transforming the energy sector the evolution of technological systems in renewable energy technology this paper analyses the development and diffusion of technologies that utilize renewable energy sources in germany sweden and the netherlands the analysis enlarges the life cycle model of industry evolution to one where the focus is on the formation and evolution of new technological systems particular focus is on explaining success and failures in shifting from a formative phase into one characterized by positive feedbacks a set of challenges is identified for policy makers attempting to influence the process of transforming the energy sector

positive and normative judgments implicit in u s tax policy and the costs of unequal growth and recessions calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion one approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real world policy choices converting a normative decision into a positive inference as in the recent surge of inverse optimum research we find that capitalizing on the potential of this approach is not as straightforward as we might hope we perform the inverse optimum inference on u s tax policy from 1979 through 2010 and argue that the results either undermine the normative relevance of the approach or challenge conventional assumptions upon which economists routinely rely when performing welfare evaluations

patterns of technological accumulation the comparative advantage and relative impact of asian emerging economies in low carbon energy technological systems abstract this paper highlights the specificities of the patterns of low carbon energy technological innovations in selected asian emerging economies china and the members of asean 4 thailand malaysia indonesia and the philippines are included in this analysis for their identical structure of developing economy we outline a synthetic framework to cluster together the technologies with similar characteristics and analyse the changes of these characteristics over time this is in order to elucidate the scope of sectoral composition and specialisation of the selected economies and thereby understand the relative impact of science based low carbon energy technologies on the niches of technological excellence the findings show that china was keen to pursue its diversification strategy and develop its capability in low carbon energy technologies since the turn of the millennium however china has been gradually losing its momentum in more traditional areas like biomass hydroelectric power natural gas and fossil fuels the asean 4 economies on the other hand are showing interest in building a number of niches of technological excellence this highlights a contrasting relative technological advantage between larger and smaller economies our findings also indicate that many of the low carbon technologies in selected economies have yet to attain strong scientific grounding for development the findings of this paper are expected to provide some insights into low carbon energy technological development of emerging economies and be useful for other developing economies to establish their strategic moves for energy technology development

gender wage differentials and discrimination in the new south africa research into discrimination within south africa sa has focused on racial issues with gender issues being largely ignored this study aims to estimate gender wage differentials and through decomposition analysis understand the different problems faced by white black coloured and indian asian in 1995 it is found that white and asian females suffer greater gender discrimination than their black and coloured counterparts which could be a signal to future problems black and coloured females may encounter the largest gender wage differential is faced by white females whilst the lowest is encountered by coloured and black females a possible explanation for this finding is the low subsistence wages that the black and coloured population groups command relative to other population groups

legitimizing research technology and innovation policies for transformative change combining insights from innovation systems and multi level perspective in a comprehensive failures framework abstract the recent policy debates about orientating research technology and innovation policy towards societal challenges rather than economic growth objectives only call for new lines of argumentation to systematically legitimize policy interventions while the multi level perspective on long term transitions has attracted quite some interest over the past years as a framework for dealing with long term processes of transformative change but the innovation systems approach is still the dominant perspective for devising innovation policy innovation systems approaches stress the importance of improving innovation capabilities of firms and the institutional settings to support them but they are less suited for dealing with the strategic challenges of transforming systems of innovation production and consumption and thus with long term challenges such as climate change or resource depletion it is therefore suggested to consider insights from transition studies more prominently in a policy framework that is based on the innovation systems approach and the associated notion of failures we propose a comprehensive framework that allows legitimizing and devising policies for transformative change that draws on a combination of market failures structural system failures and transformational system failures

prospective analysis of technological innovation systems identifying technological and organizational development options for biogas in switzerland abstract in this article we put forward a concept for the identification and analysis of future development options of technological innovation systems the key element of our approach the so called variation analysis is a methodology to identify coherent socio technical and organizational variants within a specific innovation field consistent combinations of these two dimensions may be interpreted as nuclei for alternative future developments of innovation systems the method may be used in discursive foresight processes to inform strategy formulation of firms or policy makers who see a utility in furthering the innovation field the paper has a focus on developing the theoretical background and the analytical structure of the methodology empirically we illustrate the method for the innovation system of biomass digestion in switzerland

stimulating different types of eco innovation in the uk government policies and firm motivations in this paper we adopt a recent oecd framework and examine the role of external policy tools and internal firm specific factors for stimulating three different types of eco innovations that range on a spectrum of lower to higher technological and environmental impacts end of pipeline pollution control technologies integrated cleaner production technologies and environmental r d using a novel firm level dataset from a defra survey we estimate a tobit model which provides empirical evidence showing that these eco innovations are motivated by different external policy tools and internal firm specific factors our findings indicate that end of pipeline technologies and integrated cleaner production technologies are mainly driven by equipment upgrade motives with a view of improving efficiency while environmental regulations are effective in stimulating the end of pipeline technologies and environmental r d interestingly alongside government induced regulations we find that market factors mainly motivated by cost savings are effective in driving environmental r d finally iso14001 certification is effective in strengthening the positive impact of environmental management systems on both end of pipeline technologies and environmental r d while csr policies have no significant impact on motivating any of the eco innovations

second order sustainability conditions for the development of sustainable innovations in a dynamic environment abstract in particular radical innovations can be important means to achieving improved sustainability due to the existence of path dependency and lock in however the transition from one technological trajectory to another more sustainable one is often impeded by significant barriers fortunately these barriers are by their nature subject to substantial changes in time so it makes sense to carefully distinguish between periods of stability showing high barriers in which the given trajectory can hardly be left and periods of instability characterized by low barriers where a new trajectory can be reached more easily the latter distinction matters since sustainable innovations often rely on governmental regulation and the economic burden arising from this regulation will be much lower in periods of instability moreover due to the complexity and dynamics of change in their respective environments innovations are generally associated with fundamental uncertainty such that it becomes impossible to predict the degree of sustainability yielded by specific innovations in the longer run under these circumstances it is essential to facilitate the change between trajectories and to allow for the possibility to select between a variety of alternative trajectories within a process of trial and error sustainability as viewed from this evolutionary perspective is therefore better understood as the general capability to adapt that is to readily change from less to more sustainable technological trajectories since the latter kind of sustainability determines the conditions under which the former kind i e sustainability related to a specific technology can be achieved the two kinds are respectively called second order and first order sustainability finally a series of determinants and corresponding indicators from the techno economic political and socio cultural sphere is identified which after proper measurement and weighting allow for making an assessment whether and when the incumbent industry is sufficiently destabilized and the political system rendered sufficiently favorable to the new more sustainable technology such that a transition to the preferred trajectory is possible without too much effort

structural reform of social security governments around the world have enacted or are currently considering fundamental structural reforms of their social security pension programs the key feature in these reforms is a shift from a pure pay as you go tax financed system in which taxes on current workers are primarily distributed to current retirees to a mixed system that combines pay as you go benefits with investment based personal retirement accounts this paper discusses how such a mixed system could work in practice and how the transition to such a change could be achieved it then analyzes the economic gains that would result from shifting to a mixed system i turn next to the three problems that critics raise about any investment based plan administrative costs risk and income distribution finally i comment on some of the ad hoc proposals for dealing with the financial problem of social security without shifting to an investment based system

labor income responds differently to income tax and payroll tax reforms we estimate the responses of gross labor income with respect to marginal and average net of tax rates in france over the period 2003 2006 we exploit a series of reforms to the income tax and payroll tax schedules affecting individuals who earn less than twice the minimum wage our estimate for the elasticity of gross labor income with respect to the marginal net of income tax rate is around 0 2 while we find no response to the marginal net of payroll tax rate the elasticity with respect to the average net of tax rate is not significant for the income tax schedule while it is close to 1 for the payroll tax schedule a plausible explanation is the existence of significant labor supply responses to the income tax schedule combined with sticky posted wages i e the gross labor income minus payroll taxes divided by hours worked finally the effect of the net of income tax rate seems to be driven by participation decisions in particular those of married women

do deployment policies pick technologies by not picking applications a simulation of investment decisions in technologies with multiple applications abstract the role of deployment policies that aim to foster technological change has grown considerably especially in the fields of energy and climate however recent research has shown that the adoption of deployment policies carries the potential of locking in the technology that is most cost effective at the point of policy introduction but may be inefficient in the long term the present paper contributes to the emerging literature on the role of deployment policies in creating path dependency and eventually technology lock in while previous studies focused on the relationship between lock in and the technology specificity of deployment policies this paper introduces a new factor the existence of multiple applications for a technology we argue that this factor is highly relevant for technological lock in and should be considered by policy makers to support our argument we simulate the competition among four stationary battery technologies across energy system applications in an investment simulation model this simulation shows that the degree of competition among technologies differs strongly across applications which corresponds with a highly varying lock in probability hence selecting applications in deployment policies very likely corresponds to selecting technologies we discuss the implications of these results for both policy makers and for the academic debate on deployment policies and technological lock in as well as on technology assessment and governance more generally based on the notion that policies can have different technology specificity levels we develop the idea of the application specificity of policies and provide examples of currently enacted deployment policies that vary in terms of their technology and application specificity

marginal tax rates and income new time series evidence this paper estimates the dynamic effects of marginal tax rate changes on income reported on tax returns in the united states over the 1950 2010 period after isolating exogenous variation in average marginal tax rates in structural vector autoregressions using a narrative identification approach i find large positive effects of tax cuts in the top 1 of the income distribution in contrast to earlier findings based on tax return data i also find large effects in other income percentile brackets a hypothetical tax reform cutting marginal rates only for the top 1 leads to sizeable increases in top 1 incomes and has a positive effect on real gdp there are also spillover effects to incomes outside of the top 1 but top marginal rate cuts lead to greater inequality in pre tax incomes

a policy approach to the environmental impacts of technological lock in abstract the broadening spectrum of environmental problems the uncertainty regarding their scale and duration and their possible irreversibility in the context of the growing social preference for environmental quality make it necessary to undertake an ex ante approach to the link between productive activity and environmental quality this link lies in technology and the right approach is to understand how the process of technological change can lead towards sustainability the added value of evolutionary economics in the context of environmental policy resides mainly in the fact that it warns that certain inferior environmental technologies may be locked in to the economic system the results of our model show that it would be advisable to undertake policies expressly aimed at the process of sustainable technological change applying an ex ante precautionary approach in a way that is complementary to the conventional equilibrium oriented environmental policies the nature of these policies and how they might be implemented are questions we will address from this novel approach to the concept of sustainable development in short the main objectives of this paper are to understand more fully the dynamics of the process of technological change its role in sustainable development and to assess the implications of this dynamic approach to techno environmental policy to achieve these goals we have developed an agent based model abm using distributed artificial intelligence dai concepts drawn from the general methodology of social simulation

measuring permanent responses to capital gains tax changes in panel data the authors use panel data and information about differences in state tax rates to separate the effects of transitory and permanent tax rate changes on capital gains realizations behavior the estimated effect of permanent change is substantially smaller than the effect of transitory change the difference is even larger than differences between estimates from past micro data studies which have primarily measured the transitory effect and time series studies which have primarily measured the permanent effect the authors results resolve a long standing conflict between micro data and time series studies of how marginal tax rates affect capital gains realizations behavior copyright 1994 by american economic association

the openness equality trade off in global redistribution the gulf cooperation council gcc countries accept massive numbers of migrants from poor countries and pay wages that dramatically improve over outside options but are meagre by the standards of natives as such they do dramatically more per capita to reduce global inequality than do the fortress welfare states of the organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd countries if oecd countries were to imitate the gcc it would reduce global inequality by more than full equalisation within the oecd would such examples suggest a philosophically disturbing trade off between openness to global inequality reducing migration and internal equality

explaining personality pay gaps in the uk using the british household panel survey we estimate the effect on pay of each of the big five personality traits for employed men living in the uk we add to the existing literature by estimating the role of factors such as education and occupation in explaining personality pay gaps by allowing the personality traits to affect wage differently across occupations education levels and other workers characteristics and by investigating personality pay gaps for high and low paid workers we find that openness to experience is the most relevant personality trait in explaining wages followed by neuroticism agreeableness extroversion and conscientiousness openness and extroversion are rewarded while agreeableness and neuroticism are penalized but the openness pay gap is totally explained by differences in worker characteristics particularly education and occupation

the governance of sustainable socio technical transitions a quasi evolutionary model of socio technical transitions is described in which regimes face selection pressures continuously differentiated transition contexts determine the form and direction of regime change in response to these pressures the articulation of pressures and the degree to which responses are coordinated and based on resources available within the regime define the transition context four alternative contexts are described endogenous renewal re orientation of trajectories emergent transformation and purposive transitions agency and power in the governance of regime transformation are analysed power to affect change depends on regime membership the distribution of resources for change and expectations

regional labor markets and the determinants of wage inequality from 1972 to 1990 the united states experienced the largest increase in wage inequality of any developed country the spread in log wages between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the male wage distribution increased by about 60 points and inequality increased within virtually every demographic or skill category of the labor force see chinhui juhn et al 1993 various explanations have been offered including changes in the relative demand for skill intensive goods international trade immigration of less skilled workers and increased labor force participation of women yet attempts to quantify the relative importance of these factors have not met with much success this leaves skill biased technical change as the residual claimant that rationalizes the data this paper uses regional differences in the evolution of wage inequality to provide new evidence on the determinants of relative wages using a model of factor demand in geographic markets i isolate contributions of i changing skill ratios in the labor force ii increased participation of women iii technical change and iv changes in the industrial composition of labor demand the data indicate that changing skill ratios and women s labor supply have affected the wages of low skilled men in the west the data indicate that increased immigration of less skilled hispanic and asian workers has adversely affected the wages of natives causing a greater increase in inequality there than in any other region of the country i modeling wage inequality in regional markets

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

gender role attitudes and the labour market outcomes of women across oecd countries this paper uses data from the world value surveys 1990 1995 1999 to investigate the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women s labour market outcomes across 25 oecd countries anti egalitarian views are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap these views are however softening among recent cohorts on the other hand perceptions of women s role as homemakers which are likely formed in youth and linked to religious ideology are more persistent over time they could be implicated in the recent slowdown of the gender convergence in pay finally the unavoidable clash between family values and egalitarian views that takes the form of an inner conflict for many women the so called mother s guilt is another obstacle in the path towards greater gender equality in the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

the impact of psychological and human capital on wages historically economists have taken the position that psychological capital is either unobservable or immeasurable thus heretofore little evidence has been available on the contribution of psychological capital to wages using data drawn from two different waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth we offer evidence that psychological capital has both a direct effect via self esteem and an indirect effect through locus of control on an individual s real wage we find a person s wage is more sensitive to changes in self esteem than to comparable alterations in human capital both relative wages and human capital contribute to self esteem

systems thinking market failure and the development of innovation policy the case of australia innovation policy is increasingly informed from the perspective of a national innovation system nis but despite the fact that research findings emphasize the importance of national differences in the framing conditions for innovation policy prescriptions tend to be uniform justifications for innovation policy generally relate to notions of market failure that are applicable in all nations in all conditions in this paper we develop a broad framework for nis analysis involving free market coordination and complex evolutionary system approaches within this framework we explore the evolving relationship between market failure and systems approaches to innovation policy in the case of australia drawing on information and analysis collected for a major review of australia s nis and the government s 10 year plan in response to it we show how the free market trajectory of policy making of past decades is being extended complemented and refocused by new approaches to complex evolutionary system thinking these approaches are shown to emphasize the importance of systemic connectivity evolving institutions and organizational capabilities nonetheless despite the fact that there has been much progress in this direction in the australian debate the predominant logic behind policy choices still remains one of addressing market failure and the primary focus of policy attention continues to be science and research rather than demand led approaches we discuss how the development and elaboration of notions of systems failure rather than just market failure can further improve policy making in the future

panel estimates of the earnings gap in norway do female immigrants experience a double earnings penalty this study explores the possibility that being both a female and an immigrant will impose an earnings disadvantage on immigrant women in norway well known techniques are used to decompose the earnings gap between norwegian men and immigrant women into portions attributable to productivity differentials portions attributable to a gender effect and portions attributable to an ethnic effect the analysis supports the following conclusions first there is evidence of a double negative effect on female immigrant earnings second gender effect is more important than ethnic effect finally the discrimination estimates are robust to the alternative methods used in decomposing norwegian men immigrant women earnings gap

lead markets and regulation a framework for analyzing the international diffusion of environmental innovations abstract environmental regulations are often intended to stimulate the generation and adoption of eco efficient innovations an important argument in the public debate is also the creation of new markets for environmentally benign products processes and services in other countries and the generation as a result of export opportunities for the pioneering country lead markets research on lead markets has not however focused on environmental innovations to date we therefore extend the lead market model to environmental innovations and take particular account of the peculiarities of such innovations in particular the public good character of environmental benefits and the role of regulations this approach is applied to two case studies wind energy and fuel efficient passenger cars in both cases the innovation was initially adopted in one country other countries subsequently adopted the same innovation design favored by the lead market which in turn developed into a large exporter in the wind generation and car industries respectively we discuss the regulations employed and the reasons for the international success of the innovations induced by them our findings demonstrate that when supported by global demand or regulatory trends strict regulation results in the creation of lead markets finally we provide recommendations on how our model could be used for further research and in the development of a coordinated environmental and innovation policy

clean energy and international oil oil has been the world s dominant fuel for more than 50 years substitution of oil for power generation and heating has progressed since the 1970s but substitution of oil in transport remains elusive this paper examines the progress of clean energy and compares the unfolding co evolution of technologies markets and institutions with what we know about substitution of oil and technological paradigm shifts while the rhetoric in favour of clean energy is strong technologies policies and supportive infrastructure investments are still in a formative stage the transformative process will evolve over the next 10 20 years and change irreversibly the demand dynamics for oil although decline in the demand for oil is not imminent the impact of the clean energy transition on international oil is evident even now high oil prices accelerate commitment policies and market prospects for clean energy options and speed up the market readiness of substitutes for oil while 20 years appears a long time for the development and scale up of alternatives to oil it is a short period in the context of the required paradigm shift for international oil it is well within the time frame for resource rent optimization strategic planning and investment decisions high cost resource developers need to be aware copyright 2011 oxford university press

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

assessing policy strategies for the promotion of environmental technologies a review of india s national solar mission abstract there is widespread consensus that no individual policy instrument but rather a policy mix is needed to effectively drive the development and diffusion of environmental technologies however what exactly constitutes such a policy mix remains largely undefined this paper takes this discussion a step further by developing a comprehensive framework for assessing and comparing policy approaches for the promotion of environmental technologies it begins with a critical review of existing policy mix concepts pointing out key shortcomings to address the identified challenges it proposes the concept of a policy strategy as an alternative framework for policy assessment and comparison this serves as the basis for integrating findings from the literature on environmental innovation and technological change in a comprehensive framework for assessing policy strategies for the promotion of environmental technologies the framework is then applied for the assessment of india s national solar mission the country s strategy for promoting solar energy technologies based on the resulting findings the potential and limitations of the proposed framework are discussed

the limitations of decentralized world redistribution an optimal taxation approach abstract a centralized scheme of world redistribution that maximizes a border neutral social welfare function subject to the disincentive effects it would create generates a drastic reduction in world consumption inequality dropping the gini coefficient from 0 69 to 0 25 in contrast an optimal decentralized i e with no cross country transfers redistribution has a miniscule effect on world income inequality thus the traditional public finance concern about the excess burden of redistribution cannot explain why there is so little world redistribution actual foreign aid is vastly lower than the transfers under the simulated world income tax suggesting that voluntary world transfers subject to a free rider problem produces an outcome that is consistent with rich countries such as the united states either placing a much lower value on the welfare of foreigners or else expecting that a very significant fraction of cross border transfers is wasted the product of the welfare weight and one minus the share of transfers that are wasted constitutes the implicit weight that the united states assigns to foreigners we calculate that value to be as low as 1 2000 of the value put on the welfare of an american suggesting that u s policy is consistent with social preferences that place essentially no value on the welfare of the citizens of the poorest countries or that implicitly assumes that essentially all transfers are wasted

the open eco innovation mode an empirical investigation of eleven european countries this paper deals with the open innovation mode in the environmental realm and investigates the effects that knowledge sourcing has on the environmental innovations eis of firms using the community innovation survey cis 2006 2008 we refer to the firm s probability of both introducing an ei and extending the number of ei typologies adopted we estimate the impact of the depth and breadth of knowledge sourcing in addition we test for the moderating role of the firm s absorptive capacity knowledge sourcing has a positive impact on both types of ei performance however a broad sourcing strategy reveals a threshold above which the propensity to introduce an ei diminishes cognitive constraints in processing knowledge inputs that are too diverse may explain this result absorptive capacity generally helps firms to turn broadly sourced external knowledge into ei however internal innovation capabilities and knowledge socialization mechanisms seem to diminish the ei impact of knowledge sourced through deep external interactions the possibility of mismatches between the management of internal and external knowledge and of problems in distributing the decision makers attention between the two may explain this result

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

escaping carbon lock in this article explores the climate policy implications of the arguments made in understanding carbon lock in unruh 2000 which posited that industrial countries have become locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through path dependent processes driven by increasing returns to scale carbon lock in arises through technological organizational social and institutional co evolution culminating in what was termed as techno institutional complex tic in order to resolve the climate problem an escape from the lock in condition is required however due to the self referential nature of tic escape conditions are unlikely to be generated internally and it is argued here that exogenous forces are probably required

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

true world income distribution 1988 and 1993 first calculation based on household surveys alone the paper derives world income or expenditure distribution of individuals for two years 1988 and 1993 it is the first paper to calculate world distribution for individuals based entirely on household survey data from 91 countries and adjusted for differences in purchasing power parity between the countries measured by the gini index inequality increased from an already very high 63 in 1988 to 66 in 1993 the increase was driven more by rising differences in mean incomes between the countries than by rising inequalities within countries the most important contributors were rising urban rural differences in china and slow growth of rural incomes in south asia compared to several large developed market economies

technology systems and technology policy in an evolutionary framework the central purpose of this paper is to outline an evolutionary theory of technology policy and to connect it with the emerging literature on national systems of innovation any understanding of technology policy must be based on a clear understanding of the nature of technology and the important differences between science and technology technology can be treated in terms of knowledge skills and artifacts and in each case there are different variety generating mechanisms different selection processes and different institutional structures for policy purposes the degree of connection between these different dimensions of technology is at the core of technology policy c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

is the gender wage gap declining in the netherlands in this paper i try to answer the question whether the gender wage gap in the netherlands is declining i posed this question because on several other indicators labour market differences between men and women in the netherlands declined or disappeared altogether first of all the labour market participation of women has increased and women on the labour market are no longer a small minority second the difference in productive characteristics between men and women is disappearing third both product and labour markets have become increasingly competitive due to changes in regulation like anti trust laws which should have an effect on the gender wage gap contrary to these expectations i did not find a declining gender wage gap the data in dutch institute for labour studies osa labour supply panel show a steady gender gap of approximately nineteen per cent at most twenty five to thirty per cent of the gap can be explained by productivity differences the largest part of the gender wage gap is due

from government to market and from producer to consumer transition of policy mix towards clean mobility in china abstract this paper proposes a new typology that classifies innovation policy instruments into two dimensions government selection versus market selection and producer orientation versus consumer orientation such a typology articulates the importance of consumer behavior in the policy design for a transition and the relevance for the market to select target subjects of policy during the deployment stage of clean technology innovation we apply this typology to policy instruments of china s new energy vehicle nev industry between 1991 and 2015 in order to explain the industry s rapid growth the focus of china s policy mix has transited from government selection to market selection and from producer orientation to consumer orientation other than the new typology this paper traces the entire history of policy transition within china s nev industry and finds the transition to be a result of policy learning thus contributing to future empirical studies of this industry

the effect of income taxes on household income research on the distribution of income during the 1980s has identified a trend towards increasing inequality which may be the continuation and acceleration of trends spanning several decades this paper explores to what extent behavioral responses to the tax changes during the 1980s may also explain the rising inequality the 1986 tax reform act is used as a natural experiment to explore the roles played by both taxes and a variety of nontax factors our principal finding is that both tax rates and nontax factors appear to have had significant effects on relative income growth during the late 1980s

innovations externalities and the problem of economic progress in modern industrial societies innovativeness is seen as a source of economic growth and welfare increases following this assessment economic research presently focusses almost exclusively on the question of how to elicit innovations yet innovative economic activities have always also meant losses sometimes even hardship to some members of society and incalculable risks the present paper tries to develop a more balanced picture by acknowledging these less pleasant implications whether and under what conditions the permissive regime which modern societies have adopted towards innovations can be justified is discussed within the framework of a contractarian approach

inside the black box technology and economics economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and on the whole have adhered rather strictly to a self imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box the purpose of professor rosenberg s work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box in so doing a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated the author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of variables of great concern to economists the rate of productivity improvement the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself the speed of technology transfer and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways the separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century such as the increasing reliance upon science but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies

gender roles and human capital inverstment the relationship between traditional attitudes and female labour market performance this paper investigates the relationship between the labour market behaviour of females and their attitudes towards traditional gender roles an attitudes index is constructed by employing individuals responses to statements related to the role of women and examined to determine whether it is correlated with individual characteristics the paper examines whether these attitudes influence human capital attainment and whether they are weakly exogenous to educational attainment it also focuses on the impact of these traditio nal attitudes upon labour supply and the return to education the results are dramatic it is found that females attitudes towards working women are developed in their youth and result in substantial reductions in their human capital investment labour supply and rates of return to education furthermore it is found that these attitudes are determined outside the educational process

employers discriminatory behavior and the estimation of wage discrimination this paper considers the linkage of empirical estimates of wage discrimination between two groups introduced by oaxaca 1973 to a theoretical model of employers discriminatory behavior it is shown that conditional on different assumptions about employers discriminatory tastes oaxaca s estimators of wage discrimination can be derived that the approach is more generally useful is demonstrated by deriving an alternative estimator of wage discrimination based on the assumption that within each type of labor e g unskilled skilled the utility function capturing employers discriminatory tastes is homogeneous of degree zero with respect to labor inputs from each of the two groups the estimators are compared empirically in an application to male female wage differentials

female labor force intermittency and current earnings a switching regression model with unknown sample selection using the health and retirement survey from the usa this paper finds a 16 selectivity corrected wage penalty among women who engage in intermittent labour market activity this penalty is experienced at a low level of intermittent activity but appears to not play an important role in a woman s decision to undertake such activity in addition employer preferences appear to play a larger role than human capital atrophy in the determination of the wage penalty

the role of regulatory learning in energy transition the case of solar pv in brazil abstract an important problem that has attracted significant amount of attention within the context of energy transitions is the carbon lock in a situation in which energy systems are locked in to high carbon technologies through a path dependent process several measures to avoid the carbon lock in involve technology specific measures which in turn implies that those measures may result in an energy system locked in to certain low carbon technologies we consider that the brazilian system needs policies to escape the carbon lock in which are based on providing incentives to low carbon technologies we develop an analytical framework to analyze the role of regulatory institutions in the possible lock in to utility scale photovoltaic in the sense that they create barriers to the adoption of distributed generation photovoltaic we show that the definition of a process to adapt the institutional framework in a context of stress in the innovation system is crucial for the adoption of new technologies applying our framework to the brazilian power sector we observe that only when regulators consider the possibility that the system is locked in to centralized production technologies and not when they just consider the carbon lock in they manage to eliminate barriers to distributed generation based on solar pv

redefining innovation eco innovation research and the contribution from ecological economics while innovation processes toward sustainable development eco innovations have received increasing attention during the past years theoretical and methodological approaches to analyze these processes are poorly developed against this background the term eco innovation is introduced in this paper addressing explicitly three kinds of changes towards sustainable development technological social and institutional innovation secondly the potential contribution of neoclassical and co evolutionary approaches from environmental and innovation economics to eco innovation research is discussed three peculiarities of eco innovation are identified the double externality problem the regulatory push pull effect and the increasing importance of social and institutional innovation while the first two are widely ignored in innovation economics the third is at the least not elaborated appropriately the consideration of these peculiarities may help to overcome market failure by establishing a specific eco innovation policy and to avoid a technology bias through a broader understanding of innovation finally perspectives for a specific contribution of ecological economics to eco innovation research are drawn it is argued that methodological pluralism as established in ecological economics would be very beneficial for eco innovation research a theoretical framework integrating elements from both neoclassical and evolutionary approaches should be pursued in order to consider the complexity of factors influencing innovation decisions as well as the specific role of regulatory instruments and the experience gathered in ecological economics integrating ecological social and economic aspects of sustainable development is highly useful for opening up innovation research to social and institutional changes 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

personality and the gender wage gap in this study we investigate whether personality traits contribute towards a better understanding of the reasons for the gender wage gap we explore whether two of the personality factors put forward by bowles et al 2001 as likely to be incentive enhancing in the employer employee relationship can explain the difference in wages for women and men these are 1 personal self efficacy locus of control loc and 2 time preference we also study the role of the so called big five personality traits extraversion emotional stability agreeableness openness intellect and conscientiousness which have been associated with earnings in several recent studies using a sample of dutch employees we found that 11 5 of the observed gender wage gap could be ascribed to differences in the personality trait scores mainly in agreeableness and intellect while less than 0 5 could be ascribed to gender differences in the returns to the traits the addition of personality traits to a traditional human capital

evolutionary policies for sustainable development adaptive flexibility and risk minimising abstract an evolutionary perspective on policies to foster sustainable development is presented it is argued that policies suggested by the traditional economic theory of environmental policy can stimulate unsustainable socio economic structures and patterns in addition they are unable to remove undesired locked in systems and technologies drawing on evolutionary thinking characterised by diversity selection innovation path dependence and bounded rationality an alternative partly complementary theory of environmental policy is suggested specific attention is given to the role of strategies that are aimed at increasing diversity and adaptive flexibility and at reducing risk

green transition industrial policy and economic development this paper outlines possibilities for a green industrial policy with particular emphasis on developing countries the question of green industrial policy is investigated by examining experiences and barriers to phasing in green technologies focusing on solar pv and energy efficiency as areas for a green industrial policy the paper outlines a green transition approach to sustain a shift to cleaner and more energy efficient production processes through clever policy mixes involving elements of push and pull rent management and policy adaptation by competent authorities are also part of the model the paper offers concrete guidance to the question of what governments in developing countries can usefully and realistically do to phase in green technologies given the priorities for development imperfect institutions for policy making and implementation weakly developed innovation systems and problems of lock in

inventor networks in renewable energies the influence of the policy mix in germany technological change and gains in efficiency of renewable power generation technologies are to a large extent driven by governmental support various policy instruments that can broadly be categorized as technology push demand pull or systemic constitute part of the policy mix for renewable energies our goal is to gain insights into the influence of this policy mix on the intensity and organization of inventive activities for wind power and photovoltaics in germany since the 1980s we examine the effect of different instruments on the size and structure of co inventor networks based on patent data our results indicate notable differences between the technologies the network size for wind power is driven by technology push and systemic instruments while in photovoltaics demand pull is decisive for network growth by and large the instruments complement each other and form a consistent mix of policy instruments the structure of the networks is driven by demand pull for both technologies systemic instruments increase interaction especially in the wind power network and are complementary to demand pull in fostering collaboration

redistribution when avoidance behavior is heterogeneous abstract the optimal income taxation framework is extended to account for heterogeneity in avoidance behavior the optimal tax formulae are shown to be simply and intuitively modified to reflect the value of taxable income as an indicator of the need for transfers at a given skill level this effect is in addition to any effect implied by just considering additional margins of response to taxes alternative sources of heterogeneity and their likely consequences are discussed when the choice of administration is added to the model it is demonstrated that the optimal tax system may include some seemingly wasteful avoidance schemes even if they could be eliminated without any cost when an avoidance scheme is more heavily used by the needy it may provide additional redistribution without affecting standard incentive constraints

the elasticity of taxable income during the 1990s new estimates and sensitivity analyses author affiliation seth h giertz sgiertz2 unl edu acknowledgment the author wishes to thank david weiner ed harris bob dennis doug hamilton tom woodward emmanuel saez chris bollinger and three anonymous referees for their comments and assistance 1 introductioneconomists have long recognized that taxation creates economic inefficiency by distorting relative prices often between leisure and all other goods in the economy even a broad based income tax can have substantial efficiency costs so long as leisure remains untaxed harberger 1964 uses this as motivation for comparing the efficiency implications of direct versus indirect taxation in so doing he shows how labor supply elasticities can be used to measure the efficiency implications of income taxation 1 harberger s analysis had a profound influence on public and labor economists spurring increased research into labor supply elasticities which were seen as proxies for the efficiency costs from taxation more than two decades after harberger economists began to emphasize the variety of other margins over which taxes can distort behavior in addition to hours worked these economists noted that these other behavioral responses may too have important implications for efficiency an important building block in the evolution of this literature was set forth by slemrod 1990 who presented a hierarchy of behavioral responses to taxation slemrod divided behavior into three categories based on their responsiveness to taxes his least responsive category real responses includes individuals changing consumption and work patterns and businesses altering investment and production decisions second in order of responsiveness is circumvention which includes both illegally evasion and legally avoidance bypassing the tax system 2 in the case of evasion income is concealed from tax authorities or factors that offset tax liabilities such as expenses and deductions are inflated beyond what is legally permitted in the case of avoidance income is shifted in order to receive more favorable tax treatment diverting income into a tax deferred retirement account is an example of avoidance 3 included in circumvention is the expenditure of time and money necessary to avoid or evade taxation third on the hierarchy and the most responsive is the timing of income receipt which includes pulling the receipt of income into the previous year or pushing it into the next in order to take advantage of more favorable tax treatment while not altering real behavior 4 slemrod further recognizes that the type of behavioral response could have implications for both tax revenue and tax incidence and in some cases efficiency predating slemrod s insights lindsey 1987 produced elasticity estimates for taxable income although what lindsey termed taxable income more closely approximates adjusted gross income agi instead of labor supply 5 lindsey s estimated elasticities were much larger than the labor supply literature would have suggested lindsey emphasized the revenue implications of the elasticity of taxable income eti but not its efficiency implications building on slemrod and lindsey feldstein 1995 produced eti estimates but went much further than lindsey in describing the behaviors that could affect taxable income he argued that many of these behaviors were not captured by labor supply elasticities furthermore feldstein posited that income taxation creates economic inefficiency not only by distorting the relative price between labor and leisure but more broadly by distorting the relative price between goods or activities that are taxed and those that are not taxed since leisure is not the only untaxed activity for example in response to taxes not only work hours but also work effort might change

evolutionary approaches for sustainable innovation policies from niche to paradigm fostering technological innovation is considered as an important element of policies towards sustainable development in the past 10 years evolutionary policy approaches have been increasingly advocated for several reasons they seem well equipped to underpin sustainable innovation policies they focus on dynamics of change and their drivers they allow for a substantive perspective on technologies beyond mere input output relations taking into account trajectories and different characteristics of innovation and they are able to describe circumstances under which established technologies might persist even when they are to some extent inferior to their new competitors lock in however the policy effectiveness of evolutionary approaches in cases in which radical or systemic changes are involved is not yet proven in this paper we assess the theoretical rationale instrumental aspects and the coping with policy constraints of three evolutionary policy approaches which have also been used in empirical studies strategic niche management transition management and time strategies each approach has its strengths and specific problems and all three have to be further developed and tested out but they hold promise for contributing to non incremental change with economic and environmental benefits by shaping processes of variation selection and retention with the outcomes feeding back into policy they may also be used in other areas in which innovation direction is important for instance health care or food

the tax effect on taxable income from privately held businesses the implications of the tax elasticity of taxable income have been widely discussed in the literature this study uses the reported rate of return to capture the effects of tax changes on taxable income from privately held businesses households decisions concerning reporting rates of return are embedded in a selection model of business investment decisions with 1983 1989 survey of consumer finances panel data the tax elasticity of the reported rates of return on privately held businesses is found to be positive and large the tax elasticity of taxable income from privately held businesses is thus crucial for policy evaluation several reasons for the high tax elasticity and the implications of it are also discussed

international redistribution of income summary how do international policies on aid trade and factor movements affect the international distribution of income we calculate the impact by world decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on income of merchandise trade restrictions by high income countries we find that aid s distributional impact is equality enhancing extremely small in terms of changes in inequality measures but of some importance for the lowest decile of the distribution we also find that some of this impact is counteracted by lost potential income in the lower deciles from merchandise trade barriers imposed by high income countries

innovation enabling policy and regime transformation towards increased energy efficiency the case of the circulator pump industry in europe abstract when new energy efficient products are struggling with their commercialisation and diffusion into widespread applications you would typically expect policy makers and green lead users to guide the way this paper examines the case of the hot water circulator pump industry in europe where parts of the industry envisioned and worked for a voluntary energy label bringing technological innovation new business and energy savings of approx 85 for each new circulator pump the case study explores the complexities of innovation processes where technology market actors and policy co evolve over time to transform an existing socio technical regime the paper highlights the importance of policies to reduce barriers towards innovation and energy efficiency and shows that it is not always policy makers that establish the crucial policies that change the innovation dynamics for the benefit of the environment and the industry

prospective voluntary agreements for escaping techno institutional lock in the paper looks for evolutionary policy responses to techno institutional lock in a persistent state that creates systemic market and policy barriers to technological alternatives we address the coordination role for authorities rather than corrective optimisation and elaborate three evolutionary policy objectives including fostering of i the diversity of technological options ii common vision for the implementation of technological alternatives and iii changes in social and physical networks we use these objectives to analyse documented experiences from environmental voluntary agreements and foresight activities we argue that combining the virtues of these tools into a new policy tool named prospective voluntary agreement can help facilitate an escape from techno institutional lock in the merit of the prospective voluntary agreement lies with the enhancement of collaborative policy cultures and inter sectoral and interdisciplinary stakeholder learning that creates commitment to desired action for escaping lock in d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

reported gross income and marginal tax rates estimation of the behavioural reactions of spanish taxpayers this article estimates for the spanish personal income tax the elasticity of reported gross income to marginal tax rates the identification of this elasticity has been performed using the reform approved by law 35 2006 which came into force in january 2007 the elasticities obtained suggest the existence of important efficiency costs with significant regional differences the average elasticity estimated for spain as a whole is 0 676 however this elasticity is highly dispersed throughout the spanish administrative regions which indicates the unequal power of distortion of the tax thus households whose principal source of income is salary display an elasticity of 0 337 compared to 0 682 for households whose main income source comes from business or savings lastly a positive correlation is also detected between elasticity and income level an elasticity of 3 6 is reached for taxpayers with an annual gross income exceeding 100 000

dynamic aid allocation abstract this paper introduces a framework for studying the optimal dynamic allocation of foreign aid among multiple recipients we pose the problem as one of weighted global welfare maximization a donor in the north chooses an optimal path for international transfers anticipating that consumption and investment decisions will be made by optimizing households in the south and accounting for limits in the extent to which recipients can effectively absorb aid we present quantitative results on optimal aid policy by applying our approach to a neoclassical growth model where the scope for aid funded growth is determined by the recipients distance from steady state

the two faces of market support how deployment policies affect technological exploration and exploitation in the solar photovoltaic industry the recent years have seen a strong rise in policies aiming to increase the diffusion of clean energy technologies while there is general agreement that such deployment policies have been very effective in bringing technologies to the market it is less understood how these policies affect technological innovation to shed more light on this important question we conducted comparative case studies with a global sample of 9 firms producing solar photovoltaic pv modules complemented by in depth interviews with 16 leading pv industry experts we propose that on the one hand policy induced market growth serves as an important catalyst for innovative activity as it raises the absolute level of firm investments in technological exploration on the other hand however deployment policies create an incentive for firms pursuing more mature technologies to shift their balance between exploitation and exploration toward exploitation firms focusing on less mature technologies cannot tap the potentials of exploitative learning to the same extent as those with more mature technologies therefore stimulating strong market growth may raise the barrier to market entry for less mature technologies we conclude that when designing deployment policies great care should be taken to avoid adverse effects on technological diversity and a premature lock in into more established technologies

incentive enhancing preferences personality behavior and earnings suppose there is a principal agent relationship between employer and employee in which effort is not contractible but is elicited through employer incentive mechanisms we term preferences that allow the employer to elicit effort at lower cost incentive enhancing we analyze how such preferences affect earnings nd then provide evidence that one of the relevant behavioral traits efficacy as well as other psychological aspects of individuals are significant influences on earnings we conclude that measures of cognitive performance are not sufficient indicators of the effectiveness of schools in promoting student labor market success incentive enhancing preferences are irreducibly heterogeneous incentive enhancing preferences help explain the persistence of poverty over generations within families and unlike cognitive skills incentive enhancing traits need not be welfare increasing for their bearers

mobilizing private finance for low carbon innovation a systematic review of barriers and solutions this paper analyses the field of innovation studies regarding barriers to low carbon innovation and consequences for finance investment and divestment and contributes to a more holistic understanding of the underlying mechanisms a combination of technological barriers combined with economic barriers institutional and political barriers contribute to sub optimal low carbon investment all along the innovation cycle policy makers need to take a systemic approach to enable the redirection of diverse private financial sources instruments range from cutting dirty r d subsidies and support for clean technology innovation and diffusion levelling the institutional playing field and making risks of high carbon and low carbon technologies transparent to providing a consistent but adaptive long term transition strategy this would allow financiers to gradually shift their investments away from high carbon mainstream markets and scale low carbon technology niche markets however financiers also need to sharpen their competencies with regard to new clean technologies and markets

global income distribution from the fall of the berlin wall to the great recession we present an improved panel database of national household surveys between 1988 and 2008 in 2008 the global gini index is around 70 5 having declined by approximately 2 gini points china graduated from the bottom ranks changing a twin peaked global income distribution to a single peaked one and creating an important global median class 90 of the fastest growing country deciles are from asia while almost 90 of the worst performers are from mature economies another winner was the global top 1 hence the global growth incidence curve has a distinct supine s shape with gains highest around the median and top

sibling gender and wage differences abstractfamily influences on economic performance are investigated in particular sibship sex composition is related to hourly wages using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 the wages of men are increasing in the proportion of siblings who are brothers but the wages of women are insensitive to sibling gender nonwage outcomes are generally unaffected contrasts by age structure and demographic group are also presented the analysis addresses econometric challenges like the endogeneity of fertility and selection into the workforce in addition mechanisms such as labour market interactions human capital investment and role model effects are documented a questionnaire on job search indicates a same gender bias in the use of brothers and sisters in obtaining employment developmental and psychological assessments suggest that brothers may be associated with worse childhood home environments and more traditional family attitudes among women the findings are policy relevant and cont

politics and the effectiveness of foreign aid abstract critics of foreign aid programs have long argued that poverty reflects government failure in this paper i test predictions for aid effectiveness based on an analytical framework that relates aid effectiveness to political regimes i find that aid does not significantly increase investment nor benefit the poor as measured by improvements in human development indicators but it does increase the size of government the impact of aid does not vary according to whether recipient governments are liberal democratic or highly repressive but liberal political regimes and democracies ceteris paribus have on average 30 lower infant mortality than the least free regimes this may be due to greater empowerment of the poor under liberal regimes even though the political elite continues to receive the benefits of aid programs an implication is that short term aid targeted to support new liberal regimes may be a more successful means of reducing poverty than current programs

a tale of two market failures technology and environmental policy abstract market failures associated with environmental pollution interact with market failures associated with the innovation and diffusion of new technologies these combined market failures provide a strong rationale for a portfolio of public policies that foster emissions reduction as well as the development and adoption of environmentally beneficial technology both theory and empirical evidence suggest that the rate and direction of technological advance is influenced by market and regulatory incentives and can be cost effectively harnessed through the use of economic incentive based policy in the presence of weak or nonexistent environmental policies investments in the development and diffusion of new environmentally beneficial technologies are very likely to be less than would be socially desirable positive knowledge and adoption spillovers and information problems can further weaken innovation incentives while environmental technology policy is fraught with difficulties a long term view suggests a strategy of experimenting with policy approaches and systematically evaluating their success

innovation policy rationales lessons and challenges innovation policy has emerged as a new field of economic policy during the last few decades this paper explores the rationales for national innovation policies as laid out in the existing literature on the subject and considers what the lessons and challenges for theory and practice in this area are innovation policy attempts to influence innovation activity often with the purpose of increasing economic growth but it can also have more specific aims such as preventing unwarranted climate change improving national health and so on the increasing attention given to innovation policy at the national level from the 1990s onwards went hand in hand with the development of a new systemic understanding of innovation which in a better way than before accounted for the stylised facts of innovation activity as identified by empirical work the system approach as the paper shows came to have a significant influence on the subsequent policy discourse drawing on recent advances in innovation systems theory a synthetic framework for the analysis of innovation policy is developed and used to highlight issues of particular relevance for the conduct of innovation policy and future scholarly work in this area less

marital status in a developing economy gender ethnicity and family structure this article employs population survey data for trinidad and tobago to investigate the likelihood of being married both legal and common law in the present or the past as compared to being never married in a developing economy the article finds support for the sex specialized theory of marital formation with men valued more and women valued less for their economic contributions to the family socioeconomic status and ethnicity play an important role in marital formation with sex specialization less likely to occur among africans than the more advantaged ethnic groups one of the consistent findings is that family structure matters crucially in predicting both legal and common law marriages for example living in a large multigenerational household tends to impact the likelihood of marriage as compared to remaining single in opposite ways for men and women with men in large households more likely to be married but women less likely to be married

the elasticity of taxable income evidence and implications abstract a central tax policy parameter that has recently received much attention but about which there is substantial uncertainty is the overall elasticity of taxable income we provide new estimates of this elasticity which address identification problems with previous work by exploiting a long panel of tax returns to study a series of tax reforms throughout the 1980s this identification strategy also allows us to provide new evidence on both the income effects of tax changes on taxable income and on variation in the elasticity of taxable income by income group we find that the overall elasticity of taxable income is approximately 0 4 the elasticity of real income not including tax preferences is much lower we estimate small income effects of tax changes on reported income implying that the compensated and uncompensated elasticities of taxable income are very similar we estimate that this overall elasticity is primarily due to a very elastic response of taxable income for taxpayers who have incomes above 100 000 per year who have an elasticity of 0 57 while for those with incomes below 100 000 per year the elasticity is less than one third as large moreover high income taxpayers who itemize are particularly responsive to taxation our estimates suggest that optimal tax structures may feature tightly targeted transfers to lower income taxpayers and a flat or even declining marginal rate structure for middle and high income taxpayers

meso level factors in technological transitions the development of td scdma in china this paper uses an industry case study of technological transition from second generation 2g to third generation 3g networks in china to unfold how meso level factors drove the development of td scdma china s home born 3g standard in this purposive transitional process under the coordination of a central authority multiple regime actors government agencies engaged in bargaining negotiation and consensus building that determined the developmental directions and outcome of td scdma td scdma proved to be a political success but an economic failure the policy implications are profound in particular as the silo regulatory model of policy making which focuses on a single industry is gradually replaced by a collective model involving interindustry players issues about how to manage the collective model pose a serious challenge to policy makers in china and other emerging countries the paper provides evidence for the importance of meso level factors in the multi level perspective mlp framework of sociotechnical transitions

demand pull and technology push public support for eco innovation the case of the biofuels sector the purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand pull and technology push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector the empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database biopat containing patents in the field of biofuels selected using appropriate keywords and classified according to the technological content of the invention our results generally show that technological capabilities and environmental regulation spur innovative activities in the biofuels sector both demand pull and technology push factors are found to be important drivers of innovation in the biofuels sector however technology exploitation activities in first generation technologies are found to be mainly driven by quantity and price based demand pull policies on the contrary the pace of technology exploration efforts in advanced generation biofuels is shown to react positively to price based demand pull incentives but also to technology push policy the clear diversity in the impact of different public support instruments provides new insights which fuel discussion on the optimal policy mix debate and offers new elements for the design of future policy strategies