managing without growth abstract there are three main arguments why developed countries should consider managing without growth 1 continued economic growth worldwide is not an option owing to environmental and resource constraints and so developed countries should leave room for growth in developing countries where the benefits of growth are evident 2 in developed countries growth has become uneconomic in the sense that it detracts more from well being than it adds and 3 economic growth in developed countries is neither necessary nor sufficient for meeting specific policy objectives such as full employment no poverty and protection of the environment this paper explores various growth scenarios for canada over the medium range to 2020 using lowgrow a dynamic simulation model after describing lowgrow a scenario is presented that shows conditions under which the rate of unemployment in canada could be reduced to historically low levels poverty eliminated and greenhouse gas emissions reduced to comply with canada s commitment under the kyoto protocol without relying on economic growth this is not to say that zero growth should itself become a policy objective rather that the dependence on and defence of economic growth should not be an obstacle to fulfilling more specific welfare enhancing objectives of full employment eliminating poverty and protecting the environment the paper concludes with some policy implications for managing without growth followed by an annex which provides a technical description of lowgrow

environmental efficiency evaluation of industry in china based on a new fixed sum undesirable output data envelopment analysis national natural science funds of china for innovative research groups 70821001 national natural science funds of china 70901069 71222106 71203186 research fund for the doctoral program of higher education of china 20133402110028 fundamental research funds for the central universities wk 2040150007 china scholarship council

is it possible to improve environmental quality without reducing economic growth evidence from the qatar economy abstract in line with the priorities of the qatar national vision qnv 2030 and its principal pillars we examine in this paper the energy use economic growth nexus for qatar during the period 1970 2014 using recent development in both unit roots and ardl bounds testing approach with structural breaks we found strong evidence for the growth hypothesis this result indicates that the qatari policymakers should recognize that energy conservation policies will have adverse effects on economic growth and therefore alternative means must be undertaken to preserve the environment this paper presents and discusses a detailed economic energy and environmental policies that can help qatari policymakers in achieving the objective of balance between economic growth and environment quality

conformity and the demand for environmental goods the existing literature on eco labeling and green consumerism has been framed within a classical market context where price and quality are the drivers of consumer choice however it seems possible that consumers are also concerned about the choices made by other consumers in fact it is unclear that people s consumption decisions are made independently of social context for instance under the desire to conform to certain social norms or in the presence of status concerns some individuals may be willing to pay a higher price premium for green products the more widespread green consumerism is in society we test this hypothesis using a choice experiment where the respondents were asked to choose among coffee products varying with respect to their share of ecological beans share of fair trade beans and price three treatments were used differing only in the information given about the choices made by other consumers we find different responses to the treatments across individuals and we can only confirm our hypothesis of conformity for women although men appear to have stronger preferences for ecological coffee than women have

goal programming data envelopment analysis godea for target based multi level planning allocating central grants to the greek local authorities abstract in this paper we develop an interface between goal programming and data envelopment analysis godea in order to integrate target setting and resource allocation in multi level planning problems data envelopment analysis dea has been traditionally used for assessing the performance of individual decision making units and therefore necessary extensions are needed to apply dea principles to the global organisational level without however losing its attractive features the method was originally developed as an aid to the reorganisation of the allocation of central funds to local authorities in greece

the effects of moral licensing and moral cleansing in contingent valuation and laboratory experiments on the demand to reduce externalities recent field experiments show that peer information can induce people to reduce their production of negative externalities related work in psychology demonstrates that inducing feelings of relative culpability in one domain can induce spillover pro social behavior in another domain we use a contingent valuation and parallel lab experiment to explore patterns of cross domain responses to norm based interventions asymmetric responses between those whose impacts are above or below the norm are found to be robust across decision settings substantial heterogeneity in responses is observed across a number of dimensions not explored in large field experiments raising questions about the universality of peer information effects and the design of such programs

redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities the case of north rhine westphalia abstract this paper reports on a real application of a performance and success based system for redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities in north rhine westphalia after a precise description of the decision situation we show how goal programming and distance minimization were applied in order to find a solution on the basis of real data some comments on the results and the quality of the redistribution process conclude the paper

statistical analysis and combination forecasting of environmental efficiency and its influential factors since china entered the wto 2002 2010 2012 abstract since china became a member of world trade organization wto its economy develops at a fast speed at the same time the environmental problem becomes more and more serious and increasingly affects economic development studying the factors that influence environmental efficiency has become an essential point in dealing with the relationship between economy and environment considering the differences in space and economic development among different districts this paper discusses the quantitative relationship among exports figure imports figure gdp per capita industrialization level fiscal decentralization and environmental efficiency of each chinese province by using statistical analysis furthermore this paper discusses differences among each district s influential factors from the perspective of spatial economics and makes combination forecast on the trend of environmental efficiency it also shows that the environmental efficiency of chinese provinces is generally at a low level in addition as the economic statuses of different provinces vary and the factors that influence environmental efficiency in different provinces also have significant differences each province should take certain measures to design the environmental protection policy in line with its local circumstance

resource allocation based on efficiency analysis the purpose of this paper is to develop an approach to a resource allocation problem that typically appears in organizations with a centralized decision making environment for example supermarket chains banks and universities the central unit is assumed to be interested in maximizing the total amount of outputs produced by the individual units by allocating available resources to them we will develop an interactive formal approach based on data envelopment analysis dea and multiple objective linear programming molp to find the most preferred allocation plan the units are assumed to be able to modify their production in the current production possibility set within certain assumptions various assumptions are considered concerning returns to scale and the ability of each unit to modify its production plan numerical examples are used to illustrate the approach

ecological modernization in the electrical utility industry an application of a bads goods dea model of ecological and technical efficiency abstract newly developed data envelopment analysis techniques permit simultaneous consideration of good and bad outputs in evaluating efficiency we use these techniques to determine joint ecological and technical efficiencies of the 437 largest fossil fueled electricity generating plants in the united states utilizing the epa s e grid and clean air markets databases and drawing on ecological modernization theory we evaluate whether innovations in organizational practices and technological solutions help achieve joint technical and environmental performance efficiencies

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

status effects public goods provision and excess burden abstract most studies of the optimal provision of public goods or the excess burden from taxation assume that individual utility is independent of other individuals consumption this paper investigates public good provision and excess burden in a model that allows for interdependence in consumption in the form of status relative consumption effects in the presence of such effects consumption and labor taxes no longer are pure distortionary taxes but have a corrective tax element that addresses an externality from consumption as a result the marginal excess burden of consumption taxes is lower than in the absence of status effects and will be negative if the consumption tax rate is below the pigouvian rate correspondingly when consumption or labor tax rates are below the pigouvian rate the second best level of public goods provision is above the first best level contrary to findings from models without status effects for plausible functional forms and parameters relating to status effects the marginal excess burden from existing u s labor taxes is substantially lower than in most prior studies and is negative in some cases

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

how economic contractions and expansions affect expenditure patterns in this study we attempt to understand how household budget allocations across various expenditure categories change when the economy is in recession or expansion the common assumption is that a household s tastes would not change as a function of economic conditions and therefore any adjustments in expenditure patterns during economic contractions expansions would simply be due to changes in the consumption budget standard economic models translate these budgetary effects into lateral movements along a set of fixed engel curves which relate category expenditure shares to total expenditures we propose and test a conceptual framework based on the notion of relative consumption which prescribes that for any given total consumption budget expenditure shares for positional goods services will decrease during a recession while shares for nonpositional goods services will increase i e shifting the entire engel curve upward or downward depending on the nature of the expenditure category and the economic conditions

on the performance of universities in north rhine westphalia germany government s redistribution of funds judged using dea efficiency measures abstract in fandel and gal 2001 fandel g gal t 2001 redistribution of funds for teaching and research among universities the case of north rhine westphalia european journal of operational research 130 111 120 a solution for a real process of redistributing funds for teaching and research among the universities in north rhine westphalia in germany according to specific criteria was presented the solution was based on aggregated proportional data and was determined by a negotiation process now that the absolute data with respect to the different subject areas of the universities are available it is studied to which extent the results of the redistribution can be justified by the relative efficiency measures using data envelopment analysis moreover the inefficiencies or slacks respectively in the usage of personnel give reasons to reallocate the staff among the universities or to reduce it correspondingly

are positional concerns stronger in some domains than in others for more than one hundred years economists have discussed the concept of positional goods that the utility conferred by many perhaps even most goods depends not only on the amount the individual consumes but also on the amount others consume e g thorstein veblen 1899 james duesenberry 1949 john k galbraith 1958 robert frank 1985 while economic interest in positional goods is increasing e g mark pingle and mike mitchell 2002 kenneth arrow et al 2004 ed hopkins and tatiana kornienko 2004 the literature remains largely theoretical rather than empirical if status concerns affect all items in the utility function equally leisure as well as goods the positional effect would operate like a lump sum tax reducing well being without changing the allocation of time or money arrow et al 2004 however if positional concerns are stronger for some things than for others then in order to understand how people can become better off in well being not simply in wealth we must investigate how interpersonal competition interacts with material gains frank 1997 evidence about what goods are more positional than others is essential for correct policy recommendations gregory besharov 2002 but little is actually known about the relative positional rankings of items in the typical consumer s utility function four hypotheses proposed in the literature are

energy and environmental efficiency of china s transportation sectors under the constraints of energy consumption and environmental pollutions abstract the rapid growth of the economy in china has caused many problems for the country particularly the energy shortage and environmental pollution thus establishing a sustainable development of society has attracted considerable attention in recent years in this paper we evaluate the sustainability efficiency in terms of energy usage and environmental impact by using a new equilibrium efficient frontier data envelopment analysis eefdea approach for the first time dea is used in the context of required fixed reductions in both total energy consumption and total environmental pollution which is a realistic context that introduces a zero sum aspect to the problem as part of the analysis the generalized equilibrium efficient frontier eef is constructed based on minimum satisfaction degree maximization of all units considering both minimum and maximum adjustment strategy while most existing studies only minimized the weighted sum reduction finally the sustainability efficiency of transportation sectors of china s 30 main regions is analyzed by using our proposed model the results show that more effective measures should be taken for sustainable development

the evolution of engel curves and its implications for structural change theory the tendency for expenditure engel curves to flatten out at high income levels is frequently cited as evidence that major shifts in household spending patterns take place as households become more affluent empirically little has been done to examine i how pervasive this tendency is across the engel curves of different goods and services ii whether the rate at which engel curves flatten out may significantly change over time and iii how robust engel curves are in the face of changes in the income distribution of households using data from the uk family expenditure survey we find evidence that the tendency for engel curves to flatten out which we dub saturation is indeed widespread across a wide range of goods and services however a tendency for their shape to shift over time and for these shifts to co move with changes in the income distribution of households casts some doubt on whether the declining slope of engel curves can be used to predict slowdowns in the growth rate of demand for particular goods and services

operational research in education operational research or techniques have been applied from the early stages of the discipline to a wide variety of issues in education at the government level these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions how to measure it and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings local governments as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation may also need to make decisions regarding for example the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones as well as the day to day logistics of getting pupils to schools issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses this survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government managers and consumers of education and the or techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

wealth warmth and well being whether happiness is relative or absolute depends on whether it is about money acquisition or consumption abstract a central question in consumer and happiness research is whether happiness depends on absolute or relative levels of wealth and consumption to address this question the authors evaluate a finer level than overall happiness and distinguish three specific types of happiness with money with the acquisition of an item and with the consumption of an item they find that happiness with money and with acquisition is relative and that happiness with consumption can be either absolute or relative depending on whether the consumption is inherently evaluable or not including both lab and field data this research yields implications for how to increase consumer happiness from one generation to the next

non parametric productivity analysis with undesirable outputs an application to the canadian pulp and paper industry this article extends the chavas cox approach to non parametric analysis by incorporating undesirable outputs to provide a more complete representation of the production technology inner and outer non parametric technology bounds are constructed the methods are illustrated with application to time series data for the canadian pulp and paper industry conventional measures that ignore changes in pollutant outputs underestimate true productivity growth further there is a large gap between estimates generated with reference to inner and outer bounds to the technology suggesting that researchers need to be aware of the limitations of results derived from analyses relying only on dea methods copyright 2001 oxford university press

social comparisons and optimal taxation in a small open economy in this paper we analyze how international capital mobility affects the optimal labor and capital income tax policy in a small open economy when consumers care about relative consumption the main

measuring the performance of thermal power firms in china via fuzzy enhanced russell measure model with undesirable outputs abstract thermal power has accounted for the major part of the electricity generation over recent several decades in china it plays an important role in supporting china s economic development while it also brings great pressure to the environment protection because of a large amount of pollution generated during its production in order to solve or alleviate the environmental problem caused by thermal power firms efficiency evaluation is the first important step as thermal power firm is a complex system with multiple inputs and multiple outputs usually including fuzzy data and undesirable outputs in the productions in this paper we build an integrated enhanced russell measure model based on data envelopment analysis for evaluating the performance of decision making units in the presence of the undesirable outputs in fuzzy circumstance then this new model is applied to analyze the environmental performance and provide the benchmarks for the thermal power firms in china which can guide the decision makers to make suitable future production plans for improving their performance

redistribution and optimal mixed taxation in the presence of consumption externalities abstract the literature on externalities and optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of asymmetric information has so far been confined to the case where externalities are of the atmospheric type one of the main results from this literature has been that the so called additivity property discovered by sandmo sandmo a 1975 optimal taxation in the presence of externalities swedish journal of economics 77 86 98 holds true also in this more general context this paper extends previous analyses by considering a general model where even if there is only one externality generating good the externality is not constrained to be of the atmospheric type the model is sufficiently unrestrictive to admit a variety of interpretations for example it is possible to interpret it as reflecting the case of different types of agents being differently vulnerable to the same externality another possibility is to view agents of different types as not equally effective as externality generating units yet another interpretation can be in terms of positional goods we show that while the additivity property fails in general to hold conditions can be derived which are sufficient to recover it both with respect to the commodity tax structure and with respect to the shape of the income tax schedule moreover stressing one or the other of the aforementioned interpretations delivers different results for the validity of the additivity property

conspicuous consumption and political regimes evidence from east and west germany abstract this paper investigates the influence of political regimes on the relative importance of conspicuous consumption we use the division of germany into the communist gdr and the democratic frg and its reunification in 1990 as a natural experiment relying on household data that are representative for germany our empirical results strongly indicate that conspicuous consumption is relatively more important in east germany significantly although we find some convergence a considerable gap in conspicuous consumption expenditures remains even 18 years after the german reunification

undesirable outputs in efficiency valuations abstract efficiency measurement is usually based on the assumption that inputs have to be minimized and outputs have to be maximized in a growing number of applications however undesirable outputs are incorporated into the production model which have to be minimized in this paper various approaches for treating such outputs in the framework of data envelopment analysis dea are discussed and the resulting efficient frontiers are compared new radial measures are introduced which assume that any change of the output level will involve both undesirable and desirable outputs

optimal retailer s replenishment decisions in the epq model under two levels of trade credit policy abstract the main purpose of this paper is to investigate the optimal retailer s replenishment decisions under two levels of trade credit policy within the economic production quantity epq framework we assume that the supplier would offer the retailer a delay period and the retailer also adopts the trade credit policy to stimulate his her customer demand to develop the retailer s replenishment model under the replenishment rate is finite furthermore we assume that the retailer s trade credit period offered by supplier m is not shorter than the customer s trade credit period offered by retailer n m n since the retailer cannot earn any interest in this situation m n based upon the above arguments this paper incorporates both chung and huang k j chung y f huang the optimal cycle time for epq inventory model under permissible delay in payments international journal of production economics 84 2003 307 318 and huang y f huang optimal retailer s ordering policies in the eoq model under trade credit financing journal of the operational research society 54 2003 1011 1015 under above conditions in addition we model the retailer s inventory system as a cost minimization problem to determine the retailer s optimal replenishment decisions then three theorems are developed to efficiently determine the optimal replenishment decisions for the retailer we deduce some previously published results of other authors as special cases finally numerical examples are given to illustrate the theorems obtained in this paper then as well as we obtain a lot of managerial insights from numerical examples

modeling undesirable factors in efficiency evaluation abstract data envelopment analysis dea measures the relative efficiency of decision making units dmus with multiple performance factors which are grouped into outputs and inputs once the efficient frontier is determined inefficient dmus can improve their performance to reach the efficient frontier by either increasing their current output levels or decreasing their current input levels however both desirable good and undesirable bad factors may be present for example if inefficiency exists in production processes where final products are manufactured with a production of wastes and pollutants the outputs of wastes and pollutants are undesirable and should be reduced to improve the performance using the classification invariance property we show that the standard dea model can be used to improve the performance via increasing the desirable outputs and decreasing the undesirable outputs the method can also be applied to situations when some inputs need to be increased to improve the performance the linearity and convexity of dea are preserved through our proposal

retailer s optimal replenishment decisions with credit linked demand under permissible delay in payments abstract usually it is assumed that the supplier would offer a fixed credit period to the retailer but the retailer in turn would not offer any credit period to its customers which is unrealistic because in real practice retailer might offer a credit period to its customers in order to stimulate his own demand moreover it is observed that credit period offered by the retailer to its customers has a positive impact on demand of an item but the impact of credit period on demand has received a very little attention by the researchers to incorporate this phenomenon we assume that demand is linked to credit period offered by the retailer to the customers this paper incorporates the concept of credit linked demand and develops a new inventory model under two levels of trade credit policy to reflect the real life situations an easy to use algorithm is developed to determine the optimal credit as well as replenishment policy jointly for the retailer finally numerical example is presented to illustrate the theoretical results followed by the sensitivity of various parameters on the optimal solution

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

conformism and structural change using a simple multisector model of endogenous growth we show that commodity specific consumption externalities can be a source of structural change when the degrees of consumption externalities are different between goods each sector grows at a different rate however the aggregate economy exhibits balanced growth in that capital stock and expenditure grow at the same constant rate a three sector version of our model may reconcile kaldor s stylized facts with empirically plausible profiles of industrial structure transformation

how relative income affects work hours preferences abstractin this article we look at explanations for why people want to change their working hours we focus on the role of income and differentiate between the effect of household income personal

the tragedy of the commons in a fishery when relative performance matters this paper presents a simple model of a common access fishery where fishermen care about relative performance as well as absolute profits our model captures the idea that status which depends on relative performance in a community influences a person s well being in our main specification relative performance depends on the absolute difference in after tax profits we show that overharvesting resulting from the tragedy of the commons problem is exacerbated by the desire for higher relative performance leading to a smaller steady state fish stock and smaller steady state profit for all the fishermen we also consider alternative specifications where status depends on the absolute difference in harvests or relative difference in profits or where there is heterogeneity in the degree to which status matters or allowing for the possibility of extinction in all these specifications status further reduces the steady state fish stock we examine taxes and an individual quota as policy alternatives and find support for using the direct quantity method to implement the socially efficient stock level

china s natural gas consumption peak and factors analysis a regional perspective abstract china s natural gas consumption usually accounts for a small proportion of total energy consumption but it has increased rapidly in recent years china has a vast territory and the level of economic development varies significantly across regions in this paper a panel unit root and heterogeneous panel cointegration methods are applied to investigate the natural gas consumption of 30 provinces in mainland china the influencing factors of natural gas consumption are also investigated from a long term point of view china s per capita natural gas consumption seems to fit the energy kuznets curve which implies that the current rapid growth rate of natural gas consumption would not be sustained in the long term there is a peak at 200 450 cubic meters which is about 2 4 times the current consumption per capita of china and about 7 16 of russia the specific peak consumption level and peak year depend on the speed of economic development and the pace of pipeline network development in summary gas population rate plays a more important role in gas consumption in the long run and the impact of gdp weakens the potential of gas consumption of the different regions differs greatly

total factor energy efficiency of regions in china abstract this paper analyzes energy efficiencies of 29 administrative regions in china for the period 1995 2002 with a newly introduced index most existing studies of regional productivity and efficiency neglect energy inputs we use the data envelopment analysis dea to find the target energy input of each region in china at each particular year the index of total factor energy efficiency tfee then divides the target energy input by the actual energy input in our dea model labor capital stock energy consumption and total sown area of farm crops used as a proxy of biomass energy are the four inputs and real gdp is the single output the conventional energy productivity ratio regarded as a partial factor energy efficiency index is computed for comparison in contrast to tfee our index is found fitting better to the real case according to the tfee index rankings the central area of china has the worst energy efficiency and its total adjustmentof energy consumption amount is over half of china s total regional tfee in china generally improved during the research period except for the western area a u shape relation between the area s tfee and per capita income in the areas of china is found confirming the scenario that energy efficiency eventually improves with economic growth

regional allocation of co2 emissions allowance over provinces in china by 2020 the mitigation efforts of china are increasingly important for meeting global climate target since the rapid economic growth of china has led to an increasing share in the world s total co2 emissions this paper sets out to explore the approach for realizing china s national mitigation targets submitted to the unfccc as part of the copenhagen accord that is to reduce the intensity of co2 emissions per unit of gdp by 40 45 by 2020 as well as reducing the energy intensity and increasing the share of non fossil fuel consumption through regional allocation of emission allowance over china s provinces since the realization of china s mitigation target essentially represents a total amount emission allowance allocation problem an improved zero sum gains data envelopment analysis optimization model which could deal with the constant total amount resources allocation is proposed in this study by utilizing this model and based on several scenarios of china s economic growth co2 emissions and energy consumption a new efficient emission allowance allocation scheme on provincial level for china by 2020 is proposed the allocation results indicate that different provinces have to shoulder different mitigation burdens in terms of emission intensity reduction energy intensity reduction and share of non fossil fuels increase

running to keep in the same place consumer choice as a game of status if individuals care about their status defined as their rank in the distribution of consumption of one positional good then the consumer s problem is strategic as her utility depends on the consumption choices of others in the symmetric nash equilibrium each individual spends an inefficiently high amount on the status good using techniques from auction theory we analyze the effects of exogenous changes in the distribution of income in a richer society almost all individuals spend more on conspicuous consumption and individual utility is lower at each income level in a more equal society the poor are worse off

asymmetric and non atmospheric consumption externalities and efficient consumption taxation abstract we analyze the effects of a generalized class of negative consumption externalities asymmetric and non atmospheric on the structure of efficient commodity tax programs households are not only concerned about consumption reference levels that is they gain utility from keeping up with the joneses but they also exhibit altruism two sets of efficient tax regimes are compared based on a welfarist and a non welfarist optimality criterion respectively altruism turns out not to be at odds with the consumption externalities rather altruism implicates a bound on efficient utility allocations a non welfarist government tolerates less inequality than a welfarist one in the welfarist non welfarist case first best personalized commodity tax rates respond highly sensitively barely to whether or not a consumption externality is asymmetric or non atmospheric if personalized commodity tax rates are not available second best case the tax rate on a non positional good is typically different from zero for corrective reasons for plausible functional forms and parameter values numerical simulations suggest that second best tax rates are rather insensitive with respect to both the optimality criterion and the nature of the consumption externality

is more always better a survey on positional concerns abstract we use survey data to provide some empirical information about concerns regarding relative standing respondents chose between a world where they have more of a good than others and one where everyone s endowment of the good is higher but the respondent has less than others questions asked about education attractiveness and intelligence for one s child and oneself income vacation time approval and disapproval from a supervisor and papers to write half of the respondents preferred to have 50 less real income but high relative income concerns about position were strongest for attractiveness and supervisor s praise and weakest for vacation time

relativity inequality and optimal nonlinear income taxation how does concern for consumption relative to others relativity affect the structure of optimal nonlinear income taxation our article provides three sets of answers to this general question first it supports the conclusion in the literature that relativity leads to higher marginal tax rates in doing so it both generalizes some of the conditions under which this result is obtained in the literature and fleshes out the detailed structure for optimal marginal tax rates for specific functional forms for distribution utility function and social welfare function second the article goes beyond the literature and examines the impact of relativity on the progression of optimal marginal tax rates by and large we find support for greater progressivity defined as the steepness of the rise of the marginal tax rate schedule as relativity concern increases third none of the papers in the literature to our knowledge examines the interplay of relativity and inequality in determining the optimal structure of income taxes our special analytical cases and more general numerical calculations support the conclusion that higher inequality dampens the positive impact of greater relativity on the level and the progression of marginal tax rates more work is needed to further explore this interaction between relativity and inequality that our analysis has uncovered

efficiency evaluation of regional energy saving and emission reduction in china a modified slacks based measure approach abstract china s economic reform and opening policy has resulted in china s rapid growth especially in terms of economy unfortunately the growth has brought about huge consumption of energy and increasing emission of environmental pollution little research has been done which pays close attention to the efficiency evaluation of regional energy saving and emission reduction even though such evaluation is considered a crucial method in the fight to save resources and protect the environment aiming at evaluating the efficiency of regional energy saving and emission reduction of china we firstly construct an evaluation index system for input and output selection then a modified slacks based measure model is applied to measure the performance of energy saving and emission reduction an empirical study is done on 30 of mainland china s provincial level regions the results show that the energy saving and emission reduction efficiencies of the regions in china are generally at a low level more precisely china s regional regions performed really badly in energy saving although their emissions results are passable barely to resolve this problem several policy recommendations are proposed to improve the efficiency of regional energy saving and emission reduction of china

the economics of financing higher education different arguments exist pro and contra tax financed subsidies in higher education it has been argued that private incentives to study are sufficiently high while the financing of those subsidies can be deemed regressive as they are co financed by relatively poorer non students alternatively several arguments have been put forward why higher tax financed subsidies are desirable such as externalities and credit constraints this study scrutinizes these different arguments and discusses the implications for the different ways in which higher education can be financed calculations of private returns across the oecd confirm that private incentives to invest in higher education are high however economic theory poses that it is the marginal social return that must guide policy which will reflect both equity and efficiency considerations we assess the potential regressivity of higher education subsidies using different perspectives and assess the different efficiency arguments for government intervention in higher education tax financed subsidies turn out to be regressive in most cases but depending on the perspective and the country under examination discussion of the efficiency arguments is focused on those that are most relevant in light of the empirical evidence and their relevance for the different financing modes externalities uninsurable risk credit constraints and misprediction we conclude that to deal with the more credible failures in higher education tax financed subsidies are blunt instruments for a large share of the countries under consideration shifting towards income contingent loans or graduate taxes appears more appropriate when taking into account both efficiency and equity considerations

allocating fixed costs and resources via data envelopment analysis abstract in this paper we show that data envelopment analysis dea can be viewed as maximising the average efficiency of the decision making units dmus in an organisation building upon this we present dea based models for a allocating fixed costs to dmus and b allocating input resources to dmus simultaneous to allocating input resources output targets are also decided for each dmu numeric results are presented for a number of example problems taken from the literature

fixed cost and resource allocation based on dea cross efficiency abstract in many managerial applications situations frequently occur when a fixed cost is used in constructing the common platform of an organization and needs to be shared by all related entities or decision making units dmus it is of vital importance to allocate such a cost across dmus where there is competition for resources data envelopment analysis dea has been successfully used in cost and resource allocation problems whether it is a cost or resource allocation issue one needs to consider both the competitive and cooperative situation existing among dmus in addition to maintaining or improving efficiency the current paper uses the cross efficiency concept in dea to approach cost and resource allocation problems because dea cross efficiency uses the concept of peer appraisal it is a very reasonable and appropriate mechanism for allocating a shared resource cost it is shown that our proposed iterative approach is always feasible and ensures that all dmus become efficient after the fixed cost is allocated as an additional input measure the cross efficiency dea based iterative method is further extended into a resource allocation setting to achieve maximization in the aggregated output change by distributing available resources such allocations for fixed costs and resources are more acceptable to the players involved because the allocation results are jointly determined by all dmus rather than a specific one the proposed approaches are demonstrated using an existing data set that has been applied in similar studies

too much of a good thing why altruism can harm the environment success of eco labeling schemes broadly defined varies among products and across countries based on a simple theoretical framework we show that the nature of environmental attributes among products i e private versus public and the consumer type i e egoist versus altruist shape the overall performance of such schemes in addition we demonstrate that altruistic consumers exhibiting a too high willingness to pay for the eco labeled product can inadvertently prevent egoistic consumers from purchasing it leading to a sub optimal outcome in terms of environmental performance several policy and managerial implications are drawn

china s regional natural resource allocation and utilization a dea based approach in a big data environment abstract china s economic reform and opening policy has resulted in china s rapid growth especially in terms of economy the growth however is mainly based on huge consumption of natural resources and that consumption should be reduced by significant amounts to protect global ecosystems emerged in 1980s big data has developed very quickly in recent years bringing new perspectives and opportunities for all kinds of academic fields especially in dea since it is a research highly based on data in this paper we propose a sbm dea model based on natural resource input orientation to evaluate the efficiency of natural resource utilization for 26 provincial regions in mainland china from 2005 to 2012 a dea based approach is developed to allocate a reduced total of natural resources among the 26 provincial regions drawing support from the developments of big data we use each provincial region s previously observed production data to characterize its own production technology which allows a better analysis of how the production will change after allocations of natural resources are reduced our empirical study shows that most provincial regions perform well in terms of efficiency in utilizing natural resources but that is based on huge consumption of natural resources from an area perspective the eastern area of china achieved the highest average efficiency value followed by the central and western areas our study also indicates that the most effective allocation of the natural resources requires about half of the 26 provincial regions to reduce their natural resource consumption while the remaining ones can maintain their original consumption

characterizing an equitable allocation of shared costs a dea approach abstract in many applications to which dea could be applied there is often a fixed or common cost which is imposed on all decision making units this would be the case for example for branches of a bank which can be accessed via the numerous automatic teller machines scattered throughout the country a problem arises as to how this cost can be assigned in an equitable way to the various dmus in this paper we propose a dea approach to obtain this cost allocation which is based on two principles invariance and pareto minimality it is shown that the proposed method is a natural extension of the simple one dimensional problem to the general multiple input multiple output case

a generalized dea model for centralized resource allocation abstract in this paper we introduced a new generalized centralized resource allocation model which extends lozano and villa s and asmild et al s models to a more general case in order to uncover the sources of such total input contraction in the generalized centralized resource allocation model we applied the structural efficiency to further decompose it into three components the aggregate technical efficiency the aggregate allocative efficiency and re transferable efficiency components the proposed models are not only flexible enough for the central decision maker to adjust the inputs and outputs to achieve the total input contraction but also identify the sources of such total input contraction thereby giving rise to an important interpretation and understanding of the generalized centralized resource allocation model finally an empirical example is used to illustrate the approach

positional concerns and social network structure an experiment abstract we experimentally study the positional concerns of individuals embedded in social networks in the game individuals compete for positional advantage with their direct neighbors by purchasing a positional good the nash equilibrium consumption is determined by the katz bonacich centrality of the individual s network position while the efficient outcome requires a lower consumption level for most network positions the gameplay converged to the nash equilibrium except for local centers that consumed less of the positional good than the nash prediction despite this the consumption of the positional good increased in the individual s centrality the evolution of the gameplay was explained by the myopic best response dynamics model

measuring synergy effects of a public social private partnership pspp project this article applies the cobb douglas production function to measure synergy effects of a public social private partnership pspp project following a short overview of the literature on public private partnership and in particular on public social private partnership the microeconomic approach of the cobb douglas production function is presented which can be interpreted in this context as a generalised nash solution of cooperative games and opens up the possibility of allocating the synergy effects to the partners of a pspp project the cobb douglas production function is at first briefly analysed with regard to its assumptions implications and consequences and then applied to the pspp project anschub de that was initiated by the bertelsmann stiftung the empirical analysis uses real data and is based on a survey on the project cooperation partners whereby the resources and budget contributions spent are investigated with the help of these budget contributions it is possible to determine relative success variables or synergy effects for the partners

production inventory models for a damageable item with variable demands and inventory costs in an imperfect production process in this paper economic production quantity epq models for breakable or deteriorating item are developed with variable demands being dependent on time or on hand stock here rate of production and holding cost are time dependent unit production cost is a function of both production reliability indicator and production rate set up cost is also partially production rate dependent the production process produces some imperfect quantities which are instantly reworked at a cost to bring back those units to the perfect ones the production process ultimately depends on both time and reliability indicator the models are formulated as optimal control problems and the total profit functions with effect of inflation and time value of money are expressed as finite integrals over the finite planning horizon the problems are solved using euler lagrange function based on variational calculus and newton raphson method to determine the optimal production reliability indicator r and then corresponding production rates and total profits in some cases results of the models for deteriorating item are obtained as particular cases from those of breakable item models similarly results of simple epq models without damageability are deduced as particular cases numerical experiments are performed to illustrate the models both numerically and graphically

a consensual peer based dea model with optimized cross efficiencies input allocation instead of radial reduction abstract data envelopment analysis dea is a method for estimating in efficiencies of decision making units dmus by means of weighted output to input ratios being the weights optimal virtual prices of such ex post activities for all units the cross efficiency matrix then evaluates these output to input relations with respect to all optimal price systems and hence permits efficiency rankings for the dmus by aggregating the matrix entries line and or columnwise in this contribution the classical input oriented dea approach is generalized twofold its first aim is an optimal efficiency improving input allocation rather than a mere radial input reduction the second aim is the choice of a peer dmu the price system of which is acceptable for the remaining units as free input allocation permits substitutional effects and so rises productivities in view of possible peers and for all units it supports such consensual choice numerical examples show the positive effects of the new concept

will airline efficiency be affected by carbon neutral growth from 2020 strategy evidences from 29 international airlines abstract in this paper the impact of the carbon neutral growth from 2020 cng2020 strategy on airline efficiency is analyzed based on the predicted data of 29 international airlines during 2021 2023 the data is predicted through neural network following the principle of cng2020 strategy we calculate the emission limit for each airline two models network range adjusted measure with natural disposability and network range adjusted measure with managerial disposability are proposed to discuss the efficiency change when the cng2020 strategy is considered the following findings are gotten 1 under natural disposability the indices related with undesirable output have a larger role in deciding benchmarking airline 2 for most of the 29 airlines cng2020 strategy has little influence on their efficiency

a fuzzy genetic algorithm with varying population size to solve an inventory model with credit linked promotional demand in an imprecise planning horizon abstract a genetic algorithm ga with varying population size is developed where crossover probability is a function of parents age type young middle aged old etc and is obtained using a fuzzy rule base and possibility theory it is an improved ga where a subset of better children is included with the parent population for next generation and size of this subset is a percentage of the size of its parent set this ga is used to make managerial decision for an inventory model of a newly launched product it is assumed that lifetime of the product is finite and imprecise fuzzy in nature here wholesaler producer offers a delay period of payment to its retailers to capture the market due to this facility retailer also offers a fixed credit period to its customers for some cycles to boost the demand during these cycles demand of the item increases with time at a decreasing rate depending upon the duration of customers credit period models are formulated for both the crisp and fuzzy inventory parameters to maximize the present value of total possible profit from the whole planning horizon under inflation and time value of money fuzzy models are transferred to deterministic ones following possibility necessity measure on fuzzy goal and necessity measure on imprecise constraints finally optimal decision is made using above mentioned ga performance of the proposed ga on the model with respect to some other gas are compared

corporate governance social responsibility information disclosure and enterprise value in china abstract social responsibility information disclosure relates to the long term development of enterprises all social layers pay increasing attention to social responsibility of enterprises especially those in heavy pollution industries that are listed on stock exchanges this study takes chinese companies in heavy pollution industries that were listed during 2008 2014 as objects of study to test the relationships among corporate governance social responsibility information disclosure and enterprise value the study finds that there is a declining level of social responsibility information disclosure of listed enterprises in heavy pollution industries in addition different corporate governance factors affect the social responsibility information disclosure of listed companies in heavy pollution industries to a certain extent furthermore we find that social responsibility information disclosure is not beneficial for the short term profit of an enterprise but can increase its long term value generally a high level of corporate governance is favorable for legitimacy management as well as disclosure of social responsibility information

the effect of religiosity and religious festivals on positional concerns an experimental investigation of ramadan this article examines the effect of religion on positional concerns using survey experiments we focus on two of the dimensions of religion degree of religiosity and religious festivals by conducting the experiments during both the most important day of ramadan the night of power and a day outside ramadan we find that ramadan overall has a small and negative impact on positional concerns detailed analyses based on the sorting of individuals degree of religiosity reveal that the decrease in the degree of positional concerns during ramadan is mainly explained by a decrease in positionality among individuals with a low degree of religiosity

should public policy respond to positional externalities abstract a nice suit is one that compares favorably with those worn by others in the same local environment more generally a positional good is one whose utility depends strongly on how it compares with others in the same category 1 a positional externality occurs when new purchases alter the relevant context within which an existing positional good is evaluated 2 for example if some job candidates begin wearing expensive custom tailored suits a side effect of their action is that other candidates become less likely to make favorable impressions on interviewers from any individual job seeker s point of view the best response might be to match the higher expenditures of others lest her chances of landing the job fall but this outcome may be inefficient since when all spend more each candidate s probability of success remains unchanged all may agree that some form of collective restraint on expenditure would be useful in such cases however it is often impractical to negotiate private solutions do positional externalities then become legitimate objects of public policy concern in attempting to answer this question i employ the classical libertarian criterion put forth by john stuart mill 3 who wrote the state may not legitimately constrain any citizen s freedom of action except to prevent harm to others i argue that many positional externalities appear to meet mill s test causing not just negative feelings but also large and tangible economic costs to others who are ill equipped to avoid them i also discuss an unintrusive policy remedy for positional externalities one modeled after the use of effluent charges to curb environmental pollution the paper is organized as follows section 1 notes the deep similarity between the conditions that give rise to positional arms races and those that give rise to conventional military arms races section 2 follows with a review of evidence concerning the strength of concerns about relative position section 3 describes some of the tangible economic costs that people experience as a result of positional externalities arising from such concerns section 4 takes up the question of whether collective action directed against positional externalities is consistent with respect for individual rights section 5 describes how a progressive consumption tax could neutralize many of the most costly effects of positional externalities

are we consuming too much this paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive we consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness or insufficiency of current consumption one is an intertemporal utility maximization criterion actual current consumption is deemed excessive if it is higher than the level of current consumption on the consumption path that maximizes the present discounted value of utility the other is a sustainability criterion which requires that current consumption be consistent with non declining living standards over time we extend previous theoretical approaches by offering a formula for the sustainability criterion that accounts for population growth and technological change in applying this formula we find that some poor regions of the world are failing to meet the sustainability criterion in these regions genuine wealth per capita is falling as investments in human and manufactured capital are not sufficient to offset the depletion of natural capital

conspicuous spending and the income distribution of social groups using south african household expenditure data we analyze how the spending of a household on visible goods such as jewelry and clothes depends on the distribution of income within its social group we find that this spending is positively correlated with the share of peers who possess a similar income level to the household what we dub the local income share moreover we find that the spending of a household on visible goods is positively correlated with the average income of peers that are poorer than this household we interpret this as evidence for cascade effects through which income changes among the poorest in the social group can trigger adjustments in the visible spending patterns of the wealthy in line with previous research charles et al 2009 we also find that visible spending of a household is negatively correlated with the average income of its social group we present a simple model of status competition based on hopkins and kornienko 2004 that synthesizes these effects and can account for our results jel d12 d31 o12

taking credit redistribution and borrowing in an age of economic polarization several recent studies link rising income inequality in the united states to the global financial crisis arguing that us politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution instead americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities this article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption a key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries the long run partisan composition of government is in turn a key determinant of redistributive effort examining a panel of eighteen oecd democracies the authors find that countries with limited histories of left wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential

relative consumption of housing marginal saving subsidies and income taxes as a second best policy this paper analyzes whether marginal taxation of labor and capital income are useful second best instruments for internalizing the externalities caused by conspicuous housing consumption when the

genuine saving and positional externalities much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption yet positional externalities have so far been ignored in savings based indicators of sustainable development this

conspicuous leisure optimal income taxation when both relative consumption and relative leisure matter previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons this paper considers a two type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure increased consumption positionality typically implies higher marginal income tax rates for both the high ability and the low ability type whereas leisure positionality has an offsetting role however this offsetting role is not symmetric concern about relative leisure implies a progressive income tax component i e a component that is larger for the high ability than for the low ability type moreover leisure positionality does not modify the policy rule for public good provision when the income tax is optimally chosen

reign in hell or serve in heaven a cross country journey into the relative vs absolute perceptions of wellbeing abstract questionnaires exploring the relativist vs absolutist perception of wellbeing are administered to 3883 students in eight different countries four low income countries bolivia brazil kenya and laos 1924 respondents and four high income countries italy sweden switzerland and the uk 1959 respondents our data reveal that wellbeing is perceived mainly in relative terms with the strength of relativism being higher for respondents in high income countries however when the satisfaction of some basic needs is at stake the absolutist concern becomes powerful personal characteristics such as gender and background of studies have a significant role in determining respondents perception of wellbeing finally additional insights emerge from our study interpersonal comparisons take place by looking both upward and downward along the income scale not only income ranking but also the magnitude of reference incomes plays a role and the perception of wellbeing is more elastic to absolute rather than relative income

measurement of technical efficiency in public education a stochastic and nonstochastic production function approach 1 introduction efficiency in the public education system is a significant issue in the united states nationwide real expenditure per student in public education increased more than 3 per year between 1960 and 1998 but output as generally measured by standardized test scores has not increased and in some cases e g the verbal sat score has declined one explanation is that resources are not being utilized efficiently there may be productive or technical inefficiency and or allocative or price inefficiency i e given the relative prices of inputs the cost minimizing input combination is not used this paper focuses on the former by evaluating technical inefficiency in public education using data from utah school districts the pioneering work by farrell in 1957 provided the definition and conceptual framework for both technical and allocative efficiency although technical efficiency refers to failure to operate on the production frontier allocative efficiency generally refers to the failure to meet the marginal conditions for profit maximization considerable effort has been made in refining the measurement of technical efficiency the literature is broadly divided into deterministic and stochastic frontier methodologies 2 the deterministic nonparametric approach that developed out of mathematical programming is commonly known as data envelopment analysis dea and the parametric approach that estimates technical efficiency within a stochastic production cost or profit function model is called the stochastic frontier method both approaches have advantages and disadvantages as discussed in forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 dea has been used extensively in measuring efficiency in the public sector including education where market prices for output generally are not available for example levin 1974 bessent and bessent 1980 bessent et al 1982 and fare grosskopf and weber 1989 used this method to estimate efficiency in public education the stochastic frontier methodology was used by barrow 1991 to estimate a stochastic cost frontier using data from schools in england wyckoff and lavinge 1991 and cooper and cohn 1997 estimated technical efficiency using school district data from new york and south carolina respectively grosskopf et al 1991 used the parametric approach to estimate allocative and technical efficiency in texas school districts the recent literature has seen a convergence of the two approaches and their complementarity is being recognized 3 however there is a lack of empirical evidence in the literature about the proximity of these two approaches in measuring technical efficiency policy formulations based on only one of these efficiency estimates may not be accurate because of the inherent limitations of each before any correctional measures are taken the stability of the technical efficiency estimates obtained from a parametric method should be evaluated by comparing them against those found when using the nonparametric method in this study the technical efficiency estimates for each school district using the stochastic frontier method and tobit residuals from the two stage dea model are compared in the twostage dea model technical efficiency scores obtained from dea using controllable inputs are regressed on student socioeconomic status and other environmental factors the residuals of this regression measure pure technical efficiency after accounting for fixed socioeconomic and environmental factors the empirical analysis uses data from the 40 school districts in utah for the academic year 1992 1993 the standardized test score for 11 th grade students is used as a measure of school output and two classes of inputs are included the first class is considered to be subject to control by school administrators and includes the student teacher ratio the percentage of teachers having an advanced degree and the percentage of teachers with more than 15 years of experience

the influence of energy consumption of china on its real gdp from aggregated and disaggregated viewpoints abstract this paper investigated the causal relationship between energy consumption and gross domestic product gdp in china at both aggregated and disaggregated levels during the period of 1978 2009 by using a modified version of the granger 1969 causality test proposed by toda and yamamoto 1995 within a multivariate framework the empirical results suggested the existence of a negative bi directional granger causality running from aggregated energy consumption to real gdp at disaggregated level of energy consumption the results were complicated for coal empirical findings suggested that there was a negative bi directional granger causality running from coal consumption to real gdp however for oil and gas empirical findings suggested a positive bi directional granger causality running from oil as well as gas consumption to real gdp though these results supported the feedback hypothesis the negative relationship might be attributed to the growing economy production shifting towards less energy intensive sectors and excessive energy consumption in relatively unproductive sectors the results indicated that policies with reducing aggregated energy consumption and promoting energy conservation may boost china s economic growth

competition strategy and efficiency evaluation for decision making units with fixed sum outputs this paper develops a dea data envelopment analysis model to accommodate competition over outputs in the proposed model the total output of all decision making units dmus is fixed and dmus compete with each other to maximize their self rated dea efficiency score in the presence of competition over outputs the best practice frontier deviates from the classical dea frontier we also compute the efficiency scores using the proposed fixed sum output dea fsodea models and discuss the competition strategy selection rule the model is illustrated using a hypothetical data set under the constant returns to scale assumption and medal data from the 2000 sydney olympics under the variable returns to scale assumption