does grassroots democracy reduce income inequality in china abstract using village and household survey data collected from 48 villages of eight chinese provinces for the period 1986 2002 this paper studies how the introduction of village elections affects income distribution at the village level we estimate both a static fixed effect panel model and a dynamic panel model for the within village gini coefficient and take care of the endogeneity of the introduction of elections the dynamic panel model shows that having elections reduces the gini coefficient by 0 04 or 14 3 of the sample average we also find that elections tend to increase the income shares of poorer portions of the population further econometric analysis based on dynamic panel models shows that elections increase per capita public expenditures by 271 yuan but do not increase the level or progressiveness of net or total income transfer in a village therefore elections positive role in reducing income inequality is not played through more income redistribution but through more pro poor public investment

delays in claiming social security benefits this paper focuses on social security benefit claiming behavior a takeup decision that has been ignored in the previous literature using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after retirement is optimal in a wide variety of cases and that gains from delay may be significant we find that approximately 10 of men retiring before their 62nd birthday delay claiming for at least one year after eligibility we estimate hazard and probit models using data from the new beneficiary data system to test four cross sectional predictions while the data suggest that too few men delay we find that the pattern of delays by early retirees is generally consistent with the hypotheses generated by our theoretical model

bankable permits for the control of environmental pollution abstract intertemporal trading of emission permits banking is often identified as one of three promising market mechanisms for controlling pollution along with averaging and trading surprisingly the efficiency properties of permit banking systems have not been investigated using a simple optimal control model this paper investigates firms incentives for banking or borrowing emission permits and compares the emission and output streams firms would choose with the socially optimal solution we find that in many cases firms will suboptimally choose excessive damage and output levels in early periods and correspondingly too few in later periods if given the opportunity to freely move emissions between time periods we propose a simple alternative trading scheme we term modified banking that counters this problem and should be no more difficult for an environmental authority to implement than a straigth banking system

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

spatial and economic patterns in life expectancy among us states this study investigates the determinants of gender specific life expectancy across us states over the period 1995 2007 we employ a production function specification where life expectancy depends o

good for living on the relationship between globalization and life expectancy this paper analyzes the relationship between three dimensions economic social and political of globalization and life expectancy using a panel of 92 countries covering the 1970 2005 period using different estimation techniques and sample groupings we find that economic globalization has a robust positive effect on life expectancy even when controlling for income nutritional intake literacy number of physicians and several other factors the result also holds when the sample is restricted to low income countries only in contrast political and social globalization have no such robust effects

quota enforcement in resource industries self reporting and differentiated inspections quotas are frequently used in the management of renewable resources and emissions however in many industries there is concern about their basic effectiveness due to non compliance we develop an enforcement model of a quota regulated resource and focus on a situation with significant non compliance and exogenous constraints on fines and enforcement budget we propose a new enforcement system based on self reporting of excess extraction and explicit differentiation of inspection rates depending on compliance history we use differentiated inspections to induce firms to self report excess extraction this system increases the effectiveness of the quota by allowing the regulator to implement a wider range of aggregate extraction targets than under traditional enforcement while ensuring an efficient allocation of extraction in addition inspection costs can be reduced without reductions in welfare

can punishment generate specific deterrence without updating analysis of a stated choice scenario this study explores the specific deterrence generated by punishment in the context of regulatory violations with a focus on the distinction between upward revisions to future punishment parameters likelihood and severity and the experience of being penalized in order to avoid the pitfalls of empirically analyzing actual choices made by regulated entities e g measuring entities beliefs regarding the likelihood and size of future penalties our study examines behavior associated with a stated choice scenario presented within a survey distributed to the environmental managers of facilities regulated under the us clean water act this choice of respondents strengthens the external validity of our empirical results based on a variety of statistical methods our empirical results strongly and robustly reject the standard hypothesis that specific deterrence stems solely from upward revisions to punishment parameters while supporting the alternative hypothesis of experiential deterrence whereby facilities focus on recent experiences to shape their compliance behavior

why do manufacturing facilities introduce environmental management systems improving and or signaling performance abstract in this paper we explore the motivation for the introduction of environmental management systems and their certification a distinction is drawn between their role in bringing about better compliance or improved performance and as external indicators of good environmental practices to both other market participants and regulatory authorities drawing upon a database of approximately 4000 facilities in seven oecd countries empirical evidence is found for the role that both factors play in encouraging the adoption and certification of ems s but that the relative importance of different factors varies according to facility size

the social cost of uniform regulatory standards in a hierarchical government abstract regulatory agencies charged with public health and safety typically promulgate uniform regulatory standards which suggests the agencies are concerned mainly to reduce harmful externalities with little concern for firms costs a focus on benefits to the exclusion of costs in standard setting and enforcement leads to inefficiencies we show that even when the legislature cannot peg the budget to a specific enforcement policy it can reduce the distortions by limiting the enforcement agency s budget and by permitting the agency to partially self finance from rebates of noncompliance fines

pooling of uncertainty enforcing tradable permits regulation when emissions are stochastic an under appreciated advantage of tradable permits regulation is its ability to create better decision making when emissions are stochastic in general the distribution of stochastic actual emissions around intended emissions results in over or under compliance permit tradability reduces the extent to which actual aggregate emissions deviate from regulatory targets by giving firms an additional mechanism for responding to uncertainty we construct a two period model of permit regulation with ex post enforcement to demonstrate how the permit market distributes uncertainty and to illustrate the importance of expectations toward permit market outcomes

measurement error and state dependent pollution control enforcement abstract a two group model of state dependent enforcement is applied to identical firms which minimize the expected present value of costs and fines measurement error affects the probabilities of transitions between groups and the receipt of fines it is shown that state dependent enforcement can reduce social cost below the level attainable with static enforcement and that differentiation in both monitoring probabilities and standards may be optimal however setting fines for both groups at the maximum is likely to be optimal comparisons between models and alternative model interpretations are offered

the regulatory choice of noncompliance in emissions trading programs this paper addresses the following question to achieve a fixed aggregate emissions target cost effectively should emissions trading programs be designed and implemented to achieve full compliance or does allowing a certain amount of noncompliance reduce the costs of reaching the emissions target the total costs of achieving the target consist of aggregate abatement costs monitoring costs and the expected costs of collecting penalties from noncompliant firms under common assumptions i show that allowing noncompliance is cost effective only if violations are enforced with an increasing marginal penalty however one can design a policy that induces full compliance with a constant marginal penalty that meets the aggregate emissions target with lower expected costs this last result does not depend on setting an arbitrarily high constant marginal penalty in fact the marginal penalty need not be higher than the equilibrium marginal penalty under the policy with the increasing marginal penalty and can actually be lower finally tying the marginal penalty directly to the permit price allows the policy objective to be achieved without any knowledge of firms abatement costs

social security retirement age and optimal income taxation it is often argued that implicit taxation on continued activity of elderly workers is responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement in a world of laissez faire or of first best efficiency there would be no such implicit taxation the point of this paper is that when first best redistributive instruments are not available because some variables are not observable the optimal policy does imply a distortion of the retirement decision consequently the inducement of early retirement may be part of the optimal tax transfer policy we consider a model in which individuals differ in their productivity and their capacity to work long and choose both their weekly labor supply and their age of retirement we characterize the optimal non linear tax transfer that maximizes a utilitarian welfare function when weekly earnings and the length of active life are observable while individuals productivity and health status are not observable c 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the determinants of life expectancy an analysis of the oecd health data 1 introductionthis study is concerned with understanding the determinants of life expectancy in developed countries the level and variability of life expectancy has important implications for individual and aggregate human behavior it affects fertility behavior economic growth human capital investment intergenerational transfers and incentives for pension benefit claims zhang zhang and lee 2001 coile et al 2002 from the social planners perspective it has implications for public finance for example gradstein and kaganovich 2004 conclude that increasing longevity results in increasing public funding of education and economic growth cremer lozachmeur and pestieau 2004 p 2260 argue that early retirement puts pressure on the financing of healthcare and pension schemes and this pressure is made worse by growing longevity while typically assumed strictly exogenous for the purpose of policy analysis it has been argued that life expectancy or more broadly health is predetermined by behavioral and policy variables in what can be loosely described as a production function for health estimating this function is the goal of this study auster leveson and sarachek 1969 were the first economists to study a population production function for health a regression of state level mortality rates on medical care and environmental variables today their research motivations and questions remain compelling indeed given the size and rapid growth of health care related industries and recent public interest in containing medical and insurance costs it could be argued that understanding the socioeconomic determinants of societal health is more important today than ever moreover issues concerning the government s role in sponsoring basic medical and pharmaceutical research in regulating drug alcohol and tobacco consumption and in promoting healthy lifestyles are all particularly newsworthy the research questions related to public health are obvious if societal health can be measured as life expectancy or mortality rates what are the various socioeconomic factors that increase or decrease it can the marginal effects of these factors be disentangled if so which of these factors produces the largest health benefits or costs to society these questions are as important now as when first posed by auster leveson and sarachek in 1969 since auster leveson and sarachek several economic studies have attempted to answer these questions using data from the united states or multiple countries 1 many of these have used aggregate data from the member countries of the oecd to explain cross country mortality rates or life expectancies 2 while the empirical results are mixed the general consensus is that population life expectancy or mortality is a function of environmental measures e g wealth education safety regulation infrastructure lifestyle measures e g tobacco or alcohol consumption and health care consumption measures e g medical or pharmaceutical expenditures however the appropriate econometric methodology for disentangling these effects and its meaning for the relative importance statistical or economic of the estimated effects is more contentious these methodological issues are most vividly illustrated in the few studies that have focused on pharmaceutical expenditures as a separate input to life expectancy these include peltzman 1987 babazono and hillman 1994 lichtenberg 1996 1998 frech and miller 1999 and miller and frech 2000 for example peltzman 1987 examined the effects of wealth and prescription drug laws on infectious disease mortality and on poisoning mortality across middle income countries in a generalized least squares gls framework he found that wealth variables significantly decreased both disease and poisoning mortality rates while prescription drug laws had a significant and positive effect on poisoning mortality only

decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries we study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program while governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales but interregional targeting may deteriorate as central grants to high poverty regions shrink owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions

instrument choice when regulators and firms bargain abstract we compare outcomes with an emissions tax and an emissions standard when a firm and regulator engage in cooperative bargaining over the stringency of the regulation bargaining is motivated by giving the firm a choice of abatement technologies if the firm s preferred technology differs from the regulator s the first best outcome is not an equilibrium of the traditional noncooperative game in which the regulator is a stackelberg leader the regulator may therefore choose to offer the firm a more lenient regulation if it agrees to switch technologies we find that the resulting bargaining outcomes differ for a tax and a standard even though information is symmetric and we identify conditions under which each instrument yields lower social costs

stochastic pollution costly sanctions and optimality of emission permit banking abstract this paper identifies a new economic motive for pollution regulations that allow polluting firms to bank and borrow emission permits over time when aggregate pollution is stochastic an intertemporal permit trading regime can provide firms with efficient incentives for pollution abatement without the need for costly government enforcement actions that would otherwise be required

enforcement leverage when penalties are restricted in the united states empirical studies of the enforcement of continuous compliance with environmental regulations especially air and water pollution regulations have repeatedly demonstrated the following i for most sources the frequency of surveillance is quite low ii even when violations are discovered fines or other penalties are rarely assessed in most states iii sources are nonetheless thought to be in compliance a large part of the time the evidence for the apparently low level of enforcement activity is found in a number of case studies of state and local enforcement of air and water quality regulations conducted jointly by the environmental protection agency epa and council on environmental quality ceg together with periodic surveys of implementation of air and water quality legislation conducted by the general accounting office gao these surveys show

mortality decline and long run economic growth this paper examines the impacts of mortality decline on long run growth in a dynastic family two sector growth model with social security a rise in longevity has direct effects on fertility human capital investment and growth as well as indirect effects through increasing unfunded social security contributions both the direct and indirect effects depend on the relative strength of the tastes for the number and welfare of children and may have different signs the net effects of rising longevity on fertility tend to be negative but positive on human capital investment and growth c 2001 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

decentralization of governance and development all around the world in matters of governance decentralization is the rage even apart from the widely debated issues of subsidiarity and devolution in the european union and states rights in the united states decentralization has been at the center stage of policy experiments in the last two decades in a large number of developing and transition economies in latin america africa and asia the world bank for example has embraced it as one of the major governance reforms on its agenda for example world bank 2000 burki perry and dillinger 1999 take also the examples of the two largest countries of the world china and india decentralization has been regarded as the major institutional framework for the phenomenal industrial growth in the last two decades in china taking place largely in the nonstate nonprivate sector india ushered in a landmark constitutional reform in favor of decentralization around the same time it launched a major program of economic reform in the early 1990s on account of its many failures the centralized state everywhere has lost a great deal of legitimacy and decentralization is widely believed to promise a range of benee ts it is often suggested as a way of reducing the role of the state in general by fragmenting central authority and introducing more intergovernmental competition and checks and balances it is viewed as a way to make government more responsive and efe cient technological changes have also made it somewhat easier than before to provide public services like electricity and water supply relatively efe ciently in smaller market areas and the lower levels of government have now a greater ability to handle certain tasks in a world of rampant ethnic cone icts and separatist movements decentralization is also regarded as a way of diffusing social and political tensions and ensuring local cultural and political autonomy these potential benee ts of decentralization have attracted a very diverse range

local governance and public goods provision in rural china in developing countries identifying the most effective community level governance mode is a key issue in rural development therefore empirical evaluation of these different modes is desperately needed since the 1980s tens of thousands of villages in rural china have held local government elections providing a good opportunity to investigate the effect of democratization on the level of public goods provision using a recent village survey conducted over a significant period of time this article compares two different governance modes it finds that elections affect little on the size of revenue but significantly shift the distribution of taxation from individuals to enterprises if possible however privatization has made taxation or levies on rural enterprises more difficult it also shows that elections and power sharing are conducive to improve the allocation of public expenditures

can mandated political representation increase policy influence for disadvantaged minorities theory and evidence from india accountable governments often fail to reflect the interests of disadvantaged minorities this paper exploits the institutional features of political reservation as practiced in indian states to examine the role of mandated political representation in providing disadvantaged groups influence over policy making ifind that political reservation has increased transfers to groups which benefit from the mandate this finding also suggests that complete policy commitment may be absent in democracies as is found in this case jel d72 d78 hl 1 h50

permanent versus interim regulations a game theoretic analysis abstract when a regulator anticipates learning about the benefits or costs of regulations over time questions can be raised about the appropriate regulatory policy this paper compares permanent and interim regulations in a setting with initially uncertain pollution damages a fixed capital input and costly enforcement the analysis shows that neither policy is first best conditions under which one policy dominates the other are identified with the help of a simulation the results indicate that permanent regulations may be preferable to interim regulations even when there is substantial uncertainty about damages

noncompliant firms in transferable discharge permit markets some extensions abstract this paper extends the results of previous research on transferable discharge permit tdp markets with noncompliant firms to make a specific comparison between standards and tdp systems when regulatory authorities are unable to achieve full compliance particular attention is given to the importance of the shape of the penalty function facing noncompliant firms the analysis indicates that under plausible penalty functions tdp markets may allow more pollution or a higher fraction of regulated firms out of compliance these results highlight the importance of implementation in the success of pollution control strategies relying on tdp markets

the political economy of government responsiveness theory and evidence from india the determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive this suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy the ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from india we show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater controlling for shocks where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest

avoidance screening and optimum enforcement a standard assumption in the economic literature on crime and punishment is that fines are costless transfers given this assumption several economists have argued that it is optimal to set the fine for engaging in a proscribed activity as high as possible the argument is a simple one raising the probability of a fine is costly since it requires devoting more resources to monitoring and apprehending individuals in contrast raising the magnitude of a fine is costless therefore the least costly way to achieve a given expected fine is to set the fine as high as possible presumably equal to the offender s wealth and adjust its probability so that the desired expected fine is obtained

do elected leaders in a limited democracy have real power evidence from rural china abstract do elected leaders in an authoritarian regime have any real power does grassroots democracy in a one party state entail parochial problems making use of primary survey data covering two election cycles in a mountainous area of china where an administrative village consists of several natural villages nvs we find that elected village heads favor their home nvs in resource allocations especially when these nvs have a large population in contrast the home nvs of appointed communist party secretaries do not receive disproportionately more resources on average this pattern of resource allocation is compatible with the interest of village heads and suggests that as elected leaders village heads have some true power in resource distribution

further results on permit markets with market power and cheating abstract this paper examines a market for pollution permits in which one firm has market power and one or more firms is noncompliant i show that the firm with market power may choose to hold more permits than it needs effectively retiring permits from the market i also show that some noncompliance may be socially desirable because it can mitigate the distortion caused by market power similarly some degree of market power may be socially desirable because it can in turn mitigate the distortion caused by noncompliance

the enforcement of pollution control laws inspections violations and self reporting targeting is the practice of inspecting firms most likely to violate a regulation this paper provides empirical evidence on the role of targeting in regulatory compliance i propose that self reporting by a firm is used to demonstrate that firms are willing to cooperate the results indicate that there is a one quarter penalty period following a violation inspections are also determined by the economic situation of the surrounding community demonstrating that targeting opens the door to interest group influence inspections that detect violations encourage self reporting showing that firms demonstrate their desire to cooperate with regulators by disclosing violations

enforcement costs and regulatory reform the agency and firm response influenced by models of optimal law enforcement several authors have recently revised the work on efficient levels of regulatory control to accommodate the realities of underenforcement and imperfect compliance however most of these efforts have centered on either the enforcement agency or the firm and have largely ignored the decentralized nature of the enforcement process this paper extends these results by modelling both the firm and the local agency and by incorporating detection uncertainty and concealment activity each model is then evaluated with respect to the alternative regulatory regimes of direct controls and emission taxes

enforcement and price controls in emissions trading this paper examines how enforcement affects the structure and performance of emissions trading programs with price controls under uncertainty about firms abatement costs the analysis highlights how an enforcement strategy can cause abatement cost risk to be transmitted to enforcement costs via the price of permits when this occurs accommodating the effect of abatement cost risk with an optimal policy results in higher expected emissions and lower expected permit price than their second best optimal values however it is possible to design an enforcement strategy that shields enforcement costs from abatement cost risk by tying sanctions directly to permit prices this enforcement strategy stabilizes enforcement effort the optimal permit supply and price controls are independent of enforcement costs and the policy produces the second best optimal outcome

a model of benchmarking regulation revisiting the efficiency of environmental standards the conventional economic argument favors the use of market based instruments over command and control regulation this viewpoint however is often limited in the description and characteristics of the latter namely environmental standards are often portrayed as lacking structured abatement incentives yet contemporary forms of command and control regulation such as standards stipulated via benchmarking have the potential to be efficient we provide a first formal analysis of environmental standards based on performance benchmarks we show that under specific conditions standards can provide efficient incentives to improve environmental performance

grassroots democracy and local governance evidence from rural china summary this paper studies the impacts of village elections on the accountability of the village committee local fiscal sharing and state taxation in rural china using data of 48 villages for the period of 1986 2002 elections are found to substantially increase the share of public expenditures in the village budget but reduce the shares of administrative costs and income handed to the township government these findings suggest that elections have enhanced the accountability of the village committee but weakened local fiscal sharing and the state s grip no strong evidence is found that state taxation is affected by elections nor is it found that the role of a more competitive election is different from that of a closed election

national and international tests of the new drug cost offset theory the new drug cost offset theory argues that new drugs pay for themselves by keeping people out of expensive medical facilities however few studies have tested this theory at the macroeconomic level to determine if system wide savings actually accrue this article provides two tests of the new drug cost offset theory by examining the impact of new drugs on aggregate medical care costs using time series data for the united states and also by using a panel data set of countries belonging to the organization for economic cooperation and development in support of the new drug cost offset theory the results from both tests imply the typical new drug slows the growth of overall medical care spending

environmental regulation a value theoretic and class based analysis following a value theoretic and class based approach it is argued in this paper that ecological problems are inseparably linked to the process of extracting surplus value in capitalism and owing to their adverse impacts instigate struggles over the appropriation of nature these struggles fought within and outside the state by competing agents shape environmental regulation in particular taxes permits command and control measures and subsidies affect prices profits and rents and have class and other social implications evidence of current environmental regulation shows that it takes places under the great influence of capitalist concerns

bureaucrats or politicians part i a single policy task this paper investigates the normative criteria that guide the allocation of a policy task to an elected politician versus an independent bureaucrat the bureaucrat is preferable for technical tasks for which ability is more important than effort or if there is great uncertainty about whether the policymaker has the required abilities the optimal allocation of redistributive tasks is ambiguous and depends on how the bureaucrat can be instructed but irrespective of the normative conclusion the politician prefers not to delegate redistributive policies

health expenditures and global inequalities in longevity summary longevity is a key health and development indicator used for cross country comparisons evidence on the effects of country health expenditures on longevity is mixed we evaluate the heterogeneity in country health expenditure effects throughout the life expectancy distribution worldwide during 2006 11 using quantile regression and an assembled dataset on 175 countries that includes both historic as well as recent data on life expectancy our goal is to evaluate the effects of health expenditures across quantiles of the country level life expectancy distribution to understand whether increasing expenditures are associated with changes in longevity disparities between countries we find significant heterogeneity in expenditure effects on life expectancy the largest returns from increased spending are at the left margin of the life expectancy distribution the results suggest that increasing health spending in countries with low life expectancy may have important returns to life expectancy and significantly diminish global inequalities in longevity and development by reducing the spread of the world s life expectancy distribution

prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement abstract i study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price e g taxes and quantity e g tradeable quotas instruments results indicate that a second best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty if these curves are uncertain to the regulator however the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument the reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed which makes this instrument come closer to a non linear instrument

emission permit banking pollution abatement and production inventory control of the firm abstract in this paper we present a dynamic model modified with emission permit banking and pollution abatement and investigate the effect of emission permit banking and pollution abatement on the production inventory strategy of the firm after introducing emission permit banking and pollution abatement the cost function consists of the inventory holding and production costs the cost of investment in abatement capital goods and the emission procurement selling cost furthermore the inventory holding costs are linear production costs are non decreasing and convex functions of the production level and the costs of investment in abatement capital goods are increasing and convex functions of the investment level we compare the optimal production inventory strategy before emission permit banking and pollution abatement and thereafter the mathematical investigation is based on the arrow karlin model

enforcement costs and the choice of policy instruments for controlling pollution i introduction when evaluating policy instruments for controlling pollution analysts generally agree that economic incentives are superior to direct controls in terms of minimizing abatement costs however when it comes to minimizing enforcement costs there is no such agreement some analysts such as freeman et al 1973 and anderson et al 1977 argue that economic incentives would be much easier to enforce than direct controls while others such as drayton 1978 argue that they would be virtually unenforceable the debate typically centers on technical difficulties in continuously monitoring emissions and to a lesser extent on political and legal issues related to the assessment of penalties 1 an issue that has not been examined is whether there are economic reasons for enforcement costs to vary across policy instruments although there is now a sizable economic literature on the problem of noncompliance with pollution control policies there have been no attempts to formally compare enforcement costs across policy instruments 2 accordingly the purpose of this note is to examine whether there are economic grounds for arguing that enforcement costs would be lower for economic incentives than direct controls 3 the policy instruments compared are marketable permits or emissions taxes and uniform standards the instruments are compared in a setting where the penalty schedule is previously specified by some judicial or legislative body and the regulator s enforcement policy is limited to the choice of audit frequency the analysis is based on the premise that for any policy instrument that targets emissions the regulator will have to periodically monitor emissions and assess penalties for noncompliance the relevant question then is whether less frequent monitoring would be required to ensure compliance with economic incentives casual analysis suggests this should be the case economic incentives minimize aggregate abatement costs and lower abatement costs imply lower costs to firms of complying this should imply in turn that less stringent enforcement is needed to achieve compliance this argument although intuitively appealing is flawed using a simple model of pollution control with costly enforcement i show that enforcement costs narrowly defined may be higher for economic incentives for purposes of exposition the result is established in a setting where the regulator ensures each firm is fully compliant however as shown in the appendix the result generalizes to the more realistic setting where firms are partially compliant ii the model consider a group of n risk neutral firms emitting a single pollutant for simplicity the damages from the pollutant are assumed to depend only on total emissions each firm s abatement costs are given by a strictly convex function c sub i x sub i that is decreasing in emissions x sub i the firm s maximum emissions level is denoted mathematical expression omitted and is defined by mathematical expression omitted with probability p sub i a regulator audits each firm and measures its emissions if the regulator finds the firm s actual emissions x sub i exceed its allowed emissions s sub i the firm is assessed a fine of f x sub i s sub i as is common in the literature on enforcement i assume the fine schedule is previously specified e g by a legislative body 4 thus the regulator can choose the probability with which it audits firms but not the fine it assesses for noncompliance i assume the fine schedule is such that both the total fine and marginal fine are increasing in the violation size x sub i s sub i f prime is greater than 0 and f prime prime is grater than 0 because the regulator is assumed to ensure full compliance no violations occur and no fines are collected therefore enforcement costs consist solely of auditing or monitoring costs to simplify the analysis the cost of conducting an audit a is assumed to be the same across firms

optimal pollution standards and non compliance in a dynamic framework in this paper we present a stackelberg differential game to study the dynamic interaction between a polluting firm and a regulator who sets pollution limits overtime at each time the firm settles emissions taking into account the fine for non compliance with the pollution limit and balances current costs of investments in a capital stock which allows for future emission reductions we derive two main results first we show that the optimal pollution limit decreases as the capital stock increases while both emissions and the level of non compliance decrease second we find that offering fine discounts in exchange for firm s capital investment is socially desirable we numerically obtain the optimal value of such discount which crucially depends on the severity of the fine in the limiting scenario with a very large severity of the fine the optimal discount implies that no penalties are levied since the firm shows adequate adaptation progress through capital investment

intergovernmental versus intersource emissions trading when firms are noncompliant abstract this paper analyzes the relative cost effectiveness of intergovernmental versus intersource cross border emissions trading when polluting firms are noncompliant a special focus is placed on the presence of enforcement costs and the associated credibility problem of governmental monitoring it is shown that without inspection commitment the intergovernmental system is more cost effective because the endorsed flexibility in domestic emission taxation serves as a commitment device for building credibility of monitoring

effects of family friends and relative prices on fruit and vegetable consumption by african american youths we investigate the effects of parents best friends and relative prices on fruit and vegetable consumption by african american youths using behavioral data from the family and community health study and area specific food prices from the quarterly food at home price database we construct a simultaneous equation ordered probit model that accounts for social interactions in fruit and vegetable consumption and specific aspects of the available food intake data we estimate statistically significant endogenous consumption effects between a youth and a parent lower relative prices tend to increase intakes particularly in the case of vegetables however the statistical significance of these effects is marginal the results indicate the existence of social multipliers in fruit and vegetable consumption in african american families the presence of these multipliers supports the design of youth parent based interventions to increase fruit and vegetable intake by african americans additionally intake also may be increased through relative price reductions

random wastes imperfect monitoring and environmental quality standards abstract this paper considers a firm s choice of optimal pollution abatement strategy in an environment where pollution licences are purchased through a market and a fine is levied for pollution in excess of the licences held the pollution associated with any level of abatement is stochastic and the authority monitors pollution via a random sample of observations firms choose cost minimising values for the mean and variance of emissions and the authority selects its sample size and the number of licences issued to achieve an exogenous level of environmental quality with abatement costs and monitoring costs at a minimum level

the cost effective choice of policy instruments to cap aggregate emissions with costly enforcement we study the cost effectiveness of inducing compliance in a program that caps aggregate emissions of a given pollutant from a set of heterogeneous firms based on emissions standards and the relative cost effectiveness of such a program with respect to an optimally designed program based on tradable discharge permits our analysis considers abatement monitoring and sanctioning costs as well as perfect and imperfect information on the part of the regulator with regard to the polluters abatement costs under perfect information we find that a the total cost effective design of a program based on standards is one in which the standards are firm specific and perfectly enforced and b the total cost of an optimally designed program based on standards is lower than the total cost of an optimally designed transferable emission permits system except under special conditions this is true when it is optimum to induce perfect compliance and when it is not under imperfect information nevertheless it is only by implementing a system of tradable permits and perfectly enforcing it with a constant marginal penalty tied to the price of the permits that the regulator can surmount the informational problem and at the same time minimize the total cost of the program with certainty

comparing environmental policy instruments in the presence of imperfect compliance a case study in this paper we aim to include rule making implementation monitoring and enforcement costs into the cost comparison of policy instruments we use a simple partial equilibrium model and apply it to the textile industry the model includes discrete abatement functions and costly monitoring and enforcement the case study uses individual firm data to simulate the differences in abatement costs and compliance decisions between firms we compare combinations of regulatory instruments emission taxes emission standards and technology standards and enforcement instruments criminal fines civil fines and transaction offers we show that the inclusion of information monitoring and enforcement costs indeed alters the relative cost efficiency of the different instruments

village political economy land tenure insecurity and the rural to urban migration decision evidence from china this paper investigates the impact of land tenure insecurity on the migration decisions of china s rural residents a simple model first frames the relationship among these variables and the probability that a reallocation of land will occur in the following year after first demonstrating that a village leader s support for administrative land reallocation carries with it the risk of losing a future election the paper exploits election timing and village heterogeneity in lineage group composition and demographic change to identify the effect of land security in response to an expected land reallocation in the following year the probability that a rural resident migrates out of the county declines by 2 8 percentage points which accounts for 17 5 percent of the annual share of village residents aged 16 to 50 who worked as migrants during the period this finding underscores the potential importance of secure property rights for facilitating labor market integration and the movement of labor out of agriculture

bargaining in environmental regulation revisited abstract we explore the possibility that firms and regulators achieve cooperative agreements in environmental regulation we show that it is possible that firms choose cleaner technologies in exchange for reductions of the fines for non compliance with environmental standards interestingly the likelihood of achieving these agreements depends negatively on the monitoring costs positively on the external damages and non monotonically on the differences among the eligible technologies and the maximum sanctions for violating the standards

the two part instrument in a second best world abstract standard pigovian tax theory has been extended in two directions first many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be achieved by use of a two part instrument 2pi a tax on output or income and a subsidy for clean alternatives to pollution it is a generalization of a deposit refund system drs second a different literature concerns the second best pollution tax in the presence of other tax distortions here we combine the two extensions by looking at the second best 2pi when government needs revenue is the deposit larger and the rebate smaller we find explicit solutions for each tax and subsidy in a general equilibrium model with other tax distortions and we compare these to the rates in a first best model the tax subsidy combination is explained in terms of a tax effect an environmental effect and a revenue effect the model allows for flexible interpretation to show various applications of the 2pi we also discuss important caveats

aging population and education finance abstract conventional wisdom suggests that aging of population will increase political pressure to tilt the composition of social spending in favor of the elderly while potentially sacrificing other publicly provided goods such as education this view seems to be supported by recent empirical findings that per child public education spending tends to be lower in us jurisdictions with higher fraction of elderly residents do these cross sectional findings also carry the dynamic implication that longevity will lead over time to waning political support for funding of public education this paper challenges such implication we present a model that is consistent with the aforementioned cross sectional regressions yet predicts an overall positive impact of increasing longevity on public education funding and economic growth

incentive generating state dependent penalty system the case of income tax evasion abstract penalty systems can very often be looked upon as corrective measures established in order to eliminate or reduce costly externalities generated by optimizing economic agents hence penalties can be viewed as regulatory measures and their efficient structure should be of interest to economists we propose a dynamic incentive generating penalty system which if instituted may reduce at a given cost the generation of undesirable externalities the special case to which we refer is income tax evasion although our scheme should be applicable to any kind of externalities such as pollution of the environment violation of antirust laws and others which are created by repititive actions of economic agents

avoiding tax avoidance a repeated game theoretic approach abstract we propose an optimal auditing scheme for the tax authorities who face a given tax and penalty functions and a given budget constraint under our proposed strategy individuals can be classified into one of three groups each group is characterized by two parameters i the probability of being audited in that group and ii into which group will an individual move if ii a he reported truthfully ii b he cheated it is then shown that there is a choice of these parameters so that in equilibrium i e when every individual maximizes his payoff given the auditing strategy the percentage of individuals that cheat is arbitrarily small

to comply or not to comply pollution standard setting under costly monitoring and sanctioning in this paper we characterize optimal regulatory policies composed of a pollution standard a probability of inspection and a fine for non compliance in a context where both monitoring and sanctioning are socially costly and the penalty may include gravity and non gravity components at the regulator s discretion under given penalties the optimal policy entails compliance with the standard as long as a quite intuitive condition is met non compliant policies may include standards even below the pollution levels that minimize the sum of abatement costs and external damages interestingly the appropriate structure of the penalty under non compliance is highly progressive while the best possible shape of the fine under compliance is linear if the regulator is entitled to choose the structure of the fine linear penalties are socially preferred and the optimal policy induces compliance

elected versus appointed policymakers evidence from city treasurers abstract this paper investigates whether the method of selecting public officials affects policy making i compare the policy choices of bureaucrat city treasurers and politician city treasurers who are selected and held accountable in very different ways the analysis draws on rich data from california to examine whether cities with appointed or elected city treasurers pay lower costs to borrow the results demonstrate that having appointive treasurers reduces a city s cost of borrowing by 19 31 percent holding officials directly accountable to voters can result in lower levels of performance in complex policy areas

enforcing transferable permit systems in the presence of market power we derive an enforcement strategy for a transferable permit system in the presence of market power that achieves complete compliance in a cost effective manner we show that the presence of a firm with market influence makes designing an enforcement strategy more difficult than enforcing a perfectly competitive system we also re consider hahn s 1984 suggestion that a firm with market influence should be allocated permits so that it chooses to not participate in the permit market when enforcement and its costs are taken into account hahn s suggestion does not hold except in a very special case the presence of market power will limit the extent to which transferable emissions permit systems can fulfill their theoretical promises hahn 1984 was the first to show that permit trading in the presence of market power cannot be expected to result in a distribution of emissions that minimizes aggregate abatement costs furthermore the distribution of emissions will never be completely independent of the initial allocation of permits modeling a transferable permit system in which one firm has market power while the rest are perfect competitors a dominant firm competitive fringe model hahn demonstrated that aggregate abatement costs are minimized only when the dominant firm is allocated exactly the number of permits it will choose to hold in equilibrium simply aggregate abatement costs are minimized only when a firm that can manipulate the permit price does not because it chooses to not trade permits like most of the theoretical literature on transferable permit systems hahn ignored the fact that compliance in a permit system must be enforced recognizing this important omission van egteren and weber 1996 extended hahn s work to

optimal environmental taxation and enforcement policy abstract we study the optimal environmental taxation and enforcement policy when i the regulator does not know the firms abatement costs ii penalties for tax evasion are limited and iii monitoring of pollution is costly we show that the threat of being audited alter the usual firms incentives to over estimate their abatement costs in particular depending on the firms abatement costs the optimal policy may involve over or under deterrence compared to the full information outcome we then investigate the properties of a pollution standard we show that this policy comes close to an environmental tax once the economic incentives of the accompanying enforcement policy are considered