environmental policy and international trade when governments and producers act strategically some environmentalists express concern that trade liberalization may damage the environment by giving governments incentives to relax environmental policies to give domestic producers a competitive advantage support for such concern may be given by models of imperfectly competitive trade where there may be rent shifting incentives for governments to relax environmental policies but there are also incentives for producers to act strategically e g through their investment in rd ii allowing governments to act strategically increases the incentive for producers to act strategically iii welfare is lower when both parties act strategically and iv strategic behavior by producers and governments is greater when governments use emission taxes than when they use emission standards

environmental governance in federal systems the effects of capital competition and lobby groups noel gaston we argue that centralized and decentralized environmental governance yield equivalent environmental regulations we model worker environmental and capital owner lobby groups that seek influence by offering political contributions worker lobbying in the decentralized case has an effect on environmental regulations identical to that of capital owner lobbying in the centralized case this is because the aggregate effects of environmental regulations on income are equivalent under the two institutional designs whereas workers carry the full burden in the decentralized case when capital competition occurs the burden is shared with the capital owners in the centralized case we present evidence consistent with our theory jel q28 f21 r38 d72 d78 i introduction as the demand for efficient environmental policies increases the ambit of political power in a federation must be determined cumberland 1981 suggests that uniform federal rules avoid the economic competition between jurisdictions in order to attract investment that may result in an excessively low environmental quality as discussed by burtraw and portney 1991 central decision making may be highly inefficient however because federal regulations fail to take into account the heterogeneity of local environments 1 this article develops a theory of decentralized and centralized environmental policy making in federal systems that incorporates the political forces determining the outcomes under the two alternative regulatory designs the empirical evidence on the effects of interjurisdictional capital competition on environmental policies is inconclusive and mainly anecdotal esty 1996 gives an overview of the available evidence and finds that rent seeking behavior undoubtedly affects national as well as state environmental policy making but there is no evidence that public decision making is systematically more distorted at the federal level than at state and local levels 2 in a study of packaging waste regulation in the european union eu paul 1994 95 describes how the move from decentralized to centralized regulation remains controversial some greens bitterly criticize the directive as a sellout to industry it is true that industry aggressively lobbied parliament to stop the efforts of the greens to tighten the directive and that i t is tempting to describe this debate as one more example in which the regulatory authority was captured by industry 3 evidently the move to centralized regulation stimulated industry lobbying the present paper provides an explanation for why industry lobbying may be stronger at the federal level and discusses the implications for environmental policy under decentralized and centralized environmental policy making 4 the current literature lacks a formal comparison of politically determined environmental regulations under the different institutional arrangements that may exist in federal systems 5 while we couch our argument in terms of environmental policy making that could be undertaken either at the national level or at lower levels in a federal structure we believe that the central ideas extend to regulatory policy carried out at both the highest and lowest levels of multi country federations such as the eu 6 extensions of our theory may apply more generally to several forms of regulation for example worker safety standards and product liability legislation as well as to firm taxation a key concern of environmental policy makers in federal systems is interjurisdictional capital mobility we model a decentralized system of regulation with a mobile capital stock consideration of the effects of environmental regulations on capital is important van beers and van den bergh 1997 find no significant negative effect of environmental regulation on export flows in polluting industries except when restricting their data to sectors with high capital mobility

nash equilibria in models of fiscal competition abstract this paper analyzes nash equilibria in a simple model of an economy with jurisdictions engaging in fiscal competition small number nash equilibria in which tax rates are the strategic variables are shown not to coincide with nash equilibria in which public expenditure levels are the strategic variables

the bullwhip effect in supply chains an overestimated problem abstract a phenomenon that is now well known as the bullwhip effect suggests that the variability of orders increases as they move up the supply chain from retailers to wholesalers to manufacturers to suppliers in this paper we will focus mainly on measuring the bullwhip effect existing approaches that aim at quantifying the bullwhip effect neglect the network structure of supply chains by only assuming a simple two stage supply chain consisting of a single retailer and a single manufacturer some of the relevant risk pooling effects associated with the network structure of supply chains are disregarded risk pooling effects arise when the orders which a retailer receives from its customers are statistically correlated with a coefficient of correlation less than one when analyzing the bullwhip effect in supply chains however the influence of risk pooling has to be considered the fact that these influences have not yet been analyzed motivates the research presented in this paper we will show that the bullwhip effect is overestimated if just a simple supply chain is assumed and risk pooling effects are present

a theory of interregional tax competition a general equilibrium model is constructed to study tax competition where local governments compete for capital by holding down property tax rates and public expenditure levels an exact definition of tax competition is provided and both the existence and nonexistence of tax competition are shown to be theoretically possible it is argued however that tax competition must occur under empirically reasonable conditions inefficiency in public production is also explicitly modeled the amount of capital used to produce a given level of public service output is shown to be greater than that which is required to minimize costs evaluated at the prices facing private firms

the impact of forecasting methods on the bullwhip effect abstract this paper considers the impact of forecasting methods on the bullwhip effect for a simple replenishment system in which a first order autoregressive process describes the customer demand and an order up to inventory policy characterizes the replenishment decision a bullwhip effect measure is derived for the optimal forecasting procedure that minimizes the mean squared forecasting error for the specified demand process similar measures are obtained for the moving average and exponential smoothing methods the findings indicate that different forecasting methods lead to bullwhip effect measures with distinct properties in relation to lead time and underlying parameters of the demand process moreover a simple rule is established to help managers select a forecasting method that yields the lowest inventory cost

the voluntary provision of a pure public good the case of reduced cfc emissions and the montreal protocol abstract this paper applies the theory of the voluntary provision of a pure public good to the behavior of nations to curb chlorofluorocarbon cfc emissions during the late 1980s by devising an empirical test we determine that these cutbacks in emissions are consistent with nash behavior when taste parameters are controlled the relationship between emission cutbacks and national income is nearly linear as implied by the theory if the sample is purged of potential outliers then the linear relationship results a significant taste parameter is the extent of political and civil freedoms while a marginally significant parameter is geophysical position in terms of latitude

can sustainable consumption be learned a model of cultural evolution abstract this paper shows how sustainable consumption patterns can spread within a population via processes of social learning even though a strong individual learning bias may favor environmentally harmful products we present a model depicting how the biased transmission of different behaviors via individual and social learning influences agents consumption behavior the underlying learning biases can be traced back to evolved cognitive dispositions challenging the vision of a permanent transition toward sustainability we argue that green consumption patterns are not self reinforcing and cannot be locked in permanently

a change point analysis of the impact of environmental federalism on aggregate air quality in the united states 1940 98 i introduction a major purpose of this article is to examine three important national air pollution series nitrogen oxides nox sulfur dioxides so2 and volatile organic compounds vocs for change points in their trends and in so doing determine to what extent president ronald reagan s environmental federalism economic report of the president 1982 p 44 had any effect on the trends of these series did his devolution of environmental policy from federal control to state and local control positively or negatively affect the trends in these series did the reagan devolution provide the impetus for the beneficial trends in these series that we currently observe might the aggregate series we examine tell us anything about the current controversy concerning whether increased state and local competition in environmental decision making might give rise to a race to the bottom or race to the top with respect to the stringency of environmental standards see for example cumberland 1981 glazer 1999 list and gerking 2000 first to give proper context to these questions we must take a brief look at the history of environmental policy making in the united states before 1955 there was very little environmental policy making two major exceptions were the federal refuse act of 1899 and the federal food drug and cosmetic act of 1938 the first act prevented navigational obstruction of waterways and the second act set limits on the amount of pesticide residuals allowed in farm products however beginning in 1955 federal activism concerning the environment increased resulting in the enactment of several federal environmental laws the air pollution act of 1955 facilitated cross state air quality management the clean air act of 1963 provided permanent federal support for research on air pollution the motor vehicle air pollution control act of 1965 was aimed at decreasing the level of air pollution from vehicles and the air quality act of 1967 provided national auto emissions standards moreover the clean air act of 1970 established the environmental protection agency epa for the purpose of setting and enforcing national environmental quality standards in the following year the epa established the uniform national ambient air quality standards naaqs the clean air act was amended in 1977 primarily to set new goals for achieving the naaqs in contrast to the previous 1955 80 era of federal control of air quality standards much of the environmental decision making power was devolved from the federal level to the state and local levels under the presidential administrations of ronald reagan 1981 89 and george herbert walker bush 1989 93 this policy regime shift has been referred to as the shift to environmental federalism economic report of the president 1982 p 44 with respect to environmental federalism figures 1 and 2 display governmental expenditures for air pollution abatement and control obtained from vogan 1996 unfortunately the bureau of economic analysis of the commerce department discontinued their pollution abatement and control survey with the vogan article and more recent abatement and control data are unavailable to extend the series in figures 1 and 2 beyond 1994 figures 1 2 omitted in figure 1 we have plotted total governmental expenditures for air pollution abatement and control in 1992 chain weighted dollars obviously from 1972 90 total real governmental expenditures oscillated at or below 1 trillion 1992 dollars and there was no discernible trend in total governmental commitment to environmental policy however beginning in 1991 real expenditures on abatement and control doubled to approximately 2 trillion 1992 dollars with respect to the federal to state and local devolution figure 2 displays the proportion of state and local expenditures to total governmental expenditures both in current and real 1992 dollars

the impact of pricing policy on sales variability in a supermarket retail context abstract the bullwhip effect is recognized to be a significant cost driver in supply chains one of the measures proposed frequently to counter bullwhip effect is price stability through everyday low pricing edlp however this study suggests that with an auto regressive ar1 demand process the use of constant instead of dynamic pricing may result in lower profitability and higher demand volatility an optimal price and stocking level policy is developed with normally distributed demand in this study and the model is tested using parameters from a supermarket scanner data set to determine the impact of two pricing policies the hypothesis that low prior period demand leads to discounted pricing is also tested and partially supported

a measure of bullwhip effect in supply chains with a mixed autoregressive moving average demand process abstract in this paper we quantify the impact of the bullwhip effect the phenomenon in which information on demand is distorted as moving up a supply chain for a simple two stage supply chain with one supplier and one retailer assuming that the retailer employs a base stock inventory policy and that the demand forecast is performed via a mixed autoregressive moving average model arma 1 1 we investigate the effects of the autoregressive coefficient the moving average parameter and the lead time on the bullwhip effect

small sample uncertainty aspects in relation to bullwhip effect measurement abstract the bullwhip effect as a concept has been known for almost half a century starting with the forrester effect the bullwhip effect is allegedly observed in many supply chains and it is generally accepted as a potential malice despite this the bullwhip effect still seems to be first and foremost a conceptual phenomenon some even simply denies that the phenomenon exists at all in practice this of course makes it important to perform measurements because only what gets measured gets done as the saying goes in analytics few measurements are reported in the literature however typically based on standard statistical assumptions in the case of a standard measurement of the bullwhip effect independence amongst the participating variables are required amongst others but this is definitely known not to be perfectly true if any systematic control at all have taken place in the supply chain this paper analyses the bullwhip measurement implications in case the standard test assumptions are violated and illustrates how to improve on the testing setup this is further done with a special emphasis on the unavoidable small sample aspects relating to such measurement in practice which typically renders all statistical asymptotic or robust arguments quite unusable it is shown how h 0 95 confidence test intervals still easily can be obtained numerically in such cases

inter regional competition comparative advantage and environmental federalism in this paper we compare endogenous environmental policy setting with centralized and decentralized governments when regions have comparative advantages in different polluting goods we develop a two region two good model with inter regional environmental damages and perfect competition in product markets where both regions produce both goods despite positive spillovers of pollution across regions the model predicts that decentralization may lead to weaker or stricter environmental standards or taxes depending on the degree of regional comparative advantage and the extent of transboundary pollution this suggests that federalism can lead to either a race to the bottom or a race to the top without relying on inefficient lobbying efforts or capital competition resume concurrence inter regionale avantage comparatif et federalisme environnemental dans ce texte les auteurs comparent l appareil de definition de politique environnementale endogene pour des gouvernements centralises et decentralises quand les regions ont des avantages comparatifs dans la production de divers biens polluants on developpe un modele a deux regions et a deux biens operant dans un cadre ou existent 1 des effets de retombees inter regionales toxiques pour l environnement 2 concurrence parfaite dans les marches des produits et 3 ou les deux regions produisent les deux biens malgre les effets de pollution entre regions le modele predit que la decentralisation peut entrainer des standards et des taxes portant sur l environnement qui sont soit plus faibles ou plus forts selon le degre d avantage comparatif regional et la nature de la pollution transfrontiere on suggere que le federalisme peut conduire a une emulation soit vers le bas soit vers le haut sans avoir a avoir recours a des efforts de lobbying inefficaces ou a la concurrence pour le capital pour expliquer le resultat

the politics of 1992 fiscal policy and european integration the internal market in europe will greatly increase the international mobility of resources how will this affect fiscal policy in different countries we consider taxation of capital in a two country model where a democratically chosen government in each country chooses tax policy higher capital mobility changes the politico economic equilibrium in two ways on the one hand it leads to more tax competition between the countries this economic effect tends to lower tax rates in both countries on the other hand it alters voters preferences and makes them elect a different government this political effect offsets the increased tax competition although not completely

forecasting with multivariate temporal aggregation the case of promotional modelling demand forecasting is central to decision making and operations in organisations as the volume of forecasts increases for example due to an increased product customisation that leads to more skus being traded or a reduction in the length of the forecasting cycle there is a pressing need for reliable automated forecasting conventionally companies rely on a statistical baseline forecast that captures only past demand patterns which is subsequently adjusted by human experts to incorporate additional information such as promotions although there is evidence that such process adds value to forecasting it is questionable how much it can scale up due to the human element instead in the literature it has been proposed to enhance the baseline forecasts with external well structured information such as the promotional plan of the company and let experts focus on the less structured information thus reducing their workload and allowing them to focus where they can add most value this change in forecasting support systems requires reliable multivariate forecasting models that can be automated accurate and robust this paper proposes an extension of the recently proposed muliple aggregation prediction algorithm mapa which uses temporal aggregation to improve upon the established exponential smoothing family of methods mapa is attractive as it has been found to increase both the accuracy and robustness of exponential smoothing the extended multivariate mapa is evaluated against established benchmarks in modelling a number of heavily promoted products and is found to perform well in terms of forecast bias and accuracy furthermore we demonstrate that modelling time series using multiple temporal aggregation levels makes the final forecast robust to model misspecification

environment and development theory and international evidence the environmental effects of economic development have significant implications for a wide array of policy questions facing both low and high income countries today internationally agricultural research centers are considering how to incorporate sustainability issues into their research agendas while international lending institutions are taking a close look at the environmental consequences of industrial projects domestically the north american free trade agreement has brought the relationship between economic development and environmental quality to the forefront of u s public policy debate it is surprising that despite the postwar growth of development economics the genesis of environmental economics and the fusion of ideas from both fields into the theme of sustainable development economists have not made much progress in describing the impacts of long term economic growth on environmental quality yet a vigorous public debate has arisen between individuals who maintain that environmental degradation is a necessary outcome of economic growth and those who believe that economic growth and environmental quality go hand in hand this debate was highlighted at the 1992 united nations conference on environment and development in rio de janeiro in part this debate hinges on the properties of the aggregate demand for and supply of environmental quality if the income elasticity of demand for environmental quality or amenities is high then the increased prosperity engendered by economic growth could lead to significantly higher demand for environmental quality proponents of economic growth believe this demand will translate into a higher realized level of quality as both public and private institutions and organi

tax competition and leviathan abstract attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government this paper synthesises the two extremes which as in other areas of public finance have dominated the debate typically being presented as stark alternatives the view of government as a leviathan from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy makers and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens welfare from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency conditions are derived under which when policy makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self serving tax coordination benefits the representative citizen

political institutions and pollution control this paper models the selection of environmental policies under authoritarian and democratic regimes and tests the hypothesis that political institutions systematically affect the enactment of environmental regulations the results support the contention that political institutional arrangements rather than resource endowments largely determine policies concerning environmental regulation copyright 1992 by mit press

the siting of hazardous waste facilities in federal systems the political economy of nimby this paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardous waste treatment facilitiesin federal system we first show that a decentralized systemyields the first best waste treatment capacity level and that acentralized structure gives rise to free riding behavior amonglocal jurisdictions in our model each community seeks toinfluence the central government through political contributions this leads to suboptimal levels of treatment capacity thecapacity is increasing in the compensation level if the marginalbenefit of treatment capacity is sufficiently large and in thegovernment s weight on aggregate social welfare relative tolobbying activities the centralized system can replicate thedecentralized system with a sufficiently high compensation level since compensation has proved difficult a centralized systemfaces greater obstacles than a decentralized system

too poor to be green consumers a field experiment on revealed preferences for firewood in rural guatemala the paper reports on a field experiment that investigates whether households in guatemala are willing to surrender a small material gain in order to buy legal rather than illegal firewood given the ineffectiveness of command and control policies to curb the problem of illegal logging in guatemala the experiment assesses the potential viability of market oriented solutions local consumers in developing countries are generally believed to be too poor to pay a premium for green ethical products therefore little information has been gathered on willingness to pay wtp for such products and its determinants in non affluent consumer markets while our experiment on firewood consumption in central guatemala only implies a weak and indirect test of wtp for green products the results indicate that it is premature if not unwarranted to assume that the poor are not ready to make pro ethical choices in the marketplace moreover we find that information on the legal procedures for firewood extraction significantly affects consumer choice between legal and illegal firewood

an empirical investigation on causes and effects of the bullwhip effect evidence from the personal care sector abstract this paper analyses the empirical demand data for fast moving consumer goods to measure the bullwhip effect the data consist of the sell in from a large manufacturer to the retailers and the sell out from a retailer to the consumers our findings show that the bullwhip effect can be substantial indeed in more than 50 of the cases the demand upstream sell in is twice as variable as the demand downstream sell out however in other cases it can be negligible and in one case the demand upstream is slightly less variable than the demand downstream so while the bullwhip effect can be very large it need not be so finally we attempted to delve into the dynamics that generate a significant bullwhip effect and discovered that among the various causes that create the bullwhip effect discussed by lee et al 1997a price fluctuations and forward buys driven by sales targets play a decisive role we show that the flatter the final consumer demand sell out the more room there is for the retailers to forward buy in order to take advantage of the deals offered by the manufacturer s sales force toward the end of the sales period on the contrary the more variable the final consumer demand the less willing the retailer is to make a risky inventory investment and thus the more the retailer s orders closely follow consumer demand this result at the product family level is very consistent with the results that cachon et al 2007 obtained at the company industry level

environmental regulation whose self interests are being protected special interest can explain why environmental policy limits economic activity in areas where air quality is above minumum standards locational competition among region helped create a policy that raised factor mobility cost from slower to faster growing regions analysis of votes shows greater support for this policy was received from northern urban constituencies and the greatest opposition came from the south and the west pollution abatement costs per unit of output are higher in areas with higher not lower air quality

environmental policy in majoritarian systems abstract this paper sheds new light on the determination of environmental tax policies in majoritarian federal electoral systems such as the u s and derives implications for the environmental federalism debate on whether the national or local government should have authority over environmental taxes in the absence of majority bias the socially preferred policy would be federal district level taxation which accounts both for cross boundary pollution and differences in industry concentration across districts in majoritarian systems however where the legislature consists of geographically distinct electoral districts the majority party at the national or state level favors home districts depending on the location of polluting industries and the associated damages the majority party may therefore impose sub optimally high or low pollution taxes due to a majority bias majority bias can influence the social welfare ranking of alternative environmental tax policies in some cases majority bias may make decentralized or federal uniform taxation the preferred solution

a novel time varying bullwhip effect metric an application to promotional sales abstract bullwhip effect is a problem of paramount importance that reduces competitiveness of supply chains around the world a significant effort is being devoted by both practitioners and academics to understand its causes and to reduce its pernicious consequences nevertheless limited research has been carried out to analyse potential metrics to measure it that typically are summarized in the coefficient of variation ratio of different echelons demand this work proposes a new metric based on a time varying extension of the aforementioned bullwhip effect metric by employing recursive estimation algorithms expressed in the state space framework to provide at each single time period a real time bullwhip effect estimate in order to illustrate the results a case study based on a serially linked supply chain of two echelons from the chemical industry is analysed particularly this metric is employed to analyse the effect of promotional campaigns on the bullwhip effect on a real time fashion the results show that effectively the bullwhip effect is not constant along time but interestingly it is reduced during the promotional periods and it is bigger before and after the promotion takes place

environmental policy when market structure and plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region two firm model is developed in which firms choose the number and the regional locations of their plants both firms pollute and market structure is endogenous to environmental policy there are increasing returns at the plant level imperfect competition between the home and the foreign firm and transport costs between the two markets at critical levels of environmental policy variables small policy changes cause large discrete jumps in a region s pollution and welfare as a firm closes or opens a plant or shifts production to from a foreign branch plant the implications for optimal environmental policy differ significantly from those suggested by traditional pigouvian marginal analysis

on bullwhip in supply chains historical review present practice and expected future impact abstract demand amplification or bullwhip as it is now called is not a new phenomenon since evidence of its existence has been recorded at least as far back as the start of the 20th century and is well known to economists yet industry worldwide still has to cope with bullwhip measured not just in terms of the 2 1 amplification which is frequently quoted but sometimes it is as high as 20 1 from end to end in the supply chain this can be very costly in terms of capacity on costs and stock out costs on the upswing and stockholding and obsolescence costs on the downswing in this paper we have identified 10 published causes of bullwhip all of which are capable of elimination by re engineering the supply chain we offer evidence on the present health of a family of supply chains and pinpoint much good practice this is in anticipation that such excellence will become normative in the near future as the learning experience gathers momentum and provided that human factors are properly addressed

why is capital so immobile internationally possible explanations and implications for capital income taxation the evidence on international capital immobility is extensive including the lack of international portfolio diversification real interest differentials across countries and the high correlation between domestic savings and investment the authors develop a model with asymmetric information between countries that helps rationalize all the above observations and then examine the implications of this model for optimal domestic tax policy without asymmetric information past work showed that small open economies should not impose corporate income taxes with asymmetric information the optimal policy instead involves government subsidies to capital imports some omitted factors that argue against subsidizing capital imports are explored briefly copyright 1996 by american economic association

measuring and avoiding the bullwhip effect a control theoretic approach an important contributory factor to the bullwhip effect i e the variance amplification of order quantities observed in supply chains is the replenishment rule used by supply chain members first the bullwhip effect induced by the use of different forecasting methods in order up to replenishment policies is analysed variance amplification is quantified and we prove that the bullwhip effect is guaranteed in the order up to model irrespective of the forecasting method used thus when production is inflexible and significant costs are incurred by frequently switching production quantities up and down order up to policies may no longer be desirable or even achievable in the second part of the paper a general decision rule is introduced that avoids variance amplification and succeeds in generating smooth ordering patterns even when demand has to be forecasted the methodology is based on control systems engineering and allows important insights to be gained about the dynamic behaviour of replenishment rules

relief for the environment the importance of an increasingly unimportant industrial sector deindustrialization stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter day features of many economies it is common to assume that such developments pressure policymakers to relax environmental standards however when heavily polluting industries become less important economically their political importance also tends to diminish consequently a regulator may increase the stringency of environmental policies like some other studies we find that declining industrial employment translates into stricter environmental standards in contrast to previous studies but consistent with our argument we find that greater income inequality is associated with policies that promote a cleaner environment jel q58 p16 j31 c23