three principles for market based credit regulation a key lesson of the financial crisis 2007 09 is that the bagehot rule lend freely but at a high rate needs to be updated for the emerging market based credit system a modern rule is suggested markets not banks outside spread not inside spread core not periphery

too big to manage us megabanks competition by innovation and the microfoundations of financialization disagreements over the systemic implications the future of financialization can be traced in part to the absence of sustained attention to the role of banking firms in driving this secular shift forward that is the financialization literature lacks an adequate microfoundation accounting for the drivers of financialization processes solely at the macro level overlooks the problems of how these processes came about and whether they are sustainable this paper addresses this explanatory gap arguing that a key independent microeconomic driver of increasing financialization did exist the incessant efforts by money centre banks in the usa to break out of depression era restrictions on their size activities and markets these banks growth strategies in turbulent times led to an institutional meso shift the rise of a megabank centred shadow banking system that now shapes global financial architecture even while operating in ways that are unsustainable in short too big to manage megabanks are at the heart of the fragility and instability of the economy today

structural causes of the global financial crisis a critical assessment of the new financial architecture we are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the great depression this crisis is the latest phase of the evolution of financial markets under the radical financial deregulation process that began in the late 1970s this evolution has taken the form of cycles in which deregulation accompanied by rapid financial innovation stimulates powerful financial booms that end in crises governments respond to crises with bailouts that allow new expansions to begin as a result financial markets have become ever larger and financial crises have become more threatening to society which forces governments to enact ever larger bailouts this process culminated in the current global financial crisis which is so deeply rooted that even unprecedented interventions by affected governments have thus far failed to contain it in this paper we analyse the structural flaws in the financial system that helped bring on the current crisis and discuss prospects for financial reform

an experimental investigation of the patterns of international trade this study is the first attempt to create and study a laboratory economy with some of the prominent features of an international economic system the concept of multiple countries in which each country has its own technology preferences and resource endowments is introduced and operationalized the questions posed in the study are related to the law of comparative advantage factor price equalization terms of trade efficiency in production and exchange as guided by multiple and interacting markets and the effects of tariffs on international transactions the study builds on previous work in the experimental study of general equilibrium phenomena

addressing social dilemmas with mascots information and graphics acknolwedgements this research was supported by funding from the national science foundation for the north east water resources network newrnet grant iia 1330406 and from the center for behavioral and experimental agri environmental research cbear which is supported by the u s department of agriculture economic research service we are grateful for comments received during the 2015 northeastern agricultural and resource economics association annual meeting and the 2015 behavioral and experimental economists of the mid atlantic conference authors listed in alphabetical order

recent advances in the valuation of ecosystem services and biodiversity recent interest in the economics of biodiversity and wider ecosystem services has been given empirical expression through a focus upon economic valuation this emphasis has been prompted by a growing recognition that the benefits and opportunity costs associated with such services are frequently given cursory consideration in policy analyses or even completely ignored the valuation of biodiversity and ecosystem services is therefore increasingly seen as a crucial element of robust decision making and this has been reflected in a growing body of related research we provide a critical review of some of this research considering the valuation methods applied to date and focussing upon their limitations in respect to certain categories of ecosystem services particularly cultural services and the applicability of the extant literature to new settings substantial questions also remain at the interface of natural science and economics and we consider the potential contribution of the conceptualization of ecosystems as assets as a response to this challenge as part of this review we also highlight the role which large scale ecosystem assessments have played as an impetus to extending the valuation evidence base and the way in which frameworks and assessments of how ecosystems contribute to human wellbeing might be translated into policy thinking and decision analyses

empirical studies of financial innovation lots of talk little action this paper reviews the extant empirical studies of financial innovation adopting broad criteria we could find only somewhat more than two dozen studies and since some financial innovations are examined by more than one study they cover only seventeen phenomena especially striking is the fact that only two studies offer tests of the broad hypotheses concerning the environmental conditions spurring financial innovation e g regulation taxes unstable macroeconomic conditions and ripe technologies that have been advanced in descriptive articles we offer some tentative conjectures as to why empirical studies of financial innovation are comparatively rare among our suggested culprits is an absence of accessible data we urge financial regulators to undertake more surveys of financial innovation and to make the survey data more available to researchers

incentive based policy design for pollution control and biodiversity conservation a review this paper provides a succinct review of the main developments in the literature on incentive based policy mechanisms in the contexts of pollution control and biodiversity conservation dating from the early beginnings of the science in the 1960s a focal point in the review is on the design features of these policy mechanisms key developments in policy design were originally established in controlling externalities arising from pollution and have since been extended to policy design tailored towards biodiversity conservation special emphasis is given to the spatial characteristics of the environmental problems underlying both pollution control and biodiversity conservation the paper concludes by drawing some lessons and setting out elements of a future research agenda in both policy domains

housing really is the business cycle what survives the lessons of 2008 09 the downturn of 2008 09 has confirmed that i housing is the single most critical part of the u s business cycle ii the proper conduct of monetary policy needs to be cognizant that choices made at one point in time affect the options later and iii the best time to intervene in the housing cycle is when the volume of building is above normal and growing more so what was different this time was the rapid and substantial decline in home prices

transaction costs communication and spatial coordination in payment for ecosystem services schemes agricultural producer participation and spatial coordination of land use decisions are key components for enhancing the effective delivery of ecosystem services from private land however inducing participation in payment for ecosystem services schemes for coordinating land management choices is challenging from a policy design perspective owing to transaction costs associated with participation this paper employs a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of such costs on participation and land use in the context of an agglomeration bonus ab scheme the ab creates a coordination game with multiple nash equilibria related to alternative spatially coordinated land use patterns the experiment varies transaction costs between two levels high and low which affects the risks and payoffs of coordinating on the different equilibria additionally an option to communicate is implemented between neighbors arranged on a local network to facilitate spatial coordination results indicate a significant difference in participation and performance under high and low transaction costs with lower uptake and performance when transaction costs are high these effects are however impacted by transaction costs faced in the past communication improves both ab participation rates and performance with the effect being greater for participants facing high transaction costs

renewable micro generation of heat and electricity review on common and missing socio technical configurations abstract a widespread adoption of distributed generation dg technologies in energy systems can play a key role in creating clean reliable energy and support the targets of emission reduction a transition from current modes of production to a significant deployment of renewable energy technologies can fundamentally affect the structure of the industry and change the way energy is produced transmitted and sold the current paper provides an extended review of the socio technical configurations of micro generation based on journal publications and reports during the 21st century the paper analyses currently existing and missing configurations and discusses technology and policy implications to support proliferation of micro generation technology and local energy production from renewable sources the potential for new configurations can be found particularly in heat producing micro generation with solar heat heat pumps and biomass developing further the operations and maintenance of distributed generation technologies and business models appears an area that calls for further innovation and corresponding innovation policy measures third party service and community driven deployment models can aide the proliferation of distributed generation and further innovation therein justifying the introduction of feed in tariffs to attract such models during their early diffusion

when does public information undermine the efficiency of reverse auctions for the purchase of ecosystem services abstract government agencies that conduct reverse auctions related to the payment of ecosystem services pes traditionally provide a significant amount of public information about past auction results this information includes not only the amount of money spent by the government but also can include various information about the accepted bids this research uses induced value experiments to evaluate the effect of past auction information on seller landholder rent seeking results suggest that sellers use this public information and learn how to secure higher rents however when sellers are given information only about the buyer s government agency s budget they secure lower rents results also suggest that relative budget size affects rents and that budget stochastic variability in the presence of market information diminishes the effect thus in the presence of public information and equivalent total outlays variable budgets are more likely than stationary budgets to achieve auction fiscal efficiency the measure of whether the auction achieves the greatest pes benefits given its limited budget finally this research finds that auctions with greater heterogeneity in seller opportunity costs are likely to be less fiscally efficient than when the distribution is more homogeneous

optimal installation of small hydropower plant a review abstract most of the countries have access to large amounts of water through rivers and canal with this renewable resource electricity can be generated without polluting the environment because of the increasing in electricity demand it is important to estimate the future potential of hydropower it would then be possible to plan development through mix of energy and implement measures to control the development of the electricity market by the use of sustainable small hydropower projects in the present paper attempt has been made to review the different types of model developed to evaluate the cost of the small hydropower projects a review on the different types of correlations developed by earlier investigators has also been presented the present review attempts to cover the benefits such as clean development mechanism cdm internal rate of return irr for financial viability of such projects a review on the different types of optimization techniques is also been presented to minimize the cost of the installation of shp projects

the ecosystem services framework and natural capital conservation work at the interface of ecology and economics has inspired a major transformation in the way people think about the environment increasingly ecosystems are seen as capital assets with the potential to generate a stream of vital life support services meriting careful evaluation and investment we first present the concepts underpinning the ecosystem services framework esf laying out the scope and limitations of the approach we then describe the major challenges in making the esf operational i detailed information at scales relevant to decision making ii practical know how in the process of institutional design implementation and iii compelling models of success in which economic incentives are aligned with conservation we close with a brief review of pioneering experiments now underway worldwide which illustrate how these challenges can be overcome

conservation auctions should information about environmental benefits be made public most bid evaluation systems in conservation auctions consider both the proposed payment and the environmental attributes when auctioneers have a more comprehensive understanding of the conservation benefits than bidders do information becomes a central element of the auction design concealing information about conservation benefits may be the optimal strategy when entry decisions are not relevant however disclosing information may motivate landholders whose lands are associated with high environmental benefits to participate in an auction the present study demonstrates that revealing information about conservation benefits can be an optimal strategy if it enhances an auction s participation rate when bid acceptance rates are high copyright 2013 oxford university press

assessing the performance of conservation auctions an experimental study this work uses controlled laboratory experiments to investigate the budgetary and the economic performance of competitive tenders for allocating conservation contracts to landholders experiments have been replicated in two different countries to check for robustness of results we find that auctions outperform the more traditional fixed price programs only in the one shot setting with repetition the auctions quickly lose their edge the budget constrained auction performs similarly to the target constrained in the one shot setting but appears more robust to repetition our results suggest that previous estimates of conservation auction performance are too optimistic and we propose a method for improving such estimates

introduction the global financial crisis there cannot now be a shadow of a doubt that the flaw in his ideology admitted by alan greenspan in response to a question by henry a waxman chairman of the us house of representatives committee on oversight and government reform whether he felt that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made is both significant and permanent the current financial and economic crisis that has forced the likes of greenspan to question the coherence of dominant conceptual frameworks is unprecedented in global reach and systemic gravity some basic figures speak for themselves according to mckinsey s mapping global financial markets october 2008 global financial assets rose from us 12 trillion in 1980 to us 196 trillion in 2007 the international monetary fund s global financial stability report imf 2009a estimate for the latter figure is considerably higher at us 241 trillion global cross border capital flows more than doubled between 2002 and 2007 with foreign investors holding one in four debt securities and one in five equities while in 2000 only 11 countries had financial assets of more than 350 of gross domestic product gdp 25 countries had deepened their financial markets to the same extent by 2007 as early as 1990 money managers had increased their control of us corporate equities from 8 in 1950 to 60 porter 1992 p 6 whalen 2002 p 402 similarly pension funds had extended their share of total business equities from less than 1 to just short of 39 and their fraction of corporate debt from 13 to 50 ghilarducci 1992 p 117 whalen 2002 p 402 in the period from 1986 to 2006 the us financial sector as a whole increased its share of corporate profits from 10 to 30 while its outstanding debts grew from 20 of gdp in 1980 to 116 in 2007 fed 2009 according to gillian tett from the financial times outstanding credit defaults swaps cds today amount to no less than us 60 trillion with the risk embodied after discounting mutually off setting contracts still as high as us 14 trillion tett 2009 p 264 as we know the curtains have now come down on this dance of the trillions palma 2009 the immediate hang over in the form of a pile of toxic debt is surreal not only in its

economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline there is mounting evidence of pollinator decline all over the world and consequences in many agricultural areas could be significant we assessed these consequences by measuring 1 the contribution of insect pollination to the world agricultural output economic value and 2 the vulnerability of world agriculture in the face of pollinator decline we used a bioeconomic approach which integrated the production dependence ratio on pollinators for the 100 crops used directly for human food worldwide as listed by fao the total economic value of pollination worldwide amounted to 153 billion which represented 9 5 of the value of the world agricultural production used for human food in 2005 in terms of welfare the consumer surplus loss was estimated between 190 and 310 billion based upon average price elasticities of 1 5 to 0 8 respectively vegetables and fruits were the leading crop categories in value of insect pollination with about 50 billion each followed by edible oil crops stimulants nuts and spices the production value of a ton of the crop categories that do not depend on insect pollination averaged 151 while that of those that are pollinator dependent averaged 761 the vulnerability ratio was calculated for each crop category at the regional and world scales as the ratio between the economic value of pollination and the current total crop value this ratio varied considerably among crop categories and there was a positive correlation between the rate of vulnerability to pollinators decline of a crop category and its value per production unit looking at the capacity to nourish the world population after pollinator loss the production of 3 crop categories namely fruits vegetables and stimulants will clearly be below the current consumption level at the world scale and even more so for certain regions like europe yet although our valuation clearly demonstrates the economic importance of insect pollinators it cannot be considered as a scenario since it does not take into account the strategic responses of the markets

applying tradable permits to biodiversity conservation effects of space dependent conservation benefits and cost heterogeneity on habitat allocation this paper is concerned with the cost effective allocation of habitat for species under spatio temporally heterogeneous economic development to address the dynamic dimension of the problem we consider tradable development rights as the instrument of choice a particular challenge in applying tradable development rights is that the conservation benefit of an individual habitat patch depends on its spatial relationship with other habitat patches and thus is an emergent rather than a fixed property we analyse with a conceptual model the spatial and temporal dynamics of habitats in a region under a tradable development rights market that takes spatial interaction of habitats explicitly into account in our analysis two different outcomes may emerge depending on the levels of spatial interaction and cost heterogeneity an ordered structure where habitat patches are clustered in space and are stable over time and a disordered structure where habitat patches are scattered in space and subject to high turnover of destruction and recreation a high level of spatial interaction or a low level of cost heterogeneity favours an ordered structure while a low level of spatial interaction or a high level of cost heterogeneity favours a disordered structure

tradable set aside requirements tsars conserving spatially dependent environmental amenities land conversion patterns can conflict with endangered species protection by fragmenting the landscape incentive mechanisms can help mitigate the threat of habitat fragmentation by aggregating landowner conservation decisions across the landscape the optimal conservation strategy for endangered species can target the most connected habitat cluster as an initial starting point and then expand the conservation patch to maximize connectivity herein we present an incentive mechanism the tradable set aside requirements tsars designed to target the low cost contiguous conservation landscape and share the burden of conservation among landowners in the lab we examine the performance of two land use conservation policies tsars and the tsars combined with an agglomeration bonus evaluated by economic and biological measures of efficiency we find that tsars relative to a command and control policy increases patch size and habitat connectivity within the landscape additionally combining tsars with the agglomeration bonus increases biological efficiency habitat connectivity and patch size within the landscape but at a price higher opportunity cost tsars with the agglomeration bonus can be more cost effective than a tsars only policy for species sensitive to large core habitat requirements and landscape connectivity

bee pollination and productivity growth the case of alfalfa the spread of commercial pollination has received little attention in the literature analyzing the growth in u s agricultural productivity between world war i and 1960 growers of most fruits nuts and seeds came to realize that intensive bee pollination was essential to achieve high yields alfalfa seed growers were among the last groups to adopt commercial pollination this article examines the dramatic impact that concentrating bees in alfalfa seed fields had on yields which resulted in the restructuring of the alfalfa industry the fourth most valuable commodity grown in the united states in the 1950s

a laboratory study of auctions for reducing non point source pollution abstract non point source pollution such as nutrient runoff to waterways from agricultural production is an environmental problem that typically involves asymmetric information land use changes to reduce pollution incur opportunity costs that are privately known to landholders but these changes provide environmental benefits that may be more accurately estimated by regulators this paper reports a testbed laboratory experiment in which landholder sellers in sealed offer auctions compete to obtain part of a fixed budget allocated by the regulator to subsidize abatement in one treatment the regulator reveals to landholders the environmental benefits estimated for their projects and in another treatment the regulator conceals the potential projects environmental quality the results show that sellers offers misrepresent their costs more for high quality projects when quality is revealed so total abatement is lower and seller profits are higher when landholders know their projects environmental benefits this suggests that concealing this information may improve regulatory efficiency

auctioning risky conservation contracts conservation auctions have the potential to increase the efficiency of payments to farmers to adopt conservation friendly management practices by fostering competition among them the literature considers bidders that have complete information about the costs of adoption and optimal bidding behavior reflects this information advantage farmers seek information rents and bids decrease when risk aversion increases because farmers are more averse to losing the auction we contribute to the literature by allowing for cost risk our paper shows that farmers must balance the risk of losing the auction thus foregoing information rent with the risk of submitting a bid that is not high enough to pay the costs of adopting conservation practices thus incurring losses we design an experiment to trade off these two risks and examine how risk aversion affects bidding behavior when participants face different sources and levels of risk our experiment contributes to a small literature on experimental auctions with risky product valuations we find that participants decrease their bids as risk aversion increases even in auctions with cost risk suggesting that the risk of losing the auction dominates these findings uncover new challenges for the practical implementation of conservation auctions as an efficient policy instrument

the macroeconomic cost of catastrophic pollinator declines we develop a computable general equilibrium cge approach to assess the macroeconomic impacts of productivity shocks due to catastrophic losses of pollination ecosystem services at global and regional scales in most regions producers of pollinator dependent crops end up benefiting because direct output losses are outweighed by increased prices while non agricultural sectors experience large adverse indirect impacts resulting in overall losses whose magnitudes vary substantially by comparison partial equilibrium analyses tend to overstate the costs to agricultural producers understate aggregate economy wide losses and overstate the impacts on consumers welfare our results suggest an upper bound on global willingness to pay for agricultural pollination services of 127 152 billion

a laboratory comparison of uniform and discriminative price auctions for reducing non point source pollution auctions allow regulators to identify land management changes with substantial environmental benefit and low opportunity cost this paper reports an experiment in which seller subjects compete in sealed offer auctions to obtain part of a fixed budget allocated by the experimenter regulator to subsidize pollution abatement one treatment employs uniform price auction rules whereas another treatment employs discriminative price auction rules we find that most offers in the uniform price auction are within 2 of cost whereas most offers in the discriminative price auction are at least 8 greater than cost nevertheless the discriminativeprice auction has superior overall market performance

exploring the role of economic incentives and spillover effects in biodiversity conservation policies in sub saharan africa abstract a vast array of empirical work investigates the issue of biodiversity conservation but the focus is often limited on the search for possible causes of biodiversity erosion biodiversity conservation policymaking is still understudied in this study this gap is empirically addressed on a sample of 48 sub saharan countries over the 1990 2009 period taking the ecoregion protection score provided by the center for international earth science information network ciesin as a measure of biodiversity conservation policies it is sought whether economic incentives such as biodiversity targeted international transfers as well as tourism revenues have an impact on biodiversity conservation policies moreover spillover effects are also hypothesized owing to the public good character of biodiversity conservation policies international financial assistance as well as tourism are found to have an effect on biodiversity conservation policymaking our results also evidence complementary spatial spillover effects between biodiversity conservation policies

a note on information revelation in procurement auctions abstract this paper is about a procurement auction setting introduced in gal or gal or and dukes 2007 in which suppliers offer differentiated products and the buyer needs to decide whether to reveal or not to the suppliers the own preferences for the various products we provide some technical remarks and complements to the analysis of gal or gal or and dukes 2007 and an extension to the case of risk averse suppliers

valuing ecosystem services on the basis of service providing units a potential approach to address the endpoint problem and improve stated preference methods abstract standardized methods are required to measure ecosystem services in order to value them in this paper we argue that the service providing unit spu concept may help achieve this objective by promoting the systematic quantification of the key components of nature that provide services e g population density of a key pollinator and linking these with measurable outcomes for human well being we discuss and provide examples of the potential role of the spu concept in improving economic valuation of ecosystem services further we suggest the concept may contribute to addressing the endpoint problem which can be defined simply as the inability of researchers to communicate the implications of environmental change in a way that is understood by a broad cross section of society the endpoint problem is of particular relevance to stated preference approaches and we discuss the capacity of the spu concept to refine these approaches we argue that the concept enhances interdisciplinary collaboration promoting more validated well informed valuation applications it also has the potential to minimize warm glow effects and put the notion of marginal changes in the provision of ecosystem services in a new light

adverse selection in reverse auctions for ecosystem services this paper examines how auctions for ecosystem services introduce adverse selection limiting cost effectiveness induced value experiments test theory and examine the extent of adverse selection in these markets in comparison to the baseline of either doing nothing or the optimality of an externality correcting tax a discriminatory reverse auction and two screening contracts are tested in limited budget situations the auction achieved the lowest social surplus while screening contracts that rely upon the government observing the development value yield the highest relative social surplus these results are important because recent environmental policy trends are focused on expanding fiscally costly reverse auctions jel q57 q58

adding realism to the agglomeration bonus how endogenous land returns affect habitat fragmentation abstract the agglomeration bonus has been shown to be a potentially successful policy to reunite fragmented habitat and increase conservation enrollment in laboratory testbed experiments yet one key criticism has been that land prices have been assumed exogenous and fixed in these experiments in the field voluntary conservation enrollment by landowners will likely affect the value of the surrounding land this endogeneity of land values suggests a discrepancy between results from laboratory experiments and true landowner decisions under a given policy we address this concern by using an experimental design that accounts for the endogenous effect on surrounding land values from habitat conservation based on estimated returns from an actual landscape in eastern wyoming as a case study we show that without incorporating endogenous land values traditional laboratory experiments likely will underestimate the amount of habitat fragmentation resulting from basic conservation policies without agglomeration bonuses we also find that a low cost agglomeration bonus can work to reunite this fragmented habitat even under endogenous land value conditions our research indicates that through voluntary conservation decisions by private landowners a more cost effective bonus scheme can create contiguous habitat across privately held land even when incorporating realistic endogenous land values

automatic responses of crop stocks and policies buffer climate change effects on crop markets and price volatility abstract climate change has the potential to affect crop prices and price volatility however the economic models used in prior assessments largely do not include known automatic stabilizing factors crop storage can stabilize prices and u s crop policy tends to provide support that moves opposite prices we quantify effects of circa 2050 climate forcing on the inter annual variability of u s corn belt corn and soybean yields using statistical crop models and climate scenarios from regional and global climate models climate change generally reduces mean yields and increases the inter annual variability of yields in the midwestern u s using these yield impacts and an economic model with automatic market stabilizers we find only modest increases in price volatility although individual producers and states are negatively affected by the yield reductions the aggregate effect for all corn and soybean producer returns can be positive because of price increases moreover agricultural policies based on price levels or revenue variation offset some of the impacts of market variation on farm income our results differ from other recent results and temper concerns that increasing climate instability necessarily translates to greater uncertainty about agricultural commodity uses including as food and biofuels in the near future

preference learning in consecutive experimental auctions this paper explores the origins of the strikingly high price premia paid for new food products in lab valuation exercises our experimental design distinguishes between two explanations of this phenomenon novelty of the experimental experience versus the novelty of the good i e preference learning bids reflect a person s desire to learn how an unfamiliar good fits into their preference set subjects bid in four consecutive experimental auctions for three goods that vary in familiarity candy bars mangos and irradiated meat our results suggest that preference learning is the main source of the high premia and that novelty of the experimental experience does not in itself artificially inflate valuations copyright 2000 oxford university press

the impact of information provision on agglomeration bonus performance an experimental study on local networks the agglomeration bonus is an incentive mechanism to induce adjacent landowners to spatially coordinate their land use for the delivery of ecosystem services from farmland this paper uses laboratory experiments to explore the performance of the agglomeration bonus in achieving the socially optimal land management configuration in a local network environment where the information available to subjects varies and the strategic setting is unfavorable for efficient coordination the experiments indicate that if subjects are informed about both their direct and indirect neighbors actions they are more likely to produce the socially optimal configuration thus effectiveness of the policy can be improved by implementing information dissemination exercises among landowners however given the adverse strategic setting increased game experience leads to coordination failure and optimal land choices only at the localized level independent of the information available to subjects thus success of the agglomeration bonus scheme on real landscapes will have to take account of the roles of both information and experience on participant behavior

institutional incentives for managing the landscape inducing cooperation for the production of ecosystem services abstract agricultural landscapes hold tremendous potential for producing a diverse stream of ecosystem services yet because the spatial configuration of particular ecosystems is critical to the supply of many services realizing this potential requires that farms be managed in a coordinated way across landscapes rather than as independent units under existing incentive programs this level of coordination is typically neither required nor encouraged here we explore how to achieve such coordination from an institutional perspective using voluntary incentives rather than regulation we focus on three services operating at contrasting scales from local to global pollination hydrologic services and carbon sequestration first we briefly illustrate how agricultural practices can diminish or enhance their provision next we show how all three services require coordinated landscape scale management because provision depends upon particular spatial configurations of which we provide several stylized examples finally based on these stylized configurations we evaluate the relative merits of three incentive designs the cooperation bonus the entrepreneur and the ecosystem service district to promote cross farm cooperation to enhance service provision all three incentive systems rely on rational self interest have cooperative configurations to promote ecosystem services across different scales use tiered reward systems and have a major voluntary element they are distinct in certain key features the cooperation bonus system rewards conservation even without cooperation but adds a bonus for cooperation in the entrepreneur incentive all tiers of reward are contingent upon cooperation the ecosystem service district scheme is only partially voluntary and forces cooperation of all landowners once the district is formed our analysis of these heuristic alternatives integrates biophysical economic and institutional factors with the aim of addressing the suite of institutional barriers for landscape scale management

information and auction performance a laboratory study of conservation auctions for spatially contiguous land management conservation auctions are used by public agencies to procure environmental friendly land uses from private landowners we present the structure of an iterative conservation auction that ranks bids according to a scoring rule intended to procure spatially adjacent conservation land use projects laboratory experiments are conducted to compare the performance of this auction under two information conditions under one condition subjects have knowledge about the spatial goal implemented by the scoring rule and in the other case they don t the results indicate that rent seeking is intensified with more information and increased bidder familiarity with the auction revealing the spatial information on the other hand has no impact on auction efficiency

micro hydro power in the uk the role of communities in an emerging energy resource research around micro hydro power is focused on technical aspects with limited understanding of the social organisation and environmental implications we examine the ways in which micro hydro is engaged by people and organisations as a means of contributing to the uk s policy ambition for renewable energy we bring to the fore the way in which expertise is used and contested a web based review of micro hydro schemes in the uk was undertaken and a detailed evaluation of two schemes in the north of england was conducted to determine how expertise and contestation figures in community schemes results demonstrate a rapid expansion of micro hydro in the uk ownership control is highly community based until now research around micro hydro has been dominated by technical approaches with schemes defined in terms of hardware we propose a third dimension to walker and cass s 2007 classification of renewable energy developments the environmental dimension we suggest this dimension of micro hydro is critical both in terms of the extent to which resources can be realised but also the ways in which it might attract controversy in particular around how expertise is used and valued

an experimental comparison of dispute rates in alternative arbitration systems this paper reports the results of a systematic experimental comparison of the effect of alternative arbitration systems on dispute rates the key to our experimental design is the use of a common underlying distribution of arbitrator fair awards in the different arbitration systems this allows us to compare dispute rates across different arbitration procedures where we hold fixed the amount of objective underlying uncertainty about the arbitration awards there are three main findings first dispute rates are inversely related to the monetary costs of disputes dispute rates were much lower in cases where arbitration was not available so that the entire pie was lost in the event of a dispute this confirms the empirical importance of the so called chilling effect on bargaining that has been conjectured is produced by the adoption of arbitration systems second the dispute rate in a final offer arbitration system is at least as high as the dispute rate in a comparable conventional arbitration system contrary to the usual argument we find no evidence that final offer arbitration eliminates the chilling effect third dispute rates are inversely related to the uncertainty costs of disputes dispute rates were lower in conventional arbitration treatments where the variance of the arbitration award was higher and imposed greater costs on risk averse negotiators our results can also be interpreted as providing tentative evidence that the negotiators were risk averse on average finally we find general agreement between the dispute rates in our experiment and dispute rates found in the field in comparable settings

the rise and fall of money manager capitalism a minskian approach we are in the midst of a global financial crisis accompanied by a deep and probably long lasting economic downturn indeed some analysts are already calling this the first depression of the post world war ii era in this article i argue that this is a systemic crisis a crisis of what hyman minsky called money manager capitalism i link this to the analyses of hilferding and veblen of an earlier period finance capitalism and argue that this is in effect the second failure of this type of capitalism the essential characteristics of early finance capitalism are relatively small government use of external finance for investment and growing concentration of economic power in the hands of trusts or what we might today call megacorporations with varied interests and diverse affiliations across industry finance and insurance unlike the first phase the second phase of finance capitalism took place in the context of a big government neoconservative model minsky s analysis helps us to understand how the new deal and big government created a paternalistic capitalism after world war ii which favoured high consumption high employment greater equality and financial stability however that stability was destabilising because it permitted the rise of managed money over time innovation and deregulation increased fragility which generated increasingly frequent and severe financial crises while previous crises were resolved quickly enough to prevent it another debt deflation from happening again this crisis appears to be sufficiently severe that the very survival of money manager capitalism is thrown into question the article examines the contributing factors to the current crisis including the real estate boom and bust the rise of risky financial instruments such as securitised debts and credit default swaps the commodities market bubble and the fiscal squeeze the article concludes with some suggestions concerning the possible outcome of the failure of this form of finance capitalism copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

influential publications in ecological economics revisited we revisit the analysis of costanza et al 2004 ecological economics of influential publications in ecological economics to discover what has changed a decade on we examine which sources have been influential on the field of ecological economics in the past decade which articles in the journal ecological economics have had the most influence on the field and on the rest of science and on which areas of science the journal is having the most influence we find that the field has matured over this period with articles published in the journal having a greater influence than before an increase in citation links to environmental studies journals a reduction in citation links to mainstream economics journals and possibly a shift in themes to a more applied and empirical direction

adapting auctions for the provision of ecosystem services at the landscape scale abstract auctions or competitive tenders can overcome information asymmetries to efficiently allocate limited funding for ecosystem services most auctions focus on ecosystem services on individual properties to maximise the total amount provided however for many services it is not just the total quantity but their location in the landscape relative to other sites that matters for example biodiversity conservation may be much more effective if conserved sites are connected adapting auctions to address ecosystem services at the landscape scale requires an auction mechanism which can promote coordination while maintaining competition multi round auctions in which bidding is spread over a number of rounds with information provided between rounds on the location of other bids in the landscape offer an approach to cost effectively deliver landscape scale ecosystem services experimental economic testing shows these auctions deliver the most cost effective environmental outcomes when the number of rounds is unknown in advance which minimises rent seeking behaviour it also shows that a form of bid improvement rule facilitates coordination and reduces rent seeking where the biophysical science is well developed such auctions should be relatively straightforward to implement and participate in and have the potential to provide significantly better outcomes than standard one shot tenders