towards a low carbon future a phenomenology of local electricity experiments in germany abstract a characterizing feature of the german electricity transition is that it started as a movement arising from the civil society initially the movement was directed against nuclear energy and later on turned into a movement favoring decentralized forms of energy production and distribution as well as local control over energy questions once these demands found official recognition and regulatory support a dynamic development ensued in which a host of new actors with new ideas and strategies became involved in the field of electricity generation regions cities and villages experimenting with socio technical innovations and aiming to implement new concepts developed governance structures under high uncertainty these governance structures mirror space specific social political technological and economic constellations once the old incumbent actors in the field began to falter both government and electricity providers started to stem the tide of decentralized initiatives whose dynamic in fact has recently been seriously weakened in order to help us better understand these developments in a more generic context the theory of strategic action fields will be applied

the housing market impacts of shale gas development using data from pennsylvania and an array of empirical techniques to control for confounding factors we recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from nearby shale gas development that vary with water source well productivity and visibility results indicate large negative impacts on nearby groundwater dependent homes while piped water dependent homes exhibit smaller positive impacts suggesting benefits from lease payments results have implications for the debate over regulation of shale gas development jel l71 q35 q53 r31 technological improvements in the extraction of oil and natural gas from unconventional sources have transformed communities and landscapes and brought debate and controversy in the policy arena shale gas plays underlying the populated northeastern united states were thought to be uneconomical less than ten years ago but now contribute a major share of us gas supply 1 natural gas has been hailed as a bridge to energy independence and a clean future because of its domestic sourcing and compared with coal and petroleum derivatives its smaller carbon footprint and reduced emissions of other pollutants e g particulates sulfur dioxide car

valuing nuclear energy risk evidence from the impact of the fukushima crisis on u s house prices abstract behavioral economics suggests that individuals overweight recent unexpected and or rare events when updating beliefs this study investigates the effect of such an event the fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011 on the learning process of a local environmental risk by evaluating how perceptions of the risk of a nuclear accident are capitalized into house prices near nuclear power plants npps in the u s our results provide new evidence on the dynamics of the effect spatially the impact was concentrated in a 4 km radius around npps and temporally it peaked a half year later and dissipated one year after the crisis

property tax limits local fiscal behavior and property values evidence from massachusetts under proposition abstract this paper examines the impact of a specific property tax limit proposition 2 1 2 in massachusetts on the fiscal behavior of cities and towns in massachusetts and the capitalization of that behavior into property values proposition 2 1 2 places a cap on the effective property tax rate at 2 5 and limits nominal annual growth in property tax revenues to 2 5 unless residents pass a referendum allowing a greater increase the study analyzes the 1990 1994 period a time when massachusetts municipalities faced significant fiscal stress because of a 30 cut in real state aid and a demographically driven increase in school enrollments the findings include the following 1 proposition 2 1 2 significantly constrained local spending in some communities with most of its impact on school spending 2 constrained communities realized gains in property values to the degree that they were able to increase school spending despite the limitation and 3 changes in non school spending had little impact on property values

some economic dimensions of the sovereignty debate in quebec debt gdp and migration this paper shows that the quest for sovereignty in quebec is explained by its role as the abode for a french speaking minority in north america it notes that there was no commonly agreed legal framework for the 1980 or 1995 referendums and that the attempt to impose one in 2000 has been rejected by quebec using results from existing papers and original research the paper shows that the quest for sovereignty can have an impact on the cost of financing the public debt of the entity doing this it also shows that labour flows can be affected by the existence of a sovereignty movement this gdp would be higher if the secessionist threat had not had an impact on the size of the labour force since the early 1970s

money not morale the impact of desires and beliefs on private investment in photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives abstract a transition towards renewable energy production is one proposed solution as one means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in this regard photovoltaic citizen participation initiatives are a cornerstone in fostering the diffusion of renewables allowing for active citizen engagement this article investigates the drivers behind people s decision to participate in two selected austrian citizen participation initiatives in the field of photovoltaics based on a survey of 870 potential adopters in addition to commonly used indicators variables assessing both people s desires their goals or preferences with respect to energy autonomy environmental protection financial aspects etc and their beliefs how likely they think their participation in a citizen participation initiative in the field of photovoltaics will help them achieve these goals are also included in the analysis the findings show that people s desires are not decisive in deciding on pv participation and that financial beliefs are the main driver behind joining such an initiative this focus on financial gain clearly poses a risk in any attempted transition towards renewable energy production as it indicates that adopters may withdraw from participation as soon as a more attractive investment opportunity becomes available it also indicates that subsidized feed in tariffs are likely to be essential in any long term transition policy

why do households without children support local public schools linking house price capitalization to school spending while residents receive similar benefits from many local government programs only about one third of all households have children in public schools we argue that capitalization of school spending into house prices can encourage even childless residents to support spending on schools we identify a proxy for the extent of capitalization the supply of land available for new development and show that towns in massachusetts with little undeveloped land have larger changes in house prices in response to a plausibly exogenous spending shock towns with little available land also spend more on schools we extend these results using data from school districts in 46 states showing that per pupil spending is positively related to the percentage of developed land this positive correlation persists only in districts where the median resident is a homeowner and is stronger in districts with more elderly residents who do not use school services and have a shorter expected duration in their home our findings support models in which capitalization encourages the provision of durable local public goods and provides an additional reason why some elderly support local school spending

measuring environmental effects on property values without hedonic regressions abstract the effect of environmental nuisances on property values has been frequently studied using hedonic regressions yet that method has extensive data and estimation requirements the technique developed in this paper uses repeat sales on houses to substantially reduce these requirements the technique adjusts for depreciation between sales and allows for nonzero error covariance terms when a house has been sold more than twice the effect of highway noise on property values is studied using this method and the results are statistically equivalent to the results of an extensive hedonic study for the same area

do plants decrease pollution reduction efforts during a recession evidence from upstate new york chemical plants during the us great recession us communities often experience economic hardship with plant or business closings contributing to high unemployment rates in this circumstance communities and local governments may prioritize economic recovery over environmental improvement thereby weakening community and government pressure against polluting plants in an attempt to explore the concern this study examines the impact of local economic downturn on nearby chemical plants toxic release reduction behavior a total of 351 plants in upstate new york and their toxic release inventory data were analyzed for 5 years 2006 2010 the results show plants toxic release reduction efforts were reduced when unemployment and plant closing rates were high therefore the findings highlight a possible limitation to regulatory approaches that rely on public pressure to motivate better environmental performance

opinion polls and canadian bond yields during the 1995 quebec referendum opinion poll announcements during the 1995 quebec referendum campaign that increased the likelihood of quebec sovereignty substantially increased the spread on quebec bond yields over both canada and ontario bond yields announcements that increased the likelihood of quebec sovereignty also increased the spread between government of canada real return bonds and government of the united kingdom real return bonds but had only a weak effect on expected inflation in canada expected inflation is proxied by the spread between nominal and real return bonds

promise scholarship programs as place making policy evidence from school enrollment and housing prices abstract place based promise scholarship programs which guarantee financial aid for qualifying graduates of a school district have proliferated in recent years using data from multiple sites we compare the evolution of school enrollment and residential real estate prices around program announcement dates within promise eligible and surrounding areas while our estimates indicate that enrollment increased following promise announcements merit based programs generated relative increases in white enrollment housing prices respond strongly in neighborhoods with better primary schools and in the upper half of the housing price distribution we conclude that these programs have important and under studied distributional considerations

the estimation of demand parameters in hedonic price models this paper shows that the econometric problem of estimating hedonic demand parameters is not a standard identification problem caused by demand supply interaction as has been often assumed estimation procedures based on this assumption lead to biased results the hedonic estimation problem is instead caused by the endogeneity of both prices and quantities when households face a nonlinear budget constraint an instrumental variables solution to this problem is suggested using instruments that exogenously shift the budget constraint

the enactment of socio technical transition pathways a reformulated typology and a comparative multi level analysis of the german and uk low carbon electricity transitions 1990 2014 abstract this paper aims to make two contributions to the sustainability transitions literature in particular the geels and schot 2007 res policy 36 3 399 transition pathways typology first it reformulates and differentiates the typology through the lens of endogenous enactment identifying the main patterns for actors formal institutions and technologies second it suggests that transitions may shift between pathways depending on struggles over technology deployment and institutions both contributions are demonstrated with a comparative analysis of unfolding low carbon electricity transitions in germany and the uk between 1990 2014 the analysis shows that germany is on a substitution pathway enacted by new entrants deploying small scale renewable electricity technologies rets while the uk is on a transformation pathway enacted by incumbent actors deploying large scale rets further analysis shows that the german transition has recently shifted from a stretch and transform substitution pathway to a fit and conform pathway because of a fightback from utilities and altered institutions it also shows that the uk transition moved from moderate to substantial incumbent reorientation as government policies became stronger recent policy changes however substantially downscaled uk renewables support which is likely to shift the transition back to weaker reorientation

do environmental right to know laws affect markets capitalization of information in the toxic release inventory abstract this paper investigates how information contained in the u s environmental protection agency s toxic release inventory tri program one of the largest environmental right to know programs affects prices in the housing market i use a strengthening of the reporting requirements for the chemical lead in 2001 as exogenous variation to test for housing price changes near existing firms who must now report using a difference in differences specification i find that listing an existing firm in the toxic release inventory lowers housing prices up to 11 within approximately 1 mile the results suggest that housing market participants do capitalize into prices at least some information conveyed by the tri program

scaling up social businesses in developing markets most of the world s poor live in developing markets and face unmet needs in core areas such as education health energy sanitation and financial services this offers businesses a vast opportunity for growth as these economies emerge from low income to middle income status social businesses in particular address a social need while generating profits typically reinvested into the business itself but there is limited understanding of the ways through which social businesses achieve scale this paper investigates how social businesses can scale up first we define scaling up as increasing the number of customers or members of a business as well as expanding its offer and maximising its revenues until it reaches millions of people second using three in depth case studies of social businesses that successfully scaled up according to these definitions brac aravind and amul we identify scaling up strategies for social businesses we identified market penetration market development product development and diversification as key strategies at different stages of business maturity we find that there are two ways of increasing income generated that are linked to these four strategies increasing revenue per stream and diversifying revenue streams our findings give insight to companies aiming to pursue social businesses and adds to the sparse literature on scaling up social businesses a fruitful future research avenue would be to investigate the best sequence for applying these scaling strategies across companies and sectors over time

what drives provincial canada yield spreads although recent research has led to a deeper understanding of the factors determining yields on long term canada bonds there has been little corresponding work on provincial bonds this is despite the fact that unlike the us state bond market provincial debt represents a significant part of the canadian bond market provincial and state debt are examples of sub national debt which are backed by taxing powers similar to that of the national government but without control of the money supply which leaves them open to the possibility of default or payment rescheduling this in turn makes them similar to corporate debt by using a carefully constructed new data set we establish two important results first provincial fiscal positions debt and deficits are an important factor in determining yield spreads between provincial and canada bonds second we show that provincial bonds are a substitute for corporate debt in that during recessionary flights to quality their yields react similar to those on corporate bonds

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

business models as drivers of the low carbon power system transition a multi level perspective abstract decarbonising the electrical power system holds a critical role in climate change mitigation recent developments in technology are helping change the current centralized paradigm into one of integrated distributed clean energy resources in spite of these developments radical transformation is not occurring at a speed to effectively meet environmental targets mostly due to the incumbent carbon lock in trajectory we argue that business model bm innovation dynamics are key drivers in accelerating the low carbon power system transition often operating irrespective of the underlying technology we combine bm theory with the multi level perspective on sociotechnical transitions to present a useful framework to analyze this potential transition this paper presents the application of this framework characterizing relevant bm dynamics of niche and regime business actors and supporting these with illustrative examples particularly we find that new actors in the distributed energy business are achieving market scale by offering financially innovative bms that do not require upfront costs from customers higher penetrations of renewable energy sources in liberalized electricity markets are destabilizing the historical bm of large centralized utilities through erosion of wholesale prices furthermore a shift towards distributed and dynamic energy resources further challenges incumbents and might bring opportunities for bms focused on active customer participation and social value creation as these tendencies are expected to accelerate we find analyses of bms will have important relevance for future power system transition research

reexamining the empirical evidence for an environmental kuznets curve this paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities worldwide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted u shaped relationship between national income and pollution we test the sensitivity of the pollution income relationship to functional forms to additional covariates and to changes in the nations cities and years sampled we find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes and conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted u shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data

information as regulation the effect of community right to know laws on toxic emissions abstract there is growing academic and policy level interest in the use of information as quasi regulatory mechanisms such as toxic release inventory tri and green labels mandatory disclosure requirements have been touted as market based incentives that may affect firm behavior we provide new evidence on the effectiveness of disclosure requirements by examining firm behavior in response to disclosures of tri emissions we find that firms with the largest stock price decline on the day this information became public subsequently reduced emissions more than their industry peers this is consistent with the view that financial markets may provide strong incentives for firms to change their environmental behavior

house prices during siting decision stages the case of an incinerator from rumor through operation abstract the impact of an undesirable land use on house prices is not constant over time previous proximity studies which employed only discrete changes in information such as an epa superfund site announcement ignored potentially important phases of the adjustment process this study explicitly measures how the effects of an undesirable land use evolve over the siting process and life of the disamenity some price response to rumors of a facility is indicated and the evidence that prices respond at groundbreaking before operation is strong the distance premium persists at least 7 years after the facility begins operations

on the environmental discount rate abstract in this paper i show that environmentalism itself can provide a rigorous foundation for the low and declining discount rates that environmentalists seem to favor in long term cost benefit calculations if indeed it is a stylized fact that we are moving toward a world where environmental spending is increasingly important that scenario per se may significantly lower the social rate of return a formula is derived for the ratio of social to private discount rates as a simple function of two operational environmental parameters the formula is used to explain why the social rate of return ought to be lower than the private rate and why this gap called environmental drag when measured in terms of equivalent evaporation of national income may be expected to increase over time

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

income environmental disamenity and toxic releases the literature argues that income growth leads to increased demand for environmental quality and thus reduction in pollution using a utility theoretic model we hypothesize that the income pollution relationship should depend on the level of disamenity of the pollutant we proxy for disamenity using the toxicity of releases for counties in the united states the functional relationship between income and releases depends on the level of disamenity the form is more concave for more toxic releases we find that environmental improvements occur at lower levels of per capita income for more toxic pollutants jel q25 q28 o13

scotland and small country independence the assessment this paper reviews some of the issues consequent on the formation of new states through secession while its particular focus relates to the potential withdrawal of scotland from the united kingdom it discusses preference heterogeneity as a potential cause of the break up of states relating that to recent developments in the economics of identity it examines some macroeconomic issues particularly debt and currency and reflects on how these might influence secession it examines alternatives fiscal decentralization to secession and considers the strategies that those arguing for and against secession may deploy it also explains the structure of this issue explaining how the different contributions come together

bridging the trade environment divide protection for free traders this word represents the consummate evil for environmentalists it is the ultimate good of course for the trade community protection conjures up dark images of smoot and hawley while the environmental camp sees clear mountain streams lush green forests and piercing blue skies one cannot blame all of the tensions at the trade environment interface on linguistic differences but these competing perspectives are emblematic of a deep clash of cultures theories and assumptions trade officials often seek to limit efforts to link trade and environmental policy making and sometimes to prohibit such efforts altogether in this regard the narrow focus and modest efforts of the world trade organization s committee on trade and environment are illustrative 1 the launch of negotiations for a free trade area of the americas with an express decision to exclude environmental issues from the agenda provides an even starker example of the trade community s hostility toward serious environmental engagement economists have been prominent among those arguing that pollution control and natural resource management issues are best kept out of the trade policy making process cooper 1994 bhagwati 1999 other economists however have tried to set trade policy making in a broader context and to build environmental sensitivity into the international trading system runge 1994 rodrik 1997 summers 2000

community energy and social entrepreneurship addressing purpose organisation and embeddedness of renewable energy projects in many european countries renewable energy has evolved through decentralised and small scale forms of organisation these different initiatives are often denominated as community energy in both research and practice by examining community energy initiatives through a social entrepreneurship lens we develop an integrated approach for the analysis of small scale and bottom up energy initiatives our approach relies on three specific analytical dimensions the purpose of the initiative its form of organisation and ownership and its embeddedness into local community or wider social movements we apply this analytical framework to four case studies selected from a larger empirical study on newly emerged forms of organisation in the field of renewable energy across the european union drawing on our findings we characterise social enterprises in the energy sector as collectively owned organisations that combine renewable energy production with more overarching goals of environmental and social transformation and a specific quest for civic participation these initiatives show strong relationships with different social movements and even a potential to transcend the local scale we conclude that given similarities in the two areas of research provide fertile ground for mutual advancement both conceptually and empirically

estimates of the impact of crime risk on property values from megan s laws abstract we estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move in dates of sex offenders we find significant effects of sex offenders locations that are geographically localized house prices within 0 1 miles of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average we then use this finding to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses and find costs of over 1 million per victim far greater than previous estimates however we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate risks posed by offenders or that living near an offender poses significant costs exclusive of crime risk jel k42 r23 r31

social enterprises and non market capitals a path to degrowth the aim of this paper is to look at alternatives to the classic for profit shareholding enterprise and to suggest how such alternatives might be supported within the current economic system another aim is to link the social enterprise and degrowth discourses we first re define the economy as including non monetised sectors the core economy and the economy of nature and discuss the liminal zone of not for profit and not only for profit organisations we then look at social enterprise definitions from a degrowth perspective and explain why the dimensions of scale place environment and provisioning patterns need more space in the social enterprise discourse after that we define non market capitals as capitals taken out of the market and placed under local member democratic control and explain their importance in a degrowth economy we give examples of non market capitals and suggest a model involving mutual support between primary and secondary social enterprises finally we suggest areas where more research is needed in this emerging field of inquiry

regulation and capitalization of environmental amenities evidence from the toxic release inventory in massachusetts environmental regulation in the united states has undergone a slow evolution from command and control strategies towards market based regulations one such innovation is the toxics release inventory tri a regulation that requires polluting e rms to publicly disclose information about their toxic emissions the basic tenet of this regulation is that it corrects for informational asymmetries between polluters and households allowing communities to pressure polluters to decrease their emissions policy makers have judged the tri a tremendous success as national releases declined by 43 between 1988 and 1999 yet many of the fundamental problems which are known to lead to the classic failure of the coase theorem such as high transaction costs and dife culties in organizing cast doubt on the effectiveness of disclosure rules alone to lead to an efe cient outcome in the caseof pollution we use an event study methodology with high quality data on house prices and other local attributes to assess the extent to which the public values changes in toxic releases and thus the success of tri our major e ndings include 1 declines in toxic releases appear unrelated to any political economy variables that might lead to public activism 2 initial information released under tri had no signie cant effect on the distribution of house prices and 3 house prices show no signie cant impact of declines in reportedtoxic releases over time standard errors aresmall enoughthat we can reject the hypothesis that large declines in toxic releases lead to more than a 0 5 increase in house prices these results also hold when we control for differences in the availability of information on tri and the possible effect of expectations our e ndings cast doubt on the ability of the public to process complex information on hazardous emissions and support the coase theorem in that right to know lawssuch as tri may not be the most effective form of environmental regulation

politics and social costs estimating the impact of collective action on hazardous waste facilities firms that generate negative externalities may consider the effects of their location on the surrounding environment because of the right of their prospective neighbors to demand compensation for pollution and raise the transaction costs of location since communities vary both in the value individuals place on the environment and in the ability of residents to organize politically locations that generate the least political opposition may not be the locations that result in the lowest externalities this article tests whether the degree to which firms internalize their externalities depends on the ability of affected communities to engage in collective action the results indicate that firms processing hazardous waste when deciding where to expand capacity do take into account variations in the potential for collective action to raise their costs

what are community energy companies trying to accomplish an empirical investigation of investment motives in the german case community energy has become an increasingly important issue in academia and in energy policy circles worldwide citizens jointly investing in and operating renewable energy installations have played an essential role in countries such as germany or denmark building on and extending previous studies we collect survey data on investment motives for a stratified random sample of german community energy companies structural variables are selected using a socio ecological technical systems framework this study aims to identify differences within the community energy sector to better understand investment behaviour and the effects of policy changes despite the small sample coverage at the individual member level the preliminary results of this study suggest that first community energy forms a specific type of social investment and that second there are significant differences between community energy companies especially regarding the assessment of the return motive this motive plays a more prominent role in limited partnerships than in cooperatives and for community wind than for companies focusing on solar or biomass while these and other factors are highly interrelated our data indicate that the social setting and geographical and climatic conditions are the critical ones here these findings may guide further research

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

the effect of legalizing retail marijuana on housing values evidence from colorado does legalizing retail marijuana generate more benefits than costs this paper provides a first step toward addressing that question by measuring the benefits and costs that are capitalized into housing values we exploit the time series and cross sectional variations in the adoption of colorado s municipality retail marijuana laws rmls and examine the effect on housing values with a difference in differences strategy our estimates show that the legalization leads to an average 6 increase in housing values indicating that the capitalized benefits outweigh the costs in addition we find suggestive evidence that this relatively large housing value appreciation is likely due to rmls inducing strong housing demand while having no discernible effect on housing supply finally we show that the effect of rmls is heterogeneous across locations and property types jel k20 r28

relief for the environment the importance of an increasingly unimportant industrial sector deindustrialization stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter day features of many economies it is common to assume that such developments pressure policymakers to relax environmental standards however when heavily polluting industries become less important economically their political importance also tends to diminish consequently a regulator may increase the stringency of environmental policies like some other studies we find that declining industrial employment translates into stricter environmental standards in contrast to previous studies but consistent with our argument we find that greater income inequality is associated with policies that promote a cleaner environment jel q58 p16 j31 c23