state aid programs for equalizing spending across local school districts does the structure of the program matter or only it s size this paper provides interesting insights into an important causal mechanism underlying murray evans and schwab s am econ rev 88 4 789 812 1998 finding that court mandated reforms result in less inequality in spending per pupil levels across rich and poor school districts within a state treating the choice of an education program s structure as endogenous following the analysis of leyden public finance finances publiques 47 229 247 1992 public choice 115 1 2 83 107 2003 yields empirical results suggesting that court mandated reforms increase the likelihood that a program s structure will include a price effect and that the inclusion of a price effect in turn results in a decrease in spending inequality

on the robustness of robustness checks of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis since its first inception in the debate on the relationship between environment and growth in 1992 the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis ekc hereafter has been subject of continuous and intense scrutiny the most recent line of investigation criticizes the ekc hypothesis on more fundamental grounds in that it stresses the lack of sufficient statistical testing of the empirical relationship and questions the very existence of the notion of ekc attention is in particular drawn on the stationarity properties of the series involved per capita emissions or concentrations and per capita gdp and in case of presence of unit roots on the cointegration property that must be present for the ekc to be a well defined concept only at that point can the researcher ask whether the long run relationship exhibits an inverted u pattern on the basis of panel integration and cointegration tests for sulfur stern 2004 and perman and stern 1999 2003 have presented evidence and forcefully stated that the ekc hypothesis does not exist in this paper we ask whether similar strong conclusions can be arrived at when carrying out tests of system fractional integration and cointegration as an example we use the controversial case of carbon dioxide emissions the results show that more ekcs come back into life relative to traditional integration cointegration tests however we confirm that the ekc hypothesis remains a fragile concept

a dynamic approach to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis states that pollution levels increase as a country develops but begin to decrease as rising incomes pass beyond a turning point in ekc analyses the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed as a quadratic function with the turning point occurring at a maximum pollution level other explanatory variables have been included in these models but income regularly has had the most significant effect on indicators of environmental quality one variable consistently omitted in these relationships is the price of energy this paper analyzes previous models to illustrate the importance of prices in these models and then includes prices in an econometric ekc framework testing energy income and co2 income relationships these long run price income models find that income is no longer the most relevant indicator of environmental quality or energy demand indeed we find no significant evidence for the existence of an ekc within the range of current incomes for energy in the presence of price and trade variables

data watch research data in the economics of education economists have developed a wide variety of policy relevant empirical research projects that address the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare recent examples include studies on the impact of school spending on educational outputs the differences between public and private schools the effects of competition among schools the determinants of teacher quality the impact of unions on schools and the consequences of education finance reform one reason for the proliferation of such empirical studies has been the emergence of high quality micro level data on education in this paper we discuss three broad types of data sets data on educational institutions data on educational outcomes at the individual level and data sets from school reforms and experiments in each section we summarize some of the leading surveys discuss the general availability of the data and identify some but certainly not all of the research that has utilized these data this review is by no means exhaustive we have restricted our attention to analyses of data sets describing primary and secondary education moreover we emphasize data sets that are excellent sources of information but are less wellknown and utilized by economists in particular two obvious omissions from this review are the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and the panel study of income dynamics psid both are broad based studies that track people over periods of time gathering information both on educational attainment and on many other issues as well

environmental degradation and real per capita output new evidence at the global level grouping countries by income levels abstract the objective of this research is to examine the relationship between real per capita output and carbon dioxide emissions both globally and by groups of countries we used panel data from 151 countries for the period 1980 2016 the countries are classified according to income levels using the world bank atlas method the argument behind this classification is that the strength of the relationship between the two variables differs according to the income levels of countries based on the theoretical framework of the kuznets environmental curve we found that there is a strong u shaped relationship between the two variables in middle high and low income countries the hypothesis of the kuznets environmental curve holds true in high income and middle high income countries the inclusion of additional covariants shows that urbanization has a positive and significant relationship with carbon dioxide emissions middle high and middle low income countries energy consumption and manufacturing have a positive and statistically significant relationship with carbon dioxide emissions in all the groups of countries a possible implication of economic policy derived from our research is that incentives to production should focus on activities that use environmentally friendly technologies to limit the irreversible damage caused by contamination

on the causal dynamics between emissions nuclear energy renewable energy and economic growth this paper examines the causal relationship between co2 emissions nuclear energy consumption renewable energy consumption and economic growth for a group of 19 developed and developing countries for the period 1984 2007 using a panel error correction model the long run estimates indicate that there is a statistically significant negative association between nuclear energy consumption and emissions but a statistically significant positive relationship between emissions and renewable energy consumption the results from the panel granger causality tests suggest that in the short run nuclear energy consumption plays an important role in reducing co2 emissions whereas renewable energy consumption does not contribute to reductions in emissions this may be due to the lack of adequate storage technology to overcome intermittent supply problems as a result electricity producers have to rely on emission generating energy sources to meet peak load demand

the effect of exit on entry deterrence strategies abstract recent analyses of entry deterrence strategies have required an incumbent s post entry output or pricing strategy to be profit maximizing however most papers have continued to assume that either an incumbent can commit not to exit after entry or that exit is never optimal when there are avoidable fixed costs of operating in any period however exit can be the optimal strategy in this situation entry deterrence strategies operate very differently than when exit is never optimal in fact the possibility of exit can make some previously effective strategies completely ineffective while improving the effectiveness of others

sunk costs and strategic commitment a proposed three stage equilibrium dixit s i980 paper in this journal the role of investment in entry deterrence has attracted considerable interest from economists concerned with constructing a modern theory of strategic behaviour towards entry in fact the paper has spawned quite an industry of commitment models in which the equilibrium payoffs in some final period game can be influenced by strategic commitments made by the players in an earlier period for similar models with important insights into strategic entry deterrence see eaton and lipsey i980 i98i schmalensee i98i the purpose of this note is to argue that when the instrument of stragetic commitment takes the form of sunk costs which both entrant and incumbent have to bear as it does in dixit s paper and in many other examples a three stage model rather than the two stage model presented by dixit is required although the proposed equilibrium differs from dixit s its qualitative features are the same it may or may not be profitable to deter entry and if it is the first mover may still prefer to play an accommodation strategy and allow entry to take place following dixit we restrict our attention to the asymmetric case in which one firm the incumbent makes the first move the two stage game involves the first mover sinking part of its costs in advance so that in the second stage equilibrium it will have a current cost advantage over the entrant which must incur the full cost of producing any desired output level the second period cost asymmetry ensures the incumbent a lar ger share of the post entry market which may be sufficient to deter entry altogether the problem with the two stage game lies in the nature of sunk costs sunk costs by definition are committed before the production period takes place if they were expended as a flow simultaneously with production they would not be sunk the installation of capacity is the natural example employed by dixit and well illustrates the point if installed capacity is a sunk cost which it must be for the incumbent to acquire any strategic advantage at all then the entrant s installed capacity is equally sunk and must also be committed before the production period takes place given this observation the post entry final period equilibrium should not be modelled as if the entrant were simultaneously incurring both variable and sunk costs but the incumbent only incurs variable costs this implies too great an asymmetry in favour of the incumbent the final period equilibrium should involve both firms incurring only variable

nuclear energy consumption and economic growth in nine developed countries this article attempts to test the causal relationship between nuclear energy consumption and real gdp for nine developed countries for the period 1971 2005 by including capital and labour as additional variables using a modified version of the granger causality test developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 we found a unidirectional causality running from nuclear energy consumption to economic growth in japan netherlands and switzerland the opposite uni directional causality running from economic growth to nuclear energy consumption in canada and sweden and a bi directional causality running between economic growth and nuclear energy consumption in france spain the united kingdom and the united states in spain the united kingdom and the usa increases in nuclear energy consumption caused increases in economic growth implying that conservation measures taken that reduce nuclear energy consumption may negatively affect economic growth in france japan netherlands and switzerland increases in nuclear energy consumption caused decreases in economic growth suggesting that energy conservation measure taken that reduce nuclear energy consumption may help to mitigate the adverse effects of nuclear energy consumption on economic growth in canada and sweden energy conservation measures affecting nuclear energy consumption may not harm economic growth

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

stoking the fires co2 emissions and economic growth abstract we examine the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide emissions a greenhouse gas central to global warming predictions estimates derived from global panel data suggest a diminishing marginal propensity to emit mpe carbon dioxide as gdp per capita rises despite this global carbon dioxide emissions growth will continue at 1 8 percent per annum for the foreseeable future a result that is not sensitive to average output growth instead emissions growth continues because output and population will grow most rapidly in lower income nations with high mpes this latter feature emphasizes the distributional consequences of policies to reduce emissions

education equity and intergenerational mobility quasi experimental evidence from court ordered school finance reforms starting from early seventies court ordered school finance reforms sfrs have fundamentally changed the landscape of primary and elementary education finance in the us this paper employs sfrs as quasi experiments to quantify the effects of education equity on intergenerational mobility within commuting zones first i use reduced form difference in difference analysis to show that 10 years of exposure to sfrs increases the average college attendance rate by about 5 2 for children with the lowest parent income the effect of exposure to sfrs decreases with parent income and increases with the duration of exposure second to directly model the causal pathways i construct a measure for education inequity based on the association between school district education expenditure and median family income using exposure to sfrs as the instrumental variable 2sls analysis suggests that one standard deviation reduction in education inequality will cause the average college attendance rate to increase by 2 2 for children at the lower end of the parent income spectrum placing the magnitudes of these effects in context i conclude that policies aimed at increasing education equity such as sfrs can substantially benefit poor children but they alone are not enough to overcome the high degree of existing inequalities key words public education finance intergenerational mobility school finance reforms quasi experiments

determinants of co2 emissions in a small open economy abstract the aim of the paper is to explore the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide co2 emissions for a small open and industrialized country austria we test whether an environmental kuznets curve relationship also holds for a single country rather than concentrating on panel or cross section data for a set of countries a cubic i e n shaped relationship between gdp and co2 emissions is found to fit the data most appropriately for the period 1960 1999 and a structural break is identified in the mid seventies due to the oil price shock furthermore two variables are additionally significant import shares reflecting the well known pollution haven hypothesis and the share of the tertiary service sector of total production gdp accounting for structural changes in the economy emission projections derived from this single country specification support the widely held opinion that significant policy changes are asked for when implementing the kyoto protocol in order to bring about a downturn in future carbon emissions

the effects of school spending on educational and economic outcomes evidence from school finance reforms since the coleman report many have questioned whether public school spending affects student outcomes the school finance reforms that began in the early 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s caused dramatic changes to the structure of k 12 education spending in the united states to study the effect of these school finance reform induced changes in public school spending on long run adult outcomes we link school spending and school finance reform data to detailed nationally representative data on children born between 1955 and 1985 and followed through 2011 we use the timing of the passage of court mandated reforms and their associated type of funding formula change as exogenous shifters of school spending and we compare the adult outcomes of cohorts that were differentially exposed to school finance reforms depending on place and year of birth event study and instrumental variable models reveal that a 10 increase in per pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public school leads to 0 31 more completed years of education about 7 higher wages and a 3 2 percentage point reduction in the annual incidence of adult poverty effects are much more pronounced for children from low income families exogenous spending increases were associated with notable improvements in measured school inputs including reductions in student to teacher ratios increases in teacher salaries and longer school years jel codes j10 i20 h7

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

output fluctuations as entry deterrence a model of predatory pricing if producers cannot borrow to smooth consumption then an industry s dominant producer might engineer output fluctuations to deter entry even when he has the same aversion to income fluctuations as fringe producers if all producers can borrow at the same fixed rate of interest then the dominant producer would keep output stationary if the marginal cost of loans increases with the loan then output fluctuations can benefit the dominant producer even when all producers have the same cost schedule for loans and aversion to income fluctuations the consumer can be better off under this policy than if output fluctuations were prohibited

education finance reform and the distribution of education resources between 1971 and 1996 opponents of local funding for public schools successfully challenged the constitutionality of school finance systems in sixteen states using the variation across states in the timing of these cases the authors investigate the impact of reform on the distribution of school resources their results suggest that court ordered finance reform reduced within state inequality in spending by 19 to 34 percent successful litigation reduced inequality by raising spending in the poorest districts while leaving spending in the richest districts unchanged thereby increasing aggregate spending on education reform led states to fund additional spending through higher state taxes copyright 1998 by american economic association

economic growth and environmental degradation the environmental kuznets curve and sustainable development abstract in this paper we critically examine the concept of the environmental kuznets curve ekc it proposes that there is an inverted u shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita so that eventually growth reduces the environmental impact of economic activity the concept is dependent on a model of the economy in which there is no feedback from the quality of the environment to production possibilities and in which trade has a neutral effect on environmental degradation the actual violation of these assumptions gives rise to fundamental problems in estimating the parameters of an ekc the paper identifies other econometric problems with estimates of the ekc and reviews a number of empirical studies the inference from some such ekc estimates that further development will reduce environmental degradation is dependent on the assumption that world per capita income is normally distributed when in fact median income is far below mean income we carry out simulations combining ekc estimates from the literature with world bank forecasts for economic growth for individual countries aggregating over countries to derive the global impact within the horizon of the bank s forecast 2025 global emissions of so 2 continue to increase forest loss stabilizes before the end of the period but tropical deforestation continues at a constant rate throughout the period

on the political economy of zoning abstract households choose a community in a metropolitan area and collectively set a minimum housing quality and a property tax to finance a local public good the collective imposition of a lower bound on housing consumption induces an income stratified equilibrium in a specification where meaningful community differentiation would not arise without zoning we show computationally that zoning restrictions are likely to be stringent with a majority facing a binding constraint in communities that permit it by inducing a stratified equilibrium zoning causes tiebout welfare gains in aggregate but with large welfare transfers relative to stratified equilibrium without zoning the zoning equilibrium is significantly more efficient as it reduces housing market distortions

the environmental kuznets curve and sustainability a panel data analysis abstract in recent years sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental kuznets curve ekc literature but related hypotheses performance measures and results continue to present a challenge the present paper contributes to this ongoing literature by studying two different ekc specifications for 10 middle east and north african mena countries over the period 1990 2010 using panel data methods for the first specification namely ekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between environmental degradation and income while for the second specification namely modified ekc mekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between sustainability and human development hd the relationships are shaped by other factors such as energy trade manufacture added value and the role of law more interestingly findings from the estimation show that ekc hypothesis hd and sustainability are crucial to build effective environmental policies

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

the nexus between carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth in middle east countries a panel data analysis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis assumes that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and income per capita in other words as a country grows it is assumed that its environmental quality improves in this study we aim to test the ekc hypothesis for 12 middle east countries during the period 1990 2008 by employing recently developed panel data methods our results provide evidence contrary to the ekc hypothesis we found evidence favorable to the u shaped ekc for 5 middle east countries whereas an inverted u shaped curve was identified for only 3 middle east countries furthermore there appear to be no causal links between income and co 2 emissions for the other 4 countries regarding the direction of causality there appears to be a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption in the short run in the long run however the unidirectional causality chain runs from energy consumption and economic growth to co 2 emissions we also suggest some crucial policy implications depending on these results

the failure of input based schooling policies in an effort to improve the quality of schools governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them by concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement this paper provides a review of the us and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies it then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources finally alternative performance incentive policies are described

causality between income and emission a country group specific econometric analysis abstract empirical studies of the environmental kuznets curve ekc examine the presence or otherwise of an inverted u shaped relationship between the level of pollution and the level of income customarily in the diagram of ekc the level of income is shown on the horizontal axis and that of pollution on the vertical axis thus it is presumed that the relationship between income and pollution is one of unidirectional causality with income causing environmental changes and not vice versa the validity of this presumption is now being questioned it is being asserted that the nature and direction of causality may vary from one country to the other in this paper we present the results of a study of income co 2 emission causality based on a granger causality test to cross country panel data on per capita income and the corresponding per capita co 2 emission data briefly our results indicate three different types of causality relationship holding for different country groups for the developed country groups of north america and western europe and also for eastern europe the causality is found to run from emission to income for the country groups of central and south america oceania and japan causality from income to emission is obtained finally for the country groups of asia and africa the causality is found to be bi directional the regression equations estimated as part of the granger causality test further suggest that for the country groups of north america and western europe the growth rate of emission has become stationary around a zero mean and a shock in the growth rate of emission tends to generate a corresponding shock in the growth rate of income in contrast for the country groups of central and south america oceania and japan a shock in the income growth rate is likely to result in a corresponding shock in the growth rate of emission finally causality being bi directional for the country groups of asia and africa the income and the emission growth rates seemed to reinforce each other

income and emission a panel data based cointegration analysis this paper presents the results of an investigation of the causality issue of incomeemission relationship based on time series econometric techniques of unit root test cointegration and related error correction model for a panel data set here the nature of causality between per capita co2 emission pcco2 and per capita gdp pcgdp has been examined using a cross country panel data set covering 88 countries for the period 1960 90 using the panel unit root test procedure of im et al 1997 ips we have found that the hypothesis of unit root i e non stationarity of the time series of pcgdp and pcco2 can not be rejected for individual country groups as both the variables are found to follow i 1 process we next have performed the panel data co integration test and finally we have estimated the ecm for these country groups for which significant income emission cointegration was obtained to explore the nature of dynamics implicit in the given panel data set our findings suggest that there is more or less a bi directional causal relationship between income pcgdp and co2 emission pcco2 for africa central america america as a whole eastern europe western europe europe as a whole and the world as a whole that means the movement of the one variable directly affects the other variable through a feedback system thus the policy makers should be cautious to make proper decision about the control of emission level

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

does disaggregated co2 emission matter for growth evidence from thirty countries abstract this paper investigates the causal relationship between economic growth and aggregated carbon dioxide co 2 emission as well as economic growth and disaggregated co 2 emission from burning fossil fuel coal oil and natural gas in addition the analysis extends the potential impact on economic growth if countries substitute co 2 emission from dirty energy coal by emission from relatively cleaner energy oil and natural gas the study carries out a panel analysis of 30 countries during 1960 2010 panel unit root tests cointegration techniques and causality tests are used to investigate these relationships using panel var in first differences framework the result indicates that there are feedback relationships in all cases except a unidirectional causality running from economic growth to coal induced co 2 emission utilizing wald test with linear restriction the result also finds that countries will be environmentally benefited if they substitute emission from coal by that of oil and natural gas that is if they substitute coal consumption by oil and natural gas consumption depending on the findings the paper suggests some essential policies

more equal but less mobile education financing and intergenerational mobility in italy and in the us a centralised and egalitarian school system reduces the cost of education for poor families and so it should reduce income inequality and make intergenerational mobility easier in this paper we provide evidence that italy compared to the usa displays less income inequality as expected given the type of school system but also less intergenera tional upward mobility between occupations and between education levels we explore some of the reasons which can explain this puzzling result and conclude that in a world in which family background is important for labor market success a centralised and egalitarian tertiary education does not necessarily help poor children and may take away from them a fundamental tool to prove their talent and to compete with rich children 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

what if energy time series are not independent implications for energy gdp causality analysis abstract time series of electricity petroleum products and renewables are found to be highly correlated with total energy consumption applying this insight to the huge literature on energy gdp causality explains that the results of total energy gdp causality tests frequently coincide with the results of energy type gdp tests using the test by toda yamamoto in combination with a cointegration based testing approach we detect such cases of concordance for 92 of the countries in our sample of 65 countries we infer that drawing specific economic conclusions with regard to single types of energy from bivariate causality analysis is difficult

legal constraints and the choice of educational grant structures recent empirical work suggests that legalconstraints are significant in choosingstate educational grant structures unfortunately the literature has not takensuch constraints into account thus callinginto question particular grant structurerecommendations this paper studies theconditions under which a legislature underorder to reform its educational grantstructure prefers foundation grants overdistrict power equalization grants atheoretical model is presented in which thechoice is shown to depend on the legalbasis of the court s decision and theempirical validity of this conclusion isdemonstrated using connecticut data and aseparate model of school districtexpenditure choice

sunk capacity costs long run fixed costs and entry deterrence under complete and incomplete information this article considers a three stage extensive form game where capacity once installed is sunk but where fixed costs are not sunk we show that there may be multiple perfect equilibria of the complete information game when the entrant is incompletely informed about the incumbent s cost the entrant may use the incumbent s capacity choice as a signal of the incumbent s cost we present an example where the incumbent prefers a noninformative capacity signal since this has the effect of reducing the scale of entry we present a second example where the entrant is incompletely informed because the incumbent makes a choice over production technologies that is unobservable to the entrant

capacity output and sequential entry two crucial assumptions frequently made in industrial organization are that an established firm deters entry either by a constant high output the sylos postulate or by high excess capacity the excess capacity hypothesis these assumptions may be an accurate description of the observed conduct of firms in some industries however when the rules of the post entry game are clearly specified the optimal output and investment strategies of an established firm may depart considerably from these behavioral assumptions because of this possible inconsistency with rational behavior any conclusions about the formation of industry based upon either assumption are highly suspect what is more these assumptions avoid the main issue of whether entry deterrence is worthwhile at all this paper presents a dynamic model of entry in which established firms pursue a cournot nash alternatively stackelberg strategy toward a potential entrant the entrant behaves in cournot nash fashion and chooses output on the basis of expected postentry profits at the equilibrium of the post entry game within this framework a constant output entry deterring strategy would involve maintenance of an entry deterring output level before and after entry is threatened an excess capacity entry deterring strategy would involve holding excess capacity at an entry deterring level and increasing output to that level after entry is threatened special conditions are presented under which the sylos postulate or the excess capacity hypothesis will accurately describe optimal entry deterring strategies in addition special conditions are examined under which the established firm maintains a constant output or holds pre entry excess capacity when large scale entry does in fact take place the analysis shows that in general established firm reactions to entry are quite different from these special cases the sylos postulate see joseph bain paolo sylos labini franco modigliani 1958 asserts not only that potential entrants expect established firms to maintain their output constant as entry occurs but that established firms keep output constant at a level that deters entry whether or not it is profitable to do so hailed as a welcome major breakthrough on the oligopoly front modigliani 1958 the sylos postulate underlies many papers in the large theoretical and empirical literature on limit pricing yet the sylos postulate ignores both the strategic interaction between firms and the dynamic aspects of entry 2 unless the established firm s monopoly output exceeds the entrydeterring level the established firm with a general cost function able to choose an entry deterring output level will instead always desire a lower output level before entry for the special case where capacity is an upper bound on output and the established firm is a stackelberg leader in the post entry game

richer and cleaner a study on carbon dioxide emissions in developing countries abstract the climate change debate has drawn attention to the problem of greenhouse gases emissions into the atmosphere one of the most important issues in the policy debate is the role that should be played by developing countries in joining the commitment of developed countries to reduce ghg emissions and particularly co2 emissions this debate calls into play the relationship between energy consumption co2 emissions and economic development in this paper we use a panel data model for 110 world countries to estimate the relationship between co2 emissions and gdp and to produce emission forecast the paper contains three major results i the empirical relationship between carbon dioxide and income is well described by non linear gamma and weibull specifications as opposed to more usual linear and log linear functional forms ii our single equation reduced form model is comparable in terms of forecasted emissions with other more complex less data driven models iii despite the decreasing marginal propensity to pollute our forecasts show that future global emissions will rise the average world growth of co2 emissions between 2000 and 2020 is about 2 2 yr while that of non annex 1 countries is posted at 3 3 yr

energy consumption carbon emissions and economic growth in china abstract this paper investigates the existence and direction of granger causality between economic growth energy consumption and carbon emissions in china applying a multivariate model of economic growth energy use carbon emissions capital and urban population empirical results for china over the period 1960 2007 suggest a unidirectional granger causality running from gdp to energy consumption and a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to carbon emissions in the long run evidence shows that neither carbon emissions nor energy consumption leads economic growth therefore the government of china can purse conservative energy policy and carbon emissions reduction policy in the long run without impeding economic growth

income and co2 emissions evidence from panel unit root and cointegration tests abstract this paper re investigates the stationarity properties of per capita carbon dioxide co 2 emissions and real gross domestic product gdp per capita for 109 countries within seven regional panel sets covering 1971 2003 we apply the recent unit root test of the panel seemingly unrelated regressions augmented dickey fuller suradf test developed by breuer et al 2001 misleading inferences from panel unit root tests with an illustration from purchasing power parity review of international economics 9 482 493 2002 series specific unit root tests with panel data oxford bulletin of economics and statistics 64 527 546 the panel suradf test accounts for the presence of cross country correlations in the data and the parameters in the panel specification vary across countries more importantly this test allows us to identify how many and which members of the panel contain a unit root overall our empirical results illustrate that real gdp and co 2 emissions in these countries are a mixture of i 0 and i 1 processes and that the traditional panel unit root tests could lead to misleading inferences as well as the conduct of cointegration analysis being perhaps inappropriate the results of our analysis carry critical implications for the modeling of co 2 emissions and gdp because of the different orders of integration for the two variables

pooled mean group estimation of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 abstract we apply the pooled mean group estimator to test for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 in 22 oecd countries this approach allows for more flexible assumptions in a panel data framework the period goes from 1975 to 1998

the effect of state education finance reform on total local resources abstract both the federal government and the states use intergovernmental grants to try to change the composition of local spending across different programs as well as the distribution of resources across localities many states are now under court order to use state education grants to reduce local disparities in education spending while a substantial body of literature suggests that these court orders increase the level and progressivity of state education spending there is little evidence on their broader effects on the total resources available not just for schools in low income districts but for other programs across all localities we find that states finance the required increase in education spending in part by reducing their aid to localities for other programs particularly for wealthier areas thus while court ordered school finance equalizations do increase total state aid to localities for education they do so at the expense of drawing state intergovernmental aid away from programs like public welfare health hospitals and general services these findings provide insight into the effectiveness of using earmarked funds to achieve redistribution

using market valuation to assess public school spending abstract we examine whether school expenditures are valued by potential residents and whether the current level of public school provision is inefficient by estimating the effect of state education aid on residential property values we find evidence that overall state aid is valued by potential residents and that school districts do not overspend on education however we find that districts may overspend in areas where residents have fewer schooling options but find no difference in efficiency by the degree of district unionization one interpretation of these results is that increased competition may reduce overspending on public schools in some areas

fixed costs sunk costs entry barriers and sustainability of monopoly this paper shows that i fixed costs of sufficient magnitude assure the existence of a vector of sustainable prices for the products of a natural monopolist prices making him invulnerable against entry ii nevertheless fixed costs do not constitute barriers to entry that is they need not have undesirable welfare consequences iii indeed in market forms that we call perfectly contestable large fixed costs are completely compatible with many desirable attributes of competitive equilibrium iv sunk costs do however constitute barriers to entry and v finally the profit and welfare consequences of entry barriers are described formally in this paper it is shown that i fixed costs of sufficient magnitude assure the existence of a vector of sustainable prices a set of product prices that make a natural monopolist invulnerable against successful entry ii nevertheless costs that are truly fixed do not constitute barriers to entry that is they do not have the welfare consequences normally attributed to barriers to entry iii indeed there are markets of a form which we call perfectly contestable markets and whose properties may be approximated in practice in which large fixed costs are completely compatible with many if not most of the desirable attributes of competitive equilibrium iv sunk costs do however constitute barriers to entry and v finally the resource allocation problems that stem from fixed costs are formally identical with those that accompany public goods both their sources and their character are the same thus the rationale for public supply of public goods may be no different from that pertaining to nationalization of natural monopolies

is there an environmental kuznets curve for sulfur abstract most existing estimates of the environmental kuznets curve ekc for sulfur which use samples of mainly high income countries indicate a maximum emissions turning point at middle to lower high income levels of gdp per capita we use a larger and more globally representative sample than previous sulfur ekc studies we find that sulfur emissions per capita are a monotonic function of income per capita when we use a global sample and an inverted u shape function of income when we use a sample of high income countries a model estimated in first differences results in a monotonic ekc when estimated with both high income and global samples reductions in emissions are time related rather than income related

energy consumption income and carbon emissions in the united states abstract this paper investigates the effect of energy consumption and output on carbon emissions in the united states earlier research focused on testing the existence and or shape of an environmental kuznets curve without taking energy consumption into account we investigate the granger causality relationship between income energy consumption and carbon emissions including labor and gross fixed capital formation in the model we find that income does not granger cause carbon emissions in the us in the long run but energy use does hence income growth by itself may not become a solution to environmental problems

all school finance equalizations are not created equal school finance equalization has probably affected american schools more than any other reform of the last 30 years understanding it is a prerequisite for making optimal social investments in human capital yet it is poorly understood in this paper i explain why it differs from conventional redistribution because it is based on property values which are endogenous to schools productivity taste for education and the school finance system itself i characterize equalization schemes and show why some level down and others level up schemes that strongly level down have unintended consequences even poor districts can end up worse off i also show how school finance equalization affects property prices private school attendance and student achievement

the effects of spending on test pass rates evidence from michigan abstract this study uses data on standardized test scores from 1992 through 1998 at michigan schools to determine the effects of spending on student performance the years in the data set straddle 1994 when michigan dramatically changed the way that k 12 schools are funded and moved toward equalization of spending across schools focusing on pass rates for a fourth grade math tests the most complete and consistent data available for michigan i find that increases in spending have nontrivial statistically significant effects on math test pass rates and the effects are largest for schools with initially poor performance

energy consumption economic growth and co2 emissions in middle east and north african countries this article extends the recent findings of liu 2005 ang 2007 apergis et al 2009 and payne 2010 by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real gdp for 12 middle east and north african countries mena over the period 1981 2005 our results show that in the long run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on co2 emissions more interestingly we show that real gdp exhibits a quadratic relationship with co2 emissions for the region as a whole however although the estimated long run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the ekc hypothesis in most studied countries the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases hence providing poor evidence in support of the ekc hypothesis co2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the mena region even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981 2005 the econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in co2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as gdp per capita in the mena region continues to grow