towards a science of sustainability improving the way ecological economics understands human well being abstract ecological economics seeks to recognize what traditional economics often ignores that the economy is embedded in wider social and biophysical systems to date ecological economics has focused on the biophysical dimensions of these interactions yet achieving sustainable development will require difficult decisions regarding which environmental and other assets should be preserved and in what form this emphasizes the importance of understanding why particular environmental resources and services are important to human well being and how social and economic institutions may be structured to make the best use of these and other forms of capital the paper thus examines a variety of approaches to well being characterizing these as interpreting well being as a state of mind as a state of the world as human capability or as the satisfaction of underlying needs the literature surveyed is drawn largely from political philosophy and psychology and includes classical utilitarianism and self evaluative approaches descriptive utilitarianism and preference based approaches the basic needs approach functional approaches and underlying needs based and virtue based approaches particular authors include michalos scitovsky easterlin hirsch galbraith rawls sen maslow boyden and max neef the ideas examined are found to have significant implications for economic theory and policy especially regarding the social construction of preferences the treatment of distributional issues the identification of universal underlying needs and the relationship between the satisfaction of these needs and perceived well being these insights suggest that rising real incomes are unlikely to result in improved community well being calling into question the traditional economic view of progress they also offer a new path to sustainable development in which the primary focus is on the cultivation of appropriate institutions and attitudes rather than on the better management of resources the paper concludes that important aspects of social economic and environmental systems are codetermined and thus that achieving sustainable development will require an expansion of the scope of analysis to encompass a wider system dynamic the most promising approaches to well being in this context are those that identify universal underlying human needs thus avoiding the commodity fetishism of mainstream economics

structural change in an open economy we study the importance of international trade in structural change our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks and allows for non unitary income and substitution elasticities we calibrate our model to investigate south korea s structural change between 1971 and 2005 we nd that the shock processes propagated through the model s two main transmission mechanisms non homothetic preferences and the open economy explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares and the rising part of the hump shape in manufacturing counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining south korea s structural change

natural capital and quality of life a model for evaluating the sustainability of alternative regional development paths abstract natural capital contributes to the quality of life of a region in two complementary ways first by directly providing environmental services that cannot be imported and second by supplying the natural resources that through a human controlled production process become valuable to humans the evolution of the combination of these two components of the quality of life determines the path of development a region takes environmental services also determine the ability of natural capital to regenerate itself ecosystems and other components of the regional natural capital produce environmental services that provide life support functions necessary for natural capital reproduction the destruction of this critical natural capital impairs the internal sources of improvement of the quality of life of a region leading to a non sustainable path of development this article describes a model of the relationship between natural capital and quality of life that provides a stricter definition of sustainable development through explicit characterization and classification of natural capital according to its ability to produce life supporting environmental services by its substitutability and by its possible reconstruction application of this model then shows that there are 51 possible regional development paths only 32 of which are sustainable and only 14 of which are sustainable while also providing improvements in quality of life only six of these 14 sustainable development paths are attained with economic growth however while the other eight paths increase quality of life by increasing the production of environmental services the model could help in the development of institutional interventions that would promote regional development paths that are sustainable

environmentalizing economic development a south asian perspective south asia s pursuit of economic development has entailed considerable damage to and exposed the fragility of the physical environment of the region this paper provides an analytical overview of the of the environmental problem that manifest themselves in south asia in a comparative perspective with east and southeast asian countries as well as selected developed market economics to date south asian development process has been environment intensive and environment depleting it is argued that environmental problems are likely to set serious constraints to sustain growth in production to support a growing population by exploring the relationship between indices of human welfare and bio diversity conservation the paper exposes the dichotomy of the development process finally the study underscores the need for a range of policy options that rely both based and non market based instruments in an integrated setting to enviromnentalize south asian economic development c 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

on the conservation of distance in international trade the volume of world trade has grown more than twice as fast as real world income since 1980 surprisingly the effect of distance on trade has increased during this period it could be that countries are trading greater volumes of goods that are highly sensitive to distance an alternative explanation is that distance has become more import for a significant share of goods using highly disaggregated bilateral trade data we find that adjustment in the composition of trade has not influenced the way in which distance affects trade in contrast for about 25 percent of industries distance has become more important this implies that the increased distance sensitivity of trade is a result of a change in relative trade costs that affects many industries as opposed to a shift to more distance sensitive products we also find that homogeneous products are twice as likely to have become more distance sensitive as compared with differentiated goods this is consistent with the hypothesis that falling search costs resulting from improvements in transport and communications are relatively more important for differentiated goods the results offer no evidence of the death of distance rather they suggest that distance related relative trade costs have remained unchanged or shifted in favor of proximate markets

interest rates and metal price movements further evidence abstract we offer a theory about the relationship between interest rates and metal price movements the theory is a version of the hotelling rule eq 8 the results obtained from prices of four different metals based on seasonally and unadjusted quarterly data over the period 1968 2 1982 2 suggest that a reformulated hotelling rule which has a dynamic structure can explain the relationship between metal prices and interest rates in view of this result it appears that the return on exhaustible resources is related to changes in rather than the levels of interest rates this result also confirms the results of g m heal and m m barrow rev econom stud 48 161 181 1979 econom lett 7 95 103 1981

critical natural capital a socio cultural perspective abstract critical natural capital cnc is commonly defined as that part of the natural environment which performs important and irreplaceable functions so far the challenge to determine the criticality of natural capital nc has mainly been taken up by the natural sciences and the critical functions of nature mainly associated with its life support and ecological services little attention has been paid to the socio cultural functions of nc and to their values for the health and well being of human societies the aim of this paper is to encourage a more complete accounting of the critical functions of nc and its associated values by highlighting the importance of the information functions health recreation amenity education heritage etc for the quality and sustainability of human life it is argued that despite their immaterial and often intangible nature these functions provide many socio economic benefits which might be assessed through both qualitative and quantitative valuation methodologies integration of ecology sociology and economics is essential to operationalize the concept of cnc as a tool for more balanced environmental planning and decision making

on the portents of peak oil and other indicators of resource scarcity economists have studied various indicators of resource scarcity but largely ignored the phenomenon of peaking due to its connection to non economic physical theories of resource exhaustion i consider peaking from the economic point of view where economic forces determine the shape of the equilibrium extraction path within that framework i ask whether the timing of peak production reveals anything useful about scarcity i find peaking to be an ambiguous indicator if someone announced the peak would arrive earlier than expected and you believed them you would not know whether the news was good or bad however i also show that the traditional economic indicators of resource scarcity price cost and rent fare no better and argue that previous studies have misconstrued the connection between changes in underlying scarcity and movements in these traditional indicators

modelling long term oil price and extraction with a hubbert approach the lopex model abstract the lopex l ong term o il p rice and ex traction model generates long term scenarios about future world oil supply and corresponding price paths up to the year 2100 in order to determine oil production in non opec countries the model uses hubbert curves hubbert curves reflect the logistic nature of the discovery process and the associated constraint on temporal availability of oil extraction paths and world oil price path are both derived endogenously from opec s intertemporally optimal cartel behaviour thereby opec is faced with both the price dependent production of the non opec competitive fringe and the price dependent world oil demand world oil demand is modelled with a constant price elasticity function and refers to a scenario from acropolis poles lopex results indicate a significant higher oil price from around 2020 onwards compared to the reference scenario and a stagnating market share of maximal 50 to be optimal for opec

productivity and the role of college in narrowing the male female wage differential in the usa in 1980 this study analyses the impact that productivity factors and the particular role of college have upon the inequality in male and female wages using the 1980 1 100 public use sample the findings herein suggest that whereas both black and white females and black males who entered the labour force in 1975 or later possess productivity characteristics that are superior to their elder counterparts the productivity characteristics of white males entering the labour force over this period are significantly inferior to those possessed by older white males also in sharp contrast to a voluminous literature that concludes that college widens the wage gap between the sexes this analysis shows that college played a paramount role among the productivity characteristics in narrowing the gender wage differential in 1980

an analysis of the effects of higher education on wage differentials between blacks and whites by gender in the united states previous analyses that have examined the effect to higher education on the wage differences between blacks and whites have largely been focussed on males and failed to provide quantitative estimates of the impact that higher education has on discrimination and the black white wage differential for both genders in 1980 in particular we find that equalizing the years of college completed by black and white males reduces the wage differential by 14 conversely equalizing the years of college completed by black and white females exacerbates wage inequality by increasing the wage advantage accruing to black females by nearly 24 hence the egalitarian policy mission of higher education in narrowing wage inequality between blacks and whites is complicated by the issue of gender

economic indicators of resource scarcity a critical essay abstract the theoretical arguments of the conceptual and empirical literature on economic indicators of long run resource scarcity are logically flawed if resource allocators were informed of the nature of resource scarcity their behavior and the economic indicators it generates would reflect the scarcity but if they were so informed we could simply ask them if resources were scarce if they are not informed their behavior and economic indicators are as likely to indicate their ignorance as the reality unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether they are informed or not unless we already know whether resources are scarce

direct estimates of the demand for race and sex discrimination for empirical economists one of the most fruitful areas of research has been the examination of racial sexual differences in wages and employment opportunities the dynamic movement of relative wages during the 1960s not only aroused widespread interest among the academic community it also spurred the search for ways to quantify both the level of wage discrimination and the secular changes in wage discrimination the two principle research models used in this regard have been what i shall refer to as the relative demand curve and wage decomposition approaches both approaches are inspired by the model exposited in gary becker s seminal work the economics of discrimination the relative demand curve approach interprets the intercept and time trend variables and secular changes in these variables as discrimination shifters in regression of relative wages on the relative quantities of blacks to whites the wage decomposition approach on the other hand looks at separate race specific wage regressions and takes the difference in the regression coefficients weighted by the mean value of the respective variable as indicators of wage discrimination in the next section i argue that both of these empirical approaches to estimating wage discrimination or changes in wage discrimination are intrinsically incapable of measuring becker s tastes for discrimination variable in section iii a new empirical approach to estimating wage discrimination the production function approach is presented and applied in section iv to a time series cross section of black and white

a spatial perspective on european integration heterogeneous welfare and migration effects from the single market and the brexit we use a quantitative model to study the implications of european integration for welfare and net migration flows across 1 280 european regions the model suggests that an increase of trade barriers to the level of 1957 reduces welfare by about 5 8 on average depending on the presumed trade elasticity however remote regions may face initial welfare losses of up to 10 these heterogeneous welfare effects cause estimated net migration of 1 9 of the population to the european geographic center implying that the dismantling of trade barriers in europe has led to a more homogeneous spatial distribution of economic activity with regard to the brexit we find moderate welfare losses for the united kingdom of 1 05 in the most pessimistic scenario while continental europe s welfare declines by 0 41 jel f15 r12 r13 r23

exploration and scarcity noting that a suggested measure of natural resource scarcity resource rent is unobservable we show that rent is linked to observable marginal exploration cost a two period model of extraction and exploration reveals that rent is equal to this cost when discovery is certain under risky exploration cost data can be used to bound rent the model also indicates how exploration uncertainty affects the competitive firm s extraction and exploration decisions finally the behavior of u s oil and gas exploration costs suggests that these costs were rising in the postwar era which has different implications for scarcity than indicated by other measures of scarcity

comparative advantage and the welfare impact of european integration this paper investigates the welfare gains from european trade integration and the role of comparative advantage in determining the magnitude of those gains we use a multi sector ricardian model implemented on 79 countries and compare welfare in the 2000s to a counterfactual scenario in which east european countries are closed to trade for west european countries the mean welfare gain from trade integration with eastern europe is 0 16 ranging from zero for portugal to 0 4 for austria for east european countries gains from trade are 9 23 at the mean ranging from 2 85 for russia to 20 for estonia for eastern europe comparative advantage is a key determinant of the variation in the welfare gains countries whose comparative advantage is most similar to western europe tend to gain less while countries with technology most different from western europe gain the most andrei a levchenko and jing zhang

willingness to pay for agricultural land preservation and policy process attributes does the method matter this article examines relationships between willingness to pay for land preservation and policy process attributes the approach departs from traditional welfare assessments in that it does not constrain attributes of the policy process to be utility neutral results indicate policy process attributes may influence utility in some circumstances even after controlling for the influence of land use outcomes often correlated with specific policy techniques results further imply that in some cases even comprehensive specification of land use outcomes by stated preference instruments may be insufficient to prevent systematic shifts in willingness to pay related to unspecified yet assumed policy process attributes

concepts and measures of natural resource scarcity with a summary of recent trends a general model of resource scarcity is presented from which previous models can be derived as special cases previous models of scarcity are compared and contrasted refining the concept of scarcity and leading to a resolution of current disputes over the appropriate measure of scarcity an update of the original work done by barnett and morse is summarized leading to reconsideration of their original conclusions it is found that energy and forest products experienced increasing scarcity during the 1970s

fragmentation incomes and jobs an analysis of european competitiveness increasing fragmentation of production across borders is changing the nature of international competition as a result conventional indicators of competitiveness based on gross exports are becoming less informative and new measures are needed this paper proposes an ex post accounting framework of the value added and workers that are directly and indirectly related to the production of final manufacturing goods the framework focuses on manufactures global value chain income and manufactures global value chain jobs the paper outlines these concepts and provides trends in european countries based on a recent multi sector input output model of the world economy the analysis finds that since 1995 revealed comparative advantage of the european union 27 is shifting to activities related to the production of nonelectrical machinery and transport equipment the workers involved in manufactures global value chains are increasingly in services rather than manufacturing industries the analysis also finds a strong shift toward activities carried out by high skilled workers highlighting the uneven distributional effects of fragmentation the results show that a global value chain perspective is needed to inform the policy debates on competitiveness

ecology sustainability and environment as capital abstract the idea of environment as capital has found widespread support in both the economic and ecological literature it is often suggested in a related sustainability literature that natural capital should remain intact if possible the popularity of this approach to exploring the human environment relationship is due in part to the way it is seemingly legitimised by ecological theory and practice this legitimation is important for emerging areas of human environment study such as ecological economics because ecology and other natural sciences have often dismissed economic constructions of the environment however a closer examination of the state of contemporary ecology suggests that there are problems with an ecological legitimation of the environment as capital approach first ecology itself is a troubled discipline and its ability to provide a comprehensive theory of human environment interactions is limited second emerging ecological discourse tends to undermine the ecological rationale for many natural capital related resource management recommendations this does not mean that the environment as capital concept is without considerable heuristic power it does imply however a need to return to a social construction of the environment in which different environmental possibilities are valued in terms of their potential contribution to human well being

intergenerational resource rights efficiency and social optimality the discipline of economics is generally defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources between competing social objectives given an initial distribution of resources between economic agents how would they behave so as to improve their welfare according to the pareto criterion the agents would exchange commodities until the opportunities for fruitful exchange were fully exhausted and no agent could be made better off without rendering at least one other agent worse off pareto efficiency is a powerful concept in microeconomic analysis provided that the initial distribution of property rights is equitable allocative efficiency gives rise to the best of all possible worlds acknowledging that the assumptions of perfect competition are often violated firms are monopolistic information is incomplete and externalities exist economists have argued for the modification of institutions so that economic reality will conform more closely to the assumptions of the model that yields such gratifying results but microeconomic theory has always maintained that allocative efficiency is in itself insufficient to maximize social welfare bator 1957 a social welfare function is required to discriminate a social optimum among the array of efficient allocations that correspond to alternative assignments of property rights though economists have posited alternative functional forms for the sake of pursuing conceptual arguments welfare functions have remained elusive constructs for well known theoretical and practical reasons consequently a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between questions of efficiency the province of economics and equity the principal focus of ethical and political discourse in resource economics however the line demarcating efficiency and equity is often crossed the term optimal depletion appears regularly where only efficient depletion is meant while political debates about resource exploitation over time are laden with questions of the proper distribution of our natural patrimony between generations resource economists have predominantly espoused particular use rules that guarantee efficiency but overlook potential improvements in social welfare achievable through the reassignment of property rights across generations we document the evolution and current status of the misuse of the term optimal depletion in section ii we develop a simple two generation three period general equilibrium model in section iii to illustrate how alternative distributions of resource rights between generations relate to alternative pareto efficient solutions in section iv we demonstrate how different social welfare functions affect the optimal solution and associated assignment of resource rights between generations

world oil production trend comparing hubbert multi cycle curves worldwide shale oil resources in the u s china russia poland and france could mean that potential world oil production could double or triple in the next few decades however not all of these new reserves may be as large or as productive as north dakota s bakken shale oil in addition reserves of shale oil look to be a lot less in relative terms than the reserves of shale gas as evidenced by the price of natural gas in the u s compared to the price of oil this suggests that the u s and world supplies of shale oil may be limited in this article we will look to attempt a different type of forecast for oil using a modified hubbert curve oil production forecast we look at possible world oil production trends rather than just u s oil production trends two interesting comparisons of the world oil production trend to other regional trends are the former soviet union s oil production trend and the u s oil production trend if we compare the current world oil production trend to those previous trends using indexation then we can get an idea of what may happen to world oil production in the future

openness and income the roles of trade and migration abstract this paper explores the relationship between openness to trade immigration and income per person across countries to address endogeneity concerns we extend the instrumental variables strategy introduced by frankel and romer 1999 we build predictors of openness to immigration and to trade for each country by using information on bilateral geographical and cultural distance while controlling for country size since geography may affect income through other channels we also control for climate disease environment natural resources and colonial origins most importantly we also account for the roles of institutions and early development our instrumental variables estimates provide evidence of a robust positive effect of openness to immigration on long run income per capita in contrast we are unable to establish an effect of trade openness on income we also show that the effect of migration operates through an increase in total factor productivity which appears to reflect increased diversity in productive skills and to some extent a higher rate of innovation

where ricardo and mill rebut and confirm arguments of mainstream economists supporting globalization most noneconomists are fearful when an emerging china or india helped by their still low real wage rates outsourcing and miracle export led developments cause layoffs from good american jobs this is a hot issue now and in the coming decade it will not go away prominent and competent mainstream economists enter into the debate to educate and correct warm hearted protestors who are against globalization here is a fair paraphrase of the argumentation that has been used recently by alan greenspan jagdish bhagwati gregory mankiw douglas irwin and economists john or jane doe spread widely throughout academia yes good jobs may be lost here in the short run but still total u s net national product must by the economic laws of comparative advantage be raised in the long run and in china too the gains of the winners from free trade properly measured work out to exceed the losses of the losers this is not by mysterious fuzzy magic but rather comes from a sharing of the trade induced rise in total global vectors of the goods and services that people in a democracy want never forget to tally the real gains of consumers alongside admitted possible losses of some producers in this working out of what schumpeter called creative capitalist destruction correct economic law recognizes that some american groups can be hurt by dynamic free trade but correct economic law vindicates the word creative destruction by its proof sic that the gains of the american winners are big enough to more than compensate the losers

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

an alternative approach to the analysis of wage differentials a key question in many studies of male female or black white wage differentials is how much of the differential can be explained by economic factors and how much remains unexplained the unexplained portion is then ascribed to discrimination since oaxaca 17 first formalized this decomposition the residual difference methodology has been the dominant methodology utilized in empirical studies of wage differentials 4 7 8 10 15 18 but recently the validity of the assumptions underlying the residual difference methodology have been called into question by butler 5 6 in this paper the theoretical underpinnings of the residual difference methodology are reexamined and an alternative theoretical framework for this methodology is suggested the new framework overcomes the shortcomings inherent in oaxaca s specification of the model and therefore provides a sound theoretical foundation for the residual difference decomposition

ricardian productivity differences and the gains from trade abstract this paper evaluates the role of sectoral heterogeneity in determining the gains from trade we first show analytically that in the presence of sectoral ricardian comparative advantage a one sector sufficient statistic formula that uses total trade volumes as a share of total absorption systematically understates the true gains from trade greater relative sectoral productivity differences lead to larger disparities between the gains implied by the one sector formula and the true gains using data on overall and sectoral trade shares in a sample of 79 countries and 19 sectors we show that the multi sector formula implies on average 30 higher gains from trade than the one sector formula and as much as 100 higher gains for some countries we then set up and estimate a quantitative ricardian heckscher ohlin model in which no version of the formula applies exactly and compare a range of sufficient statistic formulas to the true gains in this model confirming the earlier results formulas that do not take into account the sectoral heterogeneity understate the true gains from trade in the model by as much as two thirds the one sector formulas understate the gains by more in countries with greater dispersion in sectoral productivities

oil and the economy a systematic review of the literature for ecological economists abstract this article offers a systematic review of the mainstream literature in oil economics macroeconomics international and financial economics and political economy complementing and complicating the way ecological economics understands the links between oil and the economy we look at the supply and demand factors that affect oil prices the ways oil prices affect the economy the effect of interest rates capital flows and exchange rates on oil prices and extraction and the role of geo politics in governing oil and money flows we develop an illustrative system model of the causal pathways that link oil and the economy and compare alternative explanations of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and 2000s the emphasis of ecological economics on peak oil and resource limits to growth may be relevant over the long run but is less capable of explaining precisely how oil contributes to concrete economic short run crises now

optimal pricing use and exploration of uncertain natural resource stocks abstract units of natural resources to be called mines are assumed distributed over an unexplored territory according to a poisson process in space at any moment total reserves and unexplored land are given society can determine the rate of consumption and the rate of exploration reserves are drawn down by consumption and increased by discoveries made during exploration the amount of unexplored land is decreased by exploration at any moment the payoff of society is a concave function of consumption less a linear function of exploration with future payoffs discounted optimal policies are considered and in particular it is shown for a large amount of unexplored land the shadow prices of reserves and of unexplored land move in random cycles but show only a slight upward tread thereby casting some light on the failure of mineral prices to rise at the market rate of interest

the taxation of nonreplenishable natural resources revisited abstract the theory of nonreplenishable resource extraction has been extended to allow for extraction costs which increase as deposits are increasingly depleted in these cases profit maximization may result in the cessation of extraction before reserves are totally exhausted the effect of various taxation policies on optimal extraction patterns in these models are derived with a few exceptions the results are that the imposition of a tax will cause operators to extract at faster rates over shorter periods of time and to reduce the total amount of ore extracted the analysis allows for an output price which increases over time

information and exhaustible resources a bayesian analysis abstract we develop a continuous time bayesian model of investment in information about an exhaustible resource because of the way that information affects expectations the deterministic hotelling rule turns out to be more appropriate as a description of how resource owners forecast the value of their stocks than as a predictor of observed changes in the resource price a flow of information generates both unanticipated changes in expectations which cause the mean rate of change in the resource price to deviate systematically from the deterministic hotelling rule and reductions in uncertainty which do not affect the hotelling prediction

choice experiments site similarity and benefits transfer choice experiments are designed to account for variations in environmental resources and site characteristics as well as potential implications of these variations for willingness to pay as a result choice experiment results may be well suited for benefits transfer it is unclear however whether the flexibility of choice experiments renders the similarity of study and transfer sites less critical for transfer validity drawing from identical choice experiments conducted in different rhode island communities this model assesses the extent to which error in function based benefits transfer is related to the similarity of communities across a variety of observable dimensions results suggest that site similarity at least across some dimensions influences the validity of choice experiment benefits transfers however the use of some measures of similarity as indicators of transfer error may provide misleading results

on the global economic potentials and marginal costs of non renewable resources and the price of energy commodities a model is presented in this work for simulating endogenously the evolution of the marginal costs of production of energy carriers from non renewable resources their consumption depletion pathways and timescales such marginal costs can be used to simulate the long term average price formation of energy commodities drawing on previous work where a global database of energy resource economic potentials was constructed this work uses cost distributions of non renewable resources in order to evaluate global flows of energy commodities a mathematical framework is given to calculate endogenous flows of energy resources given an exogenous commodity price path this framework can be used in reverse in order to calculate an endogenous marginal cost of production of energy carriers given an exogenous carrier demand using rigid price inelastic assumptions independent of the economy these two approaches generate limiting scenarios that depict extreme use of natural resources this is useful to characterise the current state and possible uses of remaining non renewable resources such as fossil fuels and natural uranium the theory is however designed for use within economic or technology models that allow technology substitutions in this work it is implemented in the global power sector model ftt power policy implications are given

resource taxation with heterogeneous quality and endogenous reserves abstract this paper analyzes the impact of mining taxation on the intertemporal extraction profile for a heterogeneous ore body the extraction profile specifies both quantities and qualities extracted in each period total extraction is thus endogenously determined the taxes explicitly considered are severance taxes ad valorem or per unit on metal or on ore property taxes and profits taxes with depletion allowance the intertemporal framework integrates economic and geological factors generating new results on extraction distortions and providing qualification or reconciliation of previous diverse results in this area

on the ehrlich simon bet both were unskilled and simon was lucky abstract in 1980 biologist paul ehrlich and economist julian simon entered into a bet over whether the real prices of five resources would increase or fall between 1980 and 1990 because the real prices of the five resources declined simon won the bet but simon won not because he was more skilled than ehrlich nor because he correctly predicted the changing absolute scarcity of the five relevant resources simon won because he was lucky resource prices reflect the relative scarcity of different resource types not their absolute scarcity given the basis upon which ehrlich and simon entered the bet both men revealed their lack of understanding of the relationship between absolute resource scarcity and resource prices in the end simon was lucky because factors other than a rise in absolute scarcity had the greatest impact on resource prices between 1980 and 1990

schooling and changes in the inequality in male and female earnings in the united states over the 1970s ref jnl au fn j s sn akin eau au fn i sn garfinkel eau chti the quality of education and cohort variation in black white earnings ditferentials comment title american economic review vol 70 year 1980 fp 186 lp 191 ejnl bk au fn g sn becker eau title the economics of discrimination pub name university of chicago press cty chicago year 1957 epub ebk jnl au fn a h sn beller eau chti the impact of equal opportunity policy on sex differentials in earnings and occupations title american economic review vol 72 year 1982a fp 171 lp 175 ejnl jnl au fn a h sn beller eau chti occupational segregation by sex determinants and changes title journal of human resource vol 17 year 1982b fp 371 lp 192 ejnl jnl au fn b r sn bergmann eau chti the effect on white income of discrimination in employment title journal of political economy vol 6 year 1971 fp 294 lp 313 ejnl jnl au fn a s sn blinder eau chti wage discri

much ado about hotelling beware the ides of hubbert abstract much economic literature analyzes the hotelling principal little economic literature analyzes the hubbert curve although much controversy surrounds it this difference in emphasis by economists needs to be reconsidered critically and towards that end we attempt to look at both concepts simultaneously we test whether a simple hubbert curve model is a significant determinant of world oil price changes and whether one of the main determinants of the hotelling principle the discount rate also affects world oil prices an autoregressive distributed lag ardl bound testing approach is used to examine the effects of a hubbert index variable and a hotelling discount rate variable on the world wide price of oil results show the discount rate the most important hotelling variable has little effect on oil prices but that the hubbert curve model does show a large effect on oil prices oil is a non renewable natural resource par excellence yet the results suggest that the hotelling principle is not an important determinant for oil prices yet the hubbert curve and the theory surrounding the hubbert curve is an important determinant of oil prices