter for the assessment of households waste sorting costs data were gathered using a mail out survey to 850 randomly chosen individuals in the municipality of pitea sweden we employ an economic model of moral motivation and econometric techniques the main result that follows from the analysis is that the results support the notion that moral motives significantly lower the costs associated with household recycling efforts

the socially optimal recycling rate evidence from japan this paper estimates the average social cost of municipal waste management as a function of the recycling rate social costs include all municipal costs and revenues costs to recycling households to prepare materials estimated with an original method external disposal costs and external recycling benefits results suggest average social costs are minimized with recycling rates well below observed and mandated levels in japan cost minimizing municipalities are estimated to recycle less than the optimal rate these results are robust to changes in the components of social costs indicating that japan and perhaps other developed countries may be setting inefficiently high recycling goals

income and the recycling effort a maximization problem abstract this paper theoretically derives the impact of changes in the household s income on its trash recycling effort comparative statics are developed to derive the expression for the change in the amount recycled with a change in income each term in the expression is shown to have an economic interpretation the magnitude and the likely signs of the terms are discussed in determining the direction of the net effect finally empirical estimates from previous research are evaluated within the context of the implications of the theoretical derivations

does welfare spending crowd out charitable activity evidence from historical england under the poor laws this paper examines the relationship between government spending and charitable activity we present a novel way of testing the crowding out hypothesis making use of the fact that welfare provision under the old poor laws was decided on the parish level thus giving the heterogeneity we need to test for the impact of different levels of welfare support within a single country using data on poor relief spending combined with data on charitable incomes by county for two years before and after 1800 we find a positive relationship areas with more public provision also enjoyed higher levels of charitable income these results are confirmed when instrumenting for poor law spending using the distance to london and historical migration to london as well as when looking at first differences

crowding out voluntary contributions to public goods we test the null hypothesis that involuntary transfers for the provision of a public good will completely crowd out voluntary transfers against the warm glow hypothesis that crowding out will be incomplete because individuals care about giving our design differs from the related design used by andreoni in considering two levels of the involuntary transfer and a wider range of contribution possibilities and in mixing groups every period instead of every four periods we analyse the data with careful attention to boundary effects we retain the null hypothesis of complete crowding out in two of three pairwise comparisions but reject it in favour of incomplete crowding out in the comparison most closely akin to andreoni s design thus we confirm the existence of incomplete crowding out in some environments but suggest that the warm glow hypothesis is inadequate in explaining it

faith based charity and crowd out during the great depression abstract interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years churches in the u s were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the new deal in this paper we investigate the extent to which the new deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s we do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large christian denominations matched to data on local new deal spending we instrument for new deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state s congressional delegation and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending with both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity crowd out was small as a share of total new deal spending 3 but large as a share of church spending our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30 in response to the new deal and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939

moral duty warm glow or self interest a choice experiment study on motivations for domestic garbage sorting in italy abstract behavioural and mainstream environmental economics have proposed alternative explanations for individual motivations behind environmentally relevant activities leading to different recommendations for policymakers separate collection of different types of municipal waste represents a popular field of application in this paper we exploit the results of a choice experiment study conducted on a representative sample of 1010 italian households aimed at understanding the relative weights of economic and non economic motivations the results show that the mean willingness to pay for separate waste collection is 77 year per family which is an adequate empirical estimate of the warm glow effect of recycling however the four identified latent classes reveal individuals with fairly opposite motivations this finding can be interpreted as the fact that the two types of motivations economic and non economic do not add up but tend to cancel each other the concept of latent classes applied to environmental economics is novel and suggests distinct typologies of individuals more importantly these groups of individuals are likely to react differently to alternative policy instruments therefore instead of designing waste management policies based on the assumption that behavioural responses are stereotyped policymakers should adopt a more complex set of policy instruments that target different groups of individuals with appropriately chosen incentive schemes

giving overseas and public policy remarkable numbers of people give to overseas development charities the aim of this paper is to consider how such overseas giving is best modelled and the implications for public policy widely used theories of charitable giving based on warm glow or the provision of public goods provide insight but are not fully satisfactory as explanations of giving for the specific purpose of development instead an identification approach to individual giving is proposed here that combines the results focus of the public goods formulation with the scale of the warm glow model the theoretical model is used to examine the implications for public policy including the extent to which official aid crowds out private giving and how public policy should take account of private willingness to make charitable transfers overseas

an econometric analysis of global waste paper recovery and utilization the main purpose of this paper is to provide aneconometric analysis of the most importantdeterminants of inter country differences inwaste paper recovery and utilization rates byemploying pooled t

migration with endogenous moving costs we study a dynamic model of labor migration in which moving costs decrease with the number of migrants already settled in the destination this assumption is supported by sociological studies of migrant networks with endogenous moving costs migration occurs gradually over time once it starts it develops momentum and migratory flows may increase even as wage differentials narrow in addition migration tends to follow geographical channels and low moving cost individuals migrate first these patterns are consistent with historical evidence from the great black migration of 1915 1960 in the united states much of which cannot be reconciled with existing migration models excerpt

environmental policy when consumers value conformity abstract we present a model of consumer behaviour when consumers value conformity and examine the implications for environmental policy the model shares a feature set out in dasgupta et al 2016 of having a structure of preferences for conformity which induces a mass of consumers to adhere exactly to a norm level of consumption clumping however we extend our previous analysis by analysing the conditions for the existence and potential uniqueness of consumption norms in doing so we introduce threshold effects whereby individuals adhere to a norm only if sufficiently many others do so taken together these have striking implications for environmental policy in the case where the norm good generates pollution emissions clumping means many individuals will not change behaviour unless the norm changes while threshold effects plus clumping means that it may be hard to change a norm we show that the use of pigovian taxes to control behaviour may be either ineffective or welfare reducing and that the optimal pigovian tax will work only if it is above some threshold level there are parameter values for which quantity based injunctive policies raise welfare relative to no intervention while optimal pigovian taxes would lower welfare

the effect of immigration on productivity evidence from us states abstract in this paper we analyze the long run impact of immigration on employment productivity and its skill bias we use the existence of immigrant communities across u s states before 1960 and the distance from the mexican border as instruments for immigration flows we find no evidence that immigrants crowded out employment at the same time we find that immigration had a strong positive association with total factor productivity and a negative association with the high skill bias of production technologies the results are consistent with the idea that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization thus increasing tfp and also promoted the adoption of unskilled efficient technologies

effects of norms and opportunity cost of time on household recycling social and moral norms and the opportunity cost of time will affect household recycling efforts a model is developed to describe how norms affect the recycling decision through feelings of self respect guilty conscience and warm glow as well as respect in and sanctions from the community we find that the opportunity cost of time has a significant negative effect on household recycling all indicators of warm glow social and moral norms increase household recycling efforts we find no evidence of crowding out neither when recycling is perceived as mandatory nor when economic incentives are introduced in the form of a differentiated garbage fee

explaining the variation in household recycling rates across the uk household waste recycling rates vary significantly both across and within regions of the uk this paper attempts to explain the variation by using a new data set of waste recycling rates and policy determinants for all of the uk s 434 local authorities over the period 2006q2 to 2008q4 our results suggest that the method of recycling collection chosen by policy makers is an important factor influencing the recycling rate we also find an inverse relationship between the frequency of the residual waste collection and the recycling rate

an economic analysis of household recycling of solid wastes the case of portland oregon abstract solid waste is one of the residuals generated by economic activities faced with rising disposal costs communities are implementing programs to encourage recycling activities this paper investigates the role of price incentives and other socio economic factors in household recycling participation in recycling is modeled as an ordered probit choice using a large sample of households from the portland oregon metropolitan area demand for solid waste collection is estimated using two stage least squares results indicate that increases in disposal fees encourage recycling although demand for solid waste collection services is not reduced substantially

factor endowments inequality and paths of development among new world economies whereas traditional explanations of differences in long run paths of development across the americas generally point to the significance of differences in national heritage or religion we highlight the relevance of stark contrasts in the degree of inequality in wealth human capital and political power in accounting for how fundamental economic institutions evolved over time we argue moreover that the roots of these disparities in the extent of inequality lay in differences in the initial factor endowments dating back to the era of european colonization we document through comparative studies of suffrage public land and schooling policies systematic patterns by which societies in the americas that began with more extreme inequality or heterogeneity in the population were more likely to develop institutional structures that greatly advantaged members of elite classes and disadvantaging the bulk of the population by providing them with more political influence and access to economic opportunities the clear implication is that institutions should not be presumed to be exogenous economists need to learn more about where they come from to understand their relation to economic development our findings not only contribute to our knowledge of why extreme differences in the extent of inequality across new world economies have persisted for centuries but also to the study of processes of long run economic growth past and present

the determinants of household recycling social influence public policies and environmental preferences abstractour article aims at understanding the determinants of households selective waste sorting behaviours based on data from an original survey of 694 individuals in the french provence alpes cote d azur region the applied literature focuses mainly on countries with high recycling rates we focus on a region with the lowest recycling rate in france a country that recycles less than the european country average we first apply polychoric principal components analysis to reduce the number of explanatory variables to a set of six factors in a second step we use a probit model to estimate the probability of waste sorting as a function of these factors this model tests several hypotheses emerging from the recent literature on behavioural economics applied to households selective sorting this literature pays particular attention to the social influence on recycling behaviour which has been studied mostly by sociologists and psychologists the results of our empirical analysis confirm some of the fin

an accurate measurement of the crowd out effect income effect and price effect for charitable contributions in the past empirical research on charitable contributions has focused on two issues estimating the income and price elasticities of contributions and estimating the extent to which government funding crowded out private contributions the two fundamental problems in all these studies are the differences in the underlying conceptual models and the use of imperfect data for empirical analysis this paper addresses both of these problems

one without the other behavioural and incentive policies for household waste management this paper provides a review of economic studies that analyses the use of multiple policies to cope with waste management problems we discuss the factors that influence selective sorting behaviour and the most appropriate policies for their promotion based on the works analysed our survey shows the original features of waste as an environmental problem requiring regulation the traditional approach in which decisions respond to rational behaviour particularly cost savings has some limits although not all public policies seem justified we argue that there might be a need for specific policies to promote recycling preferably based on the provision of information to consumers or on behavioural instruments indeed personal factors specific to each individual such as emotions and the influence of social interaction should be taken into account in the development of public policies we review the literature related to different rationales and identify some avenues for future research

recycling social norms and warm glow revisited we examine the role of social norms and warm glow in a theoretical framework and establish that improving the quality of recycling facilities for example through kerbside collection will elicit more recycling effort if warm glow is present drawing on the literature we model the role of social norms with reference to age profile ethnicity and geographical location of the reference group using english local authority data we show that a social norm for recycling does exist we find the expected relationship between the quality of kerbside provision and recycling activity if the household derives warm glow from the activity however it is insignificant amongst the control variables we find evidence that multifamily dwellings recycle less

voluntary donations and public expenditures in a federal system proponents of the new federalism argue that nonprofit organizations and local governments will fully offset federal social service expenditure cutbacks the author analyzes this proposition as a competitive game in which donations are motivated by private and public good considerations the author characterizes the response of political economic equilibrium to exogenous changes in federal expenditures when local voters are cognizant of donor reactions partial replacement is the most likely outcome though others are possible copyright 1987 by american economic association

cultural diversity and economic growth evidence from the us during the age of mass migration we exploit the large inflow of immigrants to the us during the 1870 1920 period to examine the effects that within county changes in the cultural composition of the us population had on output growth we construct measures of fractionalization and polarization to distinguish between the different effects of cultural diversity our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalization significantly increased output while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output we address the issue of identifying the causal effects of cultural diversity by using the supply push component of immigrant inflows as an instrumental variable

the intergenerational transmission of generosity abstract this paper estimates the correlation between the generosity of parents and the generosity of their adult children using regression models of adult children s charitable giving new charitable giving data are collected in the panel study of income dynamics and used to estimate the regression models the regression models are estimated using a wide variety of techniques and specification tests and the strength of the intergenerational giving correlations is compared with intergenerational correlations in income wealth and consumption expenditure from the same sample using the same set of controls we find the religious giving of parents and children to be strongly correlated as strongly correlated as are their income and wealth the correlation in the secular giving e g giving to the united way educational institutions for poverty relief of parents and children is smaller similar in magnitude to the intergenerational correlation in consumption parents religious giving is positively associated with children s secular giving but in a more limited sense overall the results are consistent with generosity emerging at least in part from the influence of parental charitable behavior in contrast to intergenerational models in which parental generosity towards their children can undo government transfer policy ricardian equivalence these results suggest that parental generosity towards charitable organizations might reinforce government policies such as tax incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary transfers

environmental regulation of households an empirical review of economic and psychological factors abstract the literature on sustainable consumption and environmental regulation of household behavior is dominated by conceptual and normative approaches as a result many suggestions lack a firm empirical basis to overcome this deficiency econometric studies in three areas of environmentally relevant activities of households are reviewed residential use of energy generation of solid waste and recycling and residential use of water next to price and income elasticities attention is devoted to individual socio economic features and psychological factors such as attitudes knowledge perceptions and values potential psychological determinants and related insights are further examined by discussing a range of representative and illustrative statistical psychological studies of environmental behavior one important general finding is that there are very few empirical studies that systematically combine socio economic and psychological determinants a range of insights for environmental policy is derived and research recommendations are offered

partners in giving the crowding in effects of uk government grants abstract this study examines the determinants of voluntary donations to uk charities using empirical specifications that combine error component and simultaneous equations methods in a series of tests we identify the one way fixed effects endogenous representation for government grants as the best empirical model when this endogeneity is taken into account government grants cause significant crowding in for the full sample and the two largest cohorts price coefficients are negative and fund raising coefficients are positive religion charities are net revenue maximizers whereas other charity cohorts fund raise short of net revenue maximization

the cold shiver of not giving enough on the social cost of recycling campaigns governments sometimes try to increase individuals contributions to public goods through appeals to consumer responsibility rather than by economic incentives for example in recycling campaigns using standard consumer theory one would hardly expect such campaigns to work at all but if consumers are motivated by norms appeals may work through changing consumers perception of the normrequirement however increasing voluntary contributions through appeals may come at a social cost the reason is that appeals work through imposing a heavier perceived responsibility on consumers this represents a welfare loss which is not necessarily outweighed by warm glow benefits

an eu recycling target what does the dutch evidence tell us the european union eu advocates a household waste recycling rate of more than 65 although the netherlands has already invested heavily in recycling policies this is still a big challenge as nowadays this rate is approximately 50 on average and very few no municipalities have a rate above 65 given this practice it is possible to learn from the dutch experience which policies are effective in increasing recycling rates based on a large panel data set for the netherlands we show that unit based pricing avoiding a duo bin for unsorted and compostable waste and reducing the frequency of collecting unsorted and compostable waste at the curbside are effective in raising the recycling rate however only a bag based pricing system has a substantial effect but this policy can have some adverse effects other unit based pricing systems have effects of less than 10 points in nearly all cases changing the frequency of collection of recyclables has no or very small effects moreover the complementarity between unit based pricing and curbside service is low overall it seems very difficult to reach the eu goal of 65 with the policies applied

a signaling explanation for charity this article examines a novel but plausible motive for charitable giving charitable donations which are observable can signal wealth or income the signaling equilibrium of charitable donations has attractive properties donations increase proportionally with population size governmental funding for public goods affects private charity only through an income effect crowding out need not be complete income redistribution is generically nonneutral increasing the spread between the poorest and richest person in a community tends to increase private donations our theory are based on the assumption that people are willing to make charitable donations even if they will not increase provision of the public good the data on charitable giving support the hypothesis that donors donate at least partly for signaling purposes rather than only to aid the recipient or to obtain satisfactions unrelated to status though charitable organizations usually report donations within categories thus not allowing perfect revelation for analytical tractability we shall consider an equilibrium with perfect revelation and a continuum of types as characterized in george j mailath 1987 and norman j ireland 1994

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

social norms morals and self interest as determinants of pro environment behaviours the case of household recycling this paper considers the role which selfish moral and social incentives and pressures play in explaining the extent to which stated choices over pro environment behaviours vary across individuals the empirical context is choices over household waste contracts and recycling actions in poland a theoretical model is used to show how cost based motives and the desire for a positive self and social image combine to determine the utility from alternative choices of recycling behaviour we then describe a discrete choice experiment designed to empirically investigate the effects such drivers have on stated choices a hybrid logit model is used to link statements over attitudes to recycling to choices dealing with a potential endogeneity problem caused by the joint effects of un observables on attitudes and choices we find that a substantial share of our respondents prefer to sort their waste at home rather than in a central sorting facility this preference is associated with a moral intrinsic motivation involving a belief that sorting at home is more thorough than central sorting

the divisive and disruptive effect of a weight based waste fee abstract the ability of economic incentives to promote environmentally friendly behavior has been questioned in the literature most studies investigating this issue are grounded in the agent based rational choice model the aim of this study is to expand our insights by applying an alternative theoretical framework combining elements from classical institutional economics and self determination theory to study incentives for waste sorting the analysis is based on data from a norwegian municipality ulstein which introduced and later terminated a differentiated waste fee there are three main findings first the important role of normative motivation for sorting household waste is confirmed second the economic incentive had a divisive effect on the motivation to sort household waste perceived autonomy linked to fundamental values about environmental concern seems to play an important role in explaining why half the sample reports no extra efforts in sorting waste as a response to the economic incentive the other half was influenced by the external logic given to them i e to save costs and hence report increased motivation to sort household waste finally an increased practice of illegal waste disposal was observed as a response to the differentiated waste fee

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate

the displacement effect of convenience the case of recycling in light of increasingly ambitious recycling targets it is important to analyse the potential displacement effect of improving access to kerbside provision on other forms of recycling do households view the different modes of recycling as substitutes or complements of each other does this perceived relationship depend on the type of material recycled using data for all of the uk s local governments from 2004q2 to 2013q3 we analyse the nature of the relationship between the two main channels of recycling in the case of dry recycling the empirical findings are ambiguous on the trade off between kerbside and non kerbside recycling on the one hand the findings suggest that there is no trade off when considering the effect of expanding kerbside provision on the other hand the findings also suggest that there is a trade off when we focus on the effect of expanding non kerbside provision however putting together the empirical findings with theory in particular the symmetry property of the hicksian substitution effect suggests that there is a trade off irrespective of whether we consider expansion of kerbside or non kerbside provision in the case of green compost recycling the empirical findings on their own or together with theory unambiguously suggest that there is a trade off

private versus public charity reassessing crowding out from the supply side this paper tests a model where governmentand private charity are perfect substitutesin consumption but the cost of providingcharitable assistance differs betweenprivate and government suppliers theanalysis demonstrates that higher costs oftransferring through the government canaccount for the observed phenomenon of lessthan complete crowding out and theempirical results are broadly consistentwith that approach overall the evidenceis consistent with the hypothesis thatindividuals both care about the leakagesinvolved in transferring funds to the poorthrough government and respond in theirprivate giving to changes in thedifferential public cost