green spillovers of outward foreign direct investment on home countries evidence from china s province level data abstract in recent years there has been substantial outward foreign direct investment ofdi from china to other countries meanwhile china has taken green development as one of its core future strategies questions arise as to whether the ofdi of china brings green spillovers towards home and should the government encourage ofdi to further promote the domestic green economy to answer these questions this study examines empirically the reverse spillovers of china s ofdi on its domestic green development based on a panel dataset involving 30 provinces provincial green total factor productivity gtfp is calculated and its relationship with ofdi is discussed for the period of 2006 2015 then the main results demonstrate whether china s ofdi has green spillovers on the domestic economy and to what extent they depend on provincial heterogeneity in terms of absorptive capability and environmental regulation stringency at the national level it is only either when employees in every province have more than 12 years of schooling on average or the environmental legal construction index reaches approximately 611 that china s ofdi can generate significant spillovers towards its green economic growth such that a rise of 1 unit of ofdi is associated with 2 4 and 3 2 increases in gtfp respectively moreover green benefits from ofdi cannot be found in the home country unless the stock of ofdi reaches a certain level i e beyond approximately 3361 chinese yuan rmb per capita at the 2005 constant price at the provincial level the influence of ofdi on the green economy in the eastern provinces is greater than that in other provinces additionally this study finds that the relationships between ofdi absorptive capability environmental regulation stringency and green economic growth are robust to multiple econometric methods and alternative proxies for threshold variables overall it is indicated that china s ofdi does bring green spillovers to china but the current effects show large heterogeneities across provinces and are still very limited due to the lack of necessary supporting conditions even with the dramatically rising scale ofdi in most of chinese provinces has only small effects on local transition to the green economy calling for the formulation of proper policies to encourage ofdi and enhance its green spillover effect

environmental regulation industrial innovation and green development of chinese manufacturing based on an extended cdm model abstract as for the academics and policymakers more attention has been given to the issue on how to drive green development of the manufacturing through regulations and innovations we construct the extended crepon duguet mairesse cdm model and employ the panel data of chinese manufacturing industries during 2003 2014 to examine the effects of environmental regulation on industrial innovation and green development the findings reveal that 1 in the long term environmental regulation has crowded out r d investment 2 environmental regulation has inhibited patent outputs so that the weak version of porter hypothesis is not underpinned 3 in the short term environmental regulation has promoted the improvements of labor productivity energy efficiency and environmental efficiency in the manufacturing industry excluding green total factor productivity gtfp whereas in the long term environmental regulation only has increased energy efficiency while it has obstructed labor productivity which provides no support for the strong version of porter hypothesis 4 different innovation outputs have distinct influences on labor productivity energy efficiency environmental efficiency and gtfp finally this paper provides pertinent policy implications

productivity growth and environmental efficiency of the nonferrous metals industry an empirical study of china abstract this study intends to provide an insight into china s nonferrous metals industry production based on the analysis of the environmental efficiency the malmquist productivity index mpi and the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi the empirical experiment based on the annual data of 27 regions including provinces autonomous regions and municipalities of china during 2003 2009 shows the following results first the industry s environmental efficiency in the east area is mostly higher than that of the other area second the industry s average annual change of mpi and mlpi in china were 4 4 and 0 9 respectively this indicated that the total factor productivity growth of the industry was overestimated if undesirable outputs were ignored third the industry s productivity was mainly affected through technological advances rather than endogenous factors such as improvements in managerial practices finally during the worldwide financial crisis occurred in 2008 the industry s mlpis exceeded the mpis in most regions through measures such as adjustment of the product structure and elimination of backward production capacity

forward looking assessment of the ghg abatement cost application to china abstract evaluation of abatement costs is critical in setting reduction goals and devising climate policy however reliable forward looking assessment of the short term effects of climate policy remains a major challenge using panel data of 30 chinese provinces during 1997 2015 we first estimate the marginal co2 abatement costs using a novel data driven approach convex quantile regression based on the marginal abatement cost estimates and china s plans regarding carbon intensity reduction and economic growth we present a forward looking assessment of the abatement costs for chinese provinces for 2016 2020 our main finding is that all the chinese provinces have a negative abatement cost which means these provinces can benefit from an increase in the absolute level of co2 emissions despite the constraint on carbon intensity the magnitudes of economic benefits exhibit a significant regional disparity because some provinces can increase more co2 emissions than others however there is still costly carbon intensity abatement relative to a counterfactual where the provinces meet their economic growth targets but in the absence of the intensity reduction constraints policy implications have been proposed to enhance the efficiency and fairness of climate policy in china

the low skill trap recently it has become popular to argue that certain workers have fallen into a trap in which they have poor skills few job opportunities and a low return on training while others have not this paper demonstrates how such a trap can occur within a simple matching model with rent sharing rent sharing diminishes the worker s incentive to acquire skills however since firms also benefit from training rent sharing likewise induces job creation the subsequent improved matching prospects may offset the initial disincentive to invest however for this mechanism to be effective firms and workers must coordinate their actions if they do not the trap occurs

a modified malmquist luenberger productivity index assessing environmental productivity performance in china abstract the malmquist luenberger m l index has been used to assess environmental productivity growth with undesirable outputs through applying directional distance function ddf to standard malmquist productivity measurement however when calculating the cross period ddfs the m l index has the same infeasibility problem as the malmquist index does to address this infeasibility problem this paper discusses when infeasibility may happen and develops a modified m l index that is based on a new ddf we propose that the modified m l index can be applied to assessing environmental performance at both macro and micro levels at a macro level we evaluate china s growth in total factor productivity tfp from 1999 to 2012 accounting for undesirable impacts the results show that technical change is the main driver of most tfp growth the tfp changes support the status quo of a distinct gap in economic development among different regions at a micro level we assess chinese auto manufacturers environmental performance from 2005 to 2012 the results suggest that chinese automakers have enjoyed a noticeable tfp improvement and that technical change is the major contributor as well taking together reducing air emissions and other pollutants is an effective way of improving environmental productivity as demonstrated the proposed modified m l index has proved to be consistently feasible and guarantees non negative reference targets for all metrics as a result we recommend the modified m l index as a robust tool for solving the infeasibility problem that is typical in conventional index and for assessing productivity under environmental impacts

energy efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry accounting for undesirable outputs abstract this paper used data from 50 enterprises in china s iron and steel industry to evaluate their energy efficiency and productivity change the study first used a conventional data envelopment analysis model and the malmquist productivity index mpi to measure the energy efficiency and productivity change over the period 2001 2008 the results indicated inefficiency in many of the plants the average energy efficiency was only 61 1 the annual growth rate of productivity was 7 96 over this period and technical change was the main contributor to this growth the research then took undesirable outputs into consideration by using the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi to explore the productivity change from 2006 to 2008 omitting undesirable outputs would result in biased efficiency change and technical change this paper also claimed that environmental regulation has a potentially positive impact on technical change

environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness evidence from china economic activities are closely related to real world environmental issues currently more attention is paid to the association between environmental regulations and industrial competitiveness ic because of pressures on economic development and environmental protection in this study we identify and explain the association between environmental regulations and ic in china as the largest developing country in the world china has the unavoidable responsibility of protecting the environment and promoting global economic development we analyse the mechanisms behind environmental regulations and industrial competiveness at the provincial level and conclude that the impact of environmental regulations upon ic is not a simple linear one but a u shaped relationship it is argued that the crucial intervention to activate the u shaped relationship or porter s hypothesis is innovation which can be triggered by stringent regulations and well designed policies

endogenous inequality in integrated labor markets with two sided search we consider a market with red and green workers where labels are payoff irrelevant workers may acquire skills skilled workers search for vacancies while firms search for workers a unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant there are also asymmetric equilibria in which firms search only for green workers more green than red workers acquire skills skilled green workers receive higher wages and the unemployment rate is higher among skilled red workers discrimination between ex ante identical individuals arises in equilibrium and yet firms have perfect information about their workers and strictly prefer to hire minority workers

a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance data envelopment analysis dea has gained great popularity in environmental performance measurement because it can provide a synthetic standardized environmental performance index when pollutants are suitably incorporated into the traditional dea framework past studies about the application of dea to environmental performance measurement often follow the concept of radial efficiency measures in this paper we present a non radial dea approach to measuring environmental performance which consists of a non radial dea based model for multilateral environmental performance comparisons and a non radial malmquist environmental performance index for modeling the change of environmental performance over time a case study of oecd countries using the proposed non radial dea approach is also presented it is found that the environmental performance of oecd countries as a whole has been improved from 1995 to 1997

a search equilibrium approach to the effects of immigration on labor market outcomes we analyze the impact of the skill biased immigration inux that took place during the years 2000 2009 in the united states within a search and matching model that allows for skill heterogeneity dierential search cost between immigrants and natives capital skill complementarity and possibly endogenous skill acquisition within such a framework we nd that although the skill biased immigration raised the overall net income to natives it may have had distributional eects specically unskilled native workers gained in terms of both employment and wages skilled native workers on the other hand gained in terms of employment but may have lost in terms of wages nevertheless in one extension of the model where skilled workers and immigrants are imperfect substitutes we nd that even the skilled wage may have risen

effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

labour market performance effects of discrimination and loss of skill we examine the impact of discrimination on labor market performance when workers are subject to a risk of losing skills during an unemployment experience within a search and matching framework we show that both natives and immigrants are affected by discrimination discrimination in one sector has positive spillovers inducing employment to increase in the other sector and the effect on labor market performance therefore depends on whether discrimination is present in only one sector or in both discrimination may induce workers to train more or less than natives after having lost their skills dependent upon in which sector there is discrimination net output tends to be most negatively affected by discrimination among high skilled workers jel j15 j31 j61 j64 j71

judicial ingroup bias in the shadow of terrorism we study ingroup bias the preferential treatment of members of one s own group in naturally occurring data where economically signi cant allocation decisions are made under a strong non discriminatory norm data come from rulings in israeli small claims courts during 2000 04 a period characterized by intense ethnically based terrorism our analysis exploits the essentially random assignment of cases to judges jewish or arab and the exogeneity of terrorist attacks with respect to the legal procedure evidence suggests the existence of substantial bias a claim is around 15 more likely to be accepted if assigned to a judge of the same ethnicity as the plainti furthermore we nd that this bias increases with the intensity of terrorism in the vicinity of the court during the period preceding the ruling the results are consistent with existing theory and lab evidence according to which salience of group membership enhances social identi cation

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

productivity and environmental regulation the effect of the nitrates directive in the french pig sector this paper measures the ensuing changes in productivity in the french pig sector following the introduction of the european regulation addressing water pollution by nitrates from agriculture productivity is measured using the malmquist luenberger index the sources of changes in productivity observed are examined by breaking down this index into its technical progress and efficiency components the results show that in the early stages increases in productivity were stimulated by increased efficiency before being driven by technical progress the estimations regarding the sources of efficiency gains for the farms in the sample technical efficiency efficiency of scale and environmental efficiency are then used to estimate the indirect costs and benefits or negative costs linked to the introduction of the environmental regulation controlling the disposal of organic manure and the management of nitrogen surplus from pig farms the existence of a win win effect as regards the porter hypothesis relation between efficiency and environmental regulation is highlighted for the french pig sector

tax competition nash equilibria and residential mobility abstract wildasin journal of public economics 35 241 249 1988 examines and compares the equilibrium policies of governments when they compete in the tax rate and when they compete in the government service he finds that the two equilibrium outcomes differ with governments having greater government expenditures when they compete in taxes wildasin however assumes that residents are immobile here i show that while these two equilibria will still generally differ when residents are mobile wildasin s conclusion that competition in the tax rate results in higher government service levels does not hold when the demand for housing is elastic and government policies are chosen to maximize land rent when governments maximize the utility of landowning residents the results are reversed competition in the tax rate results in higher government service levels when the demand for housing is elastic and lower service levels when the demand is inelastic

shadow pricing of undesirable outputs in nonparametric analysis abstract for three decades a growing interest in the modeling of desirable and undesirable outputs has led to a theoretical and methodological debate in the nonparametric literature on production technology and efficiency the first main discussion is about the way of modeling bad undesirables as inputs or outputs or by transformation functions the second debate concerns the implications of the weak disposability assumption in the modeling of bad outputs in particular the possibility of assigning unexpected signs to shadow prices of bad outputs in addition we point out a current error in the modeling of weak disposability under a variable returns to scale technology in this paper we introduce a hybrid model to ensure the economically meaningful jointness of good and bad outputs while constraining shadow prices of bad outputs to their expected sign we argue that it is a sound compromise to model undesirable outputs with a meaningful primal dual economic interpretation finally we propose an extension to define shadow prices for undesirable outputs following the law of one price loop rule

exploring the green total factor productivity of china s metallurgical industry under carbon tax a perspective on factor substitution abstract the characteristics of high emissions and high energy consumption in metallurgical industry have brought great challenges to the green and low carbon transition in china as a low carbon economic instrument carbon tax is generally considered to be an effective way to reduce co2 emissions through raising energy cost but whether it will promote the green total factor productivity gtfp of china s metallurgical industry is still unanswered under this background this paper uses provincial panel data over years 2000 2015 to investigate the impact of carbon taxation on gtfp of metallurgical industry from the perspective of inter fuel and inter factor substitution the lock in mechanism is also incorporated in the three stage estimation model to better reflect the asymmetric price response of factors and fuels the results reveal that the slow marketization process of energy price and the rigid demand for energy in china s metallurgical industry hinder the substitution effect of energy the implementation of carbon tax has limited effect on energy saving and co2 reduction in the metallurgical industry of china and levying a carbon tax has a negative effect on gtfp during the research period therefore the government should not achieve co2 reduction targets at the expense of green economic growth gtfp is suggested to be considered in future assessment criteria in the process of transforming to low carbon economy

gender discrimination estimation in a search model with matching and bargaining this article develops a search model of the labor market with matching bargaining and employers taste discrimination in which under necessary but standard distributional assumption it is possible to separately identify gender discrimination and unobserved productivity differences the equilibrium shows that both prejudiced and unprejudiced employers wage discriminate maximum likelihood estimates on cps data indicate that half of the employers are prejudiced average female productivity is 6 5 lower and two third of the gender earning differential may be explained by prejudice an affirmative action policy is implemented resulting in a redistribution of welfare from men to women at no cost for employers welfare

estimating the marginal abatement cost curve of co2 emissions in china provincial panel data analysis abstract this paper estimates the marginal abatement cost curve macc of co2 emissions in china based on a provincial panel for the period of 2001 2010 the provincial marginal abatement cost mac of co2 emissions is estimated using a parameterized directional output distance function four types of model specifications are applied to fit the mac carbon intensity pairs the optimal specification controlling for various covariates is identified econometrically a scenario simulation of china s 40 45 carbon intensity reduction based on our macc is illustrated our simulation results show that china would incur a 559 623 yuan t roughly 51 57 increase in marginal abatement cost to achieve a corresponding 40 45 reduction in carbon intensity compared to its 2005 level

industrial eco efficiency in china a provincial quantification using three stage data envelopment analysis abstract the coordinated development of industrialization and the ecological environment is vital to achieve ecological civilization in china integratively considering the economy energy and resources and environment this study aims to measure the industrial eco efficiency of 30 provinces autonomous regions and municipalities in china between 2005 and 2013 a three stage data envelopment analysis dea modeling approach is adopted to eliminate interference of the external environment and statistical noise with industrial eco efficiency measurement the results show that regional industrial eco efficiency in china is affected by the factors of the environmental regulation technological innovation level of economic development and industrial structure after eliminating the impacts of external environment and statistical noise china s national average industrial eco efficiency declines by 30 between 2005 and 2013 the industrial eco efficiency of the 30 provinces increases but at different rates of growth the variation of overall regional industrial eco efficiency is primarily caused by scale efficiency furthermore all the 30 provinces are classified into four groups to interpret the causes of variation and differences of regional industrial eco efficiency in general the management and technology level and the economy of scale of industries should be improved simultaneously even though specific opportunities for industrial eco efficiency improvement vary across provinces in china

the rise of the states u s fiscal decentralization in the postwar period article i nfo article history one of the most dramatic changes in the fiscal federalism landscape during the postwar period has been the rapid growth in state budgets which almost tripled as a share of gdp and doubled as a share of government spending between 1952 and 2006 we argue that the greater role of states cannot be easily explained by changes in tiebout forces of fiscal competition such as mobility and voting patterns and are not accounted for by demographic or income trends rather we demonstrate that much of the growth in state budgets has been driven by changes in intergovernmental interactions restricted federal grants to states have increased and federal policy and legal constraints have also mandated or heavily incentivized state own source spending particularly in the areas of education health and public welfare these outside pressures moderate the forces of fiscal competition and must be taken into account when assessing the implications of observed revenue and spending patterns

environmental efficiency analysis of power industry in china based on an entropy sbm model chinese national natural science fund 71073040 710201139 71273075 humanities and social science fund of the ministry of education 09yjc790061

good jobs versus bad jobs this article develops a model of noncompetitive labor markets in which high wage good and low wage bad jobs coexist minimum wages and unemployment benefits shift the composition of employment toward high wage jobs because the composition of jobs in the laissez faire equilibrium is inefficiently biased toward low wage jobs these labor market regulations increase average labor productivity and may improve welfare

strategic tax competition with a mobile population espanoleste articulo analiza un modelo estrategico de competicion de impuestos donde el capital y los identicos consumidores pueden migrar entre jurisdicciones los resultados obtenidos son comparados con los resultados del modelo tradicional de competencia tributaria donde la poblacion es inmovil ademas de los efectos fiscales y pecuniarios que aparecen en el modelo tradicional el modelo con poblacion movil presenta un nuevo efecto que distorsiona la provision de bienes publicos como en el caso del efecto pecuniario este nuevo efecto depende de si la jurisdiccion es exportadora neta o importadora neta de capital de esta manera en el caso de jurisdicciones simetricas ambos efectos desaparecen resultando en subprovision de bienes publicos en el caso donde las jurisdicciones son asimetricas ambos modelos tienen los mismos resultados cualitativos reforzando el modelo con poblacion movil los resultados de la externalidad pecuniaria englishthis paper analyzes a model of strategic tax competition with mobile capital and mobile identical consumers the results of the model are compared to the traditional strategic tax competition model with immobile population in addition to the fiscal and pecuniary externalities present in the standard model a new effect shows up in the mo bility model to affect provision of the public good as with the pecuniary externality this new effect depends on whether the jurisdictions are net exporters or net importers of capital thus in a symmetric set up the mobility effect along with the pecuniary externality disappears yielding unambiguous underprovision of the public good while in the asymmetric case both models have the same qualitative results the mobility model strengthens the effects of the pecuniary externality the above results are obtained by comparing the form of the first order conditions between the mobility and immobility cases the remaining question is whether or not the equilibrium levels of the public goods conform to the predicted tendencies this question is answered with an example the results of this exercise show that when the jurisdiction is a net exporter of capital the level of the public good is lower in the mobility case than in the immobility case however if the jurisdiction is a net importer of capital the public good level is sometimes higher and sometimes lower in the mobility case contrary to predictions

labor market effects of september 11th on arab and muslim residents of the united states we investigated whether the september 11 2001 terrorists attacks had any effect on employment earnings and residential mobility of first and second generation arab and muslim men in the united states we find that september 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of arab and muslim men but was associated with a 9 11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings with some evidence that this decline was temporary the adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence estimates also suggest that the terrorists attacks reduced intrastate migration of arab and muslim men

a literature study for dea applied to energy and environment abstract this study systematically summarizes previous research efforts on data envelopment analysis dea applied to energy and environment in the past four decades including concepts and methodologies on dea environmental assessment industrial developments are very important for all nations in terms of their economic prosperities a problem is that the development produces various pollutions on air water and other types of contaminations all of which are usually associated with our health problems and climate changes thus it is necessary for us to consider how to make a balance between economic success and pollution mitigation to maintain a high level of social sustainability in the world it is widely considered that dea is one of the methodologies to examine the level of sustainability this study examines a recent research trend on dea applications from 1980s to 2010s nowadays many researchers have paid serious attention on how to combat various difficulties in the areas of energy and environment as a result the number of articles on dea applications on energy and environment has dramatically increased particularly after 2000s however it is true that dea has strengths and drawbacks in the applications therefore it is very important for us to carefully use dea for guiding large policy issues and business strategies such as the global warming and climate change an underlying premise of this study is that technology innovation in engineering and natural science may solve various problems by linking it with political and managerial efforts the use of dea provides a methodological linkage among them so enhancing the practicality in mitigating problems due to climate change and environmental pollutions this literature study along with a summary on conceptual and methodological developments provides us with guidelines for our future research works on dea on energy and environment issues

the eco efficiency of pulp and paper industry in china an assessment based on slacks based measure and malmquist luenberger index abstract china has become the world largest paper and paperboard producer however pulp and paper industry has involved high resource consumption and severe pollution especially for water this research has assessed the eco efficiency of china s pulp and paper industry at the national level and provincial level an overview regarding the cleaner production of china s pulp and paper industry was presented to reveal the measures for reducing environmental impact in the last two decades slacks based measure was used to analyze the efficiency levels of 16 provinces pulp and paper industries to uncover the underlying causes of eco efficiency performance malmquist luenberger index was calculated to discover the drivers of productivity growth of pulp and paper industries our results showed that the pollution treatment of china s pulp and paper industry has made progress in terms of water consumption and water pollution although the absolute amount of pollution discharge is still large chemical oxygen demand emissions are still the first critical influencing factor of pulp and paper industry s inefficiency furthermore efficiency progress was the dominating contribution of the industry s productivity growth between 2010 and 2013 the policies for adjusting the industrial structure of pulp and paper industry have resulted in the scale effects through eliminating backward production capacity and accelerating merger and acquisitions moreover the productivity of pulp and paper industry was underestimated when the undesirable outputs were ignored it indicates that the stricter environmental regulations have positive effects on paper companies to internalize environmental pressures in the production activities through environmental management in the future pulp and paper companies should further internalize the cost of pollution treatment through scale effects and technology improvement

the spillover effects of state spending abstract this paper estimates the extent to which state spending is influenced by the spending of neighboring states examining several different metrics of neighborliness in order to better identify the channels for interstate spillovers it improves on previous studies by taking advantage of exogenous shocks to state medical spending to abstract from correlated local conditions and by allowing for spatial autocorrelation focusing on mandated increases in medical spending the analysis shows that each dollar of state spending causes spending in neighboring states to increase by almost 90 cents the most predictive measure of neighborliness is the degree of population mobility between states suggesting that rational concerns about adverse migration may drive the interdependence of state spending policy

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

tightening environmental standards the benefit cost or the no cost paradigm ms ff ichael porter and claas van der linde have written a paper that is interesting and to us at least somewhat astonishing it is a defense of environmental regulation indeed an invitation to more stringent regulation that makes essentially no reference to the social benefits of such regulation this approach contrasts starkly with the methods that economists and other policy analysts have traditionally used when assessing environmental or other regulatory programs the traditional approach consists of comparing the beneficial effects of regulation with the costs that must be borne to secure these benefits for environmental regulation the social benefits include the reductions in morbidity or premature mortality that can accompany cleaner air the enhanced recreational opportunities that can result from water quality improvements the increased land values that might attend the cleanup of a hazardous waste site the enhanced vitality of aquatic ecosystems that might follow reductions in agricultural pesticide use or any of the other potentially significant benefits associated with tighter standards from this benefit cost approach emerges the standard tradeoff discussed in virtually every economics textbook porter and van der linde deny the validity of this approach to the analysis of environmental regulation claiming it to be an artifact of what they see as a static mindset in their view economists have failed to appreciate the capacity of

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

environmentally sensitive productivity growth a global analysis using malmquist luenberger index abstract we examine conventional and environmentally sensitive total factor productivity tfp in 41 developed and developing countries over the period of 1971 to 1992 due to the non availability of reliable input and co 2 emissions price data the study uses directional distance function to derive malmquist luenberger ml productivity index the index allows us to decompose the tfp into measures of technical and efficiency changes dea is used to compute the directional distance functions we find that tfp index value is not different when we account for the co 2 emissions relative to the situation when they are freely disposable but for the components of tfp change technical and efficiency changes the null hypothesis of whether the indexes are the same under two different scenarios cannot be accepted issues of catch up and convergence or in some cases possible divergence in productivity are examined within a global framework the paper also studies the impact of openness on conventional and environmentally sensitive measures of productivity

green efficiency and environmental subsidy evidence from thermal power firms in china abstract to achieve green development ample environmental subsidies have been invested into many energy intensive firms such as thermal power firms in china investigations of the effects of this kind of subsidy can help to provide specific and important implications for ongoing regulations unlike previous studies on the national regional or sectoral level this paper measures green efficiency and its compositions of thermal power firms and studies the impact of environmental subsidies on green efficiency by using the classical slacks based measure and tobit model the results show that the average green efficiency ranges from 0 509 to 0 663 during 2010 2015 which is much lower than the general efficiency the green scale efficiency is the main reason for the low green efficiency thus indicating large room for improvement environmental subsidies negatively affect green efficiency and its decompositions from 2010 to 2013 the negative effect becomes weak and insignificant in 2014 and the environmental subsidies start to significantly promote green efficiency and its decompositions in 2015 according to our findings some implications relating to improving green scale efficiency increasing the intensity of environmental subsidies to firms and strengthening their supervision are proposed

the determinants of municipal tax rates in british columbia in this paper we study the regional pattern of municipal business property tax rates in the province of british columbia reduced form tax setting equations produce some evidence that municipal governments respond to tax changes in neighbouring jurisdictions a joint investigation of the determinants of tax base and municipal taxation decisions however reveals that it is difficult to interpret this response as arising primarily out of competition over tax base there is also some evidence that municipal tax rates are sensitive to taxes set on the same base by super municipal bodies jel classification c33 h71 les determinants des taux d imposition municipale en colombie britannique dans ce memoire les auteurs etudient le pattern regional des taux d imposition municipale sur la propriete fonciere commerciale dans la province de la colombie britannique on montre a l aide d un modele en forme reduite d equations de definition des taux d imposition que les gouvernements municipaux reagissent aux changements dans les taux d imposition dans leur voisinage cependant un examen conjoint des determinants de la base d imposition et des decisions municipales montre qu il est difficile d interpreter cette reaction comme emanant d une concurrence fiscale on montre aussi que les taux d imposition municipale sont sensibles aux niveaux de fiscalite imposes sur la meme base par les autorites supra municipales

plant level productivity efficiency and environmental performance of the container glass industry this paper presents a methodology and empirical results based on themalmquist productivity index we measure productivity while treatingpollution as an undesirable output our estimates show that technicalchange has contributed to productivity and environmental performancegrowth in the container glass industry an energy and pollution intensivesector changes in inter plant efficiency over time have made thisproductivity growth more rapid than otherwise would have occurred withthe underlying technical change the efficiency estimates show that thereare both opportunities to improve productivity and reduce pollution in thisindustry as well as productivity losses associated with the emissionscontrol the shadow prices for nox the undesirable output we analyze is quite high compared to other regulated sectors

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

measuring macroeconomic performance in the oecd a comparison of european and non european countries abstract we study the macroeconomic performance of 19 oecd countries over the period 1970 1990 performance is defined in terms of the ability of a country s macroeconomic managers to provide four services to their citizens a high level of real gdp per capita a low rate of inflation a low rate of unemployment and a favorable trade balance we use linear programming techniques to construct a best practice macroeconomic performance frontier and to measure the performance of each country in each year relative to the frontier we then add two environmental disamenities carbon and nitrogen emissions to the service list and repeat the analysis to see if the performance rankings change throughout the analysis emphasis is placed on a comparison of the performance of 14 european oecd countries with that of five non european oecd countries we find that performance rankings do change and that the relative performance of the european countries declines when the environmental disamenities are added to the service list

on the macroeconomic and welfare effects of illegal immigration abstract this paper uses a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market frictions to explore the economic consequences of illegal immigration in the baseline model native workers and illegal foreign workers compete for jobs in the same market but serve as imperfect substitutes in production the calibrated model generates a u shaped relationship between long run domestic consumption and the population share of illegal immigrants after taking into account both consumption and leisure i found that an increase in illegal immigration can generate significant welfare gains for the natives the baseline model is then extended to include heterogeneous workers in the domestic population

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

should land and capital be taxed at a uniform rate if jurisdictions are allowed to tax land and capital separately they tax only land because capital taxation distorts the allocation of mobile capital to exploit absentee owners however jurisdictions tax land beyond the efficient level as absentee ownership increases throughout the economy land taxation results in greater inefficiency to alleviate the inefficiency of overtaxing land the higher level government intervenes to require jurisdictions to tax both capital and land at a uniform rate because the desire to attract capital lowers the tax rate uniform taxation of land and capital or property taxation thus may be more efficient than separate taxation jel classification h21 h71 est ce que la terre et le capital devraient etre taxes d une maniere uniforme si on permettait aux diverses juridictions de taxer capital et terre separement elles taxeraient seulement la terre parce que la fiscalite imposee au capital cree des distorsions dans l allocation du capital mobile mais pour exploiter les proprietaires absents les diverses juridictions imposent un fardeau fiscal sur la terre qui va au dela de ce que l efficacite commande a proportion que la propriete absente se developpe dans l economie la fiscalite imposee a la terre devient source de plus en plus grande inefficacite pour reduire cette inefficacite attribuable a la sur taxation de la terre le niveau senior de gouvernement intervient pour forcer les juridictions juniors a taxer capital et terre au meme taux parce que le desir d attirer le capital reduit le taux de taxation il se peut donc que la taxation uniforme de la terre et du capital ou de la taxation sur la propriete soit plus efficace que des taux d imposition differents

hang the low hanging fruit even lower evidence that energy efficiency matters for corporate financial performance abstract energy efficiency measures are often called low hanging fruit first they significantly lower the energy consumption and therefore contribute to combat global warming second they are considered short term and cost effective investments however there still exists a gap between existing profitable investments to increase energy efficiency and the corporate reality where organizations do not implement these measures the so called energy efficiency gap this analysis aims to prove that an increasing level of corporate energy efficiency is directly related to an improved corporate financial performance the study bases on a multiple regression analysis and considers the manufacturing industry worldwide findings indicate a significant positive link hence the study reveals that managers should pay more attention to the implementation of energy efficiency measures even though they incorporate investment costs the analysis further contributes to recent research as it takes into account the impacts on corporate financial performance from activities along the corporate value chain the regression model specifically includes the nine activities of the corporate value chain as variables to control for effects on corporate financial performance since gained results provide a higher predictive power the study calls future research to explicitly consider specific value chain activities when analyzing impacts on corporate financial performance

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

environmental regulation and green productivity growth empirical evidence on the porter hypothesis from oecd industrial sectors abstract green growth has become an important development strategy for oecd countries and governments have correspondingly implemented various environmental regulation policies whereas few studies have discussed the impacts of environmental regulation on green productivity growth in oecd countries based on a panel data of oecd countries industrial sectors this study analyzes the stringency of environmental regulation policies and measures green productivity growth using an extended sbm ddf approach the dynamic panel regression investigates the impacts and mechanism of environmental policy stringency on green productivity growth in oecd countries industrial sectors the main results are i porter hypothesis is validated that the environmental policy has a positive impact on green productivity growth within a certain level of stringency lower than 3 08 ii the impact turns to be adverse when the environmental regulation policy is stringent over a certain level as the compliance cost effect is higher than innovation offset effect the findings provide new empirical evidence for the strong version of the porter hypothesis and some implications for oecd countries to further promote green growth

co2 emissions reduction of chinese light manufacturing industries a novel ram based global malmquist luenberger productivity index climate change has become one of the most challenging issues facing the world chinese government has realized the importance of energy conservation and prevention of the climate changes for sustainable development of china s economy and set targets for co2 emissions reduction in china in china industry contributes 84 2 of the total co2 emissions especially manufacturing industries data envelopment analysis dea and malmquist productivity mp index are the widely used mathematical techniques to address the relative efficiency and productivity of a group of homogenous decision making units e g industries or countries however in many real applications especially those related to energy efficiency there are often undesirable outputs e g the pollutions waste and co2 emissions which are produced inevitably with desirable outputs in the production this paper introduces a novel malmquist luenberger productivity mlp index based on directional distance function ddf to address the issue of productivity evolution of dmus in the presence of undesirable outputs the new ram range adjusted measure based global mlp index has been applied to evaluate co2 emissions reduction in chinese light manufacturing industries recommendations for policy makers have been discussed

pollution abatement activities and traditional productivity abstract this study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated we apply this model to data for u s coal fired electric power plants for 1985 1995 and compare rates of productivity and technical change to gain an understanding of the association between pollution abatement activities and traditional rates of productivity and technical change while traditional productivity and technical change associated with abatement activities decline we conclude they are not statistically significant

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

econometric estimation of technical and environmental efficiency an application to dutch dairy farms in this article we estimate the technical and environmental efficiency of a panel of dutch dairy farms nitrogen surplus arising from the application of excessive amounts of manure and chemical fertilizer is treated as an environmentally detrimental input a stochastic translog production frontier is specified to estimate the output oriented technical efficiency environmental efficiency is estimated as the input oriented technical efficiency of a single input the nitrogen surplus of each farm the mean output oriented technical efficiency is rather high 0 894 but the mean input oriented environmental efficiency is only 0 441 intensive dairy farms are both technically and environmentally more efficient than extensive farms

how do environmental regulation and environmental decentralization affect green total factor energy efficiency evidence from china abstract green development is critical for china s economic transformation enhancing green total factor energy efficiency hereafter gtfee is vital to emission reduction and to win win industrial development this study uses the panel data of 30 chinese provinces for the period 2005 2016 to investigate the relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee the spatial durbin model is employed to control for the possible spatial spillover effect a dynamic threshold panel model that can effectively address the endogeneity problem and regional heterogeneity is utilized to examine the potential non linear relationship between environmental regulation and gtfee under different conditions of environmental decentralization the estimation results indicate that there is a significant u shaped relationship between environmental regulation and china s gtfee with the further expansion of environmental decentralization the local government s autonomous choice of pollution control is improved the improvement of environmental decentralization can lead to negative moderating effect of environmental regulation on gtfee additionally the regression results of dynamic threshold model show that environmental decentralization can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee interestingly the non linear impact of environmental regulation on gtfee is dependent on the specific type of environmental decentralization higher degree of environmental decentralization can lead to an increase in the restraining effect of environmental regulation on gtfee however an improvement in the decentralization of environmental supervision and environmental monitoring can increase the negative influences of environmental regulation on gtfee

racial discrimination in labor markets with posted wage offers we analyze race discrimination in labor markets in which wage offers are posted if employers with job vacancies receive multiple applicants they choose the most qualified but may choose arbitrarily among equally qualified applicants in the model firms post wages workers choose where to apply and firms decide which workers to hire labor market frictions greatly amplify racial disparities so mild discriminatory tastes or small productivity differences can produce large wage differentials between the races compared with the nondiscriminatory equilibrium the discriminatory equilibrium features lower net output lower wages for both white and black workers and greater profits for firms this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a matching model with endogenous skill requirements we consider a labor market in which workers differ in their abilities and jobs differ in their skill requirements the distribution of worker abilities is exogenous but we model the choice of skill requirements by firms high skill jobs produce more output than low skill jobs but high skill jobs require high skill workers and thus are more difficult to fill we use a matching model together with a nash bargaining approach to wage setting to determine the equilibrium mix of job types along with the equilibrium relationship between worker and job characteristics wages and unemployment

decomposition of the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier with undesirable output abstract in this paper we present an alternative analysis framework to evaluate the effects of technology heterogeneities and undesirable output on environmental efficiency measurement the proposed framework combines the directional distance function and a meta frontier analysis it can be used to measure efficiency improvements brought about by enhanced technical management and technological advances for demonstration purposes we used the framework to measure the environmental efficiency in 90 countries worldwide for the 2003 2007 period the results showed that when the meta technology set is used as the evaluation basis the average environmental efficiency of high competitiveness countries is greater than that of lower middle low and upper middle competitiveness countries the upper middle competitiveness countries perform worse than the lower middle and low competitiveness countries because of the excessive labor force usage and carbon dioxide emissions in these countries we also found that the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier for high competitiveness countries can be attributed to managerial failure in the production process whereas that for upper middle lower middle and low competitiveness countries can be attributed to technological differences

is energy intensity important for the productivity growth of eet adopters abstract energy efficient technologies eet have attracted strong interest because of their role in reducing environmental damage their adoption however remains rather low while their impact on productivity is substantial and differentiating with respect to technological characteristics energy intensity being such an obvious characteristic could be employed to classify eet adopters thus giving rise to two heterogeneous technologies i e those corresponding to firms of low and high energy consumption hence this paper examines the impact of energy intensity on the productivity growth of firms adopting eet in varying time intervals through a metafrontier based framework while also decomposing that impact in terms of technical efficiency and scale efficiency changes the analysis is complemented by examining the role of firm specific characteristics on the productivity growth through linear regression

promoting green productivity growth for china s industrial exports evidence from a hybrid input output model abstract stimulated by low labor cost and loose environmental regulations china s industrial exports have benefited significantly since joining the world trade organization wto however the extensive growth model in the past several decades has led to environmental degradation china is now shifting her development pattern to a more sustainable model using a hybrid input output model this paper found that total energy coefficients fell sharply between 1997 and 2002 and 2007 and 2012 the total energy consumption and co2 emission embodied in china s industrial exports grew by more than 100 from 2002 to 2007 with little variation from 2007 to 2012 subsequently malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi is employed to assess the green productivity growth in the sector the decomposition of the mlpi is further conducted this suggests that efficiency changes from 2002 to 2007 and 2007 to 2012 are lower than 1 indicating that technical change is the main contributor to mlpi finally policy implications are provided with emphasis on dissemination of new conservation technologies

which policy is more effective carbon reduction in all industries or in high energy consuming industries from dual perspectives of welfare effects and economic effects abstract carbon emission reduction policy is the main method to curb carbon emissions and tackle climate change however few studies have investigated the effectiveness of carbon emission reduction polices from the welfare and economic perspectives this study establishes a dynamic general equilibrium model with input output structure and compares the effects of emission reduction in all industries and in high energy consuming industries the main conclusions are that carbon emission reduction constraints for all industries have more significant negative impacts on consumption and social welfare compared to emission reduction constraints for high energy consuming industries to be more precisely carbon emission reduction in high energy consuming industries has comparative advantages in maintaining social welfare stability regarding economic effects compared with the carbon emission reduction in high energy consuming industries carbon emission reduction in all industries leads to a larger decline in total output and outputs of most industries however the role of carbon emission reduction in all industries is more significant in promoting employment the carbon emission reduction policies of all industries and high energy consuming industries have strengths in economic effects respectively the findings could provide references for the government to take appropriate measures to promote carbon emission reduction and economic growth

different types of environmental regulations and heterogeneous influence on green productivity evidence from china this paper attempts to examine if the strong version of porter hypothesis is supported in china by investigating how different regulatory instruments and the relative stringency impact green productivity we use a slacks based measure sbm and luenberger productivity index accounting for undesirable outputs to evaluate the industrial green productivity growth rates of china s 30 provinces the estimates imply an unsustainable development model in china with significant regional differences by employing a panel threshold model and a province level panel dataset during 2000 2012 empirical results show that both command and control and market based regulation have a non linear relationship with and can be positively related to green productivity but with different constrains on regulation stringency there are double thresholds with the command and control and exists an optimal range of stringency for productivity improvement while a single threshold has been found with the market based regulation and its current stringency is reasonable for most of provinces moreover based on china s reality the productivity effect driven by market based regulation is much stronger than that of the command and control the mechanism of informal regulation is much more complicated consequently we find evidence to support the strong porter hypothesis that reasonable stringency of environmental regulations may enhance rather than lower industrial competitiveness

testing for strategic interaction among local governments the case of growth controls this paper helps to fill a gap in the public economics literature by providing empirical evidence on strategic interaction among local governments using the methodology of case et al journal of public economics 52 285 307 1993 the paper focuses on the adoption of growth control measures by cities in california and looks for evidence of policy interdependence in these choices the data are drawn from an elaborate survey of growth control practices in california cities conducted by glickfeld and levine regional growth local reaction lincoln institute of land policy cambridge ma 1992 the survey results are used to compute an index of the stringency of growth controls in each city which serves as the dependent variable for the study

discrimination and skill differences in an equilibrium search model in this paper we analyze an equilibrium search model with three sources for wage an d unemployment differentials among workers with the same observed human capital but differen t appearance race unobserved productivity skill search in tensities and discrimination becker 1957 due to an appearance based employer disutility factor because they affect the earnings distributions differently empirical identification of these potential sources for the explanation of wage an d unemployment differentials is possible we show that the structural parameters of the model including the firm s disutility from certain workers are identifiab le using standard labor market survey data we demonstrate identification using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth estimation of these parameters by matching moments from a sample of black and white high school graduate s implies a blacks have a 9 lower productivi ty level than whites b the disutility factor in employer s preferences is one third of the white s productivity level and c 50 of firms have a disutility factor in their utility toward blacks

the assessment international competitiveness the concept of international competitiveness as applied to national economies is a popular one politicians businessmen and economists alike re fer to it in day to day discussion when looking at the external export import market share or trade balance performance of different countries indi cators are produced showing changes in or levels of various countries competitiveness e g the relative price or cost indices regularly published by the imf and the oecd or the absolute measures produced by organizations such as the geneva world economic forum and the lausanne institute for management development governments of ten instigate research on the matter as for instance in the case of the 1993 us competitiveness policy council orthe 1995 eu competitiveness advisory group yet it has recently been argued by paul krugman that competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies and the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous krugman 1994 p 44 apositionkrugman forcefully reaffirms in his contribution to this issue of the oxford review of economic policy

tax competition with imperfectly mobile capital abstract this paper considers interjurisdictional tax competition in a two period model with imperfectly mobile capital in the first period capital is perfectly mobile in the second period however capital cannot move perfectly because of transactions costs once employed in a jurisdiction in the first period this imperfect mobility of capital may lead to the overprovision rather than the underprovision of public goods in the second period and may make jurisdictions compete more aggressively for capital in the first period

assessing the impact of formal and informal regulations on environmental and economic performance of brazilian manufacturing firms this study investigates the impact of formal and informal regulations on environmental and economic performance of brazilian manufacturing firms we adopt a dual approach where production technology is represented by a cost function approximated by a translog form pollution is considered as a negative by product that can be modified trough using either formal regulation inspections or sanctions or informal regulation community pressure a simultaneous equation model is estimated by three stage least squares on a sample of 404 industrial establishments located in the state of sao paulo brazil we show that pollution abatement costs for the brazilian manufacturing sector are different from zero which suggests that pollution emissions are affected by environmental regulation we also demonstrate that environmental performance of firms is jointly affected by formal and informal regulation lastly formal regulation is largely influenced by informal regulation and more specifically by community pressure

local government structure and urban residential location the large research literature on the tiebout model has developed with little attention paid to the urban economic structure in which local government functions this paper attempts to examine the theoretical consequences of local jurisdictions functioning within a conventional monocentric urban model it also discusses a mathematical formulation of a two jurisdiction linear city in which the local service level and local property tax rate might be used as strategic variables in a game theory sense it is concluded that for this to happen the local service level has to have more than one element which is intuitively appealing some references are developed to current british local government and possible changes

increasing agricultural productivity while reducing greenhouse gas emissions in sub saharan africa myth or reality the motivation for this study stems from two major concerns that are interlinked the first is the decades long food insecurity crisis faced by sub saharan african ssa countries which is still prevalent the second is the negative impact greenhouse gas ghg emissions from agriculture may have on future food production and which is likely to worsen the food insecurity problem the conundrum ssa farmers face is how to increase food output through productivity growth while minimizing ghg emissions to measure changes in productivity growth and ghg emissions this study evaluates the agricultural performance of 18 ssa countries by utilizing the malmquist luenberger index to incorporate good and bad outputs for the years 1980 2012 the empirical evidence demonstrates that productivity is overestimated when bad outputs are not considered in the production model the analysis provides a better understanding of the effectiveness of previous mitigation methods and which informs an appropriate course of action needed to achieve the twin objectives of increasing agriculture productivity while reducing ghg emissions

consumer discrimination and self employment self employment rates and incomes differ significantly by race we show that these differentials arise in markets with consumer discrimination and incomplete information about the price of the good and the race of the seller equilibrium income distributions have two properties mean black incomes are lower than mean white incomes and the returns to ability are lower for black than for white sellers able blacks therefore are less likely to self select into the self employment sector than able whites using the 1980 census data we find that observed racial differences in the self employment income distributions are consistent with the theoretical predictions

green productivity growth in china s industrial economy abstract this paper uses a directional distance function ddf and the malmquist luenberger productivity index to estimate the changing patterns of green total factor productivity gtfp growth of 38 chinese industrial sectors during the period 1980 2010 unlike the measures of traditional total factor productivity tfp growth the ddf incorporates carbon dioxide emissions as an undesirable output directly into the production technology which credit sectors for simultaneously reducing their emissions and increasing their output our estimates of aggregate and sector level gtfp growth reveal that chinese industry is not yet on the path towards sustainable low carbon growth a dynamic panel data analysis of the determinants of gtfp across sectors is used to identify factors that might rectify this situation including state owned enterprise soe reform the growth of small private enterprises continued openness to foreign investment and higher spending on r d particularly in emission intensive sectors

productivity growth and environmental regulations accounting for undesirable outputs analysis of china s thirty provincial regions using the malmquist luenberger index this paper employs the malmquist luenberger ml productivity index to evaluate china s growth in total factor productivity tfp incorporating undesirable outputs during the period from 1989 to 2008 the ml productivity index and its components technical and efficiency changes are derived from the directional distance function which gives credit for an increase in good outputs and for reductions in undesirable outputs the average annual ml productivity growth accounting for undesirable outputs is 2 46 whereas the value of the traditional malmquist productivity index is 4 84 showing that the true tfp growth in china is overestimated if undesirable outputs are ignored we explore the strictness in enforcing environmental regulations and its impact on improvements in ml productivity the results show that the enforcement of environmental regulations in china is in general far below the levels achieved in the best performing regions and that the more stringent enforcement of environmental regulations would help to improve ml productivity growth in china

productivity growth environmental regulation and win win opportunities the case of chemical industry in italy and germany abstract this paper analyzes the environmental and economic efficiency of a sample of firms located in italy and germany operating in the chemical sector and included in the european pollution release and transfer register e prtr the directional distance function ddf approach in a conditional setting has been applied to obtain efficiency score and total factor productivity tfp growth indexes considering pollution in computations emissions increase in absolute term between 2004 and 2007 with a worse performance of italian firms but efficiency indicators show a reduction of inefficiency over time with similar performance of firms from the two countries the formal test for the porter s hypothesis suggests that chemical firms suffering higher compliance costs in the first period react with investment increasing productivity in the following years the empirical evidence robust to different specifications and estimation methods supports the presence of win win opportunities

pareto improving immigration in an economy with equilibrium unemployment economists from around the industrialized world demonstrate the strength of both theories about the rise of economic inequality that is it the mechanical consequence of changes in such economic fundamentals as technology and demographic parameters and that it is the contingent consequence country specific and time specific changes in institutions they find that though institutions always play a crucial role in shaping inequality and sometimes preventing it still it creeps in

a dea approach for estimating the agricultural energy and environmental efficiency of eu countries this study attempts to evaluate the energy and environmental efficiency of the primary sectors of the eu member state countries the evaluation is based on a non radial data envelopment analysis dea model which allows for non proportional adjustments to energy inputs and undesirable outputs and thus it provides different estimations for energy and environmental efficiency scores the 2001 2008 time period was selected for this research one of the most important findings is that countries like germany sweden or austria with strong environmental protection standards appear to be less energy and environmentally efficient compared with countries like denmark belgium spain france or ireland in addition a series of eastern european countries achieve low efficiency scores which can be characterized as expectable due to low technology level being implemented in the primary production process there are also two sub periods for this research the first one 2001 2006 covers the fully coupled with specific cultivations period for subsidy administation and the second 2007 2008 where the new decoupled subsidy scheme was implemented there are significant hints for considerable changes of energy and environmental efficiency after the implementation of the the new cap with the new member states siginificantly differ of both energy and environmental efficiency copmared with the older ones

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

metafroniter energy efficiency with co2 emissions and its convergence analysis for china this paper measures the energy efficiency performance with carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 30 provinces in china during the period of 1997 2011 using a meta frontier framework with the improved directional distance function ddf we construct a new environmental production possibility set by combining the super efficiency and sequential data envelopment analysis dea models to avoid discriminating power problem and technical regress when evaluating efficiency by ddf then it is used in a meta frontier framework to reflect the technology heterogeneities across east central and west china the results indicate that eastern china achieved the highest progress inefficiency relative to the metafrontier followed by western and the central china by focusing on technology gaps we offer some suggestions for the different groups based on group frontier and meta frontier analyses the inefficiency can be attributed to managerial failure for eastern and western china and technological differences for central china the convergence analysis shows that energy and co2 emission governance will produce negative effects on economic growth and it is suitable and acceptable to introduce rigorous environmental measures in eastern china

measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth an application to the urban water sector the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in the provision of urban water and sewerage services have become an increasingly important issue in recent times however the impact of negative externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions on the productivity of urban water provision has received less attention in the literature this paper applies the global malmquist luenberger gml productivity index which accounts for undesirable outputs in order to evaluate the productivity trends in the australian urban water sector results indicate that the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions significantly influences the productivity measurement findings also indicate that the conventional index which disregards undesirable outputs over states the productivity growth despite a declining trend in greenhouse emissions over the period the overall productivity trend of the urban water sector experienced a downward trend while accounting for bad output this productivity decline occurs in a period of prolonged drought water security concerns and increased reliance on desalinization and water recycling

slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance we develop two slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance on the basis of environmental dea technology of the two measures one is a composite index with a higher discriminating power for modeling economic environmental performance and the other can be used to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations we apply the proposed measures to model the co2 emissions of 30 oecd countries from 1998 to 2002 and present the results obtained

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility

a tiebout tax competition model abstract this paper analyzes a tiebout tax competition model where heterogeneity of consumer preferences is introduced into a standard tax competition framework following the modern tiebout tradition consumer sorting in the model is achieved through the activities of profit maximizing community developers once sorting is achieved the equilibrium is equivalent to that in a standard tax competition model with immobile but heterogeneous consumers a principal lesson of the analysis is that under capital taxation consumers with high public good demands are worse off than under a head tax regime in pursuit of high levels of public spending high demand communities impose high tax rates which drive away capital the analysis also establishes a number of other results