analyzing the impact of the world s largest public works project on crime india started the implementation of a rural public works program in 2006 covering all districts of the country within 3 years the program guarantees 100 days of employment per year at minimum wage to each rural household with the goal of reducing joblessness and poverty we exploit the design and implementation of this program to investigate its employment impact on various types of crimes to provide rare evidence on the employment crime relationship in a developing country context we find that employment generated by the program has a negative impact on both property crime and violent crime the same conclusion is reached when we analyze the impact of the program using its staggered rollout structure as the source of identification in a difference in difference analysis although crime elasticities with respect to employment are small this finding represents another dimension of the social benefit generated by the program jel k4 e24 h54

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

disclosure strategies for pollution control disclosure strategies which involve public and or private attempts to increase the availability of information on pollution form the basis for what some have called the third wave in pollution control policy after legal regulation the first wave and market based instruments the second wave while these strategies have become common in natural resource settings forest certification and organic farming for example they are less familiar in a pollution control context yet the number of applications in that context is now growing in both oecd and developing countries this survey will review what we know and don t know about the use of disclosure strategies to control pollution and conclude with the author s sense of where further research would be particularly helpful

compliance with mandatory environmental reporting in financial statements the case of spain 2001 2003 corporate social ethical and environmental reporting seer should ideally discharge the accountability of an organisation to its stakeholders voluntary reporting has been characterised by a dearth of neutral and objective information such that the advocates of seer recommend that it be made compulsory their underlying rationale is that legally specified disclosure requirements and enforcement mechanisms will enhance the quality of such reporting this paper sets out to explore how realistic this scenario actually is in view of the conflicting interpretations in the literature on this subject to that end a survey of the reporting patterns of 78 of the largest spanish companies between 2001 and 2003 examines the extent of their compliance with the icac 2002 standard which obliged them to make environmental disclosures in their financial statements the results suggest that progressive and improved regulation could increase the volume and quality of seer disclosures they also suggest however that persistent non compliance means that the problems associated with voluntary disclosure still exist finally through an impression management perspective the study reveals the diverse strategies ranging from dismissal to concealment that are employed by companies to avoid transparency as regulation improves and enforcement expectations rise it becomes more difficult to dismiss compulsory reporting norms as a result some firms engage in more complex concealment strategies to attain corporate legitimacy depriving stakeholders of regulatory information the latter point serves to reconcile apparently contradictory explanations in the literature as to whether legitimacy theory might explain partial compliance with seer regulation

crime and erosion of trust evidence for latin america crime has tangible economic costs it also has less understood and likely sizable intangible costs in particular widespread crime has the potential to weaken trust between citizens and institutions undermine government reform efforts and become an obstacle to development yet the impact of crime on trust remains relatively unexplored in the literature this paper analyzes the potential interrelationship between individual victimization and several measures of trust including trust in formal public institutions and trust in informal private networks it is based on a representative sample of individuals in 19 countries in latin america the empirical strategy is intended to mitigate overt biases and assess sensitivity to hidden biases the results show that victimization has a substantial negative effect on trust in the local police but no robust effect on informal institutions governments may henceforth need to redouble efforts to reduce victimization and the resulting erosion of trust in public institutions

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime comment previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime possibly due to simultaneity problems this paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrumental variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime the null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected

burglary and income inequality abstract in a model where risk neutral agents have differing legal incomes which may be supplemented by burglary we study the effects of income distribution on the level of burglary assuming that a detected burglar is incarcerated for a fixed term and assuming that burglars choose target houses using the signal of house quality we show how increases in income inequality may increase the level of crime in particular increases in relative differential inequality unambiguously increase burglary crime corollaries are that a more regressive income tax increases the level of crime and that richer neighborhoods may have lower crime rates

illicit activity and money laundering from an economic growth perspective a model and an application to colombia this paper contributes to the economic analysis of illicit activities and money laundering first it presents a theoretical model of long run growth that explicitly considers illicit workers activities and income alongside a licit private sector and a functioning government second it generates estimates of the size of illicit income and provides simulated and econometric estimates of the volume of laundered assets in the colombian economy in the model the licit sector operates in a perfectly competitive environment and produces a licit good through a standard neoclassical production function the illicit sector operates in an imperfectly competitive environment and is composed of two different activities the first activity produces an illicit good that nonetheless is valuable in the market for example illicit drugs the second does not add value to the economy but only redistributes wealth for example robbery kidnapping and fraud the paper provides a series of comparative statics exercises to assess the effects of changes in government efficiency licit sector productivity and illicit drug prices from the model the analysis derives a set of estimable macroeconometric equations to measure the size of laundered assets in the colombian economy in the period 1985 to 2013 the paper assembles a data set whose key components are estimates of illicit income from drug trafficking and common crime illicit incomes increased drastically until 2001 reaching a peak of nearly 12 percent of gross domestic product and then decreasing to less than 2 percent by 2013 the decline overlaps not only in a period of high economic growth but also after the implementation of plan colombia the data set is used to estimate the volume of laundered assets in the economy by applying the kalman filter for the estimation of unobserved dynamic variables onto the derived macroeconometric equations from the model the findings show that the volume of laundered assets increased from about 8 percent of gross domestic product in the mid 1980s to a peak of 14 percent by 2002 and declined to 8 percent in 2013

informational barriers to credit for migrants evidence from guatemala abstractdoes being a migrant in a developing country cause an individual to receive less access to credit migrant status can be a useful signal for lenders in settings with weak contract enforcement and in the absence of well developed information markets i investigate this contract enforcement based explanation using data on households that have migrated within guatemala to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues i adopt an instrumental variables approach i identify individuals who are most sensitive to violence or crime and who were born in particularly dangerous locations the interaction of these factors causes these individuals to have a higher propensity to move although such migrants are not less likely to apply for loans from formal sources they are significantly less likely to receive them furthermore weak enforcement of contracts dominates alternative explanations of this result such as moral hazard and adverse selection

on the relationships between co2 emissions energy consumption and income the importance of time variation abstract the environment that governs the relationships between energy consumption carbon dioxide co2 emissions and gross domestic product gdp in the g7 countries changes over time due to variations in economic growth regulatory policy and technology using a novel approach that may detect causalities when the time constant hypothesis is rejected we find significant time varying granger causalities among the variables under consideration there is bidirectional causality between gdp and energy consumption for japan unidirectional causality running from gdp to energy consumption for italy and unidirectional causality running from energy consumption to gdp for the resource country canada moreover the results also show a bidirectional time varying causality between energy consumption and co2 emissions for the united states and causality from energy consumption to co2 emissions for france finally while we find significant time varying causalities running from gdp to co2 emissions for italy and japan the finding of inverted n shaped curves italy and japan lends no support to the traditional environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for these countries it implies that environmental policy and economic growth should go hand in hand other policy implications of the empirical results have been proposed

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

development crime and punishment accounting for the international differences in crime rates abstract this paper analyzes the determinants of the heterogeneity in crime rates across countries focusing on reporting rates and development the behavior of the reporting rate is studied by comparing data from victimization surveys to official records reporting rates are strongly correlated with development richer countries report a higher fraction of crimes the positive relation between development and crime found in previous studies is shown to result from this correlation once the presence of the reporting error is accounted for development does not affect crime reductions in inequality and increases in growth and education are associated with reductions in crime rates

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

crime and victimization an economic perspective the recent upward trend in crime rates of developing countries has spurred widespread public concern about personal and proprietary insecurity in some countries the questions of crime violence and victimization are attracting more attention from academics and policy makers than traditional economic problems the objective of this paper is to examine the main issues related to crime and victimization from an economic perspective for this purpose the paper combines a review of the main results established in the literature with original research on the causes of crime and the risk factors of victimization the first section provides a review of the estimates of the costs of crime the main theoretical and empirical research on its causes and the relative advantages of official and survey data on crime the second section presents original work on the main causes of violent crime from a cross country perspective the empirical work starts with a basic model of the economic determinants of homicide and robbery rates in turn this empirical model is extended along five dimensions 1 deterrence factors 2 illegal drug related activities 3 demographic issues 4 income and ethnic polarization and 5 social capital the third section reviews recent case studies of latin american cities that rely on survey data to assess the empirical determinants of the probability of victimization these studies focus on three types of risk factors 1 individual characteristics 2 household characteristics and 3 community characteristics the main conclusions from the previous sections are summarized in section four

economic liberalization and violent crime abstracti study the effect of economic liberalization on violent crime the particular emphasis is on the case of india where in the years following 1991 there was a virtual dismantling of controls on entry and production in registered manufacturing this was accompanied by a significant reduction in impediments to foreign trade and access to foreign exchange economic controls create an incentive for illegal trade and a frequent by product of illegal trade is violent crime consequently violent crimes such as murders would be expected to decline following market based reforms analysis of aggregate all india data as well as data at the state level suggests that economic reforms did indeed lead to a reduction in violent crime i extend the analysis to a panel of countries and find strong evidence that greater trade openness is negatively related to violent crime

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

information as regulation the effect of community right to know laws on toxic emissions abstract there is growing academic and policy level interest in the use of information as quasi regulatory mechanisms such as toxic release inventory tri and green labels mandatory disclosure requirements have been touted as market based incentives that may affect firm behavior we provide new evidence on the effectiveness of disclosure requirements by examining firm behavior in response to disclosures of tri emissions we find that firms with the largest stock price decline on the day this information became public subsequently reduced emissions more than their industry peers this is consistent with the view that financial markets may provide strong incentives for firms to change their environmental behavior

does globalisation affect crime theory and evidence globalization skeptics argue that trade liberalization has high social costs including an increase in expropriative behavior such as civil conflict coercion of labor and crime we show that a theoretical relationship between trade and expropriation exists but the sign differs for developed and developing economies we verify this empirically using data on crime rates specifically we find trade liberalization as measured by both higher openness and lower import duty rates tends to increase burglaries and theft in very labor abundant countries for other countries however we find that trade liberalization has either a small negative effect on crime or no effect depending on the country s capital abundance

swedish co2 emissions 1900 2010 an exploratory note abstract this paper projects swedish co 2 emissions during the period 2000 2010 based on data covering 1900 1999 swedish climate policy is currently based on the assumption that carbon emissions will increase ceteris paribus by 5 15 relative to the 1990 level this forecast has motivated a number of policy measures including carbon taxes subsidies and an information package we find however that co 2 emissions may well be lower in the future this outcome is broadly consistent with the literature on the environmental kuznets curve which portrays the relationship between emissions and gdp the key contribution of this paper is that our analysis is based on a long time series current literature is invariably based on short panel data sets while we study a single country through several phases of development our analysis also sheds some light on the key importance played by nuclear power for carbon emission projections

fraud recovery and the quality of country governance abstract using supervisory data from u s financial institutions on fraud related losses in foreign markets we find that losses in countries with poor governance have lower recovery rates our results are robust to accounting for potential endogeneity and reverse causality concerns among numerous robustness checks the association is driven by intuitive governance dimensions such as control of corruption rule of law regulatory quality and government effectiveness in addition country governance plays a particularly important role in fraud recovery for firms with poor risk management quality overall this paper presents unique and novel evidence tying country governance quality to firm level risk realizations

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

detrending stylized facts and the business cycle the stylized facts of macroeconomic time series can be presented by fitting structural time series models within this framework we analyse the consequences of the widely used detrending technique popularised by hodrick and prescott 1980 it is shown that mechanical detrending based on the hodrick prescott filter can lead investigators to report spurious cyclical behaviour and this point is illustrated with empirical examples structural time series models also allow investigators to deal explicitly with seasonal and irregular movements that may distort estimated cyclical components finally the structural framework provides a basis for exposing the limitations of arima methodology and models based on a deterministic trend with a single break

epa s voluntary 33 50 program impact on toxic releases and economic performance of firms abstract this paper examines the motivations for participation in the voluntary 33 50 program and the program s impact on the toxic releases and economic performance of firms in the u s chemical industry it demonstrates that the benefits due to public recognition and the potentially avoided costs of liabilities and compliance under mandatory environmental regulations provide strong incentives for participation after controlling for sample selection bias and the impact of other firm specific characteristics this paper shows that program participation led to a statistically significant decline in toxic releases over the period 1991 93 the program also had a statistically significant negative impact on the current return on investment of firms but its impact on the expected long run profitability of firms was positive and statistically significant

fiscal foresight and information flows news or foresight about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react using tax policies as a leading example of foresight simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non fundamental equilibria econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized information flows different methods for extracting or hypothesizing the information flows are discussed and shown to be alternative techniques for resolving a non uniqueness problem endemic to moving average representations

more inequality more crime a panel cointegration analysis for the united states abstract this study employs state level panel data to examine the effect of income inequality on crime in the united states using panel cointegration techniques we find a significant negative effect of inequality on crime

economic growth and crime against small and medium sized enterprises in developing economies several studies have explored the relationship between economy level crime rates or individual level crime and economic growth however few studies have examined the relationship between economic growth and crime against firms this study uses data for about 12 000 firms in 27 developing countries and finds that economic growth is negatively associated with crime this relationship is stronger for small and medium firms than large firms the study also explores several economy wide factors and their influence on the growth crime relationship for small and medium enterprises the results are robust to various sensitivity checks

crime in europe and the united states dissecting the reversal of misfortunes contrary to common perceptions today both property and violent crimes with the exception of homicides are more widespread in europe than in the united states while the opposite was true thirty years ago we label this fact as the reversal of misfortunes we investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes incarceration abortion unemployment and immigration on crime for this we use time series data 1970 2008 from seven european countries and the united states we find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in europe our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether such a policy would also be efficient from a cost benefit point of view we leave this to future research paolo buonanno francesco drago roberto galbiati and giulio zanella

promise and pitfalls in the use of secondary data sets income inequality in oecd countries as a case study this paper examines the role of secondary data sets in empirical economic research taking the field of income distribution as a case study we illustrate problems faced by users of secondary statistics showing how both cross country comparisons and time series analysis can depend sensitively on the choice of data after describing the genealogy of secondary data sets on income inequality we consider the main methodological issues and discuss their implications for comparisons of income inequality across oecd countries and over time the lessons to be drawn for the construction and use of secondary data sets are summarized at the end of the paper

making things stick enforcement and compliance environmental rules and regulations are only useful insofar as firms can be persuaded to comply with them in full or in part we survey the rapidly growing literature on the enforcement aspects of environmental policy the difficulties facing any regulatory agency are likely to be exacerbated by information problems penalty constraints and the evasion efforts of firms and we emphasize the role that recent innovative approaches to implementation can play in bolstering more traditional enforcement instruments copyright 1998 by oxford university press

the environmental kuznets curve ekc theory part b critical issues according to the environmental kuznets curve ekc theory the process of economic growth is expected to limit the environmental degradation created in the early stages of development the first article of this study reviews the empirical studies examining various factors other than income that may lead to an ekc pattern the current article reviews in the first part the major critiques on the ekc speculation which relate to the following issues the normal distribution of world income the feedback from environmental degradation to economic growth the characteristics of the pollutant in question various econometric issues the evolution of consumption when income rises and the assumption about a common developmental pattern in all countries the second part discusses additional matters reported indirectly in the literature and or must be further examined there are doubts whether the gdp series captures the transition of production to the three productive sectors in empirical estimations and whether services are less polluting compared to industry activities finally the original kuznets theory which laid the groundwork for the ekc concept does not seem to solve income inequality problems

the welfare cost of violence across countries the cost of violence goes beyond its material dimension including also the welfare loss due to higher mortality a given mortality and its distribution across age groups determines a reduction in life expectancy that can be valued using the marginal willingness to pay approach we estimate the health dimension of the welfare cost of violence for 73 countries on average 1 year of life expectancy lost to violence is associated with a yearly social cost of 3 8 of gdp the health dimension increases the estimated social costs of violence by 40 in the united states and by 57 in latin america

whether top executives turnover influences environmental responsibility from the perspective of environmental information disclosure we have empirically examined the relationship between top executives turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility by identifying the influence of ten specific turnover reasons resulting in the chairman s departure and two important types of chairman s succession using a sample of 782 manufacturing listed companies across 3 years in china we find that the corporate environmental responsibility is negatively associated with the involuntary and negative turnover i e dismissal health and death and forced resignation and positively associated with improving corporate governance and not associated with the normal turnover i e retirement and contract expiration and the types of chairman s succession i e independence and internal or external promotion our study significantly contributes to research in environmental disclosure by revealing the relationship between chairman s turnover and the corporate environmental responsibility a feasible way is suggested to regulators and other stakeholders in monitoring or assessing the possible abnormality of environmental responsibility when firms experience involuntary and negative chairman s turnover in the emerging economies

immigrant selectivity and wages the evidence for women in an effort to extend the analysis of selectivity to female immigrants this paper examines the impact of economic conditions at the time of migration on the subsequent wages of foreign born women in the united states in addition the variables chosen to describe the migration decision have been expanded to include the effects of household status and immigration policy these results are compared to previous results for men and provide additional evidence about how the context of the migration decision affects the subsequent success of immigrants in the united states the sample for this project comes from the april 1983 current population survey and consists of married native and foreign born women between the ages of 16 and 64 excerpt

functional mechanisms of mandatory corporate environmental disclosure an empirical study in china abstract this paper analyzes the functions of a government oriented disclosure program in china which rates company environmental performance into five colors and discloses the results to the public the rating results and their annual changes during 2005 2007 are statistically summarized by using the detailed database provided by municipal environmental protection bureau of the study area changshu city in jiangsu province the reflexive deterrent and enhancement mechanisms preliminarily identified for the disclosure program are qualitatively evaluated by using the information collected by onsite interviews to 32 program participating firms in overall the firms environmental performances have been improved the companies with worse rating records would be more likely to improve their environmental performances in the following years the disclosure program encourages the firms to be more reflexive to their internal environmental problems the deterrent and enhancement functions of the program are weak due to the marginal pressure from the classified stakeholders such as investors business partners and creditors the influence of the public such as neighboring communities and environmental ngos is weak too encouraging serious reactions of firm s stakeholders to the disclosed rating results should be addressed in order to enhance the effectiveness of the disclosure strategy

the impact of the economic crisis and policy actions on ghg emissions from road transport in spain abstract road traffic is the greatest contributor to the carbon footprint of the transport sector and reducing it has become one of the main targets of sustainable transport policies an analysis of the main factors influencing greenhouse gas ghg emissions is essential for designing new energy and environmentally efficient strategies for the road transport this paper addresses this need by i identifying factors which influence the carbon footprint including traffic activity fuel economy and socioeconomic development and ii proposing a methodological framework which uses modified laspeyres index decomposition to analyze the effect of important drivers on the changes in emissions of road transport in spain during the period from 1990 to 2010 the results demonstrate that the country s economic growth has been closely linked to the rise in ghg emissions the innovative contribution of this paper is the special analysis of the changes in mobility patterns and ghg emissions during the economic crisis when for the first time spanish road traffic emissions decreased the reduction of road transport and improved energy efficiency has been powerful contributors to this decrease demonstrating the effectiveness of energy saving measures on the basis of this analysis several tailored policy recommendations have been suggested for future implementation

an empirical characterization of the dynamic effects of police spending on violent and property crime the study estimates the dynamic effects of shocks to police expenditures on measures of violent and property crime rates using annual u s state level data for the period 1960 2015 we employ a structural panel var model and achieve identification by imposing the restriction that police spending responds to structural shocks to crime with at least a lag of 1 year results indicate that a shock to police spending leads to a persistent and significant decreases in violent and property crime rates and b significant and persistent negative impacts on crime rates in periods of high crime but little impacts in periods of low crime variance decompositions show that shocks to police spending account for moderate to large proportions of the variability of u s state level crime rates our findings are robust across separate measures of violent and property crime rates as well as to the inclusion of additional variables to the baseline panel var model jel k42

global inequality when unequal countries create unequal people abstract current global inequality measures assume that national mean income does not matter to economic welfare at given household income as measured in surveys the paper questions that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and finds that prominent stylized facts about global inequality are not robust at one extreme theories of relative deprivation yield nationalistic measures whereby global inequality is average within country inequality which is rising however other theories and evidence point instead to the benefits of living in a richer country parameter values consistent with research on global subjective wellbeing imply higher inequality than prevailing measures though falling since 1990

estudos econ omicos das causas da criminalidade no brasil evid encias e controv ersias this study aims to gather and to discuss the literature on the economics of the criminality in brazil the main diculties evidences and controversies found in empirical research are presented besides some of the main criminal data bases available in brazil unavailability of data crime underreporting and the inverse causality between the deterrence variables and the criminality are some of the main inherent diculties of the economic investigation of crime the main controversy among the studies is the eect of law enforcement on crime rates the main results are that income inequality and returns on crime lead to increases in criminality also there are spatial eects aecting

impact of the economic recession on the european power sector s co2 emissions abstract this paper investigates the impact of the economic recession on co 2 emissions in the european power sector during the years 2008 and 2009 three main determinants of the power sector s emissions are identified the demand for electricity the co 2 price and fuel prices a counterfactual scenario has been set up for each of these i e what these parameters would have been if not affected by the recession a simulation model of the european power sector is then employed comparing a historical reference simulation taking the parameters as actually occurred with the counterfactual scenarios the lower electricity demand due to the recession is shown to have by far the largest impact accounting for an emission reduction of about 175 mton the lower co 2 price due to the recession resulted in an increase in emissions by about 30 mton the impact of fuel prices is more difficult to retrieve an indicative reduction of about 17 mton is obtained mainly as a consequence of the low gas prices in 2009 the simulated combined impact of the parameters results in an emission reduction of about 150 mton in the european power sector over the years 2008 and 2009 as a consequence of the recession

the long run decoupling of emissions and output evidence from the largest emitters abstract for the world s 20 largest emitters we use a simple trend cycle decomposition to provide evidence of decoupling between greenhouse gas emissions and output in richer nations particularly in european countries but not yet in emerging markets if consumption based emissions measures that account for countries net emissions embodied in cross border trade are used the evidence for decoupling in the richer economies gets weaker countries with underlying policy frameworks more supportive of renewable energy and climate change mitigation efforts tend to show greater decoupling between trend emissions and trend gdp and for both production and consumption based emissions the relationship between trend emissions and trend gdp has also become much weaker in the last two decades than in preceding decades

income distribution and development some stylized facts in recent years the relationship between income distribution and the process of development has come under increasing scrutiny much of the debate has focused on the hypothesis originally advanced by simon kuznets that the secular behavior of inequality follows an inverted u shaped pattern with inequality first increasing and then decreasing with development this hypothesis has become so much a part of the conventional wisdom on this subject that it has generated considerable skepticism about the welfare implications of the development process indeed on some interpretations developing countries face the grim prospect not just of increasing relative inequality but also of declining absolute incomes for the lower income groups

income distribution development and foreign trade a cross sectional analysis abstract this paper analyses cross sectional evidence on income inequality in developing countries within a consistent theoretical framework where the major explanatory variables are factor endowments their ownership structure and foreign trade distortions the resulting explanation of cross country differences in income distribution is considerably better than what is found in the existing literature endowments in mineral resources land concentration in agricultural exports trade protection and secondary schooling are shown to be major determinants of differences in income inequality across developing countries

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

crises and emissions new empirical evidence from a large sample abstract in this paper we empirically assess by means of the local projection method the impact of different types of financial crises on a variety of pollutant emissions categories for a sample of 86 countries between 1980 and 2012 we find that financial crises in general lead to a fall in co2 and methane emissions when hit by a debt crisis a country experiences a rise in emissions stemming from either energy related activities or industrial processes during periods of slack financial crises in general had a positive impact on both methane and nitrous oxide emissions if a financial crisis hit an economy when it was engaging in contractionary fiscal policies this led to a negative response of co2 and production based emissions

a race to the bottom in labor standards an empirical investigation abstract one of the concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for investment they relax labor standards to attract firms using spatial estimation on panel data for 135 countries over 17 years we find that the labor standards in one country are positively correlated with those elsewhere i e a cut in labor standards in other countries reduces labor standards in the country in question this interdependence is more evident in labor practices i e enforcement than in labor laws further while we find evidence of competition in both developed and developing countries it is strongest among developing countries with weak standards