calculating order up to levels for products with intermittent demand abstract the croston 1972 forecasting and stock control for intermittent demands operational research quarterly 23 289 303 method is the standard method for forecasting intermittent demand it has been shown to perform well in various studies and is available in most commercial forecasting packages however little attention has been paid to linking the method with inventory control i e using the generated forecasts to calculate the inventory control parameters in this study we consider the most commonly applied order up to policy and show how the forecasts can be used to calculate order up to levels in a numerical study we show that the calculated order up to levels lead to service levels that are close to their targets

higher education career opportunities and intergenerational inequality the uk government has expressed a desire to increase social mobility with policies to help achieve this aim focused on reducing inequalities in educational attainment this paper draws together established and new information about the contribution that higher education can make to social mobility using a life course approach considering differences by family background in terms of university attendance and achievement as well as occupation and earnings following graduation we find substantial socio economic differences at each stage young people from poorer backgrounds are on average less likely to go to university than their richer peers even among the selected group who do go to university they are less likely to attend the highest status institutions less likely to graduate and less likely to achieve the highest degree classes these differences in degree outcomes contribute to the lower average earnings of graduates from poorer families but earnings differentials go well beyond those driven purely by degree attainment or institution attended the evidence strongly suggests that even after taking these factors into account graduates from affluent families are more likely to obtain a professional job and to see higher earnings growth in the labour market we discuss the implications of these findings for the prospects of higher education as a route to greater social mobility

cooperative action on greenhouse gas emissions and the distribution of global output and damage this paper compares the performance of two allowance allocation rules in an international climate change treaty i construct a model in which countries differ according to both gdp and an idiosyncratic damage parameter that links global emissions to damage for an individual country allowances are allocated to treaty members according to an allocation rule based on a single allocation parameter the model can be solved analytically to determine upper and lower bounds on this allocation parameter that ensure that a treaty of any given composition is internally and externally stable i focus on grand coalition treaties the first treaty examined uses a simple proportional rule in which allocations are set as some fraction of emissions in the non cooperative equilibrium the second treaty adds a coverage contingent element to the allocation rule such that the emissions reduction required of each treaty member is weighted by the fraction of global emissions that treaty members as a whole emit in the non cooperative equilibrium i show that the coverage contingent treaty outperforms the simpler treaty except when all countries have the same emissions intensity in the non cooperative equilibrium in which case neither treaty can reduce emissions

multiproduct firms and environmental policy coordination the literature that analyzes the coordination of environmental taxes by governments considers that firms produce a single good at a single plant however in practice firms tend to produce several goods at various production plants multiproduct firms these firms may organize themselves in a centralized or decentralized fashion for purposes of decision making this affects their output and pollution levels this paper sets out to analyze the coordination of environmental taxes considering multiproduct firms we find that the organizational structure chosen by the owners of the firms depends on whether or not governments coordinate with one another in setting taxes and on whether the goods produced are substitutes or complements social welfare is greater if a supranational authority sets taxes in all countries in this case joint welfare is never lower if the authority is constrained to set the same tax in all countries

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

toward a political theory of the emergence of environmental incentive regulation this article makes some steps toward a formal political economy of environmental policy economists quasi unanimous preference for sophisticated incentive regulation is reconsidered we recast the question of instrument choice in the general mechanism design literature within an incomplete contract approach to political economy we show why constitutional constraints on the instruments of environmental policy may be desirable even though they appear inefficient from a standard economic viewpoint their justification lies in the limitations they impose on the politicians ability to distribute rents insights are provided on the emergence of incentive mechanisms in environmental regulation

absentee ownership of immobile factors and environmental policies in a federation this paper studies the effects of absentee ownership of immobile factors on environmental policy of a jurisdiction in a federation an increase in emissions in a jurisdiction increases factor incomes but part of the increased factor incomes goes to absentee owners while only the residents of the jurisdiction bear the full disutility in addition the increase in emissions in a jurisdiction attracts capital and decreases capital in other jurisdictions reducing the incomes that the residents of the jurisdiction earn from owning immobile factors in other jurisdictions absentee ownership thus reduces the marginal benefit of an increase in emissions while it leaves the marginal cost unaffected from the jurisdiction s perspective as a consequence absentee ownership makes environmental policy of a jurisdiction too stringent relative to the efficient level the paper also considers the effects of absentee ownership on environmental policy when goods trade is allowed

on the stock control performance of intermittent demand estimators the purpose of this paper is to assess the empirical stock control performance of intermittent demand estimation procedures the forecasting methods considered are the simple moving average single exponential smoothing croston s method and a new method recently developed by the authors of this paper we first discuss the nature of the empirical demand data set 3000 stock keeping units and we specify the stock control model to be used for experimentation purposes performance measures are then selected to report customer service level and stock volume differences the out of sample empirical comparison results demonstrate the superior stock control performance of the new intermittent demand forecasting method and enable insights to be gained into the empirical utility of the other estimators

hierarchical rank and women s organizational mobility glass ceilings in corporate law firms this article revives the debate over whether women s upward mobility prospects decline as they climb organizational hierarchies although this proposition is a core element of the glass ceiling metaphor it has failed to gain strong support in previous research the article establishes a firm theoretical foundation for expecting an increasing female disadvantage with an eye toward defining the scope conditions and extending the model to upper level external hires the approach is illustrated in an empirical setting that meets the proposed scope conditions corporate law firms in the united states results confirm that in this setting the female mobility disadvantage is greater at higher organizational levels in the case of internal promotions but not in the case of external hires

inducing environmental disclosures a dynamic mechanism design approach this paper studies the design of voluntary disclosure regulations for a firm that faces a stochastic environmental hazard the occurrence of such a hazard is known only to the firm the regulator if finding a hazard collects a fine and mandates the firm to perform costly remediation that reduces the environmental damage the regulator may inspect the firm at any time to uncover the hazard however because inspections are costly the regulator also offers a reward to the firm for voluntarily disclosing the hazard the reward corresponds to either a subsidy or a reduced fine depending on whether it is positive or negative thus the regulator needs to dynamically determine the reward and inspection policy that minimizes expected societal cost in the long run we model this problem as a dynamic adverse selection problem with costly state verification in continuous time despite the complexity and generality of this setup we show that the optimal regulation policy follows a very simple cyclic structure which we fully characterize in closed form specifically the regulator runs scheduled inspections periodically after each inspection the reward level decreases over time until a subsequent inspection takes place if a hazard is not revealed the reward level is reset to a high level restarting the cycle in contrast to the reward level the mandated remediation level is constant over time nonetheless when subsidies are not allowed in the industry we show that the regulator should dynamically adjust this remediation level which then acts as a substitute for a subsidy our analysis further reveals that optimal inspection frequency increases not only when the inspection accuracy decreases but also when the penalty for not disclosing the hazard increases

converting technology to mitigate environmental damage there are many situations where policy makers would like to induce firms to make a major discrete conversion in production technology to help the environment this paper examines how heterogeneity in the operating condition of firms plant and equipment which cannot be observed by policy makers can affect the choice between incentives to encourage conversion to a cleaner technology by relating different conditions of firms plant and equipment to production costs extent of environmental damage and cost of conversion to a cleaner technology we show when a perfectly discriminating incentive to encourage conversion is not feasible in addition we show that firms with plant and equipment in better condition will convert their technology to mitigate their environmental damage and firms with plant and equipment in poorer condition will not this and a series of additional results lead to conditions under which an administratively simple uniform lump sum incentive to switch to cleaner technology is preferable to one based on output these results and conditions extend to cases where there are network externalities in conversion and where there is strategic timing in firms choice of when to convert

innovation policy for directing technical change in the power sector this paper discusses policy instruments for redirecting technical change within the electricity sector to mitigate climate change first we unravel the mechanism behind directed technical change explaining why markets may underprovide innovations in expensive renewable technologies in comparison to innovations in energy efficient fossil fuel generators subsequently we characterize technical change in electricity generation technologies stressing the heterogeneity of knowledge spillovers both within and between clean electricity generation technologies we argue that there exists a rationale for a portfolio approach to innovation in the electricity sector i e optimal innovation policies are neither fully generic nor fully specific and they need to be adapted in response to new information learned by the government the existing innovation literature does not however provide a clear cut answer for designing such a policy we compare policy instruments and argue that public r d support to clean technologies either in the form of subsidies or prizes seems to be the prime candidate for implementing non generic innovation policy

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

regulation of prices and pollution under incomplete information abstract regulation of prices and pollution for a monopolist with private information is considered with a focus on the relative efficiency of standard setting and emissions taxation approaches to pollution control with incomplete information emissions taxation is a dominated regulatory instrument for abatement purposes because it generates information costs that can be avoided when an abatement standard and prices are set by the regulator an emissions tax has value however as a means of reducing those information costs but its use for this purpose may increase pollution

political economy information and incentives abstract this paper shows how the instruments of incentive theory can be used to develop some views about the proper design of governments to avoid the capture of politicians and bureaucrats by interest groups first treating politicians as informed supervisors to whom economic policy is delegated we show the usefulness of the separation of powers to increase the transaction costs of collusion the relevance of asymmetric control for avoiding reciprocal favors the incompleteness of the constitutional contract leaves discretion to politicians who become residual decision makers we study the trade offs between greater efficiency obtained by allowing powerful instruments to politicians and less discretion by restricting on the contrary those instruments determinants of those trade offs are the variability of the environment the extent of asymmetric information about tastes and technologies and the size of majorities finally we show the new theory of incentives for group behavior can be used to determine the transaction costs of collusion under asymmetric information and to which extent these costs relax the constraints imposed on government by collusive behavior

local versus central wage bargaining with endogenous investments investment behavior may depend on whether wage bargaining takes place centrally or locally at the firm level the outcome of the wage bargain will in turn depend on previous investments ignoring other differences between the two bargaining regimes endogenous investments imply that wages are lower and profits higher under local wage bargaining than under central bargaining this does not necessarily imply that employment is highest under local bargaining since investments may differ in the two cases with a nash bargaining solution however reasonable assumptions imply that employment is highest under local wage bargaining

strategy proof uniform effort sharing schemes for transfrontier pollution problems uniform effort sharing rules for transfrontier pollution problems like the popular equal percentage reduction arrangement do not result in a cost efficient allocation of emission abatement efforts in addition they may violate voluntary participation constraints if the uniform effort level is decided upon by means of ordinary majority vote in contrast to ordinary majority vote i consider in this paper the so called conservative mechanism by moulin 1994 which picks the smallest revealed effort level in stead of the median the conservative mechanism always respects a weak participation constraint moreover it is coalitionally strategy proof meaning that no individual player or group of players can achieve a better outcome by misrepresenting its preferences for environmental quality in order to remedy the cost inefficiency of the equal percentage arrangements i propose to apply the conservative mechanism to the choice of a uniform emission tax rate simulations for the greenhouse effect indicate that the latter mechanism does considerably better than the traditional equal percentage arrangement

intermittent demand forecasts with neural networks intermittent demand appears when demand events occur only sporadically typically such time series have few observations making intermittent demand forecasting challenging forecast errors can be costly in terms of unmet demand or obsolescent stock intermittent demand forecasting has been addressed using established forecasting methods including simple moving averages exponential smoothing and croston s method with its variants this study proposes a neural network nn methodology to forecast intermittent time series these nns are used to provide dynamic demand rate forecasts which do not assume constant demand rate in the future and can capture interactions between the non zero demand and the inter arrival rate of demand events overcoming the limitations of croston s method in order to mitigate the issue of limited fitting sample which is common in intermittent demand the proposed models use regularised training and median ensembles over multiple training initialisations to produce robust forecasts the nns are evaluated against established benchmarks using both forecasting accuracy and inventory metrics the findings of forecasting and inventory metrics are conflicting while nns achieved poor forecasting accuracy and bias all nn variants achieved higher service levels than the best performing croston s method variant without requiring analogous increases in stock holding volume therefore nns are found to be effective for intermittent demand applications this study provides further arguments and evidence against the use of conventional forecasting accuracy metrics to evaluate forecasting methods for intermittent demand concluding that attention to inventory metrics is desirable

coordination of environmental policy for transboundary environmental problems abstract in order to reach a pareto optimal outcome with transboundary environmental problems there must be some kind of international environmental agreement one possibility is to have an international environmental agreement focusing directly on emissions in each country given such an agreement an important issue is whether one ought to supplement the agreement with some kind of policy coordination or if the choice of environmental policies should be left to each country to decide on unilaterally it is shown that under ideal conditions pareto optimality will be achieved without policies being coordinated across countries such ideal conditions include among other things that all markets including the labour market are competitive however if one has imperfect competition in goods markets or unemployment decentralized policy making may give an outcome which is not pareto optimal

earnings effects of different components of schooling human capital versus screening in this paper the authors divide actual years of schooling into effective years repeated years skipped years inefficient routing years and dropout years estimation of earnings functions reveals that this topology is statistically superior to the usual concepts of either actual or effective years of schooling based on the authors distinction they formulate tests that discriminate between the human capital theory and the screening hypothesis the results give strong support to the human capital theory and refute the screening hypothesis

competition and the reform of incentive schemes in the regulated sector abstract we consider a regulation problem with complete contracting in a principal agent model with adverse selection and review within this model the various channels by which external competition parameters affect incentives within the regulated firm the channels are the principal s information the principal s objective function the agent s incentive constraint the agent s participation constraint we consider in particular a better information structure a threat of liquidation a fight for talent a more efficient private sector and the existence of better substitutes we characterize in each case the conditions under which the effect on incentives is positive

lobbies delegation and the under investment problem in regulation abstract a time inconsistency problem in regulation often results in under investment especially where there are high sunk costs in network industries such as electricity gas telecommunications and water this paper provides a new perspective on this hold up problem facing the price regulation of a firm with market power where full commitment to a price regime is not possible we compare a political equilibrium based on a voting model with lobbying with a delegation equilibrium where a government can delegate to a particular type of pro or anti industry regulator our analysis suggests two possible ways in which we may observe price regulation that encourages socially optimal investment in the absence of externally imposed regulatory commitment first there is less than total transparency in which voters receive an optimal amount of information and second the decisions on price are delegated to a sufficiently but not excessively pro industry regulator

an analysis of coordination mechanisms for the u s cash supply chain the overuse of its currency processing facilities by depository institutions dis has motivated the federal reserve fed to impose its new cash recirculation policy this overuse is characterized by the practice of cross shipping where a di both deposits and withdraws cash of the same denomination in the same business week in the same geographical area under the new policy which came into effect july 2007 the fed has imposed a recirculation fee on cross shipped cash the fed intends to use this fee to induce dis to effectively recirculate cash so that the societal cost of providing cash to the public is lowered to examine the efficacy of this mechanism we first characterize the social optimum and then analyze the response of dis under a recirculation fee levied on cross shipped cash we show that neither a linear recirculation fee which is the fed s current practice nor a more sophisticated nonlinear fee is sufficient to guarantee a socially optimal response from dis we then derive a fundamentally different mechanism that induces dis to self select the social optimum our mechanism incorporates a fairness adjustment that avoids penalizing dis that recirculate their fair share of cash and rewards dis that recirculate more than this amount we demonstrate that the mechanism is easy to implement and tolerates a reasonable amount of imprecision in the problem parameters we also discuss a concept of welfare preserving redistribution wherein the fed allows a group of dis to reallocate amongst themselves their deposits and demand if such a possibility does not increase societal cost finally we analyze the impact of incorporating the custodial inventory program another component of the fed s new policy

regulation in happyville how does risk perception affect risk regulation happyville is a society in which citizens wrongly believe that the drinking water supply is contaminated we discuss conditions under which a benevolent director of environment protection would invest in a water cleanup technology this holds if the director is populist namely if he maximises social welfare based on citizens pessimistic beliefs more surprisingly investment in the water cleanup technology may occur if the director is paternalistic in the sense that he maximises social welfare based on his own beliefs the reason is that he must take into account citizens responses to regulation

organizational inertia and dynamic incentives abstract we model the level of inertia as an endogenous rational choice made by the organization principal we show that the efficient organizational response to the presence of private information on the value of change will in general be to bias the decision rule towards the status quo the compensation of the agent differs significantly according to whether the information is private to the principal or the agent and the efficient distribution of real authority in an organization need not always be profitably retained by the principal

political sustainability and the design of social insurance this paper examines how the issue of political support affects the design of social insurance it distinguishes between redistributive character and size of social protection three main results emerge first it may be appropriate to adopt a system which is less redistributive than otherwise optimal in order to ensure political support for an adequate level of coverage in the second voting stage second supplementary private insurance may increase the welfare of the poor even if it is effectively bought only by the rich third the case for prohibiting supplementary private insurance may become stronger when the efficiency of private insurance markets increases

public goods tax policies and unemployment in ldcs 1 introduction traditionally an analytically convenient and widely used assumption in the international trade and development economics literature has been that of lump sum distribution of direct e g income or indirect e g consumption tariff tax revenue when various policy implications of such instruments e g terms of trade or welfare effects were to be examined this analytical shortcut however hardly ever constitutes a real world practice either in rich developed or in poorer developing economies on the other hand another extensive branch of economics the public finance literature has adopted a more realistic approach regarding the economic activity of a government a government is viewed among other things as a provider of public collective consumption goods and or of public inputs that enhance the productive capacity of the private sector being so it can use revenues from nondistortionary e g lump sum taxes or distortionary e g consumption taxes to finance the provision of such goods and services within this public finance context a long standing proposition states that when nondistortionary taxes are used to finance the provision of a public good the first best efficiency rule requires that the sum of the marginal rates of substitution i e the social marginal benefit equal the marginal rate of transformation i e the social marginal cost e g see samuelson 1954 when distortionary taxes are used to finance the provision of the public good pigou 1947 argued that the social marginal cost exceeds the private marginal cost because of the induced indirect cost from raising tax revenue through distortionary taxation stiglitz and dasgupta 1971 atkinson and stem 1974 and wildasin 1984 among others demonstrate that in certain cases e g when the taxed and the public goods are complements in consumption pigou s argument fails to hold and the social cost may fall short of the private marginal cost because of its more realistic appeal this public finance approach to the use of tax revenue has been subsequently adopted by the relevant international trade and development economics literature recently the efficiency rule for public good provision has been examined in the context of a small open economy by among others feehan 1988 when tariff revenue finances the provision of the public good in an economy producing two traded goods and a nontraded public consumption good michael and hatzipanayotou 1995 examine the same issue and derive the formulae for the optimal tax rates on traded or nontraded goods in an economy producing many traded and nontraded goods and where consumption tax revenue finances the provision of the public good michael and hatzipanayotou 1997 demonstrate the failure of the first best efficiency rule when lump sum taxes are used to finance the provision of a public good in a small open economy in the presence of trade restrictions i e a tariff or a ver two features in the above reviewed studies of the international trade development economics and public finance literature motivate the present paper first all these studies derive the efficiency rule for public good provision in the context of a small open or closed economy with full employment unemployment however to a lesser or to a larger extent remains a structural feature of many developed or developing economies from an analytical standpoint the existence of such a distortion may alter both the optimal tax formulae and the efficiency rule for public good provision second the above reviewed literature considers the case where a government uses a single policy instrument e g lump sum taxes income taxes tariffs to finance the provision of the public good more than often however governments may have at their disposal several tax instruments that they can simultaneously use in order to raise revenue for financing the provision of public consumption goods

the demand for environmental quality in driving transitions to low polluting energy sources the purpose of this paper is to understand the long run demand for energy related environmental quality its influence on legislation and on transitions to low polluting energy sources it starts by presenting a simple framework of the relationship between the demand for and supply of environmental quality environmental legislation and energy this forms the structure for presenting a series of episodes in british history where a demand for improvements in energy related environmental quality existed this analysis proposes that markets can drive transitions to low polluting energy sources in specific economic conditions however most probably governments will need to push them and this cannot be expected without strong and sustained demand for environmental improvements yet while demand is a prerequisite it is not enough it must also be spearheaded by strong creative and sustained pressure groups i e powerful lobbying and the weakening of the counter lobby to introduce legislation to enforce it and to avoid it being over turned by future governments

how much discretion for risk regulators we analyze the regulation of firms that undertake socially risky activities but can reduce the probability of an accident inflicted on third parties by carrying out non verifiable effort congress delegates regulation to an agency although these two bodies may have different preferences toward the industry the optimal level of discretion left to the agency results from the following trade off the agency can tailor discretionary policies to its expert knowledge about potential harm but it implements policies that are too pro industry the agency should be given full discretion when the firm is solvent partial discretion is preferred otherwise we then investigate how this trade off changes as the political and economic landscapes are modified

optimal climate change policies when governments cannot commit this paper examines the optimal design of climate change policies in the context where governments want to encourage the private sector to undertake significant immediate investment in developing cleaner technologies but the carbon taxes and other environmental policies that could in principle stimulate such investment will be imposed over a very long future the conventional claim by environmental economists is that environmental policies alone are sufficient to induce firms to undertake optimal investment however this argument requires governments to be able to commit to these future taxes and it is far from clear that governments have this degree of commitment we assume instead that governments cannot commit and so both they and the private sector have to contemplate the possibility of there being governments in power in the future that give different relative weights to the environment we show that this lack of commitment has a significant asymmetric effect compared to the situation where governments can commit it increases the incentive of the current government to have the investment undertaken but reduces the incentive of the private sector to invest consequently governments may need to use additional policy instruments such as r d subsidies to stimulate the required investment

irrigation technology adoption and gains from water trading under asymmetric information we develop a water allocation and irrigation technology adoption model under the prior appropriation doctrine with asymmetric information among heterogeneous farmers and between farmers and water authorities we find that adverse selection reduces the adoption of modern irrigation technology we also show that even with asymmetric information incentives for water trade exist and lead to additional technology adoption with gains to all parties this suggests that under asymmetric information a thin secondary market improves the allocation of water resources and induces additional adoption of modern irrigation technologies

domestic and international influences on green taxation economists have made a strong case for the relative efficiency of market based mechanisms for environmental regulation such as cap and trade and green taxes yet the spread of these forms has been limited and traditional command and control regulation still predominates the authors explain geographical and temporal variation in green tax burdens by considering their domestic and international determinants modeling international influences using spatial lags hypotheses are tested using panel data on organisation for economic co operation and development member states from 1995 to 2004 at the domestic level the authors show that green tax burdens are influenced by the left right and environmental positions of legislative medians and the power of the energy producing sector among other factors the authors also show that ideas about policy diffuse through international networks generated by trade and environmental intergovernmental organizations but they do not find compelling evidence for intern

accounting for intergenerational income persistence noncognitive skills ability and education we analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings we seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 bcs cohort and also to explore the decline in mobility in the uk between the 1958 ncds cohort and the 1970 cohort the mediating factors considered are cognitive skills non cognitive traits educational attainment and labour market attachment changes in the relationships between these variables parental income and earnings are able to explain over 80 of the rise in intergenerational persistence across the cohorts

the politics of international regime formation managing natural resources and the environment why do actors in international society succeed in forming institutional arrangements or regimes to cope with some transboundary problems but fail to do so in connection with other seemingly similar problems this article employs a threefold strategy to make progress toward answering this question the first section prepares the ground by identifying and critiquing the principal models embedded in the existing literature on regime formation and the second section articulates an alternative model called institutional bargaining the third section employs this alternative model to derive some hypotheses about the determinants of success in institutional bargaining and uses these hypotheses in a preliminary way to illuminate the process of regime formation in international society to lend empirical content to the argument the article focuses throughout on problems relating to natural resources and the environment

scope of economic incentives and abatement technologies to regulate a natural system s resilience in a general equilibrium model this paper discusses a general equilibrium model consisting of a productive sector generating externalities on another sector having clean production and on consumers affecting the property of resilience of a natural system that feeds the economic system the scope of efficiency of economic incentives is analyzed simultaneously with production activities in the polluting sector and the use of a pollution abatement technology our model predicts a boomerang effect the polluting sector could find itself in a worse situation in the equilibrium with externalities this sector initiated the problem but at the end it is highly affected in any case the use of economic incentives helps keep pollution levels to maintain more valuable equilibria of nature

on the bias of intermittent demand estimates forecasting and inventory control for intermittent demand items has been a major problem in the manufacturing and supply environment croston operational research quarterly 23 1972 289 proposed a method according to which intermittent demand estimates can be built from constituent events croston s method has been reported to be a robust method but has shown more modest benefits in forecasting accuracy than expected in this research one of the causes of this unexpected performance has been identified as a first step towards improving croston s method certain limitations are identified in croston s approach and a correction in his derivation of the expected estimate of demand per time period is presented in addition a modification to his method that gives approximately unbiased demand per period estimates is introduced all the conclusions are confirmed by means of an extended simulation experiment where croston s and revised croston s methods are compared the forecasting accuracy comparison corresponds to a situation of an inventory control system employing a re order interval or product group review

equalization or selection reassessing the meritocratic power of a college degree in intergenerational income mobility intergenerational mobility is higher among college graduates than among people with lower levels of education in light of this finding researchers have characterized a college degree as a great e

the subsidiarity bias in regulation abstract we study the choice of the regulatory structure when a firm engages in different activities for different countries under decentralization regulatory contracts suffer from two opposite distortions the competition between regulatory authorities leads to too high powered contracts however with a dispersed ownership structure contracts tend to be too low powered for sufficiently substitutable activities decentralization always leads to an inefficient drift towards fixed price contracts nonetheless when regulators have private agendas and possess the discretion to distort their policy to gain the support of some interest groups decentralization may be preferred to centralization as competition between regulatory authorities mitigates their discretionary power

the class pay gap in higher professional and managerial occupations this article demonstrates how class origin shapes earnings in higher professional and managerial employment taking advantage of newly released data in britain s labour force survey we examine the relative openness of different high status occupations and the earnings of the upwardly mobile within them in terms of access we find a distinction between traditional professions such as law medicine and finance which are dominated by the children of higher managers and professionals and more technical occupations such as engineering and it that recruit more widely moreover even when people who are from working class backgrounds are successful in entering high status occupations they earn 17 percent less on average than individuals from privileged backgrounds this class origin pay gap translates to up to 7 350 11 000 lower annual earnings this difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being employed in smaller firms and working outside london but it remains substantial even net

intergovernmental versus intersource emissions trading when firms are noncompliant abstract this paper analyzes the relative cost effectiveness of intergovernmental versus intersource cross border emissions trading when polluting firms are noncompliant a special focus is placed on the presence of enforcement costs and the associated credibility problem of governmental monitoring it is shown that without inspection commitment the intergovernmental system is more cost effective because the endorsed flexibility in domestic emission taxation serves as a commitment device for building credibility of monitoring

nash implementation of a proportional solution to international pollution control problems abstract for a very general class of pollution control models involving strictly quasi concave utility functions over consumption and environmental quality and strictly convex emission abatement cost functions a proportional cost sharing mechanism is presented inspired by the ratio equilibrium introduced by 7 it is shown that the proportional solution yields a cost efficient allocation of abatement efforts and that the resulting utility imputation always lies in the stand alone core of the cost sharing game in order to decentralize the proportional cost sharing equilibrium a financial compensation mechanism implementing the proportional solution in complete information nash equilibrium is presented

international environmental agreements the case of costly monetary transfers most existing international environmental agreements to resolve transboundary pollution problems appear constrained in the sense that either monetary transfers accompany uniform abatement standards agreements based on a uniform standard with monetary transfers or differentiated abatement standards are established but without monetary transfers agreements based on differentiated standards for two asymmetric countries facing the challenge of a transboundary pollution problem we compare the relative efficiency of these two second best agreements we study especially the role of the costs associated with transfer payments across countries in the choice of these agreements to conduct this analysis we use a negotiation game and the generalized nash bargaining solution nash in econometrica 21 128 140 1953 as the equilibrium for total welfare our findings show that countries collectively prefer the uniform to the differentiated agreement if the cost of transfers is sufficiently low compared to the ratio for countries of the difference of the abatement costs between the two agreements in the analysis of individual welfare we also discuss the reluctance of one country to sign a specific type of agreement even if it is better off than in the case of non cooperation

comparing environmental policy instruments in the presence of imperfect compliance a case study in this paper we aim to include rule making implementation monitoring and enforcement costs into the cost comparison of policy instruments we use a simple partial equilibrium model and apply it to the textile industry the model includes discrete abatement functions and costly monitoring and enforcement the case study uses individual firm data to simulate the differences in abatement costs and compliance decisions between firms we compare combinations of regulatory instruments emission taxes emission standards and technology standards and enforcement instruments criminal fines civil fines and transaction offers we show that the inclusion of information monitoring and enforcement costs indeed alters the relative cost efficiency of the different instruments

credit market frictions and political failure we study how an excessively favorable regulatory environment for banks could arise even with a perfectly competitive credit market in a median voter world in our occupational choice model with heterogeneous wealth endowments market failure due to unobservability of entrepreneurial talent endogenously creates a misalignment between surplus maximizing reforms and reforms that are preferred by the median voter who is a worker this is in contrast to the world without market failure where the electorate unanimously vote in favor of surplus maximizing institutional reforms this paper illustrates how market failure could lead to political failure even in the benchmark political system that is free from capture by interest groups

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

transitional politics emerging incentive based instruments in environmental regulation abstract this paper proposes a positive theory of environmental instrument choice we study a democratic society that seeks to lower the level of pollution from industrial sources to a pre specified target the target can be implemented by one of three instruments s uniform emission standards p tradeable permits and t emission taxes the conflict of interest between special interests representing polluters and the electorate is resolved by an elected politician we characterize when each of the three policy instruments is chosen in political equilibrium and show that the transition observed in many countries from s to either p or t can be understood as a natural consequence of increasingly ambitious environmental targets

working for the woman female managers and the gender wage gap most previous research on gender inequality and management has been concerned with the question of access to managerial jobs and the glass ceiling we offer the first largescale analysis that tur

effects of correlation on intermittent demand forecasting and stock control abstract this study investigates the effects of three different types of correlation on forecasting and stock control of intermittent demand items applying appropriate forecasting and stock control methods to theoretically generated compound poisson demand data we show that correlation in intermittent demand does play a role in forecast quality and stock control performance negative autocorrelation levels lead to higher service levels than positive values while cost does not significantly change our results also show that high intermittency levels intensify these changes in service level we also show that cross correlation produces results in the opposite direction of autocorrelation in size or intervals that is positive negative cross correlation leads to higher lower service levels

the market impact and the cost of environmental policy evidence from the swedish green car rebate we quantify the effects of the swedish gcr a program to reduce oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions in the automobile industry we find the gcr to increase the market shares of green cars and its cost to be 109 tonco2 saved thus 5 times the price of an emission permit since the main green cars in sweden are ffvs flexible fuel vehicles which can switch between petrol gasoline and ethanol we also account for fuel choice which increases the cost of the program finally we show that consumers would have purchased ffvs regardless of the rebate provided by the gcr

are uniform solutions focal the case of international environmental agreements the application of uniform solutions has several drawbacks notably their lack of cost efficiency and their inability to guarantee individual rationality a proper specification of uniform solutions however reveals that uniform solutions that satisfy individual rationality always exist when all countries hold private information about their own reduction costs there only exists one solution that always satisfies individually rationality without use of side payments and the requirement of dominant strategy implementation the solution that selects the smallest individually preferred uniform reduction which also give a theoretical explanation of the lowest common denominator effect

international environmental problems a simple taxonomy of international environmental problems is developed based on economic considerations the unidirectional externalities are illustrated by the case of one upstream and one downstream country the main problem in this case is an informational one the analysis of regional reciprocal externalities is illustrated by the acid rains in europe it is shown that an efficient solution could be achieved by transferable export rights finally global external problems are discussed with reference to greenhouse effects and extinction of species copyright 1990 by oxford university press

interjurisdictional competition with adverse selection abstract in this paper we study the welfare consequences of imposing alternative regimes of competition between two local governments that compete for mobile firms which have private information on their degree of mobility competition among jurisdictions raises the firms rents to higher levels than if jurisdictions were to cooperate therefore from the perspective of a utilitarian federation constitutional constraints on the competition process may be desirable we find that imposing a system of coarser policy instruments improves welfare relative to competition with discretionary instruments because it reduces the socially costly rents that are granted to firms in equilibrium we also find that the gains from constraining competition to uniform policy instruments are maximal when communities are identical but decline if the extent of asymmetry between locations in terms of local market size or technological complementarities increases

wage setting and the tax system theory and evidence for the united kingdom abstract this paper analyses the effects of a non linear tax system on wage bargaining the main conclusions are an increase in the marginal income or payroll tax rate reduces the pre tax wage in the isoelastic case an increase in the average tax rate increases the pre tax wage by more than the tax increase and a measure of the progressivity of the tax system residual income progression is a sufficient measure of the effect of the tax system on wage pressure empirical evidence is presented to support these propositions and the predictions of the model regarding the effect of recent changes to the u k tax system on the distribution of earnings discussed

incentives to diffuse advanced abatement technology under the formation of international environmental agreements we analyse the incentives for polluting firms to diffuse and adopt advanced abatement technology in a framework in which governments negotiate an international environmental agreement these incentives crucially depend on whether the underlying environmental policy instrument is an emission tax or an emission quota the results for the international setting fundamentally differ from those for the national setting that have been elaborated upon in the earlier literature in particular equilibrium diffusion and adoption of advanced abatement technology are not necessarily optimal under the tax regime and may be even lower than those under the quota regime

pollution control under emission constraints switching between regimes in this paper we develop a model of pollution control the aim of the society is to maximize the net social benefits which are negatively affected by the emission of pollutants we show that the presence of an upper constraint on pollution growth rate affects the actual trajectory of emissions even when emissions are far below the level where the constraint binds we get three main results first we find that for a society it is optimal to take into account the impact of the latent constraint at the outset of the planning horizon and to modify the emission flows even when the constraint is still slack second we analyze how the constraint works effectively in the intermediate phases before the constraint binds one crucial result is that the constraint on pollution growth may generate the unexpected result of increasing instead of reducing the emissions at the beginning and in the intermediate phases before the constraint binds finally we state the boundary conditions to compute the optimal trajectory of emissions switching between regimes

absolute abundance and relative scarcity environmental policy with implementation lags we study the effectiveness of environmental policy in a model with nonrenewable resources and an unavoidable implementation lag we find that a time lag between the announcement and the implementation of an emissions quota induces an increase in emissions in the period between the policy s announcement and implementation since a binding constraint on emissions restricts energy use during the implementation phase more of the resources must be extracted outside of it we call this the abundance effect in the case of multiple resources that differ in their pollution intensity a second channel emerges since cleaner sources are relatively more valuable when the policy is implemented it is optimal to conserve them before the cap is enforced this ordering effect tends to induce a switch to dirtier resources before the policy is implemented compounding the increase in emissions via the abundance channel using the announcement lag in title iv of the 1990 caaa as a case study we are able to empirically show that the abundance effect and ordering effect are both statistically and economically significant we discuss a number of alternative policy options to deal with these undesirable side effects of policy announcements