global warming technological change and trade in carbon energy challenge or threat is it possible to combat global climate change through north to south technology transfer even without a global climate treaty or do carbon leakage and the rebound effect imply that it is possible to take advantage of technological improvements under the umbrella of a global arrangement only for answering these questions two possible states of the world are discussed one where more energy efficient technologies are transferred unconditionally from the north to the south and where regions do not cooperate in the solution of the global climate problem but unilaterally decide on climate policies and technology transfers one where the north to south technology transfer is tied to the requirement that the south in some way contributes to the solution of the global climate problem rebound and leakage effects hinder a sustainable and welfare improving solution of the climate problem

cross hedging and forward contract pricing of electricity we consider the problem of an electric power marketer offering a fixed price forward contract to provide electricity that it purchases from a potentially volatile and unpredictable fledgling spot energy market one option for the risk averse marketer who wants to hedge against the spot price volatility is to engage in cross hedging to reduce the contract s profit variance and to determine the forward contract price as a risk adjusted price the sum of a baseline price and a risk premium we show how the marketer can estimate the spot price relationship between two wholesale energy markets for the purpose of cross hedging as well as the optimal hedge and the forward contract s baseline price and risk premium

support systems for the diffusion of renewable energy technologies an investor perspective concern over climate change impacts and the projected depletion of fossil fuels has urged more governments to adopt policies that stimulate the diffusion of renewable energy technologies ret with an increasingly diverse suite of support instruments the question emerges as to which instruments or combinations are able to achieve faster more substantial diffusion results although various support instruments were extensively addressed in policy studies there is still no consensus this is partly because many policy studies take a policy maker approach in comparing support instruments leaving relationships between policy design and policy results as a black box this paper proposes an investor oriented perspective to analyze the diffusion potential of support systems for ret the main argument is that it is not the type of support instrument but rather its risk profitability characteristics that influence investor behavior and the rate of diffusion the two instruments most frequently discussed and compared are the feed in tariff and the quota model the analysis in this paper concludes that policy design is crucial while often feed in tariffs are applauded and quota system feared feed in tariffs may also bring about disappointing diffusion results when poorly designed while quota systems may be also conceived as attractive instruments for independent power producers

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

one two three infinity newspaper and lab beauty contest experiments beauty contest is a game in which participants have to choose typically a number in 0 100 the winner being the person whose number is closest to a proportion of the average of all chosen numbers we describe and analyze beauty contest experiments run in newspapers in uk spain and germany and find stable patterns of behavior across them despite the uncontrollability of these experiments these results are then compared with lab experiments involving undergraduates and game theorists as subjects in what must be one of the largest empirical corroborations of interactive behavior ever tried we claim that all observed behavior across a wide variety of treatments and subject pools can be interpretedas iterative reasoning level 1 reasoning level 2 reasoning and level 3 reasoning are commonly observed in all the samples while the equilibrium choice level maximum reasoning is only prominently chosen by newspaper readers and theorists the results show the empirical power of experiments run with large subject pools and open the door for more experimental work performed on the rich platform offered by newspapers and magazines

public good provision and ancillary benefits the case of climate agreements several studies found ancillary benefits of the provision of public goods to be of considerable size if these additional private benefits were noticed they would imply not only higher cooperative but also non cooperative provision levels however beyond these largely undisputed important quantitative effects there would be qualitative and strategic implications associated with ancillary benefits public policy would no longer be a pure but an impure public good in this paper we investigate these implications in a setting of non cooperative coalition formation in the context of climate change in particular we address the following question would ancillary benefits if they were taken in consideration increase participation in international climate agreements and raise the success of these treaties in welfare terms

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

the role of uncertainty and learning for the success of international climate agreements abstract transnational externalities e g transboundary pollution trade contagious diseases and terrorism warrant coordination and cooperation between governments but this proves often difficult one reason for the meager success is the public good character of many of these economic problems encouraging free riding another reason one might suspect is uncertainty surrounding most environmental problems and in particular climate change this provides often an excuse for remaining inactive paradoxically some recent papers have concluded just the opposite the veil of uncertainty can be conducive to the success of international environmental cooperation in this paper we explain why and under which conditions this can be true however we argue that those conditions are the exception rather than the rule most important we suggest a mechanism for those conditions where learning has a negative effect on the success of cooperation which removes this effect or even turns it into a positive effect our results apply beyond the specifics of climate change to similar problems where cooperation generates positive externalities

climate treaties and approaching catastrophes abstract if the threshold that triggers climate catastrophe is known with certainty and the benefits of avoiding catastrophe are high relative to the costs treaties can easily coordinate countries behavior so as to avoid the threshold where the net benefits of avoiding catastrophe are lower treaties typically fail to help countries cooperate to avoid catastrophe sustaining only modest cuts in emissions these results are unaffected by uncertainty about the impact of catastrophe by contrast uncertainty about the catastrophic threshold normally causes coordination to collapse whether the probability density function has thin or fat tails makes little difference

climate change mitigation with technology spillovers we explore the implications of an increase in clean technology spillovers between developed and developing countries we build a game of abatements in which players are linked with technology spillovers determined by an initial choice of absorptive capacities by developing countries we show that within a non cooperative framework the response of clean technology investments in developed countries to an increase in cross country technology spillovers is ambiguous if the marginal benefits of these additional abatements are not sufficiently high developed countries have a strategic incentive to decrease investments such a strategic response jeopardizes the initial effects of an increase in technology spillovers on climate change mitigation and decreases the incentives for developing countries to enhance their absorptive capacities

the changing climate of climate change economics climate change economics is now four decades old much of what it has achieved as a field of academic enquiry can be linked back to issues of integrated assessment modelling this paper shows that the standard approach is going through a major change in scope as of the last five years the conventional focus on determining optimal mitigation paths based on modelling the social cost of carbon is being enlarged to embrace promising new waves of research these are 1 the economics of insurance against catastrophic risks 2 the economics of trade and climate and 3 the economics of climate change adaptation the paper helps to bridge the gap between economics and climate policy by showing that the analytical toolkit of climate change economics has shifted towards more realistic representations of climatic policy

the effect of medicaid expansions for low income children on medicaid participation and private insurance coverage evidence from the sipp abstract we examine medicaid enrollment and private coverage loss following expansions of medicaid eligibility we attempt to replicate cutler and gruber s q j econ 111 1996 391 results using the survey of income and program participation sipp and find smaller rates of take up and little evidence of crowding out we find that some of the difference in results can be attributed to different samples and recall periods in the data sets used extending the previous literature we find that take up is slightly increased if a child s siblings are eligible and with time spent eligible focusing on children whose eligibility status changes during the sample we estimate smaller take up effects we find little evidence of crowding out in any of our extensions

climate cooperation with technology investments and border carbon adjustment a central question in climate policy is whether early investments in low carbon technologies are a useful first step towards a more effective climate agreement in the future we introduce a climate cooperation model with endogenous r d investments where countries protect their international competitiveness via border carbon adjustments bca bca raises the scope for cooperation and leads to a non trivial relation between countries prior r d investments and participation in the coalition we find that early investments in r d render free riding more attractive therefore with delayed cooperation on emission abatement and ex ante r d investments the outcome is often characterized by high participation but inefficiently low technology investments and abatement

rethinking climate change governance and its relationship to the world trading system international climate negotiations have thus far eschewed efforts to incorporate trade restrictions but they have also failed to achieve their objective of reducing global emissions because of this failure some countries are now inclined to act unilaterally and minilaterally in many cases by imposing trade restrictions against third parties such actions are likely to invite retaliation they could even ignite an escalating trade war the best way to avoid such conflicts is not to limit the use of trade restrictions but to make international climate negotiations effective ironically success in addressing climate change multilaterally may require incorporating trade restrictions in a new kind of climate agreement trade restrictions have been used successfully in other international agreements but in these agreements the primary purpose of the restrictions has been to encourage participation that is their primary purpose has been to enforce the agreement this is the role trade restrictions ought to play in a new climate treaty but for them to play this role the design of climate treaties must change if climate treaties are designed strategically the threat to restrict trade will suffice to enforce the agreement and if the threat to restrict trade is credible and the punishment associated with the restriction severe trade restrictions will not actually have to be used by incorporating trade restrictions in this way greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced without putting at risk the gains from multilateral cooperation in trade

negotiating a uniform emissions tax in international environmental agreements abstract a consensus appears to be emerging that a global carbon tax is the best policy for managing greenhouse gas emissions emissions tax systems are relatively straightforward cost effective and can generate revenues used to offset other distortionary taxes moreover recent theoretical research weitzman 2014 has demonstrated that under some conditions the globally efficient tax rate can be implemented through a majority voting rule we extend this area of research by examining a uniform emissions tax system in the framework of an international environmental agreement in which only countries that voluntarily participate are subject to the tax we show that in the simplest situation in which countries have identical marginal benefit and cost functions the largest stable agreement consists of two countries and the tax system has little impact on abatement levels our analysis highlights that by ignoring the participation decision and assuming commitment by all parties the efficiency gains from a uniform emissions tax system are overstated

international environmental agreements with mixed strategies and investment abstract we modify a canonical participation game used to study international environmental agreements iea considering both mixed and pure strategies at the participation stage and including a prior cost reducing investment stage the use of mixed strategies at the participation stage reverses a familiar result and also reverses the policy implication of that result with mixed strategies equilibrium participation and welfare are higher in equilibria that involve higher investment

towards a green economy through innovations the role of trade union involvement abstract in this paper we address the overlooked issue of whether and how industrial relations might play a role in the process of greening the economy primarily through the levers of innovation adoption and organisational change we address our objective econometrically assessing the quality of industrial relations as a driver of environmental innovation adoption through the use of micro data on manufacturing firms the results yield two interesting main findings being a unionised firm is not associated with the adoption of environmental innovation however when we consider the industrial relations climate we observe a positive relationship between a cooperative industrial relations climate union involvement and the propensity to introduce environmental innovation two models are relevant a managerially oriented model unions are informed and a participatory model unions bargain on innovation adoption the contents of environmental innovations are also important union involvement is more relevant for adopting more complex and radical innovations to abate co2 and ems and iso practices

the impact of wind generation on wholesale electricity prices in the hydro rich pacific northwest extant literature documents that wind generation can reduce wholesale electricity market prices by displacing conventional generation but how large is the wholesale price effect of wind generation in an electricity market dominated by hydroelectric generation we explore this question by analyzing the impact of wind generation on wholesale electricity prices in the pacific northwest region of the united states this hydro rich system tends to be energy limited rather than capacity constrained with its marginal generation during the hydro runoff season often a hydro unit instead of a natural gas fired unit we find that increased wind generation reduces wholesale market prices by a small but statistically significant amount while a hydro rich system can integrate wind generation at a lower cost than a thermal dominated region the direct economic benefits to end users from greater investment in wind power may be negligible

the impact of medicaid on labor market activity and program participation evidence from the oregon health insurance experiment united states dept of health and human services assistant secretary for planning and evaluation

value of an option to purchase electric power the case of uncertain consumption abstract large manufacturers and corporations often purchase options on power to protect themselves against unanticipated price increases this paper analyzes the impact of uncertainty in power consumption by a corporation on the value of an option to purchase electric power because there is no economically viable method to store power these options are exercised to satisfy immediate consumption needs only the amount exercised may differ from the maximum amount contracted which in turn alters the payoffs that accrue to the option contract we apply a monte carlo methodology to show that consumption uncertainty may substantively lower the price of an option contract under different conditions

modeling and pricing of block flexible electricity contracts this paper presents a model for block flexible electricity contracts bfec and focuses on pricing the bfec based on the principle of no arbitrage energy is traded in blocks according to its time duration at different block prices which is called block trading the bfec requires the buyer or the seller to schedule its trading amount and the certain block of power at each time interval the block trading needs to divide the power into several blocks the prices of each power block are obtained from market clearing price by using the autoregressive model ar n as stochastic block price model an optimal scheduling strategy can be achieved by stochastic dynamic programming the price of bfec is determined by the variables and schedule of the bfec contracts with different choices of block are studied and the simulations illustrate the block flexible electricity contracts can improve power market efficiency

a model of technological breakthrough in the renewable energy sector abstract models with induced technological change in the energy sector often predict a gradual expansion of renewable energies and a substantial share of fossil fuels remaining in the energy mix through the end of our century however there are historical examples where new products or technologies expanded rapidly and achieved a high output in a relatively short period of time this paper explores the possibility of a technological breakthrough in the renewable energy sector using a partial equilibrium model of energy generation with endogenous r d our results indicate that due to increasing returns to scale a multiplicity of equilibria can arise in the model two stable states can coexist one characterized by a lower and one by higher supply of renewable energy the transition from the low output to the high output equilibrium is characterized by a discontinuous rise in r d activity and capacity investments in the renewable energy sector the transition can be triggered by a rise in world energy demand by a drop in the supply of fossil fuels or by policy intervention under market conditions the transition occurs later than in the social optimum hence we identify a market failure related to path dependence and technological lock in that can justify a strong policy intervention initially paradoxically well intended energy saving policies can actually lead to higher emissions as they reduce the incentives to invest in renewable energies by having a cushioning effect on the energy price hence these policies should be supplemented by other instruments that restore the incentives to invest in renewable energies finally we discuss the influence of monopoly power in the market for innovations we show that market power can alleviate the problem of technological lock in but creates a new market failure that reduces static efficiency

international cooperation on climate friendly technologies we examine international cooperation on technological development as an alternative to international cooperation on emission reductions we show that without any r d cooperation r d in each country should be increased beyond the non cooperative level if i the technology level in one country is positively affected by r d in other countries ii the domestic carbon tax is lower than the pigovian level or iii the domestic carbon tax is set directly through an international tax agreement we also show that a second best technology agreement has higher r d higher emissions or both compared with the first best outcome the second best subsidy always exceeds the subsidy under no international r d cooperation further when the price of carbon is the same in the second best technology agreement and in the case without r d cooperation welfare is highest r d is highest and emissions are lowest in the second best r d agreement

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

early life health interventions and academic achievement this paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school we use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients such as the classification of very low birth weight vlbw which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from chile and norway we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school these gains are in the order of 0 15 0 22 standard deviations

the advancedness of knowledge in pollution saving technological change with a qualitative application to so2 cap and trade this paper investigates the extent to which advanced knowledge and technology played a role in the so2 compliance process in electric power plants under the us so2 cap and trade program it investigates the hypothesis that advanced knowledge and technology dedicated to pollution abatement played a minor role in that process while relatively unadvanced forms of knowledge and technology played the main role new qualitative evidence in this somewhat well known case is considered interviews with electric power plant r d managers plant level compliance data and the changes undergone by boiler manufacturer coal mining and railroad companies in the supply chain advanced knowledge dedicated to pollution abatement like the type now being emphasised for carbon capture and storage ccs played a minor role while unadvanced knowledge and technology played the main role while there are clearly limits to how far this unadvanced knowledge and technology finding can be generalised to ghg emission control the specific aspects of the so2 case that might be broadly informative of the response to ghg emissions are elaborated in any case the paper shows how innovation in pollution control can be inexpensive and effective without involving very much advanced knowledge and technology for pollution control

using differences in knowledge across neighborhoods to uncover the impacts of the eitc on earnings we develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy we apply this method to characterize the impacts of the earned income tax credit eitc on earnings using administrative tax records covering all eitc eligible lers from 19962009 we begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the eitc schedule the degree of sharp bunching at the exact income level that maximizes eitc refunds by individuals who report self employment income the degree of self employed sharp bunching varies signi cantly

tipping versus cooperating to supply a public good in some important multiplayer situations such as efforts to supply a global public good players can choose the game they want to play in this paper we conduct an experimental test of the decision by a group with fixed membership playing over a finite number of periods to choose between a tipping game in which every player wants to contribute to the public good provided enough other players contribute and a prisoners dilemma the classic cooperation game in the prisoners dilemma the first best outcome is attainable but cannot be sustained as a nash equilibrium in the tipping game only a second best outcome may be attainable but there exists a nash equilibrium that is strictly preferred to the one in the prisoners dilemma we show that many groups persistently choose the prisoners dilemma despite its strategic disadvantage and that the groups that eventually choose the tipping game do better than the ones that stick with the prisoners dilemma

employment hysteresis from the great recession this paper uses us local areas as a laboratory to test for long term impacts of the great recession in administrative longitudinal data i estimate that exposure to a 1 percentage point larger 200

state abortion rates the impact of policies providers politics demographics and economic environment abstract this paper uses data on abortion rates by state from 1974 1988 to estimate two stage least squares models with fixed state and year effects restrictions on medicaid funding for abortion are correlated with lower abortion rates in state and higher rates among nearby states a maximal estimate suggests that 19 25 of the abortions among low income women that are publicly funded do not take place after funding is eliminated parental notification laws for teen abortions do not significantly affect aggregate abortion rates a larger number of abortion providers in a state increases the abortion rate primarily through inducing cross state travel

health insurance and mortality experimental evidence from taxpayer outreach we evaluate a randomized pilot study in which the irs sent informational letters to 3 9 million taxpayers who paid a tax penalty for lacking health insurance coverage under the affordable care act drawing on administrative data we study the effect of the intervention on taxpayers subsequent health insurance enrollment and mortality we find the intervention led to increased coverage in the two years following treatment and that this additional coverage reduced mortality among middle aged adults over the same time period our results provide the first experimental evidence that health insurance reduces mortality

the oregon health insurance experiment evidence from the first year in 2008 a group of uninsured low income adults in oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for medicaid this lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use financial strain and health of low income adults using a randomized controlled design in the year after random assignment the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected we find that in this first year the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations lower out of pocket medical expenditures and medical debt including fewer bills sent to collection and better self reported physical and mental health than the control group

electricity market reform failures uk norway alberta and california an analysis of electricity market reforms already taken place in the uk norway alberta canada and california usa leads to our overall conclusion that the introduction of a competitive generation market of itself has failed to deliver reliable service at low and stable prices the market reform failures are attributed to market power abuse by few dominant sellers especially at times of transmission congestion poor market design that invites strategic bidding by suppliers the lack of customer response to price spikes capacity shortage caused by demand growth not matched by new capacity and thin trading of forward and futures contracts that are critical for price discovery and risk management the paper then explains why an electricity market reform can easily fail to deliver the promised gains of better service at lower and more stable prices the policy implication is that an electric market reform can be extremely risky and may lead to a disastrous outcome thus it is imprudent to implement such a reform in countries with limited sites for newgeneration and no indigenous fuels e g israel and hong kong these countries should therefore consider introducing performance based regulation that can immediately benefit electricity consumers in terms of lower prices more stable prices improved reliability more choices while encouraging the electric sector to pursue efficient operation and investment r 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families lleras muney we estimate the long run impact of cash transfers to poor families on children s longevity educational attainment nutritional status and income in adulthood to do so we collected individual level administrative records of applicants to the mothers pension program the first government sponsored welfare program in the united states 1911 1935 and matched them to census wwii and death records male children of accepted applicants lived one year longer than those of rejected mothers they also obtained onethird more years of schooling were less likely to be underweight and had higher income in adulthood than children of rejected mothers jel i12 i14 i18 i32 i38 j16 n32

the effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children new evidence from the moving to opportunity experiment the moving to opportunity mto experiment offered randomly selected families housing vouchers to move from high poverty housing projects to lower poverty neighborhoods we analyze mto s impacts on children s long term outcomes using tax data we find that moving to a lower poverty neighborhood when young before age 13 increases college attendance and earnings and reduces single parenthood rates moving as an adolescent has slightly negative impacts perhaps because of disruption effects the decline in the gains from moving with the age when children move suggests that the duration of exposure to better environments during childhood is an important determinant of children s long term outcomes jel i31 i38 j13 r23 r38

how does your kindergarten classroom affect your earnings evidence from project star in project star 11 571 students in tennessee and their teachers were randomly assigned to classrooms within their schools from kindergarten to third grade this article evaluates the long term impacts of star by linking the experimental data to administrative records we first demonstrate that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes such as earnings at age 27 college attendance home ownership and retirement savings we then document four sets of experimental impacts first students in small classes are significantly more likely to attend college and exhibit improvements on other outcomes class size does not have a significant effect on earnings at age 27 but this effect is imprecisely estimated second students who had a more experienced teacher in kindergarten have higher earnings third an analysis of variance reveals significant classroom effects on earnings students who were randomly assigned to higher quality classrooms in grades k 3 as measured by classmates end of class test scores have higher earnings college attendance rates and other outcomes finally the effects of class quality fade out on test scores in later grades but gains in noncognitive measures persist

a unified welfare analysis of government policies we conduct a comparative welfare analysis of 133 historical policy changes over the past half century in the united states focusing on policies in social insurance education and job training taxes and cash transfers and in kind transfers for each policy we use existing causal estimates to calculate both the benefit that each policy provides its recipients measured as their willingness to pay and the policy s net cost inclusive of long term impacts on the government s budget we divide the willingness to pay by the net cost to the government to form each policy s marginal value of public funds or its mvpf comparing mvpfs across policies provides a unified method of assessing their impact on social welfare our results suggest that direct investments in low income children s health and education have historically had the highest mvpfs on average exceeding 5 many such policies have paid for themselves as governments recouped the cost of their initial expenditures through additional taxes collected and reduced transfers we find large mvpfs for education and health policies amongst children of all ages rather than observing diminishing marginal returns throughout childhood we find smaller mvpfs for policies targeting adults generally between 0 5 and 2 expenditures on adults have exceeded this mvpf range in particular if they induced large spillovers on children we relate our estimates to existing theories of optimal government policy and we discuss how the mvpf provides lessons for the design of future research

long run impacts of childhood access to the safety net a growing economics literature establishes a causal link between in utero shocks and health and human capital in adulthood most studies rely on extreme negative shocks such as famine and pandemics we are the first to examine the impact of a positive and policy driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood in particular we focus on the introduction of a key element of the u s safety net the food stamp program which was rolled out across counties in the u s between 1961 and 1975 we use the panel study of income dynamics to assemble unique data linking family background and county of residence in early childhood to adult health and economic outcomes the identification comes from variation across counties and over birth cohorts in availability of the food stamp program our findings indicate that the food stamp program has effects decades after initial exposure specifically access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of metabolic syndrome obesity high blood pressure and diabetes and for women an increase in economic self sufficiency overall our results suggest substantial internal and external benefits of the safety net that have not previously been quantified

climate change environmental and technology policies in a strategic context there are a number of features of climate change which make it one of the most challenging problems confronting policy makers and policy analysts in this paper we consider three such features i climate change is a global pollutant so there are strategic interactions between governments over climate policy ii cutting greenhouse gas emissions can have significant cost effects across a number of sectors of the economy raising concerns about the implications of climate change policy on competitive advantage iii the long time scales on which climate change operates means that an important dimension of climate change policy is policy towards r d to cut the costs of dealing with climate change in ulph and ulph 1996 ulph a ulph d 1996 in carraro c katsoulacos y xepapadeas a eds environmental policy and market structure kluwer dordrecht pp 181 208 we presented a model to analyse these issues but considered only environmental policies in this paper we extend that analysis to allow for both a richer set of policy instruments environmental and technology policies and a richer strategic context

long term impacts of childhood medicaid expansions on outcomes in adulthood we use administrative data from the internal revenue service to examine long term impacts of childhood medicaid eligibility expansions on outcomes in adulthood at each age from 19 to 28 greater medicaid eligibility increases college enrolment and decreases fertility especially through age 21 starting at age 23 females have higher contemporaneous wage income although male increases are imprecise together both genders have lower mortality these adults collect less from the earned income tax credit and pay more in taxes cumulatively from ages 19 to 28 at a 3 discount rate the federal government recoups 58 cents of each dollar of its investment in childhood medicaid

worms at work long run impacts of a child health investment this study estimates long run impacts of a child health investment exploiting community wide experimental variation in school based deworming the program increased labor supply among men and education among women with accompanying shifts in labor market specialization ten years after deworming treatment men who were eligible as boys stay enrolled for more years of primary school work 17 more hours each week spend more time in nonagricultural self employment are more likely to hold manufacturing jobs and miss one fewer meal per week women who were in treatment schools as girls are approximately one quarter more likely to have attended secondary school halving the gender gap they reallocate time from traditional agriculture into cash crops and nonagricultural self employment we estimate a conservative annualized financial internal rate of return to deworming of 32 and show that mass deworming may generate more in future government revenue than it costs in subsidies

did a local distribution company procure prudently during the california electricity crisis abstract to manage cost risk prudent procurement of electric power requires that some portion of a buyer s energy demand be met through long term contracting under cost of service regulation or performance based regulation a local distribution company ldc should be allowed to fully recover all prudently incurred power procurement costs however the regulatory test of prudence is an ex post review with the threat of disallowance this paper presents an economic analysis of procurement prudence involving a small ldc bear valley electric service bves which serves a resort area in southern california the key findings are a high and volatile prices and rolling blackouts characterized the market environment faced by the owner of bves southern california water company scwc at its signing of a 5 year fixed price contract b scwc was a price taker with no incentive to act imprudently c the contract was obtained via a competitive bidding process d the contract price was comparable to the benchmark price of contemporaneous contracts e the fixed price contract was economic when compared to available alternatives and f despite a e a negotiated settlement with the state regulator and a large user resulted in substantial disallowance the policy implication is that a regulator should approve a prudent procurement plan proposed by an ldc to remove the unreasonable risk of an ex post review if the ldc strictly adheres to the plan the resulting electricity purchases are per se prudent and should entitle the ldc to full cost recovery

institutions and behavior experimental evidence on the effects of democracy a novel experiment is used to show that the effect of a policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it is chosen democratically by the subjects than when it is exogenously imposed in contrast to the previous literature our experimental design allows us to control for selection effects e g those who choose the policy may be affected differently by it our finding implies that democratic institutions may affect behavior directly in addition to having effects through the choice of policies our findings have implications for the generalizability of the results of randomized policy interventions

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

climate treaties and breakthrough technologies an effective climate change treaty must promote the joint supply of two global public goods climate change mitigation and knowledge of new technologies that can lower mitigation costs r d is especially needed to bring about substantial long term reductions in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases for this will require the development and diffusion of revolutionary breakthrough technologies martin i hoffert et al 2002 in principle such an outcome could be realized by the kyoto protocol approach if that agreement were strengthened over time however that response may be inadequate kyoto makes no provision for r d and as i shall demonstrate unlikely to succeed can a treaty system relying directly on targeted r d and the adoption of breakthrough technologies perform better in this same setting of anarchic international relations i will show that as a general rule the answer is no essentially the same forces that undermine kyoto also challenge the r d and technology approach there is one exception to this rule r d leading to breakthrough technologies exhibiting increasing returns can improve dramatically on the kyoto approach even when these technologies are otherwise inferior to the alternatives available this suggests that our approach to treaty design should be strategic

emission taxes versus other environmental policies in the environmental policy of most countries various forms of quotas and direct regulation are more important than environmental taxes this paper addresses four arguments which are often given against the use of emission taxes the three arguments related to information asymmetries and non convexities are valid in the sense that they point to complications in the use of environmental taxes the fourth argument is related to the employment effects of different types of environmental policies in economies with unemployment although this argument is frequently used by politicians the analysis provides no justification for it on the contrary in the model used employment is higher with environmental taxes than with nonrevenue raising environmental policies

agreeing on efficient emissions reduction we propose a simple contest based mechanism providing incentives to reduce harmful emissions to their efficient level without infringing upon productive efficiency participation in the most stylized form of the scheme is voluntary and individually rational all rules are mutually agreeable and are unanimously adopted if proposed the scheme balances its budget and requires no principal in a perhaps more realistic stochastic output version which could potentially inform policy decisions we show that the transfers required by the efficient mechanism create a mutual insurance motive that can serve as an effective rationale for the gradual formation of international environmental agreements

communicating trade offs amid controversial science decision support for climate policy abstract the paper considers the decision that arises in climate policy where there is expert disagreement about the correct scientific model and where a group of stakeholders needs to agree on a common policy target policy choice is posed as a decision under knightian uncertainty where decision makers lack grounds for assigning a particular probability distribution across contending forecasting models the decision is then framed as one of balancing two competing objectives that plausibly align with the dominant concern of stakeholders from each side in the policy debate a decision criterion is proposed to identify options for compromise that balance these objectives in different ways the criterion spans three standard non bayesian decision criteria policies generated by the criterion are combined with visual tools to communicate what s at stake in an environmental policy decision in which stakeholders disagree both about scientific models and about the relative importance of risks to the environment versus risks to economic growth the approach summarizes information that could be useful to policy makers tasked with negotiating a compromise the framework is applied to climate policy using dice 2007 nordhaus 2008 the results highlight a basic asymmetry between the mistake of doing too little and that of doing too much that suggests a strong argument for avoiding the current status quo of global inaction

climate policy commitment devices abstract we develop a dynamic resource extraction game that mimics the global multi generation planning problem for climate change and fossil fuel extraction we implement the game under different conditions in the laboratory compared to a baseline condition we find that policy interventions that provide a costly commitment device or reduce climate threshold uncertainty reduce resource extraction we also study two conditions to assess the underlying social preferences and the viability of ecological dictatorship our results suggest that climate change policies that focus on investments that lock the economy into carbon free energy sources provide an important commitment device in the intertemporal cooperation problem

bounding causal effects using data from a contaminated natural experiment analysing the effects of teenage childbearing in this paper we consider what can be learned about causal effects when one uses a contaminated instrumental variable in particular we consider what inferences can be made about the causal effect of teenage childbearing on a teen mother s subsequent outcomes when we use the natural experiment of miscarriages to form an instrumental variable for teen births miscarriages might not meet all of the conditions required for an instrumental variable to identify such causal effects for all of the observations in our sample however it is an appropriate instrumental variable for some women namely those pregnant women who experience a random miscarriage although information from typical data sources does not allow one to identify these women we show that one can adapt results from horowitz and manski 1995 on identification with data from contaminated samples to construct informative bounds on the causal effect of teenage childbearing we use these bounds to re examine the effects of early chilbearing on the teen mother s subsequent educational and labour market attainment as considered in hotz mcelroy and sanders 1995a 1995b consistent with their study these bounds indicate that women who have births as teens have higher labour market earnings and hours worked compared to what they would have attained if their childbearing had been delayed

participation games and international environmental agreements a non parametric model abstract we examine the size of stable coalitions in a participation game that has been used to model international environmental agreements cartel formation rd based on these examples a consensus has emerged that in this kind of game the equilibrium coalition size is small except possibly when the potential benefits of cooperation are also small in this paper we develop a non parametric approach to the problem and demonstrate that the conventional wisdom is not robust in a general setting we identify conditions under which the equilibrium coalition size can be large even when potential gains are large contrary to previously examined leading special cases we show that reductions in marginal abatement costs in an international environmental game can increase equilibrium membership and we provide a measure of the smallest reduction in costs needed to support a coalition of arbitrary size

the effect of child health insurance access on schooling evidence from public insurance expansions although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of public health insurance programs on short run health outcomes little prior work has examined their long term effects we examine the effects of public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment we find that expanding health insurance coverage for low income children increases the rate of high school and college completion these estimates are robust to only using federal medicaid expansions and mostly are due to expansions that occur when the children are not newborns our results indicate that the long run benefits of public health insurance are substantial

reciprocal climate negotiators abstract do reciprocal preferences matter for participation in international environmental agreements combining the two canonical models of barrett 2003 and rabin 1993 i find that 1 the empty coalition is always stable 2 the grand coalition is stable if reciprocity preferences are sufficiently strong 3 if a minority of countries are not reciprocal a majority coalition can still be stable if reciprocity is sufficiently strong and widespread and 4 there is also a stable minority coalition if costs are moderate and the number of countries is not too small the latter coalition is weakly larger than the maximum stable coalition with standard preferences but barely improves on welfare and is characterized by negative sentiments the analysis illustrates that although models of reciprocity tend to be complex the context of a specific applied game may reduce this complexity

the incentives for north south transfer of climate mitigation technologies with trade in polluting goods the need to transfer climate mitigation technologies towards the developing world has been acknowledged since the beginning of climate negotiations little progress has however been made as shown by article 10 of the paris agreement one reason is that these technologies could become vital assets to compete on global markets this paper presents a partial equilibrium model with two regions the north and the south and imperfect competition in the international polluting goods market to analyze the north s incentives to accept technology transfer results crucially depend on the existence of environmental cooperation when both northern and southern governments set emission quotas non cooperatively inducing fewer global emissions is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the north to accept the transfer in contrast when governments set quotas cooperatively the north has no incentive to share its technology either before or after the agreement technology transfer commitments may be included in the agreement but with no effect on global emissions and global surplus the only impacts are distributional technology transfers and side payments may be substitute instruments

participation and duration of environmental agreements we analyze participation in international environmental agreements in a dynamic game in which countries pollute and invest in green technologies if complete contracts are feasible participants eliminate the holdup problem associated with their investments however most countries prefer to free ride rather than participate if investments are noncontractible countries face a holdup problem every time they negotiate but the free rider problem can be mitigated and significant participation is feasible participation becomes attractive because only large coalitions commit to long term agreements that circumvent the holdup problem under well specified conditions even the first best outcome is possible when the contract is incomplete

a critical assessment of the hong kong government s proposed post 2008 regulatory regime for local electricity utilities abstract in december 2005 the hong kong government issued a consultation paper on future development of the electricity markets in hong kong stage ii consultation proposing a post 2008 regulatory regime upon the expiration of the existing regulatory contract between the hong kong government and each of the two local electricity utilities we assess the proposal using the criteria of safe reliable and environmentally friendly service at the lowest rates that will allow the utilities reasonable returns on their investments we caution that if fully adopted the highly risky proposal may lead to less reliable service without the compensating benefits to the environment

exploring the nature of inter country interactions in the process of ratifying international environmental agreements the case of the kyoto protocol international environmental agreements require negotiation and cooperation among countries this paper attempts to analyze the presence and nature of inter country interactions in the process of ratifying such agreements we develop a theoretical argument based on the notions of strategic substitutability and strategic complementarity and study the interactions among three different peer types geographic neighbors trading partners and green investment projects partners in our case clean development mechanism projects partners we test for the presence of interactions by taking into account a temporal dimension which constitutes a methodological contribution to this end we introduce spatially lagged endogenous variables into a parametric survival model and apply the proposed framework to the kyoto protocol ratification process our data sample covers 164 countries for the period 1998 to 2009 we find evidence that while countries ratification decisions are basically strategic substitutes they become strategic complements once we focus on the ratification decisions of specific peers

will extending medicaid to two parent families encourage marriage several welfare programs in the united states restrict eligibility to single parent families this paper asks whether eliminating this restriction for medicaid encourages marriage i identify medicaid s effect through a series of health insurance reforms that were passed in the 1980s and 1990s targeting young children these reforms were associated with an increase in the probability of marriage of 1 7 percentage points while the expansions offered some incentives to become married they also created other incentives to become divorced known as the independence effect after controlling for the outflows from marriage due to the independence effect the estimated effect increases by 10 percent

does welfare inhibit success the long term effects of removing low income youth from the disability rolls i estimate the effects of removing low income youth with disabilities from supplemental security income ssi on their earnings and income in adulthood using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews i find that youth who are removed from ssi at age 18 recover one third of the lost ssi cash income in earnings ssi youth who are removed and stay off ssi earn on average 4 400 annually and they lose 76 000 in present discounted observed income over the 16 years following removal relative to those who do not receive a review jel i30 i38 j14 supporters of welfare programs defend them as vital lifelines for those who face barriers to work while critics charge that these programs create perverse incentives to qualify and perpetuate dependency encapsulating this debate is the controversy over the us supplemental security income ssi program a program that provides cash payments and medicaid eligibility to low income children and adults with disabilities and the aged elderly after three decades of rapid expansion ssi is now the largest nonwork based cash welfare program in the united states paying about 50 billion each year to 8 million recipients including 1 3 million children 1 ssi has been singled out by policymakers and the media for potential perverse incentives

the incredible economics of geoengineering the focus of climate policy so far has been on reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases that approach however requires broad international cooperation and being expensive has been hindered by free riding so far little action has been taken an alternative approach is to counteract climate change by reducing the amount of solar radiation that strikes the earth geoengineering in contrast to emission reductions this approach is inexpensive and can be undertaken by a single country unilaterally but geoengineering also has worrying consequences it may harm some countries it would not address ocean acidification it would pose new risks the fundamental challenge posed by this new technology is not free riding but governance who should decide if and under what circumstances geoengineering should be used

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site