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

how renewable energy consumption lower global co2 emissions evidence from countries with different income levels significant difference in the emission renewables nexus across countries with different income levels is frequently ignored in previous studies to empirically investigate whether the effect of renewable energy consumption on carbon dioxide co2 emissions differs across countries with different income levels the emission growth renewables nexus for a global panel of 120 countries and four income based subpanels over the period 1995 2015 is examined fully considering the potential cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity a series of econometric techniques allowing for cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity is utilised cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity are confirmed for the global panel as well as for all four subpanels only for the global panel high income subpanel and upper middle income subpanel is the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis valid renewable energy consumption has a negative effect on co2 emissions but its effect is not significant the mitigation effect may be obscured by higher economic growth and increasing non renewable energy consumption the global panel and four subpanels provide mixed directionality of causality among the variables suggesting that for various income based subpanels significant differences exist in the effect of renewable energy consumption on co2 emissions especially highlighting in various direct and indirect influencing paths between renewable energy consumption and co2 emissions

direct estimation of synergy a new approach to the diversity performance debate this study examines the linkages between relatedness and synergy in the context of diversification among u s pharmaceutical firms for the period 1960 1980 rather than assume as in the entropy herfindahl and concentric indices of diversification that the levels of synergy generated by different related combinations of business units are identical we estimate synergy directly using a modified version of the concentric index in addition to estimating synergy using capital market performance of the firm as a whole we examine the effects of nondrug diversification on the innovative productivity of firms pharmaceutical divisions alone our two main findings are that production relatedness such as that between drugs and chemicals in fact did not imply synergy over the period of our study and that the patterns of synergy for different types of relatedness shifted over time with the industry life cycle

questioning the empirical basis of the environmental kuznets curve for co2 new evidence from a panel stationarity test robust to multiple breaks and cross dependence abstract this paper investigates the time series properties of per capita co2 emissions and per capita gdp levels for a sample of 86 countries over the period 1960 2000 for that purpose we employ a state of the art panel stationarity test which incorporates multiple shifts in level and slope thereby controlling for cross sectional dependence through bootstrap methods our analysis renders clear cut evidence that per capita gdp levels are nonstationary for the world as a whole while per capita co2 is found to be regime wise trend stationary the analysis of country groups shows that for africa and asia per capita co2 is best described as nonstationary while per capita gdp appears stationary around a broken trend in addition we find evidence of regime wise trend stationarity in both variables for the country groups consisting of america europe and oceania the results of our analysis carry important implications for the statistical modelling of the environmental kuznets curve for co2 since the differing order of integration in both variables for the world as a whole and for africa and asia calls into question the validity of panel cointegration techniques which assume that both variables are nonstationary and cointegrated with one another cointegration techniques would not be appropriate either for the case of america europe and oceania which are characterised by per capita gdp and co2 emissions being stationary around a broken trend similar conclusions are reached when we analyse country groups based on levels of development failure to properly characterise the time series properties of the data by not controlling for an unknown number of structural breaks and for cross sectional dependence could be responsible for the fragility and lack of robustness surrounding the estimation of environmental kuznets curves

growth and environmental quality testing the double convergence hypothesis abstract this paper discusses the double convergence hypothesis dch that the uncritical analysis of the so called environmental kuznets curve ekc implicitly implies according to the ekc empirical evidence would support the hypothesis that economic growth through a deterministic sequence of phases would produce cross country convergence in per capita output and as a by product convergence in the demand for environmental quality however factual analysis seems to reject the general hypothesis of convergence in per capita output limiting the validity of such an assessment to the case of homogeneous groups of countries this is why to test the dch the paper focuses on the original group of oecd countries for which the economic convergence turned out to be true this allows us to verify whether green and convergence follows as a consequence of economic convergence the paper also tests for a more equitable distribution of protection policies among countries unlike other studies which do not make the dch explicit and have focused on pollutant emissions this research explicitly tests for the double convergence using as a proxy for the demand for environmental quality the territory set aside for protected areas the results confirm that for the selected homogenous group of countries growth has accompanied the demand for environmental quality this happens both in terms of conditional and stochastic convergence

is there a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions abstract we analyze the effect of fuel mix model specification and the level of development on the presence and size of a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions the results indicate that fuel mix the specification for income and the level of economic development affect conclusions about whether there is a turning point in the relationship between economic activity and energy use and carbon emissions including fuel shares generally reduces the size of a turning point that is estimated from a panel that includes observations from both oecd and non oecd nations but this result varies according to the level of development for oecd nations there is limited support for a turning point in the relationship between income and per capita energy use and or carbon emissions for non oecd nations there is no turning point in the relationship between income and either energy use or carbon emissions instead the relationship is positive together the results indicate that forecasters and policy makers should not depend on a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use or carbon emissions to reduce either

ceo characteristics and firm r d spending over the past fifteen years a number of studies have examined the determinants of firm r d spending these studies however almost invariably focus on the role of firm or external ownership characteristics in predicting r d spending while overlooking the attributes of the top managers involved in allocating corporate resources in this study we change that focus by empirically examining how r d spending as compared to industry competitors varies at firms based on the characteristics of their ceos using a sample of publicly traded firms we find that ceo characteristics explain a significant proportion of the sample variance in firm r d spending even when corporate strategy ownership structure and other firm level attributes are controlled in terms of individual ceo characteristics we find that r d spending is greater at firms where ceos are younger have greater wealth invested in firm stock and signifacant career experience in marketing and or engineering r d in contrast to existing theory we find that the amount of a ceo s formal education had no significant association with r d spending once a ceo has attained a college degree however significant r d spending increases are found at firms where ceos have advanced science related degrees from subgroup analyses we further find that ceo effects on relative r d spending increase with longer ceo tenure implying that ceos over time may mold r d spending to suit their own preferences from these results we make implications for both research on determinants of r d spending and managerial practice

international inequalities in per capita co2 emissions a decomposition methodology by kaya factors in this paper we provide a methodology for decomposing international inequalities in per capita co2 emissions into kaya multiplicative factors and two interaction terms we use the theil index of inequality and show that this decomposition methodology can be extended for analyzing between and within group inequality components we can thus analyze the factors behind inequalities in per capita co2 emissions across countries between groups of countries and within groups of countries the empirical illustration for international data suggests some points firstly international inequality in per capita co2 emissions is mainly attributable to inequalities in per capita income levels which helps to explain its recent reduction while differences in carbon intensity of energy and energy intensity have made a less significant contribution this result is strongly influenced by the performance of china and india secondly the between group inequality component which is the biggest component is also largely explained by the income factor thirdly the within group inequality component increased slightly during the period something mainly due to the change in the income factor and the interaction terms in a few regions

the toxic intensity of industrial production global patterns trends and trade policy this paper exploits a newly developed data set to investigate recent changes in the international distribution of industrial pollution in particular the authors examine three issues 1 the relationship between the toxic intensity of industrial production and the level of economic development 2 the impact of oecd environmental regulation on global changes in toxic intensity and 3 the relationship between trade policy and the toxic intensity of industrial production in ldc s 10 refs

when does it take a nixon to go to china substantial policy changes like market oriented reforms by populist parties and steps towards peace by hawks are sometimes implemented by unlikely parties to account for such episodes this paper develops a framework in which incumbent politicians have better information about the state of the world than voters the incumbent is unable to credibly transmit all this information since voters are also imperfectly informed about his ideology the paper identifies conditions under which an incumbent party s electoral prospects increase the more atypical the policy it proposes popular support for a policy or its credibility depends on the policymaker policy pair copyright 1998 by american economic association

a biophysical analysis of the energy real gdp ratio implications for substitution and technical change abstract this paper quantifies the factors that caused the energy real gdp ratio to change during the post war period in france the federal republic of germany japan and the united kingdom econometric results indicate that changes in the types of fuel used changes in the energy consumed by the household sector changes in the types of goods and services produced and changes in energy prices account for most of the variation in this ratio price elasticities estimated from these results are lower than those estimated by neoclassical economists and indicate that the system boundaries used by neoclassical economists overestimate the amount of energy saved by substitution analysis of the error term from the regression results indicates that energy saving technical change has had little effect on the amount of energy used to support economic activity

a lorenz pareto measure of pure diversification several diversification and concentration measures have been proposed these measures play an important role in both research and practice in the fields of strategic management industrial economics antitrust regulation and organizational studies two problems with popular existing measures are their inappropriate performance on a benchmark example of the industrial organization literature and their lack of normalization into the unit interval this note proposes a measure that overcomes these deficiencies a distinction is drawn between two separate dimensions of diversification that we call scope and pure diversfication respectively we call attention to how such pure measures can be recombined with scope for the construction of special purpose multiattribute indices our proposed measure is simply related to the well known gini index but is entirely novel a convenient relationship to pareto s principle permits flexible description and interpretation

information polarization and term length in democracy abstract this paper considers term lengths in a representative democracy where the political issue divides the population on the left right scale parties are ideologically different and better informed about the consequences of policies than voters are a short term length makes the government more accountable but the re election incentive leads to policy distortion as the government seeks to manipulate swing voters beliefs to make its ideology more popular this creates a trade off a short term length improves accountability but gives distortions a short term length is best for swing voters when the uncertainty is large and parties are not very polarized partisan voters always prefer a long term length when politicians learn while in office a long term length becomes more attractive for swing voters

trade environment and development the issues in perspective abstract this special issue on trade and the environment brings together a number of papers that are constructively critical of the conventional economic wisdom on the topic we think that this criticism is warranted because of the decidely uncritical way in which free trade has been advocated in much of the literature and especially in policy the papers analyse the validity of the underlying assumptions on which the conventional wisdom is based and provide suggestions for ways to facilitate trade that is also adequately protective of the environment sustainability and other social values in this introductory piece we discuss trade the environment and sustainability summarizing arguments in the papers included in this issue and adding a few additional points not covered by them

are younger generations higher carbon emitters than their elders inequalities generations and co2 emissions in france and in the usa abstract proper understanding of the determinants of household co2 emissions is essential for a shift to sustainable lifestyles this paper explores the impacts of date of birth and income on household co2 emissions in france and in the usa direct co2 emissions of french and american households are computed from consumer budget surveys over the 1980 2000 time period age period cohort estimators are used to isolate the generational effect on co2 emissions i e the specific effect of date of birth independent of the age the year and other control variables the paper shows that french 1935 55 cohorts have a stronger tendency to emit co2 than their predecessors and followers the generational effect is explained by the fact that over their lifespan french baby boomers are better off than other generations and live in energy and carbon inefficient dwellings in the usa the absence of a generational effect on co2 emissions can be explained by the fact that intergenerational income inequalities are weaker than in france persistence of the generational effect once income and housing type is controlled for in france can be explained by the difficulty for french 1935 55 cohorts to adapt to sober energy consumption patterns

the impact of economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan abstract this paper investigates the relationship between the economic growth and co2 emissions in azerbaijan a cointegration analysis is conducted over the period 1992 2013 for getting more robust results johansen ardlbt dols fmols and ccr methods are employed to explore cointegration and estimate long run coefficients we use cubic quadratic and linear specifications and conclude that the last one is an adequate representation for the impact of the economic growth on co2 emissions in azerbaijan the results from the different cointegration methods are consistent with each other and show that the economic growth has a positive and statistically significant impact on the emissions in the long run implying that the ekc hypothesis does not hold for azerbaijan the income elasticity of co2 emissions using different methods is found to be between 0 7 and 0 8 moreover we find that any short run imbalance can be adjusted towards the long run equilibrium path within less than one year the paper concludes that measures to increase energy efficiency carbon pricing instruments in production and international domestic trade activities and nationwide social awareness programs to instruct about the negative consequences of pollution can be considered as relevant environmental policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions

subsidiary expansion contraction during times of economic crisis this paper compares two real options within country growth and across country operational flexibility to examine subsidiary expansion contraction during times of economic crisis specifically we examine how the real options orientations of individual subsidiaries interact with the general characteristics of multinational enterprise networks our main findings are that a economic crises can be detrimental for subsidiaries with stronger within country orientations and advantageous for those with stronger across country orientations and b network characteristics are not the sole determinants of subsidiary expansion contraction what really matters is how the real options orientations of individual subsidiaries mesh with the overall characteristics of the network they belong to

the impact of energy consumption and economic development on ecological footprint and co2 emissions evidence from a markov switching equilibrium correction model abstract reducing the impact of air pollution and global environmental degradation on human health and quality of life for qatari citizens represents the most important objective of the qatar national vision 2030 with respect to this vision this study investigates the effects of economic growth energy consumption trade openness urbanization and financial development on environmental degradation by using the markov switching equilibrium correction model with shifts in both the intercept and income per capita slope for the period 1970 2015 unlike existing studies and in addition to the co 2 emissions pollutant this paper uses the total ecological footprint and ecological carbon footprint as new proxies of environmental degradation empirical results show strong evidence for cointegration with markov shifts in particular our results show that the non control for breaks can hide the true relationship among variables the results show also that when controlling for breaks the environment kuznets curve ekc hypothesis holds for the co 2 emissions and ecological carbon footprint pollutants and the u shaped behavior holds for the total ecological footprint moreover the results show that these two behaviors ekc and u shaped are regime dependent regarding the other explanatory variables the results show that trade openness and urbanization worsen ecological footprint however the electricity consumption and financial development are positively related to the ecological footprint and negatively related to ecological carbon footprint and co 2 emissions finally we found evidence for the growth hypothesis for both pollutants based on these results a detailed economic energy and environmental policy is proposed and discussed for the case of qatar

economic growth and emissions reconsidering the empirical basis of environmental kuznets curves abstract recent empirical research indicates that certain types of emissions follow an inverted u or environmental kuznets curve ekc as income grows this regularity has been interpreted as a possible de linking of economic growth and patterns of certain pollutants for developed economies in this paper the empirical basis of this result is investigated by considering some statistical particularities of the various ekc studies performed it is argued that the inverted u relationship between income and emissions estimated from panel data need not hold for specific individual countries over time based on insights from intensity of use analysis in resource economics an alternative growth model is specified and estimated for three types of emissions co2 nox and so2 in four countries netherlands uk usa and western germany it is found that the time patterns of these emissions correlate positively with economic growth and that emission reductions may have been achieved as a result of structural and technological changes in the economy sustainable growth is defined as the rate of economic growth that does not lead to growth in emissions its rate is calculated for each type of emission and country based on estimated parameter values the resulting indicators reflect a balance between the positive influence of growth and negative influence of structural change and technological progress on emission levels

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

consumption based carbon emissions and trade nexus evidence from nine oil exporting countries abstract the relationship between international trade and carbon emissions has been studied extensively nonetheless consumption based carbon emissions which is adjusted for international trade have not been studied this study is an attempt to address the gap by using consumption based carbon emissions which is adjusted for trade in case of oil exporting countries the effect of international trade is analyzed by treating exports and imports separately from 1990 to 2018 the long run impact of all variables i e exports imports and gross domestic product gdp is higher than the short run coefficients the empirical evidence both in the long run and short run confirms the negative effect of exports on consumption based carbon emissions furthermore gross domestic product gdp and imports have a positive and statistically significant impact on consumption based carbon emissions both in the short run and long run policies related to consumption based carbon emissions and international trade shall realize the effect of government policies to absorb it fully by taking approximately two years

the politics of persuasion when voters are rational a democratic society is considered where the voters but not the politicians are uncertain about how the economy works the parties therefore have a strategic motive to misinform the voters will the voters learn how the economy works and will the policy decisions be efficient it turns out that the degree of polarization of the political parties is crucial if the parties are very polarized voters will not trust the parties and the policy will not reflect how the economy actually works whereas the opposite is true if the parties are less polarized

increased ecoefficiency and gross rebound effect evidence from usa and six european countries 1960 2002 despite increased efficiency in the use of natural resources the use of these resources continues to increase in most societies this paper examines the discrepancy between the potential decrease of use of natural resources as an effect of increased efficiency and actual use during the period 1960 2002 this difference was found to grow faster in the usa than the mean for six west european countries possible reasons for this difference between the two regions are analysed to reduce the anthropogenic flows of energy and material and the consequent deleterious effects on the biosphere it will become necessary to adapt consumption to degree of efficiency in the use of natural resources based on the comparison between the two regions some economic aspects of this issue are discussed

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

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

the environmental kuznets curve for pm2 5 pollution in beijing tianjin hebei region of china a spatial panel data approach abstract the purpose of this study is to exam the existence of environmental kuznets curve ekc of pm2 5 pollution in the beijing tianjin hebei bth region of china as one of the most important economic growth poles in china bth region has long been suffering from air pollution especially pm2 5 pollution thus in this study we utilized satellite observations of pm2 5 pollution and panel data of 13 cities in bth region from 1998 to 2016 to investigate the relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 pollution after verifying the spatial effect of pm2 5 pollution by spatial statistical analysis the spatial econometric model spatial durbin model sdm was chosen over the non spatial model in the examination of ekc the results showed that 1 the relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 pollution presented a significant inverted u shaped pattern though bth region is still in the upward section there is a hope that it will cross the point and enter the downward section in the future 2 the turning points of ekc would happen later with spatial effect considered compared to the result of non spatial model 3 the turning point of ekc would not happen until the region enter the post industrial economy stage moreover though some of the cities in bth region have entered post industrial stage none of them has cross the turning point of ekc results of this study indicate a promising future in the control of pm2 5 pollution as well as provide suggestions to put more emphasis on regional cooperative governance in air pollution control for the policy makers

are we better off if our politicians have more information the model of public policy studied in this paper has heterogeneous citizens voters and two public goods one roads chosen directly by an elected policy maker and the other pollution stochastically dependent on the amount of roads both a one country and a two country version of the model are analyzed the latter displays externalities across the countries which create incentives for free riding and strategic delegation the welfare effects of providing the policy maker with information about the relationship between roads and pollution are investigated and it is shown that more information hurts some sometimes even all citizens in particular the opportunity not to create an institution for information gathering can serve as a commitment device for a country although with the unfortunate effect of making the overall outcome even worse implications for the welfare effects of informational lobbying are also discussed

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

the interaction of population growth and environmental quality an important question for policy is whether holding constant per capita income and other relevant factors population pressures have a significant effect upon environmental degradation the authors examine the effect of population pressures upon deforestation in 64 developing countries in an attempt to provide relevant empirical findings data on deforestation were drawn from the food and agriculture organizations production yearbook results suggest that a relationship exists between per capita income and deforestation and that for africa rural population density shifts the relationship upward the increase in the rate of deforestation levels off as income increases the rate of growth in per capita income also has a significant negative impact upon deforestation although the magnitude of the effect is small the authors close in stressing that reducing the rate of population growth is not necessarily the best way to reduce the rate of deforestation deforestation in developing countries is really a problem of market failure since property rights are often neither defined nor enforced there is essentially no private cost of deforestation with no long term stake in the land people have no incentive to use land efficiently this situation must be addressed in conjunction with the problems of poverty and population growth

monetary policy delegation and polarisation there is by now a comprehensive literature beginning with rogoff 1985 arguing that a government should delegate monetary policy to a central banker who is independent and more conservative than the government itself this will reduce the inflationary bias typically at the cost of stabilisation for a democratic society this result would suggest that the median voter should prefer that monetary policy is delegated to an independent central banker who is more conservative than herself typically the central banker is chosen by the government and the government is chosen by the electorate thus there is some albeit perhaps a weak link between the preferences of the electorate and the central banker although the central banker presumably should be chosen for a long period of time waller and walsh 1996 he has to be chosen at some point in time this paper contains a political economy model where the central issue in politics is the choice of central banker and

related diversification and r d intensity dynamics abstract using longitudinal data of spanish manufacturing companies we study the dynamic bidirectional relationship between firm research and development r d intensity and corporate diversification in an organic growth setting our empirical approach accounts for the different sources of endogeneity although we find a positive linear effect of r d intensity on related diversification the effect of related diversification on r d intensity assumes the form of an inverted u thus the effect of related diversification on r d intensity is positive but marginally decreases for moderate levels of related diversification such an effect can become negative however for high levels of related diversification additionally as a consequence of dynamics the effects after one year are substantially lower than the overall effects that occur over several years

policy biases with voters uncertainty about the economy and the government abstract we model policy choices where parties competing for election are better informed than voters about the state of the economy in addition voters are uncertain about the incumbent s preferences and the median voter s vote potentially depends on the state of the economy the incumbent may bias his policy in order to convey information to the voters and raise his chance of reelection the bias depends crucially on which kind of uncertainty is the most important uncertainty about preferences leads to moderate policies while uncertainty about the state of the economy leads to extreme policies

explaining the relationship between co2 emissions and national income the role of energy consumption i estimate a simultaneous equation system in which gdp and co2 emissions are jointly determined i find that including energy consumption in the regression implies a negative relationship between income and co2 emissions which is contrary to previous findings

the electoral politics of extreme policies a government may adopt extreme policies policies lying outside the interval between the ideal points of the political parties for electoral purposes it can benefit when a change in policy is costly and when the opposing party cannot commit to maintaining the status quo

happiness and health two paradoxes abstract this paper aims to establish systematic relationships between the two rapidly growing research streams on the socio economic determinants of happiness and health although they have been pursued quite independently by different communities of researchers empirical evidence points to very similar underlying causal mechanisms in particular in both cases per capita income seems to play a major role only up to a very low threshold beyond which relative income and other relational factors become crucial for happiness and health on the basis of these structural analogies we argue that a process of cross fertilisation between these two research streams would contribute to their development by clarifying the relationship between happiness health and their determinants finally we observe that the two literatures have converging policy implications measures meant to reduce poverty and inequality and invest in social and environmental capital may improve both health and happiness of the individuals

war politics an economic rational voter framework the frequency of foreign conflict initiations in the united states is found to be significantly greater following the onset of recessions during a president s first term than in other periods the authors develop an economic theory of the political use of wars which links the election cycle war decisions and economic performance consistent with the observed relationships among these events an incumbent leader with an unfavorable economic performance record may initiate a war to force the learning of his war leadership abilities and thus salvage with some probability his reelection this obtains despite voter rationality and informational symmetry copyright 1995 by american economic association

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

income growth and atmospheric pollution in spain an input output approach abstract the relationships between economic growth and environmental pressures are complex since the early nineties the debate on these relationships has been strongly influenced by the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis which states that during the first stage of economic development environmental pressures increase as per capita income increases but once a critical turning point has been reached these pressures diminish as income levels continue to increase however to date such a delinking between economic growth and emission levels has not happened for most atmospheric pollutants in spain the aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between income growth and nine atmospheric pollutants in spain in order to obtain empirical outcomes for this analysis we adopt an input output approach and use namea data for the nine pollutants first we undertake a structural decomposition analysis for the period 1995 2000 to estimate the contribution of various factors to changes in the levels of atmospheric emissions and second we estimate the emissions associated with the consumption patterns of different groups of households classified according to their level of expenditure

regulation and firm size fda impacts on innovation this article estimates the highly differential impacts of fda regulations on pharmaceutical firms of various sizes where size is measured as scale of r d expenditures estimation is performed using the method of maximum quasi likelihoods using productivity trends of the united kingdom as a control to isolate fda regulatory effects in the united states it is shown that smaller u s pharmaceutical firms suffered devastating reductions in research productivity because of fda regulations in contrast the largest u s pharmaceutical firms apparently benefited from regulation as sales gains due to reduced competition more than offset their quite moderate declines in research productivity

the politics of ambiguity politicians face a trade off between the policies that maximize their chances of reelection and their most preferred policies or the policies most preferred by the constituency which they represent this paper analyzes this trade off in a dynamic electoral model in which the voters are not fully informed about the preferences of the incumbent first we show that the incumbent follows a policy which is intermediate between the other party s ideal policy and his own ideal policy second we show that often the incumbent has an incentive to choose procedures which make it difficult for voters to pinpoint his preferences with absolute precision thus politicians may prefer to be ambiguous

technical progress structural change and the environmental kuznets curve abstract the paper shows that under reasonable assumptions about technical progress a positive sustainable growth rate fails to exist the argument is that a growing part of income has to be spent for continuing technical progress in order to compensate the pollution effects of growth hence in the long run either the sustainability condition will be violated or the growth rate must decline to zero furthermore in finite time the level of wealth will decrease despite growing income and a constant pollution level thus further growth is no longer reasonable similar arguments also hold for the environmental effects of structural change favoring less pollution intensive economic activities an evolutionary change of goods and production technology may shift the limits of growth and is hence a prerequisite for a long run ekc

internalizing co2 emissions via central banks financials evidence from the world researchers and policy makers have suggested tools to mitigate co2 emissions worldwide however there appears to be uncertainty in terms of policy effectiveness the objective of this paper is to develop an innovatively effective co2 internalizing mechanism worldwide which builds on currency in circulation as its core operational tool the study is based on a large sample of countries findings show that urbanization electric power consumption and trade positively impact on co2 emissions no evidence is found in favour of the environmental kuznets curve while the use of renewable energy reduces the level of co2 emissions the paper proposes a central bank carbon dioxide emissions internalizing fund which rests on quantitative and qualitative tools to ensure a truly effective mechanism in co2 emissions abatement quantitatively this implies the use of a direct tax on currency in circulation and a conversion penalty in the fund qualitatively there is the need to establish a global institution which would ensure that funds flow to the most polluting sectors in each country in view of unleashing the strongest decline in co2 emissions

ahp based synergy allocation to the partners in a merger abstract many corporations try to overcome vulnerabilities by external alliances with other corporations this paper concentrates on the merger case in member states of the european community under the premise that synergies are to be expected from such a transaction in this context synergy will be understood as the difference between the capitalized earning power of the merger firm and the sum of the capitalized earning powers the companies could expect when operating alone this article presents a method to allocate the financial effect to the partners in a merger based on the formal procedure of the analytic hierarchy process the method allocates synergy to the partners according to the impact intensities of their performance potentials on this synergistic effect

economic policy economic performance and elections this paper explores the role of reelection pressures in determining economic policy by assuming that voters are uncertai n as to the efficacy of different policies a reelection process is derived that depends on both a politician s past policies and the level of economic activity during his time in office it is shown th at the less uncertain are voters as to which policy is best the more likely is a politician to manipulate policy for reelection purposes manipulation entails implementing the policy that is more likely to be well received rather than the one that maximizes income copyright 1993 by american economic association

needed examples of applying ecological economics abstract nothing is as effective as examples in conveying the usefulness of ecological economics to present and potential practitioners i suggest ten example areas or problems where ecological economics can and should make specific analyses and recommendations one example a resolution or creative rephrasing of the dichotomous views of japan that contrast its economic successes with its precarious dependence on imported renewable and nonrenewable resources and its high population density for background i also briefly review nine efforts to date in the general direction of total environmental cost

polarization and inefficient policies of the economy in this case the costs of producing a public good the parties each propose a policy an election is held and the policy of the winning party is implemented voters and parties care about the level of the public good and costs two kinds of sequential equilibria exist revealing where voters learn the true costs and the implemented policy adjusts to costs and non revealing if parties preferences are polarized only non revealing equilibria fulfill a refinement criterion like the intuitive criterion if they are alike only revealing equilibria fulfill this criterion thus less political polarization improves information revelation in electoral democracies policy motivated parties are likely to be better informed about the functioning of the economy than are voters this paper presents a model where two parties but not voters are informed about the cost of producing a public good we study whether an electoral democracy leads to efficient production of the public good given this asymmetry of information in particular under which circumstances will the implemented policy the level of the public good reflect actual costs the main result is that the policy will reflect costs if and only if at least one of the parties has preferences which are sufficiently similar to the median voter s in this sense polarization leads to inefficiency the public good can be for instance infrastructure medicare or military services both a continuum of voters and the parties have preferences over the amount of the good that is provided by the government the preferences of the two parties are situated on each side of those of the median voter the costs of providing the good are not precisely known to the voters who only know the distribution of costs and that they will pay for these costs as taxpayers on the other hand the parties know the costs

multimarket contact economies of scope and firm performance we integrate the efficiency and competitive effects of product market scope choice into a comprehensive model of economic performance and empirically test the model in the context of the u s airli

the causal factors of international inequality in hbox co _ 2 emissions per capita a regression based inequality decomposition analysis this paper uses the possibilities provided by the regression based inequality decomposition fields in res labor econ 22 1 38 2003 to explore the contribution of different explanatory factors to international inequality in hbox co 2 emissions per capita in contrast to previous emissions inequality decompositions which were based on identity relationships this methodology does not impose any a priori specific relationship thus it allows an assessment of the contribution to inequality of different relevant variables in short the paper appraises the relative contributions of affluence sectoral composition demographic factors and climate the analysis is applied to selected years of the period 1993 2007 the results show the important though decreasing share of the contribution of demographic factors as well as a significant contribution of affluence and sectoral composition

coal consumption urbanization and trade openness linkage in indonesia abstract this paper explores the effects of economic growth urbanization industry and trade openness on coal consumption in indonesia over the period 1970 2015 to closely adhere to the environmental kuznets curve narratives we consider coal consumption which has been scarcely explored in the ekc debate as a proxy of environmental pressure we estimate the autoregressive distributed lag ardl method and confirm that the variables are cointegrated for long run linkage with the presence of structural breaks the empirical evidence showed that economic growth urbanization and trade openness increase coal consumption while decreasing share of secondary industry reduce it we also verify the existence of environmental kuznets curve having a vital role in the energy mix indonesia needs to restrain excessive coal consumption to enhance environmental quality our results also imply urbanization and trade openness are crucial factors on coal consumption consequently it should be taken into consideration in energy policy making process such as energy conservation policies in the residential sector and prioritize foreign investment which brings cutting edge coal technologies

diversification ricardian rents and tobin s q according to prevailing theory firms diversify in response to excess capacity of factors that are subject to market failure by probing into the heterogeneity of these factors we develop the corollary that firms that elect to diversify most widely should expect the lowest average rents an empirical test with tobin s q as the measure of rents is consistent with this theory

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

strategic campaigns and redistributive politics the article investigates strategic informative campaigning by two parties when politics concern redistribution voters are uncertain about whether parties favour special groups parties will target campaigns on groups where most votes are gained by informing about policies in equilibrium campaigning will be most intensive in groups where the uncertainty is largest and where voters are most mobile most likely to vote most receptive to campaigns and relatively uninformed initially these groups will become more informed about policy parties will therefore gain more votes by treating these groups well so these groups will gain from strategic campaigning welfare effects are assessed

environmental kuznets curve for co2 in canada abstract according to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis the relationship between per capita gdp and per capita pollutant emissions has an inverted u shape this implies that past a certain point economic growth may actually be profitable for environmental quality most studies on this subject are based on estimating fully parametric quadratic or cubic regression models while this is not technically wrong such an approach somewhat lacks flexibility since it may fail to detect the true shape of the relationship if it happens not to be of the specified form we use semiparametric and flexible nonlinear parametric modeling methods in an attempt to provide more robust inferences we find little evidence in favour of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis our main results could be interpreted as indicating that the oil shock of the 1970s has had an important impact on progress towards less polluting technology and production

the political economy of the pharmaceutical industry e conomicsis a practical science since its inception as an independent discipline it has probed the major policy issues of the day the topics that aroused the interests of its practitioners have generally been those that presented government officials with critical choices the modern literature on the economics of the pharmaceutical industry is no exception this body of material originated with the investigations of the kefauver committee in late 1959 public interest was aroused by the spectacle of confrontation between committee and industry the record made by this committee and its successors grew to tens of thousands of pages as claims and counterclaims were offered regarding industry conduct and performance the primary line of attack concerned pharmaceutical prices and profits the committee demonstrated that prices generally exceeded direct costs of manufacturing for 22 major pharmaceutical firms in 1958 costs of goods sold were merely 32 percent of total sales u s senate report 1961 p 31 the committee argued that this fact alone demonstrated the presence of monopoly power while the substantial difference between revenues and production costs permitted high expenditures on research and development it also paid for even higher selling outlays moreover reported rates of return after taxes during this period on the order of 21 to 22 percent exceeded twice the average for all manufacturing the industry replied that on the contrary prices were low relative to the value afforded consumers and high returns on successful products were required to balance the losses from the large numbers of unsuccessful ones the relevant concept of marginal costs according to the industry position must include the costs of developing and marketing new products and therefore prices were not excessive at all although it admitted earning substantial profits the industry argued that without these returns research outlays would be limited and the number of new drugs reduced the committee countered that little of social value arose from industry research molecules were manipulated and the new drugs that resulted were therapeutically similar to those already on the market indeed it suggested that much