does trade liberalization narrow the gender wage gap the role of sectoral mobility abstract this paper analyzes the impact of import competition and dynamic labor adjustment on gender outcomes in wages and welfare in the u s i consider a dynamic model of sectoral choice and structurally estimate mobility costs using data from the current population survey and o net a measure of intersectoral distance in task characteristics facilitates the structural estimation of switching costs that vary by gender and across sectors in a set of trade shock simulations an import competition shock in the manufacturing sector disproportionately affects male employment and wages since manufacturing is male labor intensive and men face higher exit costs from manufacturing wage and welfare gains from trade are higher for women than men

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

spatial cost benefit thinking in multi functional forestry towards a framework for spatial targeting of policy interventions abstract many countries now actively encourage land use change for the provision of multiple benefits specifically including non market benefits often such policies have been poorly designed because of a lack of understanding of the spatial distribution of the potential costs and especially non market benefits from land use change as with market goods the potential yield of non market goods and services from land use can be highly spatially variable in recent years more and more studies on the economic aspects of natural resources have started to make use of geographical information systems gis what is yet lacking is the systematic adoption of a framework for the spatial targeting of policy interventions which can be used to improve decision making in terms of effectiveness efficiency equity or public acceptability this paper uses existing studies in forestry to present such a framework and discusses its potential uses and limitations as a new standard tool to inform multi functional land use decisions

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

applying contingent valuation in china to measure the total economic value of restoring ecosystem services in ejina region abstract this paper reports an attempt to apply the contingent valuation method cvm in rural china the cvm was used to obtain estimates of willingness to pay for restoring ejina ecosystem services in our survey we used a payment card format and a 12 page survey booklet with maps depicting the reasons why ejina ecosystem deteriorated the means by which ecosystem services could be restored from their current level we used an in person interview along with the survey booklet we employed a parametric model to estimate the benefits of restoring ejina ecosystem results from 700 in person interviews indicate that households would pay an average of 19 37 rmb per year with 20 78 per household for the main river area and 16 41 per household for the rest of hei basin the aggregate benefit to residents of the hei basin is 8 84 million annually for 20 years taking into account an environmental discount rate calculated by using respondent s equivalent utility between periodical payments and lump sum payments the present value of aggregate benefit of restoring ejina ecosystem is 55 33 million these results suggest that the general public in hei valley would be willing to pay to restore the ejina ecosystem although this amount is substantially less than the estimated costs of restoration

the ghost of extinction preservation values and minimum viable population in wildlife models abstract the inclusion of a minimum viable population in bioeconomic modeling creates at least two complications that are not resolved by using a modified logistic growth function the first complication can be dealt with by choosing a different depensational growth function the second complication relates to the inclusion of the in situ benefits of wildlife into the analysis knowledge about the magnitude of the in situ benefits provides no guide for policy about conservation management simply knowing that people are willing to pay a large amount each year to protect a species says nothing about whether one should manage habitat to protect or enhance the species numbers unless the species is in imminent danger of extinction if willingness to pay is to be a guide it needs to be better tied to population numbers especially the minimum viable population

wage dispersion and search behavior the importance of non wage job values we use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job

pilot project on sustainability management accounting with the styrian automobile cluster abstract the paper is based on a project with the styrian automobile cluster in austria and selected member companies in six companies the environmental management costs as well as further costs for health and safety risk management and other social issues were assessed less tangible items and external effects are addressed starting with the efforts to assess the financial effects of the sustainability performance indicators provided by the global reporting initiative gri for sustainability reporting the un dsd united nations division for sustainable development method for environmental management accounting ema was enlarged by several other cost categories this paper describes these and the experiences from the pilot projects the two major cost drivers are the purchase costs of non product output and the costs related to lost working days because of sick leave and accidents and the overtime pay to make up for these lost working days the work of the environmental health and safety ehs department helps to reduce these costs the cost assessment scheme allows one to better understand the relationships between costs for treatment of undesired effects due to unimplemented protection measures and lost material purchase value in comparison to the prevention costs which mainly consist of the internal management departments and related external consultants the assessment of sustainability management costs is of interest for organisations which already publish a sustainability report and want to more accurately assess the financial effects of such aspects addressed via ema it is also useful for small and medium sized companies which use the assessment as a starting point to shape their ehs system the main benefits are more accurate data and better arguments for investment appraisal or performance indicators as well as improved consistency of information and management systems that should help them to improve their environmental social and economic performance

oil consumption and economic efficiency a comparative analysis of advanced developing and emerging economies abstract this paper investigates the economic efficiency oil consumption relationship in 42 countries during the period 1986 2006 in a first stage by using dea window analysis countries economic efficiencies are obtained in a second stage an econometric analysis based on robust gmm estimators reveals an inverted u shape relationship between oil consumption and economic efficiency in order to capture heterogeneities among countries development stages the analysis has been separated into two groups advanced economies and developing emerging economies the results show that advanced economies have much higher turning points compared to emerging and developing economies it appears that oil consumption increases countries economic efficiency in addition the consumption patterns of oil products and its derivatives have changed through years and among countries the different turning points from the econometric analysis indicate the dependence of oil consumption in advanced economies higher turning points is driven mainly by household purchasing activities and their standards of living transport housing and water food etc finally it appears that oil consumption is the main driver behind the progress of industrialization and urbanization regardless of the country s development stage

unequal pay or unequal employment a cross country analysis of gender gaps we analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment we recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median we obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several oecd countries however this difference is small in the united states the united kingdom and most central and northern eu countries and becomes sizable in southern eu countries where gender employment gaps are high selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps

optimal climate policy is a utopia from quantitative to qualitative cost benefit analysis abstract the dominance of quantitative cost benefit analysis cba and optimality concepts in the economic analysis of climate policy is criticised among others it is argued to be based in a misplaced interpretation of policy for a complex climate economy system as being analogous to individual inter temporal welfare optimisation the transfer of quantitative cba and optimality concepts reflects an overly ambitious approach that does more harm than good an alternative approach is to focus the attention on extreme events structural change and complexity it is argued that a qualitative rather than a quantitative cba that takes account of these aspects can support the adoption of a minimax regret approach or precautionary principle in climate policy this means implement stringent ghg reduction policies as soon as possible

input congestion in loan operations in the previous decade the swedish banking sector underwent large changes probably the single most influential cause was a gradual relaxation of regulations the development meant new challenges a

dynamic effects in inefficiency evidence from the colombian banking sector firms face a continuous process of technological and environmental changes that requires them to make managerial decisions in a dynamic context however costs and constraints prevent firms from making instant adjustments towards optimal conditions and may cause inefficiency to persist in time we propose a dynamic inefficiency specification that captures differences in the adjustment costs among firms and non persistent effects of inefficiency heterogeneity the model is fitted to a ten year sample of colombian banks the new specification improves model fit and have effects on efficiency estimations overall colombian banks present high inefficiency persistence but important differences between institutions are found in particular merged banks present low adjustment costs that allow them to recover rapidly efficiency losses derived from merging processes

valuing nature lessons learned and future research directions this paper critically reviews the literature on environmental valuation of ecosystem services across the range of global biomes the main objective of this review is to assess the policy relevance of the information encompassed by the wide range of valuation studies that have been undertaken so far published and other studies now cover most ecosystems with aquatic and marine contexts attracting the least attention there is also a predominance of single function valuation studies studies valuing multiple functions and uses and studies which seek to capture the before and after states as environmental changes take place are rare by and large it is the latter types of analyses that are most important as aids to more rational decision taking in ecosystem conservation versus development situations involving different stakeholders local national and global aggregate global scale estimates of ecosystems value are problematic given the fact that only marginal values are consistent with conventional decision aiding tools such as economic cost benefit analysis in general valuation data provide prima facie support for the hypothesis that net ecosystem service value diminishes with biodiversity and ecosystem loss balmford et al 2002 science 297 p 950 future research effort should include complementary research on multiple ecosystem services that seeks to capture the temporal disturbance profile and its causal factors the explicit recognition of multiple interdependent ecosystem services and values poses both conceptual and empirical research challenges it would serve to transform the practice of research in this sub field via the a priori assumption of multiple and inter dependent use instead of independent single use this line of reasoning can then be extended to the institutional arrangements that determine which values are captured new institutional processes and arrangements are probably required in order to best realise benefit streams from multiple ecosystem use and non use provision across a range of different stakeholders

from ecological macroeconomics to a theory of endogenous money for a finite planet abstract this paper takes stock of the achievements and gaps of the emerging field of ecological macroeconomics which has brought insights from specific schools of macroeconomics most notably post keynesian to ecological economics with a strong emphasis on the endogeneity of money ecological macroeconomics has proposed fiscal monetary and prudential reforms to boost green investments and developed new modeling frameworks to explore the interactions between the financial macroeconomic and biophysical spheres while these proposals open a broader range of possibilities to engage in a socio ecological transition than those offered by the current paradigm of a financialized global economy they paradoxically suffer from similar limitations by placing much faith in green investments they impose a vision of the transition that presents strong technical and institutional limitations the field also fails to revisit its own understanding of macroeconomics and of specific phenomena e g financial instability through a biophysical lens in spite of increasing transdisciplinary evidence supporting this approach we suggest overcoming these limitations through institutionalist perspectives that understand money as a language through which value is created and legitimized those perspectives seem essential to re embed the governance of money within a worldview that acknowledges the finiteness and incommensurable values of earth s life support systems

cost benefit analysis values wellbeing and ethics an indigenous worldview analysis abstract in cost benefit analysis cba values are often invoked to discuss maximization strategies that produce the highest state of social wellbeing expressed in terms of utility also the conception of preferences is what individuals reveal as contributing to their wellbeing however as cba ignores the empirically testable facts of how preferences are constituted practical question arises about the legitimacy of the values themselves in contributing to welfare maximization this paper seeks to uncover the meaning of wellbeing from lessons drawn from an extensive field study conducted with a group of indigenous people in malaysia between 2008 and 2011 it concludes that despite decades of conceptual and analytical refinement the price based cba is still limited in the practical world of evaluation because of the real difficulties it encountered in assessing the non use and indirect use components of environmental assets that are non subjectively distinguishable or are not traded in the market also in ignoring individuals value judgment and the various meanings of wellbeing from different socio cultural backgrounds cba tends to lead to welfare distortions to address these theoretical and practical deficiencies it is necessary to embrace the heterodox school of ecological economics focusing on the social cultural and biophysical aspects of valuation processes

what matters and why ecosystem services and their bundled qualities much ecosystem service es research is structured around four often implicit assumptions about es benefits and stakeholders conceptions of these 1 es assessors can identify and characterize priority es across stakeholders without local participation 2 stakeholders derive one kind of benefit from each es in a one to one production function manner 3 most ess are amenable to market or non market economic valuation and 4 stakeholders primarily conceive of the importance of nature in terms of ecosystems production of benefits we empirically evaluated these assumptions with a map based interview protocol to characterize what can be managed es and related activities what matters benefits and why values based on interviews with residents of coastal communities in british columbia 87 of responses to cultural es interview prompts conveyed bundles of linked services benefits and values many es related values e g transformative and identity matter in ways that are not adequately expressed using market or non market valuation respondents used diverse metaphors about why the ocean is important not only the es production metaphor which assumes that values are a function of ecosystem processes our research demonstrates the utility of our interview protocol for providing a fuller representation of ecosystem related values and benefits potentially informing environmental decision making processes

globalization and the gender wage gap there are several theoretical reasons why globalization will have a narrowing as well as widening effect on the gender wage gap but little is known about the actual impact except for a number of country studies the author provides a cross country study of the impact of globalization on the occupational gender wage gap based on the rarely used but most far ranging survey of wages around the world the international labour organization s october inquiry this annual survey was started in 1924 and contains a wealth of information on wages and the gender wage gap for the period 1983 99 there is information on the gender wage gap in 161 narrowly defined occupations in more than 80 countries around the world the author finds the following i the occupational gender wage gap appears to be narrowing with increases in gdp per capita ii there is a significantly narrowing impact of trade and foreign direct investment fdi net inflows on the occupational gender wage gap for low skill occupations both in poorer and richer countries and for high skill occupations in richer countries iii there is no evidence of a narrowing impact of trade but there is evidence of a widening impact of fdi net inflows on the high skill occupational gender wage gap in poorer countries iv wage setting institutions have a strong impact on the occupational gender wage gap in richer countries

between economic loss and social identity the multi dimensional cost of avoiding deforestation in eastern madagascar this paper exhibits the multiple dimensions of the cost of stopping the main driver of deforestation in madagascar slash and burn agriculture tavy as well as being a major component of the economic livelihoods of most local households living at the edge of forests tavy has been described by anthropologists as an important cultural practice in this paper we show that stopping tavy does not only entail an economic cost for local households the loss of the cultural dimension of tavy would come at an additional cultural cost for some our results suggest that a viable cessation of deforestation in madagascar would require going beyond simple compensation of the opportunity costs of avoiding deforestation

total factor energy efficiency in developing countries this paper uses a total factor framework to investigate energy efficiency in 23 developing countries during the period of 1980 2005 we explore the total factor energy efficiency and change trends by applying data envelopment analysis dea window which is capable of measuring efficiency in cross sectional and time varying data the empirical results indicate that botswana mexico and panama perform the best in terms of energy efficiency whereas kenya sri lanka syria and the philippines perform the worst during the entire research period seven countries show little change in energy efficiency over time eleven countries experienced continuous decreases in energy efficiency among five countries witnessing continuous increase in total factor energy efficiency china experienced the most rapid rise practice in china indicates that effective energy policies play a crucial role in improving energy efficiency tobit regression analysis indicates that a u shaped relationship exists between total factor energy efficiency and income per capita

evaluating policy interventions with general equilibrium externalities abstract we report on the results of analytical and numerical models that describe the effects of non separable externalities or public goods on public policies with important general equilibrium consequences in the numerical exercise we calibrate a general equilibrium model with non separable air quality benefits in order to measure the excess burden and total net benefits of transportation and energy taxes in the 1995 u s economy the change in the physical level and the economic value in air quality associated with a given policy is a function of the substitution patterns between air quality and market goods that we assume the size of the deadweight loss due to pre existing distortions such as a tax on labor income is substantially affected by these substitution patterns

estimating a bayesian stochastic frontier for the indian banking system abstract this paper employs a bayesian stochastic frontier providing exact inference on both cost and profit efficiencies of the indian banking sector in the period of 2000 2006 we also test for the inclusion of off balance sheet data in model specification the findings suggest that public banks are the most efficient followed by private and foreign banks however the latter largely improved profit efficiency outperforming domestic banks by the end of the sample accounting for off balance sheet activities significantly improves profit efficiency levels

production efficiency of british building societies the purpose of this paper is to examine the relative efficiency of british building societies and to find out whether efficiency factor is the driving force behind the merging of small building societies efficiency indices for societies are derived from a 1981 sample of cross section data the results indicate wide disparities in efficiency these differences are not related to the size of building societies but apparently to managers skill and motivation

exploring the existence of kuznets curve in countries environmental efficiency using dea window analysis abstract this paper using data envelopment dea window analysis and generalized method of moments gmm estimators examines the existence of a kuznets type relationship between countries environmental efficiency and national income specifically it measures the environmental efficiency of 17 oecd countries by constructing environmental efficiency ratios for the time period 1980 2002 the analysis with the application of dynamic panel data reveals that there isn t a kuznets type relationship between environmental efficiency and income allowing for dynamic effects we find that the adjustment to the target ratio is instantaneous we also find that increased economic activity does not always ensure environmental protection and thus the path of growth is important in addition to the growth itself

valuing environmental factors in cost benefit analysis using data envelopment analysis abstract environmental cost benefit analysis ecba is used for the social evaluation of investment projects and policies that involve significant environmental impacts economic valuation of environmental impacts forms one of the critical steps of ecba we develop a new method for this purpose which does not require price estimation for environmental impacts using stated or revealed preference methods our approach is based on data envelopment analysis dea which is modified to ecba by using absolute shadow prices instead of relative prices we also discuss how the method can be used for sensitive analysis in ecba we illustrate the method by means of a hypothetical numerical example

the costs of occupational mobility an aggregate analysis we estimate the costs of occupational mobility using a novel approach that relies on aggregate flows of workers across occupations rather than on wage data the theoretical underpinnings for this approach are derived from a model of occupation choice that delivers a gravity equation linking worker flows to occupation characteristics and to transition costs which we proxy using task data from the dictionary of occupational titles dot occupation flow data are constructed from the matched monthly current population survey cps between 1994 and 2012 we find that transition costs vary widely across occupations are increasing in task distance the dissimilarity in the mix of tasks performed in the two occupations and are higher for transitions across broad task categories however most of the transition costs are accounted for by general task independent entry costs specific to each destination occupation

twenty thousand sterling under the sea estimating the value of protecting deep sea biodiversity the deep sea includes over 90 of the world s oceans and is thought to be one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world it supplies society with valuable ecosystem services including the provision of food the regeneration of nutrients and the sequestration of carbon technological advancements in the second half of the 20th century made large scale exploitation of mineral hydrocarbon and fish resources possible these economic activities combined with climate change impacts constitute a considerable threat to deep sea biodiversity many governments including that of the uk have therefore decided to implement additional protected areas in their waters of national jurisdiction to support the decision process and to improve our understanding for the acceptance of marine conservation plans across the general public a choice experiment survey asked scottish households for their willingness to pay for additional marine protected areas in the scottish deep sea this study is one of the first to use valuation methodologies to investigate public preferences for the protection of deep sea ecosystems the experiment focused on the elicitation of economic values for two aspects of marine biodiversity i the existence value for deep sea species and ii the option value of deep sea organisms as a source for future medicinal products

value of recreational fishing in the brazilian pantanal a travel cost analysis using count data models abstract recreational fishing value of the brazilian pantanal is measured using travel cost method tcm we compare non linear poisson and negative binomial count data models to estimate recreational fishing trip demands the count data and truncated models are used primarily to account for non negative integer and truncation properties of recreational fishing trips as suggested by the recreation valuation literature the results reveal that non linear and truncated count data models perform relatively well in our study the economic values of recreational fishing in terms of consumer surplus cs are derived using non linear and truncated models we estimate the cs values from 540 54 to 869 57 per trip resulting in the total social welfare estimate range from 35 to 56 million the study demonstrates a relatively high value of recreational fishing in the pantanal in comparison to similar studies conducted in other parts of the world the findings of this study would be important for resource management decisions in the pantanal and could serve as a reference in valuing similar resources in other ecosystems around the world

costing an international public good the case of the baltic sea abstract the paper discusses an economically efficient and internationally equitable provision of a specific public good the good in question the baltic sea satisfies a number of needs but economic values implied may be different in various countries polluting and using the sea the level of eutrophication has been identified as a key characteristic of the baltic sea relevant for its value the chander tulkens model of cost sharing is used to determine a hypothetical allocation of abatement costs across the countries around the sea the application of the model is based on estimates of national abatement costs as well as national willingness to pay for reduced eutrophication estimating willingness to pay in a collection of countries some of which undergo a transition from centrally planned systems has been the main challenge of this study the results were derived from a coordinated series of contingent valuation surveys in lithuania poland and sweden combined with benefit transfer studies to cover the rest of the region predictions of cost sharing schemes obtained from the chander tulkens model are confronted with actual data on abatement expenditures and international assistance several recommendations on how to optimize the baltic wide programmes conclude the paper