questioning the empirical basis of the environmental kuznets curve for co2 new evidence from a panel stationarity test robust to multiple breaks and cross dependence abstract this paper investigates the time series properties of per capita co2 emissions and per capita gdp levels for a sample of 86 countries over the period 1960 2000 for that purpose we employ a state of the art panel stationarity test which incorporates multiple shifts in level and slope thereby controlling for cross sectional dependence through bootstrap methods our analysis renders clear cut evidence that per capita gdp levels are nonstationary for the world as a whole while per capita co2 is found to be regime wise trend stationary the analysis of country groups shows that for africa and asia per capita co2 is best described as nonstationary while per capita gdp appears stationary around a broken trend in addition we find evidence of regime wise trend stationarity in both variables for the country groups consisting of america europe and oceania the results of our analysis carry important implications for the statistical modelling of the environmental kuznets curve for co2 since the differing order of integration in both variables for the world as a whole and for africa and asia calls into question the validity of panel cointegration techniques which assume that both variables are nonstationary and cointegrated with one another cointegration techniques would not be appropriate either for the case of america europe and oceania which are characterised by per capita gdp and co2 emissions being stationary around a broken trend similar conclusions are reached when we analyse country groups based on levels of development failure to properly characterise the time series properties of the data by not controlling for an unknown number of structural breaks and for cross sectional dependence could be responsible for the fragility and lack of robustness surrounding the estimation of environmental kuznets curves

is there a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions abstract we analyze the effect of fuel mix model specification and the level of development on the presence and size of a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use and or carbon emissions the results indicate that fuel mix the specification for income and the level of economic development affect conclusions about whether there is a turning point in the relationship between economic activity and energy use and carbon emissions including fuel shares generally reduces the size of a turning point that is estimated from a panel that includes observations from both oecd and non oecd nations but this result varies according to the level of development for oecd nations there is limited support for a turning point in the relationship between income and per capita energy use and or carbon emissions for non oecd nations there is no turning point in the relationship between income and either energy use or carbon emissions instead the relationship is positive together the results indicate that forecasters and policy makers should not depend on a turning point in the relationship between income and energy use or carbon emissions to reduce either

minimum wage restrictions and employee effort in incomplete labor markets an experimental investigation abstract a minimum wage raises average wages along with modest increases in employees average effort levels generating a pareto improvement in social welfare the minimum wage reduces effort in the neighborhood of the minimum but has no systematic effect on effort levels at higher wages as a consequence average effort increases modestly with a minimum wage as it raises average wages similar results are reported within groups both when introducing and eliminating a minimum wage although the within group effects of introducing a minimum wage are stronger than dropping it

sick pay provision in experimental labor markets sick pay is a common provision in most labor contracts this paper employs an experimental gift exchange environment to explore two related questions using both managers and undergraduates as subjects first do workers reciprocate sick pay in the same way as they reciprocate wage payments second do firms benefit from offering sick pay firms may benefit in two different ways directly from workers reciprocating higher sick pay with higher efforts and indirectly from self selection of reciprocal workers into contracts with higher sick pay our main finding is that the direct effect is rather weak in terms of effort and negative in terms of profits however when there is competition among firms for workers sick pay can become an important advantage consequently competition leads to a higher provision of sick pay relative to a monopsonistic labor market

mandatory sick pay provision a labor market experiment the question whether a minimum rate of sick pay should be mandated is much debated we study the effects of this kind of intervention in an experimental labor market that is rich enough to allow for moral hazard adverse selection and crowding out of good intentions to occur we find that higher sick pay is reciprocated by workers through higher effort but only if sick pay is not mandated we also study adverse selection effects when workers have different probabilities of getting sick and can reject the hypothesis that this leads to market breakdown overall we find that mandating sick pay actually leads to a higher voluntary provision of sick pay by firms

partial gift exchange in an experimental labor market impact of subject population differences productivity differences and effort requests on behavior we report a gift exchange experiment firms make wage offers workers respond by determining an effort level higher effort is more costly to workers and firms have no mechanism for punishing or rewarding workers consistent with the gift exchange hypothesis workers provide more effort at higher wages but undergraduates provide substantially less effort than mbas evidence suggests this results from differences in prior work experience firms nonbinding effort requests are at least partially honored resulting in increased overall effort for undergraduates although higher wages are relatively more costly for lower productivity firms workers do not provide them with more effort

an alternative analysis of apparent ekc type transitions abstract the hypothesis of the environmental kuznets curve ekc depends upon the assumption that countries pass through a similar environmental impact trajectory as they experience income growth implying that income levels determine pollution levels the authors present evidence that this is not representative of the way many individual country s pollution emission trajectories evolve and question the emphasis on income determinism by the ekc the study proposes that nonlinear dynamic systems analysis provides a more complete description of individual country pollution trajectories in the case of co 2 emissions the nonlinear time trajectories show abrupt transitions that occur contemporaneously with historical events and over a broad range of incomes

promises in contract design in this paper we propose a new channel of contract design to boost efficiency if deviating from one s own words induces a self imposed moral burden the optimal contracting procedure with regard to cheap talk shall assign the responsibility for installing the nonbinding promise in the contract to whoever has the residual right to break such promise in the spirit of grossman and hart 1986 and hart and moore 1990 to study whether a worker s own promise of effort level governs his real choice of effort in a gift exchange game we implement four treatments in our experiments by varying two factors 1 who the firm or the worker takes the position of the proposer to propose the contract and 2 whether the proposed contract includes a nonbinding specification of the worker s effort level our key finding is that when it is the worker who proposes the contract and the contract includes the worker s promised effort level both the worker s actual effort choice and the aggregate profits are significantly higher than in each of the

convergence in carbon dioxide emissions among industrialised countries revisited this paper examines the existence of stochastic and deterministic convergence of carbon dioxide co2 emissions in 23 countries over the period 1960 2002 for that purpose we conduct unit root testing by employing the recently developed panel stationarity test of carrion i silvestre et al carrion i silvestre j l del barrio castro t lopez bazo e 2005 breaking the panels an application to the gdp per capita econometrics journal 8 159 175 which assumes a highly flexible trend function by incorporating an unknown number of structural breaks we accommodate general forms of cross sectional dependence as well as control for finite sample bias through bootstrap methods overall our analysis provides strong evidence supporting both stochastic and deterministic convergence in co2 emissions thus confirming strazicich and list strazicich m c list j a 2003 are co2 emission levels converging among industrial countries environmental and resource economics 24 263 271 and westerlund and basher westerlund j basher s a 2007 testing for convergence in carbon dioxide emissions using a century of panel data environmental and resource economics forthcoming findings of convergence

in search of workers real effort reciprocity a field and a laboratory experiment we present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage nor to a positive or negative peer comparison this result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort in an additional real effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables an exact calculation of an employer s surplus from the work contract is a crucial prerequisite for a positive wage effort relation this demonstrates that an employee s reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake jel c91 c92 j41

causality between income and emission a country group specific econometric analysis abstract empirical studies of the environmental kuznets curve ekc examine the presence or otherwise of an inverted u shaped relationship between the level of pollution and the level of income customarily in the diagram of ekc the level of income is shown on the horizontal axis and that of pollution on the vertical axis thus it is presumed that the relationship between income and pollution is one of unidirectional causality with income causing environmental changes and not vice versa the validity of this presumption is now being questioned it is being asserted that the nature and direction of causality may vary from one country to the other in this paper we present the results of a study of income co 2 emission causality based on a granger causality test to cross country panel data on per capita income and the corresponding per capita co 2 emission data briefly our results indicate three different types of causality relationship holding for different country groups for the developed country groups of north america and western europe and also for eastern europe the causality is found to run from emission to income for the country groups of central and south america oceania and japan causality from income to emission is obtained finally for the country groups of asia and africa the causality is found to be bi directional the regression equations estimated as part of the granger causality test further suggest that for the country groups of north america and western europe the growth rate of emission has become stationary around a zero mean and a shock in the growth rate of emission tends to generate a corresponding shock in the growth rate of income in contrast for the country groups of central and south america oceania and japan a shock in the income growth rate is likely to result in a corresponding shock in the growth rate of emission finally causality being bi directional for the country groups of asia and africa the income and the emission growth rates seemed to reinforce each other

gift exchange in a multi worker firm one of the main findings of a large body of gift exchange experiments is that in an incomplete contracts environment workers on average do not shirk and usually provide more than the minimum enforceable effort level in general 40 to 60 percent of the workers reward higher wages with higher effort these results are observed for simple one employer one worker relationships in this paper we investigate whether they generalize to the more realistic situation in which the employer employs several workers we compare a bilateral gift exchange game with a treatment in which each employer has four workers we find that effort levels in the latter treatment are only marginally lower gift exchange thus appears to be robust to increases in the size of the workforce and intention based reciprocity rather than social preferences seems to be the main driving force behind gift exchange

income and emission a panel data based cointegration analysis this paper presents the results of an investigation of the causality issue of incomeemission relationship based on time series econometric techniques of unit root test cointegration and related error correction model for a panel data set here the nature of causality between per capita co2 emission pcco2 and per capita gdp pcgdp has been examined using a cross country panel data set covering 88 countries for the period 1960 90 using the panel unit root test procedure of im et al 1997 ips we have found that the hypothesis of unit root i e non stationarity of the time series of pcgdp and pcco2 can not be rejected for individual country groups as both the variables are found to follow i 1 process we next have performed the panel data co integration test and finally we have estimated the ecm for these country groups for which significant income emission cointegration was obtained to explore the nature of dynamics implicit in the given panel data set our findings suggest that there is more or less a bi directional causal relationship between income pcgdp and co2 emission pcco2 for africa central america america as a whole eastern europe western europe europe as a whole and the world as a whole that means the movement of the one variable directly affects the other variable through a feedback system thus the policy makers should be cautious to make proper decision about the control of emission level

the price of worker reliability abstract worker absenteeism is costly to firms that use assembly line production processes this paper shows why an assembly line firm may prefer to pay higher average wages and reduce sick pay entitlement relative to firms with constant returns

gaming against managers in incentive systems experimental results with chinese students and chinese managers we examine strategic interactions between firms and planners in china comparing behavior between i students and managers with field experience with this situation ii standard versus increased monetary incentives and iii sessions conducted in context making explicit reference to interactions between planners and managers and those without any such references the dynamics of play are similar across treatments with play only gradually and incompletely converging on a pooling equilibrium a fivefold increase in incentives significantly increases initial levels of strategic play games played in context generated greater levels of strategic play for managers with minimal impact on students

the effects on sick leave of changes in the sickness insurance system to get a more complete picture of how labor supply is affected by economic incentives the effects on absenteeism should be taken into account in particular absenteeism due to sick leave can be considerable we examine whether the level of sick leave compensation affects sick leave behavior using long time series data 1955 99 for sweden with numerous changes of the compensation level we generally find strong effects reforms implying more generous compensation for sick leave tend to be associated with permanent increases in sick leave and vice versa these findings are reinforced in a panel study covering the 1983 91 period

reassessing the environmental kuznets curve for co2 emissions a robustness exercise the number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly in several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted u benvironmental kuznetsq curve in the case of co2 however the evidence is at best mixed in this paper we reconsider that evidence by assessing how robust it is when the analysis is conducted in a different parametric setup and when using alternative emissions data from the international energy agency relative to the literature our contribution can be viewed as a robustness exercise in these two respects the econometric results lead to two conclusions firstly published evidence on the ekc does not appear to depend upon the source of the data at least as far as carbon dioxide is concerned secondly when an alternative functional form is employed there is evidence of an inverted u pattern for the group of oecd countries with reasonable turning point regardless of the data set employed not so for non oecd countries as the ekc is basically increasing slowly concave according to the iea data and more bellshaped in the case of cdiac data d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the environmental kuznets curve does one size fit all abstract this paper uses a new panel data set on state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from 1929 1994 to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used in the environmental kuznets curve literature empirical results provide initial evidence that an inverted u shape characterizes the relationship between per capita emissions and per capita incomes at the state level parameter estimates suggest however that previous studies which restrict cross sections to undergo identical experiences over time may be presenting statistically biased results

sickness absence an international comparison this paper shows how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys and describes some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study we also analyse sickness absence rates by age gender and other socio economic characteristics of workers these relationships prove to be similar across countries with widely differing mean rates of absence in this dataset workers with longer tenure tend to have higher absence rates even when age is controlled for absence is also positively correlated with higher usual hours of work we show how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys lfs and describe some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study les such data fill an important gap in available information about absence since they have the potential to provide answers to a number of issues that remain unresolved in its study there is now substantial evidence going back to the work of the industrial fatigue research board in the 1920s and 1930s i that sickness absence is not purely a response to a medical condition workers who have access to compensation payments are more likely to be absent than those without buzzard and shaw 1952 the higher the rate of compensation the more absences workers are likely to take buzzard and shaw 1952 furthermore the higher the rate of compensation the longer absences are likely to be barmby et al 1991 the analysis of sickness absence is placed firmly in the agenda of economics by the idea that sickness absence rates are the consequence of choices that can be mediated by financial and other incentives the provision and level of sickpay is typically determined at two levels by negotiation between firms and their workforces and by government regulation interfirm variations in absence and their correlates are not well understood coles and treble 1996 have argued that the marginal cost of an absence is partially in the control of firms and can be usefully seen as driven by the nature of the technology adopted these theoretical arguments remain largely unexplored empirically but the ability to compare similar industries across different countries is likely to be revealing this paper was drafted during a visit to ceps instead in the summer of 1999 the research was funded by a grant of the european commission under the tmr programme access to large scale facilities hosted by iriss c i at ceps instead in differdange luxembourg we are also grateful for support from the leverhulme foundation through a grant to the institute for labour research at the university of essex and to colleagues at the ilr for their constructive comments acknowledgements to les data providers are given at the end of the paper we would also like to thank paul alkemade elena bardasi and pascal garin for their help any remaining errors are our own and the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of ceps instead 1 see for example vernon and bedford 1928

application of the dea on the measurement of efficiency in the eu countries the purpose of the paper is to investigate the relative technical efficiency of the agricultural sector in the european union eu using the data envelopment analysis dea during the period 2007 2011 the authors investigated efficiency using both the input and output oriented models with the assumption of a variable return to scale they looked for causes of inefficiency and made recommendations for inefficient agricultural sectors the results show that in average the eu agricultural sectors performed efficiently as evidenced by the relatively high value of the average input and output efficiency the efficiency of the eu agricultural sectors had changed over the past few years and in both models the efficiency has generally decreased over time as the main source of inefficiency was labelled the input total utilised agricultural area and as the strength with a positive impact on efficiency there was labelled the crop output by calculating the optimal values for the input and output variables for inefficient agricultural sectors it has been found that for the efficient production of a given quantity of outputs it was necessary to reduce the value of the in put total labour in average by 6 18 the total utilised agricultural area in average by 14 45 and the total assets in average by 5 93 in case of the output oriented model for efficient use of a given quantity of inputs the agricultural sectors should produce up to 111 85 of their crop output and 113 41 of their animal output