the state contingent approach to the noah s ark problem abstract biodiversity outcomes arising from conservation programs depend on the future state of nature yet standard economic models of biodiversity conservation are not state contingent we develop a state contingent approach to the noah s ark problem the problem of efficiently allocating limited funds to conserve biodiversity and model conservation actions under uncertainty under the state contingent approach noah will prepare for unfavorable and unexpected states of nature ex ante rather than relieving suffering ex post different species will be chosen for the ark and particularly species that underpin the foundations of ecosystems more generally the state contingent ranking equation justifies conservation policy that treats the cause rather than the symptom of biodiversity loss and recommends strategies that focus on ecosystem resilience and integrity in comparison to the standard model the state contingent approach leads to a more detailed and explicit allocation of resources jel q54 q57 q58

parents discount rates for child quality contemporary discussions of economic growth make human capital or knowledge accumulation its primary engine 25 human capital as the lead component of the stock of wealth defines a developed economy becker and murphy 4 show that human capital both increases and is increased by the scope of the market its rate of return rises with the size of its stock 5 human capital also plays significant roles in models of human fertility choice 40 population and environmental degradation 11 34 capital mobility 3 and endogenous technological progress 33 a substantial portion of an adult s human capital is accumulated during childhood children as children however cannot independently contract for the resources required to support investments in this human capital though nearly every society grants parents wide discretion about the nurture they provide their children little is understood about what motivates investment by one generation in another the relative importance of different investment modes or the discount rates which parents apply whatever the motivation and the mode because of the long time span between birth and adulthood parents discount rates potentially exert great leverage upon the investment decisions they make for their children knowledge of these discount rates is a prerequisite to acquiring an improved understanding of the internal decision processes of the household a collective decision unit which economics mostly treats as a black box 1 important policy questions as well as scientific accuracy and logical consistency demand knowledge of the discount rates parents apply to investments in their children healthier better educated and wealthier children have a better chance in life but there is no evident reason to suppose that intrafamily discount rates are socially optimal 2 many of the private reactions and behaviors which reinforce or temper the intended effects of public policies are internal to the household when these intended effects have a substantial temporal dimension parental discount rates will be influential for example increased public investments in children can be neutralized

labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content this paper analyzes labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content ldlc originally formulated by farjoun and machover 1983 first it is shown that the standard measures of labor productivity may be rather misleading owing to their emphasis on monetary aggregates instead the conventional classical marxian labor values provide the theoretically and empirically sound measures of labor productivity the notion of labor content and the ldlc are therefore central in order to understand the dynamics of capitalist economies second some rigorous theoretical relations between different forms of proflt driven technical change and productivity are derived in a general input output framework with flxed capital which provide deterministic foundations to the ldlc third the main theoretical propositions are analyzed empirically based on a new dataset of the german economy

a portfolio approach to climate investments capm and endogenous risk is there a role for investments in climate change mitigation despite low expected return we use a model of intertemporal expected utility maximisation to analyse this question similar to the capital asset pricing model capm the rate of return depends on the correlation of risk between the return on investments in climate change mitigation and the market portfolio but in contrast to the classical capm we admit the fact that economic and environmental systems are jointly determined implying that environmental risk is endogenous therefore investments in climate change mitigation may reduce risk via self protection and self insurance if risk reduction is accounted for in cost benefit evaluations climate investments may be justified despite low expected return these aspects of climate investments are not however communicated via standard cost benefit analyses of climate policy optimal climate policy may therefore be more ambitious than previously considered

new tests of the life cycle and tax discounting hypotheses abstract we first test a version of the permanent income consumption function recently suggested by barro the results support the theory except that consumption expenditures show sensitivity to transitory income next we use the consumption model to test the tax discounting hypothesis which is strongly supported this support for tax discounting disagrees with results from some earlier studies using more traditional specifications of the consumption function however we show that when certain obviously inadequate estimation procedures are corrected the traditional models also support tax discounting this uniform support for tax discounting suggests that the sensitivity of consumption to transitory income is not due to liquidity constraints

the roles of ownership ecology and economics in public wetland conservation decisions abstract scholars have studied the problem of optimal reserve site selection however the actual conservation choices made by government decision makers may yield reserve networks that are far from optimal this paper uses data on patterns of wetland conservation in austria in order to identify patterns in government decisions regarding which wetlands to protect we find that conservation decisions are guided at least in part by variation in ecological value and economic cost however there is also a marked bias against conserving lands that happen to be privately owned this bias against protecting private land is likely to be cost ineffective driven by asymmetric information and political pressure

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

natural vs anthropogenic risk reduction facing invasion risks involving multi stable outcomes abstract natural resources important to economic systems are managed in the presence of event uncertainty marking the transition from a more desirable ex ante state to a less desirable ex post state the risks of this transition are endogenous and depend on state of the natural resource system and human behavior in designing least cost policies of risk reduction policy makers should consider the optimal mix of natural and human risk reduction decisions about the best risk reduction mix matter most for systems vulnerable to ex post multi stability in which the natural resource system has the potential to begin in one of multiple locally optimal basins of attraction this is because ex ante decisions can affect the initial conditions for the ex post system thereby determining the ex post basin of attraction and the optimal ex post state in this paper we find that an ex ante system that is convex and uniquely stable without risk may become non convex and multi stable in the presence of endogenous risks and ex post multi stability this result arises because ex post non convexities and the uncertainties associated with the invasion and its magnitude can create ex ante non convexities that generate multiple optimality candidates

exploitation and time abstract this paper analyses exploitation and class formation in a dynamic context an intertemporal model of a subsistence economy is set up and among other results it is proved that in an interior equilibrium differential ownership of scarce productive assets is an inherent feature of a capitalist economy while exploitation tends to disappear in the long run asset inequality is therefore proved to be a normatively secondary though causally primary wrong it is also argued that these results raise several doubts about the possibility of providing robust micro foundations to marxian concepts by means of walrasian general equilibrium models

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 a progress report on marxian economic theory

risk self protection and ex ante economic value abstract we develop three propositions about the ex ante value of reduced risk if there is a continuous outcome distribution and if self protection influences outcome probability and severity then 1 unobservable utility terms cannot be eliminated from the ex ante value expressions 2 knowledge of the convexity or the nonconvexity of dose response functions is insufficient to sign changes in these expressions and 3 self protection expenditures need not be a lower bound measure of these expressions therefore many restrictions applied in recent empirical work on the economic value of risk changes are not immediately transferable to settings where endogenous risks prevail

spatial heterogeneity contract design and the efficiency of carbon sequestration policies for agriculture abstract in this paper we develop methods to investigate the efficiency of alternative contracts for carbon c sequestration in cropland soils taking into account the spatial heterogeneity of agricultural production systems and the costs of implementing more efficient contracts we describe contracts being proposed for implementation in the united states and other countries that would pay farmers for adoption of specified practices per hectare contracts we also describe more efficient contracts that would pay farmers per tonne of soil c sequestered and we show how to estimate the costs of implementing these more efficient contracts in a case study of a major agricultural region in the united states we confirm that the relative inefficiency of per hectare contracts varies spatially and increases with the degree of spatial heterogeneity the results also show that per hectare contracts are as much as five times more costly than per tonne contracts a degree of inefficiency similar to that found in assessments of command and control industrial emissions regulations measurement costs to implement the per tonne contracts are found to be positively related to spatial heterogeneity but are estimated to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the efficiency losses of the per hectare contract for reasonable error levels this finding implies that contracting parties could afford to bear a significant cost to implement per tonne contracts and achieve a lower total cost than would be possible with the less efficient per hectare contracts

origins of exploitation and class value theory of pre capitalist economy both the class position of agents and their status as exploiters or exploited is endogenously determined as they optimize against asset constraints which limit their capacity to produce revenue the class exploitation correspondence principle cecp asserts that class and exploitation status are related in a classical way it is further shown that the class structure associated with a labor market can be generated isomorphically by a credit market demonstrating the functional equivalence of these markets morever these results hold in models of precapitalist subsistence economy showing that the phenomena of marxian exploitation and class are applicable in economic mechanisms other than capitalist ones the possibility for a general theory of exploitation is thereby suggested

rational risk valuation given sequential reduction opportunities abstract we design experimental auctions with sequential risk reduction opportunities between private and collective self protection or self insurance we reject two hypotheses of rational risk valuation individuals do not prefer self protection to self insurance and the sequencing of private and collective mechanisms matters

economic considerations in the optimal size and number of reserve sites abstract the debate among ecologists on the optimal number of reserve sites under a fixed maximum total reserve area the single large or several small sloss problem has so far neglected the economic aspects of the problem this paper argues that economic considerations can affect the optimal number and size of reserve sites and should therefore be taken into consideration in the sloss discussion the paper presents a tractable analytical model to determine the socially optimal number of reserve sites to be allocated in a farming area under a fixed total reserve area taking the opportunity costs of nature conservation in this case agricultural profits into consideration furthermore the effect of land trade and related transaction costs on the socially optimal number of reserve sites is analyzed the analysis suggests that in the presence of diminishing returns to farming area the socially optimal number of reserve sites which maximizes social welfare is generally larger than the ecologically optimal number which maximizes an ecological objective such as population viability when the opportunity costs of conservation can be offset by land transactions however the socially optimal number of reserve sites might be closer to the ecological optimum

asymmetries in the valuation of risk and the siting of hazardous waste disposal facilities recently several economists richard thaler 1980 jack knetsch and j a sinden 1984 following suggestions of psychologists daniel kahneman and amos tversky 1979 have argued that current economic models of consumer behavior fail to explain observed asymmetries in how individuals respond to gain vs losses in perceived entitlements attention to their arguments is increasing because they relate to many current policy issues especially those associated with undesirable land uses most of the papers suggesting this limitation with the conventional economic framework have been motivated by the large differences between the estimates of willingness to pay vs willingness to accept as measures of the change in individual well being that would result from a change in the conditions of access to or the quality of a commodity in this paper we report the first evidence of a sizable property rights effect using only willingness to pay measures this change is potentially important because both the recent appraisal of contingent valuation surveys see ronald cummings et al 1986 an important source of the available empirical evidence and laboratory experiments suggest that individuals may have difficulty in dealing with the concept of compensation this is especially true when there is no opportunity for individuals to learn about transactions that involve compensation through experience based on a contingent valuation survey of households in suburban boston we found that respondents bid significantly more to reduce risk than they indicated they were willing to pay to avoid an equivalent risk increase while our findings support suggestions that changes in the implied entitlements to safety can lead to large differences in welfare measures for risk changes several of these earlier arguments would have implied that individuals were willing to pay more to avoid a risk increase the opposite to our results thus these differences imply that the determinants of individuals valuations for risk changes are more complex than past studies have acknowledged

excess sensitivity of consumption to current income liquidity constraints or myopia this paper asks whether the empirical rejection of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis occurs because agents are myopic in the sense that the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory income is non zero or because some agents face liquidity constraints the finding that the estimate of the mpc out of transitory income is dramatically affected in both magnitude and statistical significance by the inclusion of a proxy for liquidity constraints suggests that liquidity constraints are an important part of the explanation of the observed excess sensitivity of consumption to current income la sensibilite excessive de la consommation au revenu courant contraintes sur la liquidite ou myopie ce memoire examine la question a savoir pourquoi l hypothese du revenu permanent avec anticipations rationnelles n est pas v6rifiee empiriquement est ce parce que les agents economiques sont myopes i e que leur propension marginale a consommer a partir de leur revenu transitoire n est pas nulle ou bien est ce que certains agents economiques font face a des contraintes sur leur liquidite le fait que l estimation de la propension marginale a consommer le revenue transitoire est affectee par l inclusion d une variable qui tente de capturer l importance des contraintes sur la liquidit6 tant dans l 6valuation de sa taille que dans sa signification statistique suggere que ces contraintes jouent un role important dans l explication de cette sensibilite excessive qu on observe de la consommation aux changements dans le niveau de revenu courant almost all the recent empirical tests of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis re pih have rejected the hypothesis using a rich variety of data sets and estimation methods the empirical work indicates that the failure of the re pih is significant both statistically and quantitatively the null hypothesis in this empirical literature typically consists of the joint hypothesis that 1 agents expectations are formed rationally 2 desired consumption is determined by permanent income and 3 capital markets are perfect in the sense that agents can lend or borrow against 1 studies rejecting the re pih include blinder 1981 flavin 1981 hall and mishkin 1982 hayashi 1982 and sargent 1978 in his original paper hall 1978 did not reject the re pih decisively however flavin 1981 showed that with a minor alteration in the specification of the alternative hypothesis the re pih could be rejected using hall s test and data set bernanke 1981 studying panel data on automobile expenditures did not find evidence against the hypothesis for an extensive survey of the empirical literature on the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis see king 1983 canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xviii no 1 february fevrier 1985 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 85 117 36 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 05 08 58 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

an investigation of the rationality of consumer valuations of multiple health risks after developing a conceptual analysis of consumer valuation of multiple risks we explore both economic and cognitive hypotheses regarding individual risk taking using a sample of over 1 500 consumers our study ascertains risk dollar tradeoffs for the risks associated with using an insecticide and a toilet bowl cleaner we observe the expected positive valuation of risk reductions and find empirical support for a diminishing in the valuation of risk reduction as the extent of the risk reduction increases we also find evidence of certainty premiums for the total elimination of one risk but no strong evidence of additional certainty premiums for the elimination of multiple risks strong reference risk effects are evident as increases in risk were valued much more greatly than were decreases

a rule of one a rule ofone one rational person is enough to make a market one irrational person is enough to break a game let me explain the power of the market as an exchange institution rests in its ability to move resources from lowto highvalued uses the market works if one person is rational enough to look for arbitrage opportunities among the other irrational players he buys low and sells high the market collects and disseminates this information such that others

risky sports and the value of safety information abstract we develop a theoretical account of how athletes engaged in risky sports value safety information based on our model we postulate that the demand value of such information rises with wealth and exposure and declines with the athlete s appetite for risk we use survey data from a sample of backcountry skiers to empirically test these predictions the high degree of self control over exposure makes these athletes a well suited population to study the demand value of safety information caution is warranted in the empirical analysis as unobserved factors may jointly affect the athlete s perceived risk and his willingness to pay for obtaining safety information we use a recursive two stage estimation approach to account for endogeneity concerns the empirical results are supportive of our theoretical predictions and suggest that variations in athletes demand for safety information can be explained by personal beliefs about risk exposure and deliberate risk taking

differences and similarities between ecological and economic models for biodiversity conservation abstract in this paper we investigate an important obstacle which substantially complicates co operation between ecologists and economists but which has received little attention so far differences between the modelling approaches in economics and ecology to understand these differences 60 models addressing issues relevant to biodiversity conservation have been selected randomly from eight international economic and ecological journals the models have been compared according to a number of criteria including the models level of generality the mathematical techniques employed for formulation and solution of the models the level of complexity and the way time space and uncertainty are taken into account the economic models sampled are formulated and analysed analytically tend to be relatively simple and are mostly used to investigate general questions furthermore they often ignore space dynamics and uncertainty although some ecological models have similar properties there is also a substantial number of another type of ecological models that are relatively complex and analysed by simulation these models tend to be rather specific and often explicitly consider dynamics space and uncertainty the integrated ecological economic models are observed to lie in the middle between ecological and economic models an unexpected result is that they are not more complex than ecological and economic models as one could have expected from a simple merger of models from both disciplines but have an intermediate complexity

an economic analysis of air pollution and health the case of st louis a health oriented choice model is developed in which individuals are viewed as producers of health and good health is desired for both consumption and investment purposes individuals are able to adjust their consumption of medical care in order to defend against reductions in air quality a compensating variation type marginal willingness to pay expression is derived for improved air quality and the model is tested using cross sectional data on employed adult residents of st louis missouri estimates of marginal willingness to pay for the average employed person are derived for a 30 reduction in ozone these values range from 18 45 to 24 48 per year

actual labor values in a general model of production in contrast to counterfactual linear programming definitions of labor values this chapter introduces an at least equivalent definition of such values for the general case of joint production which is exclusively based on actual data this task is accomplished by extending marx s concept of individual values from multiple activities to joint production by means of certain price ratios at those points where production data are insufficient to ensure the positiveness of embodied labor time our approach generalizes the simple formula that relates labor values to monetary input output tables and it reformulates the labor theory of value in such a way that the theoretical priority of the case of a uniform composition of capital is reaffirmed in the concluding pages of his book marx s economics it is suggested by morishima that marxian economists ought radically to change their attitude towards the labor theory of value since in general the value system of the methods of production actually adopted in a capitalistic economy may be determined to be negative indefinite or even contradictory to the postulate of the uniform rate of exploitation morishima 1973 p 193 he then continues by proposing that optimal labor values the shadow prices of certain linear programming problems which minimize the amount of labor needed to produce given bundles of net output should take the place of actual labor values when production models of a more general kind than the simple leontief model are to be considered an interpretation of labor values which has been worked out in detail in morishima 1974 and has become a widely accepted approach to labor values and the labor theory of value for all types of multiple production systems

the value of a statistical life under ambiguity aversion abstract the paper shows that ambiguity aversion increases the value of a statistical life if the marginal utility of an increase in wealth is larger if one is alive rather than dead intuitively ambiguity aversion has a similar effect as an increase in the perceived baseline mortality risk and thus operates as the dead anyway effect a numerical example suggests however that ambiguity aversion cannot justify the substantial ambiguity premium apparently embodied in environmental policy making the paper also shows that ambiguity aversion decreases the marginal cost of individual self protection effort but may well decrease its marginal benefit so that the total effect of ambiguity aversion on self protection is unclear

what floats your boat preference revelation from lotteries over complex goods abstract we examine a type of lottery used to distribute some publicly held resource access rights the lottery provides participants with the opportunity to choose among a set of simple gambles over multi attribute goods participant choices result in an endogenous distribution of success rates over gambles that reflects tradeoffs between the relative desirability of the available goods and the probability of winning when lottery winnings are multi attribute goods lottery outcomes provide sufficient information to estimate hedonic prices marginal utility and marginal rates of substitution among attributes we develop a model for characterizing preferences from this information set we apply our model to idaho s four rivers whitewater recreation lottery which allows applicants to apply for one permit among a large set of alternative river day combinations that provide varying river and weather characteristics this lottery structure shows promise as a foundation for economic experiments for preference revelation

optimal land development with endogenous environmental amenities a spatially explicit model of the optimal timing and location of land development is presented that incorporates dynamic interactions between land development and water quality ignoring two way interactions leads to a lower level of water quality more development and lower social welfare the optimal pace and pattern of development can be achieved through the assessment of an impact fee that internalizes pollution damages and irreversibility costs our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for the spatial dimension of land use the interdependence between land use and environmental quality and development irreversibility in models of urbanization and amenity driven growth copyright 2008 oxford university press

targeting conservation efforts in the presence of threshold effects and ecosystem linkages abstract the prevailing federal policy of targeting conservation programs on the basis of physical criteria tends to ignore the threshold effect of conservation efforts and the correlation between alternative environmental benefits in this article we examine the extent to which conservation funds will be misallocated when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored we show that targeting conservation efforts based on physical criteria or political equity concerns may actually lead to the lowest possible benefits to society from conservation expenditure ignoring correlated benefits may lead not only to misallocation of conservation funds among watersheds but also to incorrect resources e g land streams being targeted for conservation the empirical analysis focuses on riparian habitat investments for salmon restoration in the pacific northwest we show that a large portion of conservation benefits would be lost when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored and argue that funds should be allocated so that the total value of environmental benefits is maximized not the total amount of resources protected

endogenous private safety investment and the willingness to pay for mortality risk reductions when individuals cannot undertake safety improving expenditures the effect of an increase in the initial risk on the willingness to pay wtp for mortality risk reduction is positive because of the dead anyway effect when they can undertake safety improving expenditures the effect of an increase in the initial risk is governed by two effects the dead anyway effect which is positive and the high payment effect which is negative we treat the two types of risk reducing expenditures endogenous and exogenous as inputs in a safety improving technology function and find conditions that guarantee that the high payment effect dominates

justifying the first order approach to principal agent problems it is of interest to know when the incentive compatibility conditio n in principal agent problems can be replaced by the condition that the agent s expected utility be stationary in effort the mirrlees rogerson conditions do not work if the principal can observe more than one observable statistic also the mirrlees rogerson assumption that the distribution function of output is convex in the agent s action is unsatisfactory even in the context of the basi c model it is too restrictive the paper presents a suite of conditio ns that are applicable to the multistatistic case and replaces the objectionable convex distribution function assumption copyright 1988 by the econometric society

a natural experiment approach to contingent valuation of private and public uv health risk reduction strategies in low and high risk countries we present the results of a natural experiment to test how variations in exogenous risk levels affect resultant willingness to pay wtp for risk reduction the case study presented considers wtp for reductions in the skin cancer risks associated with exposure to solar uv radiation a common design contingent valuation survey is conducted in four countries across which variation in geographical latitude and genetic mix mean that exogenous risks differ substantially survey respondents were presented with both a private and public good route for affecting risk reduction in both cases results confirm that once adjustment had been made for expected relationships with other covariates such as income and risk averting behaviour valuation responses for both goods conformed to expectations with the ordering of values across countries reflecting the ordering of scientifically established health risks this suggests that links between values and objective health risks may be observed within such situations and provides a justification for continuing research into more natural representations of risk and risk reductions in order to yield consistent and robust measures of associated values

one million miles to go taking the axiomatic road to defining exploitation this paper analyses the marxian theory of exploitation a general axiomatic approach is developed which is appropriate to study the concept of exploitation what it is and how it should be captured empirically two properties are presented that capture some fundamental marxian insights it is shown that contrary to the received view there exists a nonempty class of definitions of exploitation that preserve the relation between exploitation and profits called profitexploitation correspondence principle in general economies with heterogeneous agents complex class structures and production technologies with heterogeneous labour inputs however among the main approaches only the so called new interpretation satisfies the profitexploitation correspondence principle in general jel b51

government deficits and aggregate demand abstract the evidence presented in this paper indicates that changes in government spending transfers and taxes can have substantial effects on aggregate demand the estimates also indicate that the promise of future social security benefits significantly reduces private saving each the basic implications of the so called ricardian equivalence theorem is contradicted by the data the results are consistent with the more general view of the effects of fiscal actions and fiscal expectations that is described in the paper

economics in the anthropocene species extinction or steady state economics abstract at the dawn of the anthropocene continued economic growth carries the risk of irreversibly damaging the global carrying capacity using data from the international union for the conservation of nature red list of threatened species 2016 i present estimates of the expected extinction rates during the coming century for 557 regions i illustrate that these rates exceed the planetary boundary formulated by rockstrom et al 2009 virtually everywhere and increase with population density and gdp per capita likewise the percentage of threatened species increases with anthropogenic pressure i find no evidence in support of an environmental kuznets curve by doing so this paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the relevance of absolute versus relative scarcity for economic thought my findings suggest that the conservation of nature would benefit from degrowth or the transition to a global steady state economy

approximate aggregation under uncertainty abstract for a collection of agents with von neumann morgenstern preferences a price independent income distribution and identical probability beliefs there exists a von neumann morgenstern approximate aggregator the risk tolerance of the approximate aggregator is equal to the sum of the individual agent risk tolerances at prices which yield constant risk free contingent consumption the application of the approximate aggregator to standard asset pricing models in finance is discussed briefly

targeting incentives to reduce habitat fragmentation the fragmentation of wildlife habitat has long been recognized as a principal threat to terrestrial biodiversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to analyze the spatial targeting of incentives for the restoration of forested landscapes when land quality is spatially heterogeneous and wildlife habitat can be enhanced by reducing fragmentation we consider a regulator who uses subsidies to encourage the conversion of private agricultural land to forest on a pre defined set of landscapes the regulator can observe land use choices but not the opportunity costs on individual land parcels the important insight to emerge from the theoretical analysis is that solutions at or near corners are a strong possibility on each landscape either none or all of the agricultural land should be converted to forest corner solutions are directly linked to the spatial process determining habitat benefits to verify the theoretical insight we present a simulation of the effects of incentive based policies on the spatial distribution of forests in south carolina the empirical methodology integrates an econometric model of land use change with gis based landscape simulations the empirical findings strongly support our conjecture regarding corner solutions and the optimal targeting policy is shown to produce substantial welfare gains over a spatially uniform incentive

laboratory testbeds and non market valuation the case of bidding behavior in a second price auction with an outside option researchers now use the lab to examine the behavioral underpinnings of valuation before the field application which some argue has less experimental control but lab valuation work raises its own set of concerns when it uses private goods to explore non market valuation behavior because private goods have substitutes often unaccounted for in the lab therefore the lab as a tool to testbed field valuation work may be limited herein we design an induced valuation experiment to explore bidding behavior in a second price auction with an outside option that is a perfect substitute for the auction commodity theory predicts that rational bidders will consider the prices of outside options when formulating bidding strategies and will reduce their bids whenever their resale value exceeds the price of the outside option our results suggest that bidders account for outside options when formulating bids with behavior following comparative static predictions in addition we provide evidence concerning hypothetical versus actual behavior with induced values the data suggesting a hypothetical bias in the level of bids but not in bid shaving

averting expenditure and the cost of pollution the paper considers the relationship between the willingness to pay for environmental quality and averting expenditures that is the costs of measures undertaken in efforts to counteract the consequences of pollution the models used assume perfect mobility among locations with different levels of environmental quality the major results are i averting expenditures are not in general a good measure of willingness to pay 2 averting expenditures are not always even a lower bound on willingness to pay 3 even when averting expenditures are a lower bound the difference between the level of such expenditures and willingness to pay carmot be attributed to the unavertible aesthetic consequences of pollution for almost every kind of environmental unpleasantness we face there are averting expenditures we can make to reduce and sometimes completely remove the damage for air pollution house paint air conditioners soap for water pollution wells bottled water purifiers for noise pollution storm windows thicker walls economists have long been aware that averting behavior is both possible and practiced and they have often suggested that expenditures on such behavior can be used as a measure of the costs imposed on society by various forms of pollution the literature on this subject is difficult to characterize but to the extent that a consensus has been reached it is that averting expenditures provide a lower bound estimate of the total costs imposed by pollution and the divergence between averting expenditures and the total costs of pollution arises from the fact that some consequences of pollution e g the simple unpleasantness of breathing dirty air cannot be averted 2 3 in this note we develop two simple models of the response of utility maximizing consumers to small changes in the level of pollution which they face in the first model we assume that environmental quality is desired solely because it reduces the need for averting expenditure we show that 1 the level of averting expenditure may be either a lower bound or an upper bound estimate of the consumer s

consumers are not ricardian evidence from nineteen countries i introduction in conventional macroeconomic analysis government debt affects the economy because households view it as net wealth the larger the government debt is the wealthier households feel and the more they consume in principle however households need not view government debt as net wealth david ricardo pointed out that they might conceivably treat the future taxes servicing the government debt as exactly offsetting it 1 robert barro 1974 has shown that maximizing households will actually do so if they accurately anticipate future taxes if they face perfect capital markets and if they have effectively infinite horizons ricardian equivalence is said to hold if households do treat future servicing taxes as an exact offset to the government debt many empirical papers on consumption have investigated whether ricardian equivalence is consistent with observation kochin 1974 barro 1978 tanner 1979 seater 1982 kormendi 1983 aschauer 1985 seater and mariano 1985 kormendi and meguire 1986 1990 leiderman and razin 1988 evans 1988 and evans and hasan 1993 have reported evidence consistent with ricardian equivalence by contrast blinder and deaton 1985 feldstein 1978 1982 boskin and kotlikoff 1985 modigliani and sterling 1986 1990 and feldstein and elmendorf 1990 have reported evidence inconsistent with ricardian equivalence unfortunately most of these studies do not estimate regression equations that derive from well specified theoretical models nesting both ricardian equivalence and an alternative theory in which budget deficits and current taxes are not equivalent consequently their results are often hard to interpret moreover these studies consider the data for only one country typically the united states as a result the tests that are performed may not have much power to distinguish an economy for which ricardian equivalence would be a good approximation from one for which it would be a bad approximation olivier blanchard 1985 has provided one of the few models in the literature that tractably nests ricardian equivalence and an alternative in which households view government debt as net wealth depending upon whether a crucial parameter is zero or positive households have infinite horizons internalize all future generations and exhibit ricardian behavior or have finite horizons are at least somewhat disconnected from future generations and exhibit non ricardian behavior that strengthens as the parameter becomes larger the model has testable implications that this paper examines using annual data for nineteen countries when the data for the countries are pooled the tests have sufficient power not only to reject ricardian equivalence in favor of blanchard s alternative but also to yield a precise estimate of the deviation from ricardian equivalence this estimated deviation is approximately what one would expect if capital and insurance markets were perfect and households did not have altruistic bequest motives the deviation is however also economically unimportant for many purposes the rest of the paper is organized as follows section ii lays out blanchard s model and derives the testable implications of ricardian equivalence section iii tests these implications section iv summarizes the findings of the paper and interprets them ii empirical implications of ricardian equivalence in the stochastic variant of blanchard s model formulated in this section the economy is inhabited by a constant population of households that have finite horizons and face perfect capital and insurance markets 2 each household has a finite horizon because it has a probability p of dying each period and being replaced by another household from which it is entirely disconnected with the population normalized to unity the number of households born 0 1 2 periods earlier is always p p 1 p p 1 p sup

parental and social valuations of child health information abstract we construct an endogenous risk model of the influence of more precise hazard information on the parental demand for child health a 256 observation data set is used to estimate the marginal value to parents and to society of risk information about the future consequences of children s body lead burdens our results indicate that the social value of risk information greatly exceeds the cost of providing it and that parents will purchase too little of this information

self insurance self protection and the theory of the competitive firm several writers including magnusson 6 feldstein 5 batra 3 and ratti and ullah 9 have introduced production uncertainty into the theory of the firm by including a random variable in the firm s production function since a more favorable state of nature increases both output and the marginal product of the firm s controllable inputs in most of these analyses the random variable can be interpreted as a productive input which is complementary to the inputs chosen by the firm alternatively in this paper we view the production process as random because the firm is exposed to the possibility of production losses due to the disruptive effects of accidents the firm may then be able to undertake expenditure on resources which reduce the expected loss due to accident an increase in such expenditure will plausibly lead to a decrease in the variability of output a possibility which is precluded in most of the previous models of stochastic production this paper develops two models of the competitive firm under production uncertainty where resources can be devoted to loss reduction in the first model the firm can devote expenditure to care which reduces the magnitude of the loss without affecting the probability that a loss occurs self insurance for example the firm can reduce the severity of the loss due to fire by installation of a firm alarm system in the second model expenditure on care reduces the probability that a loss occurs without affecting the magnitude of the loss self protection for example the firm can lower the probability of fire by taking care to reduce sources of possible ignition for both models we examine the impact of increases in the degree of risk aversion and the probability of loss the distinction between self insurance and self protection is due to ehrlich and becker 4 who examined the demands for self insurance and self protection by the household when market insurance is available 2 in our model of the competitive firm market insurance is not available as is common for many production risks and we concentrate on the relationship between a traditional productive input and self insurance

choosing children s environmental risk a model of endogenous risk provides a foundation to study a parent s child care decisions when the child could be exposed to an environmental hazard e g toxic substance foodborne pathogen the parent invests in childcare quality and quantity to reduce the likelihood of a hazard exposure occurring and to reduce its severity if the exposure is realized we supply conditions to sign unambiguously the effects on a child s hazard exposure of an increased probability a parent fails to access or have command over a technique of exposure prevention or that a technique is ineffective in preventing exposure also we consider these effects when the parent is unsure what a technique can do to reduce the child s probability of exposure we conclude public policies designed to encourage use of a particular childcare technique if childcare quality and quantity are stochastic substitutes can reduce parental use of other techniques the net impact of the policy could increase the chance the child suffers

a note on parental and child risk valuation the paper develops a model that allows the estimation of parent s valuation of own and child health in an endogenous risk framework where parents can employ multiple activities to protect themselves and their children from a health risk these risk reducing activities may differ in their effectiveness and their intensity of use we suggest how to estimate the parent s ex ante marginal willingness to pay for a reduction in the ambient level of health risk unencumbered by expected utility terms

government spending and private consumption some international evidence this paper investigates the relationship between private consumption and publicly provided goods and services for a number of countries the empirical results show that in the aggregate private and government consumption are best described as complementary in the sense that an increase in one raises the marginal utility of the other the strength of this relationship is shown to be negatively affected by the government size these findings are robust across all specifications tried copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

self insurance against natural disasters abstract expenditures on self insurance to mitigate the effects of natural disasters on the value of private assets are examined in a model where individuals are partially insured against financial loss by a public relief program and where private insurance is unavailable the model predicts that optimal private expenditures on self insurance will be excessive or insufficient according to the nature of the technology by which individuals protect their assets the comparative static effects of variations in the level of public compensation individual wealth and attitudes toward risk and the degree of environmental uncertainty on self insurance expenditures and on the magnitude and frequency of public compensation are also characterized and their implications for remedial government policies are examined

biological conservation in dynamic agricultural landscapes effectiveness of public policies and trade offs with agricultural production article i nfo land use change and land management intensification are major drivers of biodiversity loss especially in agricultural landscapes that cover a large and increasing share of the world s surface incentive based agri environmental policies are designed to influence farmers land use decisions in order to mitigate environmental degradation this paper evaluates the effectiveness of agri environmental schemes for biological conservation in a dynamic agricultural landscape under economic uncertainty we develop a dynamic ecological economic model of agricultural land use and spatially explicit population dynamics we then relate policies subsidies to grassland taxation of agricultural intensity to the ecological outcome probability of persistence of a species of interest we also analyze the associated trade offs between agricultural production in value and biological conservation in probability of persistence at the landscape scale

value price and exploitation the logic of the transformation problem this paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labor values and prices from an axiomatic perspective the famous transformation problem is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and definitions a comprehensive review of recent literature is provided which shows that there are various theoretically relevant and logically consistent alternative interpretations based on different assumptions and definitions

the effects of adaptation measures on hurricane induced property losses which fema investments have the highest returns abstract this paper evaluates the relative effectiveness of fema expenditures on hurricane induced property losses we find that spending on fema ex ante mitigation and planning projects leads to greater reductions in property losses than spending on ex post adaptation programs specifically a one percent increase in annual spending on ex ante risk reduction and warning projects reduces damages by 0 21 percent while a one percent increase in ex post recovery and clean up spending reduces damages by 0 12 although both types of program spending are effective we find the marginal return from spending on programs that target long term mitigation and risk management to be almost twice that of spending on ex post recovery programs with the predicted increases in the frequency and severity of north atlantic hurricanes in the future our findings suggest there are important potential gains that could be realized from the further diversification of fema spending across project categories

the optimal allocation of conservation funds abstract this paper presents a framework to evaluate alternative designs of conservation programs and their implications for the allocation of conservation funds we show that the efficient allocation of conservation funds must consider two important pooling effects cumulative effects and interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits ignoring the cumulative effects of environmental benefits may cause conservation funds to be overly dispersed geographically and as a result may result in minimum environmental benefits when the budget is small ignoring the interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits may result in not only misallocation of conservation funds among geographical areas but also incorrect resources being targeted for conservation practices implications of these results for the design of conservation programs are discussed

is the ricardian equivalence proposition an aerie fairy theory for europe using a theoretical model based on dynamic optimizing agents we test empirically the ricardian equivalence proposition rep for the eu 15 countries the theoretical setting allows us to obtain estimates of the structural parameters of the model and to test directly the hypothesis implied by the rep using recently developed end of sample cointegration breakdown tests we find evidence of a change in the fiscal behaviour of individuals during the last decade after the introduction of a fiscal rule namely the maastricht criteria for most countries in the sample the results concerning the direction of change are mixed

can natural experiments measure behavioral responses to environmental risks efforts to measure people s responses to spatially delineated risks confront the potential for correlation between these risks and other unobserved characteristics of these locations the possibility of correlation arises in part because individuals observe other locational attributes that can be expected to influence the hedonic equilibrium one response to this problem is to use events from nature to exploit both temporal and spatial variation in the behavioral responses of interest this paper evaluates the use of hurricanes as a source of new risk information to households in coastal counties potentially subject to the effects of these storms we study the extent to which housing prices before and after hurricane andrew a hurricane with unprecedented property loss reveal how floridians responded to the risk information provided by the storm two counties are selected one without and another with damage from the hurricane to evaluate the plausibility of using quasi random experiments for locations not directly affected by natural events we compare lee county s results to those of dade county where the majority of the damage occurred our findings suggest after controlling for ex post storm damage and changes in insurance markets there is a reasonably high level of consistency in a repeat sales model s ability to estimate the effects of the risk information conveyed by the storm for both counties

equality of resources implies equality of welfare if one is an egalitarian should one try to equalize resources available to agents or to equalize their welfares with a suitably general conception of what resources are these two conceptions cannot be distinguished an allocation mechanism is defined on a space of economies and is required to satisfy various axioms that are necessary conditions for equalizing resources among a population the unique mechanism satisfying these axioms on a large domain of economies is the one that allocates commodities so as to equalize utilities of the agents methodologically the theorem is a generalization of bargaining theory because the mechanisms are defined on commodity space

class and exploitation in general convex cone economies abstract in this paper we examine what appropriate formulations for labor exploitation are in order to explain the emergence of class and exploitation status in capitalist economies given the well known controversy pertaining to plausible formulations for labor exploitation in joint production economies we propose an axiom axiom for labor exploitation le which every appropriate formulation of labor exploitation should satisfy using this axiom the necessary and sufficient condition for plausible formulations of labor exploitation is characterized to verify class exploitation correspondence principle cecp roemer 1982 according to this cecp no longer holds in general convex cone economies if the well known formulations of labor exploitation such as morishima 1974 and roemer 1982 chapter 5 are applied therefore we propose two new definitions of labor exploitation each of which verifies cecp

valuing the incremental benefits of groundwater protection when exposure levels are known both economic theory and psychological research indicate that benefit functions for reductions in health risk exposures may be conditional on current exposures using nitrates found in household wells it is demonstrated that perceptions of health risks across exposure levels are affected by the individual s current exposure level thus providing support for a conditional benefits function approach functions of conditional incremental benefits are estimated from a contingent valuation study of households that had been informed of their water test results incremental benefits reach a peak at an intermediate level of nitrates and then decline possible explanations for this non convexity are provided

evolutionary modelling of the macro economic impacts of catastrophic flood events this paper examines the possible contribution of evolutionary economics to macro economic modelling of flood impacts to provide guidance for future economic risk modelling most macro economic models start from a neoclassical economic perspective and focus on equilibrium outcomes either in a static or dynamic way and describe economic processes at a high level of aggregation as a consequence they typically fail to account for the complexity of social interactions and other behavioural responses of consumers and producers to disasters which may affect the macroeconomic impacts of floods employing evolutionary principles and methods such as agent based modelling may help to address some of the shortcomings of current macro economic models we explore and discuss the implications of applying consumer and producer heterogeneity bounded rationality network effects social and technological learning co evolution and adaptive policy making concepts into existing economic frameworks for the assessment of macro economic impacts of floods authors abstract

characterizations of bargaining solutions in production economies with unequal skills in production economies with unequal skills this paper characterizes bargaining solutions by using axioms on allocation rules rather than axioms on classical bargaining solutions we introduce a new axiom consistency w r t technological innovations so that the non welfaristic characterizations of bargaining solutions in the production economies are provided by the characterizations we can classify the three bargaining solutions the nash the kalai smorodinsky and the egalitarian solutions from the viewpoint of responsibility and compensation discussed by dworkin

cooperative and noncooperative protection against transferable and filterable externalities given self protection from an undesirable environmental externality we examine under several conditions the efficiency properties of cooperative and noncooperative behavior we demonstrate that if self protection can transfer the externality to another agent then noncooperative behavior will lead to overprotection if self protection filters or dilutes the externality then noncooperation leads to underprotection in addition overprotection will worsen if an agent with more relative power is allowed a first mover advantage or if the damage function is elastic and transferability is uncertain finally a reduction in uncertainty about transferability will accentuate overprotection if the damage function is inelastic our results suggest that coordination of protection activities among agents will enhance the overall gains from environmental policy in the european single internal market of 1992 coordination minimizes the costs of environmental protection thereby reducing the public credibility of its foes

ricardian equivalence empirical evidence from developing economies abstract the strong underlying assumptions of the barro ricardo equivalence proposition rep raise doubts on its validity especially for developing countries this paper attempts to analyze the validity of the rep and the sources of deviation from rep for a large sample of developing countries although the results are of a mixed nature they suggest that the presence of liquidity constrained individuals may be the source of deviation from the rep the analysis also indicates that public spending is a poor substitute for private consumption and hence implies that temporary increases in public spending may have some expansionary effect on aggregate demand

an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for the efficient spatio temporal allocation of species protection measures abstract using an interdisciplinary approach we present an ecological economic modelling procedure to design compensation payments for species protection we develop our procedure on the example of white stork protection in a spatio temporally structured landscape generated by human land use the proposed procedure is able to solve complex allocation problems such as the spatio temporal allocation of a budget among more than two areas with spatially differing species specific cost and benefit functions of any shapes furthermore the procedure delivers the efficient compensation payments not only qualitatively but quantitatively and is hence relevant to the implementation of species protection policies

designing frameworks to deliver unknown information to support market based instruments this article reports on an australian auction to procure multiple environmental outcomes ecotender ecotender uses a catchment modelling framework cmf to estimate the impact landholder actions have on carbon terrestrial biodiversity aquatic function water quality and quantity and saline land area this framework solves the problem of linking paddock scale land use and management to catchment scale environmental outcomes this is the first time a market based instrument has been fully integrated from desk to field with a biophysical model for the purchase of multiple environmental outcomes a multiple outcome auction provides several new economic and scientific challenges this article discusses the ecotender approach to incorporating agency preferences modeling the joint production of environmental outcomes and reporting environmental scores results indicate that linking ecotender to the carbon market reduced the cost of procuring the environmental goods by 26 further preliminary estimates show that the environmental gains from scoring the joint production of multiple outcomes are between 30 and 50 to the agency

optimal management of environmental externalities with time lags and uncertainty many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty in this paper we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic we develop a two period two polluter model and obtain closed form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes these solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags we find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on a the discount rate b conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource c persistence of the pollutant and d initial conditions

uncertainty and measurement error in welfare models for risk changes abstract most welfare models of environmental or mortality risk reductions assume that risks are exogenously determined and known with certainty however a growing body of research suggests that uncertainty about risks can affect choices over risky prospects i present a decision weighted random utility model that decomposes welfare losses into those attributable to an increase in the deterministic component of risk and those attributable to uncertainty about risk i apply the model to an illustrative dataset of subjects perceived mortality risk and willingness to accept the risk of nuclear waste transport i estimate the model using lewbel s 2000 strictly exogenous regressor approach to account for endogeneity bias and measurement error subjects display aversion to both risk and uncertainty about the risk of a transport accident so that increases in either leads to social welfare losses roughly 12 of the external cost of nuclear waste transport is attributable to the public s uncertainty about transport risk

economies human capital and natural assets human capital concerns are used to structure links between the economy and the environment suggestions for empirical work to explore these structures are provided particular attention is devoted to connections between environmental hazards and influences upon parents decisions to invest in forming children s human capital

a science driven market based instrument for determining the cost of environmental services a comparison of two catchments in australia abstract an auction based approach or mbi for market based instrument was used to purchase environmental services from landowners and to establish a long term economic resource forest plantations in two catchments in the state of victoria australia the policy goal of the mbi was to encourage the conversion of cleared land to forest plantations it was desired to achieve this while also reducing the amount of land affected by dryland salinity with minimum impact on water available for irrigation operationally interested landowners identified areas on which they would be willing to establish forest plantations and stated the amount of money they would require from the government to undertake plantation establishment this constituted a landowner bid the proposed planting area associated with each bid was processed through a quantitative hydrological model to estimate off site impacts on dryland salinity and the change in water yield resulting from the conversion of individual non forested areas to forest plantations landowner bids were then accepted or not based on the economic trade offs among dollars requested by a landowner reduction in water yield and decrease in dryland salinity to enable a comparison of costs the mbi was independently trialled in two catchments for both the cost to government of a hectare of plantation and or a hectare of salinity benefit was calculated a number of ways assuming the existence of a calibrated hydrological model costs associated with distributing money via such an mbi were publicity fieldwork processing the bids through the model probity legal and administration in the gippsland catchment the total cost to establish forest plantations was 5340 per ha whereas it was 1635 per ha in the corangamite catchment no salinity benefit was obtained in gippsland but in corangamite if considered in isolation of the economic forest plantation benefit the cost per hectare of salinity benefit was 5020 operational aspects of the mbi are presented and discussed and a comparison is made to the expected costs of a conventional non science driven approach to landowner incentives

voluntary conservation of endangered species when does no regulatory assurance mean no conservation abstract voluntary conservation agreements are becoming increasingly important in implementing the endangered species act on private land we analyze when such agreements arise and what level of conservation they generate in the presence of uncertainty about future conservation benefits and irreversibility of habitat loss and species extinction our results suggest that the likelihood of an agreement and the resulting conservation levels depend on the background threat of regulation the cost advantage offered by voluntary agreements and the availability of assurances regarding future regulation under conditions likely to hold in practice conservation agreements that offer assurances may generate higher levels of conservation and higher net social benefits than agreements that do not offer assurances however the resulting level of conservation will not be optimal and may be lower than that attainable under regulation

testing ricardian neutrality with an intertemporal stochastic model this paper s purpose is to develop and estimate a stochastic intertemporal model of consumption be havior and to use it for testing a version of the ricardian equivalen ce proposition with time series data two channels that may give rise to deviations from this proposition are specified finite horizons a nd liquidity constraints in addition the model incorporates explici tly the roles of taxes substitution between public and private consu mption and different degrees of consumer goods durability the evid ence based on data for israel in the first half of the 1980s suppor ts the ricardian neutrality specification yielding plausible estimat es for the behavioral parameters of the aggregate consumption functio n copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

relative and absolute scarcity of nature assessing the roles of economics and ecology for biodiversity conservation abstract our aim in this essay is to identify and analyze some of the difficulties with interdisciplinary integration of economic and ecological contributions to the study of biodiversity loss we develop our analysis from a widely accepted definition of economics which is based on the concept of scarcity taking a closer look at this notion we find that economics actually limits itself to a very particular aspect of scarcity which we denote as relative scarcity we describe in what respect the economic approach towards biodiversity is based on this notion and also reflect on the specific understanding of the relation of humans and nature behind the economic approach we then turn to absolute scarcity as another notion of scarcity and show that this is not within the scope of economics but has been a theme of ecology and ecological economics we describe in which way ecological and ecological economic approaches towards biodiversity are based on the idea of absolute scarcity and also reflect on the specific understanding of the human nature relationship behind this notion of scarcity against this background we discuss the roles of economics and ecology for nature conservation we conclude that the interdisciplinary integration of ecology and economics requires a philosophical underpinning and suggest a framework for further research

valuing changes in health risks a comparison of alternative measures essential to efficient provision of health safety and the environment is correct valuation of risks to human health in a world of scarcity difficult decisions concerning tradeoffs between health and other desirables are unavoidable in this paper we develop a model of health investment under uncertainty which yields a general expression for values of changes in risks to human health the preference based values of morbidity risks and mortality risks are ex ante dollar equivalents of changes in expected utility associated with risk changes the preference based values are related to two alternative measures costs of illness and preventive expenditures which are thought to be lower bounds on the value of risk reductions we demonstrate that these alternative measures are not even special cases of the more general measure and that the size relationships among the three measures are complex also we derive the relationship between the willingness to pay for risk changes and the consumer surpluses associated with health changes which occur with certainty the next section contains a brief review of the approaches to valuing changes in health

public good valuation and intra family allocation i derive values of marginal changes in a public good for two person households measured alternatively by household member i s willingness to pay wtp for the good on behalf of the household wtp i h or by the sum of individual wtp values across family members wtp c households are assumed to allocate their resources in efficient nash bargains over private and common household goods wtp i h is then defined by trade offs between the public good and the household good and wtp c by trade offs of between the public good and private goods wtp i h is found to be higher lower than wtp c when member i has a relatively high low marginal valuation of the public good but tends on average to equal wtp c as a consequence individuals tend to represent households correctly on average when questioned about the household s wtp for a public good even when they are purely selfish and answer truthfully adding all members wtp answers on behalf of the household then leads to double counting pure and paternalistic altruism the latter attached to consumption of the public good move each member s wtp on behalf of the household closer to the true sum of individual wtp but only paternalistic altruism raises this sum

spatially uniform versus spatially heterogeneous compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures the importance of compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures has grown over the past decade particularly in connection with agri environmental policy given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity enhancing land use measures are subject to spatial variation the criterion of cost effectiveness calls for spatially heterogeneous compensation payments however when deciding whether to implement uniform or heterogeneous compensation payments the regulator has to compare the disadvantage of uniform payments in terms of cost effectiveness with the disadvantages of spatially heterogeneous payments to help resolve this issue this paper provides a simple ecological economic model that allows the reduced cost effectiveness associated with uniform payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures to be assessed for different types of benefit and cost functions

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 this report explores the development of exploitation theory in mathematical marxian economics by reviewing the main controversies surrounding the proper definition of exploitation since the contribution of okishio the report first examines the debates on the fundamental marxian theorem and class exploitation correspondence principle developed mainly in the 1970s and 1980s followed by the property relation theory of exploitation by roemer then the more recent exploitation theory proposed by vrousalis and wright is introduced finally the report introduces and comments on recent axiomatic studies of exploitation by focusing on the work of veneziani and yoshihara

the economics of a public fund for environmental amenities a study of crp contracts the problem of targeting crp purchases to buy environmental amenities under productivity and environmental heterogeneity is considered gini coefficients and lorenz curves are used to measure the effectiveness of spending under alternative targeting criteria the environmental benefits considered are water erosion wind erosion surface water quality and wildlife habitat the three alternative targeting criteria examined include purchasing land according to i the benefit to cost ratio ii the level of benefits and iii the level of cost results indicate that the degree of variability and correlation determine the extent to which suboptimal targeting achieves a significant portion of available environmental benefits

the dynamics of inequalities and unequal exchange of labor in intertemporal linear economies abstract introducing a concept of fairness of economic allocations namely exploitation as the unequal exchange of labor henceforth ue exploitation by generalizing roemer s 1981 1982a seminal models this paper aims to answer the following two questions in the context of an intertemporal economy with linear technology how is income and wealth inequality related or unrelated to the existence and persistence of ue exploitation what are the mechanisms driving the persistent existence of ue exploitation in growing economies agents are ue exploited resp exploiters if the amount of labor that they contribute to the economy is bigger resp smaller than the amount of labor received by them via their income it is proved first that ue exploitation is monotonically correlated to functional income inequality second it is shown that unless agents discount the future asset inequalities are necessary but not sufficient for the persistence of ue exploitation and capital accumulation leading to the disappearance of ue exploitation cannot be ruled out in equilibrium third it is shown that regardless of whether agents discount the future labor saving technical progress may yield sustained growth with persistent ue exploitation by keeping labor abundant relative to capital which restrains wages from rising unlike in models with differentiable production functions this mechanism does not rely on changes in the marginal productivity of inputs and it is entirely driven by the interaction between innovation and labor markets