evaluating welfare reform in the united states this paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s a brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes the paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes labor force changes poverty and income changes and family formation changes a growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well being one particular set of new style welfare programs seems to show especially promising results with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty

is education always reducing fertility evidence from compulsory schooling reforms we study the relationship between education and fertility exploiting compulsory schooling reforms in england and continental europe implemented between 1936 and 1975 we assess the causal effect of education on the number of biological children and the incidence of childlessness while we find a negative relationship between education and fertility in england this result can not be confirmed for continental europe the additional education generated by schooling expansions on the continent did not lead to a decrease in the number of biological children nor to an increase in childlessness these findings are robust to a number of sensitivity and falsification checks author s abstract

the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled the impacts of international migration on remaining household members omnibus results from a migration lottery program conducted in 2002 in tonga the study observed the impact of migration lottery program on the remaining household members of tongan emigrants on the individual and intra household level income falls rapidly by 22 to 25 percent with a rise in remittances failing to offset a large fall in labor earnings ownership of livestock durable and access to financial services is lower for the remaining household members diets change to be less nutritious and more rice and root crops immigration has a negative impact on household size there is no significant impact of migration on labor supply for men nor women funding for the study derived from the world bank stanford university the waikato management school and mardsen fund

environmental regulation technological diversity and the dynamics of technological change inducing technological progress is an important objective of environmental regulation we investigate under which conditions regulation induced technological progress pursues the best technological option we analyze a setting with vertical and horizontal technological progress cost uncertainty time limited patent protection and a case that is typical for some emissi4on intensive industries like electricity generation or the chemical industry under taxes and standards only the current least cost technology is used and developed implying a lock in into a possibly inferior technology tradable permits yield slower progress but can facilitate the simultaneous development of technologies rendering lock ins less likely

effects of a holiday trip on health and quality of life evidence from a natural experiment in south korea abstractwe examine whether having a holiday trip affects an individual s well being namely quality of life health status stress level and health behaviours we use the two stage estimation method to control for endogeneity of a travel experience exploiting a natural experiment of distributing travel vouchers at random among qualified applicants in south korea in 2012 we find that for applicants whose decision to travel is influenced by receiving a voucher a travel experience has no significant effects on the traveller s well being measured 3 12 months later we also find that the ols estimates overstate benefits of a travel

reply on comments on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits professor joglekar is to be thanked for his generally insightful comments 1988 concerning my paper monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor points management sci 306 june 720 726 he has in my view correctly assessed the limitations of two important production assumptions i made assumptions which need to be rethought in any quantity discount pricing models of the future yet although i find myself in general agreement with joglekar s comments i wish to clarify some points concerning the model and its potential applicability

identification issues in the public private wage gap with an application to italy this paper reviews some of the standard assumptions that are imposed in order to estimate the average public private wage gap and that are mainly related to the possible selection of the sector there are two contributions to the existing public private wage gap literature one is a better understanding of the identified parameters standard estimators identify a local effect late which in general cannot be generalized to the entire population as instead is almost always done the other is the partial identification of the population average treatment effect with an instrumental variable to the best of my knowledge this is the first paper in this literature that employs bounds the technique is applied to male workers in italy for compliers late estimates a wage advantage from working in the public sector greater than 30 this return is within the narrowest bounds on the population average treatment effect that are consistent even with a much smaller gap about 15 or more

prices vs quantities the effects on technology choice abstract it is well known that price and quantity based regulation approaches provide different investment incentives but usually only the effect on the level of investment is studied in this paper we show that under uncertainty they also lead to the adoption of different technologies due to the disparate risks that a regulated firm is exposed to different regulatory instruments induce different technologies and this effect cannot be compensated by varying the design of the instruments furthermore price based instruments lead to the adoption of a socially suboptimal technology so that the inclusion of technology choice provides a bias in favor of a quantity based regulation compared with weitzman s weitzman m l 1974 prices vs quantities review of economic studies 41 477 491 criterion

regulatory attitudes and environmental innovation in a model combining internal and external r d the extent to which environmental regulatory institutions are either green or brown impacts not just the intensity of regulation at any moment but also the incentives for the development of new pollution control technologies we set up a strategic model of r d in which a polluter can deploy technologies developed in house or license technologies developed by specialist outsiders an eco industry polluters exert r d effort and may even develop redundant technologies to improve the terms on which they procure technology from outside we find that while regulatory bias has an ambiguous impact on the best available technology strategic delegation to systematically biased regulators can improve social welfare

a generalized quantity discount pricing model to increase supplier s profits in this paper the joint problem of ordering and offering price discount by a supplier to his sole major buyer is analyzed the objective is to induce the buyer to alter his order schedule and size so that the supplier can benefit from lower set up ordering and inventory holding costs we generalize the quantity discount pricing model of monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci 30 6 720 726 to 1 explicitly incorporate constraints imposed on the amount of discount that can be offered and 2 relax the implicit assumption of a lot for lot or order for order policy adopted by the supplier an algorithm is developed to solve the supplier s joint ordering and price discount problem

should renewable energy policy be renewable political flexibility brings about trade offs for policy makers aiming to support the deployment of renewable energy sources res on the one hand it allows incorporating new information on ex ante uncertain benefits and costs of res policy on the other hand it may deter res investments this paper scrutinizes how these trade offs play out economically and politically when res policy makers choose the degree of flexibility as well as the instruments to implement flexibility the analysis builds on a theoretical framework distinguishing between flexibility by design and by adjustment it is complemented by a discussion of three case studies res support schemes in germany and the united kingdom and the eu emissions trading scheme theoretical as well as empirical results suggest that the politically chosen degree of flexibility by policy design may be sub optimally low in contrast flexibility by policy adjustment is often excessively high

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control reply abstract the process of technological change in pollution control is broken into three basic steps innovation diffusion and optimal agency response firm incentives to promote these steps are then examined under five regulatory regimes direct controls emission subsidies emission taxes free marketable permits and auctioned marketable permits on a relative basis emission taxes and auctioned permits provide the highest firm incentives to promote technological change at times free permits generate lower incentives direct controls which are common regulatory tools usually provide the lowest relative firm incentives to promote technological change

pollution abatement subsidies and the eco industry this paper considers the combination of pollution taxes and abatement subsidies when some polluting firms procure their abatement goods and services from an oligopolistic eco industry the regulator must here cope with two simultaneous price distortions one that comes from pollution and the other which is caused by the eco industry s market power in this context we show that taxing emissions while subsidizing polluters abatement efforts cannot lead to first best but the opposite occurs provided it is the eco industry s output which is subsidized when public transfers also create distortions welfare can be higher if the regulator uses only an emission tax but subsidizing abatement suppliers while taxing emissions remains optimal when the eco industry is concentrated

environmental innovation and environmental performance abstract by estimating a simultaneous panel data model of environmental innovation and toxic air pollution this paper identifies bi directional causal links between the two we study a panel of 127 manufacturing industries over the period 1989 2004 pollutant emissions are an implicit measure of policy stringency and environmental patent counts are used to measure environmental innovation after accounting for the joint endogeneity we find that environmental innovation is an important driver of reductions in us toxic emissions conversely we find that tightened pollution targets induce environmental innovation however our estimates indicate that the environmental policy multiplier the proportionate contribution of induced innovation to long run emission reduction is small

all or nothing climate policy when assets can become stranded abstract this paper develops a new perspective on stranded assets in climate policy using a partial equilibrium model of the energy sector political economy related aspects are considered in the government s objective function lobbying power of firms or fiscal considerations by the government lead to time inconsistency the government will deviate from a previously announced carbon tax which creates stranded assets under rational expectations we show that a time consistent policy outcome exists with either a zero carbon tax or a prohibitive carbon tax that leads to zero fossil investments an all or nothing policy although stranded assets are crucial to such a bipolar outcome they disappear again under time consistent policy which of the two outcomes all or nothing prevails depends on the lobbying power of owners of fixed factors land and fossil resources but not on fiscal revenue considerations or on the lobbying power of renewable or fossil energy firms

environmental policy incentives to adopt advanced abatement technology abstract we investigate incentives through environmental policy instruments to adopt advanced abatement technology first we study the case where the regulator makes long term commitments to policy levels and does not anticipate arrival of new technology we show that taxes provide stronger incentives than permits auctioned and free permits offer identical incentives and standards may give stronger incentives than permits second we investigate scenarios where the regulator anticipates new technologies we show that with taxes and permits the regulator can induce first best outcomes if he moves after firms have invested whereas this does not always hold if he moves first

instrument choice for environmental protection when technological innovation is endogenous this paper compares qualitatively and quantitatively the welfare effects of emissions taxes auctioned emissions permits and free grandfathered permits when technological innovation is endogenous we find that there is no unambiguous case for preferring any of these policy instruments the relative welfare ranking of instruments depends on the costs of innovation the extent to which innovations can be imitated the slope and level of the marginal environmental benefit function and the number of polluting firms we illustrate the types of situations when there can be significant welfare discrepancies between the policies and when there are not

treatment effect heterogeneity in theory and practice instrumental variables iv methods identify internally valid causal effects for individuals whose treatment status is manipulable by the instrument at hand inference for other populations requires homogeneity assumptions this paper outlines a theoretical framework that nests causal homogeneity assumptions these ideas are illustrated using sibling sex composition to estimate the effect of childbearing on economic and marital outcomes the application is motivated by american welfare reform the empirical results generally support the notion of reduced labour supply and increased poverty as a consequence of childbearing but evidence on the impact of childbearing on marital stability and welfare use is more tenuous

the effect of pre primary education on primary school performance although the theoretical case for universal pre primary education is strong the empirical foundation is weak in this paper we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre primary education on subsequent primary school performance in argentina we estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores we also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student s self control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention effort class participation and discipline

pollution policy and trade liberalization of environmental goods during the doha round at the world trade organization reductions in trade barriers on environmental goods eg were put forward as a means of helping developed and developing countries alike deal with current environmental problems we examine the potential effectiveness of such a strategy in a developing country that imports all its consumption of eg from an imperfectly competitive foreign eco industry we point out that trade liberalization of eg might in fact lead to less stringent pollution taxes which can result in an actual rise in pollution levels we then show that the environmental effectiveness objective of this trade reform can be achieved when the regulator uses quantitative abatement standards as an alternative pollution policy instrument however this environmental achievement comes at the expense of social welfare

an approach for developing an optimal discount pricing policy this paper addresses the problem of why and how a seller should develop a discount pricing structure even if such a pricing structure does not alter ultimate demand the situation modeled is most appropriate where the seller s product does not represent a major component of the buyer s final product where the demand for the product is derived or where the price is only one of many factors considered in making a purchase decision a model of buyer reaction to any given pricing scheme is developed to show that there exists a unified pricing policy which motivates the buyer to increase its ordering quantity per order thereby reducing the joint buyer and seller ordering and holding costs as a result the seller is able to reduce its costs while leaving the buyer no worse off and often better off the model is extended to handle variable ordering and shipping costs and situations where the seller faces numerous groups of buyers each having different ordering policies finally a case study is presented explicitly showing how the proposed pricing policy can be applied to the situation of a large seller selling to a number of different buyer groups

a bargaining model with asymmetric information for a single supplier single buyer problem abstract banerjee s joint economic lot size jels model represents one approach to minimizing the joint total relevant cost of a buyer and a supplier by using a joint optimal order and production policy the implementation of a jointly optimal policy requires coordination and cooperation should the buyer have the market power to implement his own optimal policy as that one to be used in the exchange process no incentive exists for him to choose a joint optimal policy a joint policy can therefore only be the result of a bargaining process between the parties involved the supplier may make some sort of concession such as a price discount or a side payment in order to influence the buyer s order policy a critical assumption made throughout in supply chain literature is that the supplier has complete knowledge about the buyer s cost structure clearly this assumption will seldom be fulfilled in practice the research presented in this paper provides a bargaining model with asymmetric information about the buyer s cost structure assuming that the buyer has the power to impose its individual optimal policy

note comments on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits monahan monahan j p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci june 720 726 adapted the quantity discount model of inventory theory to the problem of determining an optimal quantity discount schedule from a vendor s point of view and opened up an important direction of research however his one item one customer one vendor model is based on several implicit assumptions that must be judged unreasonable monahan must account for the vendor s inventory carrying charges and redefine his variable s2 it is shown that a rational vendor s manufacturing frequency would not be identical to the buyer s ordering frequency if the vendor s manufacturing setup costs are substantially larger than the buyer s ordering costs a numerical example presented in this note also questions the practical usefulness of monahan s model even after its theoretical inaccuracies axe corrected monahan s model may explain discounts that are a fraction of 1 of the price of an item but it fails to explain commonly observed magnitudes of quantity discounts such as 10 of the unit price

the climate policy hold up green technologies intellectual property rights and the abatement incentives of international agreements the success of global climate policies over the coming decades depends on the diffusion of green technologies this requires that international environmental agreements ieas and trade related intellectual property rights trips interact productively using a simple and tractable model we highlight the strategic reduction in abatement commitments on account of a hold up effect in anticipation of rent extraction by the innovator signatories might abate less than non signatories turning the iea brown self enforcing ieas have fewer signatories and diffusion can reduce global abatement under trips countries hosting patent holders extract rents from trips but may be better off without them

is there an effect of incremental welfare benefits on fertility behavior a look at the family cap this analysis exploits the variation across states in the timing of policy implementation to determine if family cap policies lead to a reduction in births to women aged 15 to 34 vital statistics birth data for the years 1989 to 1998 offer no such evidence the data reject a decline in births of more than one percent the finding is robust to multiple specification checks the data also reject large declines in higher order births among demographic groups with high welfare participation rates

irreversible abatement investment under cost uncertainties tradable emission permits and emissions charges abstract a major concern with tradable emission permits is that stochastic permit prices may reduce a firm s incentive to invest in abatement capital or technologies relative to other policies such as a fixed emissions charge however under efficient permit trading the permit price uncertainty is caused by abatement cost uncertainties which affect investment under both permit and charge policies we develop a rational expectations general equilibrium model of permit trading and irreversible abatement investment to show how cost uncertainties affect investment under permits we compare the resulting investment incentive with that under charges after controlling for the assumption that random shocks affect the abatement cost linearly we find that firms investment incentive decreases in cost uncertainties but more so under emissions charges than under permits therefore tradable permits in fact may help maintain firms investment incentive under uncertainty

incentives to diffuse advanced abatement technology under environmental liability law polluting firms with advanced abatement technology at their disposal have incentives or disincentives to share this technology with other polluting firms the direction and extent of those incentives depends on the liability rule applicable and the way technical change impacts marginal abatement costs we establish that incentives for diffusion are socially optimal under strict liability and socially suboptimal under negligence if technical change lowers marginal abatement costs for all levels of abatement negligence may however induce better diffusion incentives than strict liability if technical change decreases increases marginal abatement costs for low high levels of abatement

the impact of immigration on child health experimental evidence from a migration lottery program this paper uses a unique survey designed by the authors to compare migrant children who enter new zealand through a random ballot with children in the home country of tonga whose families were unsuccessful participants in the same ballots the authors find that migration increases height and reduces stunting of infants and toddlers but also increases body mass index bmi and obesity among 3 to 5 years old these impacts are quite large even though the average migrant household has been in new zealand for less than 1 year additional results suggest that these impacts occur because of dietary change rather than direct income effects

does more stringent environmental regulation induce or reduce technology adoption when the rate of technology adoption is inverted u shaped abstract we show that for a broad class of technologies the relationship between policy stringency and the rate of technology adoption is inverted u shaped this happens when the marginal abatement cost mac curves of conventional and new technologies intersect which invariably occurs when emissions are proportional to output and technological progress reduces emissions per output this outcome does not result from policy failure on the contrary in social optimum the relationship between the slope of the marginal damage curve and the rate of technology adoption is also inverted u shaped under more general conditions these curves can look even more complicated e g such as inverted w shaped

discount pricing decisions in distribution channels with price sensitive demand abstract in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of quantity discounts and volume discounts as coordination mechanisms in distribution channels with demand that is price sensitive we consider a single vendor single retailer distribution channel demand for the product arises only at the retailer the demand faced by the retailer is assumed to be deterministic but price elastic the retailer in turn buys the product from the vendor the vendor and the retailer act independently and rationally each maximizing their own respective profit the equilibrium point that specifies the vendor s and buyer s inventory and pricing policy is determined by the solution to a stackelberg game we consider the cases when quantity discount and volume discount respectively are offered we develop methods to determine the optimal discount policy for these cases we then consider the case where both volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously and develop a method to determine the optimal simultaneous discount offer the relative performance of the alternative discount schemes is then evaluated through a numerical study the results of the study demonstrate that the effectiveness of volume discount as a coordination mechanism is higher when the sensitivity of demand to price changes is higher the effectiveness of quantity discount on the other hand is higher with lower price sensitivity of demand finally the results also demonstrate that perfect coordination is achieved when volume and quantity discounts are offered simultaneously

the economic consequences of unwed motherhood using twin births as a natural experiment social scientists have long concluded that premarital childbearing exacerbates problems of both poverty and family instability out of wedlock and adolescent childbearing may reduce a mothers educational attainment lower the probability of her eventual marriage increase her probability of welfare recipiency and decrease family income the authors use an exogenous fertility event the birth of twins to estimate the economic effects of unplanned births the approach compares the economic outcomes of women experiencing premarital twin first births to those experiencing premarital single first births in the attempt to identify the consequences of an unplanned birth upon womens future fertility and marital decisions education labor force participation labor earnings welfare receipt and poverty status 1970 and 1980 us census micro data are used to identify twin births to unmarried women analysis found large short term effects of unplanned births on labor force participation poverty and welfare recipiency among unwed mothers but not among married mothers furthermore most adverse economic effects of unplanned motherhood dissipate over time for whites but larger and more persistent negative effects weigh upon black unwed mothers

commitment versus discretion in climate and energy policy to decarbonize the power sector policy makers need to commit to long term credible rules for climate and energy policy otherwise risk of opportunistic policy making will impair investments into low carbon technologies however the future benefits and costs of decarbonization are subject to substantial uncertainties thus there may also be societal gains from allowing policy makers the discretion to adjust the policies as new information becomes available we examine how this trade off between policy commitment either unconditional or state contingent and discretion affects the optimal intertemporal design of market based instruments in the power sector using a dynamic partial equilibrium model we show that commitment to a state contingent level of ambition for the market based instrument leads to higher welfare than both unconditional commitment and discretion with benefit uncertainty the choice between the practically more feasible approaches of unconditional commitment and discretion is analytically ambiguous a basic numerical illustration suggests that policy discretion may outperform unconditional commitment in terms of welfare however this result is reversed when only a limited fraction of benefit uncertainty resolves in reasonable time when future policy makers have own agendas or when investors are risk averse with cost uncertainty policy discretion is welfare superior if the government can commit to a technology deployment target

can variation in subgroups average treatment effects explain treatment effect heterogeneity evidence from a social experiment we assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups this is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically focus on estimating mean impacts that only vary across subgroups using a novel approach to simulating treatment group earnings under the constant mean impacts within subgroup model we find this model does a poor job of capturing treatment effect heterogeneity for connecticut s jobs first welfare reform experiment notably ignoring within group heterogeneitywould lead one to miss evidence that treatment effects are consistent with basic labor supply theory

robust technology policy against emission leakage the case of upstream subsidies asymmetric regulation of a global pollutant between countries can alter the competitiveness of industries and lead to emissions leakage which hampers countries welfare in order to limit leakage governments consider supporting domestic trade exposed firms by subsidizing their investments in abatement technology the suppliers of such technologies tend to be less than perfectly competitive particularly when both emissions regulations and advanced technologies are new in this context of twin market failures we consider the relative effects and desirability of subsidies for abatement technology we find a more robust recommendation for upstream subsidies than for downstream subsidies downstream subsidies tend to increase global abatement technology prices reduce pollution abatement abroad and increase emission leakage on the contrary upstream subsidies reduce abatement technology prices and hence also emissions leakage

the wages of bmi bayesian analysis of a skewed treatment response model with nonparametric endogeneity we generalize the specifications used in previous studies of the effect of body mass index bmi on earnings by allowing the potentially endogenous bmi variable to enter the log wage equation nonparametrically we introduce a bayesian posterior simulator for fitting our model that permits a nonparametric treatment of the endogenous bmi variable flexibly accommodates skew in the bmi distribution and whose implementation requires only gibbs steps using data from the 1970 british cohort study our results indicate the presence of nonlinearities in the relationships between bmi and log wages that differ across men and women and also suggest the importance of unobserved confounding for our sample of males copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

estimating heterogeneous takeup and crowd out responses to existing medicaid income limits and their nonmarginal expansions we use a switching probit model and the income limit based structure of medicaid eligibility for children to estimate treatment effects of nonmarginal medicaid expansions on medicaid takeup private insurance coverage and crowd out as well as crowd out for those eligible for medicaid under rules already in place many of these estimates are not found in existing work on public insurance and cannot be calculated with the linear probability model used by previous work in this literature we provide an estimation approach that is straightforward to implement yet yields precise treatment effects

accounting for selectivity and duration dependent heterogeneity when estimating the impact of emigration on incomes and poverty in sending areas the impacts of international emigration and remittances on incomes and poverty in sending areas are increasingly studied with household survey data but comparing households with and without emigrants is complicated by a triple selectivity problem first households self select into emigration second in some emigrant households everyone moves while others leave members behind and third some emigrants choose to return to the origin country allowing for duration dependent heterogeneity introduces a fourth form of selectivity one must now worry not just about whether households migrate but also when they do so this paper clearly sets out these selectivity issues and their implications for existing migration studies and then addresses them by using survey data designed specifically to take advantage of a randomized lottery that determines which applicants to the over subscribed samoan quota may immigrate to new zealand the analysis compares incomes and poverty rates among left behind members in households in samoa that sent samoan quota emigrants with those for members of similar households that were unsuccessful in the lottery policy rules control who can accompany the principal migrant providing an instrument to address the second selectivity problem while differences among migrants in which year their ballot was selected allow for estimation of duration effects the authors find that migration reduced poverty among former household members but they also find suggestive evidence that this effect may be short lived as both remittances and agricultural income are negatively related to the duration that the migrant has been abroad

a supplier s optimal quantity discount policy under asymmetric information in the supply chain literature an increasing body of work studies how suppliers can use incentive schemes such as quantity discounts to influence buyers ordering behaviour thus reducing the supplier s and the total supply chain s costs various functional forms for such incentive schemes have been proposed but a critical assumption always made is that the supplier has full information about the buyer s cost structure we derive the optimal quantity discount policy under asymmetric information and compare it to the situation where the supplier has full information

quantity discounts managerial issues and research opportunities marketing managers frequently administer pricing policies involving substantial quantity discounts however our understanding of the precise role of these discounts and their design is quite limited this paper reviews and integrates the economics and marketing literature and presents a detailed analysis of the policies of four firms in order to i specify the variety of motivations for quantity discounts ii provide guidelines to managers in designing quantity discount schedules and iii set out the most fruitful directions for future research

end of pipe or cleaner production how to go green in presence of income inequality and pro environmental behavior in this paper we consider a vertically differentiated duopoly model in which a green producer competes with a brown rival in a market in which consumers are environmentally concerned in particular consumers are assumed to value not only the intrinsic quality of a certain product but also its environmental impact this environmental valuation has a positional content consumers attach a positive attribute to the green product while penalizing the brown one in this context we consider the choice of the green firm between cleaner and end of pipe abatement efforts we find that the interplay between the intensity of market competition consumers income disparity and environmental concern can play a crucial role in directing the green producer towards one or the other technological choice more precisely the adoption of cleaner production technologies can be discouraged by low average income and by tough competition while it can be spurred by the moral social incentive towards pro environmental behavior

an incremental discount pricing schedule with multiple customers and single price break abstract this paper analyzes how a supplier can formulate the terms of a quantity discount pricing schedule assuming a single incremental discount system a model is developed from which an algorithm is derived for an optimal discount schedule the cases are investigated in which both the discount rate and the break point are unknown and either one is prescribed a numerical example is presented to illustrate the algorithm developed

market power in the eco industry polluters incentives under environmental liability law this paper analyzes the output and abatement choices of perfectly competitive downstream polluters who are subject to environmental liability law and procure abatement from an imperfectly competitive eco industry under strict liability polluting firms choose suboptimal abatement but socially optimal output given abatement under negligence with firm specific abatement standards polluting firms choose suboptimal output but socially optimal abatement given output under negligence with industry wide abatement standards the output and abatement choices of most firms are socially suboptimal second best considerations are offered for each case under strict liability negligence these apply to the level of liability the behavioral standard

on the timing of climate agreements a central issue in climate policy is the question whether long term targets for greenhouse gas emissions should be adopted this paper analyzes strategic effects related to the timing of such commitments using a two country model we identify a redistributive effect that undermines long term cooperation when countries are asymmetric and side payments are unavailable the effect enables countries to shift rents strategically via their r d efforts under delayed cooperation in contrast a complementarity effect stabilizes long term cooperation because early commitments in abatement induce countries to invest more in low carbon technologies and create additional knowledge spillovers contrasting both effects we endogenize the timing of climate agreements

note on a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits monahan monahan james p 1984 a quantity discount pricing model to increase vendor profits management sci 30 june 720 726 develops a model for establishing an optimal quantity discount schedule from a vendor s viewpoint in this note we show that this model is limited to the case where the vendor buys from another supplier incorporating vendor s inventory carrying costs we develop a generalized version of monahan s model and demonstrate its equivalence with the joint economic lot size approach suggested by banerjee banerjee avijit 1986 a joint economic lot size model for purchaser and vendor decision sci 17 summer 292 311

incentives for advanced pollution abatement technology at the industry level an evaluation of policy alternatives abstract in this research we evaluate the incentive effects of five environmental policy instruments to promote the development and adoption of advanced pollution abatement technology in a heterogenous industry from most to least incentive the policy instruments can be rank ordered as follows i auctioned permits ii emissions taxes and subsidies iii issued marketable permits iv performance standards including performance standards in this list necessitates the assumption that they are differentiated between heterogeneous firms before the technology adoption in a way which replicates the initial emissions control distribution of the efficient incentive based instruments with the starting point normalized in this fashion the instrument rankings are invariant with respect to the size of firms the size of the industry or the industry s abatement cost structure

social norms and emission tax multiple equilibria in adopting pollution abatement device the effect of social norm is addressed in an adoption game where an emission tax is used to motivate oligopolistic firms to adopt a pollution abatement device we ask if the intrinsic motivation from social norm alone can motivate firms to participate in adoption the multiple equilibria in the adoption game indicates two possibilities this intrinsic motivation may or may not enhance adoption the existing literature on equilibrium selection further suggests that the most likely outcome is that it cannot enhance adoption next by keeping the assumption of symmetry we show that if cooperation is an option for firms then the presence of two coordination effects social norm on adoption and cooperation benefits on output will result in the existence of asymmetric adoptions

the effect of welfare payments on the marriage and fertility behavior of unwed mothers results from a twins experiment we study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers we use twin births to generate random within state variation in benefits effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior higher base welfare benefits 1 lead unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage and 2 lead unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth the magnitudes of these effects are fairly modest moreover we find no evidence that the marginal benefit paid at the birth of an additional child the focus of the family cap debate affects fertility

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

the role of markets and policies in delivering innovation for climate change mitigation this paper identifies market incentives and international and domestic policies that could technologically alter energy systems to achieve greenhouse gas stabilization targets while also meeting other societal goals i consider the conceptual basis and empirical evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of climate technology policies the paper reviews the literature on trends and prospects for innovation in climate change mitigation and examines the evidence on induced innovation and the implications for the choice of technology policy i then consider the impact of technological advances on the environment the role of direct government support for r d and the complementarities between policies internalizing

innovation in pollution control comparisons of the various institutional arrangements for controlling pollutant emissions from individual sources effluent fees effluent control subsidies marketable permits and direct command and control regulation have usually focused on their static efficiency properties and institutional feasibility e g dales 1968 zerbe 1970 baumol and oates 1975 kneese and schultze 1975 marin 1978 mills and white 1978 spence and weitzman 1978 russell 1979 a relatively neglected area has been the study of how each arrangement influences innovation in pollution control a few studies e g kneese and schultze 1975 marin 1978 mills and white 1978 russell 1979 have casually claimed that the control methods that rely on economic incentives provide superior incentives for innovation but there have been few systematic studies of the question this paper provides a simple model of pollution control innovation by a profitmaximizing polluter who is subject to the various control methods the consequences of the methods will be explored in three major contexts first we assume that the polluter and the innovation is a small enough part of the overall pollution problem so that none of the important marginal conditions are changed by the innovation second we assume that the polluter and the innovation are important enough so that marginal conditions are changed by the innovations but that the governmental authority determining pollution control incentives or levels fails to make the appropriate adjustments third we again assume that the innovation causes marginal conditions to change but in this case the governmental authority makes the appropriate adjustments we use the term ratcheting to describe this last phenomenon in all cases we assume that the innovating polluter correctly predicts the reactions of the governmental authority and bases his innovation decisions on that prediction a profit maximizing entrepreneur would normally be expected to adopt any innovation that promised gains present discounted value to him in excess of initial

finding missing markets and a disturbing epilogue evidence from an export crop adoption and marketing intervention in kenya in much of the developing world many farmers grow crops for local or personal consumption despite export options that appear to be more profitable thus many conjecture that one or several markets are missing this paper reports on a randomized controlled trial conducted by drumnet in kenya that attempts to help farmers adopt and market export crops drumnet provides smallholder farmers with information about how to switch to export crops makes in kind loans for the purchase of the agricultural inputs and provides marketing services by facilitating the transaction with exporters the experimental evaluation design randomly assigns pre existing farmer self help groups to one of three groups 1 a treatment group that receives all drumnet services 2 a treatment group that receives all drumnet services except credit or 3 a control group after one year drumnet services led to an increase in production of export oriented crops and lower marketing costs this translated into household income gains for new adopters however one year after the study ended the exporter refused to continue buying the cash crops from the farmers because the conditions of the farms did not satisfy european export requirements drumnet collapsed in this region as farmers were forced to sell to middlemen and defaulted on their loans the risk of such events may explain at least partly why many seemingly more profitable export crops are not adopted

dynamic incentives by environmental policy instruments a survey abstract in this paper i survey and discuss recent developments on the incentives provided by environmental policy instruments for both adoption and development of advanced abatement technology a main conclusion to be drawn from the literature is that under competitive conditions market based instruments usually perform better than command and control moreover taxes may provide stronger long term incentives than tradable permits if the regulator is myopic if the government can anticipate new technology or is able to react on it optimally regulatory policies by virtue of administered prices taxes and policies by setting quantities issuing tradable permits are almost equivalent the literature also shows that under competitive conditions there is no difference between auctioning permits and grandfathering moreover timing and commitment of environmental policy is not crucial for adoption under competitive conditions commitment has positive incentive effects however if an r d sector has market power in the presence of market imperfections the ranking of the different policy instruments is ambiguous

technology diffusion with market power in the upstream industry this paper compares taxes and tradable permits when used to regulate a competitive and polluting downstream industry that can purchase an abatement technology from a monopolistic upstream industry second best policies are derived for the full range of the abatement technology s emission intensities and marginal abatement costs the second best permit quantity can be both above or below the socially optimal emission level explicit consideration of the output market provides further insights on how market power distorts the allocation in the downstream industry the ranking between permits and taxes is ambiguous in general but taxes weakly dominate permits if full diffusion is socially optimal in addition it is analysed how a cap on the permit price affects the diffusion of an abatement technology

timing and commitment of environmental policy adoption of new technology and repercussions on r d we investigate the interplay between environmental policy incentives to adoptnew technology and repercussions on r d we study a model where a monopolistic upstream firm engages in r d and sells advanced abatement technology to polluting downstream firms we consider four different timing and commitment regimes of environmental tax and permit policies ex post taxation or issuing permits interim commitment to a tax rate a quota of permits after observing r d success but before adoption and finally two types of ex antecommitment before r d activity one with a unique tax rate quota of permits the other one with a menu of tax rates permit quotas we study the second best tax and permit policies and rank these with respect to welfare in particular we find that commitment to a menu of tax rate dominates all other policy regimes

nonparametric bounds on treatment effects assume that each member of a population is characterized by values for the variables ya yb z x here x is a vector describing a person and z is a binary variable indicating which of two treatments this person receives the treatments are labelled a and b the variables ya and yb are scalar measures of the outcomes of the two treatments for example a cancer patient might be treated by a drug therapy or b surgery the relevant outcome y might be life span following treatment an unemployed worker might be given a vocational training or b job search assistance here the relevant outcome might be labor force status following treatment assume that a random sample is drawn and that one observes the realizations of z x and of the outcome under the treatment received thus ya is observed if treatment a is received but is a latent variable if treatment b is received similarly yb is either observed or latent suppose that one wants to learn the difference in expected outcome if all persons with attributes x were assigned to treatment a or b this treatment effect is

estimating the variance of wages in the presence of selection and unobserved heterogeneity abstract identification of potential wage distributions by education is important to the study of the causal links between education inequality and uncertainty potential wage inequality within an educational group that is the variance in wages if all workers had the same education exceeds the observed statistics because self selected education truncates wage distributions decomposing potential wage inequality into heterogeneity known to the agent making the educational choice and uncertainty unknown to the agent suggests that wage uncertainty does not necessarily rise with education it is unobserved heterogeneity not uncertainty that explains the observed relationship between college graduation and higher wage inequality

estimating average and local average treatment effects of education when compulsory schooling laws really matter the change to the minimum school leaving age in the united kingdom from 14 to 15 had a powerful and immediate effect that redirected almost half the population of 14 year olds in the mid twentieth century to stay in school for one more year the magnitude of this impact provides a rare opportunity to a estimate local average treatment effects late of high school that come close to population average treatment effects ate and b estimate returns to education using a regression discontinuity design instead of previous estimates that rely on difference in differences methodology or relatively weak instruments comparing late estimates for the united states and canada where very few students were affected by compulsory school laws to the united kingdom estimates provides a test as to whether instrumental variables iv returns to schooling often exceed ordinary least squares ols because gains are high only for small and peculiar groups among the more general population i find instead that the benefits from compulsory schooling are very large whether these laws have an impact on a majority or minority of those exposed

innovation and the international diffusion of environmentally responsive technology abstract new evidence is presented on environmental innovation and diffusion over the 1970s and 1980s at a global level a substantial amount of innovations occurred in the united states japan and germany the share of environmental patents in all patents varied between 0 6 and 3 and as such was higher than the corresponding share of pollution abatement expenditure in gdp japanese environmental innovation rates were consistently high certain plausible connections between environmental regulation and innovation also emerge across these three countries and over time innovation responded to pollution abatement expenditure an indicator of the severity of environmental regulations environmental patenting rates in developing countries were also high reaching 2 in many years in brazil developing country innovators obtained a non trivial number of patents most of which appear geared towards adapting imported technologies to local conditions however domestic innovation was only one path to new technologies imports of disembodied environmental technologies foreign patents registered in developing countries were substantial foreign patents were typically important or generic patents evidence also suggests that such patents protected intellectual property in equipment exported developing countries especially in east asia often chose to obtain technologies embodied in pollution abatement equipment

experimental evidence on returns to capital and access to finance in mexico a strong theoretical argument for focusing on access to finance is that financial market imperfections can result in large inefficiencies as firms with productive investment opportunities underinvest lack of access to finance is a frequent complaint of microenterprises which account for a large share of employment in developing countries however assessing the extent to which a lack of capital affects their business profits is complicated by the fact that business investment is likely to be correlated with a host of unmeasured characteristics of the owner and firm such as entrepreneurial ability and demand shocks in a randomized experiment that gave cash and in kind grants to small retail firms providing an exogenous shock to capital the shock generated large increases in profits with the effects concentrated among firms that were more financially constrained the estimated return to capital was at least 20 33 percent a month three to five times higher than market interest rates

do voluntary pollution reduction programs vprs spur or deter environmental innovation evidence from 33 50 abstract we study whether a government sponsored voluntary pollution reduction program vpr promotes or deters the development of new environmental technologies that yield future emission reduction benefits using a panel of 127 u s manufacturing industries defined by 3 digit sic classifications over the 1989 2004 period we estimate impacts of industry level participation in the 33 50 program a vpr initiated by government regulators in 1991 on industry level rates of environmental patenting we find that higher rates of 33 50 program participation are associated with significant reductions in the number of successful environmental patent applications five to nine years after the program ended

the merits of new pollutants and how to get them when patents are granted the performance of market based environmental regulation is affected by patents and vice versa this interaction is studied for a type of innovation where a new technology reduces emissions of a specific pollutant but at the same time causes a new type of damage if the new pollutant associated with this technology is sufficiently different from existing ones such that marginal damage is increasing in each of them but additive across pollutants a diversification of the pollution portfolio is socially desirable in a situation where the incentives to develop such a technology are created by patents the efficiency of permits is affected by monopoly pricing of the patent holding firm this result carries over to other types of innovation the performance of taxes is limited by either the inability to implement specific pollution mixes or monopoly pricing for constant returns to scale at the industry level the combined use of taxes and permits ensures the first best mix of technologies and provides positive research incentives

the role of investment in environmental lobbying contests this paper establishes that a lobbying stage following investment decisions regarding abatement technology may imply a positive strategic effect of investment pointing to relatively more investment in pollution abatement technologies than without lobbying the intuition is that polluting firms may choose to implement more advanced abatement technology as a credible commitment device in order to lower the investment of environmentalists in the lobbying contest that will ultimately determine whether or not an emissions tax is introduced

demand pull and technology push public support for eco innovation the case of the biofuels sector the purpose of this paper is to explore the differentiated impact of demand pull and technology push policies in shaping technological patterns in the biofuels sector the empirical analysis is based on a novel and original database biopat containing patents in the field of biofuels selected using appropriate keywords and classified according to the technological content of the invention our results generally show that technological capabilities and environmental regulation spur innovative activities in the biofuels sector both demand pull and technology push factors are found to be important drivers of innovation in the biofuels sector however technology exploitation activities in first generation technologies are found to be mainly driven by quantity and price based demand pull policies on the contrary the pace of technology exploration efforts in advanced generation biofuels is shown to react positively to price based demand pull incentives but also to technology push policy the clear diversity in the impact of different public support instruments provides new insights which fuel discussion on the optimal policy mix debate and offers new elements for the design of future policy strategies

channel coordination and quantity discounts this paper presents a model for analyzing the impact of joint decision policies on channel coordination in a system consisting of a supplier and a group of homogeneous buyers the joint decision policy characterized by the unit selling price and the order quantity is coordinated through quantity discounts and franchise fees both the annual demand rate and the operating cost including the purchase ordering and inventory holding costs depend on the joint decision policy employed this paper contributes by integrating work addressing quantity discounts on inventory and ordering policies and work focusing on the control mechanism provided by quantity discounts in channel coordination it is shown that the optimal all unit quantity discount policy is equivalent to the optimal incremental quantity discount policy in achieving channel coordination furthermore it is shown that quantity discounts alone are not sufficient to guarantee joint profit maximization the analyses of the general models are illustrated by specific analytical results obtained for a given demand function