do legislators votes reflect constituency preference a simple way to evaluate the senate u s senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency assuming that such a preference exists both of a state s senators represent the same constituency whenever they split their votes one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference for the sample of defense related votes analyzed above misrepresentation either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference occurred at least 37 percent of the time at least 46 percent on one vote although party differences accounted for more than two thirds of the vote splitting a substantial number of splits remained besides a party difference for a state s senatorial pair is itself problematical

global imbalances and the intertemporal external budget constraint a multicointegration approach abstract this paper analyzes the external solvency of a group of 23 oecd countries for the period 1970 2012 the empirical strategy adopted underlines the increasing importance of the financial channel for the external adjustment as proposed in gourinchas and rey 2007 we unify the traditional approaches to testing for external sustainability considering the stock flow system created by the variables representing the external relationships of an open economy external sustainability is tested using several types of cointegration and multicointegration tests the results obtained point to weak sustainability in the flows analysis whereas some degree of strong sustainability is found for up to six countries in the stock flow approach among these countries we find both non european economies such as japan and new zealand and euro area members especially those with more restricted access to financing in the international markets

the role of net foreign assets in a new keynesian small open economy model abstract this paper develops a small open economy sticky price model that determines a unique stable long run asset position for households as function of their incentive to anticipate or postpone consumption and labor effort across periods this is accomplished by adopting an overlapping generations structure in which new households with no assets enter the economy in each period the same characteristics of household behavior that determine long run assets are also important determinants of the model s responses to shocks stabilizing producer prices results in a milder recession following a drop in world demand than stabilizing consumer prices because it prevents the markup in the pricing of goods from increasing in addition given an initial foreign debt allowing consumer prices to rise causes a decrease in the ex post real interest rate on impact lowering the interest burden of the initial debt the differences across policy rules generated by the initial asset position are robust to changes in the latter as long as these are brought about by changes in parameter values that do not alter the fundamental characteristics of household and firm behavior that are also the key determinants of long run assets

shirking and sorting in a political market with finite lived politicians this paper analyzes principal agent slack in the context of a political market composed of voters challengers and incumbents the introduction of a last period via finite livedness in combination with voters imperfect information about politicians preferences causes time varying shirking behavior on the part of politicians political markets eventually sort out those politicians with significantly deviant policy preferences potentially providing a solution to the last period problem and enabling politicians to make credible commitments in the extreme sorting can insure that it is not worthwhile for potential shirkers to run for office a systematic relationship between political shirking and number of terms in office may exist and depends on how quickly sorting takes place we show that evidence of little if any shirking is quite consistent with politicians having diverse and strongly held policy preferences in addition if sorting is a significant feature of political markets cross sectional studies will tend to oversample little and non shirking politicians compared to longitudinal studies reinterpretations of existing empirical work are also discussed

energy consumption real income and temporal causality results from a multi country study based on cointegration and error correction modelling techniques abstract unlike previous studies on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth this paper illustrates how the finding of cointegration i e long term equilibrium relationship between these variables may be used in testing granger causality based on the most recent johansen s multivariate cointegration tests preceded by various unit root or non stationarity tests we test for cointegration between total energy consumption and real income of six asian economies india pakistan malaysia singapore indonesia and the philippines non rejection of cointegration between variables rules out granger non causality and imples at least one way of granger causality either unidirectional or bidirectionial secondly by using a dynamic vector error correction model we then analyse the direction of granger causation and hence the within sample granger exogeneity or endogeneity of each of the variables thirdly the relative strength of the causality is gauged through the dynamic variance decomposition technique by decomposing the total impact of an unanticipated shock to each of the variables beyond the sample period into proportions attributable to shocks in the other variables including its own in the bivariate system results based on these tools of methodology indicate that while all pair wise relationships shared common univariate integrational properties only relationships for three countries india pakistan and indonesia were cointegrated for these countries temporal causality results were mixed with unidirectional causality from energy to income for india exactly the reverse for indonesia and mutual causality for pakistan the vdcs were not inconsistent with these results and provided us with an additional insight as to the relatively more dominant direction of causation in pakistan simple bivariate vector autoregressive models for the three non cointegrated systems did not indicate any direction of causality significantly in either direction

what determines real exchange rates the nordic countries the model derived in this paper yields testable implications concerning the long run co movements of real exchange rates relative labor productivity the trade balance and terms of trade countries with relatively higher output growth trade deficits or improved terms of trade are found to have more appreciated real exchange rates with the main channel of transmission working through the relative price of nontraded goods exogenous terms of trade shocks are found to be the most important determinant of long run movements in the real exchange rate for denmark and norway while demand shocks account for most of the long run variance in the real exchange rate for finland and sweden

spatial equilibrium with entry this paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote maximizing third party the resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the hotelling median equilibrium established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election this provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of two party systems namely that non cooperative behavior between established parties can effectively prevent third parties from winning

capture and ideology in the economic theory of politics the economic theory of regulation long ago put public interest theories of politics to rest these theories have correctly been viewed as normative wishings rather than explanations of real world phenomena they have been replaced by models of political behavior that are consistent with the rest of microeconomics anthony downs 1957 james buchanan and gordon tullock 1965 george stigler 1971 sam peltzman 1976 recently however debate has arisen over whether some version of a public interest theory of regulation will have to be readmitted to our thinking about actions and results in the political arena what is at issue is the empirical importance of the altruistic publicly interested goals of rational actors in determining legislative and regulatory outcomes james kau and paul rubin 1979 kalt 1981 peltzman 1982 this study assesses the nature and significance of publicly interested objectives in a particular instance of economic policymaking u s senate voting on coal strip mining regulations the existence of such objectives is of course no contradiction of the economic view of human behavior kenneth arrow 1972 gary becker 1974 and may well be rooted in genetic biological history becker 1976 jack hirshleifer 1978 generally however individuals altruistic publicly interested goals have been given little attention this reflects the judgment that such goals are so empirically unimportant as to allow the use of occam s razor in positive models or well founded apprehensions that these goals are unusually difficult to identify measure and analyze notwithstanding the latter problem we find that approaches which confine themselves to a view of political actors as narrowly egocentric maximizers explain and predict legislative outcomes poorly the tracking and dissecting of the determinants of voting on coal strip mining policy suggest that the economic theory of politics has been prematurely closed to a broader conception of political behavior

imperfect mobility of labor across sectors a reappraisal of the balassa samuelson effect this paper investigates the relative price and relative wage effects of a higher productivity in the traded sector compared with the non traded sector in a two sector open economy model with imperfect substitutability in hours worked across sectors the balassa samuelson 1964 model predicts that a rise in the sectoral productivity ratio by 1 raises the relative price of non tradables by 1 while leaving the non traded wage traded wage ratio unchanged applying cointegration methods to a panel of fourteen oecd countries over the period 1970 2007 our estimates show that the relative price rises by only 0 78 and the relative wage falls by 0 27 while our first set of empirical findings cast doubt on the quantitative predictions of the balassa samuelson model our second set of evidence highlights the role of imperfect labor mobility the relative price responds more to a productivity differential between tradables and non tradables while the reaction of the relative wage is more muted in countries with higher intersectoral reallocation of labor we show that the ability of the two sector model to account for our evidence quantitatively relies upon two ingredients i imperfect mobility of labor across sectors and ii physical capital accumulation finally our numerical results reveal that the model predicts the relative price response fairly well and to a lesser extent the relative wage response

an explanation for why senators from the same state vote differently so frequently abstract this paper explains why rational well informed voters elect politicians with divergent platforms given well defined constituencies and the costliness of any individual politician creating transfers across all interest groups we show that different politicians from the same district can successfully represent vastly different constituencies and still have each politician producing the support maximizing level of transfers our explanation focuses on how obtaining wealth transfers reduces successful constituencies returns to obtaining additional transfers the evidence strongly rejects alternative explanations based upon the median voter and polarized policy preference approaches

an investigation of co integration and causality between energy consumption and economic activity in taiwan applying hsiao a version of the granger causality method this paper examines the causality between energy and gnp and energy and employment by applying recently developed techniques of co integration and hsiao s version of the granger causality to taiwanese data for the 1955 1993 period the phillips perron tests reveal that the series with the exception of gnp are not stationary and therefore differencing is performed to secure stationarity the study finds causality running from gdp to energy consumption without feedback in taiwan it is also found that causality runs from gdp to energy but not vice versa

country size and exchange rates this paper studies how country size affects the role of the exchange rate in external adjustment first the impact of country size on the sensitivity of relative prices to external imbalances is explored in a two country neoclassical model second at the empirical level a significant effect of external imbalances on relative prices is found in particular a trade surplus is associated with a depreciation of the real exchange rate our estimations reveal a systematic pattern in the sensitivity of the real exchange rate to external imbalances larger countries are characterized by a higher absolute trade elasticity of the exchange rate

international evidence on tradables and nontradables inflation abstract using 1970 1985 sectoral data for the oecd we find that inflation in nontradable goods exceeds inflation in tradables we identify a demand shift towards nontradables and faster growth of total factor productivity in the tradable goods sector as the prime causes of the differential inflation in addition disinflation attempts and the exchange rate regime appear to have exerted significant influence on the relative inflation rate

the role of natural gas consumption and trade in tunisia s output this paper examines the impact of natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and trade on the real gdp in case of tunisia over the period of 1980 2010 we used auto regressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to test the existence of long run relationship between the variables the vector error correction method vecm granger approach is applied to test the direction of causal relation between the series our findings indicate the existence of long run relationship among the variables natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and trade add in economic growth natural gas consumption real gross fixed capital formation and real trade granger cause real gdp these findings open up new insights for policy makers to formulate a comprehensive energy policy to sustain economic growth for long run

investigating the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis in vietnam this study investigates the existence of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis in vietnam during the period 1981 2011 to realize the goals of this study a pollution model was established applying the autoregressive distributed lag ardl methodology the results revealed that the pollution haven hypothesis does exist in vietnam because capital increases pollution in addition imports also increase pollution which indicates that most of vietnam s imported products are energy intensive and highly polluted however exports have no effect on pollution which indicates that the level of exports is not significant enough to affect pollution moreover fossil fuel energy consumption increases pollution while renewable energy consumption has no significant effect in reducing pollution furthermore labor force reduces pollution since most of vietnam s labor force is in the agricultural and services sectors which are less energy intensive than the industrial sector based on the obtained results the ekc hypothesis does not exist because the relationship between gdp and pollution is positive in both the short and long run

the effects of macroeconomic stability on foreign trade an analysis for spain 1986 2000 two main factors underlie the rebirth of interest in the study of the influence of the real exchange rate on trade the reduction of its volatility and the current trend towards price stability the objective of this study is to analyse the effects of the process of nominal convergence required of the european member states for the fulfilment of monetary integration on foreign trade flows the case of spain which is especially interesting in this context is studied for the period 1986 to 2000 the results of estimating the aggregate functions of the export and import of goods shows how macroeconomic stability has altered the behaviour of trade with respect to the two basic determinants income and prices how it has caused a significant structural change in the real exchange rate and finally how it has laid the explanatory bases for transactions in the twenty first century with the single currency the euro

measuring the dollar euro permanent equilibrium exchange rate using the unobserved components model this paper employs an unobserved component model that incorporates a set of economic fundamentals to obtain the euro dollar permanent equilibrium exchange rates peer for the period 1975q1 to 2008q4 the results show that for most of the sample period the euro dollar exchange rate closely followed the values implied by the peer the only significant deviations from the peer occurred in the years immediately before and after the introduction of the single european currency the forecasting exercise shows that incorporating economic fundamentals provides a better long run exchange rate forecasting performance than a random walk process

net foreign assets and the exchange rate redux revived abstract we revisit obstfeld and rogoff s 1995 results on exchange rate dynamics in a two country monetary model with incomplete asset markets stationary net foreign assets and endogenous monetary policy the nominal exchange rate exhibits a unit root under flexible prices it also depends on the stock of real net foreign assets with sticky prices the exchange rate depends on the past gdp differential along with net foreign assets endogenous monetary policy and asset dynamics have consequences for exchange rate overshooting a persistent relative productivity shock results in delayed overshooting under both flexible and sticky prices a persistent relative interest rate shock generates undershooting under flexible prices

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

intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance a survey abstract this study surveys the intertemporal optimizing models of trade and current account balance that were developed calibrated and empirically tested since they came into vogue in the 1980s the implications of these models often differ from those of static and dynamic conventional non optimizing models the literature on optimizing models has not only grown reasonably fast but has also witnessed significant advances in methodology and these models have culminated into a distinct strand of new open economy macroeconomics the studies conducted until the late 1980s have used deterministic perfect foresight models while several studies conducted since the 1990s relax the perfect foresight and certainty equivalence assumptions and develop stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models to account for uncertainty confronting the optimizing agents the future research needs to explore the possibility of tracing any preferred specification of household preferences model the effect of time varying discount factor on household utility function and intertemporal budget constraint examine the role of costs in international trade place a parallel emphasis on the empirical verifications of theoretical propositions examine the relative performance of optimizing vis a vis non optimizing models and rationalize the extreme propositions of perfect and imperfect capital mobility in the wake of moderately open capital accounts

what do current account reversals in oecd countries tell us about the us case this study examines macroeconomic developments around reversals in current account deficits in 29 oecd countries over four decades and draws some inferences for the present us deficit estimates of a probit model indicate that the deepness of the deficit itself absence of spare production capacity and a beginning real depreciation are factors that increase the likelihood of a current account reversal in the following year for the us each of these three indicators of a reversal are now on making a near reversal probable over the past 40 years half of the current account deficit reversals in the oecd area were followed by a recession in the countries concerned

reconciling voters behavior with legislative term limits a puzzle exists over why voters continually re elect their congressional and state representatives although these same voters often support initiatives to limit the number of terms that their legislators may serve residents of california colorado and oklahoma voted in 1990 to limit the terms of their state legislators to tenures ranging from six to twelve years 1 in california these same voters however re elected 87 of 91 or 96 percent of all incumbent state representatives and senators whose terms they sought to limit 2 among re elected incumbents 67 or 77 percent had served as long as or longer than the maximum term prescribed under their state s term limit initiative voters defeated only two incumbents who would have been removed under the terms of california s tenure restrictions had they been in effect similar voter behavior characterized recent state elections in colorado and oklahoma 3 more generally these seemingly contradictory voter preferences also are apparent in public opinion polls at the federal level while 62 percent of voters immediately prior to the 1990 general elections indicated their intentions to reelect their congressman that same poll showed that only 24 percent said they approve of the way congress is handling its job gallup and newport 1990 pp 36 37 support for term limit initiatives and the low public esteem of legislators as a group both appear to be inconsistent with voters strong preferences for their own representative and the regular reelection of incumbents

a reexamination of the principal agent relationship in politics abstract that senators from the same state often have a large difference in their ideological voting records has proven inconvenient for a literature that has largely relied on a median voter model of elections one exception is palfrey review of economic studies 1984 51 139 156 whose analysis implies the hypothesis that the expected difference in such voting records varies directly with the variance of that state s density function of constituent ideological preferences this paper provides empirical testing consistent with this hypothesis the paper then argues that currently accepted methodology for measuring senatorial shirking is systematically biased towards indicating shirking and provides empirical analysis consistent with this argument

shirking representation and congressional behavior voting on the 1983 amendments to the social security act our central goals at the outset of the paper were three 1 to report on the relative significance of a sophisticated measure of constituent economic interest and a commonly used variable ada score that purports to measure the personal ideology of the candidate 2 demonstrate that the constituent economic interest variable should be adjusted to account for the fact thatvoters not citizens are the only effective principals in influencing a legislator s voting activities and 3 call into question on both theoretical and empirical grounds the claim that legislators shirk their responsibilities to voters by voting their own ideological preferences in order to evaluate our efforts consider table 5 for a large majority 15 of the 18 relevant runs the ideological variable is significant our measure of constituent economic interests does not eliminate the explanatory power of the ideological voting variable but this does not indicate shirking as opposed to shirking we may observe ideological voting because 1 it provides brand name capital 2 it represents the ideological preferences of the constituents or 3 it acts as a measure of median voter economic preferences further ada scores do not allow us to differentiate between these competing explanations for 11 of the 18 models one of the economic variables accounts for a significant portion of the variance in the dependent variables the results derived from our measure of constituent economic interests contradict most findings of the lasi school and raise questions about the validity of the empirical characterization of constituent interests in that research a breakdown of the results by chamber indicates that significant differences in the degree of ideological voting between the house and senate may exist this is important in that most research has focused only on the senate where ideological voting is more prevalent for the house table 5 reveals the constituent economic interest variable isalways significant and in fully one half of the relevant regressions it is theonly significant variable knocking ada out of the race as noted earlier the insignificance of ada is some indication of the absence of ideological shirking though its significance may indicate only measurement error voter ideology or reputational capital in the senate the results are more evenly split though it is clear that the adjusted for reelection constituency economic interest variable is an improvement ada is significant in all 12 senate regressions and the respective economic variables are significant in 5 or just under half this side by side comparison is provocative though it remains to be tested in detail but our preliminary conclusions can be stated as follows first as peltzman 1984 suggested a better specification of economic interest and constituency representation reduces though it does not eliminate the role of the ada variable in the senate second we find evidence that ideological shirking if it exists is much smaller in the house in fact from an institutional perspective it can be argued that economic interests are dominant since house districts are smaller and more homogeneous further the shorter terms for house members may make them more directly accountable to voters and smaller groups of voters may force a lesser reliance on pure ideological campaigning and require a more personal presentation of self

carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth an aggregate and disaggregate analysis of the indian economy abstract this study investigates the long and short run relationships among carbon emissions energy consumption and economic growth in india at the aggregated and disaggregated levels during 1971 2014 the autoregressive distributed lag model is employed for the cointegration analyses and the vector error correction model is applied to determine the direction of causality between variables results show that a long run cointegration relationship exists and that the environmental kuznets curve is validated at the aggregated and disaggregated levels furthermore energy total energy gas oil electricity and coal consumption has a positive relationship with carbon emissions and a feedback effect exists between economic growth and carbon emissions thus energy efficient technologies should be used in domestic production to mitigate carbon emissions at the aggregated and disaggregated levels the present study provides policy makers with new directions in drafting comprehensive policies with lasting impacts on the economy energy consumption and environment towards sustainable development

net foreign asset positions and consumption dynamics in the international economy we examine the effect of non zero steady state foreign assets on consumption dynamics in response to productivity shocks in a two country dynamic general equilibrium model the model generates non zero steady state net foreign assets by allowing for different discount factors across countries as a consequence of discounting differences individual steady state consumption profiles are tilted upward or downward worldwide shocks to long run productivity levels lead to dynamics that are absent in standard symmetric models with equal discount factors we then compare the model results to those of a var in common trend representation for the u s versus the rest of the g7 in the data we find that permanent worldwide productivity shocks lead to net foreign asset and consumption dynamics that are broadly consistent with interpreting the u s as the relatively impatient model economy and are not consistent with symmetric models with equal discount factors

structural determinants of real exchange rates and national price levels some empirical evidence contrary to the long held notion of purchasing power parity ppp economists have found systematic evidence that the general level of prices across countries at a point in time varies dramatically irving b kravis alan w heston and robert summers 1982 for example report that some countries national price levels are no more than one third the u s price level extensions of this work show that such departures from ppp have persisted for decades recently efforts have been made to explain systematically these persistent or structural departures from ppp pioneering work by kravis and robert e lipsey 1983 1987 1988 has demonstrated that a positive correlation between the price level and real per capita gross domestic product is robust across numerous cross sectional specifications for instance using data from kravis et al 1982 table 6 12 87 percent of the variation in national price levels pl of 21 countries in 1975 is explained by per capita gdp y and a constant

the influence of ideology on congressional voting i introduction the question of what determines congressional voting on legislation has inspired a number of recent empirical analyses all are in agreement that congressional voting on specific bills is correlated with the economic self interest of the representative s constituents and a measure of the representative s ideology as indicated by his broader voting record however the interpretation of the empirical results regarding the influence of ideology has generated more debate than consensus in the current literature kau and rubin 1979 find evidence that a congressman s ideology influences his voting but also find evidence for an alternative but not mutually exclusive hypothesis that a congressman s rating by ideological groups reflects membership in a logrolling coalition kalt and zupan 1984 argue that although a representative s votes are likely to reflect the economic interests and the ideology of his constituents the weak incentive for the constituent principal to monitor the voting behavior of his representative agent gives the representative the opportunity to shirk or vote according to his personal ideology rather than his constituents both nelson and silberberg 1987 and mcarthur and marks 1988 find that the degree of shirking increases as the opportunity cost of shirking decreases in contrast to the above findings peltzman 1984 argues that ideological voting by congressmen need not necessarily reflect shirking but instead may be a way for the representative to cheaply provide his constituents with information about his general position on issues what appears to be shirking allowed by an imperfect principal agent relationship may instead be signaling designed to at least partially overcome the imperfect nature of the relationship lott 1987 extends peltzman s signaling argument by hypothesizing that if politicians are viewed by constituents as search goods rather than experience goods then they will have an incentive to establish a political brand name by establishing a consistent ideological voting record dougan and munger s 1989 approach is similar to lott s they argue that politicians with strongly held views that match those of their constituents make ideal representatives because they are less likely to vote against their constituents interests when pressured by special interest groups an incumbent therefore has an incentive to invest in reputational capital by maintaining the consistency over time of his broader voting record because this reputational capital generates quasi rents in electoral competition with candidates who possess less of it neither lott nor dougan and munger find evidence of shirking in their analyses of congressmen s broader voting records as measured by ideological groups ratings dougan and munger also develop a variable intensity of commitment version of the reputational capital hypothesis this version contends that voters with unambiguously liberal or conservative ideologies may prefer a candidate whose voting record indicates that his views are more extreme than their own such a zealous candidate voters believe is even less likely to be influenced by special interest groups a congressman serving an unambiguously liberal or conservative constituency therefore has an incentive to establish and maintain an extremely ideological overall voting record in contrast a congressman serving a constituency with centrist ideological preferences has an incentive to establish an overall voting record that matches his constituency s ideological leanings the systematic deviation of a congressman s voting record from his constituents preferences when near either extreme of the ideological spectrum is not inconsistent with a faithful principal agent relationship one cannot help but be struck by the observation that those researchers finding evidence consistent with shirking studied voting on specific legislation whereas those researchers finding no evidence of shirking studied representatives broader voting records as measured by ideological ratings

time series evidence on shirking in the u s house of representatives this paper presents time series evidence on the voting behavior of members of the u s house of representatives from 1975 to 1990 the empirical results indicate that voting behavior of individual congressmen is remarkably stable over time we find no evidence of economically significant last term effects on voting behavior nor are there important effects of legislative tenure on voting patterns the most significant deviations in voting behavior occur for congressmen who failed to win their reelection bid suggesting that sizable deviations from previous policy positions may result in swift retribution by constituents in the district

causality between energy consumption and economic growth in india a note on conflicting results abstract this note examines the different direction of causal relation between energy consumption and economic growth in india applying engle granger cointegration approach combined with the standard granger causality test on indian data for the period 1950 1996 we find that bi directional causality exists between energy consumption and economic growth further we apply johansen multivariate cointegration technique on the different set of variables the same direction of causality exists between energy consumption and economic growth this is different from the results obtained in earlier studies

dynamic modeling of causal relationship between energy consumption co2 emissions and economic growth in india abstract the paper investigates the causality relationships among energy consumption carbon dioxide co2 emissions and income in india using a dynamic modeling approach the paper also utilises an innovation accounting method to investigate profiles of the macroeconomic variables persisting from an unanticipated shock in innovation our results provide evidence of the existence of bi directional granger causality between energy consumption and co2 emissions in the long run but neither co2 emissions nor energy consumption causes movements in real income there is no causality relationship between energy consumption and income in any direction in the long run implying that india could follow energy conservation and efficiency improvement policies without impeding economic growth this will allow india to reduce co2 emissions without affecting its economic growth and contribute significantly towards combating global warming as well

electricity consumption and economic growth in nigeria a revisit of the energy growth debate abstract this paper examines the dynamic causal linkages between electricity consumption and economic growth in nigeria within a trivariate vecm for the period 1971 2011 the paper obviates the variable omission bias and the use of cross sectional techniques that characterise most existing studies the results show that there is a distinct causal flow from electricity consumption to economic growth both in the short run and in the long run this finding supports the electricity led growth hypothesis that has been conjectured in the literature the paper urges policy makers in nigeria to implement policies which enhance the generation and consumption of electricity in order to engineer economic growth appropriate monetary policies must also be put in place in order to moderate inflation thus enhancing growth

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

real exchange rates in small open oecd and transition economies comparing apples with oranges abstract we find that productivity gains in tradables cause an appreciation of the real exchange rate via both tradable and nontradable prices in the cee 5 and have no affect in the baltic countries while they lead to a depreciation of the real exchange rate of tradables in oecd economies that overcompensates the appreciation due to nontradable prices rising net foreign liabilities lead to a real appreciation in the baltic countries instead of the expected depreciation found in oecd and cee 5 countries these differences are due to the different impact of the fundamentals on the real exchange rate depending on the time horizon studied

dutch disease real effective exchange rate misalignments and their effect on gdp growth in eu abstract in this article we study the impact of real effective exchange rate misalignments based on determinants including different types of foreign capital inflows on gdp growth in the eu for this analysis we use a panel of 27 eu countries for the period 1994 2012 with annual frequency core countries have been only slightly undervalued from the crisis onwards while the periphery was overvalued however the gap for the periphery has reduced in the last two years as regards the new member states these were overvalued for the entire time span the results seem to be generally driven by the inflows of bank loans the misalignments are associated with lower long run growth the exchange rate volatilities are not robust in affecting gdp growth while spillovers and global factors seem to matter in all the specifications both in the short and long run

the external wealth of nations measures of foreign assets and liabilities for industrial and developing countries abstract although capital flows are closely monitored surprisingly little is known about the accumulated stocks of foreign assets and liabilities held by various countries especially in the developing world this paper constructs estimates of foreign assets and liabilities and their equity and debt subcomponents for a sample of 67 industrial and developing countries it characterizes the stylized facts of international balance sheets and asks whether there are trends in net foreign asset positions and shifts in debt equity ratios over time finally it explores the sensitivity of estimated stock positions to the treatment of valuation effects not captured in balance of payments data

a test for pure or apparent ideology in congressional voting a politician s preferences do matter he is not simply a captured agent speaking only for his constituent s interests some latitude exists for him to shirk his responsibility to serve his constituents interests and to cast votes consistent with his own personal ideology more important to our understanding and modeling of voting behavior shirking for ideological consumption is seen to increase with age once a threshold of about 53 years old is reached shirking is not a phenomena of the politicians final term in office rather it likely exists in every term and begins to increase significantly two terms prior to the expected horizon sixty percent of the sample of senators were seen to exhibit increasing ideological consumption with age

long run determinants of the irish real exchange rate smooth adjustment to real exchange rate shifts is one of the major challenges facing the irish economy under emu rather than assume purchasing power parity the long run real exchange rate is modelled as time varying being determined by relative output levels the terms of trade and the net foreign asset position it is shown that these factors account for a large proportion of the long run movement in the irish real exchange rate

legislator voting and shirking a critical review of the literature we set out to critically review the progress in answering two related questions what determines how legislators vote and how can shirking by legislators be measured in the first category the hypothesis that legislators shirk in order to indulge their personal ideological preferences has led researchers astray the theoretical underpinning is shaky on two counts first legislators who indulge their preferences at the expense of their constituents preferences put themselves at a competitive electoral disadvantage second the original two stage procedure used to measure ideological shirking is severely flawed among many other problems the residual measure of shirking implicitly assumes that the median voter is the relevant constituent principal for the legislator agent

the new open economy macroeconomics a survey since the 1995 publication of obsteld and rogoff s redux model there has been an outpouring of research on open economy dynamic general equilibrium models that incorporate imperfect competition and nominal rigidities this paper offers an interim survey of this recent literature 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

real exchanges rates commodity prices and structural factors in developing countries this paper provides new empirical evidence about the relationship that may exist between real exchange rates and commodity prices in developing countries that are specialized in the export of a main primary commodity it investigates how structural factors like the exchange rate regime the degree of financial and trade openness the degree of export concentration and the type of the commodity exports affect the strength of the commodity price real exchange rate dependence

corruption income and the environment an empirical analysis abstract in response to the recent growth of a largely theoretical body of literature analysing the linkages between corruption and pollution this paper subjects the corruption pollution relationship to a detailed empirical examination a distinction is drawn between the direct impact of corruption on pollution and the indirect impact which operates through corruption s impact on per capita income and the resultant impact of income on pollution using data for 94 countries covering the period 1987 2000 both direct and indirect impacts of corruption on air pollution emissions are estimated for both sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide corruption is estimated to have a positive direct impact on per capita emissions indirect effects are found to be negative and larger in absolute value than direct effects for the majority of the sample income range as a result the total effect of corruption on emissions is negative for all but the highest income countries in the sample

co2 emissions energy consumption economic and population growth in malaysia abstract this study investigates the dynamic impacts of gdp growth energy consumption and population growth on co2 emissions using econometric approaches for malaysia empirical results from ardl bounds testing approach show that over the period of 1970 1980 per capita co2 emissions decreased with increasing per capita gdp economic growth however from 1980 to 2009 per capita co2 emissions increased sharply with a further increase of per capita gdp this is also supported by the dynamic ordinary least squared dols and the sasabuchi lind mehlum u slm u test tests consequently the hypothesis of the ekc is not valid in malaysia during the study period the results also demonstrate that both per capita energy consumption and per capita gdp has a long term positive impacts with per capita carbon emissions but population growth rate has no significant impacts on per capita co2 emission however the study suggests that in the long run economic growth may have an adverse effect on the co2 emissions in malaysia thus significant transformation of low carbon technologies such as renewable energy and energy efficiency could contribute to reduce the emissions and sustain the long run economic growth

ideology and legislator shirking we argue that legislator shirking voting on the basis of personal ideology rather than the interests of one s constituents can exist but its appearance should conform to the law of demand we test and confirm this theory using votes on defense expenditure bills in the u s senate in 1982 we assume the cost of shirking is relatively higher on narrowly focused bills on specific weapons systems with well defined beneficiaries and relatively lower on general defense expenditure bills with uncertain final distribution of funds we find greater influence for senators ideology in general versus specific bills

energy consumption carbon emissions and economic growth in china abstract this paper investigates the existence and direction of granger causality between economic growth energy consumption and carbon emissions in china applying a multivariate model of economic growth energy use carbon emissions capital and urban population empirical results for china over the period 1960 2007 suggest a unidirectional granger causality running from gdp to energy consumption and a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to carbon emissions in the long run evidence shows that neither carbon emissions nor energy consumption leads economic growth therefore the government of china can purse conservative energy policy and carbon emissions reduction policy in the long run without impeding economic growth

reassessing the environmental kuznets curve for co2 emissions a robustness exercise the number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly in several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted u benvironmental kuznetsq curve in the case of co2 however the evidence is at best mixed in this paper we reconsider that evidence by assessing how robust it is when the analysis is conducted in a different parametric setup and when using alternative emissions data from the international energy agency relative to the literature our contribution can be viewed as a robustness exercise in these two respects the econometric results lead to two conclusions firstly published evidence on the ekc does not appear to depend upon the source of the data at least as far as carbon dioxide is concerned secondly when an alternative functional form is employed there is evidence of an inverted u pattern for the group of oecd countries with reasonable turning point regardless of the data set employed not so for non oecd countries as the ekc is basically increasing slowly concave according to the iea data and more bellshaped in the case of cdiac data d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

external wealth the trade balance and the real exchange rate abstract we examine the link between the net foreign asset position the trade balance and the real exchange rate in particular we decompose the impact of a country s net foreign asset position external wealth on its long run real exchange rate into two mechanisms the relation between external wealth and the trade balance and holding fixed other determinants a negative relation between the trade balance and the real exchange rate we also provide additional evidence that the relative price of nontradables is an important channel linking the trade balance and the real exchange rate

political shirking opponent quality and electoral support several recent papers in the public choice literaturesuggest that legislators shirk or vote in a mannercontrary to constituent interest this paper exploresthe relationship between senatorial shirking andelectoral consequences i model political shirking opponent quality and election outcomes assimultaneous and find significant evidence of arelationship between shirking over the senatorial termand electoral outcomes however i find that voterspunish recent shirking much more than they punishearly term shirking and that senators apparently actconsistently with this relationship

the purchasing power parity debate originally propounded by the 16th century scholars of the university of salamanca the concept of purchasing power parity ppp was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re establish international exchange rate parities broadly accepted as a long run equilibrium condition in the post war period it first was advocated as a short run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s accordingly over the last three decades a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well ppp applies in both the short run and the long run since the mid 1990s larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods in particular have improved estimation as deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and ppp so did the gap narrow between theory and data and some degree of confidence in long run ppp began to emerge again in this respect the idea of long run ppp now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than 30 years a distinct reversion in economic thought

the composition of government spending and the real exchange rate we show that the composition of government spending influences the long run behavior of the real exchange rate we develop a two sector small open economy model in which an increase in government consumption is associated with real appreciation while an increase in government investment may generate real depreciation our empirical work confirms that government consumption and government investment have differential effects on the real exchange rate and the relative price of nontradables

disaggregate energy consumption and industrial production in south africa abstract this paper tries to assess the relationship between disaggregate energy consumption and industrial output in south africa by undertaking a cointegration analysis using annual data from 1980 to 2005 we also investigate the causal relationships between the various disaggregate forms of energy consumption and industrial production our results imply that industrial production and employment are long run forcing variables for electricity consumption applying the toda h y yamamoto t 1995 statistical inference in vector autoregressions with possibly integrated processes journal of econometrics 66 225 250 technique to granger causality we find bi directional causality between oil consumption and industrial production for the other forms of energy consumption there is evidence in support of the energy neutrality hypothesis there is also evidence of causality between employment and electricity consumption as well as coal consumption causing employment

divergent inflation rates in emu inflation divergence inflation rates have diverged much more widely than expected among the member states of the emu we show that much of this is attributable to the differential impact on different member states of the weakness of the euro on international currency markets in the early months of the union the balassa samuelson productivity growth effect has not yet played an important role even in respect of the outlier ireland although it will likely be more significant over a longer run especially as the accession countries join patrick honohan and philip lane