the changing time series properties of earnings cash flows and accruals has financial reporting become more conservative abstract this paper documents changes in the patterns of earnings cash flows and accruals over the last four decades in the absence of a generally accepted definition of conservatism a number of measures of reporting conservatism are identified and examined these measures rely on the accumulation of nonoperating accruals the timeliness of earnings with respect to bad and good news characteristics of the earnings distribution and the market to book ratio the patterns are consistent with an increase in conservative financial reporting over time the findings have implications for accounting standard setting regulation of financial information and financial statement analysis

war peace and the size of countries this paper studies the relationship between international con ict and the size distribution of countries in a model in which both peaceful bargaining and non peaceful confrontations are possible we show how the size distribution of countries depends on the likelihood bene ts and costs of con ict and war we also study the role of international law and show how better de ned international property rights may lead to country breakup and more numerous local con icts

buying cooperation in an asymmetric environmental differential game abstract we consider a two player asymmetric differential game of pollution control one player is non vulnerable to pollution or unwilling to consider damages when choosing her production policy in a non cooperative game we characterize the feedback nash equilibrium and the cooperative solution we establish conditions under which the vulnerable player can buy the cooperation of the non vulnerable player to control her emissions we further use the nash bargaining solution to allocate the total cooperative dividend between the two players and propose a time consistent decomposition overtime of the total payoff

proprietary public finance and economic welfare abstract we develop a positive theory of public finance in which the objective of tax and spending policy is to extract rents for the incumbent ruler the analysis shows how dependence of the incumbent ruler s survival probability on his tax and spending policy can lower the equilibrium tax rate and increase the equilibrium amount of spending on productive public services but only until the minimum credible tax rate which depends on the ruler s endogenous survival probability becomes a binding constraint the central result of the analysis is that if a relatively benevolent tax and spending policy is both necessary and sufficient for a high survival probability then the ruler s equilibrium policy is relatively benevolent

detecting earnings management a new approach this paper provides a new approach to test for accrual based earnings management our approach exploits the inherent property of accrual accounting that any accrual based earnings management in one period must reverse in another period if the researcher has priors concerning the timing of the reversal incorporating these priors can significantly improve the power and specification of tests for earnings management our results indicate that tests incorporating reversals increase test power by around 40 and provide a robust solution for mitigating model misspecification arising from correlated omitted variables

ethics in finance and accounting editorial introduction in light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice fairness and enhanced understanding and to improving their personal integrity this article written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior misbehaviors in finances and accounting professionalism in accounting ethical investing and corporate reporting we conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity human activity actually and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules but as a mutual and interdependent system of values human goods virtues and principles

environmental policy and stable collusion the case of a dynamic polluting oligopoly we show that the imposition of a markovian tax on emissions that is a tax rate which depends on the pollution stock can induce stable cartelization in an oligopolistic polluting industry this does not hold for a uniform tax thus accounting for the feedback effect that exists within a dynamic framework where pollution is allowed to accumulate into a stock over time changes the result obtained within a static framework moreover the cartel formation can diminish the welfare gain from environmental regulation such that welfare under environmental regulation and collusion of firms lies below that under a laissez faire policy

truthfulness in accounting how to discriminate accounting manipulators from non manipulators accountants preparing information are in a position to manipulate the view of economic reality presented in such information to interested parties these manipulations can be regarded as morally reprehensible because they are not fair to users they involve in an unjust exercise of power and they tend to weaken the authority of accounting regulators this paper develops a model for detecting earnings manipulators using financial statements ratios in a sample of spanish listed companies our results provide evidence that accounting data can be extremely useful in detecting manipulators this approach can be used by a large category of users of accounting information among which we can cite stock exchange supervisors or investing professionals

nash and stackelberg solutions in a differential game model of capitalism abstract this paper examines two noncooperative open loop solution concepts in a simple model of economic growth and distribution formulated as a differential game between workers who may save or consume and capitalists who may consume or invest it is demonstrated that both players prefer the stackelberg game to the nash game furthermore it is shown that under fairly realistic assumptions about the parameters of the model both workers and capitalists would prefer to act as the follower in the stackelberg game this means that capitalism is in a stalemate i e in a position where neither class wants to take the initiative and announce its strategy first the result is interpreted as an explanation of the difficulties met in designing and implementing incomes policies and social contracts

executive incentives and the horizon problem an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates the hypothesis that ceos in their final years of office manage discretionary investment expenditures to improve short term earnings performance we examine the behavior of r d expenditures for a sample of firms in industries that have significant ongoing r d activities the results suggest that ceos spend less on r d during their final years in office however we find the reductions in r d expenditures are mitigated through ceo stock ownership there is no evidence that the reduced r d expenditures are associated with either poor firm performance or reductions in investment expenditures that are capitalized for accounting purposes

carbon tariffs and cooperative outcomes abstract in the absence of an international environmental agreement iea on climate change a country may be reluctant to unilaterally implement environmental actions as this may lead to the relocation of firms to other lax on pollution countries to avoid this problem while still taking care of the environment a country may impose a carbon tariff that adjusts for the differences between its own carbon tax and the other country s tax we consider two countries with a representative firm in each one and characterize and contrast the equilibrium strategies and outcomes in three scenarios in the first benchmark scenario in a first stage the regulators in the two countries determine the carbon taxes noncooperatively and in a second stage the firms compete a la cournot in the second scenario the regulators cooperate in determining the carbon taxes while the firms still play a noncooperative cournot game in the third scenario we add another player e g the world trade organization which announced a border tax in a prior stage the game is then played as in the first scenario our two major results are i a border tax adjustment bta mimics quite well the cooperative solution in setting the carbon taxes as in scenario two this means that a bta may be a way around the lack of enthusiasm for an iea ii all of our simulations show that a partial correction of the difference in taxes is sufficient to maximize total welfare in short the conclusion is that a bta may be used as a credible threat to achieve an outcome that is very close to the cooperative outcome

why countries are fiscally decentralizing this paper models and empirically investigates underlying forces that promote governmental decentralization or effective federalism in the world over the last 25 years a move to a federal system is based on the demand by hinterland regions for local autonomy which increases with national income growth greater relative hinterland population and increasing national population it is influenced as well by the degree of democratization nationally and locally decentralization is measured by both institutional indices indicating greater devolution of power to local governments and the share of local governments in national government consumption empirically the paper finds that decentralization changes in ways predicted in particular it increases with economic growth country size and population institutional structures based on colonial experience and initial constitutional provisions also matter

international pollution control cooperative versus noncooperative strategies abstract international pollution control involving two neighboring countries is modeled as a simple two player dynamic game each country produces a good that is consumed by domestic households production of each consumption good results in emissions of pollutants households in each country derive utility from the consumption of the domestically produced good but incur costs through the total stock of pollution stock externality in this setting we characterize cooperative as well as noncooperative pollution control strategies of the governments of the two countries that maximize the discounted stream of net benefits of a representative consumer it turns out that when the governments are restricted to use linear strategies noncooperative behavior results in overall losses for both countries if on the contrary governments use nonlinear markov perfect strategies and the discount rate is small enough a pareto efficient steady state pollution stock can be supported as a differentiable subgame perfect equilibrium thus the emergence of first best solutions cooperative outcomes does not require any institutional arrangements threats retaliation etc but can be brought about through the use of nonlinear markov perfect equilibrium strategies

earnings quality in uk private firms comparative loss recognition timeliness abstract uk private and public companies face substantially equivalent regulation on auditing accounting standards and taxes we hypothesize that private company financial reporting nevertheless is of lower quality due to different market demand regulation notwithstanding a large uk sample supports this hypothesis quality is operationalized using basu s 1997 time series measure of timely loss recognition and a new accruals based method the result is not affected by controls for size leverage industry membership and auditor size or by allowing endogenous listing choice the result enhances understanding of private companies which are predominant in the economy it also provides insight into the economics of accounting standards

dynamic incentives and dual purpose accounting abstract ongoing employment relationships often give rise to implicit dynamic incentives we describe the implications of implicit incentives when firms use information about both an employee s past performance and his future productivity in a two period agency model we show that when an accounting system serves these dual objectives an employee s implicit incentives may be beneficial or detrimental to the firm as a consequence firms may prefer an accounting system that reports a single metric that combines information about past performance and future productivity over one that reports two distinct metrics one for each purpose

leviathan and competition among jurisdictions the case of benefit taxation abstract this paper shows that interjurisdictional competition for mobile factors of production forces the government to raise the efficiency of the public sector and thus helps to tame leviathan governments however this result is derived under some restrictive assumptions concerning the kind of tax policy used by the government in the case of benefit taxes e g user charges a leviathan may be tamed by interjurisdictional competition whereas this is not necessarily true in the case of lum sum taxes

fundamental information analysis fundamental analysis is aimed at determining the value of corporate securities by a careful examination of key value drivers such as earnings risk growth and competitive position in the context of such analysis we identify below a set of financial variables fundamentals claimed by analysts to be useful in security valuation and examine these claims by estimating the incremental value relevance of these variables over earnings our findings support the incremental value relevance of most of the identified fundamentals in fact for the 1980s the fundamentals add approximately 70 on average to the explanatory power of earnings with respect to excess returns we also show that the returns fundamentals relation is considerably strengthened when it is conditioned on macroeconomic variables thereby demonstrating the importance of a contextual capital market analysis for example several fundamentals that appear only weakly value relevant or even irrelevant in the unconditional analysis exhibit strong association with returns under specific economic conditions e g the accounts receivable and the provision for doubtful receivables signals during high inflation from a general examination of the role of fundamentals in security valuation we turn to the related issues of earnings persistence growth and the earnings response coefficient we hypothesize that the funda

a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation abstract we consider a dynamic model of differentiated oligopoly with capital accumulation we prove that the model may converge to either a steady state replicating the optimum of the static problem or a steady state driven by capital accumulation alone in the latter case the same steady state equilibrium is observed under both cournot and bertrand competition as well as social planning journal of economic literature classifications numbers c73 l13

earnings quality research advances challenges and future research abstract this discussion makes several observations regarding the earnings quality research reviewed in dechow ge and schrand 2010 dgs i discuss some of the factors that led to the large growth in the earnings quality literature over the past two decades and note a few of the important contributions from this literature i also present what i view as several major challenges the literature faces as well as some avenues for future research in addition i discuss the difficulties in evaluating such a diverse body of literature and comment on dgs s major conclusions

nation states vs united empire effects of political competition on economic growth is political fragmentation i e nation states more favorable to economic growth than political unification i e a united empire this study develops an endogenous growth model to analyze the growth effects of fragmentation versus unification under unification the economy is vulnerable to excessive leviathan taxation and possibly subject to the costs of unifying heterogeneous populations under fragmentation the competing rulers are constrained in taxation but spend excessively on military defense if capital mobility is above below a threshold then fragmentation unification would favor growth and this threshold is increasing in the degree of defense competition and decreasing in the costs of heterogeneity

market and political regulatory perspectives on the recent accounting scandals not surprisingly the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting we do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or political regulatory processes operate independently and the events are recent and not well researched so untangling their separate effects is somewhat conjectural this paper offers conjectures on issues such as what caused the scandalous behavior why was there such a rash of accounting scandals at one time who killed arthur andersen the securities and exchange commission or the market did fraudulent accounting kill enron or just keep it alive for too long what is the social cost of financial reporting fraud does the united states in fact operate a principles based or a rules based accounting system was there market failure or was there regulatory failure or both was the sarbanes oxley act a political and regulatory overreaction does the united states follow an ineffective regulatory model

debt covenant violation and manipulation of accruals abstract this paper examines the abnormal accruals of a sample of 94 firms that reported debt covenant violations in annual reports we expect debt covenant restrictions to influence accounting choices in the year preceding and the year of violation time series and cross sectional models are used to estimate normal accruals in the year prior to violation both models indicate that abnormal total and working capital accruals are significantly positive in the year of violation there is evidence of positive abnormal working capital accruals after controlling for management changes and auditor going concern qualifications

the politics of 1992 fiscal policy and european integration the internal market in europe will greatly increase the international mobility of resources how will this affect fiscal policy in different countries we consider taxation of capital in a two country model where a democratically chosen government in each country chooses tax policy higher capital mobility changes the politico economic equilibrium in two ways on the one hand it leads to more tax competition between the countries this economic effect tends to lower tax rates in both countries on the other hand it alters voters preferences and makes them elect a different government this political effect offsets the increased tax competition although not completely

the breakup of nations a political economy analysis this paper develops a model of the breakup or unification of nations in each nation the decision to separate is taken by majority voting a basic trade off between the efficiency gains of unification and the costs in terms of loss of control on political decisions is highlighted the model emphasizes political conflicts over redistribution policies the main results of the paper are i when income distributions vary across regions and the efficiency gains from unification are small separation occurs in equilibrium and ii when all factors of production are perfectly mobile all incentives for separation disappear i introduction following the demise of communism the entire map of europe from the atlantic coast to the urals is being redrawn and issues of separation unification and the redrawing of borders are yet again at the forefront of european concerns many of the issues raised by this process are primarily of a political cultural or linguistic nature however there are also economic considerations that bear on this problem the objective of this paper is to analyze some important economic and political determinants of the process of unification and separation of democratic nations the starting point of our analysis is to suppose that from an economic efficiency point of view separation of nations is never desirable a unified nation is always more efficient since free trade among regions is guaranteed duplication costs in defense and law enforcement are avoided and local public goods provision such as transportation and communication networks or common standards can be coordinated furthermore any benefits of decentralization that might be obtained in a world with several nations may also be achieved within a unified nation by replicating the administrative structure of the world with several

the cartelization of local governments intergovernmental competition can enhance efficiency centralization of government expenditures inhibits intergovernmental competition because it makes governments more homogeneous and so cartelizes local governments cartelization reduces tiebout competition and limits benchmark competition in which one government s performance can be compared with neighboring governments measuring fiscal centralization as the ratio of local to state and local government expenditures within the state the evidence shows that more fiscal decentralization is associated with higher levels of state per capita income cartelization of local governments negatively impacts income

gaap versus the street an empirical assessment of two alternative definitions of earnings managers security analysts investors and the press rely increasingly on modified definitions of gaap net income known by such names as operating and pro forma earnings we document this phenomenon and discuss competing explanations for the recent rise in the use of such modified earnings numbers and implications for the interpretation of related accounting research our results show that over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and magnitude of cases where gaap and street earnings differ further there is a very strong bias toward the reporting of a street earnings number that exceeds the gaap earnings number we also show that the market response to the street earnings number has displaced gaap earnings as a primary determinant of stock prices finally through an analysis of earnings releases we show that management has taken a proactive role in defining and emphasizing the street number when communicating to analysts and investors

tax competition and leviathan abstract attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government this paper synthesises the two extremes which as in other areas of public finance have dominated the debate typically being presented as stark alternatives the view of government as a leviathan from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy makers and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens welfare from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency conditions are derived under which when policy makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self serving tax coordination benefits the representative citizen

workers investment funds and the dynamic inefficiency of capitalism abstract this paper examines the effects of the partial transfer of control over the investment decision from capitalists to workers which is an essential feature of plans to establish workers investment funds in a two class model of capitalism formulated as a differential game it is shown that the institutional change which provides the workers with means to invest their savings directly instead of having to use the capitalists as agents for accumulation improves economic efficiency as a consequence the economy saves invests grows and consumes more than the pure capitalist society which is characterized by the keynesian separation of saving and investment decisions

opaque financial reports r2 and crash risk abstract we investigate the relation between the transparency of financial statements and the distribution of stock returns using earnings management as a measure of opacity we find that opacity is associated with higher r2s indicating less revelation of firm specific information moreover opaque firms are more prone to stock price crashes consistent with the prediction of the jin and myers 2006 r2 around the world new theory and new tests journal of financial economics 79 257 292 model however these relations seem to have dissipated since the passage of the sarbanes oxley act suggesting that earnings management has decreased or that firms can hide less information in the new regulatory environment

debt covenant violations and managers accounting responses abstract this paper examines accounting changes costs of default and accounting based covenants violated by 130 firms reporting violations in annual reports i find that managers of firms approaching default respond with income increasing accounting changes and that the default costs imposed by lenders and the accounting flexibility available to managers are important determinants of managers accounting responses i also document that private lending agreements are the first violated that net worth and working capital restrictions are the most frequently violated restrictions and that in 52 percent of the cases lenders require concessions from borrowers to resolve default

divided we stand united we fall the hume north jones mechanism for the rise of europe the great divergence in incomes between europe and the rest of the world occurred relatively recently why was it that western europe once a backward outpost on the fringes of the eurasian continent able to dominate in terms of income and technology the previously successful eastern economies several mechanisms have been identi ed to account for the rise of europe this paper formalizes one important mechanism the intellectual origins of which can be traced back to hume and weber and which was fully though informally articulated by e l jones this mechanism emphasizes the contrast between the european states system and the eastern empires political competition for a mobile tax base in a states system forces rulers to expropriate less from their subjects and to supply relatively more public services by effectively limiting the exit options of the ruled an empire rewards its ruler with a captive tax base that can be subjected to relatively higher levels of expropriation without a similar rise in public services provided the states system thus encourages higher levels of capital accumulation while the empire stises it the successes of the eastern empires in their consolidation phase are due to the competition they initially faced from neighboring states since europe escaped such consolidation the process of accumulation there never faced the impediments its eastern counterparts did the paper thus also provides a structural explanation for the emergence of institutions in europe that led to relatively secure property rights

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

annual bonus schemes and the manipulation of earnings abstract using confidential data of executive specific short term bonus plans we investigate the extent to which executives manipulate earnings to maximize the present value of bonus plan payments as such this paper extends the work of healy 1985 like healy we find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that managers manipulate earnings downwards when their bonuses are at their maximum unlike healy we find no evidence that managers manipulate earnings downwards when earnings are below the minimum necessary to receive any bonus we demonstrate that healy s results at the lower bound are likely to be induced by his methodology

the rise and decline of nations economic growth stagflation and social rigidities the years since world war ii have seen rapid shifts in the relative positions of different countries and regions leading political economist mancur olson offers a new and compelling theory to explain these shifts in fortune and then tests his theory against evidence from many periods of history and many parts of the world

a dynamic game of a transboundary pollutant with asymmetric players abstract modeling transboundary pollutants in a dynamic game framework provides a foundation for analyzing the impact of various policy options the focus of this analysis is on the results of a tax subsidy scheme used to address the transboundary problem of global climate change a nonzero sum dynamic game with asymmetric players is used to evaluate the policy impact of the tax subsidy scheme on the respective player s value functions and strategies as determined by a nash equilibrium feedback solution the asymmetry of the players is reflected in their respective attitudes toward global climate change with one player benefiting from the change and the other losing

earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses this paper provides evidence that firms manage reported earnings to avoid earnings decreases and losses specifically in cross sectional distributions of earnings changes and earnings we lind unusually low frequencies of small decreases in earnings and small losscs and unusually high frequencies of small increases in earnings and small positive income we find evidence that two components of earnings cash flow from operations and changes in working capital are used to achieve increases in earnings we present two theories based on stakeholder use of information processing heuristics and prospect theory about the motivation for avoidance of earnings decreases and losses

a cooperative differential game of transboundary industrial pollution between two regions abstract in recent years the transboundary pollution problems in the world are becoming more and more serious the diffusion of pollutants is common and each region which suffers from the pollution wishes that the polluter in neighboring regions would either reduce polluting or compensate for the damages this paper studies a cooperative differential game of transboundary industrial pollution between two asymmetric regions there are two novel features in this paper first there is a stackelberg game between the industrial firms and their local government while the governments can cooperate in pollution reduction second transboundary pollution damages the regions in two ways through a global accumulative pollutant and a regional non accumulative pollutant the paper characterizes the parameter spaces that governments in two neighboring regions can collaborate and gives the feedback nash equilibrium strategies of governments and industrial firms it is found that only when the governments get cooperation the regional impact caused by the neighboring region pollution diffusion could be taken into consideration when the governments develop strategies additionally a payment distribution mechanism is proposed and a subgame consistent cooperative solution is provided with such a payment distribution both governments will receive a higher payoff in a cooperative solution than in a non cooperative solution at any instant of time during the game

the effect of ethical orientation and professional commitment on earnings management behavior the purpose of this study is twofold the first objective is to examine the impact of an individual s ethical ideology and level of professional commitment on the earnings management decision the second objective is to observe whether the presence of a personal benefit affects an individual s ethical orientation or professional commitment within the context of an opportunity to manage earnings using a sample of 375 undergraduate business majors our results suggest a significant relationship between an individual s ethical orientation and decision making further participants with higher levels of professional commitment seem to be less likely to engage in earnings management behavior and less likely to behave opportunistically these results have the potential to add to our understanding of certain behaviors in entry level personnel and should be of interest to managers practitioners academicians and researchers

dictators development and the virtue of political instability a large body of literature stresses the benefits of regime stability for economic growth in poor countries this view however discounts the gains from threats to regime security when populations living under dictatorial regimes cannot benefit from the disciplining of political competition available to voters in democracies this paper applies a model of economic growth to study the sources of the differences in economic performance and repression policy among dictatorships as well as the parallel in dictatorial regimes of the benefits achieved through political competition in democracies threats to the security of dictatorial regimes are shown to be a means of benefiting the population through the responses of the regime

consumer surplus enhancing cooperation in a natural resource oligopoly abstract in this study we use a differential game to illustrate that cooperation among oligopolists selling a common pool renewable resource may lead not only to higher industrial output consumer surplus and resource stock in the stationary equilibrium but also a greater discounted sum of consumer surplus a priori this finding is not straightforward an increase in the coefficient of cooperation causes industry output to first decrease and then increase over time thus making consumers worse off in the short run and better off in the long run this study establishes the conditions under which the long run effects outweigh the short run effects of cooperation leading to an increase in the discounted sum of consumer surplus our analysis suggests that in some cases conservation cartels should be promoted on the basis of not only resource conservation but also efficiency

on time inconsistency a technical issue in stackelberg differential games abstract stackelberg differential games are useful settings in which optimal government policies can be studied this paper argues that the analysis of these games involves a key technical issue in particular we question the necessity for optimality of one boundary condition invoked in existing literature the issue is of key interest because the boundary condition is largely responsible for the time inconsistency results previously obtained we show that the boundary condition is not necessary in some cases as a result our finding undermines the credibility of the existing conclusions journal of economic literature classification numbers c61 e62 h21

time consistent side payments in a dynamic game of downstream pollution abstract this note determines a rule to share a surplus gained when two countries or regions agree to coordinate their policies to reduce downstream pollution an intertemporal decomposition scheme for the total side payment is proposed this scheme has the following individual rationality property in each subgame that starts along the cooperative trajectory one country is guaranteed to receive a higher payoff in the cooperative solution than in the disagreement solution for this country another notion of individual rationality obtains this country will at any instant of time during the play of the game receive a higher payoff in the cooperative solution than in the disagreement solution

the detection of earnings manipulation presented are a profile of a sample of earnings manipulators their distinguishing characteristics and a suggested model for detecting manipulation the model s variables are designed to capture either the financial statement distortions that can result from manipulation or preconditions that might prompt companies to engage in such activity the results suggest a systematic relationship between the probability of manipulation and some financial statement variables this evidence is consistent with the usefulness of accounting data in detecting manipulation and assessing the reliability of reported earnings the model identifies approximately half of the companies involved in earnings manipulation prior to public discovery because companies that are discovered manipulating earnings see their stocks plummet in value the model can be a useful screening device for investment professionals the screening results however require determination of whether the distortions in the financial statement numbers r

is shareholder wealth maximization immoral for those educated in modern business schools the justification for decisions made by financial professionals in business organizations has been supplied by financial economic theory broadly thi

research on bonus penalty mechanism of pollution abatement a case study of the northeastern region of china abstract as china s environmental governance turn to a high quality management establishing reasonable and effective bonus penalty mechanism is an effective means to promote coordinated emission reduction and improve regional air quality therefore this paper constructs a bi level programming model with bonus penalty standards and emission quotas based on the maximization of social benefits and the minimization of the gap between reward and punishment funds given the np hard problem of bi level programming model this work also designs a nested hierarchical particle swarm optimization hpso algorithm for the above model subsequently from the emission data of so2 and macroeconomic data in the northeastern region of china from 2006 to 2015 the so2 emission quota and bonus penalty standards of each province are calculated the results demonstrate that 1 the optimal emission quotas of heilongjiang jilin and liaoning province are 37 7 30 3 and 69 3 10 000 tons respectively 2 when the compensation fee of pollutant abatement is set at 521 48 yuan ton and the standard of excess discharge levy is 2977 43 yuan ton the effect of pollution control in each province can be effectively improved the empirical analysis also reveals that the proposed model has a remarkable effect on regional environmental governance finally this paper puts forward some suggestions on the implementation of the bonus penalty mechanism

a dynamic game of waste management abstract the paper studies a differential game of waste management disposal each of three neighbouring regions is endowed with a stock of waste but no additional waste is generated in any region and waste does not decay from natural reasons a region s stock of waste can be reduced only by dumping on its neighbours the model features two externalities a strategic externality caused by the fact that the payoff of a coalition depends on the actions of players outside the coalition and a stock externality caused by the fixed overall amount of waste the game has a finite time horizon and it is shown that intertemporal core theoretic cooperation can be sustained under intuitive conditions

the acid rain game as a resource allocation process with an application to the international cooperation among finland russia and estonia we consider optimal cooperation in transboundary air pollution abatement among several countries under incomplete information i e local information only on marginal emission abatement costs and damage costs directions of emission abatement in each country are determined that generate a succession of emissions programs shown to converge to an economic optimum a cost sharing scheme that results from appropriately designed international transfers guarantees that the individual costs of all parties are nonincreasing along the path towards the optimum a version of maler s 1989 acid rain game is used for a numerical application

international aspects of pollution control pollution is a by product of production is only gradually dissolved by the environment and crosses national borders the market outcome ignores the adverse effects of pollution and thus yields higher levels of output and pollution than would prevail under a supranational social planner which does care about pollution in practice governments often do not cooperate and this leads to outcomes of pollution and production in between the market outcomes and the outcomes under supra national social planning absence of precommitment leads to lower emission charges less cleaning up activities and more pollution appropriate levels of emission charges under the various outcomes are a result of this analysis attention is also paid to investment in clean technology the debate between optimists who believe that higher production is compatible with sound environmental policy and pessimists can be analysed in this way