on the redistribution of wealth in a developing country experimental evidence on stake and framing effects we experimentally study the effect of framing and size of large windfall gains on the redistribution of such gains randomly selected individuals from villages in bangladesh were invited to take part in dictator experiments where they received endowments worth up to five months of average household income and were asked to distribute the endowment between themselves and other individuals we manipulated whether dictators could give to or take from another individual i e whether the endowment was allocated to the dictator or other individual and whether the endowment was moderate low or very large high we also provided dictators with the option to reconsider their original decision we find that dictators allocate almost nine times more to other individuals under the take than the give frame when stakes are high even after they could reconsider their choices in addition we find that proportions allocated to other individuals dramatically drop when stakes increase under the give but not the take frame the results provide novel evidence on the role of framing and stakes for pro sociality

monetarism and the us economy we take a small macroeconomic model due to stein designed to capture the essential aspects of keynesian and monetarist propositions especially on the question of crowding out we show that stein s empirical procedure is inadequate he ignores the restrictions that he imposed on the structure of his model and concentrates on single equation reduced form estimation we are able to derive complete maximum likelihood estimates of the structural parameters subject to the non linear restrictions of the model using identical data and the same specifications but with these more appropriate estimation techniques we show that conclusions opposite to those of stein may be reached

why does the combination of the european union emissions trading scheme and a renewable energy target makes economic sense abstract the european climate and energy mix of targets and policies has been criticised by many economists in particular it is often argued that the renewable energy targets do not make economic sense because they represent an expensive option to reduce co2 emissions within a cap and trade scheme such as the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets in addition it has also been claimed that support for renewable electricity deployment negatively interacts with the eu ets having a dampening effect on the co2 price which favours the dirtiest technologies and is detrimental for the greener ones in this article we argue that this mainstream economic view is short sighted and that a multidisciplinary economic analysis of the climate and energy policy mix is required mainstream economic analysis is based on a narrow approach for the assessment of instrument combinations and neglects relevant insights from several economic disciplines including innovation economics and political economy approaches in reality economic theory supports the combination of an ets and renewable energy targets the existence of different policy goals and market failures the demand pull influence of renewable energy policies on innovation a political economy approach and the different risk exposure of renewable energy technologies call for a policy mix although policy combinations are not a panacea and bring problems on their own the aforementioned negative interaction between renewable energy deployment and the carbon price in the eu ets can be mitigated through appropriate coordination and or instrument choice and design

current situation trends and potential of renewable energy in flanders abstract the current european union eu energy policy seeks to reach a balance between sustainable development competitiveness and secure supply in this sense the eu energy policy sets the target of a 13 share of renewable energy sources ress for belgium several instruments have been implemented to reach this target the objective of this study is analyzing those instruments and its effectiveness and efficiency to tackle this objective we first analyze the current status of res in flanders second we compare the situation in flanders to the national situation in belgium and to the other eu member states then we analyze the potential of each type of res finally we discuss the opportunities and problems of res related to spatial planning in flanders the main application of renewable energy is electricity production of which the main source is biomass an aspect of the flemish energy policy worth mentioning is the green certificate system which has stimulated the development of renewable energies however a greater effort to regulate this market and to decrease the cost of kwh produced has proven to be necessary the res electricity share of total consumption has increased by 3 2 between 1994 and 2008 but compared to others eu countries the share of res to gross inland consumption in flanders is small large scale facilities are necessary to reach the eu targets the development of large wind biomass and solar projects is suggested as the preferred option for flanders

spatial structure inequality and trading community of renewable energy networks a comparative study of solar and hydro energy product trades abstract renewable energy trade is booming and has formed complicated networks worldwide however our knowledge of the spatial structures and evolution of these networks is limited in this paper network analyses are used to examine the geographic characteristics of selected renewable energy trades and their evolution based on the united nations comtrade database from 1988 to 2013 the results show that the networks are expanding to include more and more countries and relationships and scale of the networks is larger than ever a tripartite confrontational renewable energy trading system has been forming and is strengthening europe the usa china and other asian countries are the main players and china has overtaken the usa and europe as the leading player inequality and small world characteristics appear in renewable energy trade solar energy trade presents a triadic community structure with europe the usa and china as the dominant players while hydro energy trade presents a smaller and more dispersed structure the core periphery structure strongly suggests a trade dependency between hubs and peripheral elements in renewable energy trade developing countries should design appropriate incentives and contribute to particular segments in renewable energy value chain to accelerate and benefit from the south south renewable energy trade

inequality and violent crime abstract we investigate the robustness and causality of the link between income inequality and violent crime across countries first we study the correlation between the gini index and homicide and robbery rates within and between countries second we examine the partial correlation by considering other crime determinants third we control for the endogeneity of inequality by isolating its exogenous impact on these crime rates fourth we control for measurement error in crime rates by modeling it as both unobserved country effects and random noise finally we examine the robustness of this partial correlation to alternative measures of inequality the panel data consist of nonoverlapping 5 year averages for 39 countries during 1965 95 for homicides and 37 countries during 1970 94 for robberies crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and particularly between countries and this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates even after controlling for ot

income distribution political instability and investment abstract this paper successfully tests on a sample of 71 countries for the period 1960 85 the following hypotheses income inequality by fuelling social discontent increases sociopolitical instability the latter by creating uncertainty in the politico economic environment reduces investment as a consequence income inequality and investment are inversely related since investment is a primary engine of growth this paper identifies a channel for an inverse relationship between income inequality and growth we measure socio political instability with indices which capture the occurrence of more or less violent phenomena of political unrest and we test our hypotheses by estimating a two equation model in which the endogenous variables are investment and an index of socio political instability our results are robust to sensitivity analysis on the specification of the model and the measure of political instability and are unchanged when the model is estimated using robust regression techniques

burglary and income inequality abstract in a model where risk neutral agents have differing legal incomes which may be supplemented by burglary we study the effects of income distribution on the level of burglary assuming that a detected burglar is incarcerated for a fixed term and assuming that burglars choose target houses using the signal of house quality we show how increases in income inequality may increase the level of crime in particular increases in relative differential inequality unambiguously increase burglary crime corollaries are that a more regressive income tax increases the level of crime and that richer neighborhoods may have lower crime rates

crime and local inequality in south africa the authors examine the effects of local inequality on property and violent crime in south africa their findings are consistent with economic theories relating inequality to property crime and also with sociological theories that imply that inequality leads to crime in general burglary rates are 20 30 percent higher in police station jurisdictions that are the wealthiest among their neighbors suggesting that criminals travel to neighborhoods where the expected returns from burglary are highest the authors do not find evidence that inequality between racial groups fosters interpersonal conflict at the local level

modeling hourly electricity dynamics for policy making in long term scenarios abstract energy policies are often related to the global effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through increased use of renewable energies in electricity production the impact of these policies is usually calculated by energy planning tools however the modeling methodologies most currently used are not adequate to simulate long term scenarios while considering the hourly dynamics of supply and demand this paper presents an extension of the times energy planning tool for investment decisions in electricity production that considers seasonal daily and hourly supply and demand dynamics the inclusion of these dynamics enables the model to produce more accurate results in what concerns the impact of introducing energy efficiency policies and the increased use of renewable energies the model was validated in sao miguel azores portugal for the years 2006 2009 where a comparison with real data showed that the model can simulate the supply and demand dynamics further the long term analysis shows that the inclusion of these dynamics contributes to a better assessment of the renewable energy potential suggests the postponement of investments in new generation capacity and demonstrates that using fine time resolution modeling is very valuable for the design of effective policy measures under high renewable penetration energy systems

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

decarbonization scenarios for the eu and mena power system considering spatial distribution and short term dynamics of renewable generation we use the multi scale power system model limes eu to explore coordinated long term expansion pathways for renewable energy re generation long distance transmission and storage capacities for the power sector of the europe and middle east north africa mena regions that lead to a low emission power system we show that ambitious emission reduction targets can be achieved at moderate costs by a nearly complete switch to re sources until 2050 if transmission and storage capacities are expanded adequately limiting transmission capacities to current levels leads to higher storage requirements higher curtailments and to an increase in temporal and spatial electricity price variations results show an escalation of electricity prices if emission reductions exceed a critical value adequate expansion of transmission and storage capacities shift this threshold from 70 to 90 emission reductions in 2050 relative to 2010

the effect of prison population size on crime rates evidence from prison overcrowding litigation simultaneity between prisoner populations and crime rates makes it difficult to isolate the causal effect of changes in prison populations on crime to break that simultaneity this paper uses prison overcrowding litigation in a state as an instrument for changes in the prison population the resulting elasticities are two to three times greater than those of previous studies a one prisoner reduction is associated with an increase of fifteen index i crimes per year while calculations of the costs of crime are inherently uncertain it appears that the social benefits associated with crime reduction equal or exceed the social costs of incarceration for the marginal prisoner

bridging the scales a conceptual model for coordinated expansion of renewable power generation transmission and storage abstract to analyze the challenge of large scale integration of renewables during the next decades we present a conceptual power system model that bridges the gap between long term investment allocation and short term system operation decisions it integrates dynamic investments in generation transmission and storage capacities as well as short term variability and spatial distribution of supply and demand in a single intertemporal optimization framework large scale grid topology power flow distributions and storage requirements are determined endogenously results obtained with a three region model application indicate that adequate and timely investments in transmission and storage capacities are of great importance delaying these investments which are less costly than investments in generation capacities leads to system wide indirect effects such as non optimal siting of renewable generation capacities decreasing generation shares of renewables increasing residual emissions and hence higher overall costs

endogeneity in count data models an application to demand for health care the generalized method of moments gmm estimation technique is discussed for count data models with endogenous regressors count data models can be specified with additive or multiplicative errors and it is shown that in general a set of instruments is not orthogonal to both error types simultaneous equations with a dependent count variable often do not have a reduced form which is a simple function of the instruments however a simultaneous model with a count and a binary variable can only be logically consistent when the system is triangular utilizing data from the british health and lifestyle survey 1991 1992 the gmm estimator is used in the estimation of a model explaining the number of visits to doctors with a self reported binary health index as a possible endogenous regressor if this regressor is truly endogenous one expects the pseudo likelihood estimate of its coefficient to be biased upwards indeed for the additive model the estimated coefficient of the binary health index decreases in value when the possible endogeneity of this regressor is taken into account further indication of endogeneity is given by the fact that the overidentifying restrictions are rejected in the multiplicative model but not in the additive model finally a model that includes predicted latent health instead of the binary health index is estimated in stages

the merit order effect a detailed analysis of the price effect of renewable electricity generation on spot market prices in germany the german feed in support of electricity generation from renewable energy sources has led to high growth rates of the supported technologies critics state that the costs for consumers are too high an important aspect to be considered in the discussion is the price effect created by renewable electricity generation this paper seeks to analyse the impact of privileged renewable electricity generation on the electricity market in germany the central aspect to be analysed is the impact of renewable electricity generation on spot market prices the results generated by an agent based simulation platform indicate that the financial volume of the price reduction is considerable in the short run this gives rise to a distributional effect which creates savings for the demand side by reducing generator profits in the case of the year 2006 the volume of the merit order effect exceeds the volume of the net support payments for renewable electricity generation which have to be paid by consumers

estimating the economic model of crime employment versus punishment effects ann dryden witte 1980 has recently argued in this journal that new support is found for the deterrent hypothesis or the economic model of crime when individual data are employed to estimate the determinants of rearrest rates witte estimates a conventional economic model of crime using a rich and carefully constructed microdata set of released prisoners in north carolina her principal findings are that 1 increases in the certainty and severity of punishment tend to reduce participation in crime measured by number of arrests or convictions per month free and 2 higher legal wages have an extremely weak deterrent effect on crime in this comment i describe two separate data sets within which i find just the opposite results using a sample of offenders released from federal prisons in 1972 i find that increases in the severity of punishment are weakly related to participation in crime while increases in the certainty of punishment are positively related to participation in crime in addition using a sample of male repeat property offenders released from maryland prisons i find that higher wages have a strong and consistent deterrent effect on crime the conclusion is reached at least from these data sets that improving legitimate employment opportunities may be as effective if not more effective in reducing crime as is an increase in punishment

crime inequality and unemployment in england and wales a model of crime is developed based on principles from the existing literature with some original insight the implications of the model are that income inequality and unemployment are important explanatory variables for crimes motivated by economic gain but do not offer much explanatory power for other types of crime panel data of uk regions over the years from 2002 to 2007 are then used to test these predictions the empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that crime is an economic phenomenon

renewable energy sources in european energy supply and interactions with emission trading abstract this paper presents a model based approach which allows to determine the optimised structure and operation of the eu 15 electricity supply under different political and economic framework conditions with a focus on the integration of renewable energy sources for electricity generation res e in the eu 15 countries the approach is designed to take into account the characteristics of power production from both renewable and conventional sources including the technological and economic characteristics of existing plants as well as those of future capacity expansion options beyond that fuel supply structures are modelled as well as the international markets for power and co 2 certificates with their restrictions thus a profound evaluation of the exploitation of mid term renewable potentials and an assessment of the market penetration of the various renewable power generation technologies under the normative premise of a cost optimised evolution of the power system becomes possible results show that a promotion of renewable energies reduces the scarcity of co 2 emission allowances and thus lowers marginal costs of co 2 reduction up to 30 in 2030 despite the higher overall costs a diversification of the energy resource base by res e use is observed as primarily natural gas and nuclear fuels are replaced

personal indebtedness spatial effects and crime there is a long and detailed history of attempts to understand what causes crime one of the most prominent strands of this literature has sought to better understand the relationship between economic conditions and crime an economic argument is that in an attempt to maintain consumption in the face of unemployment people may resort to sources of illicit income in a similar manner we might expect ex ante that increases in the level of personal indebtedness would be likely to provide similar incentives to engage in criminality in this paper we seek to understand the spatial pattern of property and theft crimes using a range of socioeconomic variables including data on the level of personal indebtedness

complete systems methods of estimating models with rational and adaptive expectations a case study abstract this paper examines the use of complete fully efficient systems methods to compare model estimates under rational and adaptive schemes of expectations generation to do this we employ a small well known model designed to distinguish monetarist from keynesian macroeconomic structures

criminal deterrence revisiting the issue with a birth cohort we estimate the general deterrent effect of criminal justice resources on criminal behavior using panel data for a sample representative of young men in u s urban areas our data which combine individual level information on arrests and personal characteristics with aggregate information on criminal justice resources allow us to obtain deterrence measures that reflect theoretical concepts and are of potential policy relevance we find robust evidence of a general deterrent effect flowing from criminal justice particularly police resources the nature of our data also allows us to conduct extensive exogeneity tests and to explore a number of possible third causes for the deterrent effect we find strong evidence that our deterrence variables are exogenous and no evidence that our deterrence result stems from commonly hypothesized third causes copyright 1994 by mit press

how much does sorting increase inequality some commentators argue that increased sorting into internally homogeneous neighborhoods schools and marriages is radically polarizing society calibration of a formal model however suggests that the steady state standard deviation of education would increase only 1 7 percent if the correlation between neighbors education doubled and would fall only 1 6 percent if educational sorting by neighborhood disappeared the steady state standard deviation of education would grow 1 percent if the correlation between spouses education increased from 0 6 to 0 8 in fact marital and neighborhood sorting have been stable or even decreasing historically sorting has somewhat more significant effects on intergenerational mobility than on inequality

the risks and rewards of criminal activity a comprehensive test of criminal deterrence whereas previous analyses of criminal deterrence have focused on the effect of criminal enforcement on crime rates this study analyzes the existence of compensating differentials for criminal pursuits by analyzing the risk rewards trade off this approach represents a more comprehensive test of the criminal deterrence hypothesis the sample consisted of black inner city youths who reported their crime participation crime income and self assessed risks from crime the risk premiums for the three principal adverse outcomes arrest conviction and prison constituted between one half and two thirds of all crime income on the average providing strong support for the criminal deterrence hypothesis

crime punishment and the market for offenses crime is a subject of intense emotions conflicting ideologies however economists have generally explained it as a reflection of individual choice and equilibrating market forces two major themes of the literature are outlined the evolution of a market model to explain the diversity of crime across time and space and the debate about the usefulness of positive versus negative incentives systematic analyses generally indicate that crime is affected on the margin by both positive and negative incentives there are serious limitations to the effectiveness of incapacitation and rehabilitation and optimal enforcement strategies involve trade offs between narrow efficiency and equity considerations

the efficient estimation of econometric models with rational expectations the efficient estimation of econometric models with rational expectations by the substitution method usually entails the use of a non linear simultaneous equations estimator and hence is not very attractive computationally it is shown that for a wide class of problems efficient estimates can also be obtained with standard estimation methods if instead an errors in variables approach is used for many other problems although not providing fully efficient estimates because rationality is not imposed the errors in variables method will still have a strong appeal because otherwise it uses all of the structural information in the model unlike the substitution method when an incomplete information set is used it guarantees consistent estimates and it is easy to compute

heterogeneity stratification and growth macroeconomic implications of community structure and school finance this paper examines how socioeconomic stratification and alternative systems of education finance affect inequality and growth agents interact through local public goods or externalities school funding neighborhood effects and economywide linkages complementary skills knowledge spillovers sorting families into homogeneous communities often minimizes the costs of existing heterogeneity but mixing reduces heterogeneity faster integration therefore tends to slow down growth in the short run yet raise it in the long run a move to state funding of education presents society with a similar intertemporal trade off local and global complementarities play major roles in determining the efficient social and educational structures copyright 1996 by american economic association

why do increased arrest rates appear to reduce crime deterrence incapacitation or measurement error this paper attempts to discriminate between deterrence incapacitation and measurement error as explanations for the negative empirical relationship between arrest rates and crime measurement error cannot explain the observed patterns in the data incapacitation suggests that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will reduces all crime rates deterrence predicts that an increase in the arrest rate for one crime will lead to a rise in other crimes as criminals substitute away from the first crime empirically deterrence appears to be the more important factor particularly for property crimes jel k42

evaluating interconnector investments in the north european electricity system considering fluctuating wind power penetration with increasing amounts of power generation from intermittent sources like wind transmission planning has not only to account for the expected load curve but also for the stochasticity of volatile power infeeds moreover investments in power generation are no longer centrally planned in deregulated power markets but rather decided on competitive grounds by individual power companies this poses particular challenges when it comes to evaluating the benefits of increased interconnection capacities in large scale systems like the european transmission system within this article an approach is presented which allows assessing the benefits of interconnector investments in the presence of stochastic power infeed and endogenous power plant investments this model uses typical days and hours as well as recombining trees to represent both load and infeed fluctuations an application is presented covering 30 european countries and simultaneously optimizing generation investments and dispatch as well as utilization of transmission lines the model is used to evaluate the benefits of further line extensions between the european mainland and northern european countries we compute welfare gains and the distribution of these gains within a business as usual scenario up to 2030

unemployment inflation and monetarism the council s report provides a look at the 1969 71 game plan to disinflate by means of retarding aggregate demand the president elect s task force on inflation recommended as a first interim step that aggregate demand be slowed so as to bring the unemployment rate back to some equilibrium region around 4 5 percent what happened was that under the cover of the expectation and acceptance of such a limited step towards re equilibration the administration gradually tightened monetary and fiscal policy so severely as gradually to send the unemployment rate whizzing past the equilibrium zone to around 6 percent to my knowledge the theory of how and how well this medicine would act to cure the patient of his inflation was never spelled out by the council of economic advisers pp 533 34