ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty strong sustainability according to the common definition requires that different natural and economic capital stocks be maintained as physical quantities separately yet in a world of uncertainty this cannot be guaranteed to therefore define strong sustainability under uncertainty in an operational manner we propose to use the concept of viability viability means that the different components and functions of a dynamic stochastic system at any time remain in a domain where the future existence of these components and functions is guaranteed with sufficiently high probability we develop a unifying and general ecological economic concept of viability that encompasses the traditional ecological and economic notions of viability as special cases it provides an operational criterion of strong sustainability under a mild form of uncertainty and for medium spatial and temporal scales we illustrate this concept and demonstrate its usefulness by applying it to livestock grazing management in semi arid rangelands publication ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty available from https www researchgate net publication 46490456 ecological economic viability as a criterion of strong sustainability under uncertainty accessed apr 3 2017

optimal fishery management with regime shifts an assessment of harvesting strategies this paper compares outcomes from informed and uninformed harvesting strategies for a fish stock with switching dynamics where the probability of switching is influenced by climate using data on sea surface temperature anomalies the impacts of climate on the conservation and the welfare that can be extracted from the stock are investigated results indicate that an informed management policy leads to stock biomass and resource rents that are up to 2 7 and 2 times higher respectively than under an uninformed policy also the fishery is open 54 longer under the informed policy the magnitude of these effects depends on the choice of the discount rate indicating that when the future is highly discounted gains from the informed policy dissipate

job search duration and marginal tax rates an empirical inquiry in recent years the impact of taxation on work hours has generated a great deal of research effort however the effects of taxes on other dimensions of labor supply have been largely ignored the purpose of this paper is to investigate an important ignored issue the effects of tax rates on the duration of job search by those who are unemployed this issue is one which seems to us of considerable importance in resolving current debates over whether income tax changes will change unemployment to the extent that changing tax rates affect the benefits and costs of job search such changes may affect the amount of time workers spend searching for jobs which in turn will affect unemployment rates in order to estimate the effects of marginal tax rates on job search duration we employ a maximum likelihood approach which allows us to take into account the doubly censored nature of our sample this procedure remedies some of the econometric difficulties of earlier search duration studies at the same time it allows direct tests of the marginal contribution of various determinants to the length of search duration this latter advantage is particularly important since such direct tests are not available in the currently popular re employment hazard approach to analyzing search duration the paper proceeds as follows section ii provides a brief analysis of the theoretical implications of changing tax rates for job search duration we conclude that the relationship between job search duration and income tax rates is theoretically ambiguous the question must be addressed empirically in section iii we present our empirical methodology for addressing the question and compare it to approaches taken in prior search duration analyses our data and our empirical results are discussed in section iv section v contains our conclusions

wage distributions and spatial preferences in competitive job search and migration pickles a and rogerson p 1984 wage distributions and spatial preferences in competitive job search and migration reg studies 18 131 142 aggregate interstate migration data indicate that the majority of observed flows are from higher to lower wage states quite contrary to the predictions of human capital theory it is argued that a search theoretic framework may be used to complement and strengthen human capital theory such a framework may then include consideration of the flows of job information and aspects of job competition a model is proposed for application to longitudinal micro level data which overcomes a variety of theoretical and inferential problems and which remains within the bounds of empirical application

evolutionary theories in environmental and resource economics approaches and applications recent advances in evolutionary theory have important implications for environmental economics a short overview is offered of evolutionarythinking in economics subsequently major concepts and approaches inevolutionary biology and evolutionary economics are presented andcompared attention is devoted among others to darwinian selection punctuated equilibrium sorting mechanisms lamarckian evolution coevolution and self organization basic features of evolution such assustained change irreversible change unpredictability qualitativechange and disequilibrium are examined it is argued that there are anumber of fundamental differences as well as similarities betweenbiological and economic evolution next some general implications ofevolutionary thinking for environmental economics are outlined this isfollowed by a more detailed examination of potential uses ofevolutionary theories in specific areas of environmental economics including sustainability and long run development theories technologyand environment ecosystem management and resilience spatial evolutionand environmental processes and design of environmental policy

a test of the theory of reference dependent preferences eight alternative methods of eliciting preferences between money and a consumption good are identified two of these are standard willingness to accept and willingness to pay measures these methods differ with respect to the reference point used and the dimension in which responses are expressed the loss aversion hypothesis of tversky and kahneman s theory of reference dependent preferences predicts systematic differences between the preferences elicited by these methods these predictions are tested by eliciting individuals preferences for two private consumption goods the experimental design is incentive compatible and controls for income and substitution effects the theory s predictions are broadly confirmed

the estimation of models of labour market behaviour in this paper we view the labour market experience of individuals as a process of movement between the states of employment and unemployment we note that there are three main ways of sampling members of the labour force namely sampling the members of a specific state sampling the people entering or leaving a state and sampling the population regardless of state the joint distribution of observable and unobservable characteristics of individuals depends on the mode of sampling adopted we examine this dependence and its implications for the interpretation of estimates of models of labour market behaviour

estimating reservation wages of employed workers using a stochastic frontier according to search theory workers form reservation wages such that employment offers paying wages less than the reservation wage are rejected the first job offer paying a wage higher than the reservation wage is accepted and search is terminated though the reservation wage is clearly a matter of individual taste and unobservable a number of empirical articles have nevertheless appeared on the subject the present paper adds to this literature its novel aspects are that it uses data on employed workers rather than unemployed workers as is usually the case and that it applies a comparatively new econometric technique stochastic frontier estimation to the problem of estimating reservation wages our interests in this paper are twofold first the paper provides estimates of worker reservation wages utilizing the stochastic frontier regression technique second we use these estimates to test various hypotheses regarding the response of reservation wages to factors that search theory suggests are important in the determination of reservation wages the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section ii discusses the previous empirical literature on the reservation wage section iii sketches the theory and estimation techniques we use section iv lays out a framework for assessing the validity of the approach used here finally section v presents the empirical results

the econometrics of the general equilibrium approach to business cycles early in this century american institutionists and members of the german historical school attacked and rightfully so neoclassical economic theory for not being quantitative this deficiency bothered ragnar frisch and motivated him along with irving fisher joseph schumpeter and others to organize the econometric society in 1930 the aim of the society was to foster the development of quantitative economic theory that is the development of what frisch labeled econometrics soon after its inception the society started the journal econometrica frisch was the journal s first editor and served in this capacity for twenty five years

female first marriage in east and southeast asia a kiefer neumann model abstract many studies have shown that schooling levels of husband and wife are important determinants of household behavior in developing countries in this article we ask how the schooling levels of husband and wife come to be associated with each other through the marriage market the kiefer neumann model of labor market search is adapted to marital search the aim being to explain both the positive sorting on education levels for spouses and the positive relationship between female schooling and age at first marriage world fertility survey data for indonesia korea and malaysia are employed in the analyses

resilience in the dynamics of economy environment systems the ecological concept of resilience has begun to inform analysis of change in economy environment systems the linkages between resilience and the stability of dynamical systems are discussed along with its role in understanding of the evolution of such systems particular linkages discussed include those between resilience biodiversity and the sustainability of alternative states recent developments in modelling the resilience of joint economy environment systems suggest the advantages of analysing change in the system as a markov process the transition probabilities between states offering a natural measure of the resilience of the system in such states it is argued that this emergent property of the collaboration between ecology and economics has far reaching implications for the way we think about model and manage the environmental sustainability of economic development

comment on f e kydland and e c prescott the econometrics of the general equilibrium approach to business cycles real business cycle theory is cast in a competitive general equilibrium setting with infinitely lived households and a propagation mechanism allowing real shocks to produce business cycle fluctuations the models show that substantial fluctuations can be generated by real technology shocks in a competitive framework and thus reflect a pareto efficient response to changes in intertemporal possibilities for substitution the central point of this finding is that fluctuations do not necessarily reflect inefficiencies as is often implicitly implied by in particular the keynesian literature this is an observation which most people would accept although there are substantial reservations concerning the assumptions underlying the models and thus the importance of this observation however a new empirical approach known as calibration has also come to be associated with real business cycle models authors belonging to this branch of the literature interpret the results of such calibrations as empirical justification for their theories prescott 1986 p 38 goes as far as to conclude that theory predicts what is observed indeed if the economy did not display the business cycle phenomena there would be a puzzle although it is uncontroversial to regard calibrations previously known as simulations as a useful way of illustrating properties of theoretical models having a complexity which precludes an analytical solution it is less obvious that calibration can be seen as a test of a theory actually protagonists of real business cycle theories tend to go even further by suggesting that this empirical methodology is a logical consequence of the general equilibrium approach this raises the question does calibration teach us something about the model or about reality

the challenging economics of energy security ensuring energy benefits in support to sustainable development abstract energy is a key resource to economic development and is required to be available continuously and in adequate amounts also it is expected to be affordable and environmentally friendly ensuring this is a challenge yet strategic to maintain economies running under a sustainable pattern energy security is neither a new concept nor a new concern however because of new issues it requires a novel broader approach such an approach should address both demand security of supply and supply security of demand sides as well as take into account energy scarcity situations and surplus opportunities in addition it should allow for both private markets and public policies and regulations initiatives this paper presents a theoretical and practical basis for the economics of energy security energy security is defined in this context as the ability of an economy to provide sufficient affordable and environmentally sustainable energy services so as to maintain a maximum welfare state even when issues would press it otherwise we introduce the notion of energy security gap to represent the economy s failure to show such ability additionally we also propose a framework to support the evaluation planning and implementation of energy security in an economy this framework relies on the concepts of resilience adaptability and transformability walker et al 2004 to prescribe indicators to assess the energy security of an economy furthermore it proposes mechanisms to enhance energy security as well as a continuous process to increasingly achieve this

on the joint determination of biological and economic systems abstract scarce natural resources and our choices to protect or develop them make ecological and economic systems jointly determined human choices affect nature nature affects human choices this essay considers whether a dynamic model that integrates details of an economic system and an ecosystem with explicit feedback links between them yields significantly different results than does ignoring these links we focus on the case of exotic invaders that put native species at risk in yellowstone national park the results suggest that integration does matter in each scenario cutthroat trout populations differ in both magnitude and survival rates depending on whether feedback is allowed between the two systems

incorporating resilience in the assessment of inclusive wealth an example from south east australia this paper explores the consequences of changes in a system s resilience on the sustainability of resource allocation decisions as measured by inclusive wealth iw arrow et al in environ resour econ 26 647 685 2003 we incorporate an estimate of resilience in iw by taking account of known or suspected thresholds that can lead to irreversible or practically irreversible changes in the productivity and value of assets and hence social welfare these thresholds allow us to identify policies or projects that may be leading to an increased risk of decline in capital stocks the wealth of the region such risks are not reflected through usual measures of current system performance e g agricultural production we use the goulburn broken catchment in south eastern australia as a case study to explore the significance and practicality of including resilience in inclusive wealth estimates

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

capstone or deadweight inefficiency duplication and inequity in south africa s tertiary education system 1910 93 this paper presents time series on south african tertiary education the data series presented cover inputs and outputs for the university technical training and teacher training systems modern growth theory has emphasised the importance of human capital though empirical studies have attempted to isolate human capital impacts through single aggregate measures that capture only a quantity of human capital dimension while data analysis in the present study is exploratory in nature we show that strong quality differentials exist both within and between different parts of the tertiary education system the methodological implication for growth studies is that fully accounting for both the quantity and quality of human capital in aggregate human capital measures thus faces significant measurement difficulties the data also establish that discrimination in the south african tertiary education was not simply a question of underresourcing of black institutions quality of output was low but attaining it was frequently very expensive copyright 2003 oxford university press

infrastructural investment in long run economic growth south africa 1875 2001 summary productive public expenditure in the area of infrastructure such as roads transportation and housing can play an important role in promoting economic growth and encouraging private investment developments in endogenous growth theory introduce the possibility of a productive role for public expenditure this paper seeks to explain the relationship between investment in economic infrastructure and long run economic growth by examining the experience of south africa in a time series context the main findings that emerge from our examination of economic growth and economic infrastructure in south africa may be summarized as follows investment in infrastructure does appear to lead economic growth in south africa and does so both directly and indirectly the latter by raising the marginal productivity of capital there is weak evidence of feedback from output to infrastructure while the finding of an infrastructure growth impact is robust

the role of thermodynamics in the study of economic and ecological systems abstract economic theory has always maintained that economic value is generated solely within the economy where it is fully distributed among the factors of production before being consumed according to this theory the economy is an isolated system that does not need flows to pass across its boundaries in support of its steady state general equilibrium from a thermodynamic point of view this idea is unacceptable according to thermodynamic theory any open system which allows flows of matter and energy to cross its boundaries is capable of maintaining itself in steady state only because it transport value from its environment to restore the value that has been consumed within the system and dissipated drawing on the analogy with thermodynamics this paper replaces the traditional systemic analog of the economy which is the closed circular flow process with the steady flow process according to this analog any efficient economy is an open system both physically and economically requiring a flow of economic value to maintain its steady state in other words an economically isolated system has to be inefficient and is bound to misallocate and overuse environmental resources whether the economy behaves as an economically isolated inefficient or open efficient system is an empirical question however if real economies are economically open and efficient and environmental resources are abused due to the economy s unrestrained material growth parts of traditional economic theory espicially those related to benefit evaluation will have to be modified policy recommendations will be affected in any case because internalization the panacea of resource misallocations cannot be more than a temporary solution instead of opening the economy internalization encloses the harmed resource and saves it by abusing excessively other environmental resources

economy and environment a theoretical essay on the interdependence of economic and environmental systems preface notation guide 1 introduction part i the physical economy environment system 2 closed physical systems a model 3 structure and time in the physical system 4 technological change and the environmental constraints to physical growth part ii the economic system 5 the price system 6 prices property and the environment 7 economic conflict and environmental change part iii environmental strategies in an evolutionary economy environment system 8 time uncertainty and external effects 9 the market solution 10 the stationary state 11 conclusions references index

regional resilience in italy a very long run analysis cellini r and torrisi g regional resilience in italy a very long run analysis regional studies resilience is a concept referring to the manner in which systems react to and recover from shocks according to several recent analyses resilience can explain different regional economic performances however this study indicates that this explanation is quite unconvincing when applied to the italian regions in the very long run 1890 2009 only few shocks emerge to have specific impact effects differing across regions while the recovery experience is ever spatially homogeneous hence it is difficult to discern genuine differences in regional resilience this evidence can be interpreted as a reason why the regional differences in italy are huge and persistent

optimal management with reversible regime shifts abstract in this paper we examine the management of a natural resource a fishery subject to regime shifting dynamics a regime shift is defined as an episode in which the dynamics of the resource can switch between two alternative regimes at random times specifically we study the impact of reversible regime switching both observed and unobserved on optimal harvesting policy the case in which the regime is not directly observed i e observational uncertainty is addressed by using the extended pomdp approach developed in fackler and pacifici 2014 we illustrate the performance of the model under different assumptions on the underlying stochastic growth variability the biological structure of the stock in different regimes and the resilience of the regimes when the regime is known optimal policies depend on the population level and which regime is currently active when the regime is unobserved on the other hand the optimal policy depends on the population level and a belief distribution about the current regime in general when the probability of regime change is fixed and hence is not affected by harvesting policy the optimal policy is of the constant escapement variety when the probability of switching regime is endogenous the optimal policy is no longer of the constant escapement type optimal policies when the regime is uncertain are approximately equal to a weighted average of the policies when the regime is certain with the weights equal to the beliefs in the associated regimes but there are differences

towards an ecological economics of sustainability abstract persistent disagreement both as to the interpretation to be given to sustainability and as to the relation between ecological and economic sustainability has hindered the development of an ecological economics of sustainable resource use this paper identifies the main concepts of sustainability deriving from the two disciplines in order to explore the difference implied by an ecological approach to the problem it is argued that present economic and ecological approaches are largely disjoint and that they address basically different phenomena by combining the efficiency requirements of what is usually thought of as economic sustainability with the stability requirements of an ecological approach it is shown that an intertemporally efficient allocation of resources that satisfies the conditions for constant levels of consumption is not necessary to assure ecological sustainability ecological sustainability requires that the allocation of economic resources should not result in the instability of the economy environment system as a whole

earnings unemployment and the allocation of time over time since an individual s labour market history can be described by a markov chain in state space it is possible to calculate the steady states it is natural to interpret the steady state proportion in unemployment for a group of identical workers as the natural rate of unemployment for this group i e it is the expected proportion that would be employed if the environment were to remain constant it is shown how the natural rate of unemployment is different for different groups the model is estimated using data from a large u s income maintenance experiment the predictions of the model with some exceptions bear up well to confrontation by data the empirical findings also accord well with existing evidence on cross section studies of labour supply we find that labour force participation rates implied by the estimated models are positively related to earnings for all age sex and race groups as expected we demonstrate that the elasticities of the unemployment rates for all groups with respect to expected wage rates are negative and large in absolute value in the case of adults while the role of the wage in allocation of time is not novel the existing neoclassical labour literature uses static labour supply models to interpret participation rate studies

earnings expectations revisions and realizations during the spring and the fall of 1993 respondents to a national household survey were asked to report expectations of spring 1994 weekly earnings elicited in the form of subjective probabilities these data are potentially much more informative than are typical reports of economic expectations subjective probability distributions of future weekly earnings are estimated for each respondent based on his or her reports of a series of subjective probabilities this paper analyzes the cross sectional variation in expectations revisions of expectations between the spring and the fall of 1993 and the relationship between 1993 expectations and the distribution of spring 1994 earnings realizations generally positive findings on the validity of the data bode well for the prospects of eliciting expectations in future surveys

a search model applied to the transition from education to work this paper presents the specification and estimation of a search model applied to the transition from education to work the theoretical search model includes the possibility of variable search intensity the empirical model with a reservation wage relation is estimated using maximum likelihood methods a data set containing information on new law graduates is used for the estimation finally the model is estimated for two separate subperiods to investigate the effects of market changes

production growth and business cycles ii new directions abstract this paper outlines new directions for investigations of real business cycle models consideration of stochastic growth of exogenous and endogenous forms analysis of suboptimal outcomes arising due to externalities of distorting taxes and implications of labor market heterogeneity

living to spend another day exploring resilience as a new fourth goal of ecological economics abstract the three main goals of ecological economic theory seek to predict and prevent system breakdowns however chaos theory and human uncertainty ignorance guarantee that shocks breakdowns and catastrophes like covid 19 will increasingly occur due to converging environmental resource crises the challenge then is designing a resilient safe fail economy that can endure adapt to and successfully recover from breakdowns and avoid collapse to date little attention has been paid in ecological economics to the implications of resilience for broader economic decisions affecting the design of global civilization this paper provides a general introduction to resilience and an argument for why it should become a much larger focus of ecological economic research going forward five arguments are advanced for why resilience should not be subsumed under an existing goal including that efforts to build resilience have the potential to both complement and contradict the other three goals especially efficiency the resilience alliance s adaptive cycle highlighting the cost to resilience of increasing scale and complexity meshes readily with ecological economist s own critiques of growth encouraging increased collaboration between these transdisciplines the need to further study these tensions provides justification for adding resilient design as a distinct fourth policy goal to core ecological economic theory

reservation wage analysis of unemployed youths in australia this paper focuses on the analysis and structural estimation of the reservation wage function from a job search model using modified 2sls and maximum likelihood procedures with selectivity bias adj

unemployment benefits and unemployment rates revisited a general equilibrium job search model the impact of unemployment insurance systems on employment behaviour and its subsequent repercussions upon the unemployment rates is the subject of this paper generally unemployment can be viewed as the result of factors which are either external or internal to the labour market the external factors such as the level of aggregate product demand and its impact on the size of the labour market have been the chief concern of many studies of unemployment by contrast the possible impact of the internal structure of the labour market on its own size that is the employment impact of the labour turnover process has been a relatively neglected area of study here we concentrate mainly on the impact of the unemployment insurance system on search behaviour and its subsequent impact on the level of unemployment the type of unemployment we are concerned with is that affected by the duration of unemployed search and the expected duration of the resulting employment contracts rather than the unemployment generated by lack of product demand a common theoretical result in the literature is that higher unemployment insurance payments along with other factors affecting search behaviour may make unemployment less burdensome consequently reducing the incentive of the unemployed to take up employment an observable outcome of such phenomena can be that an increase in the average duration of unemployment spells follows a rise in the unemployment

modeling adaptation in multi state resource systems a current concern in the economics of natural resources is the role of adaptation in moderating the economic impact of exogenous changes in the resilience of natural resource systems we develop a bioeconomic model of the exploitation of a renewable resource that can exist in multiple states we then use this to consider the value of adaptive over non adaptive policies when there is a change in state and there are fixed costs of starting or stopping extraction we take adaptive policies to be those that base extraction on the current state of the system and the conditioning effect that has on the expected future state of the system we take non adaptive policies to be those that base extraction on the long run average state of the system we find that whether adaptive or non adaptive policies dominate depends on the fixed costs of starting or stopping extraction if the fixed costs of closure are very low non adaptive policies dominate however if the fixed costs of closure are high adaptive policies are preferred we use a numerical example based on the peruvian anchoveta fishery to illustrate the results

the system boundaries of sustainability abstract the energy systems of the western industrialized nations have passed through different stages of development and fundamental energy crises over the course of their history 14th 18th and the end of the 20th century these crises have contributed decisively to the transformation of the energy system and of european societies the various historical energy systems their system boundaries and the restrictions resulting from them have decisively influenced the opportunities for development in european societies based upon this knowledge the question arises as to what energy system boundaries a future sustainability strategy will have to deal with the different sustainability concepts strong and weak sustainability imply different system boundaries for an energy system aiming at sustainable development climate change the design of the future energy system and the finiteness of the fossil energy system are the restrictions for the future energy system hence the boundaries of the sustainability system are determined by four dimensions based on the finiteness of the fossil energy system the development of a post fossil energy system the problem of climate change and the chosen sustainability paradigm this sustainability approach could enable sustainable development opportunities for the present generation without affecting the welfare of future generations

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

estimating incentive and welfare effects of nonstationary unemployment benefits the distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell dependent unemployment benefits displays time varying exit rates building on semi markov processes we translate these rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate structural estimation using german microdata allows us to discuss the effects of an unemployment benefit reform hartz iv the reform reduced unemployment by less than 0 1 percentage points contrary to general beliefs the net wage for most skill and regional groups increased taking the insurance effect of unemployment benefits into account however the reform is welfare reducing for 76 of workers

true and spurious duration dependence the identifiability of the proportional hazard model lancaster and nickell 1980 have argued that in the proportional hazard model the effects of time dependence true duration dependence and unobserved sample heterogeneity spurious duration dependence cannot be distinguished we show that both effects can be distinguished if the model allows for observed explanatory variables in the hazard we also discuss the application of our result to practical situations

search models and applied labor economics individual effects in a nonlinear model explicit treatment of heterogeneity in the empirical job search model this paper extends the empirical version of a job search model to permit heterogeneity in the location of wage offer distributions population variance in wage offers is decomposed into variance due to heterogeneity and variance facing each individual heterogeneity is found to be an important source of offer variance in the population the amount of pure wage offer dispersion facing individuals is found to contribute little to population variance

efficient ecosystem services and naturalness in an ecological economic model in an integrated economic ecological model the economy benefits from ecosystem services that include 1 the consumptive use of a harvested species 2 the non consumptive use of popular species and 3 naturalness i e the divergence of the ecosystem s biodiversity from its natural steady state the biological component of the model which is applied to a nine species alaskan marine ecosystem relies on individual optimizing behaviour by plants and animals to establish population dynamics the biological component is used to define naturalness by varying harvesting we arrive at different steady state populations and humans choose from among these steady states welfare maximizing levels of the ecosystem services are derived then it is shown that in the laissez faire economy overharvesting occurs when the harvesting industry ignores ecosystem services 2 and 3 lastly we introduce efficiency restoring taxes and standards that internalize the ecosystem externalities

a micro econometric analysis of vacation behaviour we present a micro econometric limited dependent variable model which simultaneously explains the decision whether to go on vacation or not the choice of destination and the decision on the level of the vacation expenditures the model has been estimated on the basis of a cross section of dutch households we find a striking difference in income elasticity between domestic vacations and vacations abroad and a large impact of owning certain durables such as a boat on the choice of destination to illustrate the potential of the model some simulations are performed

optimal land conversion and growth with uncertain biodiversity costs abstract the aim of this paper is to characterise the trade offs between economic growth and natural resource conservation by determining the optimal rate of conversion of a natural reserve of land land conversion fuels consumption growth in the private sector while simultaneously giving rise to uncertain environmental consequences accounted for in terms of biodiversity benefits and modelled as non linear stochastic processes random processes governing ecosystem dynamics and adaptation to anthropogenic change are important sources of prevailing ecological uncertainty and contribute to the problem of how to balance economic development against natural resource conservation in a two sector exogenous growth framework we model a stochastic environmental good exhibiting uncertain ecological responses to environmental change and describe the economic and environmental trade offs facing a risk averse social planner allowing for ecological risk tends to slow economic growth if environmental impacts are assumed to increase exponentially as the rate of disturbance increases taken in isolation the effects of ecosystem resilience and ecological uncertainty on the rate of natural resource development are ambiguous and depend on normative parameters such as the social planner s attitude to risk and rate of time preference

on the scarcity value of ecosystem services abstract in this exploratory paper we first make a case for considering the scarcity value of ecosystem services in the analyses of jointly determined ecological economic systems next we point out that insight into the scarcity value of an ecosystem service can be gained generally by examining the manner in which the state of an ecosystem responds to changes in environmental conditions following this we specialize our discussion to the case of eutrophication in lakes this leads us to pose and analyze a stochastic control problem of lake management in which ecological thresholds are salient finally we show that this stochastic control theoretic framework can be used to obtain a numerical value that is closely related to the scarcity value of an ecosystem service provided by lakes

resilience weather and dynamic adjustments in agroecosystems the case of wheat yield in england the paper presents an investigation of agroecosystem dynamics with an application to wheat yield data in england over the period 1885 2012 the analysis relies on a threshold quantile autoregressive model the model allows for lag effects to vary across quantiles of the distribution as well as with the values taken by the lagged variables the analysis documents the dynamics and persistence of yield adjustments to shocks the estimates indicate the presence of dynamic instability in the lower quantile of the distribution the analysis shows that after controlling for the role of technological trend wheat yield exhibits resilience to adverse weather shocks

production of educational output time series evidence from socioeconomically heterogeneous populations the case of south africa 1927 1993 a number of competing reasons have been advanced for this divergence of findings since standardized test scores and earnings are two distinct outcomes school quality may simply have different impacts on the two outcome measures earnings studies are frequently argued to have insufficient controls for family background variables the effects of local labor market conditions and self selection effects present in samples and earnings studies and school achievement studies tend to employ different types of data with earnings studies tending to rely on historical information and school achievement studies on contemporaneous data the last of these reasons for divergent results between earnings and standardized test score studies is potentially important in pointing to the significance of lags in the impact of schooling inputs on outputs 2 this article furthers understanding of the link between inputs and outputs of the educational production process in contrast to earlier studies our article employs time series data in order to investigate the link between educational inputs and outputs and does so over a relatively long time run from 1910 to 1993 strong results emerge from our analysis we find that educational inputs matter in the determination of educational outputs in the case of south africa

an empirical study of long term unemployment in australia this paper has two parts the first part concentrates on modeling transitions out of unemployment using aggregated gross flow data models are estimated using monthly transition probabilities for march april 1984 this analysis produces evidence consistent with negative duration dependence but sheds no light on the role of macroeconomic factors the second part focuses on this issue a time series analysis of the proportion of long term unemployment using data for four age and sex groups provides evidence that a proportionately greater increase in long term unemployment in australia in the 1970s has been associated with reduction in job availability and the effect of certain supply shocks

the information content of wage and duration data in a search model estimates of the parameters of the wage offer density and the offer arrival process of a simple search model are presented in this paper the optimality constraint from the search model is treated as a restriction and its effect on parameter estimates is analysed estimates from wage data alone and estimates from duration data alone can be interpreted as unrestricted estimates while estimates obtained from wage and duration data together can be interpreted as restricted estimates this interpretation allows a test of the optimality constraint which is rejected by the data used estimates reveal a substantial difference in the information contained in wages and the information contained in durations but benefit elasticities are consistent with findings from previous studies

unemployment benefit duration and incentives in britain how robust is the evidence abstract recent years have seen considerable advances in the econometric treatment of micro data in models of unemployment duration this paper examines the evidence from such models concerning the effects of unemployment benefits on incentives to work in britain widely accepted results of a small but significant benefit effect are reproduced using a sample of 1 231 unemployed men however these results are only found when benefit receipt is assumed to follow a hypothetical pattern which is shown to be unrealistic and over generous when more realistic calculations of benefits are used no benefit effect is found the paper also argues that search theory is of little help in determining the choice between competing functional forms and explanatory variables results concerning benefits are shown to be sensitive to the latter