guarding the guardians good government requires some restraints on the powerful but how can those be impose if there is no one above them this paper studies the equilibrium allocation of power and resources established by self interested incumbents under the threat of rebellions from inside and outside the group in power commitment to uphold individuals rights can only be achieved if power is not as concentrated as incumbents would like it to be ex post power sharing endogenously enables incumbents to commit to otherwise time inconsistent laws by ensuring more people receive rents under the status quo and thus want to defend it

coalitional stability of multi party systems evidence from poland function form game that represents payoffs of electoral coalitions in a multi party system three empirical hypotheses are formulated under the assumption that seat maximizing parties modify coalitional structures to extract gains from coalescing the hypotheses say that party systems under stable voter preferences and electoral law tend to stability with respect to splits and coalescing the partition function is estimated for various coalitional structures for the polish party system with simulation based on district level election results and survey data the estimates show that the polish party system is split stable while the opportunities for gains from coalitions on the right were exhausted between the years of 1993 and 1997 some opportunities for such gains emerged on the left introduction

introducing cooperative push how inefficient environmental policy sometimes protects the global commons better in this paper we argue that the incentive structures of the gamesnations play in international environmental negotiations dependupon the choice of environmental policy instruments bargainingon the use of some instrument e g an effluent charge mayput the players into a dilemma game like chicken negotiationsto apply a different instrument say an emission reductionquota may lead to a cooperation game like stag hunt the higherthe incentive to cooperate in the type of game which is built upby a specific instrument the higher is this instrument s cooperative push of course comparing two instruments the one with the higher cooperative push might well be the lessefficient one in this paper we analyse a situation where thehigher cooperative push of an instrument overcompensates thisinstrument s lower efficiency aggregate welfare withbilateral cooperation the equilibrium of stag hunt is higher than withunilateral cooperation the equilibrium of the chicken game the question remains whether sovereign countries decide to playstag hunt ending up in the welfare superior equilibrium it isshown below that they do not in an uncoordinated optimising setting however we develop a particular frame where the proposedsolution meets the criteria of individual rationality stability and fairness it thereby establishes the politically mostdesired result international cooperation

which industry is greener an empirical study of nine industries in oecd countries abstract this study analyzed the relationship between the co2 emissions of different industries and economic growth in oecd countries from 1970 to 2005 we tested an environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis and found that total co2 emissions from nine industries show an n shaped trend instead of an inverted u or monotonic increasing trend with increasing income the ekc hypothesis for sector level co2 emissions was supported in the 1 paper pulp and printing industry 2 wood and wood products industry and 3 construction industry we also found that emissions from coal and oil increase with economic growth in the steel and construction industries in addition the non metallic minerals machinery and transport equipment industries tend to have increased emissions from oil and electricity with economic growth finally the ekc turning point and the relationship between gdp per capita and sectoral co2 emissions differ among industries according to the fuel type used therefore environmental policies for co2 reduction must consider these differences in industrial characteristics

varying the intensity of competition in a multiple prize rent seeking experiment we experimentally test a rent seeking model under five levels of competition at one extreme a subject s probability of winning a prize is equal to her share of the total expenditures at lower levels of competition a subject s probability of winning is affected more by her own expenditures than by the expenditures of others predicted expenditure levels are positively associated with higher levels of competition consistent with previous rent seeking experiments we find that subjects spend significantly more than the nash equilibrium prediction at all levels of competition however expenditure patterns generally follow the nash prediction expenditures decrease as the level of competition decreases our experimental design also includes a lottery choice experiment to control for subjects risk preference we find that subjects who are more risk averse spend significantly less in the contest and this effect is particularly strong for female subjects

erratum to varying the intensity of competition in a multiple prize rent seeking experiment in anderson and freeborn 2009 we inadvertently made a coding error in estimating the effects of risk preferences on subjects rent seeking expenditures in models 2 through 5 of table 5 we include individual specific effects gender and risk preference as measured by the midpoint of the coefficient of relative risk aversion hereafter mid crra and state that we control for individual subject heterogeneity using fixed effects econometrically we cannot include both fixed effects and gender mid crra however a coding error allowed us to generate the results we report when we correctly account for individual heterogeneity using a random effects model the coefficients on gender and mid crra are not significant however when we follow millner and pratt 1991 by grouping individuals into risk preference categories and performing difference of means tests there is a significant decrease in overspending relative to the nash prediction as we move along the risk preference spectrum specifically the four categories are risk loving mid crra 0 68 we are guided by holt and laury 2002 in separating subjects into the categories of somewhat risk averse and very risk averse for risk loving individuals the average deviation from the nash prediction calculated as observed effort minus nash prediction across all six scenarios is 262 22 for risk neutral the average deviation is 256 97 for somewhat risk averse the average deviation is 245 35 and for very risk averse subjects the average deviation from the nash prediction is 190 76 table 1 displays

competition and cooperation in decentralized push and pull assembly systems in this paper we study a decentralized assembly system consisting of a single assembler who buys complementary components from independent suppliers under two contracting schemes push and pull in both schemes the component suppliers are allowed to freely form coalitions or alliances among themselves to better coordinate their pricing or production decisions we show that the sole driver of the inefficiency in a push system which is due to horizontal decentralization of suppliers is the number of alliances that were formed specifically it is shown that in a push system the assembler s profit the total profit of all suppliers and the consumers surplus are all decreasing in the number of coalitions and are thus maximized when the grand coalition is formed we further carry out a stability analysis of coalition structures to verify to what extent suppliers can reduce or eliminate the inefficiency due to their decentralization by forming alliances we show that in a push system with more than two

pillage and property this paper introduces a class of coalitional games called pillage games as a model of hobbesian anarchy any coalition can pillage costlessly and with certainty any less powerful coalition power is endogenous so a pillage game does not have a characteristic function but pillage provides a domination concept that defines a stable set which represents an endogenous balance of power every stable set contains only finitely many allocations and can be represented as a farsighted core additional results are obtained for particular games including the game in which the power of each coalition is determined by its total wealth

international environmental agreements the role of foresight the present paper attempts to bridge the gap between the cooperative and the non cooperative approach employed to examine the size of stable coalitions formed to address global environmental problems we do so by endowing countries with foresightedness that is by endogenizing the reaction of the coalition s members to a deviation by one member we assume that when a country contemplates withdrawing or joining an agreement it takes into account the reactions of other countries ignited by its own actions we identify conditions under which there always exists a unique set of farsighted stable ieas the new farsighted ieas can be much larger than those some of the previous models supported but are not always pareto efficient

environmental kuznets curves new evidence on both panel and country level co2 emissions using data on per capita co2 emissions and per capita real gdp from fifteen countries spanning the period 1960 2013 this paper tests the validity of the environmental kuznets curve ekc using both panel based and time series based methodological approaches of cointegration given that the ekc hypothesis postulates an inverted u shaped relationship between emissions and output the study tests for cointegration between per capita co2 emissions per capita real gdp and the squared values of per capita real gdp the evidence from panel cointegration methodologies is mixed this result might arise due to time dependence of cointegrating coefficients the time varying cointegration approaches provide strong evidence in favor of time varying cointegration parameters furthermore based on the quantile cointegration approach the results indicate that the ekc hypothesis holds in 12 out of the 15 countries however even for these three countries the ekc hypothesis seems to hold at certain quantiles

dynamic processes of social and economic interactions on the persistence of inefficiencies an economy with a finite number of agents and a finite number of states is considered an exogenous institutional rule prescribes which moves from one state to another are feasible to each coalition at each time an agent is called to act with some exogenous probability and he chooses a coalition a feasible new state to move the economy to and side payments between the agents in the coalition the setup can be applied to various dynamic processes of social and economic interactions such as legislative bargaining coalition formation or exchange economies whenever agents are unable to write long term contracts but are otherwise unconstrained both in their ability to write arbitrary spot contracts and in their ability to collude there can be long run inefficiencies with cycles or inefficient steady states however when agents are sufficiently patient the initial state from which the process starts plays no role in the long run moreover when there exists an efficient state that is free of negat

indicators for sustainable energy development a multivariate cointegration and causality analysis from tunisian road transport sector this paper studies causal mechanism between indicators for sustainable energy development related to energy consumption from tunisian road transport sector the investigation is made using the johansen cointegration technique and the environmental kuznets curve ekc approach it examines the nexus between transport value added road transport related energy consumption road infrastructure fuel price and co2 emissions from tunisian transport sector during the period of 1980 2010 empirical results show that road transport related energy consumption transport value added transport co2 emissions and road infrastructure are mutually causal in the long run these results do not support the hypothesis of neutrality between energy and income for the tunisian road transport sector also there is a unidirectional causality running from fuel price to road transport related energy consumption with no feedback in both the short and long runs the fuel price and the road infrastructure are significant in the causal chain though the estimated long run cointegrated equation we conclude that there is an inverse n shaped relation between transport value added and transport co2 emissions with income turning point respectively equal to 75 and 579 constant 2000 tnd prices therefore our empirical findings refute the hypothesis of an inverted u shaped ekc for transport co2 emissions in tunisia the findings of this study have a number of policy implications economic growth environmental degradation energy and transportation policies should be recognized in order to improve the energy efficiency in transport sector all measures that should reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions without affecting economic growth may be undertaken the policymakers in tunisia should plan urban transport relocate production units improve fuel efficient vehicles and reinforce legislation on controlling emissions in order to copying with policies based on low carbon development and climate resilient strategies

do binding agreements solve the social dilemma we investigate whether binding agreements can provide a solution to the social dilemma that arises in the presence of pure public goods by signing a binding agreement players can prevent free riding by the contributors to a public good however a well known theoretical result is that the outcome of the endogenous formation of agreements is not necessarily efficient in our setting the individual level of contribution to the public good increases with the size of the coalition reaching an agreement and the global coalition is always the socially optimal structure agreements form sequentially and the equilibrium outcome is an asymmetric structure which consists of two coalitions our experiment therefore lends force to the theoretical result that outcomes may be inefficient in fact we observe an outcome which is even less efficient than that predicted by the equilibrium agreement structure however it seems that when subjects reach agreements they do so with the intention of cooperating rather than free riding furthermore it seems that they learn to cooperate over time and reach the global agreement more often towards the end of sessions keywords

a theory of endogenous coalition structures consider an environment with widespread externalities and suppose that bind ing agreements can be written we study coalition formation in such a setting our analysis proceeds by defining on a partition function an extensive form bargaining game we establish the existence of a stationary subgame perfect equilibrium for such a game our main results are concerned with the characterization of equilib rium coalition structures we develop an algorithm that generates under certain conditions an equilibrium coalition structure our characterization results are especially sharp for symmetric partition functions in particular we provide a uniqueness theorem and apply our results to a cournot oligopoly journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72 c78 d62 q 1999 academic press

carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth panel data evidence from developing countries in this paper we test the environment kuznet s curve ekc hypothesis for 43 developing countries we suggest examining the ekc hypothesis based on the short and long run income elasticities that is if the long run income elasticity is smaller than the short run income elasticity then it is evident that a country has reduced carbon dioxide emissions as its income has increased our empirical analysis based on individual countries suggests that jordan iraq kuwait yemen qatar the uae argentina mexico venezuela algeria kenya nigeria congo ghana and south africa approximately 35 per cent of the sample carbon dioxide emissions have fallen over the long run that is as these economies have grown emissions have fallen since the long run income elasticity is smaller than the short run elasticity we also examine the ekc hypothesis for panels of countries constructed on the basis of regional location using the panel cointegration and the panel long run estimation techniques we find that only for the middle eastern and south asian panels the income elasticity in the long run is smaller than the short run implying that carbon dioxide emission has fallen with a rise in income

the strategy structure of some coalition formation games in coalitional games with side payments the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared the predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully these difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form as the collection of pairs of buyer seller in an assignment game the incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection furthermore the relationships with vickrey clarke groves mechanisms are drawn

a model of endogenous government formation political parties bargain over the allocation of cabinet portfolios when forming coalition governments noncooperative theories of legislative bargaining typically predict that the formateur enjoys a disproportionate share of government ministry positions however empirical evidence indicates that parties receive shares of portfolios proportional to their share of legislative seats that a government party contributes to the government coalition in support of gamson s law of portfolio allocation this article examines government formation as a process in which both the government coalition and the formateur are determined endogenously in equilibrium if parties have similar preferences over cabinet portfolios the share of seats they are allocated is proportional to the parties sizes

farsighted coalitional stability abstract i define the largest consistent set a solution concept which applies to situations in which coalitions freely form but cannot make binding contracts act publicly and are fully farsighted in that a coalition considers the possibility that once it acts another coalition might react a third coalition might in turn react and so on without limit i establish weak nonemptiness conditions and apply it to strategic and coalitional form games and majority rule voting i argue that it improves on the von neumann morgenstern stable set as it is usually defined but is consistent with a generalization of the stable set as in the theory of social situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

political selection and persistence of bad governments we study dynamic selection of governments under different political institutions with a special focus on institutional flexibility a government consists of a subset of the individuals in the society the competence level of the government in office determines collective utilities e g by determining the amount and quality of public goods and each individual derives additional utility from being part of the government e g rents from holding office we characterize the dynamic evolution of governments and determine the structure of stable governments which arise and persist in equilibrium in our model perfect democracy where current members of the government do not have veto power over changes in governments always leads to the emergence of the most competent government however any deviation from perfect democracy to any regime with incumbency veto power destroys this result there is always at least one other less competent government that is also stable and can persist forever and even the least competent government can persist forever in office we also show that there is a nonmonotonic relationship between the degree of incumbency veto power and the quality of government in contrast in the presence of stochastic shocks or changes in the environment a regime with less incumbency veto power has greater flexibility and greater probability that high competence governments will come to power this result suggests that a particular advantage of democratic regimes with a limited number of veto players may be their greater adaptability to changes rather than their performance under given conditions finally we show that royalty like dictatorships may be more successful than junta like dictatorships because in these regimes veto players are less afraid of change

farsighted stability in patent licensing an abstract game approach abstract this paper analyzes the negotiations made by an external patent holder and potential licensee firms in a new model of patent licensing assuming that they are all farsighted and characterizes the symmetric farsighted stable sets given a net profit of each licensee firm a set of outcomes is a symmetric farsighted stable set if and only if at any outcome in the set each licensee firm receives the net profit and the number of licensee firms maximizes the patent holder s profit provided that licensee firms obtain the net profits we also show the close relationship between the symmetric farsighted stable sets and the relative interior of the core further we confirm that the symmetric farsighted stable sets are the absolutely maximal farsighted stable sets ray and vohra forthcoming as well as the history dependent strongly rational expectation farsighted stable sets dutta and vartiainen forthcoming

mistakes in cooperation the stochastic stability of edgeworth s recontracting in an exchange economywith a finite number of indivisible goods we analyze a dynamic trading process of coalitional recontracting where agents may make mistakes with small probability we show first that the recurrent classes of the unperturbed mistake free process consist of i all core allocations as absorbing states and ii cycles of non core allocations next we introduce a perturbed process where the resistance of each transition is a function of the number of agents that make mistakes do not improve in the transition and of the seriousness of each mistake if preferences are always strict we show that the unique stochasticallystable state of the perturbed process is the walrasian allocation in economies with indifferences non core cycles are sometimes stochastically stable while some core allocations are not

how economic growth affects emissions an investigation of the environmental kuznets curve in portuguese and spanish economic activity sectors abstract it is a disquieting reality that increased economic growth for many years now in the western world is at odds with environmental degradation in this paper the relationship between economic growth and environmental variables is analyzed under two non linear specifications a quadratic and a cubic specification the study is conducted for portugal and spain in the period 1975 2012 using data for 13 sectors gva is used as proxy for income while energy use and carbon dioxide account for environmental degradation there is evidence for an inverted u shaped ekc however there are also other inverted n shaped functions that explain the relationship between economic growth and emissions altogether empirical results do indicate particular differences between portuguese and spanish sectors the results are of interest not only for researchers but also for policy makers political mitigation measures are also analyzed

allocating value among farsighted players in network formation we study the stability of networks when players are farsighted and allocations are determined endogenously the set of strongly efficient networks is the unique von neumann morgenstern farsightedly stable set with bargaining if the value function is anonymous component additive and top convex and the allocation rule is anonymous and component efficient moreover the componentwise egalitarian allocation rule emerges endogenously

voting for voters a model of electoral evolution we model the decision problems faced by the members of societies whose new members are determined by vote we adopt a number of simplifying assumptions the founders and the candidates are fixed the society operates for k periods and holds elections at the beginning of each period one vote is sufficient for admission and voters can support as many candidates as they wish voters assess the value of the streams of agents with whom they share the society while they belong to it in spite of these simplifications we show that interesting strategic behavior is implied by the dynamic structure of the problem the vote for friends may be postponed and it may be advantageous to vote for enemies we discuss the existence of different types of equilibria in pure strategies and point out interesting equilibria in mixed strategies

equilibrium binding agreements abstract we study equilibrium binding agreements the coalition structures that form under such agreements and the efficiency of the outcomes that result we analyze such agreements in a context where the payoff to each player depends on the actions of all other players thus a game in strategic form is a natural starting point unlike the device of a characteristic function explicit attention is paid to the behavior of the complementary set of players when a coalition blocks a proposed agreement a solution concept and its applications are discussed journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71

international environmental agreements with mixed strategies and investment abstract we modify a canonical participation game used to study international environmental agreements iea considering both mixed and pure strategies at the participation stage and including a prior cost reducing investment stage the use of mixed strategies at the participation stage reverses a familiar result and also reverses the policy implication of that result with mixed strategies equilibrium participation and welfare are higher in equilibria that involve higher investment

the environmental kuznets curve economic growth renewable and non renewable energy and trade in tunisia we use the autoregressive distributed lag ardl b ounds testing approach for cointegration with structural breaks and the ve ctor error correction model vecm granger causality approach in order to investigate relationships between per capita co 2 emissions gdp renewable and non renewable energy consumption and international trade exports or imports for tunisia during the period 1980 2009 we show the existence of a short run unidirectional causality running from tra de gdp co 2 emission and non renewable energy to renewable energy our long run estimates show that non renewable energy and trade have a positive impact on co 2 emissions whereas renewable energy impacts weakly and negatively co 2 emission when using the model with exports and this impact is statistically insignificant when using the model wi th imports the inverted u shaped environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is not supported graphically and analytically in the long run this means that tunisia has not ye t reached the required level of per capita gdp to get an inverted u shaped ekc our main policy recommendations for tunisia are the following i to radically reform the subsidies system granted b y the tunisian government for fossil fuels consumption ii to encourage the use of renewable energy and ener gy efficiency by reinforcing actual projects and regulatory frame work iii to locate ports near exporting industrial zones or vice versa to reduce emission of pollution caused by the transport of merchandise iv to elaborate a strategy for maximizing its benefit from renewable energy technology transfer occurring when importing capita l goods v to encourage the creation of renewable energy projects for export to the eu with a proportion of production for national consumption

determinants of the environmental kuznets curve considering economic activity sector diversification in the opec countries abstract sectors contribute differently to the total level of co2 emissions per capita since they are heterogeneous in terms of gdp structure this work investigates the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis considering a set of twelve of the fourteen opec countries it contributes to previous literature exploring the environmental kuznets curve relationship by analysing how economic activity sector diversification impacts the relationship between economic growth and carbon emissions addressing an important identified gap to address this gap annual data from 1992 to 2015 is used a panel cross section analysis is provided between countries and for the seven considered sectors is estimated through panel corrected standard errors and convergence estimations are presented conclusions point to the relocation of pollution intensive sectors to almost all of the opec countries for all countries a u shaped relationship is evidenced implying that economic growth in oil producing and exporting countries increases environmental degradation while energy consumption increases environmental damage trade openness seems to have a significant and negative effect over emissions leading to environmental improvements this study points out that opec countries will have increased challenges facing them in terms of environmental degradation and only a few economic activity sectors can conduct environmental improvements through growth the inclusion of oil prices increased coefficients magnitude probably these sectors are already allocating more labour and capital in projects and investments on renewable energy energy efficiency and energy savings substituting fossil fuels like oil

a model of agreements in strategic form games abstract because in a strategic form game all the possibilities of communication available to the players must be explicitly listed in the strategy spaces coalitions and coalitional behaviour are not very often taken into account in noncooperative games however it may be desirable especially in applications to separate the basic strategic features of a situation from those strategic features added as a consequence of the possibility of coalitional behaviour we define an equilibrium for the bargaining procedure called by greenberg the theory of solid situations an alternative game theoretic approach cambridge university press cambridge uk 1990 coalitional contingent threat situation we argue that the crucial problem of expectations on the counterdeviations following a deviation can be addressed by defining coalitional strategies and studying the equilibrium of the extended game journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c70 c71

inequality of energy intensities across oecd countries a note abstract this paper proposes the use of theil s second measure to analyze international energy intensity differences this index allows differences to be broken down within and between groups of countries in a consistent manner an analysis of oecd countries for the period 1971 1999 shows some basic points first the fall in energy intensities differences is attributable both to within group and between group inequality components second between group inequalities are currently the main contributor to the whole inequality value finally a detailed exploration on within group inequalities reveals the significant explanatory role played by eu countries

stable sets for exchange economies with interdependent preferences abstract we introduce the notion of stable sets with externalities and prove its existence stable sets provide a successful alternative to core notions of externalities i e core core and strong nash equilibrium which are typically empty however the stable sets do exist in situations where the above core notions are empty

limited farsightedness in network formation pairwise stability jackson and wolinsky 1996 is the standard stability concept in network formation it assumes myopic behavior of the agents in the sense that they do not forecast how others might react to their actions assuming that agents are perfectly farsighted related stability concepts have been proposed we design a simple network formation experiment to test these extreme theories but find evidence against both of them the subjects are consistent with an intermediate rule of behavior which we interpret as a form of limited farsightedness on aggregate the selection among multiple pairwise stable networks and the performance of farsighted stability crucially depends on the level of farsightedness needed to sustain them and not on efficiency or cooperative considerations individual behavior analysis corroborates this interpretation and suggests in general a low level of farsightedness around two steps on the part of the agents

energy innovations ghg emissions nexus fresh empirical evidence from oecd countries abstract this study explores the impact of improvements in energy research development erd on greenhouse gas ghg emissions using environmental kuznets curve hypothesis for 28 oecd countries over the period of 1990 2014 in doing so we have employed a panel data where public budget in energy research development and demonstration erd d has transformed into a finite inverted v lag distribution model developed by de leeuw 1962 this model considers that energy innovation accumulates in time and presents empirical evidence how energy innovation contributes in reducing energy intensity and environmental pollution as well our results indicate that energy innovation measures require lapses of time to reach their full effect i e innovation applied to measures for environmental correction does not reach its whole effect immediately requiring instead a certain amount of time to pass innovation policies have recommended for improving environmental quality

linking analyses and environmental kuznets curves for aggregated material flows in the eu abstract the relationship between economy and environmental impacts has been an essential topic in the discussion on environmental problems for a long time from the 1990s this relationship has gained a position in environmental policy as well de coupling the use of natural resources from economic growth has been set as one of the policy goals in the sixth environmental action programme by the european commission in the scientific discussion the concept of environmental kuznets curve deals closely with the de coupling or de linking phenomenon aggregated material flows on the other hand have often been considered as a macro level proxy of environmental degradation different methods or approaches have been designed for sustainability or carrying capacity evaluation as well the objective of this article is i to discuss the possibilities and limitations of using environmental and economic indicators in the sustainability analysis at the macro level ii to present a theoretical framework for the linking analysis including a classification of the degrees of de linking re linking environmental impacts from to economic growth and iii to give an empirical example by using indicators of direct material flows as a proxy of environmental degradation and by applying the framework into the european union and its 15 member countries the results show that the trend in the european union is a weak de linking of material flows from economic growth during the years 1980 2000 in other words material intensity of the economy has generally decreased due to increased efficiency but the absolute amount of material use has increased although at a lower rate of increase than economic growth on the other hand there is a quite large variation between different eu member countries however absolute decrease in the use of materials cannot be found as a continuous trend between the years 1980 and 2000 in any of the studied eu member countries

coalitions agreements and efficiency if agents negotiate openly and form coalitions can they reach efficient agreements we address this issue within a class of coalition formation games with externalities where agents preferences depend solely on the coalition structures they are associated with we derive ray and vohra s 1997 notion of equilibrium binding agreements using von neumann and morgenstern abstract stable set and then extend it to allow for arbitrary coalitional deviations as opposed to nested deviations assumed originally we show that while the new notion facilitates the attainment of efficient agreements inefficient agreements can nevertheless arise

farsightedness changing stock location and the stability of international fisheries agreements changes in stock location may affect the stability of international fisheries agreements this paper offers a theoretical analysis of the stability of regional fisheries management organisations rfmos in a non cooperative coalition formation game based on the classic gordon schaefer model we employ a new stability concept which modifies farsighted stability chwe j econ theory 63 299 325 1994 we call this concept farsighted downwards stability fds we also employ the internal stability is concept for comparison analytical results regarding fds for symmetric players without changing stock location show stable grand coalitions for n le 4 player games and the possibility for partial cooperation sensitivity analysis deals with changing stock location and cost asymmetry stability decreases in n increases when costs are asymmetric and increases when fds is employed farsighted conjectures on behalf of rfmo members can thus help to maintain cooperation as stock location changes however fds is more sensitive to changes in stock location than is

farsighted strategies in the formation of a communication network abstract i examine the formation of a specific communication network a variant of the two way flow model in which agents have farsighted strategies i show that the likelihood to form efficient networks tends to zero for sufficiently large network sizes

games for cautious players the equilibrium in secure strategies abstract a non cooperative solution the equilibrium in secure strategies einss is defined as an extension of the nash equilibrium in pure strategies and is meant to solve games where players are cautious i e looking for secure positions and avoiding threats this concept abstracts and unifies ad hoc solutions already formulated in various applied economic games that have been discussed extensively in the literature a general existence theorem is provided and then applied to the price setting game in the hotelling location model to tullock s rent seeking contests and to bertrand edgeworth duopoly finally competition in the insurance market game is re examined and the rothschild stiglitz wilson contract is shown to be an einss even when the nash equilibrium breaks down

coalition formation as a dynamic process abstract we study coalition formation as an ongoing dynamic process with payoffs generated as coalitions form disintegrate or regroup a process of coalition formation pcf is an equilibrium if a coalitional move to some other state can be justified by the expectation of higher future value compared to inaction this future value in turn is endogenous it depends on coalitional movements at each node we study existence of equilibrium pcfs we connect deterministic equilibrium pcfs with unique absorbing state to the core and equilibrium pcfs with multiple absorbing states to the largest consistent set in addition we study cyclical as well as stochastic equilibrium pcfs

using the environmental kuznets curve to evaluate energy policy some practical considerations abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc is a widely applied empirical model that is used to assess the effect of country s increased income on its emissions such as co 2 typical estimation is of a reduced form model relating per capita emissions to per capita gdp and sometimes to energy consumption with an eye toward determining whether a country s per capita emissions increase or decrease with per capita gdp in this article we consider a number of practical issues in estimating and using the ekc for energy policy analysis proper estimation procedures should be used if the empirical work is to provide valid estimates of the ekc s shape in addition policymakers should proceed with caution when crafting policy on the basis of reduced form estimates of the ekc because the reduced form model provides limited insight into the policy implications of the relationship between income energy consumption and emissions

a model of farsighted voting i present a new method of interpreting voter preferences in settings where policy remains in effect until replaced by new legislation in such settings voters consider not only the utility they receive from a given policy today but also the utility they will receive from policies likely to replace that policy in the future the model can be used to characterize both long term preferences and distributions over policy outcomes in situations where policy is ongoing and voters are farsighted

deviations dynamics and equilibrium refinements existing equilibrium refinements rule out nash equilibria susceptible to deviations we propose a framework for considering not only equilibria impervious to deviations but also equilibria likely to recur in the long run because they are repeatedly deviated to we explore which equilibria are recurrent with respect to the deviations underlying some existing signaling refinements we show that the set of recurrent equilibria based on cho and kreps s 1987 intuitive criterion is equivalent to their solution concept but that applying our framework to existing cheap talk refinements make those solution concepts more realistic and guarantee existence where their current formulations do not journal of economic literatureclassification numbers b49 c72 c73

a new environmental kuznets curve relationship between direct material input and income per capita evidence from industrialised countries abstract many studies have focused on the quantification of the input of materials into the economy however the insights provided by those studies have generally been limited this paper attempts to bring analytical value to the discussion on dematerialization considering direct material input dmi per capita as the dependent variable in a test of the environmental kuznets curve ekc the explanatory variable is as usual gross domestic product per capita the quadratic and cubic versions of the ekc are tested econometrically using panel data ranging from 1960 to 1998 for 16 industrialised countries the results indicate a strong and robust support for both the quadratic and cubic ekc relationships between material input and income in industrialised economies while the statistical support to both types of evolution may seem contradictory it suggests that as industrialised economies grow the intensity of material consumption first increases but eventually starts exhibiting a decreasing trend after a certain income threshold is reached the inverted u or quadratic relationship is confirmed even though for the ranges of income considered in this study the trend is mostly on the increasing part of the inverted u curve however the statistical support to the cubic specification suggests that these results need to be regarded with caution overall the statistically stronger models are the quadratic and cubic models with country random effects and the cubic model with country and year fixed effects

is renewable energy effective in promoting growth abstract this paper applies panel data techniques to analyze the role of the various energy sources in economic growth for a set of 24 european countries 1990 2007 controlling for energy consumption and energy dependency the results suggest that the negative effect of the use of renewables supplants the positive effect of creating income by exploiting a natural resource locally and thus growth does not appear to improve with the change towards renewables the high costs of promoting renewables are probably being placed excessively upon the economy namely by increasing the costs of electricity tariffs thus inducing a deceleration in economic activity fossil fuels lead to dissimilar effects on growth while natural gas does not appear to be relevant in explaining growth coal hampers the capacity for growth whereas the use of oil stimulates that growth this is in line with productive structures that are deeply grounded in fossil fuels particularly oil

conflict leads to cooperation in demand bargaining abstract we consider a multilateral nash demand game in which short sighted players come to the bargaining table with requests for both coalition partners and the potentially generated resource we prove that the resulting process converges with probability one to a state in which all players agree on a strictly self enforcing division of resources i e a strict core allocation highlighting group dynamics we show how the myopic actions of players may lead to the break up of groups in the short run but can ultimately bring about a situation from which a strictly self enforcing allocation can be reached

greenhouse gas emissions energy consumption and economic growth a panel cointegration analysis from canadian industrial sector perspective abstract this paper investigates the long run and the causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions energy consumption and economic growth for canadian industrial sectors over the period 1990 2007 the empirical findings suggest that in the long run equilibrium energy consumption has a positive and statistically significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions whereas a non linear relationship is found between greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth consistent with the environmental kuznets curve the short run dynamics conveys that there is a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to greenhouse gas emissions from economic growth to greenhouse gas emissions and a weak unidirectional causality running from greenhouse gas emissions to energy consumption from economic growth to energy consumption in the long run however there seems to be a weak one way causality flowing from energy consumption and economic growth to greenhouse gas emissions

modeling the evolutionary nexus between carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth abstract given the fast paced world economy increasing carbon dioxide co2 emissions have caused serious concern regarding global warming many studies have examined the nexus between co2 emissions and economic growth and inconsistent results are provided limited evidence suggests that different time periods under investigation could be a source of inconsistency but there lacks of a thorough analysis this paper systematically focuses on the evolutionary characteristics of the nexus to explore the influence of time periods the panel data are reorganized by considering different time periods in various countries and an intelligent data driven approach symbolic regression is applied to discover models for each period without predefined structure and parameters three issues does the time period matter what are the trends in different time periods what are the applicable scopes of the models have been addressed in this paper the results reveal the evolutionary nature of the nexus and it is verified that an intrinsic time period distinction does generate extrinsic inconsistency the detailed dynamics of models indicate that the optimal models tend to be more complex as the time periods are extended for countries with different locations and income levels the applicable scopes of the four superior models monotonically increasing inverted u shaped inverted n shaped and m shaped vary in different time periods the findings highlight that the effect of time periods cannot be ignored and the models should not be applied unconditionally when conducting empirical research finally several policy implications are provided which are critical for the balance of economic growth and co2 emissions particularly in some developing countries

driving forces for aggregate energy consumption a cross country approach abstract although a cornerstone for development past and current energy use has often posed a major challenge for policymakers with respect to planning and management within this context in this paper an updated multi sectorial cross country assessment of energy consumption trends was undertaken aiming at identifying the main drivers of changes in aggregate energy consumption these drivers have been interpreted in the light of the policy measures that have been implemented over the years by different countries to achieve a sustainable development of the energy sector the cross country assessment encompasses a set of developed united kingdom portugal and spain and emerging brazil china and india countries resorting to the logarithmic mean divisia index lmdi decomposition method changes in the aggregate energy consumption were decomposed into three main explanatory effects activity structure and intensity the major findings achieved reflect the relevance of intensity and activity effects in detriment of the structural effect the assessment of energy consumption trends using the lmdi decomposition method provides critical information regarding which is the dominant factor that should be focused in policy design

stochastic stability for roommate markets we show that for any roommate market the set of stochastically stable matchings coincides with the set of absorbing matchings this implies that whenever the core is non empty e g for marriage markets a matching is in the core if and only if it is stochastically stable i e stochastic stability is a characteristic of the core several solution concepts have been proposed to extend the core to all roommate markets including those with an empty core an important implication of our results is that the set of absorbing matchings is the only solution concept that is core consistent and shares the stochastic stability characteristic with the core

the co2 emissions income nexus evidence from rich countries the paper attempts to test the environment kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for 36 high income countries for the period 1980 2005 the test is based on the suggestion of narayan and narayan 2010 various panel data unit root and co integration tests are applied carbon dioxide co2 emissions and gdp series are integrated of order one and co integrated especially after controlling for cross sectional dependence additionally the blundell bond system generalised methods of moments gmm is employed to conduct a panel causality test in a vector error correction mechanism vecm setting unidirectional causality running from real per capita gdp to per capita co2 emissions is uncovered in both the short run and the long run the empirical analysis based on individual countries provides evidence of an ekc for greece malta oman portugal and the united kingdom however it can be observed that for the whole panel a 1 increase in gdp generates an increase of 0 68 in co2 emissions in the short run and 0 22 in the long run the lower long run income elasticity does not provide evidence of an ekc but does indicate that over time co2 emissions are stabilising in the rich countries

stable farsighted coalitions in competitive markets in this paper we study dynamic alliance formation among agents in competitive markets we look at n agents selling substitutable products competing in a market in this setting we examine models with deterministic and stochastic demand and we use a two stage approach in stage 1 agents form alliances coalitions and in stage 2 coalitions make decisions price and inventory and compete against one another to analyze the stability of coalition structures in stage 1 we use two notions from cooperative games the largest consistent set lcs and the equilibrium process of coalition formation epcf which allow players to be farsighted thus in forming alliances players consider two key phenomena first players trade off the size of the total profit of the system versus their allocation of this total pie and second they weigh the possibility that an immediate beneficial defection can trigger further counter defections that in the end may prove to be worse than the status quo in particular one such example is that of the grand coalition which we show to be stable in the farsighted sense even though players benefit myopically by defecting from it we also provide conditions under which a situation of a few lone players competing against a large coalition is stable we examine the impact of the size of the market n the degree of competition the effect of cost parameters and the variability of the demand process on the prices inventory levels and structure of the market we discuss the possible strategic implications of our results to firms in a competitive market and for new entrants

farsightedness in a coalitional great fish war we explore the implications of the farsightedness assumption on the conjectures of players in a coalitional great fish war model with symmetric players derived from the seminal model of levhari and mirman bell j econ 11 649 661 1980 the farsightedness assumption for players in a coalitional game acknowledges the fact that a deviation from a single player will lead to the formation of a new coalition structure as the result of possibly successive moves of her rivals in order to improve their payoffs it departs from mainstream game theory in that it relies on the so called rational conjectures as opposed to the traditional nash conjectures formed by players on the behavior of their rivals for values of the biological parameter and the discount factor more plausible than the ones used in the current literature the farsightedness assumption predicts a wide scope for cooperation in non trivial coalitions sustained by credible threats of successive deviations that defeat the shortsighted payoff of any prospective deviator compliance or deterrence of deviations may also be addressed by acknowledging that information on the fish stock or on the catch policies actually implemented may be available only with a delay dynamic farsightedness in that case the requirements are stronger and the sizes and number of possible farsighted stable coalitions are different in the sequential move version which could mimic some characteristics of fishery models the results are not less appealing even if the dominant player or dominant coalition with first move advantage assumption provides a case for cooperation with the traditional nash conjectures

networks and farsighted stability the main contribution of this paper is to provide a framework in which the notion of farsighted stability for games introduced by chwe 1994 can be applied to directed networks in particular we introduce the notion of a supernetwork a supernetwork is made up of a collection of directed networks the nodes and uniquely represents via the arcs connecting the nodes agent preferences and the rules governing network formation by reformulating chwe s basic result on the nonemptiness of farsightedly stable sets we show that for any supernetwork i e for any collection of directed networks and any collection of rules governing network formation there exists a farsightedly stable directed network we also introduce the notion of a nash network relative to a given supernetwork as well as the notions of symmetric nonsimultaneous and decomposable supernetworks to illustrate the utility of our framework we present several examples of super networks compute the farsightedly stable networks and the nash networks

revisiting environmental kuznets curves through the energy price lens abstract the goal of this paper is to provide new insights to elucidate the inconclusive results from the environmental kuznets curve ekc empirical literature for the first time in empirical literature an econometric analysis includes the relative prices for several energy sources the paper provides strong evidence on the relevance of energy prices to co 2 emissions accordingly one reason for the lack of agreement in the ekc literature may be the absence of energy prices in empirical exercises the presence of relative energy price changes in the econometric specification confirms a monotonic and positive relationship between co 2 and gross domestic product gdp therefore we may conclude that there is a decoupling process but without reaching any turning point on that relationship the policy implications are straightforward direct climate action by policy makers is required to break the positive relationship between co 2 and gdp that conclusion has been reinforced by the reduction of energy prices since the middle of 2014 otherwise the trend in energy prices may reverse the relative decarbonisation processes accounted for in recent years in major developed countries

vertical integration with endogenous contract leadership stability and fair profit allocation abstract this paper studies vertical integration in serial supply chains with a wholesale price contract we consider a business environment where the contracting leader may be endogenously changed before and after forming the integration a cooperative game is formulated to normatively analyze the stable and fair profit allocations under the grand coalition in such an environment our main result demonstrates that vertical integration is stable when all members are pessimistic in the sense that they are sure that they will not become the contracting leader if they deviate from the grand coalition we find that in this case the grand coalition s profit must be allocated more to the retailer and the members with higher costs nevertheless we also show the conditions under which the upstream manufacturer can have strong power as in traditional supply chains

unimprovable allocations in economies with incomplete information abstract the paper considers an exchange economy with incomplete information in which agents can retrade goods until all gains from trade are exhausted unimprovable allocations are defined to be those allocations from which agents would not wish to deviate either by retrading goods or by revealing further information the concept of unimprovability is then used to analyze a lemons market and an adverse selection insurance market in which agents can renegotiate after information has been revealed finally unimprovability is compared to different concepts of efficiency and to the concept of durability journal of economic literature classification number d82

endogenous mergers in endogenous sunk cost industries abstract this paper uses an endogenous coalition formation game to derive an upper bound to industry concentration the proposed coalitional stability concept assumes that firms are endowed with foresight in that they look ahead and anticipate the ultimate outcome of their actions it is shown that while in exogenous sunk cost industries the upper bound to concentration falls as the market becomes large in endogenous sunk cost industries regardless of the size of the market arbitrarily concentrated outcomes can arise in equilibrium in addition for this second class of industries if products are sufficiently good substitutes then duopoly coalition structures can only be sustained in equilibrium if composed of sufficiently size asymmetric coalitions the results therefore complement those of sutton sutton j 1991 sunk costs and market structure cambridge ma mit press sutton j 1998 technology and market structure theory and history cambridge ma mit press

empirical analysis of the environmental and energy policies in some developing countries using widely employed macroeconomic indicators the cases of brazil china and india abstract this paper proposes an empirical analysis concerning the environmental and energy policies of some important developing countries brazil china and india today present in the international scenario with very different features than in the past the research is carried out using two of the most important macroeconomic indicators several times proposed in the field of policy analysis emission intensity ratio and energy intensity ratio moreover the emission intensity ratio is used in order to verify the empirical existence of the so called environmental kuznets curve for the three countries for what concerns this last point final results do not correspond closely to the theoretical strict formulations hypothesised in the classical environmental kuznets curve model this paper follows completing and concluding the previous one carried out by the same author for some industrialised countries after a brief but ineluctable premise considering the theoretical basic assumptions to define the question and regarding general statements the specific cases are analysed main findings show that resulting trends in these developing countries are different and furthermore they differ from those already observed in industrialised ones

formation of alliances in internet based supply exchanges in different industries such as automobiles chemicals or retailing competitors are joining forces in establishing electronic marketplaces to reduce inefficiencies in the purchasing process and cut costs by combining their buying power joining such an alliance leads to reduced costs including those of possible rivals because members share the development and operating costs a company that joins an alliance agrees to share its suppliers with others which may lead to more intense competition among the increased number of suppliers and it may further benefit an alliance member at the expense of companies left outside the alliance natural questions that could arise then are when would a firm prefer to take part in an electronic marketplace joint venture when would it prefer that other firms possibly rivals join the venture and what are the financial consequences of either joining an alliance or remaining independent in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the issues we have developed a model of three retailers whose products may have a certain degree of substitutability we provide some conditions in terms of product substitutability and compatibility of retailers that would lead to the formation of a three member alliance or a two member alliance or no alliance at all we also study the effect of alliance structure and compatibility of retailers on the profit of a company

threshold cointegration and nonlinear adjustment between co2 and income the environmental kuznets curve in spain 1857 2007 abstract article history received 9 march 2011received in revised form 24 february 2012accepted 2 march 2012available online 14 march 2012jel classi cation c2q4keywords environmental kuznets curveco 2 emissionsnonlinear relationshipthreshold cointegration inthispaper wemodelthe long run relationship between per capita co 2 and per capita income for the spanisheconomy over the period 1857 2007 according to the environmental kuznets curve eck the relationshipbetween the two variables has an inverted u shape however previous studies for the spanish economy onlyconsidered the existence of linear relationships such an approach may lack exibility to detect the trueshape of the relationship our empirical methodology accounts for a possible non linear relationship throughthe use of threshold cointegration techniques our results con rm the non linearity of the link between thetwo above mentioned variables pointing to the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for the spanishcase 2012 elsevier b v all rights reserved

do investments in specialized knowledge lead to composite good industries we try to understand why firms producing goods by means of complementary components do not merge especially in industries in which investments in component based knowledge matters as audretsch we state that these activities are developed by individuals who do their best to appropriate the return from their knowledge and whose effort is non contractible the organization of the industry into firms is identified to a partition of the set of individuals in this context we prove that an organization in which each individual hold his own firms is both stable with respect to unilateral deviation and optimal in the line of the property right approach if the returns are high enough this structure is even the only one which shares both properties

farsighted network formation this paper studies a model of dynamic network formation when individuals are farsighted players evaluate the desirability of a current move in terms of its consequences on the entire discounted stream of payoffs we define a concept of equilibrium which takes into account farsighted behavior of agents and allows for limited cooperation amongst agents we show that an equilibrium process of network formation exists we also show that there are valuation structures in which no equilibrium strategy profile can sustain efficient networks we then provide sufficient conditions under which the equilibrium process will yield efficient outcomes

coalition formation with binding agreements we study coalition formation in real time a situation in which coalition formation is intertwined with the ongoing receipt of pay offs agreements are assumed to be permanently binding they can only be altered with the full consent of existing signatories for characteristic function games we prove that equilibrium processes whether or not these are history dependent must converge to efficient absorbing states for three player games with externalities each player has enough veto power that a general efficiency result can be established however there exist four player games in which all markov equilibria are inefficient from every initial condition despite the ability to write permanently binding agreements copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

participation games and international environmental agreements a non parametric model abstract we examine the size of stable coalitions in a participation game that has been used to model international environmental agreements cartel formation rd based on these examples a consensus has emerged that in this kind of game the equilibrium coalition size is small except possibly when the potential benefits of cooperation are also small in this paper we develop a non parametric approach to the problem and demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is not robust in a general setting we identify conditions under which the equilibrium coalition size can be large even when potential gains are large contrary to previously examined leading special cases we show that reductions in marginal abatement costs in an international environmental game can increase equilibrium membership and we provide a measure of the smallest reduction in costs needed to support a coalition of arbitrary size

pooled mean group estimation of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 abstract we apply the pooled mean group estimator to test for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 in 22 oecd countries this approach allows for more flexible assumptions in a panel data framework the period goes from 1975 to 1998

inventory games with permissible delay in payments abstract meca et al 2004 studied a class of inventory games which arise when a group of retailers who observe demand for a common item decide to cooperate and make joint orders with the eoq policy in this paper we extend their model to the situation where retailer s delay in payments is permitted by the supplier we introduce the corresponding inventory game with permissible delay in payments and prove that its core is nonempty then a core allocation rule is proposed which can be reached through population monotonic allocation scheme under this allocation rule the grand coalition is shown to be stable from a farsighted point of view

dynamics and stability of constitutions coalitions and clubs a central feature of dynamic collective decision making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions for example current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations we develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness we show how this framework can be applied in political economy coalition formation and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs the explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision making 1 a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society 2 efficiency enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender

risk aversion and rent seeking an extension and some experimental evidence theoretical investigations indicate that the risk attitudes of individuals will effect the amount of rent that can be assumed to be dissipated by rent seeking activities following this line of investigation we extend hillman and katz s work to a small numbers case and demonstrate that the degree to which a monopoly rent is dissipated is dependent upon the structure of the risk attitudes of two risk averse individuals

participation and duration of environmental agreements we analyze participation in international environmental agreements in a dynamic game in which countries pollute and invest in green technologies if complete contracts are feasible participants eliminate the holdup problem associated with their investments however most countries prefer to free ride rather than participate if investments are noncontractible countries face a holdup problem every time they negotiate but the free rider problem can be mitigated and significant participation is feasible participation becomes attractive because only large coalitions commit to long term agreements that circumvent the holdup problem under well specified conditions even the first best outcome is possible when the contract is incomplete

coalition bargaining in repeated games we consider an intertemporal game theoretic framework in which different coalitions interact repeatedly over time both the terms of trade and the endogenous cooperation structure arising in this setup are characterized in a protocol free manner provided that just three natural conditions on the outcome are satisfied c1 a coalition is formed with positive probability if and only if the shares obtained in this case by its members weakly exceed their respective share expectations c2 each matched coalition distributes the entire surplus among its members c3 members of any coalition are treated symmetrically with respect to their share expectations when the surplus of this coalition is distributed our analysis primarily focuses on the limit scenario where the game ends each date with vanishing probability we show that in this case the cooperation structure and the shares are unique in an application to trade networks we show that in a complete network a unique price arises and agents specialize in either buying or selling in an incomplete network on the other hand transactions occur generally at multiple prices and some agents become arbitrageurs that buy and sell at different prices

the environmental kuznets curve does one size fit all abstract this paper uses a new panel data set on state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from 1929 1994 to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used in the environmental kuznets curve literature empirical results provide initial evidence that an inverted u shape characterizes the relationship between per capita emissions and per capita incomes at the state level parameter estimates suggest however that previous studies which restrict cross sections to undergo identical experiences over time may be presenting statistically biased results

revisiting the environmental kuznets curve in a global economy the present study deals with an empirical investigation between co2 emissions energy intensity economic growth and globalization using annual data over the period of 1970 2010 for turkish economy we applied unit root test and cointegration approach in the presence of structural breaks the direction of causality between the variables is investigated by applying the vecm granger causality approach our results confirmed the existence of cointegration between the series the empirical evidence reported that energy intensity and economic growth globalization increase condense co2 emissions the results also validated the presence of environmental kuznets curve ekc the causality analysis shows bidirectional causality between economic growth and co2 emissions this implies that economic growth can be boosted at the cost of environment

is there an environmental kuznets curve for sulfur abstract most existing estimates of the environmental kuznets curve ekc for sulfur which use samples of mainly high income countries indicate a maximum emissions turning point at middle to lower high income levels of gdp per capita we use a larger and more globally representative sample than previous sulfur ekc studies we find that sulfur emissions per capita are a monotonic function of income per capita when we use a global sample and an inverted u shape function of income when we use a sample of high income countries a model estimated in first differences results in a monotonic ekc when estimated with both high income and global samples reductions in emissions are time related rather than income related

correlated equilibria incomplete information and coalitional deviations this paper proposes new concepts of strong and coalition proof correlated equilibria where agents form coalitions at the interim stage and share information about their recommendations in a credible way when players deviate at the interim stage coalition proof correlated equilibria may fail to exist for two player games however coalition proof correlated equilibria always exist in dominance solvable games and in games with positive externalities and binary actions c 2008 elsevier inc all rights reserved

energy consumption economic growth and co2 emissions in middle east and north african countries this article extends the recent findings of liu 2005 ang 2007 apergis et al 2009 and payne 2010 by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real gdp for 12 middle east and north african countries mena over the period 1981 2005 our results show that in the long run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on co2 emissions more interestingly we show that real gdp exhibits a quadratic relationship with co2 emissions for the region as a whole however although the estimated long run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the ekc hypothesis in most studied countries the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases hence providing poor evidence in support of the ekc hypothesis co2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the mena region even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981 2005 the econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in co2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as gdp per capita in the mena region continues to grow

stable coalition structures with externalities this paper argues that the sign of external effects of coalition formation provides a useful organizing principle in examining economic coalitions in many interesting economic games coalition formation creates either negatie externalities or posi tie externalities for nonmembers examples of negative externalities are research coalitions and customs unions examples of positive externalities include output cartels and public goods coalitions i characterize and compare stable coalition structures under the following three rules of coalition formation the open