household carbon inequality in urban china its sources and determinants designing mitigation policies for households requires knowledge of household carbon distributions this study surveys the household carbon inequality in urban china and analyzes its sources and determinants using weighted household survey data different from existing literatures studying carbon inequality on the international or regional level we focus on the household aspect and first survey its characteristics by some comparisons by ascribing household carbon emissions calculated by the consumer lifestyle approach to several consumption categories with the method of gini coefficient decomposition we find that residential consumption with high carbon intensity is the most important source of household carbon inequality in urban china food consumption and the consumption of educational cultural and recreational services are the next largest sources because of the consumed quantities or carbon intensity the application of shapley decomposition shows the determinants of household carbon inequality in urban china and their contributions which are household demographic characteristics 59 74 household employment and income 24 31 household burdens 8 00 and household assets and financial plans 7 95 the policy implications of these results are also discussed

the low pay commission and the national minimum wage great britain has had statutory regulation of minimum pay for most of this century but never previously had a national minimum wage nmw this paper outlines the history of minimum wage regulation culminating in 1997 with the establishment of the low pay commission lpc the three key debates within the lpc are analysed namely the definition of the wage what to do about youngsters and the level to set the nmw the impact of the nmw on the pay distribution employment family incomes and exchequer finances is set out the paper concludes that the lpc is a fine example of successful social partnership

are ghettos good or bad spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups may theoretically have positive or negative effects on the economic performance of those groups we examine the effects of segregation on outcomes for blacks in schooling employment and single parenthood we find that blacks in more segregated areas have significantly worse outcomes than blacks in less segregated areas we control for the endogeneity of location choice using instruments based on political factors topographical features and residence before adulthood a one standard deviation decrease in segregation would eliminate one third of the black white differences in most of our outcomes

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

an empirical study of the consolidation of local public health services in connecticut this study contributes to the literature by empirically examining the decision of connecticut communities to consolidate the delivery of public health services as theory suggests the prospect of scale economies is found empirically to increase the likelihood that a community consolidates public health services in addition differences across communities are found to inhibit the consolidation of public health services overall the results imply that financial incentives may be necessary to encourage more regional districts because localities may underestimate the true minimum efficient scale for public health services and because heterogeneity among jurisdictions impedes regional cooperation

future inequality in co2 emissions and the impact of abatement proposals this paper analyzes future carbon emissions inequality using a group decomposition of the gini index business as usual projections to the year 2100 for 135 countries show inequality in per capita emissions declines slowly next the impact on emissions levels and inequality of the kyoto protocol and other abatement proposals for annex ii countries in 2010 are measured with a focus on the gap narrowing and reranking effects substantial reranking of per capita emissions between annex ii and non annex ii countries will not occur unless the former reduce their emissions by at least 50 versus 1990 levels and the latter continue growing unabated

international inequalities in per capita co2 emissions a decomposition methodology by kaya factors in this paper we provide a methodology for decomposing international inequalities in per capita co2 emissions into kaya multiplicative factors and two interaction terms we use the theil index of inequality and show that this decomposition methodology can be extended for analyzing between and within group inequality components we can thus analyze the factors behind inequalities in per capita co2 emissions across countries between groups of countries and within groups of countries the empirical illustration for international data suggests some points firstly international inequality in per capita co2 emissions is mainly attributable to inequalities in per capita income levels which helps to explain its recent reduction while differences in carbon intensity of energy and energy intensity have made a less significant contribution this result is strongly influenced by the performance of china and india secondly the between group inequality component which is the biggest component is also largely explained by the income factor thirdly the within group inequality component increased slightly during the period something mainly due to the change in the income factor and the interaction terms in a few regions

the geography of linguistic diversity and the provision of public goods abstract this paper analyzes the importance of local interaction between individuals of different ethnolinguistic groups for the provision of public goods at the national level the conceptual framework we develop suggests that a country s public goods i decrease in its overall ethnolinguistic fractionalization and ii either increase or decrease in its local global ethnolinguistic complementarity a measure of how local interaction affects antagonism towards other groups in the society at large after constructing a 5 km by 5 km dataset on language use for 223 countries we empirically explore these theoretical predictions while overall fractionalization worsens public goods outcomes local interaction mitigates this negative association conditional on a country s overall diversity public goods outcomes are maximized when there are a few large sized groups and the diversity of each location mirrors that of the country as a whole

economic growth in a cross section of cities abstract we examine the relationship between urban characteristics in 1960 and urban growth between 1960 and 1990 income and population growth move together and both types of growth are 1 positively related to initial schooling 2 negatively related to initial unemployment and 3 negatively related to the initial share of employment in manufacturing racial composition and segregation are uncorrelated with urban growth across all cities but in cities with large nonwhite communities segregation is positively correlated with population growth government expenditures except for sanitation are uncorrelated with growth government debt is positively correlated with later growth

distributional aspects of emissions in climate change integrated assessment models the recent failure of copenhagen negotiations shows that concrete actions are needed to create the conditions for a consensus over global emission reduction policies a wide coalition of countries in international climate change agreements could be facilitated by the perceived fairness of rich and poor countries of the abatement sharing at international level in this paper i use two popular climate change integrated assessment models to investigate the path and decompose components and sources of future inequality in the emissions distribution results prove to be consistent with previous empirical studies and robust to model comparison and show that gaps in gdp across world regions will still play a crucial role in explaining different countries contributions to global warming

decomposing inequality in co2 emissions the role of primary energy carriers and economic sectors emission inequality across countries and the contribution of the energy mix and the sectoral composition of a country s energy use are of central importance to the climate debate we analyze the evolution of inequality in global co2 per capita emissions using both historical data on energy related co2 emissions and future emission scenarios generated with the integrated assessment model remind within our sample of 90 countries the results indicate that the gini index declined from about 0 6 in 1971 to slightly above 0 4 in 2008 a decomposition of the gini index of total emissions into primary energy carriers indicates that this reduction is mainly attributed to declining shares of emissions from coal peat and oil in total emissions and decreasing emission inequality within all fossil primary energy sources from the perspective of economic sectors the decline in overall inequality is almost entirely due to a decline of the contribution of emissions from manufacturing construction our analysis also suggests that an equally spread emission reduction from any one source would not have a major impact on overall emission inequality the analysis of future scenario data indicates that climate policy reduces absolute emission inequality while inducing drastic progressive emission reductions in all regions

is the median voter decisive evidence from referenda voting patterns abstract this paper examines whether the voter with the median income is decisive in local spending decisions previous tests have relied on cross sectional data while we make use of a pair of california referenda to estimate a first difference specification the referenda proposed to lower the required vote share for passing local educational bonding initiatives from 67 to 50 and 67 to 55 respectively we find that voters rationally consider future public service decisions when deciding how to vote on voting rules however the empirical evidence strongly suggests that an income percentile below the median is decisive for majority voting rules especially in communities that have a large share of high income voters with attributes that suggest low demand for public services based on a model that explicitly recognizes that each community contains voters with both high and low demand for public school spending we also find that an increase in the share of low demand voters is associated with a lower decisive voter income percentile for the high demand group this two type model implies that our low demand types individuals over age 45 with no children have demands that are 45 lower than other voters collectively these findings are consistent with high income voters with weak preferences for public educational services voting with the poor against increases in public spending on education

global appropriation of resources causes high international material inequality growth is not the solution abstract high levels of resource consumption cause detrimental environmental change very low consumption may fail to meet basic needs a major challenge for a sustainability transformation is to reduce inequalities and achieve a globally sustainable level of resource flows by providing access to resources beyond national boundaries trade could either lead to more equal international distribution or aggravate unequal distribution of material resources for a sample of 173 countries between 1993 and 2010 we studied the role of trade and the upstream global appropriation of resources in international material inequality until the turn of the century per capita material extraction was as unequally distributed as material consumption extraction plus imports minus exports import and export flows as such do not greatly affect inequality the global appropriation of materials associated with trade however decisively increased inequality until 2000 in the 21st century decreasing inequality coincided with a sharp rise in global material extraction appropriated by high and upper middle income countries such growth led reduction of inequality is not environmentally sustainable it has until now been enabled by global trade patterns distributing resources in a way that can never be globally inclusive putting especially the world s poorest countries at risk

cities and cultures we investigate whether cultural diversity across us cities measured as the variety of native languages spoken by city residents is associated with any effect on their productivity diversity of cultures may imply diversity of production skills of abilities and of occupations that enhances the productive performance of a city on the other hand transaction costs and frictions across groups may hurt productivity similarly diversity in available goods and services can increase utility but distaste for or hostility to different cultural groups may decrease it using census data from 1970 to 1990 we find that wages and employment density of us born workers were systematically higher ceteris paribus in cities with richer linguistic diversity these positive correlations reveal a net positive effect of diversity on productivity that survives robustness checks and instrumental variable estimation this effect is found to be stronger for highly educated workers and for white workers we also show that better assimilated non native speakers i e those who speak english well and have been in the us for more than five years are most beneficial to the productivity of us born workers

do political parties matter evidence from u s cities are cities as politically polarized as states and countries no is the answer from our regression discontinuity design analysis which shows that whether the mayor is a democrat or a republican does not affect the size of city government the allocation of local public spending or crime rates however there is a substantial incumbent effect for mayors we investigate three mechanisms that could account for the striking lack of partisan impact at the local level and find the most support for tiebout competition among localities within metropolitan areas

crowd out and diversity abstract research has shown that altruism is lower in diverse communities can this phenomenon be counteracted by government intervention to answer this question this paper introduces diversity to the canonical model of warm glow giving diversity may have two effects on incentives it may attenuate individuals altruistic preferences for public goods and it may cool off the warm glow that individuals get from voluntarism either of these effects leads to diverse communities having lower levels of public goods consistent with prior research however these effects have opposite implications for the efficacy of government intervention i then empirically investigate whether government intervention is more effective in diverse communities for identification i exploit the supreme court mandated 1991 expansion of the ssi program using a new dataset of united methodist churches from 1984 to 2000 the results show that the expansion of ssi crowded out charitable spending by churches the crowd out estimate for the average church is reasonably large but this masks significant differences in crowd out between communities crowd out occurred almost entirely in relatively homogeneous communities there is only modest evidence of crowd out in racially diverse communities thus diverse communities while having the lowest levels of altruism are in this instance the most amenable to government intervention

redistribution in a model of voting and campaign contributions abstract i propose a framework in which individual political participation can take two distinct forms voting and contributing resources to campaigns in a context in which the negligible impact of any individual s actions on aggregate outcomes is fully recognized by all agents i then use the framework to reassess the relationship between inequality and redistribution the model shows that even though each contribution has a negligible impact the interaction between contributions and voting leads to an endogenous wealth bias in the political process as the advantage of wealthier individuals in providing contributions encourages parties to move their platforms closer to those individuals preferred positions this mechanism can in turn explain why the standard median voter based prediction that more inequality produces more redistribution has received little empirical support higher inequality endogenously shifts the political system further in favor of the rich in equilibrium there is a non monotonic relationship in which redistribution is initially increasing but eventually decreasing in inequality i present some empirical evidence supporting the framework using data on campaign contributions from us presidential elections in particular inequality increases contributions to republicans but not to democrats as predicted by the model

old and young politicians we consider the role of a politician s age in italian municipal governments when the term limit is not binding younger mayors engage in political budget cycles more often than older mayors thus younger politicians behave more strategically in response to electoral incentives probably because they expect to have a longer political career and stronger career concerns we discuss and rule out several alternative interpretations

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

weighting vectors and international inequality changes in environmental indicators an analysis of co2 per capita emissions and kaya factors abstract analyses of international inequality in environmental factors such as the well known co 2 per capita or the kaya factors that is carbon intensity energy intensity and affluence have overlooked the effect that weighting vectors of distance functions and their time variations can have on the evolution of the inequality observed thus for example increases in the relative weight of countries with low emissions tend ceteris paribus to increase the inequality even when the vector of international per capita emissions remains unchanged this effect strictly associated with share variations is assessed in this paper by means of a simple decomposition methodology this methodology allows us to ascertain what part of the time variation of the inequality is attributable to the variations in the shares and or the variations in the environmental variable analysed and in turn suggests extending the analysis to the group components of inequality shorrocks 1980 this proposition is used empirically to assess international inequalities in co 2 per capita and the kaya factors for a variety of sub periods during the 1971 2007 period and for various satisfactory inequality indices

inequality in co2 emissions across countries and its relationship with income inequality a distributive approach this paper analyses the inequality in co2 emissions across countries and groups of countries and the relationship of this inequality with income inequality across countries for the period 1971 1999 the research employs the tools that are usually applied in income distribution analysis the methodology used here gives qualitative and quantitative information on some of the features of the inequalities across countries that are considered most relevant for the design and discussion of policies aimed at mitigating climate change the paper studies the relationship between co2 emissions and gdp and shows that income inequality across countries has been followed by an important inequality in the distribution of emissions this inequality has diminished mildly although the inequality in emissions across countries ordered in the increasing value of income inequality between rich and poor countries has diminished less than the simple inequality in emissions lastly the paper shows that the inequality in co2 emissions is mostly explained by the inequality between groups with different per capita income level the importance of the inequality within groups of similar per capita income is much lower and has diminished during the period especially in the low middle income group

examining the relationship between municipal consolidation and cost reduction an instrumental variable approach abstractthis study explores the cost reduction effects of local government consolidation using data from japanese municipalities we use municipal panel data from japan for the years 2000 2005 and 2010 a data set including numerous consolidation cases reverse causality between consolidation decisions and size of municipal expenditure is a concern in the voluntary consolidation of local governments an instrumental variable iv methodology is employed to deal with possible endogeneity associated with consolidation decisions the main finding is that municipal current expenditure per capita increases immediately after consolidation but then gradually declines because consolidation seems to increase per capita expenditure in the absence of the effect of this long term declining trend incorporating this trend into estimation is crucial in cost efficiency analysis of consolidation it is also shown that conventional panel data regressions yield biased consolidation effects suggesting the superiority o

the welfare implications of climate change policy abstract the response to three different climate change policies is measured within a general equilibrium model of world output technological change greenhouse gas emissions and climate driven changes in productivity the proposed policies including an approximation to the kyoto protocol are shown to differ greatly in how they mitigate climate change support economic growth and allocate rents across generations benefits of alternative policies relative to the status quo do not necessarily accrue to the generations that bear the costs the results also show that the chosen rent distribution rule has a profound effect on policy evaluation in particular policies which allocate rents on a per capita basis are shown to be systematically welfare preferred to situations where emissions rights are grandfathered to emitting firms this implies that both the optimal level of emissions and the welfare cost of reaching a given target of emissions or atmospheric concentration would be lower under a per capita allocation of emissions permits or carbon tax revenues

social connections and group banking lending to the poor is expensive due to high screening monitoring and enforcement costs group lending advocates believe lenders overcome this by harnessing social connections using data from finca peru i exploit a quasi random group formation process to find evidence of peers successfully monitoring and enforcing joint liability loans individuals with stronger social connections to their fellow group members i e either living closer or being of a similar culture have higher repayment and higher savings furthermore i observe direct evidence that relationships deteriorate after default and that through successful monitoring individuals know who to punish and who not to punish after default

the breakup of nations a political economy analysis this paper develops a model of the breakup or unification of nations in each nation the decision to separate is taken by majority voting a basic trade off between the efficiency gains of unification and the costs in terms of loss of control on political decisions is highlighted the model emphasizes political conflicts over redistribution policies the main results of the paper are i when income distributions vary across regions and the efficiency gains from unification are small separation occurs in equilibrium and ii when all factors of production are perfectly mobile all incentives for separation disappear i introduction following the demise of communism the entire map of europe from the atlantic coast to the urals is being redrawn and issues of separation unification and the redrawing of borders are yet again at the forefront of european concerns many of the issues raised by this process are primarily of a political cultural or linguistic nature however there are also economic considerations that bear on this problem the objective of this paper is to analyze some important economic and political determinants of the process of unification and separation of democratic nations the starting point of our analysis is to suppose that from an economic efficiency point of view separation of nations is never desirable a unified nation is always more efficient since free trade among regions is guaranteed duplication costs in defense and law enforcement are avoided and local public goods provision such as transportation and communication networks or common standards can be coordinated furthermore any benefits of decentralization that might be obtained in a world with several nations may also be achieved within a unified nation by replicating the administrative structure of the world with several

wages rents and the quality of life this study focuses on the role of wages and rents in allocating workers to locations with various quantities of amenities the theory demonstrates that if the amenity is also productive then the sign of the wage gradient is unclear while the rent gradient is positive the theory is extended to include the housing market and nontraded goods these extensions require little modification of the conclusion the empirical work on wages shows that the regional wage differences can be explained largely by these local attributes with the use of site price data implicit prices are estimated and quality of life rankings for the cities are computed

international equity and differentiation in global warming policy ne of the major obstacles to reaching a comprehensive agreement on global warming is the setting of greenhouse gas emission reduction targets for individual countries long standing tensions between industrialized and developing countries have raised the issue of equity in burden sharing moreover individual industrialized nations have pleaded special circumstances and have sought differentiation in their obligations this paper analyzes alternative rules for distributing tradable carbon dioxide emissions permits a non linear programming model which distinguishes between allocation based and outcome based rules is used to analyze the relative welfare outcomes the model is applied to the world body of nations and yields several important policy implications

the political economy of regional integration projects at borders where poor and rich meet the role of cross border shopping and community sorting abstract at borders between poor and rich countries huge service price differentials could be exploited to mutual benefit offering better paid job opportunities to the poor as well as better shopping opportunities to the rich however cross border shopping is often limited by the substantial transaction costs of crossing the border moreover countries and regions frequently fail to cut these transaction costs even when they have the opportunity to do so we provide a politico economic analysis of cross border integration projects more specifically we show how the political outcome depends on i intra country mobility ii decision making and housing ownership regimes and iii federal grants and international border regulations our analysis builds on two key characteristics in which individuals differ interregional mobility and intercultural ability

electoral vulnerability and size of local governments evidence from voting on municipal mergers abstract we analyze how anticipated changes in the electoral vulnerability of municipal councilors affect their voting behavior over municipal mergers the electoral vulnerability changes due to a merger because it changes the composition of political competitors and the number of available seats in the next election we use this variation for identification and find that the smaller the increase in the electoral vulnerability of a councilor the more likely he is to vote for the merger the documented effect is not driven by the behavioral response of the voters or by party line considerations the councilors desire to avoid personal electoral competition may lead to sub optimally small municipalities from the local citizens point of view

a spatial merger estimator with an application to school district consolidation abstract this paper develops a spatial merger estimator to explain political integration generally and then applies this method to a wave of school district mergers in the state of iowa during the 1990s our estimator is rooted in the economics of matching and thus accounts for three important features of typical merger protocol two sided decision making multiple potential partners and spatial interdependence rather than simply explaining when a particular region is likely to experience a wave of political integration our method allows us to explore the factors driving which specific subregional mergers take place this allows us to explore how those districts that merge choose with which of their neighbors to do so our results highlight the importance of state financial incentives for consolidation economies of scale diseconomies of scale and a variety of heterogeneity measures in this particular application we also demonstrate the power of our estimator relative to existing estimators to detect a statistically significant role for heterogeneity factors while our application is limited to school district consolidation our method can be adapted to include the salient features of many spatial integration problems

federal competition and economic growth abstract this paper exploits exogenous variation in the natural topography of the united states to estimate the causal impact of inter jurisdictional competition on income growth we find that doubling the number of county governments in a metropolitan area leads to a 17 increase in the average annual growth rate of earnings per employee over 1969 2006 and a 10 increase in 2006 income per employee decomposing income effects using 2000 census worker level data we find that approximately half of the effect stems from making workers more productive while the other half comes from changing the composition of the workforce and inducing workers to work more hours we also present evidence that inter jurisdictional competition leads local governments to raise more in taxes spend more and issue more debt per capita but does not help them obtain more inter governmental transfers however the additional cost from this increase in expenditures to a median wage employee is much smaller than the increase in that employee s wages due to greater inter jurisdictional competition

citizens support for inter municipal cooperation evidence from a survey in the german state of hesse inter municipal cooperation imc is often proposed as a politically feasible way by which rural municipalities can cope with intensified interregional competition and demographic change we provid

ghost house busters the electoral response to a large anti tax evasion program the incentives of political agents to enforce tax collection are key determinants of the levels of compliance we study the electoral response to the ghost buildings program a nationwide anti tax evasion policy in italy that used innovative monitoring technologies to target buildings hidden from tax authorities two million buildings were registered as a result of the program our difference in differences identification strategy exploits both variation across towns in the ex ante program scope to increase enforcement as well as administrative data on actual building registrations local incumbents experience an increase in their reelection likelihood as a consequence of the policy in addition these political returns are higher in areas with lower tax evasion tolerance and with higher speed of public good provision implying complementarity among enforcement policies the underlying tax culture and government efficiency

municipal preferences for state imposed amalgamations an empirical study based on the swedish municipal reform of 1952 this paper concerns municipal preferences for state imposed municipal amalgamations focusing on factors that may explain municipal acceptance of or objection to a state imposed amalgamation deci

volunteering to be taxed business improvement districts and the extra governmental provision of public safety abstract when the median voter s preference sets the level of local public goods some voters are left unsatisfied is there an institution by which subsets of voters can resolve the collective action problem and increase the local provision of public goods if so what are the consequences in response to problems such as crime and vandalism neighborhood property owners have established business improvement districts bids to provide local public goods when a bid is approved by a majority of property owners in a neighborhood state law makes contributions to the bid budget mandatory this resolution of the neighborhood s collective action problem reduces crime bids in the city of los angeles are robustly associated with crime declines of 6 to 10 indeed crime falls regardless of estimation technique fixed effects comparing bids to neighborhoods that considered but did not adopt bids using propensity score matching and comparing bids to their neighbors strikingly these declines are purchased cheaply attributing all bid expenditure to violent crime reduction and thus ignoring the impact of bid expenditure on many quality of life crimes bids spend 21 000 to avert one violent crime this higher bound estimate is substantially lower than the 57 000 social cost of a violent crime

conflict defense spending and the number of nations abstract this paper provides a formal model of endogenous border formation and choice of defense spending in a world with international conflict we examine both the case of democratic governments and of dictatorships the model is consistent with three observations first breakup of countries should follow a reduction in the likelihood of international conflicts second the number of regional conflicts between smaller countries may increase as a result of the breakup of larger countries third the size of the peace dividend the reduction in defense spending in a more peaceful world is limited by the process of country breakup

the dynamics of low income in rural areas phimister e upward r and vera t oscano e 2000 the dynamics of low income in rural areas reg studies 34 407 417 this paper provides a picture of the dynamics of low income in rural areas by comparing a rural sample with a non rural sample using the british household panel survey the paper considers income distributions and inequality low income mobility the distribution of low income spells the characteristics of those on low incomes and possible trigger events associated with low income entry and exit across the two samples although in absolute terms somewhat less important than in non rural areas the results confirm that low income in rural areas is significant and emphasize a number of important dynamic aspects of the problem such as the extent of persistent low income among the rural poor phimister e upward r et vera toscano e 2000 la dynamique du faible revenu dans les zones rurales reg studies 34 407 417 a partir du british household panel survey un sondage aupres des m

network effects and welfare cultures we empirically examine the role of social networks in welfare participation using data on language spoken at home to better infer networks within an area our empirical strategy asks whether being surrounded by others who speak the same language increases welfare use more for those from high welfare using language groups this methodology allows us to include local area and language group fixed effects and to control for the direct effect of being surrounded by one s language group these controls eliminate many of the problems in previous studies the results strongly confirm the importance of networks in welfare participation

decomposing inequality in energy related co2 emissions by source and source increment the roles of production and residential consumption abstract using provincial data on energy related co2 emissions in china from 1997 to 2014 and the co2 emission gini coefficient ceg this study evaluates china s spatial inequality in energy related co2 emissions further we decompose this inequality and its variation from the perspectives of production and residential energy consumption using the source decomposition and source increment decomposition methods this paper presents a new ceg source increment decomposition method that can achieve complete decomposition the results reveal a downward trend in china s overall production sector and residential sector co2 emissions inequality although the gini coefficient of co2 emissions from the residential sector is larger than that from the production sector the contribution of the latter to the overall ceg is higher the impacts of the spatial inequality of co2 emissions from china s production and residential sectors depend on the type of energy the concentration effect is the primary factor responsible for inducing changes in china s overall and production sector co2 emissions inequality but it is not the only dominant factor for the residential sector co2 emissions inequality

political jurisdictions in heterogeneous communities we investigate whether political jurisdictions form in response to the trade off between economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population we consider heterogeneity in income race ethnicity and religion and we test the model using american school districts school attendance areas municipalities and special districts we find strong evidence of a trade off between economies of scale and racial heterogeneity we also find evidence of a trade off between economies of scale and income heterogeneity conversely we find little evidence that ethnic or religious heterogeneity shapes jurisdictions to clarify the direction of causality between heterogeneity and jurisdictions we exploit shocks to racial heterogeneity generated by the two world wars

international ecological footprint inequality a methodological review and some results scarcities of environmental services are no longer merely a remote hypothesis consequently analysis of their inequalities between nations becomes of paramount importance for the achievement of sustainability this paper aims on the one hand at revising methodological aspects of the inequality measurement of certain environmental data and on the other at extending the scarce empirical evidence relating to the international distribution of ecological footprint ef most of the techniques currently important in the literature are revised and then tested on ef data with interesting results we consider the underlying properties of different inequality indices those indices which fit best with environmental inequality measurements are cv 2 and ge 2 because of their neutrality property subgroup and source decompositions are also discussed from a methodological perspective empirically this paper contributes to the environmental inequality measurement of ef this inequality has been quite stable subgroup decomposition by using exogenous country groups world bank classification conclude that between group inequality explains almost the totality of international ef inequality source decomposition warns of the dangers of confining co 2 emissions reduction to crop based energies because of the implications for basic needs satisfaction

the potential impact of the minimum wage in rural areas this article explores the extent to which the potential impact of the national minimum wage might differ in rural areas using pre 1999 data from the british household panel survey a number of dimensions of the policy s potential impact in rural areas are considered in particular the number of workers affected their typical characteristics and the effects on pay inequality and household income distribution the results show that for the majority of rural areas that are accessible to urban labour markets the impact is likely to be broadly similar in contrast the potential impacts and particularly the distributional effects of the national minimum wage are found to be greatest in remoter rural areas

the size of countries does it matter borders are a man made institution and as such their shape cannot be taken as part of the physical landscape the size of countries is endogenous to politico economic forces this paper discusses recent efforts by economists to study three related questions what determines the evolution of the size of countries does size matter for economic success given the trend toward decentralization and of creation of supernational unions such as the eu is the meaning of national borders evolving jel h10

the building blocks of international ecological footprint inequality a regression based decomposition this paper carries out an empirical decomposition of international inequality in the ecological footprint with a view to quantifying the extent of the contribution of explanatory variables such as countries affluence economic structure demographic characteristics climate and technology using data for the period 1993 2007 the regression based inequality decomposition methodology we use allows us to extend the results obtained in standard environmental impact regressions stirpat models and to deal with an often neglected aspect of such models that of equity within generations the results obtained point towards the prioritization of policies which take into account both future and present generations in this regard economic redistribution should be considered as a primary environmental policy

r d investment strategy for climate change abstract the economic costs of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations over the coming century depend critically on the development of new technologies in the energy sector our research and development r d investment strategy is the control variable for technology availability this paper proposes an analytic framework for determining optimal r d investment allocation and presents some numerical results to demonstrate the implementation of the methodology the value of technological advance in three targeted areas fossil based generation renewables and carbon capture and storage is represented by the increase in expected welfare in the presence of an emissions policy constraint of initially uncertain stringency r d expenditure increases the probability of advance optimal investment is determined by its relationship with success probability which is assumed to exhibit decreasing returns to scale relative to the value of success while the numerical results are speculative the paper offers insights into the nature of an optimal technology strategy for addressing climate change

on the number and size of nations this paper studies the equilibrium determination of the number of countries in different political regimes and in different economic environments with more or less economic integration we focus on the trade off between the benefits of large jurisdictions and the costs of heterogeneity of large and diverse populations our model implies that i democratization leads to secessions ii in equilibrium one generally observes an inefficiently large number of countries iii the equilibrium number of countries is increasing in the amount of economic integration

regional evidence on the effect of the national minimum wage on the gender pay gap robinson h 2005 regional evidence on the effect of the national minimum wage on the gender pay gap regional studies 39 855 872 this paper provides evidence on employment rates and the extent of the change in the gender wage gap across regions around the introduction of the national minimum wage nmw the variation in the proportions of low paid workers across britain provides a quasi natural experiment with which to try and measure the effect of the introduction of the nmw all things being equal if women are over represented amongst the low paid and the proportion of low paid workers varies across regions one might expect to see the introduction of the nmw narrowing the overall gender pay gap by varying degrees across the country using difference in differences type estimation on labour force survey data it is concluded that there is variation in the limited narrowing of the overall gender pay gap across regions consistent with regional differences in the incidence and magnitude of low pay

analysis of the international distribution of per capita co2 emissions using the polarization concept abstract the concept of polarization is linked to the extent that a given distribution leads to the formation of homogeneous groups with opposing interests this concept which is basically different from the traditional one of inequality is related to the level of inherent potential conflict in a distribution the polarization approach has been widely applied in the analysis of income distribution the extension of this approach to the analysis of international distribution of co 2 emissions is quite useful as it gives a potent informative instrument for characterizing the state and evolution of the international distribution of emissions and its possible political consequences in terms of tensions and the probability of achieving agreements in this paper we analyze the international distribution of per capita co 2 emissions between 1971 and 2001 through the adaptation of the polarization concept and measures we find that the most interesting grouped description deriving from the analysis is a two groups one which broadly coincide with annex b and non annex b countries of the kyoto protocol which shows the power of polarization analysis for explaining the generation of groups in the real world the analysis also shows a significant reduction in international polarization in per capita co 2 emissions between 1971 and 1995 but not much change since 1995 which might indicate that polarized distribution of emission is still one of the important factors leading to difficulties in achieving agreements for reducing global emissions

the causal factors of international inequality in hbox co _ 2 emissions per capita a regression based inequality decomposition analysis this paper uses the possibilities provided by the regression based inequality decomposition fields in res labor econ 22 1 38 2003 to explore the contribution of different explanatory factors to international inequality in hbox co 2 emissions per capita in contrast to previous emissions inequality decompositions which were based on identity relationships this methodology does not impose any a priori specific relationship thus it allows an assessment of the contribution to inequality of different relevant variables in short the paper appraises the relative contributions of affluence sectoral composition demographic factors and climate the analysis is applied to selected years of the period 1993 2007 the results show the important though decreasing share of the contribution of demographic factors as well as a significant contribution of affluence and sectoral composition

municipal incorporation in the united states this article empirically examines the formation of municipalities in the usa it traces change in unincorporated areas over decades to determine how basic dimensions of population heterogeneity aff

do formula based intergovernmental transfer mechanisms eliminate politically motivated targeting evidence from ghana abstract various countries have adopted formulas for determining intergovernmental transfers as a strategy to limit the role of political considerations in resource allocation in this paper we investigate a formula based system of allocating resources from a central government to local governments to determine whether the political characteristics of recipient areas have any bearing on their allocation specifically we study the sharing of resources of the district assemblies common fund dacf in ghana amongst the country s district governments over the period 1994 to 2005 we find evidence that the mechanism does not eliminate politically motivated targeting of the grants per capita dacf grants were higher in districts where vote margins in the previous presidential election were lower suggesting that swing districts were targeted we find evidence that dacf formula indicators and their weighting were chosen and amended to produce politically desired patterns of transfers

electoral rules and minority representation in u s cities of minority representation majorities tend to disenfranchise minorities through strategic manipulation of electoral rules with the aim of explaining changes in electoral rules adopted by u s cities particularly in the south we show why majorities tend to adopt winner take all city wide rules at large elections in response to an increase in the size of the minority when the minority they are facing is relatively small in this case for the majority it is more effective to leverage on its sheer size instead of risking conceding representation to voters from minority elected districts however as the minority becomes larger closer to a fifty fifty split the possibility of losing the whole city induces the majority to prefer minority votes to be confined in minority packed districts single member district rules serve this purpose we show empirical results consistent with these implications of the model in a novel data set covering u s cities and towns from 1930 to 2000

the effects of minimum wages on employment theory and evidence from britain recent work on the economic effects of minimum wages has stressed that the standard economic model where increases in minimum wages depress employment is not supported by empirical work in some labor markets we present a general theoretical model whereby employers have some degree of monopsony power which allows minimum wages to have the conventional negative impact on employment but which also allows for a neutral or positive impact studying the industry based british wages councils between 1975 and 1992 we find that minimum wages significantly compress the distribution of earnings but do not have a negative impact on employment

culture ethnicity and diversity we investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms attitudes and preferences using surveys of individual values in 76 countries we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values yet that within group variation in culture trumps between group variation thus in contrast to a commonly held view ethnic and cultural diversity are unrelated we explore the correlates of cultural diversity and of the overlap between culture and ethnicity finding that the level of economic development is positively associated with cultural diversity and negatively associated with the overlap between culture and ethnicity finally although only a small portion of a country s overall cultural heterogeneity occurs between groups this does not imply that cultural differences between groups are irrelevant indeed we find that civil conflict becomes more likely when there is greater overlap between ethnicity and culture