environmental regulation industrial innovation and green development of chinese manufacturing based on an extended cdm model abstract as for the academics and policymakers more attention has been given to the issue on how to drive green development of the manufacturing through regulations and innovations we construct the extended crepon duguet mairesse cdm model and employ the panel data of chinese manufacturing industries during 2003 2014 to examine the effects of environmental regulation on industrial innovation and green development the findings reveal that 1 in the long term environmental regulation has crowded out r d investment 2 environmental regulation has inhibited patent outputs so that the weak version of porter hypothesis is not underpinned 3 in the short term environmental regulation has promoted the improvements of labor productivity energy efficiency and environmental efficiency in the manufacturing industry excluding green total factor productivity gtfp whereas in the long term environmental regulation only has increased energy efficiency while it has obstructed labor productivity which provides no support for the strong version of porter hypothesis 4 different innovation outputs have distinct influences on labor productivity energy efficiency environmental efficiency and gtfp finally this paper provides pertinent policy implications

energy efficiency and productivity change of china s iron and steel industry accounting for undesirable outputs abstract this paper used data from 50 enterprises in china s iron and steel industry to evaluate their energy efficiency and productivity change the study first used a conventional data envelopment analysis model and the malmquist productivity index mpi to measure the energy efficiency and productivity change over the period 2001 2008 the results indicated inefficiency in many of the plants the average energy efficiency was only 61 1 the annual growth rate of productivity was 7 96 over this period and technical change was the main contributor to this growth the research then took undesirable outputs into consideration by using the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi to explore the productivity change from 2006 to 2008 omitting undesirable outputs would result in biased efficiency change and technical change this paper also claimed that environmental regulation has a potentially positive impact on technical change

institutions capital and growth the international development community has encouraged investment in physical and human capital as a precursor to economic progress recent evidence shows however that increases in capital do not always lead to increases in output we develop a growth model where the allocation and productivity of capital depends on a country s institutions we find that increases in physical and human capital lead to output growth only in countries with good institutions in countries with bad institutions increases in capital lead to negative growth rates because additions to the capital stock tend to be employed in rent seeking and other socially unproductive activities

energy efficiency in china s iron and steel industry evidence and policy implications abstract currently the iron and steel industry isi accounts for more than 16 of china s total energy consumption improving energy efficiency ee and promoting energy savings in this industry have vital significance for china s further sustainable development using provincial panel data from 2000 to 2014 and meta frontier data envelopment analysis dea this paper investigates ee and the energy saving potential ep of china s isi by considering regional technology heterogeneities the results show that 1 from 2001 to 2014 ee in china s isi achieved significant improvement technological progress is the most powerful driving factor while the declines in scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency are two obstructive factors 2 the sources of energy inefficiency ei show distinct spatial difference characteristics ei in the eastern region mainly stems from scale inefficiency and pure technical inefficiency while that in the central and western regions stems from three aspects of scale inefficiency pure technical inefficiency and technology gap and 3 there is considerable ep in china s isi which represents nearly 80 of isi s current total energy consumption because the sources of ep vary across regions the focus of future work for china s regional isi should also vary

the impact of capital market imperfections on investment cash flow sensitivity abstract we examine the investment cash flow sensitivity of us manufacturing firms in relation to five factors associated with capital market imperfections fund flows institutional ownership analyst following bond ratings and an index of antitakeover amendments we find a steady decline in the estimated sensitivity over time furthermore we find that investment cash flow sensitivity decreases with increasing fund flows institutional ownership analyst following antitakeover amendments and with the existence of a bond rating the overall evidence suggests that investment cash flow sensitivity decreases with factors that reduce capital market imperfections

does environmental regulation affect energy efficiency in china s thermal power generation empirical evidence from a slacks based dea model abstract data envelopment analysis dea has gained much popularity in performance measurement of power industry this paper presents a slack based measure approach to investigating the relationship between fossil fuel consumption and the environmental regulation of china s thermal power generation we first calculate the total factor energy efficiency without considering environmental constraints an environmental performance indicator is proposed through decomposing the total factor energy efficiency the proposed approach is then employed to examine whether environmental regulation affects the energy efficiency of china s thermal power generation we find that the environmental efficiency plays a significant role in affecting energy performance of china s thermal generation sector decreasing the discharge of major pollutants can improve both energy performance and environmental efficiency besides we also have three main findings 1 the energy efficiency and environmental efficiency were relatively low 2 the energy and environmental efficiency scores show great variations among provinces 3 both energy efficiency and environmental efficiency are of obvious geographical characteristics according to our findings we suggest some policy implications

network dea model for supply chain performance evaluation this paper constructs an alternative network dea model that embodies the internal structure for supply chain performance evaluation we take the perspective of organization mechanism to deal with the complex interactions in supply chain three different network dea models are introduced under the concept of centralized decentralized and mixed organization mechanisms respectively efficiency analysis including the relationship between supply chain and divisions and the relationship among the three different organization mechanisms are discussed as a further extension we investigate internal resource waste in supply chain

further evidence on the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth often it is maintained that economic freedom may further high levels of economic growth using various measures of economic freedom constructed by scully and slottje the robustness of this relationship is examined both direct and indirect effects of lack of liberties are analysed our main conclusion is that the link between economic freedom and economic growth depends upon the measure used for some indicators of economic freedom there appears a robust direct relationship while for others there is no such relationship investment is not related to our indicators for economic freedom

market oriented institutions and policies and economic growth a critical survey this paper surveys recent evidence suggesting that market oriented institutions and policies are strongly related to economic growth focusing on studies using the economic freedom ef indicator of the fraser institute this index is critically discussed also various serious shortcomings of empirical studies using this index are identified nevertheless there are strong indications that liberalization i e an increase in the ef index stimulates economic growth this paper also reviews studies on the determinants of ef political liberalization is often found to enhance economic liberalization whereas there is less evidence for causality running in the other direction

endogenous financial constraints and innovation we investigate which indicators of a firm s innovation activities are associated with financial constraints and analyze the nature and direction of causal links between innovation and financial constraints by estimating simultaneous bivariate probit models on data from the uk innovation surveys we show that among innovation inputs research and development r d activity increases the likelihood that firms face financial constraints among innovation outputs only new to market products generate financial constraints reverse effects on innovation appear limited to external r d

regulation versus taxation abstract we study which policy tool and at what level a majority chooses in order to reduce activities with negative externalities we consider three instruments a rule that sets an upper limit to the activity which produces the negative externality a quota that forces a proportional reduction of the activity and a proportional tax on it for all instruments the majority chooses levels which are too restrictive when the activity is performed mainly by a small fraction of the population and when costs for reducing activities or paying taxes are sufficiently convex also a majority may prefer an instrument different than what a social planner would choose for instance a rule when the social planner would choose a tax

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

different types of environmental regulations and heterogeneous influence on green productivity evidence from china this paper attempts to examine if the strong version of porter hypothesis is supported in china by investigating how different regulatory instruments and the relative stringency impact green productivity we use a slacks based measure sbm and luenberger productivity index accounting for undesirable outputs to evaluate the industrial green productivity growth rates of china s 30 provinces the estimates imply an unsustainable development model in china with significant regional differences by employing a panel threshold model and a province level panel dataset during 2000 2012 empirical results show that both command and control and market based regulation have a non linear relationship with and can be positively related to green productivity but with different constrains on regulation stringency there are double thresholds with the command and control and exists an optimal range of stringency for productivity improvement while a single threshold has been found with the market based regulation and its current stringency is reasonable for most of provinces moreover based on china s reality the productivity effect driven by market based regulation is much stronger than that of the command and control the mechanism of informal regulation is much more complicated consequently we find evidence to support the strong porter hypothesis that reasonable stringency of environmental regulations may enhance rather than lower industrial competitiveness

investment default propensity score and cash flow sensitivity in six eu member states evidence based on firm level panel data abstractusing a panel data set covering six european countries and 119700 firms 582153 observations over the period 2008 2013 we analyse the cash flow sensitivity of investment spending as most

success of start up firms the role of financial constraints although there are some studies that empirically test the impact of financial constraints on the success of start ups the persistence of this impact is not well understood using survey data for a cohort of swiss start ups that were observed during a period of 10 years we find that financial constraints are not only a problem of the first years although the negative impact of financial constraints on firm survival disappears with increasing age of the firms profit is persistently negatively affected by financial constraints copyright 2014 the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

does central bank independence really matter new evidence for developing countries using a new indicator abstract this paper provides a new indicator for central bank independence cbi based on the turnover rate of central bank governors for 82 developing countries over the period 1980 1989 using this new indicator it is concluded that this proxy for cbi is related to inflation only if the high inflation countries are included in the sample the view that both cbi and inflation are caused by effective opposition towards inflation is not supported using both the extreme bound analysis and sala i martin s method we do not find evidence that cbi is robustly related to economic growth

the shifting scully curve international evidence from 1871 to 2016 scully curves estimating growth maximizing public sector size are constructed using panel data covering 17 industrialized nations from 1870 2016 results suggest that government expenditure to gdp

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

an analysis of the impact of climate change on crop yields and yield variability this paper develops an econometric model of stochastic production functions to quantify the impacts of climatic variables on the mean variance and covariance of crop yields the estimates of the production function parameters and their elasticities are utilized to analyse the impacts of the projected climate change on agriculture the results show that the climate change will have modest effects on the mean crop yields but will significantly reduce the variance and covariance for most of the crops considered the results have implications for allocations of agricultural land among crops and for crop production mix

environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry a data envelopment analysis dea based approach abstract china s economic has got remarkable achievements during the past 30 years which has brought tremendous pressure on natural resources and serious environmental pollution at the same time in this paper we aim to make environmental efficiency analysis of china s regional industry data envelopment analysis dea method is incorporated and the slacks based measure sbm model considering undesirable outputs is introduced to measure the environmental efficiency of different regions big data theory is introduced in the collection and selection of the input and output data of the regions further we evaluate the environmental efficiencies of china s industry using data from 2008 to 2012 the results show that apart from several developed provinces the environmental efficiencies of china s industry are generally low and the environmental efficiencies of the regions did not show any increasing trend through the past 5 years additionally lager differences exist in environmental efficiencies between the regions in china finally we suggest the chinese government to focus on the low environmental efficiencies and the unbalanced development of its regional industry

an activity analysis model of the environmental performance of firms application to fossil fuel fired electric utilities the productivity of firms when some outputs pollution are undesirable has been studied in the literature for some time in this paper we introduce an environmental performance indicator based on the decomposition of overall factor productivity into a pollution index and an input output efficiency index this indicator is compared to the more conventional jaggi and freedman 1992 model results are given for illustrative purposes using data from u s fossil fuel fired electric utilities the rankings of the utilities obtained with the two models show significant divergence which is due to the different ways in which the undesirable outputs are dealt with as well as due to the different possible tradeoffs between the pollutants released into the atmosphere and the resources used as inputs

social sustainability measured by intermediate approach for dea environmental assessment chinese regional planning for economic development and pollution prevention abstract this study examines the level of simultaneous achievement on economic prosperity and environmental protection so measuring the level of sustainability by a newly proposed intermediate approach conventionally dea data envelopment analysis for performance evaluation was used to assess various economic activities of organizations that utilized inputs e g the number of employees to yield desirable outputs e g the number of products the methodology was usually classified into radial or non radial category in an effort of extending it to environmental assessment dea needs to incorporate undesirable outputs e g the amount of co 2 into the computational framework this type of assessment is referred to as dea environmental assessment the proposed intermediate approach develops a new type of dea environmental assessment by combining the analytical features of radial approach with those of non radial approach the new approach measures the level of unified inefficiency on each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores a rank sum test and a mean test are additionally incorporated into the proposed intermediate approach such a combination enhances the statistical capability as an application this study examines the level of sustainability related to 30 provinces in china from 2003 to 2014 the application finds four policy implications first it is important for china to allocate its resources to western provinces at a level that it has used for coastal developments second the government continues to reinforce the policy making effort on environmental protection by paying attention to central and southern regions the chinese industries need to transfer toward green energy the transfer should be efficiently executed for their future developments third the government has focused on the sustainability development in urban provinces and then has gradually shifted the policy influence toward rural areas finally the policy implementation needs a time lag until it becomes effective the time lag on economic policy is longer than that of environmental policy the economic policy has historically produced a regional imbalance often leading to educational and income imbalances among chinese provinces

justifying the incorporation of the materials balance principle into frontier based eco efficiency models frontier based models are an alternative to traditional eco efficiency ratio indicators this paper considers two different types environmentally adjusted production efficiency models and frontier eco efficiency models and tries to find justification for incorporating the materials balance principle mbp in them similar importance is attached to the economic and environmental outcomes of a production process like economic outcomes can be derived from inputs and outputs and respective prices some cases allow for deriving environmental outcomes from the production function with the mbp after an overview of attempts to incorporate environmental issues in production efficiency models and some reflections why mbp has been neglected in environmental economics and production efficiency analysis the paper gives basic principles to incorporate the mbp in conventional production efficiency methods and shows how this adjustment leads to a more diversified diagnosis of eco efficiency finally potentialities and bottlenecks are discussed exploiting the mbp in production efficiency and eco efficiency analysis will facilitate more pro active eco efficiency research

environmental regulations innovation and firm performance a revisit of the porter hypothesis part of the research for this paper was supported by funding from nottingham innovative manufacturing research centre and the university of bedfordshire business and management research institute

the effects of environmental regulation on technology diffusion the case of chlorine manufacturing we use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry we estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies we find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry however it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

assessing regional eco efficiency from the perspective of resource environmental and economic performance in china a bootstrapping approach in global data envelopment analysis abstract eco efficiency has been receiving increasing attention across the world this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model which combines global benchmark technology directional distance function and a bootstrapping approach to investigate the dynamic trends of regional eco efficiency in china from 2003 to 2014 moreover a developed slacks based measure is utilized to decompose the performance fluctuations into resource environmental and economic efficiency then the key factors responsible for the changes in eco efficiency are explored using the global malmquist luenberger index the empirical results demonstrate an upward trend of eco efficiency in china during the study period this trend was high in eastern and northern areas but low in northwestern areas however it should be noted that some eco efficient regions still consume much land water and energy and emit much environmental pollutants in absolute terms the whole of china performs well on the economic front while resource and environmental performances are not encouraging particularly on environmental efficiency the eastern and northern regions have experienced the greatest advances in both resource and environmental efficiency while the undeveloped areas have not shown much progress which further widens the gaps between developed areas and undeveloped areas the decomposition of productivity growth indicates that technical progress is the decisive factor in promoting china s eco efficiency while decreasing management level is the major obstacle hampering the improvement in eco efficiency

environmental efficiency and abatement efficiency measurements of china s thermal power industry a data envelopment analysis based materials balance approach abstract appropriate measurement of environmental and emission abatement efficiency is crucial for assisting policy making in line with constructing a more sustainable society the majority of traditional approaches for environmental efficiency measures take pollutant emissions as either undesirable outputs or environmentally determined inputs which suffer a limitation of not satisfying the physical laws that regulate the operation of economic and environmental process in this study we propose a dea based approach which is combined with the materials balance principle mbp that accounts for laws of thermodynamics to jointly evaluate environmental and abatement efficiency this approach is along the line of weak g disposability based modelling but is an extension to existing models that in our approach the identification of possible adjustments on polluting mass bound in inputs and outputs and potential adjustments on abatement of pollutants are all included the overall environmental efficiency measured by this approach is decomposed into the measures of technical efficiency polluting inputs allocative efficiency and polluting and non polluting inputs allocative efficiency with the emphasizing of incorporating pollutant abatement activities accordingly new measures of abatement efficiency are proposed which help to identify the pollutant abatement potential that can be achieved from end of pipe abatement technology promotion associated with polluting input quality promotion and input resources reallocation furthermore several global malmquist productivity indices for identifying the changes on environmental and abatement efficiency are proposed this approach is applied to china s thermal power industry and some empirical results verifying the necessity of introducing the mbp are obtained

effects of local and civil environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in china a spatial durbin econometric analysis this paper employs metafrontier malmquist luenberger index and a spatial durbin model to investigate the influence of both local and civil environmental regulation and its spatial spillover effect on green total factor productivity in 273 cities of china in 2003 2013 according to city political attribute and regional differences this article divides the sample city into six categories the results show that effect of local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity is significantly positive in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone but negative effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone moreover the race to the top results in significantly positive spatial spillover effects from local environmental regulation on green total factor productivity in high political attribute cities a1 and a2 zone while the race to the bottom causes significantly negative spatial spillover effects in lower political attribute cities b2 and b3 zone as for civil environmental regulation it has positive direct and indirect effects in promoting green total factor productivity we further find that environmental regulation inhibits the original technological innovation of enterprises which suggests that government should reduce market intervention improve enterprise flexibility of market change and promote enterprises to carry out the original technological innovation thus the government and citizen should make targeted pollution reduction policies for the green total factor productivity increase

sensitivity analysis of efficiency and malmquist productivity indices an application to spanish savings banks abstract hypothesis testing and statistical precision in the context of non parametric efficiency and productivity measurement have been investigated since the early 1990s recent contributions focus on this matter through the use of resampling methods i e bootstrapping techniques however empirical evidence is still practically non existent this gap is more noticeable in the case of banking efficiency studies where the literature is immense in this work we explore productivity growth and productive efficiency for spanish savings banks over the initial post deregulation period 1992 1998 using data envelopment analysis dea and bootstrapping techniques results show that productivity growth has occurred mainly due to improvement in production possibilities and that mean efficiency has remained fairly constant over time the bootstrap analysis yields further evidence as for many firms productivity growth or decline is not statistically significant with regard to efficiency measurement the bootstrap reveals that the disparities in the original efficiency scores of some firms are lessened to a great extent

how do inputs and weather drive wheat yield volatility the example of germany increases in cereals production risk are commonly related to increases in weather risk we analyze weather induced changes in wheat yield volatility as a systemic weather risk in germany we disentangle however the relative impacts of inputs and weather on regional yield volatility for this purpose we augment a production function with phenologically aggregated weather variables increasing volatility can be traced back to weather changes only in some regions on average inputs explain 49 of the total actual wheat yield volatility while weather explains 43 models with only weather variables deliver biased but reasonable approximations for climate impact research

the eco efficiency of pulp and paper industry in china an assessment based on slacks based measure and malmquist luenberger index abstract china has become the world largest paper and paperboard producer however pulp and paper industry has involved high resource consumption and severe pollution especially for water this research has assessed the eco efficiency of china s pulp and paper industry at the national level and provincial level an overview regarding the cleaner production of china s pulp and paper industry was presented to reveal the measures for reducing environmental impact in the last two decades slacks based measure was used to analyze the efficiency levels of 16 provinces pulp and paper industries to uncover the underlying causes of eco efficiency performance malmquist luenberger index was calculated to discover the drivers of productivity growth of pulp and paper industries our results showed that the pollution treatment of china s pulp and paper industry has made progress in terms of water consumption and water pollution although the absolute amount of pollution discharge is still large chemical oxygen demand emissions are still the first critical influencing factor of pulp and paper industry s inefficiency furthermore efficiency progress was the dominating contribution of the industry s productivity growth between 2010 and 2013 the policies for adjusting the industrial structure of pulp and paper industry have resulted in the scale effects through eliminating backward production capacity and accelerating merger and acquisitions moreover the productivity of pulp and paper industry was underestimated when the undesirable outputs were ignored it indicates that the stricter environmental regulations have positive effects on paper companies to internalize environmental pressures in the production activities through environmental management in the future pulp and paper companies should further internalize the cost of pollution treatment through scale effects and technology improvement

inventories sales uncertainty and financial strength abstract we investigate the empirical linkages between sales uncertainty and firms inventory investment behavior while controlling for firms financial strength using large panels of manufacturing firms from several european countries we find that higher sales uncertainty leads to larger stocks of inventories we also identify an indirect effect of sales uncertainty on inventory accumulation through the financial strength of firms our results provide evidence that financial strength mitigates the adverse effects of uncertainty

how environmental regulations affect innovation in the australian oil and gas industry going beyond the porter hypothesis the impact of environmental regulation on innovation is of central interest to many industries and policy makers alike while traditional research adopts a top down view of regulation and attempts to measure the innovation response the more bottom up view of contemporary theory argues that firms produce innovations that exceed compliance levels as a competitive strategy we approach this dichotomy by investigating innovation introduced by australian oil and gas firms in light of environmental regulatory compliance burden and firm level characteristics including competitive capabilities analyses of survey responses executive level interviews and conference proceedings reveal both regulatory top down and competitive advantage bottom up perspectives explain innovation in this industry regression analyses reveal that product service and novel innovations all types are related to a high compliance burden competitive skills research and development activity and engagement in formal collaborations interview and conference data add nuance to our findings revealing collaborative compliance frameworks result in similar innovation outcomes

does economic freedom cause prosperity an iv approach a positive statistical and economic significant relation between growth income level and the economic freedom of the world efw index has been amply documented most analyses however use ols methods which in the presence of endogenous variables do not establish causality and produce biased and inconsistent estimates this paper uncovers the exogenous component of efw using iv methods and finds a robust channel from economic freedom to prosperity the findings including instrument validity tests support the importance of policies and institutions for development and warrants policy advice aimed at increasing economic freedom to foster prosperity

tailored to the extremes quantile regression for index based insurance contract design a new approach for weather index based insurance design based on quantile regression qr to condition the yield index dependency is developed and compared to standard regression technique three conceptual different risk measures i e expected utility expected shortfall and a spectral risk measure are used to evaluate the risk reducing properties of these contracts our findings show that qr is much more powerful in establishing the yield index dependency and lead for all risk measures to a higher risk reduction than the standard technique ordinary least squares ols thus qr leads to a more efficient contract design which is beneficial for both the insurer smaller remaining risk and the insured higher demand and willingness to pay our empirical application is based on a 31 years long time series of wheat yield data from northern kazakhstan

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

the responsibility for carbon emissions and carbon efficiency at the sectoral level evidence from china this work reviews benefit based principles to measuring responsibility for carbon emissions at the sectoral level using environmental input output analysis several new emissions multipliers are proposed to measure sectoral carbon efficiency these principles are used in an empirical analysis of carbon emissions in china and differences between the principles are compared the results indicate that all principles considered can prevent double counting of emissions but that different principles may lead to significantly different attributions of responsibility for carbon emissions and to different multiplier values for particular sectors electricity and heat supply is found to be the sector with the highest emissions responsibility under all but the consumer responsibility principle as well as the highest carbon multiplier under all principles however this sector s responsibility under producer responsibility principles is greater than that under other principles basic metals and transportation and post and telecommunication are among the top five sectors with the greatest responsibilities under all but the consumer responsibility principle whereas construction has the highest consumer responsibility among all sectors the pros and cons and policy implications of each principle are also discussed

towards an equilibrium level of market reform how politics affects the dynamics of policy change in this article we examine the dynamics of economic reforms that are implemented by incumbent policy makers interested in maintaining their political power we use a sample of 86 countries over a time period going from 1980 to 2001 and find that the achievement of an equilibrium level of market liberalization is highly costly our results are robust to endogenity and model specification

measuring eco efficiency based on green indicators and potentials in energy saving and undesirable output abatement abstract nowadays majority of organizations are seeking to achieve sustainable development with respect to green concept one of the main criteria for assessing green performance is eco efficiency to identify all aspects of the eco efficiency inputs should be divided into energy and non energy and outputs should be divided into good and bad outputs to deal with this issue a data envelopment analysis dea model is developed to divide inputs into both energy and non energy and outputs into both desirable good and undesirable bad outputs likewise variables are separated into both discretionary and non discretionary factors accordingly a bounded adjusted measure bam based on green indicators is developed to calculate the eco efficiency of decision making units dmus besides energy saving potentials and undesirable output abatement potentials are calculated to show correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable output finally proposed model is validated by assessing the eco efficiency of some selected members of organization for economic cooperation and development oecd australia finland ireland new zealand and switzerland are recognized as eco efficient countries and the rest of countries are inefficient in terms of the eco efficiency high and positive spearman correlation coefficient between energy consumption and undesirable outputs addresses that the more use of energy inputs the more undesirable outputs

endogenous economic freedom and the wealth of nations evidence from a panel of countries 1996 2011 indexes of economic freedom measure the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive of economic freedom the authors find a considerable scope for improvement in index of economic freedom created by heritage foundation since not all components of index have equal effect on economic well being contrary to heritage methodology the authors tackle the aggregation bias and highlight that each index component contributes differently to the level of economic freedom and subsequently to the level of income per capita the level of fiscal freedom and monetary freedom exert the strongest influence on the overall index of economic freedom authors present the new endogenous cross country ranking of 135 countries from instrumental variable two stage least squares iv 2sls empirical specification which removes the inconsistencies arising from the arbitrary assumption of the equivalent effect of each component on the overall index and hence the level of real income per capita

investigating the performance of different estimation techniques for crop yield data analysis in crop insurance applications we investigate the performance of the ordinary least squares ols m mm and the theil sen ts estimator for crop yield data analysis in crop insurance applications using monte carlo simulations more specifically the performance is assessed with respect to trend estimation prediction of future yield levels and the estimation of expected indemnity payments in agreement with earlier findings other estimators are found to be superior to ols in simple regression problems if yield distributions are outlier contaminated and heteroscedastic while this conclusion is also valid for subsequent applications such as yield prediction and the estimation of expected indemnity payments the difference between the considered estimators becomes less distinct for these applications we find particularly the m estimator to be a good compromise between high breakdown very robust estimators and the very efficient ols estimator because no regression technique dominates all others in all applications and scenarios for error term distributions our results underline that the choice of the estimation technique should be dependent on the purpose of the crop yield data analysis however alternative estimators such as m mm and ts estimator can reduce and bound the risk of unreliable or inefficient crop yield data analysis in crop insurance applications

what drives investment cash flow sensitivity around the world an asset tangibility perspective motivated by ongoing debates on investment cash flow sensitivity icfs and its documented decline and disappearance in the u s we investigate the determinants of icfs using firm level data across 41 countries for the 1993 2013 period we document an important role of asset tangibility in explaining the patterns in icfs asset tangibility affects icfs through two channels investment intensity and cash flow persistence as the share of tangible capital investment and cash flow persistence has fallen in developed economies icfs has declined in contrast as developing economies operate with more tangible capital have higher investment rates and more persistent cash flows their icfs is more stable the results support our explanation of icfs as a reflection of capital investment intensity and income predictability rather than a measure of financial constraints

environmental productivity and kuznets curve in india abstract as a result of india s extremely rapid economic growth the scale and seriousness of environmental problems are no longer in doubt whether pollution abatement technologies are utilized more efficiently is crucial in the analysis of environmental management because it influences the cost of alternative production and pollution abatement technologies in this study we use state level industry data of sulfur dioxide nitrogen dioxide and suspended particular matter over the period 1991 2003 employing recently developed productivity measurement technique we show that overall environmental productivities decrease over time in india furthermore we analyze the determinants of environmental productivities and find environmental kuznets curve type relationship existences between environmental productivity and income panel analysis results show that the scale effect dominates over the technique effect therefore a combined effect of income on environmental productivity is negative

national competitive advantage and the roles of economic and political freedom evidence from hong kong the equivocal interrelationships between economic performance and the institu tions of respectively economic and political freedom are examined using data from firms op erating in hong kong an economy where both an erstwhile paramount international business reputation for competitiveness and the institutional basis on which it was predicated have come into question in recent years it is hypothesized that i both economic and political freedom declines will be associated with a proxy for future economic performance competitiveness decline but that ii the correlation of economic freedom declines with competitiveness de cline will be mediated by political freedom declines hierarchical regression analyses tend to support these hypotheses although results vary by firm origin

determinants of environmental innovation in us manufacturing industries abstract this paper provides new evidence on the determinants of environmental innovation we employ panel data models to study how environmental innovation by us manufacturing industries responded to changes in pollution abatement expenditures and regulatory enforcement during the period 1983 through 1992 we find that 1 environmental innovation as measured by the number of successful environmental patent applications granted to the industry responded to increases in pollution abatement expenditures however 2 increased monitoring and enforcement activities related to existing regulations did not provide any additional incentive to innovate we also find some empirical evidence that environmental innovation is more likely to occur in industries that are internationally competitive

organising for socio ecological resilience the roles of the mountain farmer cooperative genossenschaft gran alpin in graubunden switzerland risks are increasing for agriculture particularly for marginal systems like the cereal production systems of the swiss alps the article critically examines the outcomes of innovative governance responses to socio ecological risk through an analysis of the roles of the cooperative organisation genossenschaft gran alpin according to the perceptions of its farmer members gran alpin provides a secure premium price for cereal producers in graubunden linked to the uniqueness of local organic mountain cropping systems and all the values of local identity landscape stewardship biodiversity conservation and regional development that such systems represent gran alpin is enabling an alternative approach for rural development to evolve around key elements including high quality breads pastas flours and beer the mountains the extreme production system organic production and animal welfare landscapes aesthetics in a core tourism region and the cooperation of like minded farmers resilience within the socio ecological system is enhanced as the cooperative exploits evolving forms of collaboration market niches and private and public governance relationships to respond implicitly and explicitly to agro ecological economic and political risks

investment cash flow sensitivities are useful a comment on kaplan and zingales arecent paper in this journal by kaplan and zingales reexamines a subset of erms from work of fazzari hubbard and petersen and criticizes the usefulness of investment cash eow sensitivities for detecting enancing constraints we show that the kaplan and zingales theoretical model fails to capture the approach employed in the literature and thus does not provide an effective critique moreover we describe why their empirical classiecation system is eawed in identifying both whether erms are constrained and the relative degree of constraints across erm groups we conclude that their results do not support their conclusions about the usefulness of investment cash eow sensitivities in a recent paper in this journal kaplan and zingales 1997 hereinafter kz argue that investment cash eow sensitivities do not provide useful evidence about the presence of enancing constraints because kz use a subset of the same erms and the same regressions as fazzari hubbard and petersen 1988 hereinafter fhp and claim page 176 that fhp can legitimately be considered the parent of all papers in this literature it is appropriate that we respond based on a simple theoretical model kz reach the provocative conclusion page 211 that the investment cash eow sensitivity criterion as a measure of enancial constraints is not well grounded in theory in section i we show that the kz model does not capture the theoretical approach employed in fhp and many subsequent studies most of the kz paper attempts to show that empirical investment cash eow sensitivities do not increase monotonically with the degree of enancing constraints within the 49 low dividend erms from the fhp sample in section ii we explain why the kz classiecation of the degree of constraints is eawed in identifying both whether or not erms are constrained absolute constraints as well as the relative degree of constraints across erms as a result we argue in section iii that there is no expected ex ante pattern for the

environmental regulations environmental governance efficiency and the green transformation of china s iron and steel enterprises abstract based on micro level enterprise panel data from 2005 to 2014 a slack based global data envelopment analysis dea model and a global malmquist luenberger index model are used to calculate the environmental governance efficiency ege of china s iron and steel enterprises ises then the different effects of two types of environmental regulation on ege of china s ises are analysed the results show that the overall level of ege for china s ises has remained low over the past 10 years the total factor environmental governance efficiency tfege presents a decreasing trend from 2005 to 2014 and the decline in tfege is mainly attributed to the technical progress change index gtpch moreover the bootstrap dea method is used for bias correction and the correction efficiency values are all within the confidence interval improving the accuracy of ege evaluation the regression analysis results show that different types of environmental regulations exert heterogeneous effects on tfege the relationship between market incentive environmental regulation and tfege has an inverted u shaped implying that although market incentive environmental regulation may improve the tfege in the short term continuously increasing this intensity would inhibit it however command control environmental regulation and tfege have a positive but not significant relationship

multiple environmental policies and pollution haven hypothesis evidence from china s polluting industries abstract theoretical studies of pollution haven hypothesis predict that differentiated environmental regulation policies will result in inter country relocation of polluting industries this paper investigates pollution haven hypothesis at domestic level in china using panel data of 30 provincial level regions for the period 2004 to 2013 this paper empirically examines to what extent multiple environmental policies affect intra country relocation of polluting industries in china it is found that the implementation of both economic policy instrument like pollution discharge fee and public participation like letter complaints on environmental problems encourages industrial relocation whereas the implementation of environmental legal policy instrument like laws regulations and rules prevents polluting industries from relocating to other regions it is also found that the relocation effect of environmental policies varies with industrial characteristics compared with water pollution intensive industry air pollution intensive industry dominated by stated owned capitals are insensitive to legal policy instruments these findings suggest that the validity of pollution haven hypothesis is jointly associated with the type of environmental policy as well as industrial characteristics

democracy and economic growth a meta analysis despite a sizeable theoretical and empirical literature no firm conclusions have been drawn regarding the impact of political democracy on economic growth this article challenges the consensus of an inconclusive relationship through a quantitative assessment of the democracy growth literature it applies meta regression analysis to the population of 483 estimates derived from 84 studies on democracy and growth using traditional meta analysis estimators the bootstrap and fixed and random effects meta regression models it derives several robust conclusions taking all the available published evidence together it concludes that democracy does not have a direct impact on economic growth however democracy has robust significant and positive indirect effects through higher human capital lower inflation lower political instability and higher levels of economic freedom democracies may also be associated with larger governments and less free international trade there also appear to be country and region specific democracy growth effects overall democracy s net effect on the economy does not seem to be detrimental

financial shocks and corporate investment in emerging markets we examine how cross firm and cross country heterogeneity shapes the responses of corporate investment in emerging markets to changes in u s monetary policy and financial market volatility the latter proxying for uncertainty we find that in response to increases in u s monetary policy rates or financial market volatility financially weaker firms reduce investment by more than financially strong firms we also show that firms with stronger balance sheets delay investment voluntarily when faced with higher uncertainty finally we find that stronger macroeconomic fundamentals lower public debt or higher international reserves help to buffer corporate investment from increases in u s monetary policy rates

an ordinal ranking of economic institutions abstractwe provide the first ranking of countries economic institutions using an ordinal methodology using the five areas of the fraser institute s economic freedom of the world efw index we find that final rankings of a country s institutions are sensitive to the importance ordering of area 1 size of government when areas 2 5 are in the most important position we find that there is no significant difference between the efw rankings and our rankings when area 1 is placed in the most important position however a number of european countries with large welfare states but good governance do poorly

financial distress outside directors and corporate tax aggressiveness spanning the global financial crisis an empirical analysis abstract we examine financial distress and tax aggressiveness spanning the global financial crisis gfc of 2008 and the impact of the interaction between board independence and firm specific financial distress on tax aggressiveness our regression results show that both financial distress and the gfc are positively associated with tax aggressiveness more importantly we find that the positive association between financial distress and tax aggressiveness is magnified by the gfc we also observe that the interaction between board independence and financial distress is positively associated with tax aggressiveness our results are robust to multiple measures of financial distress and tax aggressiveness

environmental investment and firm performance a network approach abstract this study examines the role of investment in environmental production practices for both environmental performance and energy efficiency over time we employ a network dea approach that links successive production technologies through intertemporal investment decisions with a period by period estimation this allows us to estimate energy efficiency and environmental performance separately as well as productivity change and its associated decompositions into efficiency change and technology change incorporating a network model also allows us to account for both short term environmental management practices and long term environmental investments in each of our productivity measures we apply this framework to a panel of detailed plant level production data for swedish manufacturing firms covering the years 2002 2008

power industry restructuring and eco efficiency changes a new slacks based model in malmquist luenberger index measurement measuring variations in efficiency and its extension eco efficiency during a restructuring period in different industries has always been a point of interest for regulators and policy makers this paper assesses the impacts of restructuring of procurement in the iranian power industry on the performance of power plants we introduce a new slacks based model for malmquist luenberger ml index measurement and apply it to the power plants to calculate the efficiency eco efficiency and technological changes over the 8 year period 2003 2010 of restructuring in the power industry the results reveal that although the restructuring had different effects on the individual power plants the overall growth in the eco efficiency of the sector was mainly due to advances in pure technology we also assess the correlation between efficiency and eco efficiency of the power plants which indicates a close relationship between these two steps thus lending support to the incorporation of environmental factors in efficiency analysis

investment and cash flow new evidence we study the investment cash flow sensitivities of u s firms from 1971 2009 our tests extend the literature in several key ways and provide strong evidence that cash flow explains investment beyond its correlation with q a dollar of current and prior year cash flow is associated with 0 63 of additional investment for firms that are the most likely to be constrained even after correcting for measurement error in q our results suggest that financing constraints and free cash flow problems are important for investment decisions

the influence of chinese environmental regulation on corporation innovation and competitiveness abstract according to porter hypothesis appropriate environmental regulation can promote corporation innovation the innovation will even offset the corporation loss caused by environmental regulation and improve corporation competitiveness in order to explore the porter hypothesis practical situation in china this paper does an empirical study to explore this mechanism by using chinese pollution intensive corporations panel data samples during 2007 2012 results show that the implementation of flexible control policies has achieved initial success environmental regulation has significant positive effects on corporation s innovation but the fact of its weak effects also partly explains why environmental regulation still has negative effects on corporation competitiveness even it is insignificant from the point of regional differences east and middle regions have weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon while that of the west region is not significant return on assets roa and gross domestic product gdp in the east region are relatively higher which is not based on high energy consumption and environmental pollution but due to the high transformation rate of research and development expenditure r d to roa for the middle region even it shows signs of the strong porter hypothesis but due to the fact that government gives fiscal subsidies and tax returns to companies to cover the cost from environmental regulation it only has the weak but not strong porter hypothesis phenomenon since this mechanism is not consistent with that of porter hypothesis

the effects of economic freedom on fdi inflows an empirical analysis there is a regular emphasis on the significant role of inward foreign direct investment fdi in promoting economic growth this favourable relationship has induced many governments to adopt polici

dea environmental assessment in time horizon radial approach for malmquist index measurement on petroleum companies abstract the climate change and various pollutions have been influencing our societies and economies the environmental assessment to be discussed in this study is increasingly important because it serves as an initial step toward pollution prevention corporate leaders policy makers researchers and individuals who are interested in environmental protection have been paying attention to the assessment so that they can prepare policy suggestions on the global warming and climate change as a methodology for the assessment this study proposes a use of data environment analysis dea in a time horizon most of data sets on the climate change are sampled in a time series where the performance of organizations fluctuates every moment in applying the dea environmental assessment to such a data set it is necessary for us to classify outputs into desirable e g oil production and undesirable e g co 2 emission categories because all organizations usually produce not only desirable but also undesirable outputs as a result of their economic activities to unify the two different types of outputs this study incorporates the concept of natural and managerial disposability into the computational framework of dea and extends them into a time horizon for the research purpose this study incorporates malmquist index into the proposed dea environmental assessment to examine an occurrence of a frontier shift among multiple periods the frontier shift indicates a technology progress and or managerial innovation during an observed period the index is further separated into four subcomponents in a time horizon these subcomponents are differently expressed under the natural and managerial disposability thus eight different subcomponents on the malmquist index are proposed to measure the frontier shift as an application this study uses the proposed dea approach to examine whether the frontier shift due to technology progress occurs or not in the petroleum industry from 2005 to 2009 our empirical study finds that the industry has not exhibited any major frontier shift under natural disposability but showing a considerable frontier shift under managerial disposability in other words the petroleum firms have improved their environmental performance by eco technology to reduce an amount of co 2 emission during the observed annual periods

measuring energy consumption efficiency of the construction industry the case of china the energy conservation has become a considerable issue in construction industry for achieving sustainable development therefore it is crucial for policy makers to look for optimized and flexible tools to measure the total energy consumption efficiency in construction industry data envelopment analysis dea can be applied for multiple input and output decision making units dmus productivity measurement dea based malmquist productivity index mpi can be used as a tool for measuring the productivity change longitudinally in this paper we use input oriented model to measure the energy consumption productivity change of the construction industry from 2004 to 2009 with data in 26 provinces of china it is found that only guangdong demonstrated effective energy improving in the whole reference period it also identified the regional groups always lie on the efficiency frontier of energy consumption as benchmarks regional analysis shows that energy conservation gaps exist between northeastern western region and central eastern region dea based malmquist productivity index provides a good way to measure the energy consumption efficiency and can help policy makers to improve strategies of sustainable development in china

freedom and growth do constitutions matter this paper uses an augmented solow model with cross section data to measure the effect on per capita income of a the entrenchment of various rights in a country s constitution and b the level of economic freedom in a country broadly construed the results suggest that entrenchment per se of any single right seldom has a significant general economic effect while the effect of economic freedom is significant and substantial the paper then considers whether such evidence could support the proposition that constitutions do not matter while it concludes otherwise it does caution against incurring excessive negotiation costs to obtain entrenchment of a comprehensive wish list of rights

the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy a malmquist index analysis of oecd countries abstract in recent years renewable energy and environmental efficiency have been interesting issues for both academics and industry actors when discussing sustainable development against this background the present study examines the environmental efficiency of renewable energy from the static and the dynamic perspective in 31 oecd countries a study conducted to understand the impact of renewable energy across countries as a non parametric methodology data envelopment analysis is used to measure environmental efficiency through multiple inputs and outputs labor capital and renewable energy supply are the three inputs while gdp is the desirable output and carbon emissions are the undesirable output to measure the dynamic environmental efficiency of renewable energy the malmquist productivity index is applied to estimate the average efficiency change from 2004 to 2011 the results demonstrate geographical differences in environmental efficiency across the oecd countries in oecd america have the highest average environmental efficiency and those in oecd europe have the largest standard deviation we also find that dynamic efficiency is influenced by the global financial crisis triggered in the united states further we show that oecd countries implement both catch up and frontier shift strategies to improve environmental efficiency

deciding on large scale investments abstractthis study analyses the importance of investment factors across investment sizes and the frequency of large investment decisions within the firms we use data from 1442 investment decisions made by 226 brazilian firms between 1997 and 2010 the results indicate that the influence of investment factors is different for investments of different sizes the results also indicate that the increase in the frequency of large scale investment decisions made by the firm influences especially the role of cash flow diminishing its importance as an investment factor this result allows one to argue that probably firms more experienced in large scale decisions could be bolder in their decision making process relying less on the accumulation of funds through cash flow

slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance we develop two slacks based efficiency measures for modeling environmental performance on the basis of environmental dea technology of the two measures one is a composite index with a higher discriminating power for modeling economic environmental performance and the other can be used to estimate the impacts of environmental regulations we apply the proposed measures to model the co2 emissions of 30 oecd countries from 1998 to 2002 and present the results obtained

how sensitive is investment to cash flow when financing is frictionless i analyze the sensitivity of a rm s investment to its own cash ow in the benchmarkcase where nancing is frictionless this sensitivity has been proposed as a measure of nancing constraints in earlier studies i nd that the investment cash ow sensitivities that obtain in the frictionless benchmarkare very similar both in magnitude and in patterns they exhibit to those observed in the data in particular the sensitivity is higher for rms with high growth rates and low dividend payout ratios tobin s q is shown to be a more noisy measure of near term investment plans for these rms does a high sensitivityof a rm s investment to its own cash ow indicate that the rm is nancially constrained a large body of research starting with fazzari hubbard and petersen 1988 hereafter fhp suggests that rms facing nancing constraints should exhibit high investment cash ow sensitivities re ecting the wedge between the costs of external and internal funds empirical ndings seem to give support to this hypothesis since rms classi ed as constrained on a priori criteria such as size dividend payout or leverage do have higher cash ow sensitivities even after controlling for their investment opportunities by conditioning on tobin s q however the reliability of these results critically depends on whether q is a proper control for the investment opportunity set if q performs worse for certain classes of rms higher sensitivities may obtain for these rms simply because cash ow re ects information about investment opportunities this critique is not new in his discussion of fhp poterba 1988 was the rst to point out that measurement error in q may cloud the empirical results similar concerns have been raised in subsequent studies as well while the qualitative point is well known its quantitative impact on the investment cash ow sensitivity has not been analyzed can the linkbetween cash ow and the investment opportunity set account for the observed magnitudes of the sensitivity or are these magnitudes too large to be explained without nancing frictions

environmental efficiency and economic growth of china a ray slack based model analysis abstract the chinese economy has been experiencing rapid growth since the implementation of the reform and opening up policy however at the same time it faces issues regarding resource savings and environmental protection which are important aspects of the new industrialization therefore this study conducts data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the environmental efficiency of chinese regions certain existing dea models account for undesirable outputs and do not elucidate the weak disposable relationship between undesirable and desirable outputs thus polar theory is introduced among the dea modeling in this study first drawing on stochastic frontier analysis ray stochastic frontier analysis and dea we propose a ray slack based model rsbm to evaluate provincial environmental efficiencies in china from 2004 to 2012 subsequently an rsbm malmquist luenberger total factor productivity index is structured finally economic growth environmental efficiency and energy consumption are analyzed using spatial panel econometrics as this study treats industrial waste as undesirable outputs the rsbm results show that the environmental efficiencies in the east are the highest while those in the central regions are the lowest the spatial econometric analysis reveals that the ratios of direct to total elasticity and those of direct to total effect for capital labor and energy input variables are fixed furthermore the study provides policy implications and suggestions for future research

productivity growth and environmental efficiency of the nonferrous metals industry an empirical study of china abstract this study intends to provide an insight into china s nonferrous metals industry production based on the analysis of the environmental efficiency the malmquist productivity index mpi and the malmquist luenberger productivity index mlpi the empirical experiment based on the annual data of 27 regions including provinces autonomous regions and municipalities of china during 2003 2009 shows the following results first the industry s environmental efficiency in the east area is mostly higher than that of the other area second the industry s average annual change of mpi and mlpi in china were 4 4 and 0 9 respectively this indicated that the total factor productivity growth of the industry was overestimated if undesirable outputs were ignored third the industry s productivity was mainly affected through technological advances rather than endogenous factors such as improvements in managerial practices finally during the worldwide financial crisis occurred in 2008 the industry s mlpis exceeded the mpis in most regions through measures such as adjustment of the product structure and elimination of backward production capacity

evidence of slowing yield growth the example of swiss cereal yields we analyze trends in crop yields and yield variability of barley maize oats rye triticale and wheat in switzerland from 1961 to 2006 it shows that there have been linear increases in crop yields since the 1960s however yields of barley oats rye triticale and wheat have leveled off in switzerland since the early 1990s which contrasts linear trends in cereal yields that is usually assumed for europe we show a relationship between the introduction of agricultural policy measures towards environmentally friendly cereal production that fostered widespread adoption of extensive farming practices and the observed leveling off of crop yields thus this paper emphasizes that agricultural policy can be an important reason for slowing crop yield growth agricultural policy measures will be one of the key driving forces of future crop yields thus the potential leveling off of crop yields that is indicated in this study should be considered in analyses of future land use and food supply as well as in the evaluation of agri environmental measures and policy reforms

investment cash flow sensitivity cannot be a good measure of financial constraints evidence from the time series abstract investment cash flow sensitivity has declined and disappeared even during the 2007 2009 credit crunch if one believes that financial constraints have not disappeared then investment cash flow sensitivity cannot be a good measure of financial constraints the decline and disappearance are robust to considerations of r d and cash reserves and across groups of firms the information content in cash flow regarding investment opportunities has declined but measurement error in tobin s q does not completely explain the patterns in investment cash flow sensitivity the decline and disappearance cannot be explained by changes in sample composition corporate governance or market power and remain a puzzle

central bank independence and inflation good news and bad news abstract the bad news is that the findings of recent studies of central bank independence and inflation are very sensitive to outliers the good news is that evidence presented here reinforces the existing case for bank independence in high income economies

non parametric efficiency progress and regress measures for panel data methodological aspects this purely methodological paper deals with the role of time in non parametric efficiency analysis using both fdh and dea technologies it first shows how each observation in a panel can be characterized in efficiency terms vis a vis three different kinds of frontiers i contemporaneous ii sequential and iii intertemporal these are then compared with window analysis next frontier shifts outward and inward interpreted as progress or regress are considered for the two kinds of technologies and computational methods are described in detail for evaluating such shifts in either case these are also contrasted with what is measured by the malmquist productivity index finally an alternative way of identifying progress and regress independent of the frontier notion and referring instead to some benchmark notion is extended here to panel data

a sequential malmquist luenberger productivity index environmentally sensitive productivity growth considering the progressive nature of technology this study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change the rationale of this methodology is to exclud

how robust is the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth using various indicators for economic freedom it is shown that increases in economic freedom are robustly related to economic growth this conclusion holds even if the impact of outlying observations is taken into account the level of economic freedom is not related to growth

the impact of negative cash flow and influential observations on investment cash flow sensitivity estimates abstract kaplan and zingales quart j econ 112 1997 169 and clearly j finance 54 2 1999 673 diverge from the large literature on investment cash flow sensitivity by showing that investment is most sensitive to cash flow for the least financially constrained firms we examine if this result can be explained by the fact that when firms are in sufficiently bad shape incurring cash losses investment cannot respond to cash flow we find that while cleary s results can be explained by such negative cash flow observations the kaplan zingales results are driven more by a few influential observations in a small sample we also record a decline in investment cash flow sensitivity over the 1977 1996 period particularly for the most constrained firms

government size and growth a survey and interpretation of the evidence the literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings this conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied an alternative approach of limiting the focus to studies of the relationship in rich countries measuring government size as total taxes or total expenditure relative to gdp and relying on panel data estimations with variation over time reveals a more consistent picture the most recent studies find a significant negative correlation an increase in government size by 10 percentage points is associated with a 0 5 to 1 percent lower annual growth rate we discuss efforts to make sense of this correlation and note several pitfalls involved in giving it a causal interpretation against this background we discuss two explanations of why several countries with high taxes seem able to enjoy above average growth one hypothesis is that countries with higher social trust levels are able to develop larger government sectors without harming the economy another explanation is that countries with large governments compensate for high taxes and spending by implementing market friendly policies in other areas both explanations are supported by ongoing research

derivative cash flows and corporate investment abstract according to an influential argument corporate hedging supports corporate investment when internal cash flows are volatile and external financing is costly froot scharfstein and stein 1993 despite its vast influence the predictions of this theory have not yet been directly tested using actual derivative cash flows this study uses hand collected data on cash flows from derivative positions in the oil and gas industry between 2000 and 2015 strikingly on average an extra dollar in derivative cash flows translates into one more dollar in capital expenditure during industry recessions the median ratio of derivative cash flows to capital expenditure rises to 20 for hedging firms suggesting that derivatives play a crucial role in sustaining investment when the cost of external financing rises abruptly

environmental regulation and environmental productivity the case of china abstract constrained by the dual mission of supporting industrial growth and reducing emissions china s traditional emission reduction oriented environmental policies unavoidably face a dilemma this study adopts the gml index to calculate china s industrial productivity by considering environmental factors in addition based on the assumption of industry heterogeneity the author examines the non linear relationship between china s environmental regulation and environmental productivity and calculated the optimal regulation environment for industries according to this study when impact of undesirable outputs pollutant emissions is considered environmental regulation and environmental productivity are positively correlated which to some degree validates the porter hypothesis at present environmental regulation has significant positive effects on clean production industries but shows a lag effect on pollution intensive industries the degree of environmental regulation and environmental productivity show an inverted u shaped relation and display three thresholds it should be noted however that the relationship between regulation and productivity may vary across industries these findings have clear policy implications rather than continually increasing the level of environmental regulation the government should establish standards for individual industries that emphasize flexibility