intergenerational equity and sustainability abstract this paper explores the limitations of conventional economic analysis of intergenerational problems and examines some of the alternatives suggested in the literature it is argued that proper consideration of future generations has at least three requirements first when future costs and benefits are considered it should be taken into account that they are to be enjoyed by different generations second the sustainability requirement should be adopted this represents an equity commitment to the future and implies the recognition that future generations have the right to nondeteriorated ecological and economic capacity the paper studies the ways in which the recognition of these rights might be incorporated into economic evaluation and management third an appropriate institutional network to enforce the recognition of these rights in decision making processes should be constituted its design and necessary functions are also analyzed

sustainability and externalities is the internalization of externalities a sufficient condition for sustainability in an important contribution in ecological economics van de bergh 2010 correctly concludes that sustainability does not imply zero externalities however he continues with the delphic statement delphic statements were uttered by the renowned oracle of ancient greece at delphi they were phrased in such a way as to be self fulfilling because alternative interpretations covered every possibility without externalities the problem of sustainability vanishes if this statement refers to an impossible economic process that produces no externalities then he is right however it might be interpreted as stating that whenever environmental policy internalizes environmental externalities then sustainability will be ensured in this note i assert that in the real world where externalities prevail their internalization or neutralization in the traditional way cannot lead to sustainability only if internalization takes a very specific form that results in the inviolable preservation of environmental rights of future generations in pure biological terms can sustainability be ensured after revised the original commentary i resubmit it the issues raised by the editor have been carefully considered

towards an operational sustainability criterion abstract this paper examines the concept of sustainability and its implications for environmental policy analysis it builds on the premise that present society holds a moral obligation to pass on a world of undiminished life opportunities to members of future generations maintaining life opportunities in turn can be achieved by maintaining or improving a diverse set of resources and capabilities that support a person s freedom to define and pursue her own conception of the good life on an operational level this framework points to the following guideline for environmental policy protecting the rights of future generations requires either the conservation of environmental resources or compensatory measures including the provision of substitute technologies that ensure the fair and proportionate sharing of net benefits over intergenerational time scales in this framework resource depletion is permissible only if with reasonable certainty it would generate a pareto improvement relative to a baseline scenario involving strict resource conservation

sustainability and the intergenerational distribution of natural resource entitlements abstract the paper describes an olg economy with a single exhaustible resource that has amenity value the steady states of this economy form a continuum implying path dependency we compare three policy scenarios first a zero extraction policy of enforced conservation that avoids environmental degradation possibly at the expense of intertemporal efficiency second a grandfathering policy that endows the present generations with all resources and that ensures efficiency but cannot prevent a persistent decline in lifetime utility from one generation to the next third a trust fund policy where future generations receive claims for the natural resource of the three only the trust fund ensures efficiency and protects welfare of all generations

maternal education home environments and the development of children and adolescents we study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children s cognitive achievement behavioral problems grade repetition and obesity we address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up using matched data from the female participants of the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 nlsy79 and their children we can control for mother s ability and family background factors our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education for children aged 7 8 for example our iv results indicate that an additional year of mother s schooling increases the child s performance on a standardized math test by almost 0 1 of a standard deviation and reduces the incidence of behavioral problems our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child we find that income effects delayed childbearing and assortative mating are likely to be important and we show that maternal education leads to substantial differences in maternal labor supply we investigate heterogeneity in returns and we present results focusing both on very early stages in the child s life as well as adolescent outcomes we present a falsification exercise to support the validity of our instruments and our results are found to be robust in a sensitivity analysis we discuss policy implications and relate our findings to intergenerational mobility

bride price and fertility decisions evidence from rural senegal abstractthis paper provides evidence about the relationship between bride price payments and fertility decisions in senegal higher bride price payments reduce the fertility pressure for women with results being robust to confounding socio economic and contextual factors the fertility reducing impact is greater for women who are economically dependent on their husbands in polygamous households and for arranged marriages a lower bride price increases fertility pressure while in monogamous households and for non arranged marriages the bride price does not affect fertility as bride price payments have less power over economically independent women empowerment will give leeway to girls in traditional societies

the origins of intergenerational associations lessons from swedish adoption data we use unique swedish data with information on adopted children s biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education we argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors including genes and prenatal environment and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors such as childhood environment we find that both pre and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions and that prebirth factors are more important for mother s education and less important for father s income we also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors

help wanted job needed estimates of a matching function from employment service data i estimate a function that matches vacant jobs and unemployed workers to produce new hires israeli law requiring vacancy registration yields unique data quality the literature underestimates matching function coefficients because of a simultaneity bias as the outflow of hires depletes stocks of unemployed and vacancies instruments and a new simulation method address this bias a new test reveals strong evidence of heterogeneity in unemployed and vacancies estimates imply labor market dynamics that absorb shocks completely within only 2 months reductions in the hire rate of referrals can explain a 2 1 percentage point increase in unemployment between 1978 and 1990

comprehensive life cycle assessment by transferring of preventative costs in the supply chain of products a first draft of the oiconomy system abstract a major part of global unsustainability is embedded in consumption and the processes involved in the lifecycle of products but there is currently no comprehensive and objective method for product sustainability measurement including both environmental and social issues this requires a life cycle approach current life cycle assessment lca systems developed to compare environmental performance of products and production alternatives have many shortcomings if used to comprehensively measure product sustainability the most important shortcomings are the lack of a measuring standard the top down approach the weighting of different issues the very laborious procedures of addressing specific supply chains limitation to environmental aspects the very complex nature of impact based data and difficult database maintenance this article presents a new type of bottom up and product specific lca for the comprehensive measurement of the hidden environmental and social costs of products every supply chain actor collects the upstream supply chain hidden costs calculates and adds its own contribution and transfers the result to the next link by means of a monetary unit the eco social cost unit escu every escu allocation is the product of a quantitative factor for an issue and a price factor the uniform measurement of the quantitative factor their transfer through the supply chain and the creation of a self learning database of the price factors is achieved by means of a standard the price factor represents the marginal preventative costs for the relative impact category of sustainability issues for initial determination of the price factor this article extends the ecocost value ratio system developed by vogtlander et al to social issues discusses implications of the system its principles advantages research challenges and limitations and proposes system boundaries for application of the system and future research contributions to the project

does increasing women s schooling raise the schooling of the next generation the positive cross sectional relationship between the schooling of mothers and their children is substantially biased upward due to correlations between schooling and heritable ability as well as assortative mating an increase in the schooling of women would not have beneficial effects in terms of the schooling of children increased maternal schooling leads to reduced home time for mothers anticipating the consequences of investing in women s schooling requires attention to the role that schooling plays in the marriage market as well as to opportunities in the labor market for women

nature roads or hospitals an empirical evaluation of sustainable development preferences while a key proposition is that a sustainable path is one where wealth does not decline whether losses in natural capital can be compensated in wellbeing terms by more produced social or natural capital remains an area of controversy in this paper we seek to better understand preferences for different combinations of assets that comprise part of the asset portfolio of a nation in a study of coastal and marine natural assets we test for the existence of weak or strong sustainability preferences using different compensation options respectively produced capital and natural capital offered to a sample of the public in spain in the case of possible future oil spills as a further element of this test we provide an empirical reflection on aldred 2002 2006 and turner 2007 who speculate that individuals may not view money as compensating for certain environmental losses whereas investments in social assets may offer a more acceptable compensation option our results do appear to circumscribe in some way the acceptability of investing in produced capital and reveal a tendency towards a preference for social capital compensation nevertheless the size of the oil spill and the environmental beliefs of respondents also influence choices over the natural capital compensation option

the right man for the job this paper describes a search model with a continuum of worker and job types free entry and transferable utility we apply a second order taylor expansion to characterize the equilibrium derive the cost of search and show that it is decreasing in the substitutability of worker types this cost of search is then decomposed into three components unemployment vacancy costs and mismatch our contact technology rules out congestion effects between different worker types and therefore exhibits increasing returns to scale one third of those increasing returns in contacts are shown to be absorbed by firms and workers being more choosy the resulting equilibrium is not efficient unemployment benefits can reduce the loss by serving as a search subsidy numerical simulations of the model show that our taylor expansions are quite accurate 2004 the review of economics studies limited

how important is parental education for child nutrition existing evidence on the impacts of parental education on child nutrition is plagued by both internal and external validity concerns in this paper we try to address these concerns through a novel econometric analysis of 376 992 preschool children from 56 developing countries we compare a naive least square model to specifications that include cluster fixed effects and cohort based educational rankings to reduce biases from omitted variables before gauging sensitivity to sub samples and exploring potential explanations of education nutrition linkages we find that the estimated nutritional returns to parental education are a substantially reduced in models that include fixed effects and cohort rankings b larger for mothers than for fathers c generally increasing and minimal for primary education d increasing with household wealth e larger in countries regions with higher burdens of undernutrition f larger in countries regions with higher schooling quality and g highly variable across country sub samples these results imply substantial uncertainty and variability in the returns to education but results from the more stringent models imply that even the achievement of very ambitious education targets would only lead to modest reductions in stunting rates in high burden countries we speculate that education might have more impact on the nutritional status of the next generation if school curricula focused on directly improving health and nutritional knowledge of future parents

measuring the existence value of wildlife reply we know little about the motives underlying individual responses to contingent valuation cv questions concerning the existence of wildlife yet motives are important because they determine how the resulting value estimates should be interpreted and used in making management decisions for example zero bids are very common in cv but these are often protests that do not represent zero valuation for the resource itself protest zero bids may be particularly prevalent in wildlife existence value studies because some people may view trade offs between money and wildlife as unethical or immoral if protest zero bids are not interpreted correctly existence value estimates obviously will be biased the motives underlying positive cv bids also matter unfortunately these motives have received much less research attention and so may be more controversial our study of wildlife values in new england suggests that many respondents who gave positive bids were motivated by ethical concerns altruism or the desire to do their fair share concerns that indicate they used decision making processes inconsistent with the neoclassical paradigm stevens et al 1991 cv results may therefore fail to measure the economic value of existence in traditional terms the bergson tintner samuelson formulation presented by kohn 1993 is useful in this context because it attempts to disentangle behavior motivated by ethical concerns about existence from preferences about wildlife use each individual is assumed to wear two hats one as citizen the other as consumer from this perspective citizens express social values which may be ethically driven while economic values are expressed by consumers kohn suggests that we make use of this distinction by first asking respondents as citizens to make implicit trade offs between income and the preservation of wildlife respondents are then asked about their willingness to pay for the option of consuming wildlife while this is an interesting proposal the bergson tintner samuelson framework is only one of several alternative theories about behavior involving ethical considerations for discussion these theories can be classified into three groups a theories of social or group interest b natural rights and c theories based upon the neoclassical model of self interest social interest theories include the bergson tintner samuelson formulation outlined by kohn and the dual utilities model proposed by margolis 1982 margolis suggests that people are motivated by two basic concerns a self interest and b social or group interest social interest which pertains to the welfare of society as a whole is assumed to be governed in part by ethics moral duty and commitment expressions of social interest include charity participation in the political process voting and contributions for the provision of public goods margolis maintains that the neoclassical theory of self interest generally fails to adequately explain individual behavior about social interests and he proposes a dual utilities model of individual preferences in which people have irreducibly distinct social and private preferences unlike the framework proposed by kohn there is no grand maximum where social value is traded off against private value rather individuals are assumed to allocate income between social and private preferences so as to do their fair share for the welfare of society as a whole con

social ecology sustainability and economics article i nfo what mode of analysis might be employed that captures the confluent action of material and social systems acting together the framework of social ecology which first emerged as a rejoinder to the chicago school of human ecology of the early 1900s evolved over subsequent decades as an attempt at such integration we revisit social ecology s historical origins and foundational assumptions we propose that the social ecological framework can offer useful conceptual grounding to scholars of ecological economics we illustrate how this analytical lens affords a deeper understanding of unsustainable systems and valuation problems

the intergenerational effects of compulsory schooling this article attempts to improve our understanding of the causal processes that contribute to intergenerational immobility by exploiting historical changes in compulsory schooling laws that affected the educational attainment of parents without affecting their innate abilities or endowments we examine the influence of parental compulsory schooling on children s grade for age using the 1960 1970 and 1980 u s censuses our estimates indicate that a 1 year increase in the education of either parent reduces the probability that a child repeats a grade by between 2 and 4 percentage points

willingness to pay of committed citizens a field experiment in this paper we propose a behavioral approach to determine the extent to which the consumer citizen distinction affects interpretations of monetary values in stated preferences methods we perform a field experiment dealing with air pollution where some randomly selected subjects are given the opportunity to behave politically by signing a petition for environmental protection prior to stating their private preferences in a standard contingent valuation exercise we show that signing has the potential to influence respondents willingness to pay values results indicate that even market like situations are not immune to citizen behavior

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

externality or sustainability economics abstract in an effort to develop sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010 neglect the central concept of environmental economics environmental externality this note proposes a possible connection between the concepts of environmental externality and sustainability in addition attention is asked for other aspects of sustainability economics namely the distinction weak strong sustainability spatial sustainability and sustainable trade distinctive sustainability policy and the ideas of early sustainability economists i argue that both sustainability and externalities reflect a systems perspective and propose that effective sustainability solutions require that more attention is given to system feedbacks notably other regarding preferences and social interactions and energy and environmental rebound the case of climate change and policy is used to illustrate particular statements as a conclusion a list of 20 insights and suggestions for research is offered

one sided sustainability tests with amenities and changes in technology trade and population abstract if an economy with multiple consumption goods including environmental amenities uniquely maximises present value with constant discounting it is unsustainable at some time if either of two measures augmented net investment or the change in augmented green net national product are zero or negative then augmented denotes that time is treated as a productive stock which includes in each measure the value of future exogenous changes in technology or terms of trade adjustments are found to make each measure a test for individual sustainability when population grows exogenously the practical and philosophical rationale for testing sustainability in a present value maximising and therefore fully prescribed development path is discussed

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

decision support models for sustainable mining networks fundamentals and challenges abstract natural resource endowments have the potential of transforming the prospects of many developing economies however a nation s mineral resources can only generate prosperity if specific technology assets are employed in a way as to effectively develop its resource sector capture value from it and transform that value into long term benefits the roadmap to such an ambitious goal lies in effective management supported by consistent formal decision making methods yet integrating environmental and social goals into strategic tactical and operational decisions is a complex challenge often addressed without adequate analytical rigour we provide a systematic analysis of the literature devoted to the development and application of quantitative decision support methods with sustainability considerations in the mining industry by establishing a framework based on the fundamental elements inherent to decision making processes pertinent to mining operations we identify several opportunities for advancing research and practice in particular we find important gaps in elements such as project portfolio optimization operations and waste management and mine closure and rehabilitation and even more so when social targets and impacts are considered it is our belief that insights from this discussion could be of significant value to both academics and practitioners interested in promoting sustainable socio economic development throughout the mining industry

intergenerational competitive equilibria under technological uncertainty and an exhaustible resource constraint abstract this paper presents a model of competitive intertemporal equilibrium in a finite horizon overlapping generations economy facing technological uncertainty and an exhaustible resource constraint individuals form rational expectations regarding future prices and economic conditions and income is redistributed from one generation to the next through government mandated lump sum transfers under uncertainty the relationship between resource price appreciation and the interest rate is mediated by consumers risk aversion with respect to consumption in alternative states of nature the intuitively appealing proposition that the expected resource price rises at the expected rate of interest holds only as a special case if future generations are taken to be state contingent in the sense that their composition depends on the states of nature prevailing when they are born then equilibria are generally pareto efficient but if future generations are state independent so that the set of individuals born at a given date is independent of the prevailing state of nature then equilibria may be inefficient because markets do not exist where successive generations may equilibrate their marginal rates of substitution across consumption in alternative contingent states such inefficiencies may be remedied through the implementation of appropriate intergenerational transfers an optimal intergenerational welfare distribution may be supported as a competitive equilibrium if the income transfer regime is properly selected and enforced the social optima that result for a simple version of the model under the maximin welfare criterion indicate that greater sacrifices are required on the part of the present generation when future generations are taken to be state contingent than when they are regarded as state independent this finding provides a possible explanation for the extreme risk aversion of conservationists with respect to the welfare of future generations

why the apple doesn t fall far understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital parents with higher education levels have children with higher education levels however is this because parental education actually changes the outcomes of children suggesting an important spillover of education policies or is it merely that more able individuals who have higher education also have more able children this paper proposes to answer this question with a unique dataset from norway using the reform of the education system that was implemented in different municipalities at different times in the 1960s as an instrument for parental education we find little evidence of a causal relationship between parents education and children s education despite significant ols relationships we find 2sls estimates that are consistently lower than the ols estimates with the only statistically significant effect being a positive relationship between mother s education and son s education these findings suggest that the high correlations between parents and children s education are due primarily to family characteristics and inherited ability and not education spillovers

assessing the economic viability of alternative water resources in water scarce regions combining economic valuation cost benefit analysis and discounting abstract this paper demonstrates a comprehensive methodology for assessing the viability of an environmental management plan that has long run economic and ecological impacts the case study under consideration is the implementation of a water resource management plan in a water scarce region of the world namely cyprus specifically this plan proposes to replenish a depleting aquifer with treated wastewater the proposed methodology first identifies the key stakeholder groups farmers and the general public who are hypothesized to derive economic values benefits from implementation of this plan and then uses stated preference methods to capture the total economic value of these benefits benefits are aggregated over the relevant populations of these stakeholder groups and weighed against the total costs of implementing the plan in a long run cost benefit analysis cba an econometrically estimated time declining trajectory of discount rates is used for the cba in order to assess the long run sustainability of the plan the results reveal that the net benefit trajectory estimated with the time declining discount rate takes one and a half to three times as long to come to a plateau compared to the constant discount rates of 3 5 and 6 emphasizing the importance of using declining discount rates and capturing the entirety of the benefits generated by such plans this methodology is particularly recommended for providing much needed information to support the implementation of the eu water framework directive which advocates the use of cba with consideration of the notion of sustainability for achieving the good water status for all european waters

vive la revolution long term educational returns of 1968 to the angry students the famous events of may 1968 starting with student riots threw france into a state of turmoil as a result normal examination procedures were abandoned and the pass rate for various qualifications increased enormously the lowering of thresholds at critical stages of the education system enabled a proportion of students to pursue more years of higher education than would otherwise have been possible for those on the margin of passing their examinations additional years of higher education increased future wages and occupational levels interestingly the effect is also transmitted across generations and is reflected in the educational performance of children

marriage and class here we consider a matching model where agents are heterogeneous and utilities nontransferable we utilize this framework to study how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets we impose conditions that guarantee the existence of a steady state equilibrium and then characterize it several examples are developed to illustrate the richness of equilibria the model reveals an interesting sorting externality that can support multiple steady state equilibria even with constant returns to matching excerpt

search and the efficient assignment of workers to jobs in a model in which different types of workers form matches with different types of employers a method of calculating opportunity costs of workers and jobs is derived these are shown to differ systematically from the reservation wages and profits used by workers and employers to determine whether matches should be formed ex ante differences among workers and among jobs then generate externalities in the labor market resulting in inefficient assignments of workers to jobs and multiple equilibria intervention in the labor market by altering the assignment can increase aggregate output but may cause regressive redistribution copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

entitlements missing markets and environmental uncertainty reply abstract at one level dore and ward seem intent on immunizing received doctrine they say that i did not prove that rights violated nozick s principles of justice and that i did not prove that missing markets were the problem more telling they allege i did not prove that my story was better than the particular story favored by dore and ward that is they argue that there is an alternative approach based on the theory of public economics which is indeed operational 3 they then use the bulk of their comment to explain and defend this alternative model they hope to convince the reader that the model of public economics survives intact in the face of my alternative model to the extent that their model allows one to define the problem away it is not difficult to see why they find it so compelling more seriously dore and ward fail to make a coherent argument about the concept of rights and duties and the logic of a particular rights structure that happens to prevail they seem concerned that my article was tampering with some sacred social construct the status quo rights structure and that my article threatened the received wisdom of both public economics and paretian walrasian bliss indeed theirs seems to be a genuine fear that if economists release their grip on the certitude of received orthodoxy the floodgates will be open to all manner of bumbling regulators seeking to shift rights and wealth positions across generations my article is apparently threatening because it seems to suggest that the received wisdom may at times be misleading

between ostrom and nordhaus the research landscape of sustainability economics abstract we survey the emerging research area of sustainability economics through a quantitative full text analysis of peer reviewed journal publications from 1987 to 2013 to identify relevant contributions we draw on existing definitions of sustainability economics for a keyword based identification strategy a combined focus on a the human nature relationship b the long term uncertain future c normative orientation towards sustainability and d economic analysis our analysis of a random subsample of 343 relevant papers reveals that i sustainability economics is a rapidly developing research area ii while theoretical contributions shaped the area in earlier years applied work now constitutes the largest share of contributions iii the research landscape can be clustered into eleven research clusters these range from participatory governance of social ecological systems associated with the work of elinor ostrom to questions of intertemporal allocation and distribution applied to climate economics associated with the work of william nordhaus iv the research area is broad in scope and heterogeneous and there is relatively little interaction between important clusters v relevant contributions are published in more than 100 journals ten journals publish half of all contributions led by ecological economics and 40 appear in non economics journals underscoring the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue

use and usefulness of sustainability economics abstract sustainable development is at the roots of sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010 define sustainability economics as the combination of economic efficiency and justice in the distribution of nature s services van den bergh in press criticizes their approach as axiomatic and incomplete lacking a discussion of environmental externalities and dogmas like the gdp dogma the focus on non measurable welfare or happiness in both articles impairs the use and usefulness of their sustainability notions for applied economics and policy alternatively environmentally modified national accounts offer a quantifiable sustainability concept of produced and natural capital maintenance for practical reasons sustainability economics should therefore deal with sustainable economic performance and growth coordination with other social goals has to be left to politics

human capital investment and the gender division of labor in a brawn based economy we use a model of human capital investment and activity choice to explain facts describing gender differentials in the levels and returns to human capital investments these include the higher return to and level of schooling the small effect of healthiness on wages and the large effect of healthiness on schooling for females relative to males the model incorporates gender differences in the level and responsiveness of brawn to nutrition in a roy economy setting in which activities reward skill and brawn differentially empirical evidence from rural bangladesh provides support for the model and the importance of the distribution of brawn

child labor urban proximity and household composition using detailed survey data from nepal this paper examines the determinants of child labor with a special emphasis on urban proximity we find that children residing in or near urban centers attend school more and work less in total but are more likely to be involved in wage work or in a small business the larger the urban center the stronger the effect is urban proximity is found to reduce the workload of children and improve school attendance up to 3 h of travel time from the city in areas of commercialized agriculture located 3 to 7 h from the city children do more farm work urban proximity effects are accounted for by a combination of local labor supply and demand conditions most notably the local importance of agriculture the education level of the parents and the local wage rate child servants which represent a small proportion of all children work much harder than other children and appear particularly at risk

review of internalization of externalities and dynamics of atmospheric emissions in energy sector of baltic states abstract the existence of external costs can lead to market failure this is because the free market generally ignores the existence of external costs pollution taxes and other flexible market instruments are being applied to internalize external costs of atmospheric emissions subsidies to renewable energy technologies are also being applied to internalize positive external benefits of renewables as these technologies have lower life cycle emissions of classical pollutants and ghg emissions in comparison with fossil fuel based energy generation technologies the paper applies context mechanism outcome cmo theoretical framework based on realistic evaluation theory for review and assessment of the level of internalization of externalities and their impact on atmospheric emissions of classical pollutants in baltic states the paper aims to compare external costs of atmospheric pollution and pollution taxes and other measures to internalize externalities in baltic states and to relate them to the trends of emission of classical pollutants in these countries the external costs of atmospheric pollution were compared in baltic states together with atmospheric pollution taxes and other policy measures used to internalize external costs of atmospheric pollution in baltic states the analysis of trends of atmospheric pollution by classical pollutants in baltic states indicated positive trends since 2004 in all analysed countries though review of internalization of externalities in latvia indicated the lowest levels of external costs internalization in terms of pollution taxes excise taxes and feed in tariffs and subsidies from eu structural funds for renewables the atmospheric emission reduction trends for classical pollutants are very favourable in latvia except air pollution by ozone this indicates that the degree of internalization of external costs related to specific pollutants does not necessary imply emission reduction of these pollutants as other factors as well as country context also play very important role and further investigations of this problem are necessary

searching for sustainability the poverty of spontaneous order abstract traditional approaches to sustainability rely on models that depend upon judgments of welfare across future generations right prices and some sense as to what future persons will find giving of utility these models both accept the spontaneous order of market processes and rely on that order to derive optimal consumption paths into the future sustainability is however not a problem of divining optimal paths predicated upon right prices rather sustainability to be operational requires a prior constructed order predicated upon rights for future persons and duties for those now living who sit in a position as dictator over the settings and circumstances that will be passed on to future persons rights based approaches to sustainability do not rely upon unknowable preferences of future persons but rather upon an environmental regency in which those now living agree to preserve settings and circumstances for the future this reminds us that the issue of sustainability concerns not how much to preserve but what to preserve

the wage distribution in a model of the assignment of skills to jobs this paper discusses a general equilibrium model of the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs both jobs and workers are measured along a continuous one dimensional scale the c

household bargaining and excess fertility an experimental study in zambia we posit that household decision making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard due to the fact that most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman using an experiment in zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 less likely to seek family planning services 25 less likely to use concealable contraception and 27 percent more likely to give birth however women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well being suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable

the medium run effects of educational expansion evidence from a large school construction program in indonesia this paper studies the medium run consequences of an increase in the rate of accumulation of human capital in a developing country from 1974 to 1978 the indonesian government built over 61 000 primary schools the school construction program led to an increase in education among individuals who were young enough to attend primary school after 1974 but not among the older cohorts 2sls estimates suggest that an increase of 10 percentage points in the proportion of primary school graduates in the labor force reduced the wages of the older cohorts by 3 8 10 and increased their formal labor force participation by 4 7 i propose a two sector model as a framework to interpret these findings the results suggest that physical capital did not adjust to the faster increase in human capital

the determinants of equilibrium unemployment the paper takes the search and matching model of the aggregate labor market to the data it tests the model s empirical validity and employs structural estimation to generate a characterization of the optimal behavior of firms and workers the model is applied to israeli data that are uniquely suited for this kind of empirical investigation the structural estimates are used to quantify the frictions embodied in the model including the costs of search the congestion and trading externality effects and the matching process a calibration simulation analysis then studies the effect of several key variables on equilibrium unemployment

sustainability constraints versus optimality versus intertemporal concern and axioms versus data sustainable sustained or survivable development are defined here as distinct sustainability constraints on intertemporal distribution in a context which ignores uncertainty environmental and intratemporal concerns such constraints are neither self contradictory nor redundant for they can conflict with maximizing the present value of utility optimality nor inferior since the axioms underlying optimality are ethically arbitrary and refuted by empirical psychological data axiomatic arguments may clarify but cannot resolve debates about intertemporal concerns data suggest that sustainability constraints are not respected and that intertemporal welfare functions containing a preference for sustained improvement may better reflect what bodies politic mean by sustainability

the necessity for environmental taxes for the avoidance of environmental thievery a note on the paper environmental responsibility versus taxation abstract internalizing environmental costs is a necessary condition for an effective environmental policy since the majority of socio economic activities cannot be free of environmental impacts the noninternalized external environmental costs impose a peculiar thievery of welfare charging environmental costs through environmental taxes and other economic instruments is a necessary condition for avoiding welfare thievery in this context the anti tax approaches emerging within ecological economics are found to be misleading and directing away from an effective environmental policy environmental responsibility is a different issue from the charging of the environmental costs therefore environmental taxes should not be considered as an induction to less environmental responsibility and hence to environmental degradation

intergenerational resource rights efficiency and social optimality the discipline of economics is generally defined as the science of the allocation of scarce resources between competing social objectives given an initial distribution of resources between economic agents how would they behave so as to improve their welfare according to the pareto criterion the agents would exchange commodities until the opportunities for fruitful exchange were fully exhausted and no agent could be made better off without rendering at least one other agent worse off pareto efficiency is a powerful concept in microeconomic analysis provided that the initial distribution of property rights is equitable allocative efficiency gives rise to the best of all possible worlds acknowledging that the assumptions of perfect competition are often violated firms are monopolistic information is incomplete and externalities exist economists have argued for the modification of institutions so that economic reality will conform more closely to the assumptions of the model that yields such gratifying results but microeconomic theory has always maintained that allocative efficiency is in itself insufficient to maximize social welfare bator 1957 a social welfare function is required to discriminate a social optimum among the array of efficient allocations that correspond to alternative assignments of property rights though economists have posited alternative functional forms for the sake of pursuing conceptual arguments welfare functions have remained elusive constructs for well known theoretical and practical reasons consequently a sharp line of demarcation has been drawn between questions of efficiency the province of economics and equity the principal focus of ethical and political discourse in resource economics however the line demarcating efficiency and equity is often crossed the term optimal depletion appears regularly where only efficient depletion is meant while political debates about resource exploitation over time are laden with questions of the proper distribution of our natural patrimony between generations resource economists have predominantly espoused particular use rules that guarantee efficiency but overlook potential improvements in social welfare achievable through the reassignment of property rights across generations we document the evolution and current status of the misuse of the term optimal depletion in section ii we develop a simple two generation three period general equilibrium model in section iii to illustrate how alternative distributions of resource rights between generations relate to alternative pareto efficient solutions in section iv we demonstrate how different social welfare functions affect the optimal solution and associated assignment of resource rights between generations

education and household welfare abstractusing census data from nepal we examine how the partial derivatives of predicted household welfare vary with parental education we focus on fertility child survival schooling and child labor female education is not as strongly associated with beneficial outcomes as is often assumed male education often matters more and part of the association between female education and welfare is driven by marriage market matching with more educated men controlling for the average education of parental cohorts does not change this finding but when we use educational rank to proxy for unobserved ability and family background the positive association between female education and beneficial outcomes becomes weaker or is reversed for women the association between educational rank and outcomes is strong women who obtain more schooling than their peers in school have fewer children and educate them better in contrast for men the statistical association between education and household welfare remains str

measuring the existence value of wildlife what do cvm estimates really show two research programs are brought together to contribute to the growing body of work on alternatives to standard welfare based approaches to environmental valuation and policy the first is the theoretical literature undermining the new welfare

unraveling the veil of fuzziness a thick description of sustainability economics this article provides a thick description geertz 1973 of sustainability economics baumgartner and quaas 2010a b have proposed as an alternative to ecological economics the new field of sustainability economics which has triggered various replies the purpose here is to order and to review these contributions building upon a literature review of sustainability economics the paper argues that the concept currently has more of a fuzzy and declamatory character the rhetoric mccloskey 1998 of sustainability economics contains general issues of sustainability economics externalities and the capability approach the article argues that it is currently not clear how the solutions for science and policy proposed by sustainability economics differ from those of ecological economics efforts should be directed towards further development of the theory and the operationalization of sustainability principles the systemic view of co evolutionary development social learning and sustainability economics normative underpinning merits more consideration in the debate about sustainability economics