who withdraws housing equity and why the decision to extract home equity is examined using household level data for the uk over 1993 2003 at its peak during the period around 1 in 10 homeowners withdraw equity per year little is known about this financial decision i find that the equity withdrawal decision conforms to predictions from the standard life cycle framework and models that predict its use as a financial buffer the paper also estimates responses to the large house price appreciation and significant reductions in mortgage rates seen during the period

a proposal to solve the comparability problem in cost utility analysis in cost utility analysis it is assumed that health state valuations are directly comparable across individuals instead health state valuations may be relative and related to people s expectations and abilities then health state valuations are not fully comparable across people and consequently cost utility analysis cannot be applied in full the present paper analyzes this comparability problem and proposes a method to solve it

assessing income population and technology impacts on co2 emissions in canada where s the ekc abstract this study investigates the macroeconomic forces underlying carbon dioxide co2 emissions from fossil fuel use in canada in keeping with the relevant literature on environmental degradation three forces are expected to influence co2 emissions gross domestic product per capita gdp capita population and technological change while previous work has employed reduced form models that allow for non linear relationships between co2 and gdp capita it has been common practice to assume linear relationships between co2 and the latter two variables this study tests a more flexible model using a five region panel data set in canada over the period 1970 2000 findings indicate that gdp capita is unrelated to co2 that an inverted u shaped relationship exists with population and that a u shaped relationship exists with technology thus technological and population changes are supported over the commonly hypothesized environmental kuznets curve an inverted u shaped relationship between gdp capita and environmental degradation for affecting co2 emissions from fossil fuel use in canada

liquidity constraints and labor supply abstract in this paper we shed some light on how restrictions in financial markets the so called liquidity constraints might act in affecting labour supply decisions of italian workers one way to neutralize the existence of binding liquidity constraints is simply by supplying additional labor instead of reducing consumption we estimate whether resorting to additional labor supply as a smoothing consumption device is at work by using the italian survey of households income and wealth shiw the longitudinal dimension of the shiw dataset allows us to control for individual unobserved heterogeneity we also use an iv strategy to address the endogeneity of our measure for credit constraints in labor supply equations due to time varying factors our results show that liquidity constraints increase the intensity in the supply of men s labor constrained men work on average 4 hours more than their unconstrained counterpart self employed workers turn out to be more sensitive to binding liquidity constraints possibly because they are more flexible in adjusting the intensity of their labor supply

evaluating decision strategies for equity of public risks many important decisions include the loss of life among their possible consequences alternative actions have different implications for the number of possible fatalities the equity of those eventual fatalities and the equity of the process resulting in those fatalities this paper defines a concept of ex ante risk equity to address the equity of the process and distinguishes this concept from the ex post risk equity of the fatalities the paper indicates that an analysis of decision strategies addresses ex ante equity in this context both types of equity as well as loss of life are included in a von neumann morgenstern utility model developed to evaluate public risks this approach provides a method to investigate the implications of different value judgments in examining alternatives and illustrates an appropriate use of von neumann morgenstern utility for problems involving social consequences such as public risks

credit constraints and labor supply evidence from bank branching deregulation this paper examines labor supply adjustment both at the intensive and extensive margins following financial market development specifically we exploit the staggered passage of bank branching deregulation in the united state to study the impact of relaxing credit constraints on labor supply decisions we find strong evidence that improvements in how credit markets function decrease weekly hours worked and that the effect is most significant for the lower middle marginal income group furthermore we observe heterogeneous responses across demo graphic groups race and income in contrast we find little to no evidence that deregulation has a significant impact on the extensive margin of participation

the other margin do minimum wages cause working hours adjustments for low wage workers this paper estimates the impact of the introduction of the uk minimum wage on the working hours of low wage employees using difference in differences estimators the estimates using the employer based new earnings surveys indicate that the introduction of the minimum wage reduced the basic hours of low wage workers by between one and two hours per week the effects on total paid hours are similar indicating negligible effects on paid overtime and lagged effects dominate the smaller and less significant initial effects within this estimates using the employee based labour force surveys are typically less significant

or forum perspectives on utility theory utility theory is a branch of decision analysis that is concerned with building models to explain and guide choice behavior under uncertainty in situations in which long run expected values are too simplistic beginning with bernoulli in the 18th century researchers have tried to analyze how people do and how people should make decisions when risk aversion is a factor in this paper we review some recent developments in the area

a new axiomatic approach to the evaluation of population health in this paper we explore the implications of normative principles for the evaluation of population health we formalize those principles as axioms for social preferences over distributions of health for a given population we single out several focal population health evaluation functions which represent social preferences as a result of combinations of those axioms our results provide new rationale for popular theories in health economics such as the unweighted aggregation of quality adjusted life years qalys or healthy years equivalents hyes and generalizations of the two aimed to capture concerns for distributive justice without resorting to controversial assumptions on individual preferences

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity i study a simple widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear unobserved effects models rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables i propose finding the distribution conditional on the initial value and the observed history of strictly exogenous explanatory variables the approach is flexible and results in simple estimation strategies for at least three leading dynamic nonlinear models probit tobit and poisson regression i treat the general problem of estimating average partial effects and show that simple estimators exist for important special cases copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

on aggregating qalys a comment on dolan dolan dolan p 1998 the measurement of individual utility and social welfare journal of health economics vol 17 pp 39 52 in a recent paper suggested an empirical method for estimating the shape of the social welfare function using a simple theoretical model it is shown that dolan s proposed empirical method has no theoretical foundation the main problem with the approach is that it measures only the altruistic values that individuals attach to other peoples health status and ignores the utility that individuals attach to their own health status

equity axioms for public risks from the perspective of a two person society we explain and analyze six axioms for equity among individuals who are exposed to the possibility of death from a public hazard the axioms are concerned with how a given total risk expected fatalities is distributed over the four possible life death consequences for the two people maximal subsets of mutually compatible equity axioms are identified first for a monotonic ordinal utility function and then for a more restrictive von neumann morgenstern utility function

economic growth and emissions reconsidering the empirical basis of environmental kuznets curves abstract recent empirical research indicates that certain types of emissions follow an inverted u or environmental kuznets curve ekc as income grows this regularity has been interpreted as a possible de linking of economic growth and patterns of certain pollutants for developed economies in this paper the empirical basis of this result is investigated by considering some statistical particularities of the various ekc studies performed it is argued that the inverted u relationship between income and emissions estimated from panel data need not hold for specific individual countries over time based on insights from intensity of use analysis in resource economics an alternative growth model is specified and estimated for three types of emissions co2 nox and so2 in four countries netherlands uk usa and western germany it is found that the time patterns of these emissions correlate positively with economic growth and that emission reductions may have been achieved as a result of structural and technological changes in the economy sustainable growth is defined as the rate of economic growth that does not lead to growth in emissions its rate is calculated for each type of emission and country based on estimated parameter values the resulting indicators reflect a balance between the positive influence of growth and negative influence of structural change and technological progress on emission levels

nonhomothetic growth models for the environmental kuznets curve we show the role of the elasticity of substitution between general consumption and the environment in environmental degradation specifically our numerical experiments demonstrate for a wide range of models exponential utility generates the environmental kuznets curve without adding any special assumptions with exponential utility the elasticity of substitution and hence the substitution effect between consumption and the environment are both decreasing in income hence when income is low society the government readily gives up environmental quality in return for more consumption but it does not want to substitute consumption for the environment anymore once it becomes wealthy enough

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

reexamining the empirical evidence for an environmental kuznets curve this paper uses an updated and revised panel data set on ambient air pollution in cities worldwide to examine the robustness of the evidence for the existence of an inverted u shaped relationship between national income and pollution we test the sensitivity of the pollution income relationship to functional forms to additional covariates and to changes in the nations cities and years sampled we find that the results are highly sensitive to these changes and conclude that there is little empirical support for an inverted u shaped relationship between several important air pollutants and national income in these data

the impact of the introduction of the u k minimum wage on the employment probabilities of low wage workers this paper uses longitudinal data from three contrasting data sets matched labor force surveys the british household panel survey and matched new earnings surveys to estimate the impact of the introduction of the u k minimum wage in april 1999 on the probability of subsequent employment among those whose wages would have needed to be raised to comply with the minimum a difference in differences estimator is used based on position in the wage distribution no significant adverse employment effects are found for any of the four demographic groups considered adult and youth men and women or in any of the three data sets used jel j38 j23

new toxics race to the bottom and revised environmental kuznets curve the case of local and global pollutants abstract this study empirically evaluated three different forms of environmental kuznets curve ekc including new toxics race to the bottom and revised ekc in a panel of 36 developed and developing countries for the period of 1995 2013 the results of robust least square mm estimator confirmed the race to the bottom hypothesis in nitrous oxide emissions n 2 o and carbon monoxides co emissions while revised ekc hypothesis exist in traffic volume emissions and co emissions the study constructed an emissions index by the principal component matrix for evaluating new toxics ekc hypothesis and confirm that industrial activities continuously created new unregulated and potentially toxic pollutants in a panel of countries the results found that industrial activities substantially increase traffic emissions and mono nitrogen oxides nox emissions across countries in a majority of the cases trade openness energy demand and per capita food variability directly associated with the air pollutants that deteriorate the natural environment

health utility indices and equity considerations the aim of this paper is to propose methods that incorporate equity concerns into cost utility analysis the focus of the paper is on qalys but the results apply to health utility indices in general two interpretations of qalys are considered qalys as von neumann morgenstern utilities and qalys as measures of health a justification is provided for aggregating consistently scaled qalys as utilities over individuals the conditions underlying unweighted aggregation of qalys are identified these conditions exclude two common types of equity concern algorithms are proposed that take into account equity concerns and that are relatively easy to apply

more wealth shorter hours evidence from the netherlands this study examines the effect of wealth shocks on working hours to address the endogeneity of wealth i use information on inheritances regional house price developments and expectations about saving behavior the results indicate that the effect of wealth on working hours is limited for men but significant for women

the environmental kuznets curve ekc theory part a concept causes and the co2 emissions case abstract the main purpose of this study is to capture the main features of the environmental kuznets curve ekc concept according to the ekc theory the process of economic growth is expected eventually to limit the environmental degradation created in the early stages of development the ekc concept leads many researchers from the early 1990s to assume that each economy should focus on its growth and any environmental problems will be eventually eliminated by the process of economic growth several studies attempt to test empirically the ekc hypothesis using data on many countries and examining various types of environmental degradation while other studies examine the underlying factors that may drive such a relationship this article reviews the evolution of the ekc concept and the possible causes of an ekc pattern like the distribution of income the international trade pollution haven hypothesis structural changes technical progress and improvements in energy efficiency institutions and governance and consumer preferences as co2 emissions are a pollutant with global effects several studies deal with the possible ekc pattern for co2 emissions and these studies are discussed separately the various critiques on the ekc concept are reviewed in the second article of this work

when efficient is insufficient fairness in decisions affecting a group many key decisions have significant consequences for a group of people rather than a single individual in some cases traditional group decision making techniques such as negotiation voting or compromise can be employed by the group members themselves to determine a satisfactory course of action in other instances however the intervention of a central decision maker may be necessary intervening on behalf of a group raises additional concerns for the decision maker one of which is fairness this paper builds upon envy based fairness concepts from the fair allocation literature and theories of ex ante and ex post equitable distributions from the social risk literature to develop a model for choice among limited options under uncertainty when preferences are heterogeneous the model is therefore appropriate when other existing models are not an example demonstrates an application of the model for choice under uncertainty and contrasts the approach and decision recommendation with that of existing models by quantifying the degree of envy rather than treating it dichotomously the approach captures the balance between fairness and efficiency some envy may be tolerated if it brings greater overall utility and or if some envy already exists in the status quo option lastly implementation issues and the impact of differing preferences and attitudes toward risk on fairness and efficiency considerations are explored

state dependence serial correlation and heterogeneity in intertemporal labor force participation of married women a dynamic search framework is developed to analyze the intertemporal labor force participation behavior of married women using longitudinal data to allow for a rich dynamic structure the sensitivity to alternative distributional assumptions is evaluated using linear probability and probit models the dynamic probit models are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood msl estimation to overcome the computational difficulties inherent in maximum likelihood estimation of models with nontrivial error structures the results find that participation decisions are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the error component the hypothesis that fertility decisions are exogenous to women s participation decisions is rejected when dynamics are ignored however there is no evidence against this hypothesis in dynamic model specifications women s participation response is stronger to permanent than current nonlabor income reflecting unobserved taste factors

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

job changes and hours changes understanding the path of labor supply adjustment we use british panel data to investigate single women s labor supply changes in response to three reforms that affected individuals work incentives we use these reforms to identify changes in labor supply there is evidence of small hours of work effects for two of such reforms a third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers hours of work the mechanism by which the labor supply adjustments were made occurred largely through job changes rather than hours changes with the same employer this is little overall effect of the reforms on wages

axioms for health care resource allocation this paper examines principles of health care resource allocation based on axioms for individual preferences and distributive justice we establish axioms for representing individual preferences by quality adjusted life years qalys as well as axioms for existence of a social welfare function depending only on qalys a symmetric cobb douglas social welfare function is characterized by an axiom stating that social welfare is anonymous with respect to the distribution of individual life years replacing this axiom with an axiom of non age dependence we obtain a characterization of a utilitarian social welfare function with certain weights further we give axioms for a social welfare function being a weighted sum of power transformations of individual qalys

fairness and social risk i unaggregated analyses this paper is the second of a two paper study of fairness issues for decisions that affect the benefits received and the risks encountered by a population the study examines fairness for individuals and for homogeneous groups within the population it considers fairness both for population benefit risk profiles and for probability distributions over profiles our study bases fairness on notions of envy among individuals and groups the first paper focused on fairness in profiles and profile distributions when benefits and risks are not aggregated the present paper uses individual preferences to assess fairness when benefits and risks are aggregated within groups or over the population it concentrates on intergroup envy measures and fairness indices that account for ways that aggregated benefits and risks might be allocated to members of groups or to groups within the population

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

technical note measuring equity in public risk an equitable distribution of risk is often an important criterion in the evaluation of technological and environmental risks in this paper we define the concept of equity precisely and develop measures for ex post and ex ante equity we then show how these measures combined with information on the number of possible fatalities can be used to rank alternatives that involve risks to human life

equity measurement in facility location analysis a review and framework abstract in selecting sites for facilities especially in the public sector the issue of equity is becoming increasingly important beginning with the work of mumphreys et al 1971 mcallister 1976 and savas 1978 a substantial literature has developed that incorporates equity in facility siting decision models despite this level of interest however there has been little agreement in these models as to how equity should be measured further except for some recent works there has generally been little comparison of alternative measures or assesment of their relative value let alone any consensus on the best measure s to use perhaps even more surprising is the great number and variety of measures employed the motivation for this paper is to address these problems and provide for researchers a base from which issues of equity can be included in facility siting models more specifically we seek to review the equity literature as it pertains to facility location assemble the set of measures that have been developed and introduce a framework and common notation for organizing them we also will discuss approaches that can be used to select an appropriate measure of equity

dispersive equity and social risk dispersive equity is concerned with the impact of life threatening risks from alternative policy decisions on homogeneous groups in a population it is not addressed to the disutility of various numbers of fatalities that might occur but rather to how fatalities are distributed over the groups although dispersive equity has long been recognized as an important component of some policy decisions it has received little formal treatment within the matrix of salient factors for such decisions our purpose is to advance its formal development this is done within a formulation based on probability distributions over potential fatality sets the formulation gives rise to four distinct but not independent equity concepts individual risk equity group risk equity dispersive equity and social outcome equity each of these is analyzed but special attention is given to dispersive equity the paper also comments on relationships between total equity and its four components and between total equity and the dis

equity considerations in utility based measures of health outcomes in economic appraisals an adjustment algorithm in this paper we consider whether methods currently used to measure utility of health outcomes are consistent with the equity criteria adopted by researchers we show that unless the chosen equity criterion is incorporated in the design of the measurement instrument the derived health state utilities are inconsistent with the equity criterion except under special circumstances adjustment algorithms are derived based on the axioms of von neumann morgenstern utility theory which take account of difference equity criteria currently adopted in the literature the proposed approach is based on simple lottery questions of the type already used widely in empirical studies

economic models for the environmental kuznets curve a survey abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc refers to an inverted u shaped relationship between some pollutant level and per capita income i e the environmental quality deteriorates at early stages of economic growth and subsequently improves at a later stage since the early 1990s a considerable number of empirical studies have been conducted on the ekc and although there is no conclusive proof it has been recognized that the ekc emerges as an empirical regularity however some recent studies cast doubt on the concept and methodology of empirical results and evidence of the existence of the ekc has been questioned in fact how economic growth affects the environmental quality i e the shape of the ekc is still controversial in order to identify the actual relationship between the environmental quality and economic growth it is essential to develop economic models from various points of view this paper overviews the current stage of theoretical models that explain such relationship

on the economic foundations of cea ladies and gentlemen take your positions abstract there are still many ongoing debates about several aspects of the methodology of economic evaluations of health care interventions some of the disparities in recommendations on methodological issues may be traced back to different viewpoints on cost effectiveness analysis cea in general two important views are the welfarist approach which aims at embedding cea into traditional welfare economics and the decision maker s approach which takes a broader and more pragmatic view on cea the focus in welfarism may be on utility while that of the decision maker s approach may be considered to be on health in this paper it is examined how these two views differ and how these differences may subsequently lead to debates in methodological areas it is indicated that embedding the practical operationalisation of cea in welfare economics seems impossible in a strict welfarist approach it is necessary to view qalys as being utilities although one may question whether such an approach to qalys is appropriate also equity considerations may play an important role in cost effectiveness analysis and these should preferably be taken into account in a way that reflects societal attitudes towards an equitable distribution of health care these equity considerations may not always be directly related to utility or efficiency furthermore both camps may prefer different methods for cost measurement in areas such as productivity costs and informal care a better recognition of the contents and origins of controversies and disputes may enhance the clarity of discussions

aversion to health inequalities in healthcare prioritisation a multicriteria optimisation perspective abstract in this paper we discuss the prioritisation of healthcare projects where there is a concern about health inequalities but the decision maker is reluctant to make explicit quantitative value judgements and the data systems only allow the measurement of health at an aggregate level our analysis begins with a standard welfare economic model of healthcare resource allocation we show how under the assumption that the healthcare projects under consideration have a small impact on individual health the problem can be reformulated as one of finding a particular subset of the class of efficient solutions to an implied multicriteria optimisation problem algorithms for finding such solutions are readily available and we demonstrate our approach through a worked example of treatment for clinical depression

a nonparametric elicitation of the equity efficiency trade off in cost utility analysis we performed an empirical elicitation of the equity efficiency trade off in cost utility analysis using the rank dependent quality adjusted life year qaly model a model that includes as special cases many of the social welfare functions that have been proposed in the literature our elicitation method corrects for utility curvature and therefore our estimated equity weights are not affected by diminishing marginal utility we observed a preference for equality in the allocation of health the data suggest that the elicited equity weights were jointly determined by preferences for equality and by insensitivity to group size a procedure is proposed to correct the equity weights for insensitivity to group size finally we give an illustration how our method can be implemented in health policy

constraints on the desired hours of work of british men this paper investigates constraints on desired hours of work using information on hours preferences from the british household panel survey for 1991 over a third of male manual workers would prefer to work fewer hours at the prevailing wage than they do and we estimate that on average desired hours per week are 4 3 lower than actual hours we hypothesise that job insecurity and scarcity of alternative job opportunities enable employers to set hours constraints above employee preferences and find that the minimum hours constraints set by firms are an increasing function of the unemployment rate an individual faces

dirty industries patterns of change in industrial countries this article concerns itself with the environmental role of heavily polluting industries since 1970 analysing its development in 11 basic industries as well as electricity production and road transport in 32 industrial countries it argues for a green industrial policy demonstrating that other mitigations of environmental pressure in industrial countries end of pipe treatment relocation to the third world structural change in the industrial sector and even environmentally oriented modernization have so far been unable to solve the problems of dirty industries although some approaches have shown some promise

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

evaluation of public investment in health care is the risk irrelevant abstract in this note we discuss the application of developments in economic theory to the evaluation of risky public health programs we show that the use of expected values as measures of outcome in such programs is inappropriate instead we suggest the use of certainty equivalent values measured by a direct assessment the standard gamble as an appropriate way to evaluate the outcome

compelling evidence of an environmental kuznets curve in the united kingdom the objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between per capita emissions hbox co 2 and hbox so 2 and economic growth per capita gdp in the uk using a long span of data this paper examines the existence of a non linear relationship between emissions and economic growth using methods that do not restrict the relationship to be any particular shape the methodology employs instrumental variables in the place of per capita gdp to deal with potential concerns about errors in variables and endogeneity the empirical results provide strong support for the environmental kuznets curve with estimated turning points in 1966 and 1967 for hbox co 2 and hbox so 2 respectively these turning points correspond roughly with the introduction of the clean air act in the uk as well as the reduction in the use of coal as an energy source and together they provide a snapshot of the forces driving the turning points the paper continues by further investigating the temporal behavior of the inverted u shaped relationship the findings indicate that if emissions and per capita gdp deviate from their long run relationship emissions do the heavy lifting to restore the system to equilibrium this result is intuitively pleasing because mitigation is directly affected by legislation as opposed to declining economic growth

worker displacement and the added worker effect this article examines the added worker effect which is the labor supply response of wives to their husbands job losses unlike past studies which focused on the husbands current unemployment status this article analyzes wives responses before and after job losses to examine the life cycle labor supply adjustments using panel study of income dynamics data reveals small predisplacement effects and large persistent postdisplacement effects the timing of the responses differs with type of displacement possibly because of differences in the information acquired before job loss long run labor supply increases compensate for over 25 of the husbands lost income

equity considerations in public risks evaluation recent contributions by r k sarin and r l keeney and r l winkler approach the problem of public risks evaluation from a multiattribute perspective in which fatalities ex ante equity and ex post equity play leading roles the present paper considers the same problem from the perspective of holistic comparisons between potential fatality distributions we consider a number of axioms for such comparisons identify maximally compatible sets of axioms and relate our approach to the multiattribute approach we also identify a form of dispersive equity that is not discussed in recent work but deserves further consideration

qalys and the equity efficiency trade off as the volume of research on quality adjusted life years qalys has increased concern has begun to be expressed about the equity aspects of resource allocation decisions based on the results of this research this paper suggests that a common theme running through the criticisms of the qaly approach is a concern about inequality it also suggests that the method for incorporating distributional concerns which is currently being pursued by advocates of the qaly approach will only ever capture concerns other than a concern about inequality the paper suggests a method for incorporating both sets of concerns into resource allocation decisions

the role of ex ante and ex post decisions in the valuation of life abstract this paper examines the use of ex ante and ex post criteria in the evaluation of projects involving the risk of death one issue concerns the appropriate welfare function and it is argued that this should reflect both ex post and ex ante considerations but not in the form of restrictions on the welfare function the second issue concerns the form of compensation the argument in favour of ex post compensation as a means of reducing the cost of risk bearing needs to be modified when risks involve more than a single dimension as they do in projects involving the risk of death

the dynamic relationship between environmental pollution economic development and public health evidence from china abstract during the last two decades of rapid economic growth china s environmental pollution has become increasingly serious and the corresponding health damage has become a significant problem that has attracted domestic and foreign attention as china pursues sustainable economic growth the issues of environmental degradation and public health should be well addressed using sulfur dioxide emissions wastewater emissions and soot and dust emissions as indicators of environmental quality this study investigates the comprehensive dynamic relationship between environmental quality economic development and public health in china for the first time to control for potential endogeneity this paper utilizes a carefully designed simultaneous equation model sem that is composed of three equations that describe the relationships among economic development environmental quality and public health using panel data from 30 chinese provinces for the period from y2002 to y2014 the model verified the negative effect of environmental pollution on public health moreover economic and social factors may also affect public health for instance real gdp per capita has a significant negative impact on perinatal mortality rates and education and medical conditions also contribute significantly to promoting economic growth and improving the level of public health

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

decision analysis models for social attitudes toward inequity social preferences for equity in the distribution of net benefits are not represented in a cost benefit study by the sum of the individuals net present values this paper presents two different decision analysts models for representing such an equity issue for each model conditions on the tradeoffs between different individuals are shown to imply that preferences can be represented by a special type of group value function procedures are presented by which such a group value function can be determined and used as part of a public policy evaluation

a dynamic model of the environmental kuznets curve turning point and public policy we set up a simple dynamic macroeconomic model with i polluting consumption and a preference for a clean environment ii increasing returns in abatement giving rise to an ekc and iii sustained growth resulting from a linear final output technology there are two sorts of market failures caused by external effects associated with consumption and environmental effort the model is employed to investigate the determinants of the turning point and the cost effectiveness of different public policies aimed at a reduction of the environmental burden moreover the model offers a potential explanation of an n shaped pollution income relation it is shown that the model is compatible with most empirical regularities on economic growth and the environment

technical note equity in risk bearing von neuman morgenstern utility functions are found incompatible with valuing fairness and lead to an invalid conclusion about risk proneness

labour supply as a buffer evidence from uk households this paper examines how individuals use their labour supply hours of work and participation decisions as a margin of adjustment or buffer in response to financial shocks the financial shock measure is constructed using individuals expected change to their financial situation in the year ahead relative to the perceived outcome one year later using bhps data we find that both men and women adjust their labour supply in response to financial shocks the propensity to participate in the labour market also appears to respond to the experience of a financial shock but is less robust

measurement of health state utilities for economic appraisal health status measurement for use in economic appraisal of health care programmes is reviewed in this paper with particular emphasis on utility measurement a framework for economic appraisal is presented displaying the various components that must be measured and showing how the three forms of analysis cost effectiveness analysis cost benefit analysis and cost utility analysis relate to the framework and to each other one of the components in the framework is health status it can be measured using ad hoc numeric scales willingness to pay receive or health state utilities the determination of health state utilities is reviewed covering the following issues alternative sources of utilities health state descriptions multi attribute utility approach determination of appropriate subjects utility aggregation and accuracy three measurement techniques for health state utilities are described in detail rating scale standard gamble and time trade off the use of these methods is described for both chronic and temporary health states and for both health states considered better than death and those considered worse than death

the normative economics of health care finance and provision whereas in many countries the crisis in medical care has been seen in terms of excess spending on health services in the uk it has been seen at least by most of those who manage and work in the nhs as a crisis of underfunding this has come about as the result of the government s successful attempts to restrain the rate of growth of real spending on the nhs which in turn reflects the government s belief that its principal effective weapon against what it perceives to be inefficiency in the nhs is to challenge management itself reformed and to some extent liberated by systematic financial squeezes the same concern has given rise to a host of proposals for reform of the nhs most of which involve a much greater role for private insurance private finance of other kinds such as out of pocket payments and private provision of health care itself

catastrophe aversion and risk equity in an interdependent world catastrophe aversion and risk equity are important concepts both in risk management theory and practice keeney keeney rl 1980 equity and public risk oper res 28 3 527 534 was the first to formally define these concepts he demonstrated that the two concepts are always in conflict yet his result is based on the assumption that individual risks are independent it has therefore limited relevance for real world catastrophic events we extend keeney s result to dependent risks and derive the conditions under which more equity and more correlation between two risks imply a more catastrophic situation we then generalize some of the results for multiple correlated risks this paper was accepted by manell baucells decision analysis

attitudes toward catastrophe in light of climate change and other global threats policy commentators sometimes urge that society should be more concerned about catastrophes this paper reflects on what society s attitude toward low probability high impact events is or should be we first argue that catastrophe risk can be conceived of as a spread in the distribution of losses based on this conception we review studies from decision sciences psychology and behavioral economics that explore people s attitudes toward various social risks contray to popular belief we find more evidence against than in favor of catastrophe aversion the preference for a mean preserving contraction of the loss distribution and discuss a number of possible behavioral explanations next we turn to social choice theory and examine how various social welfare functions handle catastrophe risk we explain why catastrophe aversion may be in conflict with equity concerns and other regarding preferences finally we discuss current approaches to evaluate and regulate catastrophe risk

transfer principles in income redistribution abstract dalton s principle of transfer for income redistribution says that society will be better off when a unit of income in transferred from a richer to a poorer individual this paper investigates the conjunction of a natural extension of dalton s principle which says that any combination of a socially desirable transfer with its inverse at uniformly higher levels of income will have positive social benefit and a traditional utilitarian egalitarian formulation of social welfare the transfer principles involved in the extension of dalton s rule correspond to stochastic dominance relations between income distributions with a common mean and lead to the conclusion that when and g are income distributions the social welfare of is larger than that of g if e ax x ax g x for all positive a this conclusion is intimately connected with a measure of income inequality studied by kolm

measurement of income inequality experimental test by questionnaire abstract we reconsider some of the basic assumptions of the literature on inequality analysis students views on the meaning of inequality comparisons were elicited by means of a questionnaire involving both numerical and verbal questions the responses suggest that two important axioms the principle of transfers and decomposability are not universally accepted

stock market wealth and consumption this paper explores the link between changes in the aggregate value of corporate stock and changes in consumer spending it presents data on the distribution of corporate stock ownership based on the 1998 survey of consumer finances it also uses time series evidence on the comovement of stock market wealth and various categories of consumer spending to calibrate the wealth effect it concludes that in the year after a change in stock market values consumer spending is likely to rise by between one and two cents for each dollar increase in the value of corporate stock

economic growth and the diffusion of clean technologies explaining environmental kuznets curves the paper provides a theoretical explanation for the inverted u shaped relation between pollution and income often found in empirical research environmental kuznets curve we model the transition in the pollution pattern as a change in general purpose technologies and investigate how it interferes with economic growth driven by quality improvements we provide an analytical foundation for the claim that the rise and decline of pollution can be explained by endogenous innovations policy induced technology shifts and intrasectoral changes once environmental degradation becomes too severe regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production

growth pollution policy abstract we investigate long run patterns in pollution flows in an optimally regulated growing economy in which consumption and environmental quality are imperfectly substitutable and pollution is a by product of production we show that by production implies that a scale effect will always drive increasing pollution when productivity is sufficiently low on the other hand if a clean technology exists it will always be chosen in the long run hence emissions will approach zero because for any strictly positive flow of pollution willingness to pay to reduce that flow grows without bound as consumption grows without bound whereas the cost of switching is bounded we clarify the intuition using a specified model in which pollution arises as a by product of the use of natural resource inputs