optimal contract imperfect output observation and limited liability abstract we study the optimal contract when output is imperfectly observed when all parties are risk neutral and the agent has unlimited liability the optimal contract remains the same regardless of whether the output is perfectly or imperfectly observed when the agent s liability becomes limited the optimal contract changes profoundly under imperfect information we show that the high productivity agent never produces at first best and may be required to produce an effort lower than the one required from the low productivity agent and both types of agents can earn rents journal of economic literature classification number d82

the impact of population on co2 emissions evidence from european countries this paper analyses the impact of population growth on co2 emissions in european union countries traditionally researchers have assumed a unitary elasticity of emissions with respect to population growth in this study population is treated as a predictor in the model instead of being included as part of the dependent variable per capita emissions thus relaxing the above mentioned assumption of unitary elasticity we also contribute to the existing literature by taking into account the presence of heterogeneity in the sample and considering a dynamic specification the sample covers the period 1975 1999 for the current european union members our results show that the impact of population growth on emissions is more than proportional for recent accession countries whereas for old eu members the elasticity is lower than unity and non significant when the properties of the time series and the dynamics are correctly specified the different impact of population change on co2 emissions for the current eu members should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies within the eu

economic growth and pollutant emissions in tunisia an empirical analysis of the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper investigates the relationship between economic growth and pollutant emissions for a small and open developing country tunisia during the period 1961 2004 the investigation is made on the basis of the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis using time series data and cointegration analysis carbon dioxide co 2 and sulfur dioxide so 2 are used as the environmental indicators and gdp as the economic indicator our results show that there is a long run cointegrating relationship between the per capita emissions of two pollutants and the per capita gdp an inverted u relationship between so 2 emissions and gdp has been found with income turning point approximately equals to 1200 constant 2000 prices or to 3700 in ppp constant 2000 prices however a monotonically increasing relationship with gdp is found more appropriate for co 2 emissions furthermore the causality results show that the relationship between income and pollution in tunisia is one of unidirectional causality with income causing environmental changes and not vice versa both in the short run and long run this implies that an emission reduction policies and more investment in pollution abatement expense will not hurt economic growth it could be a feasible policy tool for tunisia to achieve its sustainable growth in the long run

energy consumption carbon emissions and economic growth in saudi arabia an aggregate and disaggregate analysis the objective of this study is to examine the relationship among economic growth carbon emissions and energy consumption at the aggregate and disaggregate levels for the aggregate energy consumption model we use total energy consumption per capita and co2 emissions per capita based on the total energy consumption for the disaggregate analysis we used oil gas and electricity consumption models along with their respective co2 emissions the long term income elasticities of carbon emissions in three of the four models are positive and higher than their estimated short term income elasticities these results suggest that carbon emissions increase with the increase in per capita income which supports the belief that there is a monotonically increasing relationship between per capita carbon emissions and per capita income for the aggregate model and for the oil and electricity consumption models the long and short term income elasticities of carbon emissions are negative for the gas consumption model this result indicates that if the saudi arabian economy switched from oil to gas consumption then an increase in per capita income would reduce carbon emissions the results also suggest that electricity is less polluting than other sources of energy

beyond optimal city size an evaluation of alternative urban growth patterns the aim of the paper is to present a critical view of theoretical works on city size we begin with the consideration that during the 1960s and 1970s the question of optimal city size tended to b

catching the agent on the wrong foot ex post choice of monitoring abstract in a principal agent model with multiple performance measures we show that the principal benefits by choosing ex post which variables will be monitored if it is too costly for one type of agent to mimic all performance measures expected from another type the principal can hope to catch the agent on the wrong foot if the agent tries to misrepresent his type for cases of small asymmetry of information the principal can implement the first best contract for more serious asymmetries of information the first best is not implementable then the low type may be required to overproduce which is in contrast to the traditional result of second best contracting we also obtain a ranking of monitoring instruments according to the frequency of their use

the economic theory of agrarian institutions introduction alternative approaches to the theory of institutions in economic development pranab bardhan rational peasants efficient institutions and a theory of rural organization methodological remarks for development economics joseph e stiglitz part 1 land and labour theories of sharecropping nirvikar singh a comparison of principal agent and bargaining solutions the case of tenancy contracts clive bell contracts with eviction in infinitely repeated principal agent relationships bhaskar dutta et al production relations in semi arid african agriculture hans binswanger et al part 2 credit and interlinked transactions rural credit markets the structure of interest rates exploitation and efficiency kaushik basu credit and agrarian class structure mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal credit rationing tenancy productivity and the dynamics of inequality avishay braverman and joseph e stiglitz on choice among creditors and bonded labour contracts t n srinivasan some aspects of linked product and credit market contracts among risk neutral agents clive bell and t n srinivasan a note on interlinked rural economic arrangements pranab bardhan interlinkages and the pattern of competition debraj ray and kunal sengupta part 3 marketing and insurance agricultural institutions for insurance and stabilization david m newbery peasants risk aversion and the choice of marketing intermediaries and contracts a bargaining theory of equilibrium marketing contracts pinhas zusman part 4 co operatives technology and the state agricultural producer co operatives louis putterman institutional analysis of credit co operatives avishay braverman and j luis guasch agrarian structure technological innovations and the state alain de janvry et al

does the quality of institutions limit the mena s integration in the world economy using a large sample of countries over the 1990s this paper examines the extent to which institutions functioning disables a greater participation of the middle east and north africa mena in the world economy it focuses on the impact on manufactured exports and fdi attractiveness and considers a broad index of political risk as well as indices targeted toward specific aspects of governance corruption government effectiveness and the rule of law the results are robust to different econometric approaches and lend strong support to the hypothesis that the functioning of institutions may disable the participation of mena countries in the world economy they suggest that the impact of an improvement in the quality of institutions may result in a sensitive increase of fdi inflows and manufactured exports that increase is comparable to the one resulting from liberalisation policies hence although institutional reforms can take time they deserve the necessary efforts given their outcomes as compared to other reforms

delegation of monitoring in a principal agent relationship this paper studies a principal agent relationship with moral hazard in which the principal or the supervisor can monitor the agent s hidden action by using identical monitoring technologies the paper shows that delegation of monitoring to the supervisor is profitable because of two effects with delegation the principal can better regulate the incentives incentive effect and can commit to wage structures to which she could not commit without delegation commitment effect as a logical step collusion is introduced and it is shown that even with the possibility of collusion delegation is an optimal strategy

an econometric study of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in turkey abstract this study attempts to empirically examine the dynamic causal relationships between carbon emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of turkey using the time series data for the period 1960 2005 this research tests the interrelationship between the variables using the bounds testing to cointegration procedure the bounds test results indicate that there exist two forms of long run relationships between the variables in the case of first form of long run relationship carbon emissions are determined by energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of second long run relationship income is determined by carbon emissions energy consumption and foreign trade an augmented form of granger causality analysis is conducted amongst the variables the long run relationship of co2 emissions energy consumption income and foreign trade equation is also checked for the parameter stability the empirical results suggest that income is the most significant variable in explaining the carbon emissions in turkey which is followed by energy consumption and foreign trade moreover there exists a stable carbon emissions function the results also provide important policy recommendations

is there an ekc between economic growth and smog pollution in china new evidence from semiparametric spatial autoregressive models abstract although china has achieved rapid economic growth it suffers from severe smog conditions determining how to promote cleaner production and environmental sustainability is of great significance in clarifying the relationship between income and pollutants within an extension of the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework the effects of economic growth on pm2 5 contamination are explicitly investigated based on a recent large sample of 249 chinese cities in 2015 from a nonlinear spatial perspective this study marks the first attempt at comprehensively exploring the nexus between the selected variables and pm2 5 emissions using semiparametric spatial autoregressive models which overcome the misspecification issues of conventional parametric models to avoid the limitations of a single method this study also applies different estimation techniques such as the spatial lag model slm the spatial autoregressive model with spatial autoregressive disturbances sarar two stage least squares regression 2slsr quantile regression qr and nonparametric regression npr the results reveal that pm2 5 pollutants show strong positive characteristics of spatial spillover the results also suggest that there is a significant inverted u shaped relationship between economic growth and pm2 5 concentrations which confirms the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis additionally the empirical findings highlight the influence that the population density industrialization urbanization and traffic development factors have on increasing pm2 5 emissions in contrast technological innovation and green coverage do not play important roles in reducing pm2 5 concentrations the distribution of pm2 5 concentrations displays apparent geographical features to provide an in depth understanding of these impacts marginal analysis is performed to distinguish the local and neighbouring effects of determinants on pm2 5 pollution

incentives for monitoring quality we analyze a procurement problem in which the quality of the delivered product can be observed perfectly by the buyer and supplier but may not be verifiable i e may not be observable to any third party we present a set of plausible conditions under which the equilibrium welfare of both the buyer and supplier is higher when quality is verifiable than when it is unverifiable the welfare gain for the privately informed supplier arises even when the buyer has all the bargaining power thus the interests of the buyer and supplier coincide with regard to whether delivered quality should be made verifiable

house prices and marital stability we investigate the effect of house price changes on divorce using data for 1991 2010 from the current population survey and the federal housing finance agency our findings suggest that changing house prices significantly affect the share of a cohort that is divorced and that these effects are asymmetric with respect to housing gains versus losses in addition we find differential effects for groups that are more likely to be homeowners versus renters some of this evidence is consistent with homeowners being locked into their homes and hence marriages by increased transactions costs in down markets

equity and time to sale in the real estate market evidence from the boston condominium market of the early 1990s reveals that an owner s equity position determines his experience as a seller an owner of a property with a high loan to value ratio sets a higher asking price has a higher expected time on the market and if he sells receives a higher price than an owner with proportionately less debt the down payment requirement for purchasers but not incumbent owners provides a simple explanation for this phenomenon among owner occupants the results provide supporting evidence for equity based aggregate theories of price volume movements in the housing market copyright 1997 by american economic association

ask prices offers and time to sale in an online exchange i introduction in this article we consider the role served by the ask price posted by sellers in an online exchange for used computers the functional role served by the ask price in this exchange is similar to that in other bilateral exchange settings the ask price is not binding and essentially serves as a starting point for negotiations furthermore every offer that we observe by buyers lies well below the ask price this type of bargaining institution is common in online marketplaces and also in markets for used cars housing and goods sold through want ads placed in newspapers the general finding of empirical literature examining these other markets is that ask prices convey information a high ask price may indicate a desire by the seller to hold out for a higher offer in such a setting ask price dispersion may arise if sellers trade off higher prices against the likelihood of making a sale high ask prices will then lead to higher sale prices on average but longer time on the market the standard justification for the inverse relationship between ask prices and time on the market is that a seller asking a high price will receive fewer offers if search by buyers is costly most of the existing findings in support of this view have focused on real estate markets as an empirical matter it is not clear that ask prices should play a similar role in the online setting that we examine although the notion that sellers have differing reservation prices seems plausible if the market is characterized by perfect information and costless search then ask prices will serve no functional role this is important because there is a general anecdotal view that online markets serve as sufficiently effective mechanisms for information transmission that search is costless in such a setting an initial ask price posted by the seller would be irrelevant one caveat to this view is that although information is readily available online it may be costly to process the used computers sold on this exchange are complex products that differ on a number of dimensions viewing the large amount of information available and forming an estimate of willingness to pay in such a situation is a nontrivial task though the cost in terms of time and effort required to process this information does not fall as neatly within the imperfect information paradigm as does the housing market it is clearly analogous the search costs involved in visiting and walking through a house for sale are substantial but relative to the value of the house they may be no larger than the costs of viewing and assessing the characteristics of a used computer it is possible then that the immediate access to information online may not eliminate search costs one contribution of our research therefore is an assessment of the extent to which online markets can be thought of as search markets our approach is to see whether the relationship between ask prices offers and time to sale on the exchange is similar to that in other markets characterized by costly search our data differ in some key ways from that available in more traditional settings for example data regarding the number of offers a given property receives are rarely available in housing markets nor in many cases is the sequence of offers for a given property observable in our case we observe the number of offers made and the level of each offer a disadvantage of our data is that we do not observe final transaction prices because once computers are sold they are removed from the publicly available listings on the exchange thus we cannot directly estimate the relationship between ask prices and sale prices we can however estimate the relationship between the ask price and the level of the highest outstanding i e rejected offer that the computer received this allows us to test the implication that sellers with high ask prices are more likely to reject offers of a given level

does economic integration damage or benefit the environment africa s experience abstract the leaders of african nations have committed to the establishment of the continental free trade area cfta over the coming years improved links among the african nations via increased intra regional trade have been considered as an essential mechanism to produce desired growth run overs and to support regional economic improvement however remarkable theoretical and empirical evidence has shown that increased trade might damage the environment and therefore may hinder the effort towards sustainable development and poverty reduction on the continent the present paper seeks to investigate and test the impact of intra africa trade using two measurements of environmental pollutants namely co2 and mp10 whilst integrating economic growth and energy consumption the study used a panel dataset regarding 46 african countries over the period 1990 2017 to carry out the empirical analysis the latest panel estimation techniques were employed more specifically and for the urbaneness purpose we employed a parametric technique which is dynamic ols and a non parametric approach which is fmols the results of both methods suggested that intra africa trade improved environmental quality on the continent in addition the results confirmed the presence of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis the findings also indicated that whilst the consumption of energy played a vital role in the deterioration of the environment its impact remained marginal overall the results implied that intra regional trade and the environment quality were mutually supportive in africa

portfolio choices for homeowners abstract in this paper i show that introducing frictions associated with housing into standard life cycle models can partially resolve the portfolio choice puzzle i calibrate a model in which a representative household endogenously transits from renting to mortgage financed homeownership the household can later adjust housing status either voluntarily or because of a forced move by paying transaction costs it is shown that homeownership crowds out stock market participation risky owner occupied housing substitutes for stocks while bonds provide liquidity young and middle aged households regardless of whether they are currently homeowners hold much less stock than predicted by traditional models without housing

measuring the influence of space and time effects on time on the market this paper is concerned with spatial effects of time on the market for residential property and time varying relationships using a dataset of properties from the adelaide metropolitan area australia during the period 2002 2011 the analysis firstly considers the spatial dependence in time on the market and secondly extends the analysis to a space time model using 2sls regression the findings demonstrate the complexity in spatial analysis with results indicating a random distribution of time on the market in 86 of observations a pattern that is consistent over time spatial autocorrelation is shown to increase time on the market in the subject property while spatial error decreases time on the market in the subject property suggesting a high level of market transparency and improved liquidity the compensating or nullifying effects of both types of spatial association is shown to contribute to the random distribution observed in time on the market a strong explanatory capacity of the business cycle suggests that economic drivers are leading time on the market rather than prices abstract from author

is honesty the best policy curtailing insurance fraud through optimal incentive contracts an incentive contracting approach is used to characterize optimal contracts when insured individuals possess private information about their losses and are able to misrepresent permanently their loss magnitudes by engaging in the falsification of claims we demonstrate that efficient agreements necessarily induce some falsification but that the extent of such claims inflation is mitigated partially by an indemnification schedule that overcompensates small losses while overpaying larger ones the differential costs of generating insurance claims through falsification provide an avenue by which the heterogencous insureds can credibly signal their underlying losses and are exploited in an optimal contract to implement loss contingent insurance payments

government intervention in production and incentives theory a review of recent contributions national science foundation the commissariat general du plan and the center for energy policy research at m i t

contractual contingencies and renegotiation in a dynamic model of asymmetric information between the owner of a firm and a manager we investigate the optimal set of contingencies on which an incentive contract should depend when renegotiation is possible in particular we characterize the circumstances in which the contracting parties find it desirable to deliberately restrict what the owner can monitor thereby limiting the contractible contingencies our findings thus provide an endogenous explanation for contract simplicity in contrast to those based on transactions costs or bounded rationality

urbanization and co2 emissions a semi parametric panel data analysis this paper investigates the relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions in a sample of 20 emerging countries over the period 1992 2008 using the semi parametric panel data model with fixed effects proposed by baltagi and li 2002 we find little evidence in support of an inverted u curve and thus the kuznets hypothesis is not confirmed by our analysis our findings shed new light on the urbanization co2 emissions nexus

retail contracting and costly monitoring theory and evidence abstract we reconcile seemingly conflicting hypotheses and evidence that surface in the principal agent literature specifically we examine the literature that deals with the effect of costly monitoring on retail organizational form our principal agent model of the optimal relationship between up and downstream firms allows the principal to garner two types of imperfect signals of agent effort sales data and behavior data the model yields predictions that we confront with the econometric evidence which comes from both franchising and sales force compensation literatures we find that when variation in the informativeness and in the cost of increasing the informativeness of both signals is considered the evidence is consistent with the theory

a disequilibrium model of the market for houses implicit selling time as a signal of optimal holding periods and buyer valuation a theoretical model is developed of house market disequilibrium price and quantity adjustments occur as the consequence of inventory adjustment in the absence of a market maker this approach reve

guilty until proven innocent regulation with costly and limited enforcement abstract we consider optimal regulations for a polluting firm when regulators cannot observe emission control costs and can only observe emissions via costly monitoring fines or subsidies for enforcing compliance are also limited the optimal regulations resemble a deposit refund system the firm reports its emissions and pays an initial tax based on this report if the firm is monitored it receives a rebate when actual and reported emissions coincide the enforcement constraints and the firm s rights determine whether the incentives to reduce emissions are optimally provided by varying the rebate for compliance the monitoring probability or the initial tax

the choice between emission taxes and output taxes under imperfect monitoring we consider a regulator s choice between environmentally motivated emissions taxes and output taxes we investigate how the optimal instrument depends on the monitoring cost function the firm s technology and on social preferences regarding output and environmental quality pure emissions taxes are usually not optimal with monitoring costs pure output taxes are optimal under sufficiently high monitoring costs sufficiently limited options for emission reduction by means other than output reduction and sufficiently high substitutability of the output finally conditions for the optimality of mixed taxes are given

co2 emissions energy consumption trade and income a comparative analysis of china and india in order to prevent the destabilisation of the earth s biosphere co2 emissions must be reduced quickly and significantly the causes of co2 emissions by individual countries need to be apprehended in order to understand the processes required for reducing emissions around the globe china and india are the two largest transitional countries and growing economies but are in two entirely different categories in terms of structural changes in growth trade and energy use co2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have significantly increased in the recent past this paper compares china and india using the bounds testing approach to cointegration and the ardl methodology to test the long and short run relationships between growth trade energy use and endogenously determined structural breaks the co2 emissions in china were influenced by per capita income structural changes and energy consumption a similar causal connection cannot be established for india with regard to structural changes and co2 emissions because india s informal economy is much larger than china s india possesses an extraordinarily large number of micro enterprises that are low energy consumers and not competitive enough to reach international markets understanding these contrasting scenarios is prerequisite to reaching an international agreement on climate change affecting these two countries

the environmental kuznets curve and sustainability a panel data analysis abstract in recent years sustainability has represented one of the most important policy goals explored in the environmental kuznets curve ekc literature but related hypotheses performance measures and results continue to present a challenge the present paper contributes to this ongoing literature by studying two different ekc specifications for 10 middle east and north african mena countries over the period 1990 2010 using panel data methods for the first specification namely ekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between environmental degradation and income while for the second specification namely modified ekc mekc we show that there is an inverted u shape relationship between sustainability and human development hd the relationships are shaped by other factors such as energy trade manufacture added value and the role of law more interestingly findings from the estimation show that ekc hypothesis hd and sustainability are crucial to build effective environmental policies

length of stay for low cost tourism abstract awareness of tourists length of stay and the factors which determine that is an essential element for good planning and management at tourist destinations this article analyses to what extent the personal characteristics of the low cost tourist those of the trip and stay and those of the destination itself are significant in determining the duration of a trip to this end an econometric duration model is estimated the results obtained show that the effect of time restrictions seem to be relevant for explaining the observed differences in length of stay as well as the effects of the tourist s spending capacity prices and the differences between urban and sun and sand destinations furthermore the model also allows us to analyse changes in the likelihood of the stay being ended at a specific point in time hazard associated with changes in the explanatory variables and to obtain predicted survival times for different groups of tourists

costly distortion of information in agency problems anecdotal evidence suggests that agents often spend resources distorting information transmitted to principals we present a model where costly information distortion emerges as equilibrium behavior the information structure we focus on is intermediate between and encompasses the cases of private information and public information the agent can falsify the privately observed state at some cost although the principal can design contracts that induce no falsification these may involve excessive iinformation rents falsification can be beneficial in spite of the waste of resources involved because it helps reduce information rents we examine how optimal contract and equilibrium payoffs change as the information structure ranges from private to public information

input versus output monitoring who is the residual claimant abstract we observe that residual claimancy can be a source of rent in a principal agent relationship we show that the choice between input or output monitoring will be chiefly determined by the identity of the residual claimant of the principal agent relationship the principal will find input monitoring more efficient if the principal is the residual claimant and he will find output monitoring more efficient if the agent is the residual claimant if residual claimancy is a choice the principal will be the residual claimant under input monitoring under output monitoring residual claimancy is not an issue if both residual claimancy and the monitoring instrument can be chosen the principal will choose to monitor input and to be the residual claimant journal of economic literature classification numbers d23 d82 l22

the nexus between carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth in middle east countries a panel data analysis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis assumes that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and income per capita in other words as a country grows it is assumed that its environmental quality improves in this study we aim to test the ekc hypothesis for 12 middle east countries during the period 1990 2008 by employing recently developed panel data methods our results provide evidence contrary to the ekc hypothesis we found evidence favorable to the u shaped ekc for 5 middle east countries whereas an inverted u shaped curve was identified for only 3 middle east countries furthermore there appear to be no causal links between income and co 2 emissions for the other 4 countries regarding the direction of causality there appears to be a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption in the short run in the long run however the unidirectional causality chain runs from energy consumption and economic growth to co 2 emissions we also suggest some crucial policy implications depending on these results

asset level risk and return in real estate investments relatively little is known in the academic literature about the idiosyncratic returns of individual real estate investments though quite a few commercial properties command prices commensurate with the market values of small to medium publicly traded companies i use purchase and sale data from the national council of real estate investment fiduciaries ncreif to compute holding period price appreciation returns for commercial properties in stark contrast with liquid asset returns idiosyncratic drift and volatility estimates diverge as the holding period shrinks this puzzling phenomenon survives a variety of controls for vintage effects systematic risk heterogeneity and sample selection biases i derive an equilibrium search based illiquid asset pricing model which when calibrated fits the data very well thus a structural model of illiquidity seems crucial to a descriptive theory of real estate investment returns the model can be extended to other illiquid asset classes and used to price derivatives such as debt claims

foreign direct investment co2 emissions nexus in middle east and north african countries importance of biomass energy consumption abstract this study examines the association between foreign direct investment fdi and carbon emissions for the middle east and north african mena region in 1990 2015 including biomass energy consumption as an additional determinant of carbon emissions we apply the generalized method of moments gmm to validate the existence of the pollution haven hypothesis phh the n shaped association is also validated between fdi and carbon emissions the link between economic growth and carbon emissions is inverted u and n shaped that is it satisfies the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypotheses biomass energy use lowers carbon emissions and the causality analysis reveals that fdi causes co2 emissions clearly the results confirm the existence of a feedback effect between economic growth and carbon emissions the connection between biomass energy use and co2 emissions is also bidirectional the empirical findings suggest policy makers to design comprehensive trade and energy policies by targeting the cleaner production practices for not only to ensure environmental sustainability but also to fulfil the objectives of sustainable development goals

regulation asymmetric information and auditing this article analyzes a model of a regulated firm that is better informed about its cost function than is the regulator by auditing at a cost however the regulator is assumed to be able to observe the realized cost of the firm if the regulator finds that the firm had misrepresented its costs at the time at which prices were set he can order a refund to consumers in the optimal policy the regulator audits when the firm reports for pricing purposes that its costs will be high and orders a refund when the auditfinds that realized costs are lower than anticipated given the original report a separation result that obtains for an important case indicates that the initial pricing decision is independent of the auditing decision the auditing decision however depends on the price that was initially set the optimal auditing strategy is characterized and the nature of the welfare gains are identified the methodology used in the analysis involves the characterization of an equilibrium of a revelation game with an ex post observable

a semi parametric panel data analysis on the urbanisation carbon emissions nexus for the mena countries abstract this study seeks to examine the impacts of urbanisation on carbon emissions through the investigation of the existence of an environmental kuznets curve ekc within the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology stirpat framework this is the first study in the mena region to explore the urbanisation and carbon emissions nexus using panel data together with a semi parametric panel fixed effects regression the data set refers to a panel of 20 countries in the mena region spanning the period 1980 2014 according to the results there is little evidence to support an inverted u shaped relationship between urbanisation and carbon emissions in the region more specifically it was found in the region and with the continuation of the urbanisation process carbon emissions per capita decreased in addition the results suggest that energy use and economic growth are the main sources of carbon emissions in the region the results imply that policies to reduce carbon emissions in the countries with relatively higher carbon emissions should concentrate more on energy use and the pattern of economic growth and not the urbanisation issue

panel estimation for co2 emissions energy consumption economic growth trade openness and urbanization of newly industrialized countries abstract this paper empirically examines the dynamic causal relationships between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption economic growth trade openness and urbanization for the panel of newly industrialized countries nic using the time series data for the period 1971 2007 using four different panel unit root tests it is found that all panel variables are integrated of order 1 from the johansen fisher panel cointegration test it is found that there is a cointegration vector among the variables the granger causality test results support that there is no evidence of long run causal relationship but there is unidirectional short run causal relationship from economic growth and trade openness to carbon dioxide emissions from economic growth to energy consumption from trade openness to economic growth from urbanization to economic growth and from trade openness to urbanization it is found that the long run elasticity of carbon dioxide emissions with respect to energy consumption 1 2189 is higher than short run elasticity of 0 5984 this indicates that over time higher energy consumption in the newly industrialized countries gives rise to more carbon dioxide emissions as a result our environment will be polluted more but in respect of economic growth trade openness and urbanization the environmental quality is found to be normal good in the long run

implicit house prices variation over time and space in spain asking price has a fundamental influence on market behaviour and understanding how attributes affect the perceived price of housing this paper employs a large database of houses from the spanish housing market to estimate the role of attributes in asking price formation star methodology and glm with random effects are used to extract the price of attributes and the spatial and time pattern results show that the pricing of attributes varies by geographical region and over time with property size and economic and demographic attributes being the key variables explaining asking price formation

performance versus design standards in the regulation of pollution abstract this paper presents a model of pollution regulation in an oligopolistic market two forms of regulation are considered performance standards which regulate pollution directly by an upper limit on emissions and design standards which regulate pollution indirectly by a minimum usage requirement of an enissions control input equilibria under each regulatory regime are characterized a welfare analysis reveals that performance standards are preferred to design standards if the objective is minimization of emissions plus pollution damage costs however the comparison is indeterminate if the regulator s objective is total surplus less pollution damage an equivalence between emissions taxes and performance standards is established so the above welfare comparisons also apply to emissions taxes versus design standards

environment kuznets curve for co2 emissions a cointegration analysis for china abstract this study examines the long run relationship between carbon emissions and energy consumption income and foreign trade in the case of china by employing time series data of 1975 2005 in particular the study aims at testing whether environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship between co 2 emissions and per capita real gdp holds in the long run or not auto regressive distributed lag ardl methodology is employed for empirical analysis a quadratic relationship between income and co 2 emission has been found for the sample period supporting ekc relationship the results of granger causality tests indicate one way causality runs through economic growth to co 2 emissions the results of this study also indicate that the carbon emissions are mainly determined by income and energy consumption in the long run trade has a positive but statistically insignificant impact on co 2 emissions

effectiveness of rca institutions to limit local externalities using foreclosure data to test covenant effectiveness residential community associations rcas are said to be an efficient institutional agreement to limit local spillovers while several studies have identified a positive marginal effect of rca rules none have explicitly measured the effectiveness of these institutions to limit local externalities this study measures this effectiveness by estimating how the direct and spillover price impacts caused by foreclosure differ by rca status using a spatial hedonic model that controls for selection bias using propensity score methods and coarsened exact matching we find that foreclosed rca properties experience smaller direct foreclosure discounts and produce smaller spill over effects than their non rca counterparts

redlining in boston do mortgage lenders discriminate against neighborhoods historically lenders have been accused of redlining minority neighborhoods as well as refusing to lend to minority applicants considerable bank regulation is designed to prevent both actions however the strong correlation between race and neighborhood makes it difficult to distinguish the impact of geographic discrimination from the effects of racial discrimination previous studies have failed to untangle these two influences in part because of severe omitted variable bias the data set in this paper allows the distinct effects of race and geography to be identified and it shows that the evidence for redlining is weak

global co2 efficiency country wise estimates using a stochastic cost frontier this paper examines global carbon dioxide co2 efficiency by employing a stochastic cost frontier analysis of about 170 countries in 1997 and 2007 the main contribution lies in providing a new approach to environmental efficiency estimation in which the efficiency estimates quantify the distance from the policy objective of minimum emissions we are able to examine a very large pool of nations and provide country wise efficiency estimates we estimate three econometric models corresponding with alternative interpretations of the cancun vision conference of the parties 2011 the models reveal progress in global environmental efficiency during a preceding decade the estimates indicate vast differences in efficiency levels and efficiency changes across countries the highest efficiency levels are observed in africa and europe while the lowest are clustered around china the largest efficiency gains were observed in central and eastern europe co2 efficiency also improved in the us and china the two largest emitters but their ranking in terms of co2 efficiency deteriorated policy implications are discussed

estimates of the impact of crime risk on property values from megan s laws abstract we estimate the willingness to pay for reductions in crime risk using the location and move in dates of sex offenders we find significant effects of sex offenders locations that are geographically localized house prices within 0 1 miles of a sex offender fall by 4 percent on average we then use this finding to estimate the costs to victims of sexual offenses and find costs of over 1 million per victim far greater than previous estimates however we cannot reject the alternative hypotheses that individuals overestimate risks posed by offenders or that living near an offender poses significant costs exclusive of crime risk jel k42 r23 r31

the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions evidence from developing countries abstract this paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on co2 emissions in developing countries from 1975 to 2003 it contributes to the existing literature by examining the effect of urbanization taking into account dynamics and the presence of heterogeneity in the sample of countries the results show an inverted u shaped relationship between urbanization and co2 emissions indeed the elasticity emission urbanization is positive for low urbanization levels which is in accordance with the higher environmental impact observed in less developed regions among our contributions is the estimation of a semi parametric mixture model that allows for unknown distributional shapes and endogenously classifies countries into homogeneous groups three groups of countries are identified for which urbanization s impact differs considerably for two of the groups a threshold level is identified beyond which the emission urbanization elasticity is negative and further increases in the urbanization rate do not contribute to higher emissions however for the third group only population and affluence but not urbanization contribute to explain emissions the differential impact of urbanization on co2 emissions should therefore be taken into account in future discussions of climate change policies

the cyclical behavior of the beveridge curve in the housing market abstract this paper develops a business cycle model of the housing market with search frictions and entry of both buyers and sellers the housing market exhibits a well established cyclical component which features three stylized facts prices move in the same direction as sales and the number of houses for sale but opposite to the time it takes to sell a house these stylized facts imply that in the data housing vacancies and the number of buyers are positively correlated i e that the beveridge curve is upward sloping a baseline search and matching model of the housing market is unable to match these stylized facts because it inherently generates a downward sloping beveridge curve with free entry of both buyers and sellers our model reproduces the positive correlation between prices sales and vacancies and matches the stylized facts qualitatively and quantitatively

the social and private micro level consequences of homeownership abstract this paper reviews the literature that describes the micro level economic and social consequences of homeownership we adopt an interdisciplinary approach and include studies from economics sociology geography political science psychology and other disciplines our focus is on the set of consequences of homeownership in developed countries our list of potential outcomes of homeownership includes the impact on household wealth and portfolio choice mobility labor force participation urban structure and segregation home maintenance political and social activities health demographics self esteem and child outcomes there is substantial evidence that homeownership has important effects on some household behaviors and outcomes however we find that much of the past 30 year s literature on consequences of homeowning is deficient from a theoretical or econometric perspective we suggest solutions and identify research gaps present in the literature

the compact city just or just compact a preliminary analysis the aim of the research described in this paper is to examine the validity of the claims that higher density urban form promotes social equity that is promotes benefits for the life chances of low income groups overall the evidence suggests that for medium sized english cities higher urban densities may be positive for some aspects of social equity and negative for others more specifically likely benefits include improved public transport reduced social segregation and better access to facilities while the main problems are likely to be reduced living space and a lack of affordable housing investigations of different aspects of density show that the cities that most support social equity appear to be those that have a large proportion of high density housing

endogenous punishments in agency with verifiable ex post information the article studies an adverse selection model in which a contractible imperfect signal on the agent s type is revealed ex post the agent is wealth constrained which implies that the maximum penalty depends on the contracted transaction e g the volume of trade first we show that the qualitative effects of the signal can be unambiguously tied to the nature of the problem e g whether the agent is in a buyer or a seller position second the distortions caused by informational asymmetries may become more severe although more information is now available finally the signal can actually serve to increase the agent s informational rents

protecting the environment when costs and benefits are privately known in this survey i analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction the presence of asymmetric information calls for some important departures from the textbook prescriptions of marketable permits and emission taxes for controlling pollution for instance it may no longer be optimal to equate the social marginal benefits to the marginal cost of cleanup in determining appropriate abatement levels i conclude this review with some suggestions for future research in this area

countervailing incentives in agency problems abstract we analyze countervailing incentives in agency problem countervailing incentives exist when the agent has an incentive to understate his private information for some of its realizations and to overstate it for others when countervailing incentives arise pooling generally characterizes the equilibrium contract furthermore performance is distorted both above and below efficient levels in addition the agent s rents generally increase with the realization of his private information over some ranges and decrease over other ranges we demonstate that the creation of countervailing incentives can enhance aggregate welfare

wildfire risk salience housing demand abstract in this paper we develop a parsimonious model that links underlying changes in location specific risk perceptions to housing market dynamics given estimates of both the price and quantity effects induced by shocks to agents beliefs the model allows us to draw inferences about the underlying changes in risk perceptions that gave rise to observed housing market dynamics we apply the model s predictions to an empirical analysis of the influence of severe wildfires on housing prices and sales rates in the front range of colorado interpreted in the context of the model our empirical results suggest that natural disasters lead to significant but short lived increases in risk perceptions

using markets to allocate pollution permits and other scarce resource rights under limited information abstract we consider the design of government policy to ration such scarce resources as water or pollution permits in the presence of limited information when government policy is formulated some informed agents e g established public utilities know how highly they value the resource other uninformed agents e g potential independent power producers only learn their valuations at some later date the government allows uninformed agents to trade the resource rights they receive on a competitive market informed agents may or may not have the same privilege the optimal initial distribution of resource rights differs significantly according to whether informed agents can trade the rights they receive

creating countervailing incentives through the choice of instruments abstract we analyze the relative efficiency of output and input incentive schemes in an agency model under adverse selection depending on the marginal rate of substitution between effort and productivity two cases of note may appear in the first one both incentive schemes imply the same ranking of agents regarding the productivity parameter in that case one instrument always dominates the other one whatever the agent s type in the second case the two schemes produce reverse rankings and the principal is always better off using a type dependent mixed strategy over the two incentive schemes if there is no restriction on mixed strategies the principal is able to implement the first best if the principal must use pure strategies she is still better off by offering contracts with type dependent monitoring instrument allowing the agent to choose the instrument enhances the principal welfare

arm s length relationships we show that lowering the cost of acquisition of information that a principal obtains about the performance of an agent may make it more difficult for the principal to commit to threats hence it will weaken incentives and can therefore be counterproductive this phenomenon is explored in a framework where improving the quality of information makes a commitment not to renegotiate less credible applications to the theory of the firm are briefly explored

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

is china s development conforms to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis and the pollution haven hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses have been verified by many studies however there is still no consensus on whether china s situation is consistent with the abovementioned hypotheses therefore to investigate whether china s development aligns with the environmental kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses this study considered provincial panel data from 1996 to 2015 and used the fixed effects panel data partially linear additive model which integrates economic growth and foreign direct investment into the same framework to investigate their impact on carbon emissions the results revealed that there exists a reverse u shape relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions and an inverted n shaped relationship between foreign direct investment and carbon dioxide emissions moreover the results revealed that energy consumption has an accelerating effect on the production pace of carbon dioxide emissions the upgrading of industrial infrastructure technology diffusion and trade liberalization can contribute to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions additionally this study proposes the following future research directions first considering the regional differences in china the conclusions of this study should be re examined by grouping different regions secondly the formation mechanism of the inverted n type relationship between foreign direct investment and carbon emissions is also an issue that requires further discussion finally a comparative study between developed and developing countries is needed to test and verify the universality and adaptability of the conclusions drawn from this study

energy consumption economic growth and co2 emissions in middle east and north african countries this article extends the recent findings of liu 2005 ang 2007 apergis et al 2009 and payne 2010 by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions energy consumption and real gdp for 12 middle east and north african countries mena over the period 1981 2005 our results show that in the long run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on co2 emissions more interestingly we show that real gdp exhibits a quadratic relationship with co2 emissions for the region as a whole however although the estimated long run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the ekc hypothesis in most studied countries the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases hence providing poor evidence in support of the ekc hypothesis co2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the mena region even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981 2005 the econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in co2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as gdp per capita in the mena region continues to grow

a more timely house price index using listings data we construct a new repeat sales house price index that describes house values at the contract date when the price is determined rather than the closing date when the property is transferred we showthat this difference in timing helps explain several puzzles about house prices including their strong short term serial correlation and their weak correlation with stock prices and macroeconomic news shocks in addition we showthat a variant of our index that relies exclusively on listings data for recent transactions accurately reveals trends in house prices several months before existing price indexes like case shiller become available

delegation as commitment the case of income tax audits in this article we study the value of delegating authority over income tax audit policy arising from the incompleteness of contracts consider a utilitarian government whose ability to commit is limited to aggregate dimensions of its audit policy as publicly verifiable information about detailed allocations of audit budgets is not available we show that the welfare level associated with the full commitment solution can be attained by delegating authority over audit policy to a manager the latter is offered a simple incentive scheme based only on the aggregate variables which are publicly observable in contrast if the government retains authority direct commitment to these same variables does not allow the full commitment welfare level to be achieved thus despite sharing a common informational basis delegation may perform better than centralized arrangements in the presence of incomplete contracts