employer matching and 401 k saving evidence from the health and retirement study abstract employer matching of employee 401 k contributions is often touted as a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension plan design in the united states using detailed administrative contribution earnings and pension plan data from the health and retirement study this analysis formulates a life cycle consistent econometric specification of 401 k saving and estimates the determinants of saving accounting for non linearities in the household budget set induced by matching the participation estimates indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k participation by 5 percentage points the parametric and semi parametric estimates for saving indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k saving by 365 in 1991 dollars overall the analysis reveals that the 401 k saving response to matching is quite inelastic and hence matching is a rather poor policy instrument with which to raise retirement saving

conceptualising environmental responsibility abstract downstream responsibility is rarely addressed in the academic literature and in corporate sustainability reporting we conceptualise downstream responsibility for the example of carbon emissions by establishing a terminology as well as a framework for quantifying downstream carbon footprints by extracting emissions intensive sales chains for a number of australian industry sectors and comparing these to emissions intensive supply chains we demonstrated the ability of input output analysis to quantify emissions responsibility in both directions we extend the definition of downstream responsibility beyond the product use and disposal phases to include what we call enabled emissions this term implies that whatever is sold downstream enables our customers to operate and emit irrespective of whether it is our product that is combusted or that directly combusts fuels or not our structural path analyses and threshold capture relationships reveal stark differences between industries with regard to the data collection efforts necessary to achieve a reasonably complete footprint assessment industries appear to have their own specific carbon footprint profiles and one cannot design generic relevance tests that tell which data to collect moreover we conclude that current completeness standards in carbon reporting cannot be satisfied using relevance thresholds input output analysis and structural path analysis are excellent tools that can help companies undertake screening exercises which in turn help prioritising and streamlining the collection of data needed to establish a corporate downstream carbon footprint compared to conventional manual approaches hybrid life cycle assessments assisted by input output analysis and structural path analysis achieve more complete results with substantially less staff money and time

shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice abstract over the past decade an increasing number of authors have been examining the nexus of producer versus consumer responsibility often dealing with the question of how to assign responsibility for internationally traded greenhouse gas emissions recently a similar problem has appeared in drafting the standards for the ecological footprint while the method traditionally assumes a full life cycle perspective with full consumer responsibility a large number of producers businesses and industry sectors have started to calculate their own footprints see www isa org usyd edu au adding any producer s footprint to other producers footprints or to population footprints which all already cover the full upstream supply chain of their operating inputs leads to double counting the sum of footprints of producers and consumers is larger than the total national footprint the committee in charge of the footprint standardisation process was hence faced with the decades old non additivity problem posing the following dilemma for the accounting of footprints or any other production factor if one disallows double counting but wishes to be able to account for producers and consumers then one cannot impose the requirement of full life cycle coverage the supply chains of actors have to be curtailed somehow in order to avoid double counting this work demonstrates and discusses a non arbitrary method of consistently delineating these supply chains into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive portions of responsibility to be shared by all actors in an economy

from production based to consumption based national emission inventories abstract under the united national framework convention of climate change unfccc countries are required to submit national emission inventories nei to benchmark reductions in greenhouse gas ghg emissions depending on the definition and system boundary of the nei the mitigation options and priorities may vary the territorial system boundary used by the unfccc has been critiqued for not including international transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage to address these issues past literature has argued in favour of using consumption based nei in climate policy this article discusses several issues in moving from the standard production based nei to consumption based nei first two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption based nei are presented the approaches differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products second a consistent method of weighting production based and consumption based nei is discussed this is an extension of the previous literature on shared responsibility to nei third due to increased uncertainty and a wide system boundary it may be difficult to implement consumption based nei directly into climate policy several alternative options for incorporating consumption based inventories into climate policy are discussed

household saving micro theories and micro facts in this survey we review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on household saving and consumption the discussion is structured around a list of motives for saving and how well the standard theory captures these motives we show that almost all of the motives for saving that have been suggested in the informal saving literature can be captured in the standard optimizing model particular attention is given to recent work on the precautionary motive and its implications for saving and consumption behavior we also discuss the behavioral or psychological approach that eschews the use of standard optimization techniques and focuses instead on direct consideration on saving we provide a section on facts who save and how much we then discuss informally the recent decline in the u s saving rate and whether the theory is of much use in understanding this and other changes in aggregate saving rates over time we do not find any convincing explanation for the change in saving rates we also discuss some analyses of saving behavior over the life cycle addressing such questions as whether households save enough for retirement and whether the consumption patterns of older households can be rationalized within a simple life cycle model we also review a great number of studies of the consumption euler equations based on our analysis of the studies cited we conclude that there is still mixed evidence that consumption is excessively sensitive to income we also examine in depth the recent empirical literature on the precautionary motive we conclude that although some households do seem to have a significant precautionary motive at some points in their life cycle this motive is not so strong empirically as some investigators suggest

testing for liquidity constraints in euler equations with complementary data sources previous tests for liquidity constraints using consumption euler equations have frequently split the sample on the basis of wealth arguing that low wealth consumers are more likely to be constrained we propose alternative tests using different and more direct information on borrowing constraints obtained from the 1983 survey of consumer finances in a first stage we estimate probabilities of being constrained which are then utilized in a second sample the panel study of income dynamics to estimate switching regression models of the euler equation our estimates indicate stronger excess sensitivity associated with the possibility of liquidity constraints than the sample splitting approach

towards a dynamic schumpeterian welfare economics knowledge plays an increasingly important role in shaping the dynamics of an economy a static paretian welfare economics is therefore inadequate and needs to be supplemented by a dynamic schumpeterian welfare theory a dynamic welfare economics acknowledges the role of knowledge and communication as knowledge develops cumulatively in a social environment knowledge may not be readily diffused or exchanged different costs of communication need to be considered each affecting the creation of new knowledge recent developments in intellectual property right ipr law are evaluated to determine the extent to which they affect communication costs and thus future economic welfare

aggregation in variance of shared responsibility a case study of australia abstract this article deals with shared producer and consumer responsibility a concept aimed at overcoming the non additivity or double counting problem in corporate and national sustainability reporting it reports on the potentially distorting effects that varying sector and business classifications could have on the apportioning of emissions or other sustainability measures amongst producers and consumers in an economy a quantitative in variance analysis is provided which shows that shared responsibility formulations are remarkably stable under extreme aggregation of the underlying input output data value added pegging of the sharing parameters generally reduces variance in comparison to constant sharing parameters these results help in substantiating the robustness of the shared responsibility concept a feature which is critically important if shared responsibility were to become corporate and national reporting practice

constructing long term 1948 2011 consumption based emissions inventories accompanying the boom in the global economy co2 emissions have soared over the past several decades with the developing world exhibiting higher emission growth rates than the developed world emissions transfers between regions which represent a significant fraction of total emissions are assumed to be a primary factor contributing to this difference it is important to understand these transfer figures and the resulting consumption based emissions in order to evaluate the emissions drivers and establish climate policies existing studies however have merely estimated figures over a 20 years span post 1990 using a traditional input output analysis ioa framework to broaden the data coverage to pre 1990 of these transfer figures and to further analyze their impacts on total emissions in the long term a new model called the long term consumption based accounting model lcba which is directly based on statistics is developed to span the period from 1948 to 2011 the results are consistent with the magnitudes and trends of existing studies over the validation post 1990 period we use monte carlo methods to calculate upper and lower bounds on the lcba for each country and year and find that 3 existing time series are almost fully included within these boundaries from 1990 furthermore the lcba model is succinct enough to be easily expanded for future ghg estimations or to analyze other ecological footprints related to the flow of materials it can be assumed that the soaring emissions transfers will seriously jeopardize the current climate policies such as kyoto protocol the durban platform for enhanced action adp under which all parties are legally bound will require a consumption based accounting method together with the territorial one in order to achieve an equitable agreement however more researches are still needed to facilitate the use of these figures to better support decision making

structural path analysis of india s carbon emissions using input output and social accounting matrix frameworks abstract while input output io tables have been widely employed to study energy and environmental issues social accounting matrix sam which further considers the interactions of the production system primary factors households and social institutions in the economy is rarely seen in this field this paper thus compares the transmission dynamics under an io framework and a sam framework with the help of structural path analysis spa technique which decomposes the io and sam analysis results by extracting the interconnections in the economic system a case study is performed to investigate india s carbon emissions based on its latest publicly available io and sam tables as the fourth largest emitter in the world india s large population base fast population growth and huge unmet demand imply a surge of carbon emissions following future economic development there have been a few studies on india s energy and emission issues using io tables but more research from different perspectives is still needed to better support policy making this is the first study on india s carbon emissions under a sam framework and using spa techniques and also the first study that extends the use of spa by transmission path to the energy and environmental literature

sales and consumer lock in this paper examines the dynamically consistent price path for a new product monopolist unable to commit to future prices when consumers must incur setup costs of adopting the product the authors find that setup costs give rise to a price path with introductory sales along the path periods of high prices during which only locked in or captive customers buy the product alternate with sales low price periods during which new customers adopt the product as the stock of captive customers increases over time sales become less frequent after the customer base reaches some critical level no further sales take place they show that the monopolist may hold a sleeping patient in which initial sales of the product are postponed to avoid locking into a high pricing strategy that ignores new customers copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

forgoing invention to deter entry abstract a monopoly facing potential entry may not want to develop an efficient technology even at zero r d costs such a phenomenon occurs if a new technology is distinct from the existing one so production uncertainty becomes technology specific then the monopoly can reduce the entrant s post entry profit to the point of deterrence by using the existing technology with which the entrant would enter we show that the monopoly develops a new technology when the entrant faces a sufficiently high or low entry cost but forgoes invention when the entry cost is intermediate these results hold both in quantity and price competition

the development of commercial local area resource and emissions modelling navigating towards new perspectives and applications meeting near future uk greenhouse gas ghg emissions targets will require all parts of the uk economy to contribute and in particular significant changes in business practices are required at the local level from review it was found that there is a lack of detailed business accounting and reporting of ghg emissions at the local level especially concerning supply chain impacts and small and medium sized enterprises this paper presents a framework model to generate detailed benchmark estimates of ghgs both on site and supply chain related for individual businesses and all businesses of a sector within an area the model makes use of available economic and environmental data and with similar datasets existing in other parts of the world such models may be used elsewhere the framework model is applied to an empirical case study estimates from such a framework can be used in a step by step approach to move businesses and local areas towards improved accounting reporting and sustainability including procurement the model makes use of two different accounting perspectives the production perspective on site ghgs and the provision perspective supply chain ghgs attributable to purchased inputs of a business or sectors production the new provision perspective and its consequences are explored and explained

patent protection in the shadow of infringement simulation estimations of patent value empirical estimates of the private value of patent protection are derived for four technology areas computers textiles combustion engines and pharmaceuticals using new patent data for west germany 1953 1988 patentees must pay renewal fees to keep their patents in force as well as legal expenses in order to enforce them a dynamic stochastic discrete choice model of optimal renewal decisions is developed incorporating both learning and depreciation as well as the potential need to prosecute infringement the evolution of the distribution of returns over the life of a group of patents is calculated for each technology using a minimum distance simulation estimator results indicate that the aggregate value of protection generated per year is on the order of 10 of related r d expenditure

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

attributional or consequential life cycle assessment a matter of social responsibility abstract results of life cycle assessment lca are critically dependent on the system boundaries notably the choice of attributional or consequential modelling published lca studies rarely specify and justify their modelling choices since lca studies are typically performed within the context of social responsibility and product life cycle management this article investigates the relationship between social responsibility paradigms and the system modelling choices in lca we identify three different social responsibility paradigms value chain responsibility supply chain responsibility and consequential responsibility we point out that while there is no generally right or wrong choice of system model each responsibility paradigm implies a specific matching system model we then argue that all responsibility paradigms ultimately imply a consequential perspective namely that of responding to the concerns of the system stakeholders although value or supply chains are systems defined without concern for consequences and thus may include activities that the decision maker cannot influence the chosen system is still analysed and assessed by accounting for its social consequences and it is for these consequences that social responsibility is then taken we argue that it is inconsistent to exclude consequences of own actions i e the consequential system while including consequences from actions of others in value chain or supply chain we thus conclude that a consistent socially responsible decision maker must always take responsibility for the activities in the consequential product life cycle and may additionally take responsibility for the consequences of other activities in the value chain or supply chain we end the article with recommendations on reporting on lca system models that are more specific than those of the current lca standards

using patents to mislead rivals firms claim they do not rely heavily on patents yet they patent as indicated by the large number of patents that are granted this paper offers a possible resolution to this puzzle it takes a simplified version of a duopoly innovation race and studies the patenting decision of an innovator who has private information about the improvability of her innovation it is shown that a firm may use the patenting decision to mislead her rival under symmetric information research can be stimulated but not disclosed however under asymmetric information disclosure is more likely even though research incentive may be weakened jel classification 031 l1 de l utilisation des brevets pour leurrer les concurrents les entreprises innovatrices pretendent ne pas compter sur leurs brevets afin de s approprier les rendements de leurs innovations cependant les firmes brevetent comme l atteste le nombre de brevets deposes nous proposons une explication a cette apparente contradiction dans un modele simplifie de course a l innovation a deux firmes nous etudions la decision de breveter d un innovateur qui a une information privee sur l ameliorabilite de son innovation nous montrons que la decision de breveter peut etre utilisee afin de leurrer la firme concurrente lorsque les deux firmes partagent la meme information bien que la recherche puisse etre stimulee nous montrons qu elle reste non brevetee et donc non divulguee cependant lorsque l information est asymmetrique l innovateur brevete plus souvent son innovation mais son concurrent a alors moins d incitation a entreprendre la recherche

appropriability and commercialization evidence from mit inventions the effects of appropriability on invention have been well studied but there has been little analysis of the effect of appropriability on the commercialization of existing inventions exploiting a database of 805 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions licensed from the massachusetts institute of technology mit between 1980 and 1996 we explore the influence of several appropriability mechanisms on the commercialization and termination of projects to develop products based on university inventions our central hypothesis is that the relationship between a licensee s decision to either terminate or commercialize the invention is driven by the current market value of the invention as well as the option value of delaying its commercialization we use a competing risks framework that allows for nonparametric heterogeneity and correlated risks we find that better appropriability in the sense of more effective patent strength and secrecy has a strong negative effect on the hazard of license termination the effectiveness of learning has a strong positive effect on the hazard of technology commercialization while lead time has a negative effect

consumer and producer environmental responsibility comparing two approaches abstract two different indicators of environmental responsibility were independently proposed by rodrigues et al rodrigues j domingos t giljum s schneider f 2006 designing an indicator of environmental responsibility ecological economics 59 3 256 266 and lenzen et al lenzen m murray j sack f wiedmann t 2007 shared producer and consumer responsibility theory and practice ecological economics 61 27 42 these indicators are both supposed to reflect the indirect effects of consumer and producer behavior in the generation of environmental pressure in this paper we compare their mathematical properties and interpretation we conclude that they have different implications for environmental policy

do patents slow down technological progress abstract this paper challenges the widely held view in the industrial organization literature that patents always speed up technological progress we introduce a model of an innovating firm with uncertain property right to its innovation the impact of a commitment to an r d project is to create future options for patenting and market introduction each decision undertaken will change the conditions in which the innovator operates it is shown that an increase in patent protection reduces the elasticity of the option value of the program with respect to the value of the project raising the threshold value of market introduction and enhancing the ability of the innovator to wait thus while the effect of patent is to raise the rents on and thereby the potential amount of innovations it also tends to slow down market introduction

economic drivers of greenhouse gas emissions in china abstract for china greenhouse gas emissions increased by 0 075 gigatons gt in the period of 1995 2000 and increased by 4 23 gt from 2000 to 2009 then reached the amount of 8 61 gt in 2009 different from the traditional analysis focused on accounting sectors greenhouse gas emissions under the production based responsibility this paper investigates sectoral ghg emissions in china in the period of 1995 2009 from the perspective of consumption based and income based responsibility we found that different metrics yield very different ghg emission responsibilities the sector of electricity gas and water supply has the highest ghg emissions responsibility based on the production and income metrics while the sector of construction is the largest emitter under the consumption metric in the light of the key driver analysis of ghg emissions from 1995 to 2009 based on the consumption metric the change in the final demand volume is the largest driver of increase in china s consumption based ghg emissions 17 18 gt the changes in the production structure and the final demand structure are other contributors 0 53 gt 1 46 gt the improvement to the intensity of ghg emissions is the main force for ghg emissions mitigation 14 86 gt according to the income metric the contributions of input volume changes input structure changes and ghg intensity changes are similar to the effects of consumption based responsibility 19 11 gt 1 13 gt 14 95 gt the difference is that the change in the production structure is another force that offset ghg increase 0 98 gt results in this paper can give some recommendation on mitigating ghg emissions in china for policy makers from production side demand side and supply side

invention and innovation under alternative market structures the case of natural resources this paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress the structures considered are a planned economy pure monopoly and competition with patent rights in an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation the date at which technology is used this is also true with a pure monopoly but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large also competition may lead to sleeping patents where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation

money on the table some evidence on the role of liquidity constraints in 401 k saving abstract using health and retirement study data on contributions earnings and pension plans we examine the role of liquidity constraints in explaining why employees fail to take full advantage of employer matching contributions in 401 k plans leaving money on the table

international trade and the geographical separation between income and enabled carbon emissions abstract in this paper we study how international trade allows the geographical separation between the place where carbon emissions occur and the place where income from those emissions is derived we do so by studying the carbon emissions enabled by the primary inputs of products downstream along the production chain we find that 18 of global carbon emissions are enabled abroad and that developed economies fossil fuel exporters and asia account for 80 of the downstream emissions enabled by international trade both developed economies and fossil fuel exporters exhibit a positive trade balance of enabled emissions while for asia the opposite is true developed economies and fossil fuel exporters enable emissions mainly through the export of manufactured products 690 mt and fossil fuels 684 mt respectively while asia exhibits an outflow of enabled emissions through the import of fossil fuels 209 mt the measurement of enabled emissions allows the understanding of how a region s income is derived from carbon emissions occurring abroad

the elasticity of intertemporal substitution new evidence from 401 k participation abstract using health and retirement study data and a structural econometric model we exploit variation in employer matching rates in 401 k plans to generate new estimates of the eis 0 74 in our richest specification with a 95 confidence interval of 0 37 1 21

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

imitation costs and patents an empirical study it has long been recognised that the costs of imitating new products have an important effect on the incentives for innovation in a market economy as arrow i962 and others have pointed out if firms can imitate an innovation at a cost that is substantially below the cost to the innovator of developing the innovation there may be little or no incentive for the innovator to carry out the innovation in their discussions of the innovation process economists frequently have called attention to the major role played by the costs of imitation but there has been little or no attempt to measure these costs to test various hypotheses concerning the factors influencing them or to estimate their effects in this paper we report some findings of what seems to be the first study of this topic in addition we present data regarding the effects of patents on imitation costs and on the rate of innovation

unintentional unavoidable and beneficial knowledge leakage from the multinational enterprise knowledge leakage as an undesirable outcome for mnes is an accepted view in ib literature we challenge this view and argue that knowledge leakage is often unintentional unavoidable and beneficial for the mne in a highly networked and information rich society knowledge leakage from mnes 1 happens naturally due to interfirm relationships interactions and socialization 2 is unavoidable due to employee mobility and 3 facilitates knowledge inflows due to the reciprocity nature of knowledge exchange and hence is beneficial for mnes in addition the costs of protecting knowledge incurred by an mne will often outweigh the benefits

technology adjusted national carbon accounting for a greener trade pattern abstract crediting green trade patterns is essential for effective national carbon accounting neither production nor consumption based accounting satisfies this condition thus kander et al kander a jiborn m moran d d wiedmann t o 2015 national greenhouse gas accounting for effective climate policy on international trade nature climate chang 5 5 431 435 proposed a technology adjusted consumption based carbon accounting method that focuses on interregional differences in sectoral carbon intensity the intermediate input structure is also closely related to the production technology level therefore this study recommends a new technology adjusted consumption based carbon accounting framework that distinguishes between direct and cumulative exports forward and backward industrial linkages and different trade patterns based on the consideration that production based accounting will remain the core indicator for regional emissions in the near future this study proposes a technology adjusted production based accounting framework the empirical study is based on the world input output database and the results indicate that technology adjusted carbon accounting will redraw the global emissions map if the intermediate input linkage is considered the technology adjusted carbon accounting method satisfies the conditions of additivity sensitivity monotonicity and scale invariance through proper selection of the world average emissions multipliers

the economics of product patents this paper develops a model of product patents in which the patent changes the nature of market entry behavior rather than preventing entry entirely the model incorporates three levels of action namely the innovator s patenting decision the potential entrant s location decision and possible court action the analysis demonstrates how the characteristics of the patents system and the enforcement framework can influence rivals variety choices and thus the market equilibrium it also considers how the system can in principle be adjusted to improve social welfare copyright 1990 by american economic association

estimates of the value of patent rights in european countries during the post 1950 period this paper examines the distribution of the values of patent rights in the united kingdom france and germany during the post 1950 period these values are inferred from the behavior of patentees with respect to payment of renewal fees on their patents a simple economic model of renewal decisions is combined with data on the proportion of patents renewed at alternative ages and the renewal fee schedules to produce estimates of the distribution and the total value of patent rights in these countries moreover the data indicate that there have been changes in the value distribution and we follow these changes over the period the empirical results of particular interest concern the total value of patent rights and the relationship between changes in it and changes in the quantity of patents the skew in the distribution of patent values and the rate of obsolescence on the returns to patents

how broad should the scope of patent protection be i explore the trade off between a patent s length that is its lifetime and its width that is its scope of coverage a wider patent generally reduces the distortion of consumers choices between the patented brand of the product and unpatented lower priced varieties sold by competitors but also permits higher prices which increase relative to profits the deadweight losses from consumers switching consumption out of the product class i show under what conditions infinitely lived but very narrowly focused patents are the socially efficient way to reward innovation and under what conditions very short lived but very broad patents are optimal

a three perspective view of greenhouse gas emission responsibilities in new zealand abstract while responsibility for the environmental impacts of production has been commonly assigned to producers production is driven by consumer demand and it is valid to question whether impacts should instead be assigned to consumers however in each of these approaches producers and consumers either bear the full burden of responsibility or none at all an example of this is the kyoto protocol where all greenhouse gas emissions are assigned to the producer and no consideration is given to where goods are finally consumed rather than taking the conventional producer or consumer responsibility approach a third perspective is possible in which responsibility is shared we use input output analysis to apply all three of these responsibility perspectives to new zealand s domestic greenhouse gas emissions our main findings from the shared responsibility approach are that new zealand producers are responsible for 44 of domestic emissions new zealand consumers take 28 and 27 are exported a shared responsibility approach appears to distribute the burden of responsibility and associated liability between parties more fairly and is likely to be more widely acceptable than pure producer or consumer perspectives

provincial responsibility for carbon emissions in china under different principles abstract by applying a multi regional input output model the study compares the provincial responsibility for carbon emissions and provincial carbon multipliers in china under seven responsibility allocating principles including three basic principles the production income and consumption principles and four shared responsibility principles the income weighted consumption weighted comprehensive and weighted comprehensive principles empirical results indicate that carbon multipliers of provinces under these principles are significantly different from one another the carbon multipliers of provinces with higher ratios of carbon intensive sectors in their outputs are also larger at the same time the carbon multipliers of the same sector in the provinces are significantly different from one another changing the principle causes significant changes in the responsibility for carbon emissions of some provinces but only slight changes in the responsibilities of some other provinces however the responsibilities of provinces with large economic sizes output are always the largest whereas provinces with the smallest economic sizes are always the smallest regardless of the principles further this study proposes a series of regional policies for carbon mitigation according to provincial carbon multipliers and responsibility allocation features under the different principles

positive and negative feedback in consequential life cycle assessment abstract in this paper we develop a typology of consequences that can be used for environmental assessments of investment in technologies as an illustration we estimate how the inclusion of different cause effect chains could affect the estimated greenhouse gas emissions resulting from buying and using a fuel cell bus today in contrast to earlier studies we include cause effect chains containing positive feedback from adoption e g economies of scale and learning we discuss how our findings affect the usefulness and limitations of consequential life cycle assessment lca and how lca methodology in more general can be used to support strategic technology choice a major conclusion is that environmental assessments of investment in emerging technologies should not only include effects resulting from marginal change of the current system but also marginal contributions to radical system change

patents as options some estimates of the value of holding european patent stocks in many countries holders of patents must pay an annual renewal fee in order to keep their patents in force this paper uses data on the proportion of patents renewed and the renewal fees faced by post world war ii cohorts of patents in france the united kingdom and germany in conjunction with a model of patent holders renewal decisions to estimate the returns earned from holding patents in these countries since patents are often applied for at a nearly stage in the innovation process the model allows agents to be uncertain about the sequence of returns that will be earned if the patent is kept inforce formally then the paper presents and solves a discrete choice optimal stochastic control model derives the implications of the model on aggregate behaviour and then estimates the parameters of the model from aggregate data the estimates enable a detailed description of the evolution of the distribution of returns earned from holding patents over their life spans and calculations of both the annual returns earned from holding the patents still in force or the patent stocks in the alternative countries and the distribution of the discounted value of returns earned from holding the patents in a cohort this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

incentives for procrastinators we examine how principals should design incentives to induce time inconsistent procrastinating agents to complete tasks efficiently delay is costly to the principal but the agent faces stochastic costs of completing the task and efficiency requires waiting when costs are high if the principal knows the task cost distribution she can always achieve first best efficiency if the agent has private information the principal can induce first best efficiency for time consistent agents but often cannot for procrastinators we show that second best optimal incentives for procrastinators typically involve an increasing punishment for delay as time passes

income based environmental responsibility abstract a strong mitigation effort is underway to reduce the levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions an allocation of the mitigation effort among multiple agents requires understanding which agent is responsible for what emissions according to a defined measure of carbon responsibility the metric adopted by current international climate policy is production based or territorial responsibility however other types of responsibility have been discussed in the literature namely consumption based or upstream responsibility and downstream responsibility in this paper we study the latter which is little explored in the literature we clarify the term through a novel nomenclature income based responsibility and present a case study with the quantification of income based responsibility for 112 world regions and the comparison of the results with production and consumption based responsibilities

home is where the equity is mortgage refinancing and household consumption applying a permanent income model with exogenous liquidity constraints and mortgage behavior household refinancing when mortgage interest rates are historically high and rising a persistent empirical puzzle is explained using data from the panel study of income dynamics households experiencing an unemployment shock and having limited initial liquid assets to draw upon are shown to have been 25 more likely to refinance 1991 94 on average such liquidity constrained households converted over two thirds of every dollar of equity they removed into current consumption as mortgage rates plummeted 1991 94 producing an estimated expenditure stimulus of at least 28 billion