labor market effects of hawaii s mandatory employer provided health insurance the author analyzes how mandatory employer provision of health insurance in hawaii which became law in 1974 affected workers wages employment and insurance coverage between 1970 and 1990 the

wind power development in sweden global policies and local obstacles abstract recently the swedish government adopted a national planning goal of a yearly wind power generation of 10 twh by 2015 implying a substantial increase from the current 0 6 twh level in this paper we provide an economic assessment of the potential for future wind power investments in sweden in close conjunction with an analysis of the legal attitudinal and policy related uncertainties that face a wind mill investor it is shown that the economics of swedish wind power is negatively affected by a the lack of policy stability b public criticism at the local level and in particular c the legal provisions governing the assessment of the environmental impacts of wind mills and the planning procedures for mill location while national and global energy policies as well as the general public point out wind power as particularly environmentally friendly most of the objections to its expansion at the local level tend to have environmental origins the interests of those who object to wind mill installations gain strong legal protection and the municipal territorial planning monopoly in sweden implies that it is hard to make national energy policy goals heard at the local implementation stage compared to its competitors wind power is the technology that tends to have the most to loose from the risk and uncertainties created by this investment environment the paper identifies and discusses a number of ways in which the national policy interests could be strengthened at the local level we discuss the role of citizen participation as well as solutions within the realms of the legal system moreover since the diffusion of wind power encounters the most strident legal and attitudinal obstacles where it interferes with competing land uses a move offshore appears to be an efficient strategy from the perspective of a wind mill investor a stronger political commitment to wind power expansion in legal provisions as well as in the form of long run stability in policy instrument implementation will probably be necessary to attain the 2015 policy goal

on the determinants of employer demand for part time workers this paper uses a survey of private establishments to examine the determinants of the firm s relative demand for partand full time workers the elasticity of substitution of part time for full time workers is about 1 5 considerably lower than previous estimates with aggregate data the results indicate that the quasi fixed labor costs have a negative impact on the proportion of part timers in a firm s work force

cyclical and market determinants of involuntary part time employment we examine the determinants of involuntary part time employment focusing on variation associated with the business cycle and variation attributable to more persistent structural features of the labor market our theoretical framework distinguishes between workers decision to seek part time work and employer demand for part time work hours emphasizing demand and supply determinants of involuntary part time work such as workplace technology labor costs and workforce demographics we conduct regression analyses using state level panel and individual data for the years 2003 2014 the results show that the combination of cyclical variation and the influence of market level factors can explain virtually all of the variation in the aggregate incidence of involuntary part time employment since the great recession

a joint dynamic model of fertility and work of married women this article estimates a dynamic model of fertility and labor supply of married women drawn from the national longitudinal survey of young women 1968 91 it distinguishes part time and full time employment sectors which differ by pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns and transferability of human capital the model with unobserved heterogeneity in earning ability and preferences for children fits the data and produces reasonable forecasts of labor force participation in decisions the estimates unpack important features of the persistence in labor market decisions intertemporal substitution of leisure over the life cycle and the effect of work interruptions due to childbirth on lifetime utility

fuel taxes an important instrument for climate policy abstract this article shows that fuel taxes serve a very important role for the environment and that we risk a backlash of increased emissions if they are abolished fuel taxes have restrained growth in fuel demand and associated carbon emissions although fuel demand is large and growing our analysis shows that it would have been much higher in the absence of domestic fuel taxes people often assert that fuel demand is inelastic but there is strong research evidence showing the opposite the price elasticity is in fact quite high but only in the long run in the short run it may be quite inelastic which has important implications for policy makers had europe not followed a policy of high fuel taxation but had low us taxes then fuel demand would have been twice as large hypothetical transport demand in the whole oecd area is calculated for various tax scenarios and the results show that fuel taxes are the single most powerful climate policy instrument implemented to date yet this fact is not usually given due attention in the debate

nondiscrimination rules and the distribution of fringe benefits this article considers the impact of nondiscrimination nd rules in the federal tax code nondiscrimination rules limit within firm inequality in the provision on nonwage benefits but they place no corresponding limit on within firm inequality in wages firms can skirt nd rules by moving workers with unusual benefits into part time and seasonal positions because workers in such positions are excluded from some nd compliance calculations we examine these issues empirically and find relationships consistent with the hypothesis that nd rules provide a binding constrain on within firms benefits inequality

an examination of firms employment costs the existence of quasi fixed costs of work may affect firms desired employee hours and number of workers which has important implications for the estimation of labour supply parameters firm level data from the 1982 employment opportunity pilot project is used to estimate the importance to firms of employee quasi fixed costs related to searching hiring training and firing specifically this paper examines how these costs affect number of workers and hours per worker turnover and vacancies to the extent that the costs are determined by the firm s presumably exogenous industrial classification an attempt is made to control for biases due to employee heterogeneity as well results show that higher costs are associated with lower turnover fewer vacancies and longer hours as predicted by a model of labour demand

are part time women paid less a model with firm specific effects this paper uses data from a survey of child care establishments to compare part and full time wages within two narrow occupations one high skill and one low skill unlike previous studies it controls for firm specific effects we find that when firm specific effects are accounted for only the low skill workers in our sample receive lower wages for working part time on the other hand when compensation is defined to include prorated fringe benefits establishments appear to compensate both high and low skill part timers at a lower hourly rate

effects of the tax treatment of fringe benefits on labor market segmentation current federal tax law requires that all workers having the same experience with a firm must receive essentially the same package of fringe benefits in order for those benefits to qualify for preferential tax treatment the authors argue that this nondiscriminatory provision of fringe benefits promotes labor market segmentation by inducing workers to sort themselves across the economy according to their demand for fringe benefits several empirical tests using 1968 78 data confirm the existence of sorting and suggest that labor market segmentation increased over time as workers responded to changes in incomes and marginal tax rates

reducing rebound effect through fossil subsidies reform a comprehensive evaluation in china abstract china has committed a sharp reduction in its carbon intensity by 2020 and proposed to take integrated policy package including energy subsidy reform to achieve this goal while energy efficiency improvement is the key influencing factor for this goal its effectiveness is significantly determined by rebound effect energy subsidy as an economic regulation policy would significantly affect rebound effect to explore how china s fossil subsidies reform would affect rebound effect this study conducts a comprehensive evaluation based on a multi sector computable general equilibrium cge model rebound effects at different technological improvement levels are investigated and the impacts of different subsidies reform scenarios on mitigating rebound effects and on the whole economy is analyzed the results provide significant policy insights firstly rebound effect does exist in china larger for electricity than for primary energies secondly by removing fossil energy subsides the rebound effect would be effectively mitigated and removing all subsides would reduce the rebound effect most however it would bring significant negative impacts on the macro economy thirdly an integrated policy with removal of fossil energy subsidies and increment of clean energy subsidies would be more effective greatly reducing rebound effect and also bring benefits for both economy and environment our findings would be critical for china s low carbon policy making in the future

the elusive wage benefit trade off the case of employer provided health insurance this study shows that standard regressions estimated to measure a trade off between wages and health insurance are misspecified by insufficiently accounting for establishment and firm size an interactive size corrected specification is more likely to reveal a trade off furthermore because insurance decisions are typically made by firms and wages set by establishments the insurance constraint on establishments in multi establishment firms weakens the trade off we use model generated data to show that both factors contribute to the failure in previous research to identify a trade off and data from a cross section of northern californian establishments to test for a trade off in multi establishment and single establishment firms

turnover costs and the wage fringe mix this paper examines how firms choose their compensation package to influence employee turnover a firm will attempt to maintain a steady state of trunover consistent with its training and hiring costs we develop a model of this relationship when the firm s ability to offer a differentiated compensation package both the theoretical and empirical findings of our study emphasize the importance of the link between turnover costs and the compensation mix that is quits are negatively realted to both the share of pensions in the total compensation package and the level of wages the influence of pensions in attracting stable workers however is diminishing an important implication is that the policies which attempt to standardize worker compensation will hinder the market determination of turnover and hence will generate inefficiencies in the labour market

understanding carbon lock in abstract this paper narrative argues that industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co evolution driven by path dependent increasing returns to scale it is asserted that this condition termed carbon lock in creates persistent market and policy failures that can inhibit the diffusion of carbon saving technologies despite their apparent environmental and economic advantages the notion of a techno institutional complex is introduced to capture the idea that lock in occurs through combined interactions among technological systems and governing institutions while carbon lock in provides a conceptual basis for understanding macro level barriers to the diffusion of carbon saving technologies it also generates questions for standard economic modeling approaches that abstract away technological and institutional evolution in their elaboration the question of escaping carbon lock in is left for a future paper

an empirical investigation of the pollution haven effect with strategic environment and trade policy abstract using a new dataset on the stringency and enforcement of environmental policy this study is the first to find robust confirmation of a pollution haven effect in a cross country context by accounting for strategically determined environment trade and intellectual property right ipr policies a simple game theoretic approach to policy determination is described which suggests an identification strategy based on other country characteristics it is found that for the top 20th percentile of countries in terms of growth in u s multinational affiliate value added as much as 8 6 of that growth between 1999 and 2003 can be attributed to declining relative stringency and enforcement of environmental policy the results are robust to a number of identification tests weak iv tests and third country spatial effects further evidence is found that relatively footloose industries are more likely to be affected by environmental policy than more traditionally dirty industries and enforcement of environmental policies tends to be a more important deterrent than the stringency of the policy set

the gender pay gap fringe benefits and occupational crowding using data from the 1991 national longitudinal survey of youth the authors estimate earnings equations for each of seven occupational categories and the aggregate sample when fringe benefits are excluded from the compensation measure a gender coefficient is statistically significant that is women are found to have received significantly lower compensation than men within six of the seven occupational categories the exception being the most female dominated category when an index of compensation that includes fringe benefits is used however a gender coefficient is significant in only one category which contains relatively heterogeneous jobs gender specific regressions are used to estimate what part of the earnings gap between men and women is due to differences in traits the results indicate that occupational assignment is the primary determinant of the pay gap a result that is consistent with a crowding explanation of that gap

a model of technological breakthrough in the renewable energy sector abstract models with induced technological change in the energy sector often predict a gradual expansion of renewable energies and a substantial share of fossil fuels remaining in the energy mix through the end of our century however there are historical examples where new products or technologies expanded rapidly and achieved a high output in a relatively short period of time this paper explores the possibility of a technological breakthrough in the renewable energy sector using a partial equilibrium model of energy generation with endogenous r d our results indicate that due to increasing returns to scale a multiplicity of equilibria can arise in the model two stable states can coexist one characterized by a lower and one by higher supply of renewable energy the transition from the low output to the high output equilibrium is characterized by a discontinuous rise in r d activity and capacity investments in the renewable energy sector the transition can be triggered by a rise in world energy demand by a drop in the supply of fossil fuels or by policy intervention under market conditions the transition occurs later than in the social optimum hence we identify a market failure related to path dependence and technological lock in that can justify a strong policy intervention initially paradoxically well intended energy saving policies can actually lead to higher emissions as they reduce the incentives to invest in renewable energies by having a cushioning effect on the energy price hence these policies should be supplemented by other instruments that restore the incentives to invest in renewable energies finally we discuss the influence of monopoly power in the market for innovations we show that market power can alleviate the problem of technological lock in but creates a new market failure that reduces static efficiency

the effect of health insurance on married female labor supply we investigate the effects of employer provided health insurance on the labor supply of married women because health benefits commonly are restricted to full time workers wives who prefer to work short hours but have no alternate source of insurance may work long hours in order to acquire coverage for their families we use data from the april 1993 current population survey benefits supplement and we exploit variation in coverage under husbands health plans to estimate the magnitude of this effect our reduced form labor supply models indicate a strong negative effect of husbands health insurance on wives work hours particularly in families with children this effect persists when we replace husbands insurance coverage with husbands offered insurance and when we use a multinomial logit model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in family labor supply preferences

on modeling and interpreting the economics of catastrophic climate change with climate change as prototype example this paper analyzes the implications of structural uncertainty for the economics of low probability high impact catastrophes even when updated by bayesian learning uncertain structural parameters induce a critical tail fattening of posterior predictive distributions such fattened tails have strong im plications for situations like climate change where a catastrophe is theoretically possible because prior knowledge cannot place sufficiently narrow bounds on overall damages this paper shows that the economic consequences of fat tailed structural uncertainty along with unsureness about high temperature damages can readily outweigh the effects of discounting in climate change policy analysis

the dynamic demand for part time and full time labour this paper explores the hypothesis that part time work plays a distinct role in the adjustment strategies of firms in the face of economic shocks dynamic labour demand equations for part time and full time labour estimated from monthly data from the us current population survey indicate that part time labour is adjusted more rapidly in a number of industries furthermore the adjustment of the two types of labour is not independent disequilibrium in one slows the rate of adjustment of the other these results lend support to the notion that part time labour provides an important source of dynamic flexibility in some industries policies that reduce the relative costs of adjusting part time labour and changes in the economic environment that make flexibility more important to firms may explain some of the growth in part time employment that has taken place over the last several decades part time employment has expanded significantly over the last several decades in both north america and europe standing at about 15 5 of the labour force in germany in the early 1990s 12 2 in france and 18 9 in the united states houseman 1995 this paper explores the hypothesis that part time work plays a distinct and important role in the adjustment strategies of firms in the face of economic shocks as suggested by a variety of authors and substantiated by a small amount of survey evidence zeytinoglu 1992 firms may be motivated to hire part time workers partly because such workers can provide them with more flexibility in adjusting their labour forces obtaining evidence on this hypothesis can generate insight into one of the potential causes of the growth of part time employment part time labour may be more flexible than full time labour for a number of reasons if there are positive training costs short term layoffs will be costly when workers are not available for rehire when conditions improve if parttime workers on short term layoff are less likely to seek other employment adjustment costs relating to training will be lower for them workers who choose full time employment may on average have stronger preferences for regular schedules and constant incomes than do workers who are employed on a part time basis varying hours or employment therefore may cause greater discontent among full time workers than part time workers resulting in reduced productivity or compensatory wage increases finally firms that pay efficiency wages may segment their labour forces into primary workers who have greater job security and secondary workers who act to absorb shocks to product demand as rebitzer and taylor 1991 show providing primary workers with a credible promise of future employment lowers the wage rate required to ensure that these workers do not shirk for all the reasons just described part time workers may form a natural source of secondary workers for firms pursuing this strategy

globalizing carbon lock in this paper extends the arguments surrounding carbon lock in elaborated in unruh energy policy 28 2000 817 30 2002 317 to countries currently undergoing industrialization it argues that for numerous reasons industrializing countries are unlikely to leapfrog carbon intensive energy development on the contrary carbon lock in may be globalizing and could further constrain climate change mitigation options it is then argued that many policy recommendations ignore carbon lock in possibly limiting their potential for successful implementation the paper then discusses four policy approaches that appear to have advantages given lock in conditions it is recognized however that relative ease of implementation does not necessarily equate with superiority instead it is merely a path dependent outcome of past development decisions pursuing policies on the basis of relative implementation ease may help address the issue of climate change but could also result in sub optimal outcomes along other dimensions of sustainable development

why did china s energy intensity increase during 1998 2006 decomposition and policy analysis abstract despite the fact that china s energy intensity has continuously decreased during the 1980s and mostly 1990s the decreasing trend has reversed since 1998 and the past few years have witnessed rapid increase in china s energy intensity we firstly conduct an index decomposition analysis to identify the key forces behind the increase it is found that 1 the high energy demand in industrial sectors is mainly attributed to expansion of production scale especially in energy intensive industries 2 energy saving mainly comes from efficiency improvement with energy intensive sectors making the largest contribution and 3 a heavier industrial structure also contributes to the increase this study also makes the first attempt to bridge the quantitative decomposition analysis with qualitative policy analyses and fill the gap between decomposition results and policy relevance in previous work we argue that 1 energy efficiency improvement in energy intensive sectors is mainly due to the industrial policies that have been implemented in the past few years 2 low energy prices have directly contributed to high industrial energy consumption and indirectly to the heavy industrial structure we provide policy suggestions in the end

wage offers and full time and part time employment by british women strong evidence in support of the hypothesis that women receive lower wage offers in part time jobs than in full time jobs is provided by estimation of wage offer functions for british women which control for self selection into these two types of jobs analysis of married women s employment decisions indicates that the difference in a woman s expected wage offers between full time and part time employment is an important determinant of whether she works full time while husband s income mainly affects the decision of whether to work in addition it appears that women who work despite having observed characteristics that discourage employment are much more likely to work part time

self selection via fringe benefits this paper extends the theory of self selection to circumstances in which economic agents have some access to markets we use the analysis to explain the existence of multidimensional compensation packages in the presence of limited re marketability employment contracts that include fringe benefits are prominent examples of such multidimensional packages

the earnings of soviet workers evidence from the soviet interview project micro data gathered by the soviet interview project provide one of the first opp ortunities for western researchers to investigate the determinants of soviet earnings the data show that soviet labor markets operate in many respects like u s labor markets yet institutional differences remain the most striking institutional impact is that soviet workers are rewarded and penalized for political behavior external to the firm as in the u s education and experience are rewarded men earn more than women however the soviet pattern of returns to education is different returns to experience are lower and occupational segregation of women is less important copyright 1988 by mit press

part time work and the hiring of older workers this research uses german establishment data to examine the relationship between back loading compensation the hiring of older workers and their part time status we confirm that establishments that defer compensation are less likely to hire older workers we demonstrate for the first time that establishments that defer compensation are more likely to limit older workers to part time jobs when they do hire them thus deferred compensation plays a larger role in reducing the chances of older workers being hired into full time jobs than would be inferred from past estimates simply examining their odds of being hired at all

a view from the macro side rebound backfire and khazzoom brookes abstract this paper attempts to delineate a few key insights extracted from theoretical macroeconomic considerations of the rebound issue the goal has been to reduce these thoughts to a clear set of assertions that if true would be useful points of reference in the ongoing discussion despite their non empirical nature

social insurance with in kind provision of private goods this paper addresses the desirability of providing in kind transfers as a screening device to facilitate redistribution of income from able to disabled persons within a social insurance system an optimal policy consisting of cash transfers income contingent in kind transfers of one good particularly demanded by disabled workers and linear taxation of other commodities is characterized it is then asked whether and if so when this policy can be replaced by an earning tested scheme that provides the in kind good only to those indivi duals who have no earnings from labor or by a non linear pricing policy

fringe benefits and the demand for part time workers in the us tax code nondiscrimination rules and other institutional constraints require employers to offer the same fringe benefits to all full time workers but allow them to deny benefits to part time workers as a result firms that offer generous fringe benefits to higher skill workers have an incentive to hire lower skill workers on a part time or contingent basis this paper uses cross section establishment data to investigate the effect of employer provided fringe benefits on the demand for part time workers the results indicate that firms that offer more generous fringe benefits make greater use of low wage part time workers there is no significant relationship between fringe benefits and the proportion of high wage workers employed part time

state mandated benefits and employer provided health insurance abstract one popular explanation for the low rate of employee health insurance coverage is the presence of numerous state regulations which mandate that group health insurance plans must include certain benefits by raising the minimum cost of providing any health insurance coverage these mandated benefits make it impossible for firms which would have desired to offer minimal health insurance at a low cost to do so i use data on insurance coverage among employees in small firms to investigate whether this problem is an important cause of employee non insurance i find that mandates have little effect on the rate of insurance coverage this finding is robust to a variety of specifications of the regulations i also find that this lack of an effect may be because mandates are not binding since most firms appear to offer these benefits even in the absence of regulation

a general equilibrium view of global rebound effects abstract how do energy efficiency gains affect energy consumption the effects are generally called rebound effects in the literature previous studies have extensively focused on only part of the global economy to study rebound effects e g energy consumption by households one industry or one country however since the global economy is highly connected among countries these studies may lead to misleading conclusions if the rebound effects in the rest of the economy are significant recently saunders 2008 analyzes the demand side by taking the global economy as a whole wei 2007 also provides a general analysis by using cobb douglas production functions for the global economy the present article expands wei 2007 general analysis to explore the rebound effects from an economist s viewpoint by taking the global economy as a whole and applying general forms of production functions the analysis provides new insights related to rebound effects we highlight the role of energy supply as a determinant of rebound we show that the substitution between energy resources and other productive resources is more relevant to long term rebound we predict that long term rebound may be lower than short term rebound and we also discover that super conservation can happen in both the short term and the long term

china s foreign trade and climate change a case study of co2 emissions abstract the globalization of trade has numerous environmental implications trade creates a mechanism for consumers to shift environmental pollution associated with their consumption to other countries carbon leakage exerts great influences on international trade and economy applying an input output approach the paper estimates the amount of carbon dioxide co2 embodied in china s foreign trade during 1997 2007 it is found that 10 03 26 54 of china s annual co2 emissions are produced during the manufacture of export goods destined for foreign consumers while the co2 emissions embodied in china s imports accounted for only 4 40 1997 and 9 05 2007 of that we also estimate that the rest of world avoided emitting 150 18 mt co2 in 1997 increasing to 593 mt in 2007 as a result of importing goods from china rather than manufacturing the same type and quantity of goods domestically during 1997 2007 the net additional global co2 emissions resulting from china s exports were 4894 mt then the paper divides the trade embodied emissions into scale composition and technical effect it was found that scale and composition effect increased the co2 emissions embodied in trade while the technical effect offset a small part of them finally its mechanism and policy implications are presented

redistribution and small coalitions of friends when side marketing trade is perfect linear taxation of retradeable commodities is the only scheme that survives attempts to arbitrage in this paper i discuss tax schemes when side trading is imperfect in the sense that commodities can only be re exchanged within coalitions no larger than two people in the framework of a two class economy i identify coalitions which might have an incentive to form and provide a characterisation for the pareto efficient tax scheme the tax formula has a very simple form and strongly resembles the formula for the no side trade case in a numerical exercise the constraints imposed on policy by an imperfect side trading process are found to be almost as tough as those imposed by perfect side trading

the incidence of mandated maternity benefits i consider the labor market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group the efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group specific wages i study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age i find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group correspondingly i find little effect on total labor input for that group jel 118 j32 h51 in an era of tight fiscal budget constraints mandating employer provision of workplace benefits to employees is an attractive means for a government to finance its policy agenda consequently in recent years there has been a growth of interest in mandated benefits as a tool of social policy for example the centerpiece of president bill clinton s health care proposal is mandated employer provision of health insurance and more than 20 states have man

the expansion of temporary help employment in the us 1982 1992 a test of alternative economic explanations employment in the temporary help supply ths industry more than tripled in the us between 1982 and 1992 during that period the variability and cyclical sensitivity of ths jobs their average weekly hours and real hourly earnings were extraordinarily high in addition changes in temporary employment levels disproportionately affect aggregate employment flows over this period one possible explanation of the dramatic rise and variability in ths jobs is demographic changes in the composition of the labour force towards groups believed to prefer impermanent job commitment or temporal flexibility in supplying labour services a contrasting view considers it part of an explicit human resource strategy increasingly adopted by firms seeking greater numerical or cost flexibility this strategy may reflect an employer response to greater volatility in demand intensifying price competition pressures in product markets and rising quasi fixed costs incurred for permanent employees such as nonwage benefits a tw

carbon lock in rebound effects and china at the limits of statism abstract from the beginning the statist frame of the kyoto protocol has invited a focus on national carbon budgets and piecemeal mitigation within rich countries despite the clean development mechanism and other efforts to diffuse low carbon technologies to developing countries china has over the last decades continued to construct hundreds of new thermal coal power plants leading not only to skyrocketing emissions in the present but also to long term carbon lock in in light of this china is likely to continue to put strong upward pressure on global emissions for many decades to come ignoring the seriousness of this situation many rich countries have persisted to seek marginal improvements to intermittent low energy sources such as wind power rather than taking the lead in developing breakthrough baseload technologies such as nuclear fusion this paper argues that only such high energy technologies if made significantly cheaper than any fossil alternatives will be capable of breaking the current carbon lock in process in china and other developing countries

scenario analysis of china s emissions pathways in the 21st century for low carbon transition china s growing demand for energy and its dependence on coal has seen its carbon emissions increase more than 50 since 2000 within the debate about mitigating global climate change there is mounting pressure for emerging economies like china to take more responsibility for reducing their carbon emissions within a post 2012 international climate change policy framework for china this leads to fundamental questions about how feasible it is for the country to shift away from its recent carbon intensive pattern of growth this paper presents some general results of scenarios that have been developed to investigate how china might continue to develop within a cumulative carbon emissions budget the results show how changes in the key sectors of the chinese economy could enable china to follow four different low carbon development pathways each of which complies with a cumulative emissions constraint each scenario reflects different priorities for governmental decision making infrastructure investments and social preferences having compared the key features of each scenario the paper concludes with some implications for chinese government policy

what are the effects of fiscal policy shocks we propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policy using vector autoregressions specifically we use sign restrictions to identify a government revenue shock as well as a government spending shock while controlling for a generic business cycle shock and a monetary policy shock we explicitly allow for the possibility of announcement effects i e that a current fiscal policy shock changes fiscal policy variables in the future but not at present we construct the impulse responses to three linear combinations of these fiscal shocks corresponding to the three scenarios of deficit spending deficit financed tax cuts and a balanced budget spending expansion we apply the method to us quarterly data from 1955 to 2000 we find that deficit financed tax cuts work best among these three scenarios to improve gdp with a maximal present value multiplier of five dollars of total additional gdp per each dollar of the total cut in government revenue 5 years after the shock copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

effects of austerity expenditure and tax based approaches we review the debate surrounding the macroeconomic effects of deficit reduction policies austerity the discussion about austerity in general has distracted commentators and policymakers from a very important result namely the enormous difference on average between expenditure and tax based austerity plans spending based austerity plans are remarkably less costly than tax based plans the former have on average a close to zero effect on output and lead to a reduction of the debt gdp ratio tax based plans have the opposite effect and cause large and long lasting recessions these results also apply to the recent episodes of european austerity which in this respect were not especially different from previous cases

the implications of job matching for retirement health insurance and leave benefits this paper focuses on potential reasons for variations in benefit packages in particular variations in the availability of retirement health insurance and leave an important feature of our analysis is that we do not start with heterogeneity in workforces to explain fringe benefit differences across employers it would be straightforward to say that differences across employers in fringe benefit packages simply represent differences in the preferences of their workforces rather we focus on heterogeneity across employers as an important source of differences in fringe benefit packages preliminary evidence is found supportive of the predicted differences in the likelihood of such fringe benefits as retirement health insurance and leave based upon two variables the extent of on the job training offered by the employer and the size of the employers we also examine the implied links between these fringe benefits and such variables as average tenture and the proportion of the workforce that is female

fiscal policy in good times and bad in the 1980s several countries with large government debt or deficit implemented substantial and in some cases drastic deficit cuts contrary to widespread expectations in many cases private consumption boomed rather than contracted this paper shows that in times of fiscal stress shocks to government revenues and especially expenditure have very different effects on private consumption than in normal times

cost minimizing welfare programs abstract we study opportunities for lowering the cost of welfare programs by exploiting heterogeneity in the unobservable tastes of welfare recipients relying on the inability of cash based programs to achieve self selection we provide circumstances in which it is optimal to provide payments in kind our model differs from other self selection models because we allow the recipients the opportunity to trade the subsequent to the receipt of their welfare packages the presence of unreported cash among the recipient population is considered

the rebound effect some empirical evidence from india abstract the present paper looks at the effect of technical efficiency gains on energy use in three sectors in india at varying levels of aggregation high positive rebound implies that efficient technology unless supplemented by appropriate pricing policy will not be successful in containing demand however the main purpose of the paper is to focus on the unique mechanism of rebound that may occur in developing countries with unmet demand

the time for austerity estimating the average treatment effect of fiscal policy after the global financial crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data this article reconciles seemingly disparate estimates of multipliers within a unified and state contingent framework we achieve identification of causal effects with new propensity score based methods for time series data using this novel approach we show that austerity is always a drag on growth and especially so in depressed economies a 1 of gdp fiscal consolidation translates into a loss of 3 5 of real gdp over five years when implemented in a slump rather than just 1 8 in a boom

the demand of part time in european companies a multilevel modelling approach part time work is one of the most well known atypical working time arrangements in contrast to previous studies focusing on the supply side the originality of our research is to investigate t

the output effect of fiscal consolidation plans abstract we show that the correct experiment to evaluate the effects of a fiscal adjustment is the simulation of a multi year fiscal plan rather than of individual fiscal shocks simulation of fiscal plans adopted by 16 oecd countries over a 30 year period supports the hypothesis that the effects of consolidations depend on their design fiscal adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax based ones and have especially low output costs when they consist of permanent rather than stop and go changes in taxes and spending the difference between tax based and spending based adjustments appears not to be explained by accompanying policies including monetary policy it is mainly due to the different responses of business confidence and private investment

energy consumption and economic growth evidence from china at both aggregated and disaggregated levels using a neo classical aggregate production model where capital labor and energy are treated as separate inputs this paper tests for the existence and direction of causality between output growth and energy use in china at both aggregated total energy and disaggregated levels as coal oil and electricity consumption using the johansen cointegration technique the empirical findings indicate that there exists long run cointegration among output labor capital and energy use in china at both aggregated and all three disaggregated levels then using a vec specification the short run dynamics of the interested variables are tested indicating that there exists granger causality running from electricity and oil consumption to gdp but does not exist granger causality running from coal and total energy consumption to gdp on the other hand short run granger causality exists from gdp to total energy coal and oil consumption but does not exist from gdp to electricity consumption we thus propose policy suggestions to solve the energy and sustainable development dilemma in china as enhancing energy supply security and guaranteeing energy supply especially in the short run to provide adequate electric power supply and set up national strategic oil reserve enhancing energy efficiency to save energy diversifying energy sources energetically exploiting renewable energy and drawing out corresponding policies and measures and finally in the long run transforming development pattern and cut reliance on resource and energy dependent industries