total factor carbon emission performance of the chinese transportation industry a bootstrapped non radial malmquist index analysis this paper proposes a non radial malmquist co2 emission performance index nmcpi for measuring dynamic changes in total factor co2 emission performance over time this index enables the consideration of non radial slacks in the conventional malmquist co2 emission index mcpi the nmcpi is calculated based on a non radial directional distance function derived by several data envelopment analysis dea models furthermore nmcpi could be decomposed into an efficiency change ec index and technological change tc index a bootstrapping approach is conducted to introduce statistical inferences into the nmcpi and its decompositions based on the proposed indices the dynamic co2 emission performance change and its decompositions of the chinese regional transportation industry from 2002 to 2010 are investigated the empirical results demonstrate that the total factor carbon emission performance of the transportation industry as a whole decreased by 32 8 over the period and this reduction was primarily caused by technological decline

the effects of stock market growth and renewable energy use on co2 emissions evidence from g20 countries the primary objective of this study is to empirically examine the effect of stock market growth and foreign direct investment fdi inflows on co2 emissions further this study investigates the impact of renewable energy consumption on co2 emissions and economic output in a panel of the g20 countries the empirical analysis was carried out on the full sample as well as on sub samples of developed and developing economies of the g20 member countries the results confirm a significant long run equilibrium relationship among the variables across the panels further the long run elasticities suggest that fdi significantly reduces co2 emissions in the full sample and developing economies while stock market growth reduces in developed economies similarly the renewable energy consumption substantially reduces co2 emissions and increases economic output across the panels our findings have important policy implications for instance the policy makers have to initiate effective policies to promote the renewable energy sources to meet the increasing demand for energy by replacing the use of conventional energy such as coal gas and oil this will therefore help to reduce the co2 emissions and also ensure sustainable economic development in the g20 nations

pollution haven hypothesis revisited a comparison of the brics and mint countries based on vecm approach abstract the aim of this study is to investigate the existence of pollution haven hypothesis phh and test the casual relationship between inward foreign direct investment fdi and environmental pollutions as well as other potential influencing factors of environmental performance to this end a panel vector error correction model vecm and panel co integration test is conducted for two country groups the brics i e brazil russia india china and south africa and the mint i e mexico indonesia nigeria and turkey during 1982 2014 empirical results illustrate a bidirectional and positive causality between fdi inflows and gdp per capita for both groups implying a virtuous circle of fdi growth nexus more importantly both the brics and mint countries illustrate bidirectional and negative causality between fdi inflows and environmental pressures i e per capita energy consumption for brics and per capita carbon emissions for mint such findings indicate the pollution haven hypothesis does not stand in this case in addition it is also found that the opening degree of trade can be promoted by fdi inflows which has rarely been deeply analyzed in prior studies concluding remarks and policy suggestions are proposed in the last section

the tree cutting problem in a stochastic environment the case of age dependent growth abstract harvest policies are derived for growing biological assets e g forests livestock subject to stochastic age dependent growth and price uncertainty the task posed is analyzed as a continuous time optimal stopping problem for diffusion processes both single and ongoing rotation problems are considered qualitative comparative static and numerical results are provided

decarbonization under green growth strategies the case of south korea the win win opportunities connected to green growth are appealing to academics and policy makers alike but empirical evaluations about the effectiveness of green growth policies are still scattered taking south korea as case study which set up a highly ambitious green growth program in 2009 our research casts light on the extent to which the korean green growth strategy has been effective in decarbonizing the economy our methodology combines decomposition analysis and econometrics with a review of energy and climate policies including related structural changes on the short term 2008 2012 most of the drivers displayed an enhancing effect on co2 emissions from fuel combustion with gdp per capita being the strongest driver from a historical perspective 1971 2012 findings reveal that important drivers such as energy and co2 intensity even worsened their effects during the first years under the green growth strategy regression statistics revealed that gdp per capita was in fact the driver with the most explanatory power for co2 emissions followed by energy intensity the korean policy mix of modest government support to low carbon energy technologies and a lack of complementary pricing policies did not deliver the targeted emissions reduction at least in the short term despite recent policy developments i e the introduction of a renewable portfolio standard in 2012 and an emissions trading system in 2015 several key policy challenges for decarbonization remain less

technology choice under several uncertainty sources abstract we analyze a model of irreversible investment with two sources of uncertainty a risk neutral decision maker has the choice between two mutually exclusive projects under input price and output price uncertainty we propose a complete study of the shape of the rational investment region and we prove that it is never optimal to invest when the alternative investments generate the same payoff independently of its size a key feature of this bidimensional degree of uncertainty is thus that the payoff generated by each project is not a sufficient statistic to make a rational investment in this context our analysis provides a new motive for waiting to invest the benefits associated with the dominance of one project over the other as an illustration we apply our methodology to power generation under uncertainty

response to a comparative analysis of electricity generation costs from renewable fossil fuel and nuclear sources in g20 countries for the period 2015 2030 abstract recently ram et al 2018 published a study based on the earlier greenpeace report ram et al 2017 on the electricity generation costs from different sources commendably authors provided some details of their computations in the supplementary spreadsheet the cost of energy services is a serious consideration in combination with the need to decarbonize the global economy rapidly however the article by ram et al seems to have some shortcomings which should be fixed before further conclusions can be drawn from it i outline some reasons for my concern below

the economic consequences of regulatory taking risk on land value and development activity abstract in this paper the real options approach to land valuation is extended by i showing how land value may be adversely effected when localities threaten a regulatory taking with less than full compensation ii quantifying the resulting probability of development which may increase in an attempt to thwart the taking of development rights and iii measuring the value of lost income on an ex ante basis when an interim taking occurs we find that the economic impact of such regulation can be substantial which has implications for measuring just compensation claims as well as for general land use regulatory policy and related legal theory

insights on the effect of land use choice the perpetual option on the best of two underlying assets abstract we consider the effect of land use choice on speculative land value and on development timing as reflected in the optimal hurdle ratio which triggers immediate development we find that land use choice i e multiple use zoning may add over 40 to land value under typical economic circumstances the conditions for optimal development of the land become markedly more difficult to achieve higher hurdle ratio required when the two land uses have similar values indeed a rational indecision result obtains in theory development will never occur when the two land use choices have equal value

mutually exclusive investment with technical uncertainty a firm which faces technical uncertainty as in pindyck 1993 can choose between two mutually exclusive investment projects projects 1 and 2 the added option to exercise project 2 makes the firm less likely to exercise project 1 an increase in the degree of technical uncertainty the investment rate or the investment value upon completion for project 2 encourages the firm to exercise project 2 by increasing the trigger level of the expected cost of project 2 this however ambiguously affects the firm s incentive to exercise project 1 as the firm would rather implement project 1 2 in a region where the expected cost of project 2 is relatively high low

the taking of land when should compensation be paid the analysis focuses on the question of whether the payment of compensation for land taken by eminent domain is efficient when the taking decision is independent of land use zero compensation is efficient but full compensation is not when the project decision is no longer independent of land use and can be affected by investor decisions neither compensation rule is generally efficient because of the moral hazard problem with risk averse consumers and risk neutral firms the previous conclusions remain essentially unchanged however when the project decision rule involves a budgetary fiscal illusion additional compensation may be necessary to correct the incentives facing the project decision maker

zoning and the distribution of location rents an empirical analysis of harris county texas the coase theorem presents two criteria for evaluating regulation regulations efficiency relative to private solutions and how the regulation affects the distribution of wealth previous studies of the impact of municipal zoning have focused on coase s first criteria whether zoning raises land values overall this study estimates the transfer of wealth between owners of existing homes that results from the creation of a municipal zoning ordinance we find that property best suited to residential use gains in value while property with relatively higher potential as commercial property experiences a decline in the value we find that zoning is distributive

carbon intensity changes in the asian dragons lessons for climate policy design abstract there is a growing political interest in carbon intensity targets because they are the basis for climate pledges from relevant developing countries such as china they may be also the basis for policy designs in developed countries like eu members this paper develops a comprehensive econometric study on the main drivers of national emissions intensity in emerging countries in east asia this regional focus responds to their pivotal position in global economic growth and remarkable trends in carbon emissions intensity the main hypothesis of this paper is that the nature of economic growth has a major effect on carbon intensity trends that deserves some attention accordingly the novelty of this paper is to examine the contribution of intensive and extensive gdp growth for carbon intensity abatements labour productivity is revealed to be the main factor responsible for major carbon intensity reductions by asian dragons whereas household energy per capita and industrial energy per worker contributed in the opposite direction consequently intensity targets may become meaningless for real climate action contributions if they do not take into account labour productivity trends

a metafrontier approach for measuring an environmentally sensitive productivity growth index this paper presents an alternative environmentally sensitive productivity growth index to incorporate group heterogeneities into a conventional malmquist luenberger productivity growth index the p

pricing american style securities using simulation abstract we develop a simulation algorithm for estimating the prices of american style securities i e securities with opportunities for early exercise our algorithm provides both point estimates and error bounds for the true security price it generates two estimates one biased high and one biased low both asymptotically unbiased and converging to the true price combining the two estimators yields a confidence interval for the true price the proposed algorithm is especially attractive compared with lattice and finite difference methods when there are multiple state variables and a small number of exercise opportunities preliminary computational evidence is given

what is the aggregate economic rate of return to foreign aid in recent years academic studies have been converging towards the view that foreign aid promotes aggregate economic growth we employ a simulation approach to i validate the coherence of empirical aid growth studies published since 2008 and ii calculate plausible ranges for the rate of return to aid our results highlight the long run nature of aid financed investments and the importance of channels other than accumulation of physical capital we find the return to aid lies in ranges commonly accepted for public investments and there is little to justify the view that aid has had a significant pernicious effect on productivity

competing interests and the political market for smart growth policy the broad intent of smart growth is to reduce development in environmentally sensitive areas by limiting the outward expansion of development and redirecting private investment to urban areas local decisions that shape and constrain land uses can pit narrow economic interests against broader based environmental organisations and impact decisions on smart growth based on the political market framework this study specifically examines the influence of pro growth and smart growth interest groups on smart growth policies adopted by local governments in the state of massachusetts usa the results suggest both real estate interests and environmental groups influence local policy decisions and depending on the policy the characteristics of local political institutions mediate these influences

drivers of stagnating global carbon intensity of electricity and the way forward abstract despite the signing of the paris climate agreement there is still great uncertainty regarding the world s ability to decarbonize and meet the 2 c target in this regard the electricity production sector deserves particular attention the sector has the largest decarbonization potential and its share of the world s co2 emissions from fuel combustion increased from 30 in 1990 to 36 in 2014 to better understand global trends this study analyses the factors influencing changes in the global aggregate carbon intensity aci of electricity a measure of the level of co2 emissions per unit of electricity produced over the last 25 years using multidimensional index decomposition analysis it finds that global aci barely improved since 1990 because of a shift in electricity production from developed to developing countries with higher acis this geographical shift offset consistent improvements to power generation efficiency worldwide and is likely to persist in the future to keep the 2 c target realisable it is imperative to enhance international cooperation to lower the acis of emerging economies and deepen the penetration of renewables which have thus far performed below expectations

options uncertainty and sunk costs an empirical analysis of land use change abstract in a real option model of land conversion incorporating return uncertainty and sunk costs optimal conversion thresholds are significantly higher than those from expected net present value models not accounting for these factors empirical tests of conversion from agriculture to forest suggest that landowners value the option to convert when making conversion decisions higher uncertainty in returns to all potential uses and lower correlation between shocks to agricultural and forest returns decreases the likelihood of conversion estimates indicate a significant impact on conversion decisions with approximations of option values ranging from 7 to 81 of the expected value of the land asset

asset retirement with infinitely repeated alternative replacements harvest age and species choice in forestry abstract at what age should productive assets be retired how should replacements be chosen when they differ in their uncertain ability to generate future incomes as a particular version of that problem we study the tree harvesting decision with two possible replacement species whose values as timber are stochastic and whose growth functions are deterministic in the single rotation wicksell problem starting with a bare piece of land an empty shop it is optimal to choose and plant one species immediately if its current value is sufficiently high relative to that of the other species the alternative equipment however if the species are insufficiently price differentiated it is preferable to leave the land vacant the shop empty despite the opportunity cost of doing so in the repeated version of the problem it is never optimal to leave the land bare provided the cost of replacement is null furthermore the optimal harvest tree retirement age not only depends on the price and current productivity of the trees in place but also on the price and productivity of the other species because it may replace the current one the harvest age reaches a peak at some critical threshold of the relative price that signals the necessity to switch to the alternative species indeed this is when the opportunity cost of choosing one alternative replacement over the other is the highest the land value and also the value of the firm is similar to an american option with free boundary infinite expiry period and endogenous payoff the paper highlights the opportunity cost of alternative replacement options and the central role of their volatility in both asset retirement and replacement choice decisions all results are derived analytically a numerical treatment by the penalty method completes the resolution

has australia surpassed its optimal macroeconomic scale finding out with the aid of benefit and cost accounts and a sustainable net benefit index abstract the sustainable economic welfare of a nation depends largely on the sustainable net benefits the macroeconomy confers to its citizens for this reason an optimal macroeconomic scale can be considered one where the physical scale of the macroeconomy and the qualitative nature of the stock of wealth it comprises maximises a nation s sustainable net benefits the corollary of this definition is thus the physical scale of the macroeconomy should grow only if in the process the sustainable net benefits of a nation increase it should cease to grow once sustainable net benefits are maximised whilst it is one thing to promote an optimal macroeconomic scale it is another entirely to gain an appreciation of the sustainable net benefits yielded by the macroeconomy gaining such an appreciation constitutes the central aim of this paper with the assistance of two separate benefit and cost accounts to replace gross domestic product gdp a sustainable net benefit index is constructed for australia for the period 1966 1967 to 1994 1995 the index particularly at the per capita level indicates that economic welfare in australia is declining i e the average australian is getting poorer despite per capita real gdp increasing the index therefore suggests that the scale of the australian macroeconomy has probably well exceeded the optimum

energy efficiency and marginal carbon dioxide emission abatement cost in urban china abstract energy efficiency improvement and carbon emission reduction are two important ways to mitigate energy consumptions and global warming this paper aims to examine energy efficiency and carbon dioxide co2 emissions abatement costs of city urban areas in china to this end an improved slacks based measure approach is introduced which considers the linkage between desirable and undesirable outputs then measures of energy efficiency co2 emission abatement cost and comprehensive state index of co2 emissions abatement cost and co2 emissions reduction potential are defined the proposed model is then applied to the dataset of 285 cities in china during 2008 2012 the results show that most city urban areas in china have relatively low energy efficiencies surprisingly there are gradually narrowing gaps regarding mean energy efficiencies between areas during 2008 2012 nevertheless there are great disparities in energy efficiencies between cities within a typical area and even a provincial region it is found that co2 emissions abatement cost in urban china exhibits an increasing trend during the study period also significantly geographic disparities in abatement costs between areas regions and cites are found specifically energy efficiency has significantly positive correlation with the comprehensive state index in china some important findings and useful policy implications are achieved

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

the costs of carbon sequestration a revealed preference approach increased concem by policy makers with the threat of global climate change has brought with it considerable attention to the possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide national academy of sciences nas 1992 james p bruce et al 1996 1 the kyoto protocol to the united nations framework convention on climate change 1997 which establishes emission reduction targets for the united states and other industrialized nations states that carbon sequestration can be used by participating nations to achieve their targets moreover even before the kyoto agreement this approach had become an explicit element of both u s and intemational climate policies u s department of energy 1991 united nations general assembly 1992 william j clinton and albert gore 1993 this high level of interest has been due in part to suggestions that sufficient lands are available to use the approach to mitigate a substantial share of annual carbon dioxide c02 emissions greg marland 1988 daniel a lashof and dennis a tirpak 1989 mark c trexler 1991 and claims that growing trees to sequester carbon is a relatively inexpensive means of combating climate change roger a sedjo and allen m solomon 1989 daniel j dudek and alice leblanc 1990 nas 1992 in other words the serious attention given by policy makers to carbon sequestration can partly be explained by implicit assertions about respective marginal cost functions i develop and demonstrate a method by which the costs of carbon sequestration can be estimated on the basis of evidence from landowners behavior when confronted with the opportunity costs of alternative land uses the simplest of previous economic analyses derived single point estimates of average costs associated with particular sequestration levels marland 1988 sedjo and solomon 1989 dudek and leblanc 1990 edwin s rubin et al 1992 omar masera et al 1995 often it has been assumed that land opportunity costs are zero g van kooten et al 1992 j k winjum et al 1992 new york state energy office 1993 robert k dixon et al 1994 another set of studies essentially engineering costing models has constructed marginal cost schedules by using information on revenues and costs of production for altemative uses on representative types or locations of land and then sorting these in ascending order of cost robert j moulton and kenneth r richards 1990 richards et al 1993 simulation models include a model of the lost profits due to removing land from agricultural production peter j parks and ian w hardie 1995 a mathematical programming model of the agricultural sector and the timber market richard m adams et al 1993 a related model incorporating the effects of agricultural price support programs j m callaway and bruce mccarl 1996 and a dynamic simulation model of forestry susan swinehart 1996 lastly an analysis by andrew j plantinga 1995 adopts land use elasticities from an econometric study to estimate sequestration costs we draw on some of the best features of the previous studies including the carbon levelization method of moulton and richards john f kennedy school of government harvard university 79 john f kennedy street cambridge ma 02138 and resources for the future richard newell supplied excellent research assistance and valuable comments on a previous version were provided by lawrence goulder william nordhaus andrew plantinga kenneth richards two anonymous referees participants in seminars at the universities of california at los angeles and santa barbara the university of maryland the university of michigan the university of texas harvard university stanford university yale university resources for the future and the national bureau of economic research the author alone is resdonsible for any errors 1 after fossil fuel combustion deforestation is the second largest source of carbon dioxide emissions estimates of annual global emissions from deforestation range from 0 6 to 2 8 billion tons compared with slightly less than 6 0 billion tons annually from fossil fuel combustion cement manufacturing and natural gas flaring combined r a houghton 1991 t m smith et al 1993

how can china reach its co2 intensity reduction targets by 2020 a regional allocation based on equity and development in late 2009 the chinese government committed to cut its carbon dioxide emissions per unit of gross domestic product gdp by 40 to 45 of 2005 levels by 2020 this has raised the issue of how to allocate the co2 reduction target regionally to meet the national reduction target to meet this objective the following aspects may be taken into consideration equity principles common but differentiated responsibilities intensity reduction target fulfillment and economic difference and reduction potential among provinces this paper selects per capita gdp accumulated fossil fuel related co2 emissions and energy consumption per unit of industrial added value as indicators for emission reduction capacity responsibility and potential respectively based on these three indicators a comprehensive index is developed and an intensity allocation model constructed as decision makers may have different preferences when allocating the reduction burden we allocate different weights to the indicators analyzing the results using cluster analysis the following aspects may also be considered together with the national regional development strategy to determine how to share the burden the reduction potential of various regions implementation potential of the plans and promotion of a highly efficient low carbon economic development model

the high price of dematerialization a dynamic panel data analysis of material use and economic recession abstract dematerialization at the national level occurs almost exclusively during periods of economic recession or low growth while recession is not a sustainable strategy to curb environmental impact such periods may offer important insights on the possibilities of reducing material use economic recession research has focused on the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables with little systematic research dedicated to uncovering how resource use develops during periods of recession using a dynamic panel model we investigate whether and to what extent material use in a sample of 150 economies between 1970 and 2010 was affected by recession and low growth recession occurred most frequently and in more than two thirds of all countries during the 1980s and the 1990s in the 2000s more than half of the recessions occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 periods of recession were significantly and negatively correlated with material use they tended to coincide with dematerialization material use decreased in recession years but the significant correlations with growth in material use became weaker as growth rates increased construction minerals and metals used to build stocks of manufactured capital reacted more strongly to economic fluctuations than the throughput dominated flows of biomass and fossil fuels we conclude that the systematic link between recession and dematerialization can become policy relevant if the mechanisms causing reductions in material use during these periods are identified

the intensity and timing of investment the case of land the authors model the decision to replace durable capital when intensity is variable decisions of this type include land redevelopment decisions where the density of residential or commercial development is a choice variable as well as capital replacement decisions where capacity is variable the authors provide a general yet simple formation of the problem using an optimal stopping framework they characterize the value of the project the timing of investment and the intensity of development the authors show that intensity interacts in important ways with timing taxes and project values the ability to vary intensity raises hurdle rents and delays development decisions copyright 1994 by american economic association

building codes and land values in high hazard areas vacant land prices on florida s barrier islands are examined under four coastal building regulatory regimes a hedonic pricing model features 1 745 vacant residential land sales from five barrier islands in lee county between 1980 and 1993 we find that land values decrease in response to the county s participation in the national flood insurance program the establishment of a coastal building zone and following the reestablishment of the coastal construction control line the findings suggest that benefits of safety from increased building standards are outweighed by the additional costs of compliance brought about by the code changes

regulation and corporate investment policy in a previous paper it was shown that the traditional rule that the allowed return on the equity of a regulated firm should be set equal to its cost of equity capital was conceptually deficient 2 this deficiency arises because the cost of equity capital of a regulated firm depends upon its risk which depends in turn upon the regulatory policy that will be followed in the future including the allowed rate of return it was argued therefore that this traditional rule should be replaced by the requirement that the regulatory policy be consistent a consistent regulatory policy achieves what the traditional rule only attempts it ensures that at the time of a regulatory hearing the market value of the firm equity is equal to the equity financed portion of the rate base to devise a consistent regulatory policy it is necessary to have a valuation model which takes explicit account of regulatory policy such a model was developed in the above mentioned paper in this paper we generalize the earlier valuation model so that the investment policy of the regulated firm is determined by the value maximizing decisions of the management instead of being taken as exogenous to the extent that investment policy is discretionary its endogeneity must be taken into account in devising a consistent regulatory policy and this is made possible by the generalized model in reality it seems unclear to what extent the investment policies of regulated firms are predetermined by the requirement that they meet demand and to what extent they are discretionary since the model presented here easily accommodates constraints on the investment policy it is the more appropriate model so long as there exists any element of discretionary investment behaviour and permits a more adequate approach to the determination of consistent regulatory policies with discretionary investment policy an important consequence of any particular consistent regulatory policy is the investment policy it induces in section 4 we show how the value maximizing investment policy is affected by the choice of regulatory policy on the other hand regulated firms are wont to argue that their investments are in the main predetermined by demand and must be undertaken regardless of their profitability this putative lack of discretion it is maintained means that the appropriate allowed rate of return is higher than would otherwise be the case in section 4 also we evaluate the strength of this consideration by comparing the allowed rate of return under consistent regulatory policies when investment policy is and is not discretionary section 5 shows briefly how the analysis can be extended to account for the effect of debt in the capital structure

decomposition of the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier with undesirable output abstract in this paper we present an alternative analysis framework to evaluate the effects of technology heterogeneities and undesirable output on environmental efficiency measurement the proposed framework combines the directional distance function and a meta frontier analysis it can be used to measure efficiency improvements brought about by enhanced technical management and technological advances for demonstration purposes we used the framework to measure the environmental efficiency in 90 countries worldwide for the 2003 2007 period the results showed that when the meta technology set is used as the evaluation basis the average environmental efficiency of high competitiveness countries is greater than that of lower middle low and upper middle competitiveness countries the upper middle competitiveness countries perform worse than the lower middle and low competitiveness countries because of the excessive labor force usage and carbon dioxide emissions in these countries we also found that the environmental inefficiency of the meta frontier for high competitiveness countries can be attributed to managerial failure in the production process whereas that for upper middle lower middle and low competitiveness countries can be attributed to technological differences

public information and performance the role of spatial dependence in the worldwide governance indicators among african countries summary the worldwide governance indicators wgi provide transparent and comparable country statistics for different dimensions of governance linked to under development yet does the public availability of governance data actually enhance performance if investors donor agencies and citizens are made aware of relative governance performance competition for inward investment such as fdi and oda and domestic legitimacy become plausible mechanisms for diffusion of good governance we test whether such mechanisms operate using the wgi for africa and find evidence for spatial diffusion of democracy rule of law and corruption control there is no evidence for diffusion of regulatory quality and government effectiveness

an empirical examination of the timing of land conversions in the presence of farmland preservation programs using a panel of parcel level data we estimate a hazard model and find strong evidence that the mere existence of an option to preserve farmland delays decisions to convert farmland to developed uses by about six years a reduction in median conversion time of 12 to 43 depending on parcel size where such delays allow local governments to improve infrastructure or implement stricter growth control measures benefits of a preservation option may be even more long term also increases in the variance of returns to development tended to slow conversion for parcels with all but the highest lot capacities copyright 2008 oxford university press

what factors drive inequalities in carbon tax incidence decomposing socioeconomic inequalities in carbon tax incidence in ireland abstract carbon taxes increase the cost of necessary household energy expenditures in many developed countries carbon taxes are regressive as they comprise a greater proportion of a poorer household s income certain socioeconomic groups are more negatively affected by these impacts than others while inequality of incidence by income group has received great attention in the literature a gap exists to quantify the inequality associated with socioeconomic characteristics this information is policy relevant as it may inform the most effective means to offset negative welfare impacts through changes to taxes and or social transfers this paper provides this contribution first the inequality of carbon tax incidence across the income spectrum is quantified using the concentration index methodology a subsequent multivariate decomposition quantifies the contribution each socioeconomic factor makes towards this inequality of incidence this is carried out for electricity motor fuel and all other home fuels to elicit variation of socioeconomic incidence by source while income contributes a great deal towards inequality of incidence for other home fuels other socioeconomic characteristics are the primary determinants of electricity and motor fuel related carbon tax incidence the relative importance of each characteristic in determining regressive impacts is quantified and this varies by carbon tax source

the stochastic city abstract this paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty household income rents and prices for land follow stochastic processes even though investors are risk neutral uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use is irreversible growth on the other hand affects urban and agricultural land prices but not the level of rents we show that uncertainty i delays the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use ii imparts an option value to agricultural land iii causes land at the boundary to sell for more than its opportunity cost in other uses and iv reduces equilibrium city size

takings compensation and equal treatment for owners of developed and undeveloped property this article constructs an economic model of government takings in which some property owners develop their land earlier than others because it is efficient for the government to take undeveloped land before developed land uncompensated takings will give landowners an incentive to develop their property early in order to reduce the risk of government appropriation this overdevelopment incentive can be countered and efficiency thereby restored if landowners are appropriately compensated when their property is taken or if equal treatment is afforded to owners of developed and undeveloped land however when the government responds to political pressure a judicial compensation requirement will often lead to less government land use regulation than is efficient in contrast a judicial equal treatment requirement can elicit efficient development and regulatory decisions

measuring wellbeing performance of carbon emissions using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques empirical tests for g20 countries and implications for china abstract a quantitative measure of performance that integrates national level carbon emission profiles with key parameters of social and economic wellbeing can provide an effective management tool for policy interventions this paper constructs non parametric evaluation and decomposition models using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques the proposed models are employed to estimate the wellbeing performance of carbon emissions wpce and identify the sources of wpce inefficiency empirical analyses based on the group 20 g20 countries for the 2000 2015 period shows the worst performance is in the brics country group i e brazil russia india china and south africa known for rapid growth whereas the developed and the developing economies of the g20 group show positive trajectories of performance as for china its performance measure of wpce was the lowest among the g20 indicating significant potential for further improvement the analysis also highlights the role of managerial failure as the primary driver of inefficiency more important than technological inefficiency in explaining efficiency loss within the g20 countries this critical finding the relevance and importance of managerial capability suggests the need for a high level of attention to governance and managerial capacity to ensure continued improvements in performance on carbon emissions and human wellbeing a lesson to be drawn from this study is that china s policies to promote a low carbon economy can benefit from increased priority given to low carbon technological innovation for the energy system transition and enhancement of environmental governance and managerial capacity to achieve a long term sustainability

the credibility of a threat to nationalize abstract this paper empirically estimates the credibility of the african national congress s recent threat to nationalize south african mineral assets while south africa s financial press argued that the threat was negatively affecting mineral investment and asset values mining industry executives were confident that the threat was not credible using financial market data i estimate the annual probability of nationalization to have been relatively low at 1 4 although specific to the south african political environment this result can serve as a benchmark when including political risk in applied models of land and natural resource valuation investment timing and resource extraction

debt and development abstract this paper examines incentive and valuation effects of debt financing on land investment when land is debt financed the landowner holds both a development option on the land and a default option on the debt because development typically devalues the default option investment may be delayed past the point at which efficient investment would otherwise proceed the incentive to underinvest is shown to be more pronounced as debt level increases i e as the debt becomes riskier this agency problem provides an explanation as to why land is generally difficult to debt finance and may also explain why debt levels are relatively low for land intensive real estate firms novel comparative statics show that debt value may increase for a given increase in asset volatility as well as for a given increase in interest rate renegotiation and restrictive contract provisions are considered as mechanisms to promote efficient investment policy in the presence of debt financing

the equilibrium valuation of risky discrete cash flows in continuous time this paper values a contingent claim to discrete stochastic cash flows generated by a poisson arrival process with a randomly varying intensity parameter in the most general case both the size and the arrival intensity of cash flows may correlate wih state variables in a continuous time economy assuming the conditions of an intertemporal capital aset pricing model solutions for the value of the contingent claim can be found using various techniques the paper suggests immediate applications to the valuation of insurance contracts the decision to build a firm with unknown future investment opportunities and the pricing of mortgage backed securities

the real exchange rate foreign aid and macroeconomic transmission mechanisms in tanzania and ghana a recent study of 36 sub saharan african countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries however for tanzania and ghana two major aid recipients aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial this paper singles out these two countries for a more detailed empirical investigation the focus is now on the effect of aid when allowing external and nominal factors to play a role in the macroeconomic transmission mechanism we conclude that aid played a significantly positive but very different role in the two countries due in part to generous aid inflows tanzania experienced positive investment and gdp growth from the late 1960s to 2007 but until the mid 1980s the impact of aid on growth was well below its potential as the large inflows of aid facilitated a serious over appreciation of the real exchange rate in ghana declining aid in the 1970s was associated with lacking growth while the reactivation of aid flows in the 1980s supported an economic rebound when monetary and external factors are properly accounted for we find that aid has been pivotal to growth in both real gdp and investment

revisiting cross country poverty convergence in the developing world with a special focus on sub saharan africa abstract the literature on poverty convergence is sparse and much of the empirical evidence relies on ravallion 2012 who found a lack of poverty convergence across some ninety less developed countries ldcs during 1980 2007 this paper revisits cross country poverty convergence using data from the same sources but an extended period of 1980 2014 we find that while poverty convergence remains absent across ldcs it is present in sub saharan africa ssa during the extended period initial poverty canceling the effectiveness of growth in reducing poverty explains the lack of poverty convergence across ldcs while a strong growth effect dominating the adverse effect of initial poverty on growth effectiveness explains the strong poverty convergence found in ssa a direct adverse link between initial poverty and subsequent growth which ravallion 2012 recognized as the main impediment to poverty convergence during 1980 2007 is not found in this study

evidence on the specification of price in the study of domestic water demand the development of lakefront property in northern wisconsin has prompted in several towns minimum frontage zoning stricter than the state standard such zoning generates an economic loss by constraining development development effect and an economic

measuring total factor co2 emission performance and technology gaps using a non radial directional distance function a modified approach implementing the common but differentiated responsibilities principle for co2 mitigation requires an understanding of co2 emission performance and technology gaps in different countries this paper uses a meta frontier and non radial directional distance function to propose an alternative three stage approach to measure total factor co2 emission performance and technology gaps the first stage calculates the co2 emission performance of the group frontier the second stage uses these results to calculate the technology gap ratio the third stage integrates data from the first two stages to calculate co2 emission performance under the meta frontier this approach is easier to apply than other approaches in the literature and effectively avoids the phenomenon of the technology gap ratio being greater than unity the proposed approach can also decompose co2 emission performance loss into two categories management inefficiency and technical gaps to demonstrate the method an empirical analysis using data for 54 countries was conducted the study highlighted three main findings first upper middle income countries did not perform as well as high income countries and lower middle income countries second high income countries generally enjoy optimized production technology whereas the lower middle income countries generally had the lowest technological levels third both management inefficiency and technical gaps negatively impacted co2 emission performance but management inefficiency played a dominant role

the fundamentals of land prices and urban growth abstract in a very simple model in which capital is durable and landowners have perfect foresight the price of urban land has four additive components the value of agricultural land rent the cost of conversion the value of accessibility and the value of expected future rent increases a growth premium in rapidly growing cities the growth premium may easily account for half of the average price of land and may create a large gap between the price of land at the boundary minus conversion cost and the value of agricultural land rent

green growth in the post copenhagen climate global climate change stands out from most environmental problems because it will span generations and force us to think in new ways about intergenerational fairness it involves the delicate problem of complex coordination between countries on a truly global scale as long as fossil fuels are too cheap climate change policy will engage all major economies the costs are high enough to make efficiency a priority which means striving toward a single market for carbon plus tackling the thorny issues of fairness hopes for a grand deal were mercilessly shattered at copenhagen in december 2009 and in other recent unfccc meetings with the result that green growth is promoted as an alternative path indeed green growth is clearly the goal but it is no magic bullet the world economy will require clear and rather tough policy instruments for growth to be green and it is naive to think otherwise growth green or not will boost demand for energy and coal is normally the cheapest source the magnitude of the challenge is greater if we also consider the problems related to nuclear fission energy and in some instances to bioenergy such as its competition for land that may be essential for the poor this paper discusses some necessary ingredients for a long term global climate strategy as we wait for the final and maybe elusive worldwide treaty we must find a policy that makes sense and is not only compatible with but facilitates the development of such a treaty c 2011 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

adjustment of consumers durables stocks evidence from automobile purchases this paper tests an optimal s s rule in household durable purchases and examines directly the resulting aggregate expenditure dynamics the observed decision rule responds to income uncertainty and growth as predicted by an s s model resulting from transactions costs tests against liquidity constraints find that about half the households purchase according to an optimal s s rule aggregating the s s rule over households produces a cross section distribution of durables holdings the empirical distribution is similar to that predicted theoretically as is its response to aggregate shocks furthermore simulations of aggregate expenditure based on the household distribution exhibit dynamics consistent with those observed in the 1980s

inequalities in life expectancy and the global welfare convergence abstract becker et al 2005 maintain that including life expectancy gains in a welfare indicator result in a reduction of inequality between 1960 and 2000 twice as great as when measured by per capita income we discuss their methodology and show it determines the convergence result we use an alternative methodology based on fleurbaey and gaulier 2009 which monetizes differences in life expectancy between countries at each date rather than life expectancy gains we show that including life expectancy has no effect on the evolution of world inequality

unintended impacts of public investments on private decisions the depletion of forested wetlands by affecting relative economic returns infrastructure investments can induce major changes in private land use the authors find that 30 percent of forested wetland depletion in the mississippi valley has resulted from private decisions induced by federal flood control projects despite explicit federal policy to preserve wetlands the model aggregates individual land use decisions using a parametric distribution of unobserved land quality dynamic simulations are used to quantify the impacts on wetlands of federal projects and other factors copyright 1990 by american economic association

a comparative analysis of electricity generation costs from renewable fossil fuel and nuclear sources in g20 countries for the period 2015 2030 abstract despite the positive momentum achieved by the renewable energy sector in recent years there are substantial challenges that need the attention of the global community and one of the more pressing issues is dealing with the deleterious external costs of power generation one of the parameters to compare costs of energy across various technologies is levelised cost of energy lcoe but it has been conventional practice to neglect the external costs in estimating the lcoe of power generation technologies furthermore as lcoe is a critical indicator for policy and decision makers there is a need to juxtapose actual costs of renewable and conventional power generation technologies this research paper attempts to internalise some of these external and ghg emission costs across various power generation and storage technologies in all the g20 countries as they account for 85 of global power consumption as future investment decisions are largely influenced by costs estimates in this research prove renewables and storage to be far cheaper than fossil and nuclear sources by 2030 even without considering external costs the myth that renewables are way too expensive has been debunked repeatedly and the cost decline of wind and solar photovoltaic pv technologies have outpaced most industry expectations the results of this research not only substantiate this trend but also statistically display that all the g20 countries have the opportunity to decrease their energy costs significantly between now and 2030 renewable energy technologies offer the lowest lcoe ranges across g20 countries in 2030 utility scale solar pv generally shows the lowest values ranging from 16 to 117 mwhel and onshore wind lcoe range is from 16 to 90 mwhel rooftop solar pv generally offers the next lowest lcoe ranging from 31 to 126 mwhel followed by lcoe of offshore wind power ranging from 64 to 135 mwhel solar pv and battery systems are highly competitive on an lcoe basis at utility scale ranging from 21 to 165 mwhel and at residential scale from 40 to 204 mwhel the g20 as well as other countries can continue to develop their economies in a sustainable manner along with substantial co benefits in adjacent policy fields such as higher national welfare better health of citizens lower respective health costs and improved energy security