gone with the wind valuing the visual impacts of wind turbines through house prices this study provides quantitative evidence on the local benefits and costs of wind farm developments in england and wales focussing on their visual environmental impacts in the tradition of studies in environmental public and urban economics housing sales prices are used to reveal local preferences for views of wind farm developments estimation is based on quasi experimental research designs that compare price changes occurring in places where wind farms become visible with price changes in appropriate comparison groups these groups include places close to wind farms that became visible in the past or where they will become operational in the future and places close to wind farms sites but where the turbines are hidden by the terrain all these comparisons suggest that wind farm visibility reduces local house prices and the implied visual environmental costs are substantial

does money talk the effect of a monetary attribute on the marginal values in a choice experiment when designing choice experiments for nonmarket valuation the role of the price attribute is of major importance in the energy sector the uncertainty of future direction of changes in prices makes it difficult to include an adequate price vector in the design we separately investigate the implication of using price vectors with increases and decreases in tariffs from current levels on marginal value estimate from choice experiment data developed using prospect theory in addition we also analyse the effect of excluding the price vector on these marginal values by and large our results support the neoclassical theory as we find that the means of the conditional estimates of the marginal values of attributes are unaffected by the direction of the price change and from exclusion of the price attribute however the distributions show a larger spread of values when the choice experiment implies a tariff decrease which may have policy implications

income inequality in france 1901 1998 this paper uses data from income tax returns 1915 98 wage tax returns 1919 98 and inheritance tax returns 1902 94 in order to compute homogeneous yearly estimates of income wage and wealth inequality for twentieth century france the main conclusion is that the decline in income inequality that took place during the first half of the century was mostly accidental in france and possibly in a number of other countries as well wage inequality has been extremely stable in the long run and the secular decline in income inequality is for the most part a capital income phenomenon holders of large fortunes were badly hurt by major shocks during the 1914 45 period and they were never able to fully recover from these shocks probably because of the dynamic effects of progressive taxation on capital accumulation and pretax income inequality

conformity and the demand for environmental goods the existing literature on eco labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice however it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers in fact it is unclear that people s consumption decisions are made independently of social context for instance under the desire to conform to certain social norms or in the presence of status concerns some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society we test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans share of fair trade beans and price three treatments were used differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers we find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have

valuing the attributes of renewable energy investments increasing the proportion of power derived from renewable energy sources is becoming an increasingly important part of many countries s strategies to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions however renewable energy investments can often have external costs and benefits which need to be taken into account if socially optimal investments are to be made this paper attempts to estimate the magnitude of these external costs and benefits for the case of renewable technologies in scotland a country which has set particularly ambitious targets for expanding renewable energy the external effects we consider are those on landscape quality wildlife and air quality we also consider the welfare implications of different investment strategies for employment and electricity prices the methodology used to do this is the choice experiment technique renewable technologies considered include hydro on shore and off shore wind power and biomass welfare changes for different combinations of impacts associated with different investment strategies are estimated we also test for differences in preferences towards these impacts between urban and rural communities and between high and low income households

gains from an integrated market for tradable renewable energy credits abstract decoupling the environmental attributes of renewable energy re generation from the physical unit of energy is an innovative mechanism for marketing green or renewable power the introduction of tradable renewable energy credits trecs allows the green power attributes of energy to be sold or traded separately from the physical unit of energy since the green power certificate system removes potential locational and physical bottlenecks both suppliers and consumers gain flexibility in the marketplace the trec is also an efficient tool to meet renewable portfolio standard rps required by different states in the us this paper discusses the rps requirements for different states and examines the implications of an integrated trec market it offers a competitive setting to the consumers to pay for renewable energy and a cost effective tool to support renewable energy generation grace and wiser 2002 this paper also highlights some practical difficulties that should be addressed in order to establish an efficient integrated trec market

a market for renewable energy credits in the indian power sector abstract electricity generation from renewable energy sources in india has been promoted through a host of fiscal policies and preferential tariff for electricity produced from the same the fiscal policies include tax incentives and purchase of electricity generated through renewable energy sources the enactment of the electricity act 2003 the act has lent further support to renewable energy by stipulating purchase of a certain percentage of the power procurement by distribution utilities from renewable energy sources the renewable portfolio obligation as well as the feed in tariff for power procurement has been specified by a number of state electricity regulatory commissions sercs for the respective state under their jurisdiction a feed in tariff determined through a cost plus approach under a rate of return framework lacks incentive for cost minimisation and does not encourage optimal utilisation of renewable energy resources in the country such regulatory provisions differ across states the prevalent practice of fixing a renewable portfolio obligation along with cost based feed in tariffs disregards economic efficiency the paper proposes nationally tradable renewable energy credits scheme for achieving the targets set by the respective sercs as renewable portfolio obligation this would reduce the cost of compliance to a renewable portfolio obligation and would encourage efficient resource utilisation and investment in appropriate technologies the paper highlights its advantages and implementation issues this paper discusses regulatory developments for promotion of renewable energy in various indian states the paper also identifies a number of issues related to regulations concerning renewable portfolio obligation

sharing the national cake in post reform new zealand income inequality trends in terms of income sources abstract using household economic survey hes data in unit record form this paper examines the trends of household income inequality in new zealand over the period 1984 96 a period that saw new zealand implement a wide range of economic and social policy reform the observed changes in the overall income inequality are then decomposed by income components to measure the contributions of the different sources of personal income to the overall inequality to our knowledge this is the first time that the methodology for disaggregating the gini co efficient including its more recent extensions by lerman and yitzhaki review of economics and statistics 63 1985 151 podder review of income and wealth 39 1993 51 and mookherjee and shorrocks economic journal 92 1982 886 has been applied to micro level new zealand data for computing income inequality and other related indices and measures reported in this study the findings which indicate a steady upward trend in income inequality are examined in the light of the reform policies used at the time their implications for policy are also addressed

the income and tax share of very high income households 1960 1995 this paper presents new information on the fraction of adjusted gross income and of wages and salaries that is reported by taxpayers in the top one half of one percent of the income distribution this corresponds to roughly five hundred thousand households in the late 1990s this paper relies on data from the treasury s individual income tax model for the period 1960 1995 the definition of adjusted gross income is standardized so that changes in the tax law do not affect the measured concentration of agi the results suggest that the share of agi reported by the highest income households increased significantly between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s with most of the increase taking place in the years immediately following the tax reform act of 1986 while we find some evidence of transitory changes in the concentration of income around major tax changes which may be the result of income retiming by high income taxpayers re timing does not seem to explain most of the changes since 1986 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a turbine is not only a turbine the role of social context and fairness characteristics for the local acceptance of wind power to gain acceptance for renewable energy production sites it is not sufficient to develop the appropriate technology without taking the social context and fairness concerns into account using a factorial survey experiment we investigate the influence of both on the local acceptance of wind turbine developments in germany and poland two countries differing in installed wind power capacity respondents were surveyed with hypothetical situations describing the construction of wind farms varying in the opportunity to participate in the planning process participatory justice the distribution of turbines across regions distributive justice and ownership among other characteristics we find higher acceptance levels in poland than in germany respondents in both countries are willing to accept new turbines in their vicinity if they can participate in decision making the turbines are owned by a group of citizens and if the generated electricity is consumed in the region instead of being exported overall participatory justice is more important than distributive justice confirming previous results we also find that respondents who already have turbines in their vicinity show higher acceptance levels than those who are not yet affected thus the negative externalities are likely to be overestimated in the planning and implementation process

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

the development and deployment of low carbon energy technologies the role of economic interests and cultural worldviews on public support large scale deployment of low carbon energy technologies is crucial to mitigating climate change and public support is an important barrier to policies and projects that facilitate deployment this paper provides insights to the origins of public opposition that can impede the adoption of low carbon technologies by investigating how perceptions are shaped by local economic interests and individual cultural worldviews the research considers both carbon capture and storage and wind energy technologies because they differ in maturity economic impact and resource base further for each technology the research examines support for two types of policies deployment in local community and public funding for research and development results indicate the influence of economic interests and cultural worldviews is policy specific individual cultural worldviews do not affect support for the deployment of technology but they do significantly influence a person s support for publicly funded research and development conversely local economic interests have a significant role in determining support for deployment while they do not affect support for research and development

wind farms where and how to place them a choice experiment approach to measure consumer preferences for characteristics of wind farm establishments in sweden this paper explores preferences among the general public in sweden for attributes related to the establishment of wind power farms the method applied is a choice experiment where people are asked to choose between two hypothetical wind farms characterized by different attributes five attributes are included in the experiment i type of landscape ii type of ownership iii the degree of local participation in the planning process iv the choice to transfer revenue to the society in a pre specified way and v a monetary cost in terms of an additional electricity certificate fee the data are analyzed with multinomial logit random parameter logit and latent class models the results indicate that consumers in sweden are more likely to accept the higher renewable electricity certificate fee if a wind power farms in areas used for recreational purposes are substantially avoided b the establishment is anchored by whole or partial ownership in the local community and c the locals are involved in the planning and implementation process our policy simulation exercise shows that respondents are willing to pay a higher electricity fee corresponding to about 0 6 euro cents per kwh to avoid wind farms located in the mountainous area and private ownership

willingness to accept local wind energy development does the compensation mechanism matter wind power development projects often include compensation for the affected communities but little is known about the efficacy of the alternative compensation mechanisms this study addresses this question by examining the relative potential of private and public compensation we conduct a choice experiment ce that investigates household preferences of compensation for the local siting of a hypothetical wind park households chose among different alternatives where each alternative was characterized by three varying attributes the number of turbines the level of private compensation and the level of public compensation results indicate the wind park imposes welfare losses to local residents and non local recreational users with about 35 of these losses corresponding to non use values findings show that households prefer public compensation to private compensation with household s willingness to accept being lower with public compensation than private compensation this finding suggests that estimates of local resistance to wind development depends on the compensation mechanism

optimal top marginal tax rates under income splitting for couples abstract this paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses consumption is taxed and the skill distribution is unbounded optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all german top taxpayers we find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to about 2 3 and convergence obtains at income levels that are substantially higher than those currently subject to the actual top tax rate

acceptance of wind power development and exposure not in anybody s backyard abstract despite a large stated preference sp literature on wind power externalities few sp studies employ a case control approach to examine whether people s acceptance of new wind power developments and renewable energy initiatives increases or decreases with exposure furthermore the existing studies are inconclusive on this issue in a case control discrete choice experiment we measure the level of acceptance in terms of people s willingness to accept wta for having future land based wind power developments in norway comparing exposed and non exposed people s wta we find that exposure lowers acceptance furthermore exposed people are also unwilling to pay as much to increase general domestic renewable energy production from all sources as non exposed people and thus have lower acceptance for such renewable energy policy initiatives after testing for type of exposure we argue that the inconclusiveness in the literature of how exposure affects acceptance of wind power developments could be due to the fact that impacts considered differ somewhat across studies

using conjoint analysis to quantify public preferences over the environmental impacts of wind farms an example from spain this paper focuses on the effect on people s utility of the potential environmental impacts of wind farm developments we report on research designed to provide insight into their preferences and we show how two alternative choice modelling techniques can be used to estimate them our results show that significant social costs in the form of environmental impacts can be associated with wind farm developments as relative environmental values are revealed by these methods it would be possible to develop wind farms in such a way that minimises the total social costs of the investment and which maximises its net benefits

the distribution of wealth and fiscal policy in economies with finitely lived agents we study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and intergenerational transmission of wealth financial markets are incomplete exposing agents to both labor and capital income risk we show that the stationary wealth distribution is a pareto distribution in the right tail and that it is capital income risk rather than labor income that drives the properties of the right tail of the wealth distribution we also study analytically the dependence of the distribution of wealth of wealth inequality in particular on various fiscal policy instruments like capital income taxes and estate taxes and on different degrees of social mobility we show that capital income and estate taxes can significantly reduce wealth inequality as do institutions favoring social mobility finally we calibrate the economy to match the lorenz curve of the wealth distribution of the u s economy

are ceos really paid like bureaucrats a common view is that there is little correlation between firm performance and ceo pay using a new fifteen year panel data set of ceos in the largest publicly traded u s companies we document a strong relationship between firm performance and ceo compensation this relationship is generated almost entirely by changes in the value of ceo holdings of stock and stock options in addition we show that both the level of ceo compensation and the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance have risen dramatically since 1980 largely because of increases in stock option grants

top incomes in the netherlands and the united kingdom over the 20th century a method is developed for using income tax data to investigate the evolution of the highest incomes over virtually the entire 20th century the income shares of the top 10 5 1 0 5 0 1 and 0 05 percent are analysed for the uk and the netherlands for considering the top shares among themselves the pareto lorenz coefficient is proposed between the two countries the top shares appear to undergo a strikingly similar and strong decline up to the mid 1970s since then british top shares have increased significantly while dutch shares remained basically unchanged this outcome parallels similar results for the us and france obtained by piketty and saez and poses interesting questions for research jel n34 d31 o15

values in the wind a hedonic analysis of wind power facilities the siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial this paper uses data on 11 331 property transactions over nine years in northern new york state to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values we use a fixed effects framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases we find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values in two of the three counties studied these results indicate that existing compensation to local homeowners communities may not be sufficient to prevent a loss of property values jel q51 q53

supply amount and marginal price of renewable electricity under the renewables portfolio standard in japan abstract the renewables portfolio standard rps in japan requires that approximately 1 35 of each retail supplier s electricity sales in fy2010 come from renewable energy sources res for example photovoltaics wind biomass geothermal and small hydropower to help retail suppliers and renewable generators develop effective strategies this study provides a quantitative analysis of the impact of this measure we assume the supply conditions for electricity generation from renewable energy sources res e based on regional resource endowments and we derive the cost effective compositions of renewable portfolios res e certificate prices and additional costs to retail suppliers the future prospects of res e are assessed based on technology region and year up to fy2010 the analysis reveals that wind power and biomass power generated from municipal waste will provide the majority of the total supply of res e under the rps it also indicates that the marginal price of res e certificates will be approximately 5 8 jpy kwh 5 2 usc kwh in fy2010 in the case wherein the marginal price of electricity is assumed to be 4 jpy kwh 3 6 usc kwh in order to elaborate on this further sensitivity analyses for some parameters of res and the price of electricity are provided the dynamic supply curves of res e certificates are also indicated

hedging familiarity and portfolio choice we exploit the restrictions of intertemporal portfolio choice in the presence of non nancial income risk to design and implement tests of hedging that use the information contained in the actual portfolio of the investor we use a unique dataset of swedish investors with information broken down at the investor level and into various components of wealth investor income tax positions and investor demographic characteristics portfolio holdings are identi ed at the stock level we show that investors do not engage in hedging but invest in stocks closely related to their non nancial income we explain this with familiarity that is the tendency to concentrate holdings in stocks with which the investor is familiar in terms of geographical or professional proximity or that he has held for a long period we show that familiarity is not a behavioral bias but is information driven familiarity based investment allows investors to earn higher returns than they would have otherwise earned if they had hedged

rural versus urban preferences for renewable energy developments development of renewable energy resources such as wind farms and hydro electric schemes are being promoted as a new method of expanding and diversifying employment in rural areas however such energy projects are associated with a range of environmental impacts which might be detrimental to other economic activities such as those based on nature tourism the authors use a choice experiment to quantify peoples preferences over environmental and employment impacts that may result from the deployment of renewable energy projects in rural areas of scotland focussing in particular on any differences between the preferences of urban and rural dwellers and on heterogeneity within these groups rural and urban households are shown to have different welfare gains which are dependent on the type of renewable energy technology and on the scale of project under consideration