an economic theory of self control the concept of self control is incorporated in a theory of individual intertemporal choice by modeling the individual as an organization the individual at a point in time is assumed to be both a farsighted planner and a myopic doer the resulting conflict is seen to be fundamentally similar to the agency conflict between the owners and managers of a firm both individuals and firms use the same techniques to mitigate the problems which the conflicts create this paper stresses the implications of this agency model and discusses as applications the effect of pensions on saving saving and the timing of income flows and individual discount rates

productivity growth and environmental efficiency of the nonferrous metals industry an empirical study of china abstract this study intends to provide an insight into china s nonferrous metals industry production based on the analysis of the environmental efficiency the malmquist productivity index mpi and the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi the empirical experiment based on the annual data of 27 regions including provinces autonomous regions and municipalities of china during 2003 2009 shows the following results first the industry s environmental efficiency in the east area is mostly higher than that of the other area second the industry s average annual change of mpi and mlpi in china were 4 4 and 0 9 respectively this indicated that the total factor productivity growth of the industry was overestimated if undesirable outputs were ignored third the industry s productivity was mainly affected through technological advances rather than endogenous factors such as improvements in managerial practices finally during the worldwide financial crisis occurred in 2008 the industry s mlpis exceeded the mpis in most regions through measures such as adjustment of the product structure and elimination of backward production capacity

multiple environmental policies and pollution haven hypothesis evidence from china s polluting industries abstract theoretical studies of pollution haven hypothesis predict that differentiated environmental regulation policies will result in inter country relocation of polluting industries this paper investigates pollution haven hypothesis at domestic level in china using panel data of 30 provincial level regions for the period 2004 to 2013 this paper empirically examines to what extent multiple environmental policies affect intra country relocation of polluting industries in china it is found that the implementation of both economic policy instrument like pollution discharge fee and public participation like letter complaints on environmental problems encourages industrial relocation whereas the implementation of environmental legal policy instrument like laws regulations and rules prevents polluting industries from relocating to other regions it is also found that the relocation effect of environmental policies varies with industrial characteristics compared with water pollution intensive industry air pollution intensive industry dominated by stated owned capitals are insensitive to legal policy instruments these findings suggest that the validity of pollution haven hypothesis is jointly associated with the type of environmental policy as well as industrial characteristics

environmental regulations innovation and firm performance a revisit of the porter hypothesis part of the research for this paper was supported by funding from nottingham innovative manufacturing research centre and the university of bedfordshire business and management research institute

energy efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry accounting for undesirable outputs abstract this paper used data from 50 enterprises in china s iron and steel industry to evaluate their energy efficiency and productivity change the study first used a conventional data envelopment analysis model and the malmquist productivity index mpi to measure the energy efficiency and productivity change over the period 2001 2008 the results indicated inefficiency in many of the plants the average energy efficiency was only 61 1 the annual growth rate of productivity was 7 96 over this period and technical change was the main contributor to this growth the research then took undesirable outputs into consideration by using the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi to explore the productivity change from 2006 to 2008 omitting undesirable outputs would result in biased efficiency change and technical change this paper also claimed that environmental regulation has a potentially positive impact on technical change

the effects of environmental regulation on technology diffusion the case of chlorine manufacturing we use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry we estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies we find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry however it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

assessing regional eco efficiency from the perspective of resource environmental and economic performance in china a bootstrapping approach in global data envelopment analysis abstract eco efficiency has been receiving increasing attention across the world this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model which combines global benchmark technology directional distance function and a bootstrapping approach to investigate the dynamic trends of regional eco efficiency in china from 2003 to 2014 moreover a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose the performance fluctuations into resource environmental and economic efficiency then the key factors responsible for the changes in eco efficiency are explored using the global malmquist luenberger index the empirical results demonstrate an upward trend of eco efficiency in china during the study period this trend was high in eastern and northern areas but low in northwestern areas however it should be noted that some eco efficient regions still consume much land water and energy and emit much environmental pollutants in absolute terms the whole of china performs well on the economic front while resource and environmental performances are not encouraging particularly on environmental efficiency the eastern and northern regions have experienced the greatest advances in both resource and environmental efficiency while the undeveloped areas have not shown much progress which further widens the gaps between developed areas and undeveloped areas the decomposition of productivity growth indicates that technical progress is the decisive factor in promoting china s eco efficiency while decreasing management level is the major obstacle hampering the improvement in eco efficiency

environmental efficiency and abatement efficiency measurements of china s thermal power industry a data envelopment analysis based materials balance approach abstract appropriate measurement of environmental and emission abatement efficiency is crucial for assisting policy making in line with constructing a more sustainable society the majority of traditional approaches for environmental efficiency measures take pollutant emissions as either undesirable outputs or environmentally determined inputs which suffer a limitation of not satisfying the physical laws that regulate the operation of economic and environmental process in this study we propose a dea based approach which is combined with the materials balance principle mbp that accounts for laws of thermodynamics to jointly evaluate environmental and abatement efficiency this approach is along the line of weak g disposability based modelling but is an extension to existing models that in our approach the identification of possible adjustments on polluting mass bound in inputs and outputs and potential adjustments on abatement of pollutants are all included the overall environmental efficiency measured by this approach is decomposed into the measures of technical efficiency polluting inputs allocative efficiency and polluting and non polluting inputs allocative efficiency with the emphasizing of incorporating pollutant abatement activities accordingly new measures of abatement efficiency are proposed which help to identify the pollutant abatement potential that can be achieved from end of pipe abatement technology promotion associated with polluting input quality promotion and input resources reallocation furthermore several global malmquist productivity indices for identifying the changes on environmental and abatement efficiency are proposed this approach is applied to china s thermal power industry and some empirical results verifying the necessity of introducing the mbp are obtained

effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

market equilibrium with private knowledge the effect of asymmetric information between buyers and sellers on product quality was first explored by akerlof 1970 in his pathbreaking paper on the market for lemons he showed that if all purchasers have imperfect information on quality then a market for the product may not exist or if it does function it may not be efficient these results have led to a number of papers concerning insurance and labor markets under different assumptions regarding how agents discriminate between products of varying quality see pauly 1974 rothschild and stiglitz 1976 wilson 1977 miyasaki 1977 and spence 1978

sensitivity analysis of efficiency and malmquist productivity indices an application to spanish savings banks abstract hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of non parametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods i e bootstrapping techniques however empirical evidence is still practically non existent this gap is more noticeable in the case of banking efficiency studies where the literature is immense in this work we explore productivity growth and productive efficiency for spanish savings banks over the initial post deregulation period 1992 1998 using data envelopment analysis dea and bootstrapping techniques results show that productivity growth has occurred mainly due to improvement in production possibilities and that mean efficiency has remained fairly constant over time the bootstrap analysis yields further evidence as for many firms productivity growth or decline is not statistically significant with regard to efficiency measurement the bootstrap reveals that the disparities in the original efficiency scores of some firms are lessened to a great extent

multi period insurance contracts this paper examines the form of insurance contracts in the presence of asymmetric information about consumers accident probabilities our goal is to understand the adjustment in contract terms as a function of accident histories in a finite horizon model we also compare these adjustments between alternative market structures our principal findings indicate that history dependent insurance contracts serve a useful sorting role individuals who declare themselves low risks to insurance companies face adverse contracturai terms if they subsequently have many accidents these adjustments are strongest in the case of a single insurance seller but are present in the competitive model as well

slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance we develop two slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance on the basis of environmental dea technology of the two measures one is a composite index with a higher discriminating power for modeling economic environmental performance and the other can be used to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations we apply the proposed measures to model the co2 emissions of 30 oecd countries from 1998 to 2002 and present the results obtained

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

network dea model for supply chain performance evaluation this paper constructs an alternative network dea model that embodies the internal structure for supply chain performance evaluation we take the perspective of organization mechanism to deal with the complex interactions in supply chain three different network dea models are introduced under the concept of centralized decentralized and mixed organization mechanisms respectively efficiency analysis including the relationship between supply chain and divisions and the relationship among the three different organization mechanisms are discussed as a further extension we investigate internal resource waste in supply chain

the eco efficiency of pulp and paper industry in china an assessment based on slacks based measure and malmquist luenberger index abstract china has become the world largest paper and paperboard producer however pulp and paper industry has involved high resource consumption and severe pollution especially for water this research has assessed the eco efficiency of china s pulp and paper industry at the national level and provincial level an overview regarding the cleaner production of china s pulp and paper industry was presented to reveal the measures for reducing environmental impact in the last two decades slacks based measure was used to analyze the efficiency levels of 16 provinces pulp and paper industries to uncover the underlying causes of eco efficiency performance malmquist luenberger index was calculated to discover the drivers of productivity growth of pulp and paper industries our results showed that the pollution treatment of china s pulp and paper industry has made progress in terms of water consumption and water pollution although the absolute amount of pollution discharge is still large chemical oxygen demand emissions are still the first critical influencing factor of pulp and paper industry s inefficiency furthermore efficiency progress was the dominating contribution of the industry s productivity growth between 2010 and 2013 the policies for adjusting the industrial structure of pulp and paper industry have resulted in the scale effects through eliminating backward production capacity and accelerating merger and acquisitions moreover the productivity of pulp and paper industry was underestimated when the undesirable outputs were ignored it indicates that the stricter environmental regulations have positive effects on paper companies to internalize environmental pressures in the production activities through environmental management in the future pulp and paper companies should further internalize the cost of pollution treatment through scale effects and technology improvement

towards de financialisation the role of the state understanding the nature of state financialisation is crucial to ensure de financialisation efforts are successful therefore this article provides a structured overview of the emerging literature on financialisation and the state we define financialisation of the state broadly as the changed relationship between the state understood as sovereign with duties and accountable towards its citizens and financial markets and practices in ways that can diminish those duties and reduce accountability we then argue that there are four ways in which financialisation works in and through public institutions and policies adoption of financial logics advancing financial innovation embracing financial accumulation strategies and directly financialising the lives of their citizens organising our review around the two main policy fields of fiscal and monetary policy four definitions of financialisation in the context of public policy and institutions emerge when dealing with public expenditure on social provisions financialisation most often refers to the transformation of public services into the basis for actively traded financial assets in the context of public revenue financialisation describes the process of creating and deepening secondary markets for public debt with the state turning into a financial market player finally in the realm of monetary policy financial deregulation is perceived to have paved the way for financialisation while inflation targeting and the encouragement or outright pursuit of market based short term liquidity management among financial institutions constitute financialised policies

environmental regulations environmental governance efficiency and the green transformation of china s iron and steel enterprises abstract based on micro level enterprise panel data from 2005 to 2014 a slack based global data envelopment analysis dea model and a global malmquist luenberger index model are used to calculate the environmental governance efficiency ege of china s iron and steel enterprises ises then the different effects of two types of environmental regulation on ege of china s ises are analysed the results show that the overall level of ege for china s ises has remained low over the past 10 years the total factor environmental governance efficiency tfege presents a decreasing trend from 2005 to 2014 and the decline in tfege is mainly attributed to the technical progress change index gtpch moreover the bootstrap dea method is used for bias correction and the correction efficiency values are all within the confidence interval improving the accuracy of ege evaluation the regression analysis results show that different types of environmental regulations exert heterogeneous effects on tfege the relationship between market incentive environmental regulation and tfege has an inverted u shaped implying that although market incentive environmental regulation may improve the tfege in the short term continuously increasing this intensity would inhibit it however command control environmental regulation and tfege have a positive but not significant relationship

how environmental regulations affect innovation in the australian oil and gas industry going beyond the porter hypothesis the impact of environmental regulation on innovation is of central interest to many industries and policy makers alike while traditional research adopts a top down view of regulation and attempts to measure the innovation response the more bottom up view of contemporary theory argues that firms produce innovations that exceed compliance levels as a competitive strategy we approach this dichotomy by investigating innovation introduced by australian oil and gas firms in light of environmental regulatory compliance burden and firm level characteristics including competitive capabilities analyses of survey responses executive level interviews and conference proceedings reveal both regulatory top down and competitive advantage bottom up perspectives explain innovation in this industry regression analyses reveal that product service and novel innovations all types are related to a high compliance burden competitive skills research and development activity and engagement in formal collaborations interview and conference data add nuance to our findings revealing collaborative compliance frameworks result in similar innovation outcomes

are german banks different in recent years there has been a vigorous revival of the long standing debate about the uniqueness of german banks to date little consensus has been reached while some see few differences between the role of banks in germany and in other countries others claim that universal banks equity shareholdings in and nomination of representatives to the boards of nonfinancial firms are the key institutional features driving the rest of the german model of long term investment in high quality internationally competitive manufacturing this article argues that the uniqueness of the german banking system lies 1 in its unusually high capacity to provide industrial finance in the form of long term debt capital and 2 in its avoidance of the speculative boom credit crunch cycle experienced by almost every other advanced industrialized country in the 1980s and early 1990s these two key characteristics are attributable to a regulatory framework which involves strict prudential regulation access to long term refinancing sources and a federalist form of corporatism furthermore the behavior of german banks must be analyzed within a broader institutional system of economic governance which includes corporatist labor market institutions and a relatively large and modern sme sector

the effectiveness of bank governance reforms in the wake of the financial crisis a stakeholder approach this study examines the impact of bank corporate governance reforms in the wake of the financial crisis these reforms correspond to criticism of shareholder focused agency based corporate governance practices and a renewed focus on the stakeholder impact of corporate governance lapses in the financial sector this study differs from previous studies of corporate governance in the financial sector in using performance indicators that proxy the interests of customers and the community drawing on data from 134 countries over an eight year period from 2004 to 2011 we find that the post crisis corporate governance reforms in the banking sector appear to be effective in promoting greater bank attention to non shareholder stakeholders interests this study provides a means to conceptualize measures of bank performance from a stakeholder perspective in order to test emerging ideas about governance effectiveness in the financial sector

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

the responsibility for carbon emissions and carbon efficiency at the sectoral level evidence from china this work reviews benefit based principles to measuring responsibility for carbon emissions at the sectoral level using environmental input output analysis several new emissions multipliers are proposed to measure sectoral carbon efficiency these principles are used in an empirical analysis of carbon emissions in china and differences between the principles are compared the results indicate that all principles considered can prevent double counting of emissions but that different principles may lead to significantly different attributions of responsibility for carbon emissions and to different multiplier values for particular sectors electricity and heat supply is found to be the sector with the highest emissions responsibility under all but the consumer responsibility principle as well as the highest carbon multiplier under all principles however this sector s responsibility under producer responsibility principles is greater than that under other principles basic metals and transportation and post and telecommunication are among the top five sectors with the greatest responsibilities under all but the consumer responsibility principle whereas construction has the highest consumer responsibility among all sectors the pros and cons and policy implications of each principle are also discussed

power industry restructuring and eco efficiency changes a new slacks based model in malmquist luenberger index measurement measuring variations in efficiency and its extension eco efficiency during a restructuring period in different industries has always been a point of interest for regulators and policy makers this paper assesses the impacts of restructuring of procurement in the iranian power industry on the performance of power plants we introduce a new slacks based model for malmquist luenberger ml index measurement and apply it to the power plants to calculate the efficiency eco efficiency and technological changes over the 8 year period 2003 2010 of restructuring in the power industry the results reveal that although the restructuring had different effects on the individual power plants the overall growth in the eco efficiency of the sector was mainly due to advances in pure technology we also assess the correlation between efficiency and eco efficiency of the power plants which indicates a close relationship between these two steps thus lending support to the incorporation of environmental factors in efficiency analysis

tying life insurance and savings decisions a multiperiod expected utility approach abstract many whole life insurance contracts provide in addition to protection in case of death of the insured also a savings element the main purpose of this article is to provide an economic rationale for this practice two alternative models are offered in both models it is assumed that there is an asymmetry of information between the insurers and insureds where the know better their probability of death and hence adverse selection may cause a market failure it is shown that by offering several deliberately designed contracts tying savings and insurance the insurers can induce the insureds to self select that is insureds with higher probability of death will voluntarily choose different contracts than those with a lower probability of death and hence will reveal their probability of death to the insurers the problem of adverse selection is thus overcome in the first model contracts differ in the amount of insurance they specify and the amount of savings tied with insurance in the second model a multiperiod actually two period contract and a single period contract are offered the multiperiod contract specifies a savings element which will be received by the insured if he or she lives at the end of the second period it is shown that by the right choice of the return on the savings part insureds with lower probabilities of death will choose the multiperiod contract whereas insureds with higher probability of death will prefer two successive single period contracts again self selection is achieved these two models show that tie in arrangements of savings and insurance may help overcome the adverse selection problem and hence an economic rationale is provided for their existence the paper also examines the demand for life insurance and savings the sensitivity of the demand for these products to variations in key parameters is analyzed the differences between the sensitivity analyses results obtained when insurance and savings decisions are made separately and those obtained when these decisions are simultaneosly made are highlighted and explained

measuring eco efficiency based on green indicators and potentials in energy saving and undesirable output abatement abstract nowadays majority of organizations are seeking to achieve sustainable development with respect to green concept one of the main criteria for assessing green performance is eco efficiency to identify all aspects of the eco efficiency inputs should be divided into energy and non energy and outputs should be divided into good and bad outputs to deal with this issue a data envelopment analysis dea model is developed to divide inputs into both energy and non energy and outputs into both desirable good and undesirable bad outputs likewise variables are separated into both discretionary and non discretionary factors accordingly a bounded adjusted measure bam based on green indicators is developed to calculate the eco efficiency of decision making units dmus besides energy saving potentials and undesirable output abatement potentials are calculated to show correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable output finally proposed model is validated by assessing the eco efficiency of some selected members of organization for economic cooperation and development oecd australia finland ireland new zealand and switzerland are recognized as eco efficient countries and the rest of countries are inefficient in terms of the eco efficiency high and positive spearman correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable outputs addresses that the more use of energy inputs the more undesirable outputs

gaussian demand and commodity bundling in an important and widely cited essay adams and yellen 1976 examine the use of package selling as a price discrimination device they consider a monopolist producing two goods with constant unit costs and facing buyers with diverse tastes the marginal utility of a second unit of either good is assumed to be zero for all buyers the two goods are independent in demand for all buyers so that any buyer s reservation price for the first unit of either good is independent of the market price of the other thus the maximum amount any buyer would pay for a bundle consisting of one unit of each good is the sum of the two reservation prices and buyers are completely described by the values of those two prices 2 resale markets are assumed away in order to obtain comparative results for alternative pricing strategies the distribution of reservation prices in the adams yellen framework is assumed to be bivariate normal implications of gaussian demand are explored pure bundling is shown to operate by reducing buyer diversity thus facilitating the capture of consumers surplus it generally makes buyers worse off than unbundled sales it is more profitable if average reservation prices are high enough mixed bundling combines advantages of both pure bundling and unbundled sales and it is generally strictly more profitable than either bundling which treats goods symmetrically seems most attractive under symmetric reservation price distributions i am indebted to severin borenstein for superb research assistance to the ford motor company for research support through a grant to m i t and to the harvard economics department for housing me as a visiting scholar while most of this research was performed of course only i can be held responsible for this essay s shortcomings 1 the first clear recognition of this possibility seems to have been by stigler 1968 but also see burstein 1960 2 paroush and peles 1981 relax the assumption that consumers purchase at most one unit of each good but they consider only two types of buyers both with linear demand functions they retain the assumption that demands are independent for all buyers telser 1979 and phillips 1981 use different frameworks to analyze bundling policies spence 1980 explores the relation between bundling across commodities as here and bundling multiple units of the same

the influence of chinese environmental regulation on corporation innovation and competitiveness abstract according to porter hypothesis appropriate environmental regulation can promote corporation innovation the innovation will even offset the corporation loss caused by environmental regulation and improve corporation competitiveness in order to explore the porter hypothesis practical situation in china this paper does an empirical study to explore this mechanism by using chinese pollution intensive corporations panel data samples during 2007 2012 results show that the implementation of flexible control policies has achieved initial success environmental regulation has significant positive effects on corporation s innovation but the fact of its weak effects also partly explains why environmental regulation still has negative effects on corporation competitiveness even it is insignificant from the point of regional differences east and middle regions have weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon while that of the west region is not significant return on assets roa and gross domestic product gdp in the east region are relatively higher which is not based on high energy consumption and environmental pollution but due to the high transformation rate of research and development expenditure r d to roa for the middle region even it shows signs of the strong porter hypothesis but due to the fact that government gives fiscal subsidies and tax returns to companies to cover the cost from environmental regulation it only has the weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon since this mechanism is not consistent with that of porter hypothesis

a combined monopoly and optimal packaging this paper specifies the conditions under which a profit maximizing monopoly will market a package of two different commodities even when the demands for and the cost of production of each commodity are entirely independent of the other packaging is here a useful way of implicitly discriminating by price especially when explicit price discrimination is not possible some of the welfare applications are discussed

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

banks and the false dichotomy in the comparative political economy of finance the wide ranging varieties of capitalism literature rests on a particular conception of banks and banking that the authors argue no longer reflects the reality of modern financial systems they take advantage of the greater information regarding bank activities revealed by the financial crisis to consider the reality across eight of the world s largest developed economies of the financial power of banks to act as bulwarks against market forces this article offers a marketbased banking framework that transcends the bank based capital market based dichotomy that dominates comparative political economy s consideration of financial systems and argues that future cpe research should focus on the activities of banks by demonstrating how market based banking increases market influences on the supply of credit the authors highlight an underappreciated source of financial market pressure on nonfinancial companies nfc s that can have a potential impact across the range of issues that the varieties of capitalism voc literature has seen as differentiating national systems this approach has implications in areas such as labor welfare innovation and flexibility

different types of environmental regulations and heterogeneous influence on green productivity evidence from china this paper attempts to examine if the strong version of porter hypothesis is supported in china by investigating how different regulatory instruments and the relative stringency impact green productivity we use a slacks based measure sbm and luenberger productivity index accounting for undesirable outputs to evaluate the industrial green productivity growth rates of china s 30 provinces the estimates imply an unsustainable development model in china with significant regional differences by employing a panel threshold model and a province level panel dataset during 2000 2012 empirical results show that both command and control and market based regulation have a non linear relationship with and can be positively related to green productivity but with different constrains on regulation stringency there are double thresholds with the command and control and exists an optimal range of stringency for productivity improvement while a single threshold has been found with the market based regulation and its current stringency is reasonable for most of provinces moreover based on china s reality the productivity effect driven by market based regulation is much stronger than that of the command and control the mechanism of informal regulation is much more complicated consequently we find evidence to support the strong porter hypothesis that reasonable stringency of environmental regulations may enhance rather than lower industrial competitiveness

a sequential malmquist luenberger productivity index environmentally sensitive productivity growth considering the progressive nature of technology this study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change the rationale of this methodology is to exclud

dea environmental assessment in time horizon radial approach for malmquist index measurement on petroleum companies abstract the climate change and various pollutions have been influencing our societies and economies the environmental assessment to be discussed in this study is increasingly important because it serves as an initial step toward pollution prevention corporate leaders policy makers researchers and individuals who are interested in environmental protection have been paying attention to the assessment so that they can prepare policy suggestions on the global warming and climate change as a methodology for the assessment this study proposes a use of data environment analysis dea in a time horizon most of data sets on the climate change are sampled in a time series where the performance of organizations fluctuates every moment in applying the dea environmental assessment to such a data set it is necessary for us to classify outputs into desirable e g oil production and undesirable e g co 2 emission categories because all organizations usually produce not only desirable but also undesirable outputs as a result of their economic activities to unify the two different types of outputs this study incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of dea and extends them into a time horizon for the research purpose this study incorporates malmquist index into the proposed dea environmental assessment to examine an occurrence of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is further separated into four subcomponents in a time horizon these subcomponents are differently expressed under the natural and managerial disposability thus eight different subcomponents on the malmquist index are proposed to measure the frontier shift as an application this study uses the proposed dea approach to examine whether the frontier shift due to technology progress occurs or not in the petroleum industry from 2005 to 2009 our empirical study finds that the industry has not exhibited any major frontier shift under natural disposability but showing a considerable frontier shift under managerial disposability in other words the petroleum firms have improved their environmental performance by eco technology to reduce an amount of co 2 emission during the observed annual periods

measuring energy consumption efficiency of the construction industry the case of china the energy conservation has become a considerable issue in construction industry for achieving sustainable development therefore it is crucial for policy makers to look for optimized and flexible tools to measure the total energy consumption efficiency in construction industry data envelopment analysis dea can be applied for multiple input and output decision making units dmus productivity measurement dea based malmquist productivity index mpi can be used as a tool for measuring the productivity change longitudinally in this paper we use input oriented model to measure the energy consumption productivity change of the construction industry from 2004 to 2009 with data in 26 provinces of china it is found that only guangdong demonstrated effective energy improving in the whole reference period it also identified the regional groups always lie on the efficiency frontier of energy consumption as benchmarks regional analysis shows that energy conservation gaps exist between northeastern western region and central eastern region dea based malmquist productivity index provides a good way to measure the energy consumption efficiency and can help policy makers to improve strategies of sustainable development in china

the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy a malmquist index analysis of oecd countries abstract in recent years renewable energy and environmental efficiency have been interesting issues for both academics and industry actors when discussing sustainable development against this background the present study examines the environmental efficiency of renewable energy from the static and the dynamic perspective in 31 oecd countries a study conducted to understand the impact of renewable energy across countries as a non parametric methodology data envelopment analysis is used to measure environmental efficiency through multiple inputs and outputs labor capital and renewable energy supply are the three inputs while gdp is the desirable output and carbon emissions are the undesirable output to measure the dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy the malmquist productivity index is applied to estimate the average efficiency change from 2004 to 2011 the results demonstrate geographical differences in environmental efficiency across the oecd countries in oecd america have the highest average environmental efficiency and those in oecd europe have the largest standard deviation we also find that dynamic efficiency is influenced by the global financial crisis triggered in the united states further we show that oecd countries implement both catch up and frontier shift strategies to improve environmental efficiency

what makes german banks different the past few years have seen a revival in the academic debate over the economic functions of german banks this paper takes the position that large non financial firms have become highly autonomous of the banks and the corporate governance role of banks while still important is much less significant than widely presumed german banks however do fulfill certain economic functions to a greater degree and in a different manner than banks in other countries these bank functions of long term commercial financing comprehensive management consulting and supporting diversified quality production strategies are made possible by the institutional character of the banking system itself and the institutional context in which it operates a complex web of government laws regulations and government financial aid combine with bank group competition to create an extensive and successful financial support system for german smes this system faces various adjustment challenges from international financial market integration to eu regulatory harmonization but it has thus far managed to adapt while sustaining its core functions

environmental productivity and kuznets curve in india abstract as a result of india s extremely rapid economic growth the scale and seriousness of environmental problems are no longer in doubt whether pollution abatement technologies are utilized more efficiently is crucial in the analysis of environmental management because it influences the cost of alternative production and pollution abatement technologies in this study we use state level industry data of sulfur dioxide nitrogen dioxide and suspended particular matter over the period 1991 2003 employing recently developed productivity measurement technique we show that overall environmental productivities decrease over time in india furthermore we analyze the determinants of environmental productivities and find environmental kuznets curve type relationship existences between environmental productivity and income panel analysis results show that the scale effect dominates over the technique effect therefore a combined effect of income on environmental productivity is negative

institutional change in contemporary capitalism coordinated financial systems since 1990 what happens when the unstoppable force of liberalization collides with the immovable object of national financial institutions in the advanced industrial democracies to answer this question and evaluate alternative mechanisms to explain institutional change this article examines the cases of the three large european economies with concentrated share ownership france germany and italy in the formal legal mechanism interest coalitions adopt new laws leading actors to deviate from formerly stable patterns of behavior in shareholding in the joint belief shift mechanism collective actors use a triggering event to jointly reevaluate their views of how the world works and thus how their interests can best be pursued using the metric of patient capital this article shows that institutional change took place in france but not in germany or italy despite the fact that germany and italy experienced significant regulatory change in the area of corporate governance while france did not this evidence fits joint belief shift and is inconsistent with the formal legal mechanism it is likely that the importance of the two mechanisms of institutional change depends on the degree of strategic interdependence among institutional actors where it is high the joint belief shift mechanism is likely to precipitate change and where it is low the formal legal mechanism is likely to precipitate change

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry a data envelopment analysis dea based approach abstract china s economic has got remarkable achievements during the past 30 years which has brought tremendous pressure on natural resources and serious environmental pollution at the same time in this paper we aim to make environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry data envelopment analysis dea method is incorporated and the slacks based measure sbm model considering undesirable outputs is introduced to measure the environmental efficiency of different regions big data theory is introduced in the collection and selection of the input and output data of the regions further we evaluate the environmental efficiencies of china s industry using data from 2008 to 2012 the results show that apart from several developed provinces the environmental efficiencies of china s industry are generally low and the environmental efficiencies of the regions did not show any increasing trend through the past 5 years additionally lager differences exist in environmental efficiencies between the regions in china finally we suggest the chinese government to focus on the low environmental efficiencies and the unbalanced development of its regional industry

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

environmental investment and firm performance a network approach abstract this study examines the role of investment in environmental production practices for both environmental performance and energy efficiency over time we employ a network dea approach that links successive production technologies through intertemporal investment decisions with a period by period estimation this allows us to estimate energy efficiency and environmental performance separately as well as productivity change and its associated decompositions into efficiency change and technology change incorporating a network model also allows us to account for both short term environmental management practices and long term environmental investments in each of our productivity measures we apply this framework to a panel of detailed plant level production data for swedish manufacturing firms covering the years 2002 2008

social sustainability measured by intermediate approach for dea environmental assessment chinese regional planning for economic development and pollution prevention abstract this study examines the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the level of sustainability by a newly proposed intermediate approach conventionally dea data envelopment analysis for performance evaluation was used to assess various economic activities of organizations that utilized inputs e g the number of employees to yield desirable outputs e g the number of products the methodology was usually classified into radial or non radial category in an effort of extending it to environmental assessment dea needs to incorporate undesirable outputs e g the amount of co 2 into the computational framework this type of assessment is referred to as dea environmental assessment the proposed intermediate approach develops a new type of dea environmental assessment by combining the analytical features of radial approach with those of non radial approach the new approach measures the level of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores a rank sum test and a mean test are additionally incorporated into the proposed intermediate approach such a combination enhances the statistical capability as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the application finds four policy implications first it is important for china to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments second the government continues to reinforce the policy making effort on environmental protection by paying attention to central and southern regions the chinese industries need to transfer toward green energy the transfer should be efficiently executed for their future developments third the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally the policy implementation needs a time lag until it becomes effective the time lag on economic policy is longer than that of environmental policy the economic policy has historically produced a regional imbalance often leading to educational and income imbalances among chinese provinces

justifying the incorporation of the materials balance principle into frontier based eco efficiency models frontier based models are an alternative to traditional eco efficiency ratio indicators this paper considers two different types environmentally adjusted production efficiency models and frontier eco efficiency models and tries to find justification for incorporating the materials balance principle mbp in them similar importance is attached to the economic and environmental outcomes of a production process like economic outcomes can be derived from inputs and outputs and respective prices some cases allow for deriving environmental outcomes from the production function with the mbp after an overview of attempts to incorporate environmental issues in production efficiency models and some reflections why mbp has been neglected in environmental economics and production efficiency analysis the paper gives basic principles to incorporate the mbp in conventional production efficiency methods and shows how this adjustment leads to a more diversified diagnosis of eco efficiency finally potentialities and bottlenecks are discussed exploiting the mbp in production efficiency and eco efficiency analysis will facilitate more pro active eco efficiency research

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility

environmental efficiency and economic growth of china a ray slack based model analysis abstract the chinese economy has been experiencing rapid growth since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy however at the same time it faces issues regarding resource savings and environmental protection which are important aspects of the new industrialization therefore this study conducts data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the environmental efficiency of chinese regions certain existing dea models account for undesirable outputs and do not elucidate the weak disposable relationship between undesirable and desirable outputs thus polar theory is introduced among the dea modeling in this study first drawing on stochastic frontier analysis ray stochastic frontier analysis and dea we propose a ray slack based model rsbm to evaluate provincial environmental efficiencies in china from 2004 to 2012 subsequently an rsbm malmquist luenberger total factor productivity index is structured finally economic growth environmental efficiency and energy consumption are analyzed using spatial panel econometrics as this study treats industrial waste as undesirable outputs the rsbm results show that the environmental efficiencies in the east are the highest while those in the central regions are the lowest the spatial econometric analysis reveals that the ratios of direct to total elasticity and those of direct to total effect for capital labor and energy input variables are fixed furthermore the study provides policy implications and suggestions for future research