the role of capital and labour in shaping the environmental effects of fiscal stimulus abstract although the macroeconomic consequences of short term fiscal stimulation packages have been thoroughly analysed in the literature still relatively little is known about their environmental effects we discuss an important channel through which short run expansionary fiscal policy influences greenhouse gas emissions we show that fiscal policy exerts its impact not only by increasing general level of economic activity but also by changing the composition of factors of production capital and labour using the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of economy we demonstrate that fiscal expansion results in a shift from capital intensive to more labour intensive technologies our panel study proves that the latter tends to be associated with lower emissions of greenhouse gases per unit of production hence our analysis demonstrates that an extensive use of fiscal stimulus during recessions can significantly reduce the environmental burden of the additional units of gdp

democracy comes to europe franchise extension and fiscal outcomes 1830 1938 abstract this paper examines the relation between public spending and the spread of democracy in western europe during the period 1830 1938 our data set includes measures of the size of the electorate the election rule and electoral participation as well as measures of the size and composition of central government expenditures for 12 countries we estimate panel regressions and find that 1 the gradual lifting of socio economic restrictions on the voting franchise contributed to growth in government spending mainly by increasing spending on infrastructure and internal security 2 the female suffrage had a weak positive effect through spending on health education and welfare 3 the change from majority to proportional rule which took place in 10 of the countries did not contribute to growth in government spending and held back spending on health education and welfare 4 there exists weak complementarity between economic development and the spread of democracy

are macroeconomic policies better in curbing air pollution than environmental policies a dsge approach with carbon dependent fiscal and monetary policies abstract the environmental impacts of macroeconomic policies and their interaction with climate policies are under researched in the existing literature this paper compares the effectiveness of standard macroeconomic tools fiscal and monetary policies with carbon taxation in curbing air pollution by using an environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium e dsge model we show how government expenditure interest rate and carbon tax rate should vary over time in order to stabilize carbon emission levels we find that i while all the aforementioned policies could stabilize carbon emissions their underlying mechanisms are different fiscal monetary and carbon tax policies uniquely and respectively lead to a reduction in abatement effort income tax revenue and general price level ii with economic expansions driven by total factor productivity tfp shocks fiscal policy is the only policy that could maintain the emission levels and simultaneously improve household welfare in term of consumption and labor iii regarding the interaction between carbon and macroeconomic policies carbon taxation should complement monetary policy while it should not respond to fiscal policy

do better schools matter parental valuation of elementary education the evaluation of numerous school reforms requires an understanding of the value of better schools given the difficulty of calculating the relationship between school quality and student outcomes i turn to another method and use house prices to infer the value parents place on school quality i look within school districts at houses located on attendance district boundaries houses then differ only by the elementary school the child attends i thereby effectively remove the variation in neighborhoods taxes and school spending i find that parents are willing to pay 2 5 percent more for a 5 percent increase in test scores this finding is robust to a number of sensitivity checks

private values of risk tradeoffs at superfund sites housing market evidence on learning about risk this paper incorporates a bayesian learning model into a hedonic framework to estimate the value that residents place on avoiding cancer risks from hazardous waste sites we show that residents are

energy consumption and the influencing factors in china a nonlinear perspective abstract different from many studies on energy kuznets curve this paper does not directly consider income factor but conducts a nonlinear study on per capita primary energy consumption and electricity consumption in china whose economic development is considered investment driven in which government macroeconomic policies especially government expenditure plays a very important role in particular this paper attempts to compare the different impacts of government expenditures and the other influencing factors on energy consumption based on the results of the threshold regression in the future with the further development of the economy the driving force of labor population growth will slow down comparing with primary energy the relationship between electricity consumption and its influencing factors will change later and the difference in the effects of the influencing factors is mainly reflected in the formation of capital stock investment and the development of urbanization government expenditure on private goods may not be always as inefficient in energy consumption and cleaner production as previously thought in the literature meanwhile the growth of government expenditure on public goods will become a powerful driving factor which indicates that the government needs to assess its overall impact on energy consumption and energy efficiency when participating in the provision of public goods the paper also found that when studying the issue of energy consumption and regional differences in china the geographic classification of eastern central and western regions may not be appropriate grouping according to energy consumption levels may be one of the better options and the distribution of energy consumption levels in china s provinces is consistent with the distribution of government expenditure levels the estimation results also provide us with important policy implications the government expenditure in education is of great importance and it can produce a strong energy saving effect through technological progress

gospel or disaster an empirical study on the environmental influences of domestic investment in china abstract since the beginning of china s reform and opening up in late 1970s the contradiction between environmental quality and economic development has become increasingly acute as the main driving force of development china s fixed asset investment fai has grown rapidly in the meanwhile china s energy consumption surged and the environmental pressures mounted the surge in fai may have great influences on the environmental quality on the one hand the rapid increase in fai facilitated the development of the secondary industry especially energy and pollution intensive industries which brought about significant amount of energy related pollution on the other hand growing investment on environmental investment is expected to slow environmental deterioration moreover the environmental quality and domestic investment may have potential spatial correlations in this paper after fully accounting for the spatial dependence the relationship between domestic investment and environmental quality in china is quantitatively investigated using co2 and so2 as two representative pollutants the estimation results indicate that the spatial dependence indeed exists and total effects of fai on pollutant emissions are positive however there is no evidence that environmental protection investment had expected effects to effectively curb pollutant emissions in china

the costs of urban property crime this paper estimates the impact of recorded domestic property crime on property prices in the london area crimes in the criminal damage category have a significant negative impact on prices a one tenth standard deviation decrease in the local density of criminal damage adds 1 to the price of an average inner london property burglaries have no measurable impact on prices even after allowing for the potential dependence of burglary rates on unobserved property characteristics one explanation we offer here is that vandalism graffiti and other forms of criminal damage motivate fear of crime in the community and may be taken as signals or symptoms of community instability and neighbourhood deterioration in general

relationship between forest resources and economic growth empirical evidence from china abstract natural resources especially forests are critical to china s sustainable development in recent years effective utilization of forest resources has become a significant concern in china in this study on the basis of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis the relationship between forest resources and economic growth is examined using panel data from 30 provinces in china for the period 2002 2015 and the generalized method of moments gmm approach to control for potential endogeneity the empirical results indicate that with continuous economic growth the timber output and area of afforestation would at first increase and then decrease after reaching the corresponding turning points given the considerable regional gap in economic and social development three regions of china were investigated to perform a more in depth analysis evidence observed for the country and the three regions suggests an ekc for forest resources these findings indicate positive effects of china s pursuit of a more balanced growth path where forest resources would be less consumed and more actively protected

effects of public and private expenditures on environmental pollution a dynamic heterogeneous panel data analysis abstract this paper examined the impact of expenditures of household firm and government on aggregate and sectoral carbon emissions in the world economies during 1990 2015 the modified heterogeneous panel data technique was used to estimate both carbon emission and income models from which both the direct and indirect effects of expenditure categories were estimated along with long run and short run analyses empirical results indicate that in the long run the negative direct effect of government expenditure was reduced by the positive indirect effects leading to positive total effect on aggregate carbon emission however in the short run the negative direct effect was enhanced by the negative indirect effect culminating into negative total effect further in the long run the positive direct effect of investment expenditure was reduced by the negative indirect effects resulting into negative total effect on aggregate carbon emissions however the negative short run direct effect was reduced by the positive indirect effect leading to marginal positive total effect the total direct effect of household consumption spending was negative in the long run and could be relatively large in the short run the effect of the household expenditure on sectoral carbon emissions was negative while that of private investment was positive and that of public spending was diverse the policy lessons include the need to conduct value chain environmental pollution implications of any expenditure policy

fiscal spending and green economic growth evidence from china abstract the green economy is considered as an efficient way for sustainability but the connection between fiscal spending and green economic growth has not been systematically explained this paper attempts to fill this research gap based on the panel data of 282 prefecture level cities from 2005 to 2016 we first construct the green economic growth index by using the non radial direction distance function then by employing the system gmm estimation we further evaluate the effect of fiscal education spending and r d spending on green economic growth finally we explore the potential mechanism and discuss our findings we obtain the following conclusions 1 the green economic growth index fluctuated in the study period we attribute it to the political tournament of local governments 2 the system gmm estimation results confirm the existence of composition effect and technique effect in the full sample but the sub sample analysis suggests that there is a heterogeneous effect in different areas with different resources abundant degree 3 mechanism analysis illustrates that fiscal r d spending and education spending foster the green economic growth through technological activities and human capital intensive activities respectively but they exhibit distinct roles in different areas based on these findings we propose some targeted policy suggestions for promoting green economic growth

efficient estimation of structural hedonic systems when a product or job is not homogeneous but instead embodies several different characteristics it is difficult to use price information about the product to learn anything about the structure of the supply and demand for the embodied characteristics s rosen 1974 highlighted this problem and suggested that the estimated slope of the price characteristic relation the marginal price could be used instead of standard prices in otherwise standard estimation of the supply and demand system however recently brown and h rosen 1982 brown 1983 and mendelsohn 1985 have pointed out that this method is applicable only when the marginal price depends on variables not found in the supply and demand equations in this paper we show that since the hedonic system matches consumers with high demand for the characteristic to firms with low costs of producing it exogenous variables from the supply equation are not valid instruments in the demand equation and vice versa therefore even when the brown rosen mendelsohn brm condition holds estimation of the identified system by standard simultaneous equations techniques will produce inconsistent estimates we then show that the system can be identified despite the absence of the standard instruments and develop an efficient estimator for the identified system since cross equation constraints make estimation of hedonic systems particularly vulnerable to specification error we also consider some specification tests in this section we consider a simple model with only one characteristic the extension to several characteristics is straightforward the basic model developed by rosen can be described as follows firms with different technologies produce products which provide consumers with varying levels of some characteristic z each consumer buys one unit of the good the product is such that an amount of z from two units of the good provides less utility than the same amount of z embodied in a single unit e g acceleration in a car safety in a job consumers

competition between private and public schools vouchers and peer group effects a theoretical and computational model with tax financed tuition free public schools and competitive tuition financed private schools is developed students differ by ability and income achievement depends on own ability and on peers abilities equilibrium has a strict hierarchy of school qualities and two dimensional student sorting with stratification by ability and income in private schools high ability low income students receive tuition discounts while low ability high income students pay tuition premia tuition vouchers increase the relative size of the private sector and the extent of student sorting and benefit high ability students relative to low ability students

sulfur dioxide so2 emissions and government spending on environmental protection in china evidence from spatial econometric analysis abstract this study pays attention to a rarely discussed but important issue regarding the influence of the government s environmental protection expenditure on sulfur dioxide so2 emissions in china under consideration of the potentially spatial dependence of so2 emissions a panel dataset of 30 provinces from 2008 to 2013 is utilized to estimate the panel spatial durbin models the main findings of this study are that so2 emissions can be effectively reduced by government spending on environmental protection and that the relationship between so2 emissions and gross regional product grp per capita in china is cubic polynomial n shaped in addition as direct investment from foreign countries toward china increases so2 emissions will be reduced the trade factor also plays an important and negative role in so2 emissions provinces with higher shares of secondary industries to total grp will have more so2 emissions the investment completed in the treatment of industrial pollution in the private sector can effectively reduce so2 emissions and a higher population density causes a reduction in so2 emissions the coefficient of spatial autocorrelation is statistically positive confirming a positive spatial correlation also meaning a spatial competition of so2 emissions among provinces in china all these conclusions are consistent with those in previous works and with our expectations and remain the same while a two stage procedure is applied to cope with the potential endogeneity problem of grp with the exception of the effect of population density

the effects of fiscal policy on co2 emissions evidence from the u s a abstract this paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on co2 emissions using vector autoregressions on u s quarterly data from 1973 to 2013 in particular we analyze the short and mid term interactions between fiscal policy and emissions by using sign restrictions to identify the policy shocks we construct the impulse responses to linear combinations of fiscal shocks corresponding to the scenarios of deficit financed spending and deficit financed tax cuts to consider possible variations of the effect of fiscal policy according to the sources of pollution we distinguish between production and consumption generated co2 emissions the results point out that the implementation of expansionary fiscal spending provides an alleviating effect on emissions from both sources of the pollutant whereas deficit financed tax cuts are associated with an increase on consumption generated co2 emissions the exact pattern of the effects depends on the source of emissions the scenario of fiscal policy that is implemented and the functional class of government expenditure being increased

the estimation of demand parameters in hedonic price models this paper shows that the econometric problem of estimating hedonic demand parameters is not a standard identification problem caused by demand supply interaction as has been often assumed estimation procedures based on this assumption lead to biased results the hedonic estimation problem is instead caused by the endogeneity of both prices and quantities when households face a nonlinear budget constraint an instrumental variables solution to this problem is suggested using instruments that exogenously shift the budget constraint

bubbles and self enforcing debt we characterize equilibria with endogenous debt constraints for a general equilibrium economy with limited commitment in which the only consequence of default is losing the ability to borrow in future periods first we show that equilibrium debt limits must satisfy a simple condition that allows agents to exactly roll over existing debt period by period second we provide an equivalence result whereby the resulting set of equilibrium allocations with self enforcing private debt is equivalent to the allocations that are sustained with unbacked public debt or rational bubbles in contrast to the classic result by bulow and rogoff 1989a positive levels of debt are sustainable in our environment because the interest rate is sufficiently low to provide repayment incentives

estimating the marginal willingness to pay function without instrumental variables abstract the hedonic model of rosen 1974 has become a workhorse for valuing the characteristics of differentiated products despite a number of well documented econometric problems including a source of endogeneity that has proven difficult to overcome here we outline a simple likelihood based estimation approach for recovering the marginal willingness to pay function that avoids this endogeneity problem using this framework we find that marginal willingness to pay to avoid violent crime increases by sixteen cents with each additional incident per 100 000 residents accounting for the slope of the marginal willingness to pay function has significant impacts on welfare analyses

international lending with moral hazard and risk of repudiation in this paper i examine the constrained optimal pattern of capital flows between a lender and a borrower in an environment in which there are two impediments to forming contracts the first impediment to contracting arises from the assumption that lenders cannot observe whether borrowers invest or consume borrowed funds this assumption leads to a moral hazard problem in investment the second impediment arises from the assumption that the borrower as a sovereign nation may choose to repudiate his debts the optimal contract is shown to specify that the borrowing country experience a capital outflow when the worst realizations of national output occur this seemingly perverse capital outflow forms a necessary part of the optimal solution to the moral hazard problem in investment

sovereign debt ignorance can be bliss abstract an example is given to show that the bulow rogoff argument for the non existence of reputational debt contracts does not extend to a world with asymmetric information about the needs of the debtor country

does government expenditure affect environmental quality empirical evidence using chinese city level data abstract with rapid economic development the chinese government expenditures at various levels have increased sufficiently at the same time the environmental pollution in china has deteriorated significantly in this study the city level panel data of 106 chinese cities over the 2002 2014 period are utilized to investigate the impacts of government expenditure on the emissions of three typical pollutants specifically the total effects are divided into two types direct effects through which government expenditure affects pollution directly and indirect effects which refer to the indirect influences of government expenditure on environmental pollution through its impacts on gdp per capita to control for potential endogeneity and introduce dynamics the generalized method of moments gmm method is utilized the estimation results indicate that the total effects of government expenditure on these three pollutants are very different for sulfur dioxide so 2 soot and chemical oxygen demand cod the total effects are decreasing inverted u and u shaped respectively furthermore the indirect effects dominate the direct effects

does hazardous waste matter evidence from the housing market and the superfund program this paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of superfund sponsored cleanups of hazardous waste sites we show that if consumers value the cleanups then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites we compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for superfund cleanups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these cleanups we find that superfund cleanups are associated with economically small and statistically insignificant changes in residential property values property rental rates housing supply total population and types of individuals living near the sites these findings are robust to a series of specification checks including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule overall the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of superfund cleanups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the 43 million mean cost of superfund cleanups

tax subsidies to owner occupied housing an asset market approach inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation this paper presents an asset market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s which substantially reduced homeowners user costs could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner occupied housing

panel data hedonics rosen s first stage as a sufficient statistic traditional cross sectional estimates of hedonic price functions can recover marginal willingness to pay for characteristics but face endogeneity problems for estimating non marginal welfare measures i show that when panel data on household demands are available one can construct a second order approximation to non marginal welfare measures using only the first stage marginal prices with repeated cross sections of product prices the measure can be set identified or under a single crossing restriction point identified bounds also can be constructed when there are mobility costs finally a variant remains valid when individual preferences shift over time

which hedonic models can we trust to recover the marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities abstract the hedonic property value model is among our foremost tools for evaluating the economic consequences of policies that target the supply of local public goods environmental services and urban amenities we design a theoretically consistent and empirically realistic monte carlo study of whether omitted variables seriously undermine the method s ability to accurately identify economic values our results suggest that large gains in accuracy can be realized by moving from the standard linear specifications for the price function to a more flexible framework that uses a combination of spatial fixed effects quasi experimental identification and temporal controls for housing market adjustment

spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the brief summarizes the spring cleaning rural water impacts valuation and property rights institutions the first two rounds of spring protection occurred in january april 2005 and august november 2005 the author measure health impacts of spring protection an investment that improves source water quality the author also estimate households valuation of spring protection and simulate the welfare impacts of alternatives to the current system of common property rights in water which limits incentives for private investment spring infrastructure investments reduce fecal contamination by 66 percent but household water quality improves less due to recontamination child diarrhea falls by one quarter travel cost based revealed preference estimates of households valuations are much smaller than both stated preference valuations and health planners valuations and are consistent with models in which the demand for health is highly income elastic the author estimate that private property norms would generate little additional investment while imposing large static costs due to above marginal cost pricing private property will function better at higher income levels or underwater scarcity and alternative institutions could yield pareto improvements

fuel consumption in road transport a comparative study of china and oecd countries abstract energy conservation and emissions reduction have been the focus of the road transport sector due to its energy intensive and air pollution intensive nature it also embodies the imprints of human technological progress this paper compares the energy consumption of the road transport sector in china and oecd countries we used time series and panel data co integration analysis error correction model and dynamic model to study the impacts of the major influencing factors such as income income structure urbanization price and technological advancement on gasoline and diesel consumption in road transport overall china s fuel consumption is influenced mainly by investment government expenditure and demographic changes such as urbanization while the fuel consumption of oecd countries is mainly driven by household final consumption expenditure in the short run and from a dynamic perspective china s fuel consumption is less influenced by its historical consumption than current influencing factors while that of oecd countries is more affected by historical fuel consumption based on the analysis and findings of this study some policy implications are proposed

the environmental kuznets curve for pm2 5 pollution in beijing tianjin hebei region of china a spatial panel data approach abstract the purpose of this study is to exam the existence of environmental kuznets curve ekc of pm2 5 pollution in the beijing tianjin hebei bth region of china as one of the most important economic growth poles in china bth region has long been suffering from air pollution especially pm2 5 pollution thus in this study we utilized satellite observations of pm2 5 pollution and panel data of 13 cities in bth region from 1998 to 2016 to investigate the relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 pollution after verifying the spatial effect of pm2 5 pollution by spatial statistical analysis the spatial econometric model spatial durbin model sdm was chosen over the non spatial model in the examination of ekc the results showed that 1 the relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 pollution presented a significant inverted u shaped pattern though bth region is still in the upward section there is a hope that it will cross the point and enter the downward section in the future 2 the turning points of ekc would happen later with spatial effect considered compared to the result of non spatial model 3 the turning point of ekc would not happen until the region enter the post industrial economy stage moreover though some of the cities in bth region have entered post industrial stage none of them has cross the turning point of ekc results of this study indicate a promising future in the control of pm2 5 pollution as well as provide suggestions to put more emphasis on regional cooperative governance in air pollution control for the policy makers

interjurisdictional housing prices in locational equilibrium abstract in this study we discuss how to construct interjurisdictional housing price indexes that are consistent with locational equilibrium theory in theoretical models housing is assumed to be homogeneous which provides problems in empirical analysis we provide conditions that allow us to treat heterogeneous housing as if it were homogeneous the same conditions that allow us to develop a quantity index for housing also imply that we can estimate interjurisdictional housing price indexes using hedonic price regressions locational equilibrium models impose a number of restrictions regarding the co movement of housing price indexes local public goods and mean income levels we propose to use these properties of locational equilibrium models to evaluate the different price index estimates we estimate a variety of price indexes using a unique panel data set of housing transactions in southern california our empirical results by and large support our approach

environmental performance corruption and economic growth global evidence using a new data set abstractthis study investigates the relationship between environmental performance corruption and economic growth using panel data of 87 countries covering the period from 2002 to 2012 the environmental performance index is used for the first time to evaluate the environmental quality on economic growth by employing both static and dynamic panel models we find that environmental performance is positively related to economic growth and is more significant in non organization for economic cooperation development oecd countries moreover when corruption is incorporated the empirical estimation results indicate that although lower corruption helps economic growth in non oecd countries the negative coefficients of the three interactive terms show that the positive effect of environment performance on economic growth will drop while greater environmental performance combined with natural resource abundance inevitably leads to inefficient bureaucracies and hence disadvantageous economic growth as

environmental keynesian macroeconomics some further discussion abstract this paper extends the is lm ee framework first formulated by heyes heyes a 2000 a proposal for the greening of textbook macro is lm ee ecol econ 32 1 7 in his model exogenous fiscal or monetary shocks are needed so that the intersection of all three schedules is reached such independent adjustments are circumvented in this paper which argues that a naturally adjusting process exists and formalizes this mechanism for the is lm ee framework

the effects of government spending on deforestation due to agricultural land expansion and co2 related emissions this paper examines the effect of changes in government spending level and composition on deforestation due to agricultural land expansion and related carbon dioxide emissions our theoretical model shows an unintended consequence from increased government spending and widening social safety nets in developing countries where agricultural land expansion significantly affects forest cover there is an increase in deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions from land use change our empirical tests show that an increase in total government spending significantly increases forest land clearing for agricultural production in the short run leading to more carbon dioxide emissions however there is no long run statistically significant effect on the steady state forest cover and carbon dioxide emissions

hedonic markets and sorting equilibria bid function envelopes for public services and neighborhood amenities abstract hedonic regressions with house value as the dependent variable are widely used to study public services and neighborhood amenities this paper builds on the theory of household bidding and sorting across communities to derive bid function envelopes which provide a form for these regressions this approach allows for household heterogeneity and multiple amenities yields estimates of the price elasticity of amenity demand directly from the hedonic without a rosen two step procedure and provides tests of hypotheses about sorting an application to cleveland area data from 2000 yields price elasticities for school quality and neighborhood ethnic composition and supports the sorting hypotheses

should governments stop subsidies to private goods evidence from rural latin america abstract this paper empirically documents the effects of subsidizing private goods to the detriment of the government s supply of public goods we use a new data set from the rural sector in fifteen latin american countries over the period 1985 2001 collected using a methodology that allows us to separate government subsidies to private goods from expenditures in the provision of public goods the econometric evidence shows that the government s decision to subsidize either private or public goods has dramatic consequences for economic development reducing the share of subsidies to private goods or equivalently increasing the share of public goods in the government s budget has ceteris paribus a large and significant positive impact on rural per capita income reduces certain undesirable environmental effects associated with output expansion and contributes to poverty reduction

the effect of government expenditure on the environment an empirical investigation abstract this paper examines the impact of government spending on the environment using a panel of 77 countries for the time period 1980 2000 we estimate both the direct and indirect effects of government spending on pollution the indirect effect in particular operates through the impact of government spending on income and the subsequent effect of the income level on pollution to take into account the dynamic nature and the potential endogeneity in the relationships examined appropriate econometric methods are used for so2 government spending is estimated to have a negative direct impact on per capita emissions while the direct effect is insignificant on co2 pollution the indirect effect on so2 is negative for low income levels and becomes positive as income increases while it remains negative for co2 for the most part of the sample range the resultant total effects follow the patterns of the indirect effects which dominate their respective direct ones for each pollutant policy implications from the results vary depending on the income level of the considered countries

corruption and the environmental kuznets curve empirical evidence for sulfur abstract we investigate how corruption influences the income level at the turning point of the relationship between sulfur emissions and income using a wide cross national panel of countries at different levels of development and with different degrees of corruption our results support the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis for sulfur we find evidence that the higher the country s degree of corruption the higher the per capita income at the turning point suggesting different income pollution paths across countries due to corruption we build upon a new specification for the ekc developed by bradford et al 2005 that avoids using nonlinear transformations of potentially nonstationary regressors in panel estimation also we account for the indirect impact of corruption on emissions through its impact on per capita income our main findings remain unchanged when we investigate additional heterogeneity allowing for different income slopes across richer and poorer countries

the cyclical behaviour of fiscal policy evidence from the oecd this paper addresses the topic of cyclicality in scal policy in particular we show that the level of cyclicality varies across spending categories and across oecd countries in line with leading theories of scal cyclicality we show that countries with volatile output and dispersed political power are the most likely to run procyclical scal policies wage government consumption is highlighted as the most important channel by which these variables affect scal cyclicality

government expenditure corruption and total factor productivity abstract this paper classifies government expenditures into three types and constructs a theoretical framework to explore the influences of government expenditures and corruption on total factor productivity it then establishes a dynamic spatial autoregressive model and a panel threshold model to test the theoretical hypotheses based on provincial panel data from 2007 to 2014 the results illustrate that u shape curve relationships exist between government expenditures of administrative service investment development safeguard governance and total factor productivity and that the relationship between the government expenditure structure and total factor productivity follows an inverted u shape curve in addition the findings suggest that increased corruption levels can directly reduce regional total factor productivity and that the effects of the proportions of administrative service expenditures investment development expenditures and safeguard governance expenditures on total factor productivity have a single corruption threshold increasing the proportions of government expenditures could improve the total factor productivity up until the threshold value

the environmental consequences of domestic and foreign investment evidence from china abstract fixed asset investment fai and foreign indirect investment fdi have important influences on economic development and environmental quality because environmental performance is related with economic development fai and fdi may affect environment indirectly through their impacts on economic growth in this study the direct and indirect effects of both fai and fdi on china s environmental quality are distinguished and separately estimated for the first time with a carefully designed framework of a two equation model because most economic activities and environmental pollutions occur in the urban areas a panel data of 112 chinese cities for the period 2002 2015 is utilized several spatial factors are also introduced to control for the potential spatial correlations in economic development and pollutant emissions the estimation results indicate that there exist apparent differences in the environmental effects of fai and fdi the direct effects of fai on so 2 emissions are significant positive and dominate the negative indirect effects by contrast the direct indirect and total effects of fdi on pollutant emissions are all negative therefore overall speaking well designed and targeted policies should be formulated to reduce the negative environmental impacts of fai and to increase the positive influences of fdi on environment

is there convergence in per capita so2 emissions in china an empirical study using city level panel data abstract as china s economy has grown rapidly in recent years china s environmental pollution has become increasingly significant among all the traditional pollutants sulfur dioxide has been monitored by the chinese government since the 1990s in this study china s city level panel data between 2002 and 2012 are utilized to investigate the existence of convergence in per capita sulfur dioxide emissions across chinese cities the conventional estimation methods for convergence suffer from an endogeneity problem and therefore produce biased results to address the endogeneity problem and allow for dynamics dynamic panel data estimators are utilized and the static estimation results are conducted as a robustness check in addition the influential factors for convergence are examined the empirical results indicate that in the chosen sample period there were absolute and conditional convergences in per capita sulfur dioxide emissions across cities within the whole nation as well as in the eastern western and central regions of china because per capita gross domestic product and the ratio of secondary industry to gross domestic product are both positively related with per capita sulfur dioxide emissions higher income per capita and greater importance of the secondary industry would cause the convergence speed to be lower therefore the most straightforward policy implication for the empirical results is that the policies for controlling sulfur dioxide emissions should be regionally differentiated for cities with high sulfur dioxide emissions per capita the regulation could be tight as the emissions would decrease faster because convergence exists however for cities with low sulfur dioxide emissions per capita the target for reducing emissions should not be excessively aggressive

a further generalization of the solow growth model the role of the public sector we develop in this paper an augmented version of the solow 1956 solow r 1956 a contribution to the theory of economic growth quarterly journal of economics 70 65 94 growth model including the role of government the model leads to a non monotonic relationship between the rate of growth of per capita output and government size generalizing previous results by barro 1990 barro r 1990 government spending in a simple model of endogenous growth journal of political economy 98 s103 s125 to the case in which returns to scale to private factors are not constant 2000 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

estimates of the impact of crime risk on property values from megan s laws abstract we estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move in dates of sex offenders we find significant effects of sex offenders locations that are geographically localized house prices within 0 1 miles of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average we then use this finding to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses and find costs of over 1 million per victim far greater than previous estimates however we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate risks posed by offenders or that living near an offender poses significant costs exclusive of crime risk jel k42 r23 r31

corruption income and the environment an empirical analysis abstract in response to the recent growth of a largely theoretical body of literature analysing the linkages between corruption and pollution this paper subjects the corruption pollution relationship to a detailed empirical examination a distinction is drawn between the direct impact of corruption on pollution and the indirect impact which operates through corruption s impact on per capita income and the resultant impact of income on pollution using data for 94 countries covering the period 1987 2000 both direct and indirect impacts of corruption on air pollution emissions are estimated for both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide corruption is estimated to have a positive direct impact on per capita emissions indirect effects are found to be negative and larger in absolute value than direct effects for the majority of the sample income range as a result the total effect of corruption on emissions is negative for all but the highest income countries in the sample

a test of environmental kuznets curve for haze pollution in china evidence from the penal data of 27 capital cities abstract the mounting environmental crisis especially the large scale and continuous haze pollution is the most pressing challenge for china during rapid urbanization process this study is aimed at examining the relationship between haze pollution and economic growth and its turning points for different regions in china based on the panel data of 27 capital cities and municipalities in china during 2011 2015 we constructed the parameter estimation model after conducting the unit root cointegration and hausman tests based on the basic and extended models we find that the relationship between haze pollution and economic growth in china is not a typical inverted u shaped environmental kuznet curve ekc by introducing variables such as industrial structure foreign trade and energy intensity this study demonstrates that adjusting industrial structure and improving energy efficiency are effective means for haze pollution control grouping regressions reveal that regional differences exist in the relationships between haze pollution and economic growth and their tuning points for instance there was a u shaped relationship for the central region while there were inverted n shaped relationships for eastern western and northeastern regions policy implications are thus summarized for different regions in terms of balancing economic growth and environmental protection

measuring the property value effects of local land use and preservation referenda this paper examines a massachusetts policy that encourages communities to raise money through referenda for preservation and affordable housing i use difference indifferences fixed effects and quantile regression to compare home prices before and after such referenda in two towns i include covariates representing existing land uses zoning and historic resources to estimate the value of these amenities standard regression techniques indicate weak effects of the referenda while the estimated coefficients on land use and historic preservation confirm that preservation has a positive effect on property values the quantile regression sheds light on some heterogeneity that goes unnoticed in standard regression results

regulation and capitalization of environmental amenities evidence from the toxic release inventory in massachusetts environmental regulation in the united states has undergone a slow evolution from command and control strategies towards market based regulations one such innovation is the toxics release inventory tri a regulation that requires polluting e rms to publicly disclose information about their toxic emissions the basic tenet of this regulation is that it corrects for informational asymmetries between polluters and households allowing communities to pressure polluters to decrease their emissions policy makers have judged the tri a tremendous success as national releases declined by 43 between 1988 and 1999 yet many of the fundamental problems which are known to lead to the classic failure of the coase theorem such as high transaction costs and dife culties in organizing cast doubt on the effectiveness of disclosure rules alone to lead to an efe cient outcome in the caseof pollution we use an event study methodology with high quality data on house prices and other local attributes to assess the extent to which the public values changes in toxic releases and thus the success of tri our major e ndings include 1 declines in toxic releases appear unrelated to any political economy variables that might lead to public activism 2 initial information released under tri had no signie cant effect on the distribution of house prices and 3 house prices show no signie cant impact of declines in reportedtoxic releases over time standard errors aresmall enoughthat we can reject the hypothesis that large declines in toxic releases lead to more than a 0 5 increase in house prices these results also hold when we control for differences in the availability of information on tri and the possible effect of expectations our e ndings cast doubt on the ability of the public to process complex information on hazardous emissions and support the coase theorem in that right to know lawssuch as tri may not be the most effective form of environmental regulation

pooled mean group estimation of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 abstract we apply the pooled mean group estimator to test for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for co2 in 22 oecd countries this approach allows for more flexible assumptions in a panel data framework the period goes from 1975 to 1998

evidence of the effects of water quality on residential land prices we use hedonic techniques to show that water quality has a significant effect on property values along the chesapeake bay we calculate the potential benefits from an illustrative but limited water quality improvement and we calculate an upper bound to the benefits from a more widespread improvement many environmental hedonic studies have almost entirely ignored the potential for omitted variables bias the possibility that pollution sources in addition to emitting undesirable substances are likely to be unpleasant neighbors we discuss the implications of this oversight and we provide an application that addresses this potential problem o 2000 acadcmic prcss

the impact of environmental regulation shadow economy and corruption on environmental quality theory and empirical evidence from china abstract mounting environmental pressures led china to focus on the effectiveness of the environmental regulation to control pollution since the shadow economy or underground economic activities that are not included in official statistics accounts for an increasing fraction of china s economy its impacts on environmental quality should be carefully evaluated in this study the main research questions are as follows 1 what is the extent of the effect of environmental regulation on environmental quality and 2 what are the factors that influence the impact of environmental regulation on environmental pollution a theoretical model is developed to explain the relationship among the environmental regulation shadow economy and environmental quality in china an empirical analysis is conducted to test the three propositions of the model thereby examining the explanatory power of the theoretical model concretely using panel data from 30 provinces for the period of 1998 2012 the generalized method of moments gmm method is employed to control for potential endogeneity and introduce dynamic effects the estimation results indicate that stringent environmental regulation and the level of the shadow economy are both positively related to china s environmental pollution however the results also indicate that tighter environmental control would help reduce pollution at a given level of the shadow economy moreover an increase in the proportion of corrupt officials may weaken the environmental regulation which would consequently lead to the increase in illegal production and total pollutant emissions besides many economic and social factors may also affect the environmental quality for instance the development of secondary industry contributes toward an increase in pollutant emissions however increased research and development r d spending on eco friendly industrial operations can help to reduce pollution

sovereign debt as intertemporal barter author s kletzer kenneth m wright brian d abstract borrowing and lending between sovereign parties is modeled as intertemporal barter that smoothes the consumption of a risk averse party subject to endowment shocks the surplus anticipated in the relationship offers sufficient incentive for cooperation by all parties including any other competitive agents who are potential lenders to the sovereign the sole punishments consist of renegotiation proof changes in the path of future payments we show that intertemporal trade can be sustained in the absence of any exogenous enforcement of lending relationships whatsoever that is borrowing and lending are possible under anarchy and are supported by punishments that consist of cheating any cheater long term implicit relationships may be fulfilled as the continual renegotiation of simple incomplete short term loans the analysis suggests that the crucial role of the explicit loan contract is the identification of the relationship and the parties involved

income fluctuation and asymmetric information an example of a repeated principal agent problem we examine a simple repeated principal agent model with discounting there are a risk averse borrower with an unobservable random income and a risk neutral lender the efficient contract is characterized it tends to the first best constant consumption contract as the discount factor tends to one and the time horizon extends to infinity if the time horizon is infinite and the contract is legally enforceable the borrower s utility becomes arbitrarily negative with probability one if the borrower has constant absolute risk aversion consumption is transferred between any two states at a constant interest rate which is less than the rate of time preference

government size and growth accounting for economic freedom and globalization we examine the relationship between government size and economic growth controlling for economic freedom and globalization and using bayesian averaging over classical estimates in a panel of rich countries

residential property price differentials of waste plants evidence from beijing china as a primary source of urban pollution waste plants release toxic gases and polluted waste water that can cause great harm to human health and contaminate water resources the adverse impact of wa

is there an environmental kuznets curve for sulfur abstract most existing estimates of the environmental kuznets curve ekc for sulfur which use samples of mainly high income countries indicate a maximum emissions turning point at middle to lower high income levels of gdp per capita we use a larger and more globally representative sample than previous sulfur ekc studies we find that sulfur emissions per capita are a monotonic function of income per capita when we use a global sample and an inverted u shape function of income when we use a sample of high income countries a model estimated in first differences results in a monotonic ekc when estimated with both high income and global samples reductions in emissions are time related rather than income related

income and democracy existing studies establish a strong cross country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables we show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and vari ous measures of democracy we present instrumental variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy the cross country corre lation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years this pattern is con sistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political economic development paths at certain critical junctures jel d7 e 1

the effect of legalizing retail marijuana on housing values evidence from colorado does legalizing retail marijuana generate more benefits than costs this paper provides a first step toward addressing that question by measuring the benefits and costs that are capitalized into housing values we exploit the time series and cross sectional variations in the adoption of colorado s municipality retail marijuana laws rmls and examine the effect on housing values with a difference in differences strategy our estimates show that the legalization leads to an average 6 increase in housing values indicating that the capitalized benefits outweigh the costs in addition we find suggestive evidence that this relatively large housing value appreciation is likely due to rmls inducing strong housing demand while having no discernible effect on housing supply finally we show that the effect of rmls is heterogeneous across locations and property types jel k20 r28

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined