inequality resource depletion and welfare accounting applications to indonesia and costa rica abstract ahluwalia and chenery noted that the standard measures of gdp growth imply distributional weights that place greater weight on the income of richer income groups and proposed distribution neutral and pro poor alternatives more recently pilot studies by the world resources institute wri have questioned the sustainability of gdp growth and have introduced natural resource modifications to national income accounting to date no studies have undertaken both revisions concurrently creating a revised measure based on gdp but corrected for both distributional bias and resource depletion such a measure is derived in this paper and its impact illustrated with data from indonesia and costa rica the countries studied by the wri

are the self employed really jacks of all trades testing the assumptions and implications of lazear s theory of entrepreneurship with german data using a large representative german data set and various concepts of self employment this paper tests the jack of all trades view of entrepreneurship by lazear am econ rev 94 2 208 211 2004 consistent with its theoretical assumptions we find that self employed individuals perform more tasks and that their work requires more skills than that of paid employees in contrast to lazear s assumptions however self employed individuals do not just need more basic but also more expert skills than employees our results also provide rather limited support for the idea that human capital investment patterns differ between those who become self employed and those ending up in paid employment

the middle class collapse and the environment abstract the thesis that unequal societies are harmful to the planet was defended by boyce 1994 in a framework based on the unequal bargaining power between rich and poor our study reinvestigates this theory by removing any reference to power in order to study the conditions under which it can still occur we show that a middle class collapse can aggravate or alleviate the burden on the planet depending on income disparities and weight of upward vs downward mobility moreover the paper shows how an appropriate environmental policy can increase the political acceptability of a social one designed for mitigating the deleterious effects of a middle class collapse through the reduction of ex post income disparities

stochastic equilibria existence spanning number and the no expected financial gain from trade hypothesis stochastic equilibria under uncertainty with continuous time security trading and consumption are demonstrated in a general setting a common question is whether the current price of a security is an unbiased predictor of the future price of the security plus intermediate dividends this is the hypothesis of no expected financial gains from trade the relevance of this hypothesis in multi good economies is called into question by the following demonstrated fact for each set of probability assessments there exists a corresponding equilibrium one with the original agents original equilibrium allocations and no expected financial gains from trade under the given probability assessments the spanning number of the economy is defined as the fewest number of security markets required to sustain a complete markets equilibrium in a dynamic sense made precise in the paper the spanning number is linked directly to agent primitives in particular the manner in which new information resolves uncertainty over time the spanning number is shown to be invariant under bounded changes in expectations several examples are given in which the spanning number is finite even though the number of potential states of the world is infinite

income distribution and environmental quality in china a spatial econometric perspective abstract paying heed to a surge of concern about the serious and continuous environmental degradation that is currently being witnessed in china in this paper we investigate whether income distribution contributes to environmental deterioration environmental degradation can be linked not only to income growth we argue but also to increases in income inequality the study calculated the gini coefficient of 31 province using a data set of 403 city level data in mainland china and estimated the linkage between income distribution and environmental deterioration utilizing balanced data for 31 chinese provinces during the period 1996 2015 first the degree of environmental pollution was calculated by constructing a comprehensive index system which was formulated using the entropy method based on six environmental indicators then a spatial panel regression model was also employed in order to estimate whether income inequality is likely to be a relevant factor in environmental deterioration in china the estimation results showed that using the index and spatial analysis techniques significant spatial positive agglomeration were found existing between chinese provinces in terms of their levels of environmental degradation the influencing factors estimation results substantiated the existence of an invert u shaped relation lending support to the environmental kuznets curve theory more importantly the study found that income inequality played a significant role in preventing environmental degradation suggesting that an appropriate level of income inequality over a delimited period is beneficial to improving environmental quality it should however also be emphasized that optimizing the country s income distribution is remains an important long term task for the chinese government other factors were found to exert different types and magnitudes of impacts on environmental pollution results showed that many factors for instance energy intensity the share of secondary industry population density and foreign direct investment contribute to environmental deterioration conversely our findings also indicate that rising urbanization levels can have a positive effect on environmental quality in addition no clear evidence was found to suggest that local government expenditure is related to environmental degradation

does income inequality harm the environment empirical evidence from the united states abstract this study revisits the growth inequality environment nexus in the context of country specific time series data the short and long run effects of income inequality economic growth and energy consumption on co2 emissions in the u s are examined using the autoregressive distributed lag ardl approach we find that more equitable distribution of income in the u s results in better environmental quality in the short and long run it is also found that in both the short and long run economic growth has a beneficial effect on environmental quality whereas energy consumption has a detrimental effect on the environment

el salvador s agricultural sector macroeconomic policy agrarian change and the environment abstract this paper argues that current agricultural policy in el salvador is failing to further the goals of macroeconomic growth and stability sustainable livelihood security and environmental sustainability macroeconomic policy has turned relative prices sharply against agriculture the plight of the rural poor has been exacerbated by continuing inequities in the agrarian structure the breakdown in rural livelihoods and limited access to land and other assets is accelerating environmental degradation suggested alternative policies such as more favorable price policies agrarian reform and environmental restoration would promote sustainable development by capitalizing on the complementarity among growth poverty reduction and consolidation of peace

entrepreneurship human capital and labor demand a story of signaling and matching in contrast to employee qualifications there is no clear evidence that entrepreneurs qualifications positively affect their income in this study we propose that entrepreneurs can benefit from using their qualification as a signal during the process of recruiting employees this is assumed to follow a process of matching equals among equals we confirm a matching of qualification levels for highly skilled employees in denmark and an indication of this in germany partial support for matching among medium skilled employees was only found in germany with no consistent evidence of matching for low skilled employees in neither country this suggests that as skill levels of employees decrease their probabilities of working for different founders converge founders qualifications are the most reliable predictor of recruitment choices over time our findings are robust to numerous control variables as well as across industries and firm age

inequality and the environmental kuznets curve abstract is income inequality harmful to the environment the answer to this question has not reached a consensus in the literature this study seeks to provide insight into this question by examining the influence of income inequality on the environmental kuznets curve ekc i e the impact of income inequality on the ekc turning point two potential mechanisms through which inequality may affect the ekc turning point by reducing public demand for environmental protection and by increasing a power of capital owners to prevent such protection using a large sample n 170 174 of countries we find evidence of the ekc for so2 emissions and income inequality has a significant impact on the ekc turning point income inequality increases the ekc turning point suggesting that high inequality can be damaging to the environment the results are robust to potential outliers different data sources of income inequality a different so2 emissions measure changes in model specification different samples and an alternative estimation method we also find that inequality appears to be more important than corruption in determining the ekc turning point

are women graduates jacquelines of all trades challenging lazear s view on entrepreneurship this study challenges the basic reasoning behind lazear s theory on entrepreneurship 2005 based on the key motive of maximizing one s lifetime income lazear posits that individuals with a balanced set of skills should have a higher probability of being self employed his jack of all trades hypothesis presumes that entrepreneurs need sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to succeed while paid employees benefit from being specialists in a certain area demanded by the labor market because most women led businesses are neither based on the motive of making money nor are they growth oriented we argue that maximizing their lifetime income is not the main motivation of many women to start a business however we argue that lazear s theory can be extended to motivations that are mostly stated for women entrepreneurs as well we apply it to a specific representative sample of 1384 women graduates in germany and test our hypothesis with logit regression a dichotomized measure indicating whether a women graduate was self employed n 706 or not n 678 served as the dependent variable our results widely confirm lazear s assumption for women graduates who run relatively small businesses in terms of sales and employment professional training balanced industry experience and balanced entrepreneurship based self efficacy increase the probability of being self employed solo self employed tend to have balanced industry experience more often than those being in a team or having employees lazear s theory has male as the norm and as such does not readily apply to the case of women but could and should be extended to women s specifics

poverty and environmental degradation in the nicaraguan hillsides abstract this article questions the assumption of poverty as a major cause of environmental degradation examining five environmentally harmful natural resource management practices in the nicaraguan hillsides it shows that the immediate agents of environmental degradation are the nonpoor farmers not the poorest it argues that to analyze the causal links between poverty and environment a distinction between poverty as a state of deprivation and poverty as a relational phenomenon is necessary finally the article warns that the often strategic reference to poverty as the major cause of environmental degradation made by nonpoor and poor farmers may lead to negative environmental impacts

income inequality and co2 emissions in the g7 1870 2014 evidence from non parametric modelling abstract we examine whether income inequality effected carbon emissions in what are now the world s wealthiest countries over the period 1870 2014 employing a non parametric panel estimation method with cross sectional and time varying coefficients we find that the relationship between income inequality and co2 emissions is highly non linear in terms of signs and significance the nonparametric coefficient function for income inequality is found to vary over the period 1870 2014 income inequality exhibits a significant positive effect from 1870 to 1880 and a significant negative impact from 1950 to 2000 on co2 emissions we also find that for extended periods between 1881 and 1949 and between 2000 and 2014 there is no significant relationship between the two variables

labor market returns to college major specificity abstract this paper develops a new approach to measuring human capital specificity in the context of college majors and estimates its labor market return over a worker s life cycle to measure specificity we propose a novel method grounded in human capital theory a gini coefficient of earnings premia for a major across occupations our measure captures the notion of skill transferability across jobs education and nursing are the most specific majors while philosophy and psychology are among the most general using data from the american community survey we find that the most specific majors typically pay off the most with an early career earnings premium of about 5 6 over average majors 15 20 over the most general majors driven by higher hourly wages general majors lag far behind at every age despite their earnings advantage graduates from specific majors are the least likely to hold managerial positions with graduates from majors of average specificity being the most likely to do so it may be that managerial positions require a mix of specific knowledge and broadly applicable skills

do individual preferences explain the environmental kuznets curve abstract some economists maintain the optimistic view that individual preferences of rich people eventually lead to a virtuous circle relationship between rising income and environmental degradation in this article i review some of the models that establish a relationship between individual preferences and environmental quality these models provide a basis for discussion of the key role played by two factors individual preferences and technology they do not however capture the distributive conflicts that occur between different social groups in the process of defining environmental policy neither do they provide a good basis for distinguishing between environmental costs caused by the decisions of particular consumers and those which affect the same consumers this point is related to the various manners in which environmental costs are displaced displacement often occurs within a country for current costs and is even clearer and more relevant when costs are transferred across a great distance or to a remote future in such cases there are few incentives to reduce consumption or alter its composition displacement moreover can become a strategy pursued more or less consciously for maintaining high and rising levels of consumption without dealing with the associated environmental costs

political and economic inequality and the environment abstract this paper analyzes and tests the hypothesis that political and economic equality result in lower levels of environmental degradation based on formal statements of the argument put forward by boyce r 1994 ecological economics 11 169 178 i show that equality may or may not be necessary to minimize degradation under some plausible conditions greater inequality may even be conducive to lower degradation actual results depend primarily on the intersection between the distribution of preferences across groups and the institutional rules two cross national empirical tests tend to support the contention that distributional issues do not systematically explain variations in environmental quality the results reinforce the conclusion that assumptions about the structure of preferences and workings of social choice institutions ignore complex interactions which influence the relationship between degradation and equality

income inequality and the environment aggregation bias in environmental kuznets curves abstract the environmental kuznets curve assumes an inverted u shaped relation between environmental damage and per capita income recently it has been argued in the literature that in addition to income levels the inequality in the distribution of power and income is positively related to environmental degradation we provide an additional argument based on simple aggregation for including a measure of income dispersion in empirical analyses when the relationship between environmental damage and household income is concave e g resembles an environmental kuznets curve then income inequality is negatively related to total environmental damage results from an empirical analysis of cross national variation indicate that the aggregation effect can run counter to and outweigh the political economy effect for some environmental indicators

testing the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis across the u s evidence from panel mean group estimators abstract it is widely believed that greenhouse gases contribute to a warmer climate since global warming is a serious threat and greenhouse gas emissions are one of the main causes of it analyzing the effects of economic development on environment have great importance in this study the validity of the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is tested for the 50 u s states during the 1960 2010 period using recent panel data estimators that take cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity into account accordingly the cross sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity robust estimators augmented mean group amg and common correlated effects mean group estimator ccemg provide mixed results the amg estimator strongly validates the ekc hypothesis asserting that the ekc holds in 30 of the 50 states with turning points for income per capita lie between 1292 and 48597 on the contrary the ccemg estimator provides only weak evidence on the ekc hypothesis and the ekc holds only in 10 states with turning points between 2457 and 14603

market resolution and valuation in incomplete markets the arrow debreu approach to general equilibrium in an economy has been recognized as one of the most general and conceptually elegant frameworks for the study of financial problems under uncertainty 2 9 equally well known is its elusiveness when it comes to ready application to practical problems like capital budgeting or empirical testing see 6 15 18 however some recent research see 1 3 6 12 16 18 and 19 has made a serious attempt to put the state preference theoretic model in an operational setting breeden and litzenberger 6 have developed an interesting approach to derive constructively the prices of elementary arrow debreu securities from the prices of call options on aggregate consumption banz and miller 3 use a similar technique to value capital budgeting projects based on values for state contingent claims computed from prices of call options written on the market portfolio the supershare securities proposed by hakansson 14 16 and related work by garman 13 ross 24 etc have also served to give the so called state contingent approach a practical flavor

is income inequality a driver for renewable energy consumption abstract although many initiatives have been made to research the effect of income inequality on environmental issues the question of whether income inequality affects renewable energy consumption hasn t been answered this gap in the literature raises an important question that needs to be answered by researchers can the income inequality affect renewable energy consumption as far as is known the study is the first attempt to discover this relationship therefore the impact of income inequality on renewable energy consumption is examined theoretically and empirically in 43 developed and developing countries for 2000 2015 in order to avoid the omitted variable problem economic environmental and institutional variables such as gdp per capita corruption co2 emissions and trade openness are included in the model the results demonstrate that the decline in income inequality will enhance renewable energy consumption in other words policymakers have the opportunity to reduce income inequality and environmental degradation at the same time similarly corruption control and raise co2 emissions will increase also renewable energy consumption otherwise economic determinants such as economic growth and trade openness have no meaningful effect on renewable energy consumption

the role of natural capital in sustaining livelihoods in remote mountainous regions the case of upper svaneti republic of georgia in the greater caucasus of the republic of georgia proponents of a new ski tourism zone and long term timber concessions claim that new wage opportunities will benefit households these developments will also limit access to common pool resources cprs this study uses the sustainable livelihoods framework to identify the conditions under which a development strategy will improve livelihood outcomes in the region analysis of original household survey data in depth interviews and field observation reveals that households depend on cprs for a range of market and non market benefits low income households depend on cprs for up to 60 of their total income ols regression estimates show that households in villages farthest from market centers have a higher income dependence on cprs and are more likely to participate in forest use activities a majority of households report that there are few available substitutes to improve livelihood outcomes a development strategy should secure access to market benefits from cprs or wage income must increase in proportion to lost cpr income and affordable substitutes must be provided access to non substitutable components of cprs must be secured and the distribution of changes in access to natural capital and new wage opportunities must be accounted for

the index of sustainable economic welfare isew as an alternative to gdp in measuring economic welfare the results of the austrian revised isew calculation 1955 1992 abstract although the inadequacy of gdp to measure economic welfare is widely accepted theoretically it is still used as the key indicator for economic policy this article s aim therefore is to give some empirical evidence to the theoretical critique economic welfare or at least its change over time is estimated by the index of sustainable economic welfare isew which takes account of gdp unpaid household labor social costs environmental damage and income distribution the concept of the isew which was originally developed by herman daly and john cobb is entirely reformulated with special regard to questions of inner consistency and clarity in structure as an illustration the methods of the calculation in the austria case study and its results are presented the main result is that gdp and economic welfare as measured by the isew differ significantly up until the 1970s gdp only slightly overestimated the growth of economic welfare but since then it has been completely misleading while gdp continues to rise sustainable economic welfare has been stagnating since the middle of the 1980s the main causes have been growing future welfare reductions increasing income inequality and a stagnation in the value of unpaid household labor as gdp neglects those aspects it systematically misinterprets economic welfare however the isew does not intend to simply replace gdp as a unique welfare measure but should form part of a more holistic social reporting system

the environment and the ethics of discounting an empirical analysis abstract this paper examines the application of discount rates by individuals and by governments when they make decisions about environmental resource use the paper is presented in the context of ethics as determined by what is good and also by what is right for society since in this instance there appears to be no conflict between the two perspectives in addition the paper assesses whether ethical considerations are included in decision making frameworks at the individual and community levels consistency of discount rate applications between individuals and governments is also investigated since consistency is an element of ethical arguments empirical data from a study of soil conservation adoption by philippines upland farmers are used in the analysis individual discount rates are assessed in relation to income and poverty interest rates paid on debt purpose of borrowings land tenure income inequality and soil conservation adoption some of the results appear to be counter intuitive and reasons for this phenomenon are sought the overall results have policy implications and suggestions are made about how an ethical perspective might be developed by governments to help ensure that decision making criteria are more consistent with the practices of individuals within the communities they serve it is suggested that this approach would lead to greater intergenerational and intragenerational equity and better environmental quality

the environment left wing political orientation and ecological economics the objectives of this commentary are twofold the first is to examine the relationship between a party s position within the left right political spectrum and its stance on environmental issues as stated in party manifestos the second is to examine the relationship between individuals ideological orientation and pro environmental beliefs attitudes and self reported behavior equality distributional concerns and market skepticism are typically regarded as defining factors of left wing political orientation our results suggest that left wing parties and individuals are also more pro environmental than their right wing counterparts ecological economics similarly embraces sustainability efficient resource allocation and equitable distribution and is skeptical towards the ability of unregulated markets to achieve these objectives the hypothesis is put forward that ecological economics is more likely to be supported by left wing parties and individuals

spanning and completeness with options the role of ordinary options infacilitating the completion of securities markets is examined in the context of a model of contingent claims sufficiently general to accommodate the continuous distributions of asset pricing theory and option pricing theory in this context it is shown that call options written on a single security approximately span all contingent claims written on this security and that call options written on portfolios of call options on individual primitive securities approximately span all contingent claims that can be written on these primitive securities in the case of simple options explicit formulas are given for the approximating options and porfolios of options these results are applied to the pricing of contingent claims by arbitrage and to irrelevance propositions in corporate finance

indicators of sustainable development some lessons from capital theory abstract interest in sustainable development has prompted a search for suitable indicators that might complement or supplant the traditional measures of economic success although there is no agreement about the precise meaning of sustainable development one idea which is increasingly in good currency is that sustainable development requires that the stock of capital that one generation passes on to the next be maintained or enhanced further this stock of capital is seen by some to comprise two elements manufactured capital and natural capital the extent to which these are believed to be substitutes or complements is one factor which separates the neoclassical school from some of its critics a premise of this paper is that if capital theory is relevant to sustainable development then it should also be helpful in developing indicators however even within the normal confines of economics capital theory is not a homogeneous body of analysis therefore an exploration of capital theory and its relevance to sustainable development can be expected to generate various perspectives on those measures most useful for gauging the sustainability of economic activity it is these linkages between capital theory in various schools of thought and possible indicators of sustainable development that are the subject of this paper

an inquiry into power and participatory natural resource management decentralised environmental governance based on community participation is increasingly replacing top down natural resource management there is increasing awareness however that such mechanisms might fail to ensure effective participation by all stakeholders and be prone to producing and or perpetuating power inequalities against this backdrop we claim that power should be positioned at the centre of analyses of natural resource management in this paper we provide a taxonomy of positions to analyse participatory decision making in natural resource management we operationalise this framework to analyse two failures of participatory natural resource management in turkey focusing on reasons for failure and the role of power asymmetries our results are based on case studies comprising in depth interviews focus groups and a survey administered to 944 individuals we conclude that participatory mechanisms are highly unlikely to bring democratic and equitable outcomes unless power relations are addressed at both institutional and local levels copyright oxford university press

inequality as a cause of environmental degradation abstract this paper advances two hypotheses first the extent of an environmentally degrading economic activity is a function of the balance of power between the winners who derive net benefits from the activity and the losers who bear net costs second greater inequalities of power and wealth lead all else equal to more environmental degradation

income inequality and carbon consumption evidence from environmental engel curves abstract i investigate the relationship between income inequality and the carbon dioxide co2 content of consumption i quantify the co2 content of household expenditure using input output analysis and estimate environmental engel curves eecs which describe the income emissions relationship using eecs for the united states between 1996 and 2009 i decompose the change in co2 over time and the distribution of emissions across households in both cases income is an important driver of household carbon finally i describe a potential equity pollution dilemma progressive income redistribution may raise the demand for aggregate greenhouse gas emissions i estimate that transfers raise emissions by 5 1 at the margin and by 2 3 under complete redistribution

power distribution the environment and public health a state level analysis abstract this paper examines relationships among power distribution the environment and public health by means of a cross sectional analysis of the 50 us states a measure of inter state variations in power distribution is derived from data on voter participation tax fairness medicaid access and educational attainment we develop and estimate a recursive model linking the distribution of power to environmental policy environmental stress and public health the results support the hypothesis that greater power inequality leads to weaker environmental policies which in turn lead to greater environmental degradation and to adverse public health outcomes

the shading and distancing of commerce when internalization is not enough abstract a political economy of degradation and of sustainability should account not only for the full range of production costs but the sources of those costs it should consider how the pursuit of wealth can deliberately or not lead to uncounted costs and unaccountable actors this article explores the conditions of cost generation and externalization especially those that are largely unintended and inadvertent it shows how the pursuit of wealth the expansion of markets the mobility of capital and the entanglements of production processes can lead to the unwitting generation and displacement of costs it analyzes competitive business strategy and patterns of production and consumption for their contribution to such costs business strategy and state policy tend to create a never ending search for frontiers however simulated and however unecological they may be the costs generated in those frontiers are a function of shading that is obscuring of costs and distancing the separation of production and consumption decisions both of which impede ecological and social feedback and create cognitive institutional and ethical lags between initial benefits and eventual full costs as distance increases along dimensions of geography culture bargaining power or agency negative feedback loops are severed stakeholders expand while decision making contracts environmental problems are displaced and shading and cost externalization increase the likelihood of sustainable resource use increases as distance is lowered as institutions locate decision authority in those who receive negative ecological feedback and who have the capacity and incentives to act on that feedback and as the burden of proof for economic interventions shifts to the interveners

how does income inequality affect energy efficiency empirical evidence from 33 belt and road initiative countries abstract at present income distribution and environmental pollution are serious issues faced by the belt and road initiative bri countries and exploring the impact of income inequality on energy efficiency is meaningful for the sustainability of bri countries using the panel data of 33 bri countries from 2000 to 2016 we first evaluate the energy efficiency of the countries by dynamic dea model and then adopt the tobit regression model to investigate the nonlinear effect of income inequality on energy efficiency the results suggest that first during 2000 2016 the overall energy efficiency of 33 bri countries is relatively low falling to 0 38 while the overall energy efficiency of high income bri countries is much higher than that of the middle and low income bri countries second the average energy efficiency of the bri countries has declined since year 2013 third there is an inverted u type effect of income inequality on energy efficiency in the whole sample but the impact of income inequality on energy efficiency is heterogeneous for countries at different income levels specifically in high income bri countries income inequality shows a u type effect on energy efficiency while in middle and low income bri countries the relationship between income inequality and energy efficiency is an inverted u type moreover economic growth positively impacts the energy efficiency while industrialization and energy structure negatively influence the energy efficiency

hierarchies and entrepreneurship we establish a correlation between the hierarchical structure of a firm and the likelihood of business creation among its former employees using a sample of 16 million observations of swedish workers and a novel proxy for hierarchies based on occupation data conditional on firm size and many other variables employees in firms with more layers are less likely to enter entrepreneurship to become self employed and to switch to another employer the effects of layers are much stronger for business creation than for job switching and they are stronger for entrepreneurship than for self employment we discuss two potential explanations for the distinctive hierarchy effect we find part of the effect could be to be due to preference sorting by employees and part due to employees in firms with fewer layers having a broader range of skills one test showing that the probability of entrepreneurship increases with their prior rank in an organization is consistent with ability sorting and inconsistent with preference sorting

efficient funds for meager asset spaces abstract for finite state space models of securities markets there exists a portfolio of traded securities on which conventional call or put options suffice to complete securities markets 28 moreover these efficient funds are generic 2 18 the objective of this paper is to present a class of larger models of securities markets for which existence and genericity of efficient funds obtains conditions abstracted from the finite state space case serve to define a meager asset space it is shown that for meager asset spaces satisfying a separability condition efficient funds exist and are generic in a category theoretic sense

economic inequality and the value of nature abstract understanding what influences the value of nature is crucial for informing environmental policy from a sustainability perspective economic valuation should not only seek to determine a society s willingness to pay for environmental goods to devise an efficient allocation of scarce resources but should also account for distributional effects to ensure justice yet how economic inequality affects the value of non market environmental goods remains understudied combining recently developed theoretical results with empirical evidence this commentary shows that more equal societies have a higher valuation for environmental public goods and that non market benefits of environmental policy accrue over proportionally to poorer households on this ground we discuss implications for environmental valuation management and policy making and identify a number of fruitful areas for future research we conclude that environmental valuation should explicitly account for economic inequality and that encompassing assessments of the distributional effects of environmental policies must consider the distribution of non market environmental benefits

adjustment toward peace an introduction abstract the recent experience of el salvador offers valuable lessons for economic policy in post conflictual transitions in the wake of a negotiated settlement to a civil war economic policy must support the adjustment toward peace in the short run policy must promote not only macroeconomic stabilization but also political stabilization this requires the mobilization of resources and the maintenance of political will for implementation of immediate peace related needs such as the reintegration of excombatants into civil society and the strengthening of democratic institutions long run policy objectives must encompass not only the attainment of macroeconomic balances but also equity that is balance in the distribution of income and wealth balanced investment in human natural and physical capital and democratization in the broad sense of a more balanced distribution of power in the end policies which fail to build on the crucial complementarities between peace and development are unlikely to achieve either goal

does inequality affect environmental quality evidence from major japanese cities abstract this study investigates whether income inequality affects environmental degradation we use city level data in japan where local governments have limited authority and often use voluntary agreements with private firms we test the hypothesis that inequality weakens residents bargaining power over polluters and has a negative effect on environmental quality our results show that inequality negatively affected air quality in residential and commercial areas during the 1990s but not in industrial areas this evidence suggests that the inequality pollution relationship is not just a correlation but reflects a causal effect of residents bargaining power on environmental quality this implies that equal communities can pressure firms into accepting pollution prevention agreements

intra generational equity and sustainable welfare a time series analysis for the uk and sweden this paper discusses the importance of intra generational equity to sustainable development it outlines a number of methodologies for measuring income inequality in the economy and presents several possible ways of incorporating the impact of distributional effects into measures of welfare in the economy the authors highlight in particular an index developed by atkinson atkinson a b 1970 distributive politics and economic growth q j econ may 465 490 based on the social welfare model this method possesses two main advantages over other methods firstly it is expressed directly in terms of social well being secondly value judgements incorporated into the measure are made explicit through the parameter o which expresses society s degree of aversion to income inequality the paper calculates the value of the atkinson index for two case study countries sweden and the uk between 1950 and 1996 for a central estimate of o0 8 the results show that the welfare loss due to inequalities in the distribution of income varied between 5 and 10 for sweden and between 6 and 14 for the uk with the higher values coming towards the end of the period the paper explores the sensitivity of these results to changes in the value of o for the case of the uk and discusses the relevance of the work to the measurement of sustainable welfare 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

poverty and environmental degradation a review and analysis of the nexus abstract there is much controversy surrounding the poverty environmental degradation nexus the predominant school of thought argues that poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and if policy makers want to address environmental issues then they must first address the poverty problem another school of thought argues that a direct link between poverty and environmental degradation is too simplistic and the nexus is governed by a complex web of factors in this paper a formal structure for analyzing the complex web of factors is formulated and used to review the existing literature on the links between poverty and the degradation of four natural resource sectors the analysis highlights the important role institutional and market failure in encouraging agents from various income groups to exhibit unsustainable activities which in turn forces some of the agents to fall into poverty another important factor is the role of conflicts between different agents income groups in the povertyenvironmental degradation nexus the analysis also highlights the presence of feedback loops between environmental degradation and poverty

are nascent entrepreneurs jacks of all trades a test of lazear s theory of entrepreneurship with german data in a recent paper edward lazear proposed the jack of all trades view of entrepreneurship based on a coherent model of the choice between self employment and paid employment he shows that having a background in a large number of different roles increases the probability of becoming an entrepreneur the intuition behind this proposition is that entrepreneurs must have sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to put together the many ingredients needed for survival and success in a business while for paid employees it suffices and pays to be a specialist in the field demanded by the job taken this study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by empirically testing lazear s hypothesis using a large recent representative sample of the german population the empirical estimation takes the rare events nature of becoming a nascent entrepreneur and the regional stratification of the sample into account the results illustrate the statistical significance and economic importance of the jack of all t

measuring resource inequalities the concepts and methodology for an area based gini coefficient abstract although inequalities in income and expenditure are relatively well researched comparatively little attention has been paid to date to inequalities in resource use this is clearly a shortcoming when it comes to developing informed policies for sustainable consumption and social justice this paper describes an indicator of inequality in resource use called the ar gini the ar gini is an area based measure of resource inequality that estimates inequalities between neighbourhoods with regard to the consumption of specific consumer goods it is also capable of estimating inequalities in the emissions resulting from resource use such as carbon dioxide emissions from energy use and solid waste arisings from material resource use the indicator is designed to be used as a basis for broadening the discussion concerning food deserts to inequalities in other types of resource use by estimating the ar gini for a wide range of goods and services we aim to enhance our understanding of resource inequalities and their drivers identify which resources have highest inequalities and to explore trends in inequalities the paper describes the concepts underlying the construction of the ar gini and its methodology its use is illustrated by pilot applications specifically men s and boys clothing carpets refrigerators freezers and clothes washer driers the results illustrate that different levels of inequality are associated with different commodities the paper concludes with a brief discussion of some possible policy implications of the ar gini

carbon dioxide emission and income a temporal analysis of cross country distributional patterns the existence of a cointegrating relationship between income and co2 emission for individual country groups suggests existence of a corresponding relationship between the inter country disparities in the levels of income and co2 emission this paper explores the relationship between the patterns of cross country distribution of income and co2 emission and temporal shifts in such a relationship this paper also examines how the mean level of per capita co2 emission and its distributional inequality are related to the corresponding mean income level and the distributional inequality of income the analysis is based on a cross country panel data set at the level of country group environmental quality demanded is treated as a private good and not as a public good as done in most other studies the technique of lorenz and specific concentration curve analysis are used as the basic analytical framework to argue that a measure of relative distributional inequality of income should be used as an explanatory variable in the environmental kuznets curve ekc relationship along with the mean income level in the empirical exercise johansen s cointegration analysis technique is used to explore existence of statistically significant cointegrating vector s relating mean level of emission and specific concentration ratio scr of emission to mean income level and lorenz ratio lr of income the empirical results confirm that the pattern of cross country income distribution has significant effect on the mean level of emission for all the country groups considered

distribution of ecological entitlements implications for economic security and population movement abstract the concept of economic and environmental security is explored in a broad sense as a series of necessary entitlements to forest and other resources traditional measures of inequality such as the gini coefficient or the atkinson index of inequality which rely on measures of the distribution of formal cash income or wealth are regarded as flawed to the extent that they do not adequately reflect the value and distribution of access to non marketed goods and services an ecologically sensitive atkinson or gini index is proposed as a more relevant measure of inequality and of economic and environmental security to improve security policies must attempt to improve the value of these indices an empirical example is provided based on household survey data for 357 households in 24 villages in a rainforest zone of cameroon analyses of data relating to forest use incomes and demographics provides insights into the distribution of ecological entitlements across various income groups and into the impacts of these entitlements on economic and environmental security through measures related to population migration the empirical analysis demonstrates a number of important conclusions a use of ecologically adjusted indices provides a more complete picture of inequality inequality in the forest zone is less pervasive than traditional measures would have us believe b traditional forest entitlements contribute positively to reducing inequality and improving security and c income support programs targeted to conventional cash crops cocoa and coffee increase inequality and reduce security the analyses also demonstrate that when other economic factors have been taken into account population movement can be a useful indicator of environmental security an analysis of migration demographic and income patterns suggests that low population movement in this zone can be construed as an indicator of higher environmental security the analysis also provides direct evidence that a decline in ecological entitlements increases the probability of migration out of an area

heterogeneity and collective management evidence from common forests in himachal pradesh india summary this paper conducts a statistical investigation into the impact of differences in economic benefits wealth and social classes within the community on collective management of forests there are two key results first social parochialism is not a pre requisite for collective management of forests moderate levels of social diversity are associated with low collective management but at high levels of social diversity collective management is high second moderate wealth heterogeneity is beneficial however at high levels and in the presence of benefit heterogeneity it decreases collective management similarly benefit heterogeneity reduces collective management if wealth heterogeneity also exists these results run counter to the dominant understanding of heterogeneity but may be seen as alternate explanations under a specific socioeconomic context

a measure of sustainable national income for the netherlands abstract we present calculations on the sustainable national income sni indicator first proposed by hueting which corrects net national income nni for the costs to bring back environmental resource use to a sustainable level using an applied general equilibrium age model specifying 27 production sectors we calculate different variants of sni for the netherlands in 1990 given a set of pre determined sustainability standards the age model is extended with emissions and abatement cost curves based on large data sets for nine environmental themes the model combines the advantages of a top down approach the age model with the information of a bottom up approach the environmental data and data on emissions reductions costs the presented numerical results show that in 1990 dutch sni is about 50 below nni though many uncertainties are still present in the data and the model the enhanced greenhouse effect is the most expensive environmental theme

the trade off between income inequality and carbon dioxide emissions abstract we investigate the theoretically ambiguous link between income inequality and per capita carbon dioxide emissions using a panel data set that is substantially larger in both regional and temporal coverage than those used in the existing literature using an arguably superior group fixed effects estimator we find that the relationship between income inequality and per capita emissions depends on the level of income we show that for low and middle income economies higher income inequality is associated with lower carbon emissions while in upper middle income and high income economies higher income inequality increases per capita emissions the result is robust to the inclusion of plausible transmission variables

the political economy of the paris agreement income inequality and climate policy abstract we empirically assess how both between country inequality and within country inequality relate to climate policy ambition as defined by ndc pledges of the paris agreement cop21 we exploit the difference between high and low ambition targets submitted by parties to construct a climate policy ambition index we find that both inequalities shape countries pledges first low income countries tend to be more ambitious in setting their pledges when external support is received second within country inequality is associated with i lower mitigation ambition in low and middle low income countries and with ii higher mitigation ambition although non statistically significant for upperhigh and high income countries our results are discussed in terms of i climate policy being a superior good in rich countries and ii elites benefiting from emitting economic activities in poorer countries

end of pipe or cleaner production how to go green in presence of income inequality and pro environmental behavior in this paper we consider a vertically differentiated duopoly model in which a green producer competes with a brown rival in a market in which consumers are environmentally concerned in particular consumers are assumed to value not only the intrinsic quality of a certain product but also its environmental impact this environmental valuation has a positional content consumers attach a positive attribute to the green product while penalizing the brown one in this context we consider the choice of the green firm between cleaner and end of pipe abatement efforts we find that the interplay between the intensity of market competition consumers income disparity and environmental concern can play a crucial role in directing the green producer towards one or the other technological choice more precisely the adoption of cleaner production technologies can be discouraged by low average income and by tough competition while it can be spurred by the moral social incentive towards pro environmental behavior

forest loss and economic inequality in the solomon islands using small area estimation to link environmental change to welfare outcomes abstract to study welfare effects of environmental change data from household surveys may be linked to remote sensing data using spatial aggregation to link risks ecological fallacy since surveys are usually representative for areas larger than the spatial scale of decision making units this paper uses survey to census imputation to estimate welfare indicators for small areas to study the effect of deforestation on subsequent inequality in the rural solomon islands this country depends on logging for almost half of foreign exchange and one sixth of government revenue and most forested land remains under customary ownership a sharp increase in log exports to seven times the sustainable yield and a major shift in export destinations as other countries withdrew from the tropical log trade represents an exogenous shock that helps to identify effects of deforestation on inequality rather than the reverse relationship a standard deviation increase in the rate of forest loss over 2000 to 2012 raises the gini index of inequality in 2013 by one third of a standard deviation mean incomes and poverty rates are also higher implying that deforestation makes some households richer while others become poorer these precisely estimated effects would be obscured using more spatially aggregated data

identifying the impacts of income inequality on co2 emissions empirical evidences from oecd countries and non oecd countries abstract the emergence of environmental quality challenges is rooted in social problems which mainly come from income inequality and power gap income inequality and climate change have been highlighted as hindering the achievement of sustainable development and environmental protection globally though existing literature has estimated the influences of income inequality on co2 emissions relatively little is known about the long run and short run effects from a cross national perspective therefore the aim of this study is to shed light on the long run and short run relationships between income inequality and per capita co2 emissions based on balanced country level panel dataset for 78 countries from 1990 to 2017 in order to understand how a country s economic level affects the link between inequality and co2 emissions this study classified the sample countries into three groups oecd countries low income non oecd countries and high income non oecd countries the fmols and dols model is applied to examine the relationship between the income inequality and per capita co2 emission meanwhile the estimates of an ardl model revealed the long run and short run effects our empirical results indicate that there is a long term cointegration relationship between income inequality and per capita co2 emissions higher income inequality promotes emission reductions in oecd countries and high income non oecd countries while the influences are insignificant in low income non oecd countries in the long run per capita income carbon intensity population size and urbanization were also considered in this study the estimates of an ardl model indicate that whilst income inequality does not have a significant impact on co2 emissions in the short run per capita national income positively affects co2 emissions meaning that income growth will accelerate emissions carbon intensity positively affects co2 emissions in the long term indicating that increased income facilitates increased energy use and emissions but that progress in co2 recycling technology may ultimately reduce emissions neither population size nor urbanization rate exerted any obvious effects on per capita co2 emissions from a policy perspective governments have an onerous task ahead of them in balancing economic efficiency and distributary justice lastly we provide insights for policy makers that in order to realize the goal of emission reductions in the long run it may be best to proceed by making reasonable national income redistribution policies and by adjusting the welfare system

spanning with index options current literature stresses that efficient funds do not exist when asset returns are contin uously distributed this paper shows that the existence of efficient funds can be restored if security returns are generated by a linear factor model

analyzing the returns to entrepreneurship by a modified lazear model a modified version of lazear s model in american economic review 94 208 211 2004 journal of labor economics 23 649 680 2005 for occupational choice is formulated it includes a utility adjustment factor that captures the combined effect of nonpecuniary benefits and uncertainty associated with entrepreneurship we show that the counterfactual income returns to entrepreneurship are lower than the market value of entrepreneurial talent and higher than the inverse of the utility adjustment factor moreover if the skill profiles in the population are frechet distributed the ratio between the expected incomes of entrepreneurs and observationally similar wage employees is lower than the inverse of the utility adjustment factor thus entrepreneurs will on average earn less than wage employees if the utility adjustment factor is greater than or equal to one it is also shown that the self selection bias related to this income ratio or returns measure increases with the observed percentage of entrepreneurs swedish employment data are used to calibrate the modified lazear model the empirical results indicate that uncertainty considerations might be more important for the occupational choices than nonpecuniary benefits

the income inequality and carbon emissions trade off revisited abstract this paper investigates the marginal effect of income inequality on carbon emissions per capita we use a panel consisting of 68 countries over a 50 year period from 1961 to 2010 we report estimates that support the hypothesis that there is a trade off between carbon emissions per capita and income inequality this trade off is not homogeneous across countries and depends upon the level of development measured by income per capita using panel smooth transition regression we find that this relationship is negative for countries with low to moderate income per capita but becomes slightly positive after passing a threshold located around fifteen thousand 2011 us dollars moreover the inequality elasticity of emissions per capita is comparable in magnitude to its income elasticity therefore both inequality and income levels are crucial to define policies to reduce carbon emissions this implies a challenge to policymakers who pursue to reduce both income inequality and carbon emissions

the impact of information on environmental commodity valuation decisions a conceptual model is developed which provides insight into how information affects willingness to pay for environmental commodities a refutable hypothesis of the effects of a specific information type on the magnitude of willingness to pay for an environmental commodity is developed this hypothesis is tested using a contingent valuation method experiment results indicate that information affects willingness to pay in a theoretically plausible manner the results support the contention that information is important for accurate environmental commodity consumer valuations

a simple approach to arbitrage pricing theory the following sections are included introductionarbitrage pricingdiscussionreferencesdiscussion notes on the arbitrage pricing theorypure arbitrage pricing theoryapproximate arbitrage and the aptapproximate factor modelsthe competitive equilibrium version of the aptconclusionnotereferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

income distribution and co2 emission a comparative analysis for china and india abstract the aim of this paper is to test whether income inequality contributes to environmental degradation in china and india where both countries are giving a great concern about the implications of their unsustainable energy consumption to the environment not only to themselves but also to the global environmental sustainability by applying the bounds test approach to cointegration we found in both countries a long run but not a statistically significant relationship between income inequality and co 2 emissions both in the long run and in the short run the robustness of our cointegration results is also ascertained by using three different long run tests furthermore applying the variance decomposition analysis to examine the dynamic causal relationship between the gini coefficient of income distribution and co 2 emissions we found that income inequality was the least important factor in determining co 2 emissions and that there was no causality running in any direction between co 2 emissions and income inequality in both countries still income and energy consumption are the major determinants of co 2 emissions in both countries nevertheless even though the evidence is not statistically significant in the case of china it indicates that reducing income inequality can have a positive impact on environmental quality while in india redistributing income to improve environmental degradation may not be effective

efficient funds in a financial market with options a new irrelevance proposition under the same assumptions that ross used to assert the existence of an efficient fund on which a spanning set of options can be written we prove that almost any portfolio is an efficient fund from a constructive point of view a randomly chosen vector of portfolio weights yields an efficient fund when the ross assumptions are relaxed a limited notion of efficiency maximal efficiency is the best attainable the maximally efficient funds are also everywhere dense in the portfolio space some implications are discussed and illustrative examples given the theory of consumer and firm behavior in economies with a complete set of contingent claims is rather well understood these complete market structures1 bring about competitive equilibria where consumers maximize utility firms maximize profits and prices adjust to match demand and supply as shown in debreu 7 all competitive equilibria are pareto optimal and any pareto optimum can be sustained as a competitive equilibrium it is commonly recognized however that complete markets have not come into

implications of the discreteness of observed stock prices stock prices on the organized exchanges are restricted to be divisible by 1 8 therefore the true price usually differs from the observed price this paper examines the biases resulting from the discreteness of observed stock prices it is shown that the natural estimators of the variance and all of the higher order moments of the rate of returns are biased an approximate set of correction factors is derived and a procedure is outlined to show how the correction can be made the natural estimators of the beta and of the variance of the market portfolio on the other hand are nearly unbiased the behavior of stock prices has been an issue of interest to the financial economist for many years this interest resulted in a growing number of empirical studies which attempt to estimate this behavior e g blattberg and gonedes 2 fama 6 fama and roll 7 8 barnea and downes 1 to date stock price behavior is estimated under the assumption that the observed trading price is the true equilibrium price however observed stock prices and stock price changes on the organized exchanges are restricted to multiples of 1 8 of a dollar 1 therefore if the true distribution of stock prices is continuous an observed trading price can be different from the true price this paper examines the biases in estimating the moments of stock price changes caused by the discreteness of observed stock prices the major focus of the paper is in noting this problem providing a model which explains the source of these biases and quantifying their size section i demonstrates that due to the discrete nature of observed stock prices the natural estimators for the variance and for the higher order moments of the rate of returns are biased upward this bias is larger for stocks with lower prices and smaller standard deviation for instance assuming that the standard deviation a is 0 001 the stock price is one dollar the true probability distribution of stock prices is lognormal and the observed prices are as close as possible to the true prices then the natural estimator of r has expectation 0 01400 hence it is biased upward by 1300 significant biases have important implications in option pricing we derive an approximate set of correction factors which can be applied to the

does skewed pattern of income distribution matter for the environmental quality evidence from selected brics economies with an application of quantile on quantile regression qqr approach abstract using annual data from 1980 to 2014 the study explores the relationship between carbon emissions and skewed pattern of income distribution among 4 selected brics economies e g brazil india china and south africa using quantile on quantile regression qqr technique of sim and zhou 2015 it tries to contribute towards an empirical understanding on the quantile structure of both the variables for the selected brics countries it finds for india and brazil that as income rises although both lower and upper income people degrade the environmental quality by releasing more co2 emissions but interestingly it is the poor who intensively degrade the environmental quality than the rich in sharp contrast for china and south africa it finds that it is the poor who relatively contribute less to the environmental degradation by reducing co2 emissions than the rich these findings have greater policy significances which are discussed at the concluding section in greater detail

risk balanced skills and entrepreneurship this paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skill profiles making them more likely to become entrepreneurs by not taking this possible linkage into account previous research has underestimated the impacts of both risk aversion and balanced skills on the likelihood individuals choose entrepreneurship data on dutch university graduates provide an illustration supporting our contention we raise the possibility that even risk averse people might be suited to entrepreneurship and it may also help explain why prior research has generated somewhat mixed evidence about the effects of risk aversion on selection into entrepreneurship

inequality democracy and the environment a cross national analysis abstract this paper joins the debate on the relationship between inequality and the environment departing from the past contributions which focused either on the theories of environmental behavior or on economic interests this paper develops arguments about political choice mechanisms that help explain the linkages between inequality and national policymaking related to the establishment of protected areas a cross national analysis of the interactions between inequality democracy and the legal designation of protected areas in a global sample of 137 countries shows that ceteris paribus the effects of inequality vary depending on the strength of democracy in relatively democratic countries inequality is associated with less land in protected areas whereas in relatively undemocratic countries the reverse is true the highly significant effects of inequality undermine the democratic dividend in the arena of nature conservation

the inequality adjusted human development index a constructive proposal abstract this paper proposes a method to incorporate a concern for distributional inequalities of income education and longevity into the framework of the human development index hdi as it is presently designed by the united nations development programme the paper constructs gini coefficients for a set of 20 developing countries measuring inequalities in annual income educational attainment and life span attainment these calculations are combined with data from the hdi to produce an inequality adjusted human development index iahdi the implications of this proposed index for evaluating and promoting development are considered

the role of education in the environmental kuznets curve evidence from australian data abstract this paper is based on the underlying idea that the use of energy resources in a society significantly depends on their level of education then it is hypothesized that education might directly affect environmental quality by worsening it at early stages and improving it once education expands from its certain level thus we pursue an extension of the standard environmental kuznets curve by including an indicator of the evolution of citizens education this empirical strategy might avoid bias on income coefficients and in turn assess the value of education as environmental policy an application for australia is given to illustrate this possibility by using higher education data for a large time span 1950 2014 empirical results suggest that in most of the studied period expansion in education rate has increasingly compensated the rise of per capita co 2 emissions stemming from the economic growth moreover only in recent years both per capita income and education expansion have been proved to reduce emissions however provided that income growth is difficult to manage it would be worth considering the possibility of promoting education in order to achieve environmental objectives

mechanisms explaining the impact of economic inequality on environmental deterioration abstract rising economic inequality often considered intrinsically harmful is increasingly being viewed as having a number of secondary impacts as well including impacts on health and economic growth the ongoing nature of today s environmental crisis also raises questions about inequality s role in environmental deterioration despite the large number of papers that have been written on this topic no theoretical or empirical consensus presently exists firstly our article identifies that authors conclusions in this area depend on their hypotheses regarding 1 the relationship between individual income and individual environmental pressure 2 the impact of inequality on the social norms that influence individual environmental pressure 3 the interests that social groups have in degrading or protecting the environment 4 how these interests play out in terms of political demands and 5 how these political demands translate into political decisions secondly the study shows that despite enabling a general test of the causal relationship between inequality and the environment the empirical methods utilised do not account for the full range of theoretical mechanisms in play hence the suggestion that a research programme be launched to conduct empirical studies of the five aforementioned hypotheses by applying a recursive approach

impact of income inequality and environmental regulation on environmental quality evidence from china abstract china s environmental pollution is of widespread concern and environmental governance has become the country s main method of achieving high quality development environmental quality is a comprehensive indicator which includes many factors such as air water and solid waste pollution this study did not use a single pollutant as a substitute variable for environmental quality firstly we used principal component analysis to construct a comprehensive environmental quality index secondly the stochastic impacts by regression on population affluence and technology and panel quantile regression models were used with data from 30 chinese provinces in china from 1998 to 2017 to analyze the effect of income inequality and environmental regulation on environmental quality the constructed comprehensive index revealed that china s environmental quality had an m type trend over time the mean regression results showed that income inequality and environmental regulation improved environmental quality but higher income inequality reduced environmental quality the panel quantile regression model results revealed that the coefficient of income inequality was positively significant at the 10 30 quantiles and negatively significant at the 70 90 quantiles the coefficients of the absolute value of income inequality at the 10 30 quantiles were less than those at the 70 90 quantiles this implied that higher income inequality reduced environmental quality whereas higher environmental regulations improved environmental quality considering the possible impact of environmental quality on income inequality and environmental regulations we designed a simultaneous equation model to overcome the deviation caused by bilateral causality the conclusions of this study provide policymakers with a new perspective on environmental governance and new paths for achieving high quality development

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

income inequality and the development of environmental technologies within rich countries a large dispersion in the capacity of generating environmental innovations appears correlated to the level of inequality previous works analyze the relationship between inequality and environmental quality in a static setting this paper builds a dynamic model more suitable to analyze technological externalities driven by the emergence of a new demand for green products under fairly general assumptions on technology and preferences we show that 1 the relationship between inequality and environmental innovation is highly non linear and crucially depends on per capita income 2 an excessive inequality harms the development of environmental technologies especially in rich countries key to our results is the fact that externalities generated by pioneer consumers of green products benefit the entire population only for relatively low income distances the empirical analysis robustly confirms our theoretical results that is whereas for rich countries inequality negatively affects the diffusion of innovations per capita income is paramount in poorer ones

a complete analysis of full pareto efficiency in financial markets for arbitrary preferences this paper provides a complete analysis of the necessary and sufficient conditions for financial markets to achieve fully pareto efficient allocation of aggregate wealth through trade in economies with arbitrary preferences we show that full pareto efficiency obtains only if the market structure of contingent claims spans the information partition of a minimal aggregate wealth statistic and a halmos savage sufficient statistic for the beliefs of the traders all the known allocation efficiency results in the literature due to arrow hakansson john ross and others are unified by this result a security is a certificate that entitles the holder to a stream of cash flows

spanning and completeness in markets with contingent claims abstract we characterize financial markets that are complete or that contain portfolios which span all measurable functions of a particular asset payoffs either finite and infinite dimensional these results are then employed to describe the extent to which options trading is sufficient to complete markets to investigate the existence of efficient funds and to establish the extent of market completeness required to ensure the unanimity and irrelevance results of modern corporation finance

income inequality and carbon emissions in the united states a state level analysis 1997 2012 abstract this study investigates the relationship between u s state level co 2 emissions and two measures of income inequality the income share of the top 10 and the gini coefficient each of the inequality measures which focus on unique characteristics of income distributions is used to evaluate the arguments of different analytical approaches results of the longitudinal analysis for the 1997 to 2012 period indicate that state level emissions are positively associated with the income share of the top 10 while the effect of the gini coefficient on emissions is non significant the statistically significant relationship between co 2 emissions and the concentration of income among the top 10 is consistent with analytical approaches that focus on political economy dynamics and veblen effects which highlight the potential political and economic power and emulative influence of the wealthy the null effect of the gini coefficient is generally inconsistent with the marginal propensity to emit approach which posits that when incomes become more equally distributed the poor will increase their consumption of energy and other carbon intensive products as they move into the middle class

income inequality and pollution a reassessment of the environmental kuznets curve abstract improvements in some measures of air and water quality can accompany rising per capita income as illustrated by the so called environmental kuznets curve for pollution variables which show such a relationship we hypothesize that a more equitable distribution of power contributes to these outcomes by enhancing the influence on policy of those who bear the costs of pollution relative to the influence of those who benefit from pollution generating activities an empirical analysis of international variations in seven indicators of air and water quality supports this hypothesis literacy political rights and civil liberties are found to have particularly strong effects on environmental quality in low income countries

globalization and the connection of remote communities a review of household effects and their biodiversity implications abstract the remote regions of the world provide refuge to a disproportionate amount of the earth s biodiversity as globalization continues isolated human communities in these regions are increasingly connected to global market migration and technology networks we review the diffuse literature on the household effects of changing market access migration and technology adoption in remote regions and implications for native biodiversity market access affects biodiversity in remote communities through changes in household economics and social networks migration either to or from remote settlements affects biodiversity through changes in population remittances human capital and social networks finally we consider effects due to production public infrastructure and information and communication technologies there is much ambiguity surrounding these causal pathways and thus we also examine the roles of various ecological household community and institutional mediating factors in determining the impacts of global connection finally we explore the limitations of our current knowledge and research practices and propose directions for future work to address key uncertainties in theory and evidence as well as weaknesses in methodological approaches we recommend a broad and interdisciplinary mode of inquiry as the best means toward clarifying globalization s impacts on human settlements and the biodiversity harbored in the earth s remaining remote regions

environmental pressure group strength and air pollution an empirical analysis there is an established theoretical and empirical case study literature arguing that environmental pressure groups have a real impact on pollution levels our original contribution to this literature is to provide the first systematic quantitative test of the strength of environmental non governmental organizations engos on air pollution levels we find that engo strength exerts a statistically significant impact on sulfur dioxide smoke and heavy particulates concentration levels in a cross country time series regression analysis this result holds true both for ordinary least squares and random effects estimation it is robust to controlling for the potential endogeneity of engo strength with the help of instrumental variables the effect is also substantively important strengthening engos represents an important strategy by which aid donors foundations international organizations and other stakeholders can try to achieve lower pollution levels around the world

the nexus between income inequality and co2 emissions in turkey abstract environmental degradation and income inequality are two of the most important international debates that await immediate resolution despite that their interaction in the environmental economics literature has been very little analysis the aim of this study is to examine the impact of income distribution on the co2 emissions in turkey during 1984 2014 an autoregressive distributed lag model ardl test is employed to determine possible long term and short term nexus among the series the ardl test results show that the series are cointegrated and that income inequality has a positive effect on co2 emissions we also find that the environmental kuznets curve ekc is valid in turkey the toda yamamoto causality test denotes that gini coefficient is the granger cause of co2 emission the results show that deterioration in income distribution will reduce environmental quality in turkey which validates that political economy approach is valid in turkey study results can be an important guide for policymakers reducing income inequality for a new strategy in the fight against environmental problems may lead to a win win situation for turkey and the international community

the carbon footprint of european households and income distribution abstract this paper calculates the carbon footprint of private consumption in the eu27 by five groups of household income using a fully fledged macroeconomic input output model covering 59 industries and five groups of household income for the eu27 due to macroeconomic feedback mechanisms this methodology besides induced intermediate demand also quantifies i private consumption induced in the other household groups ii impacts on other endogenous final demand components and iii negative feedback effects due to output price effects of household demand the carbon footprint is calculated separately for the consumption vector of each of the five income groups the simulation results yield a non linear income elasticity of direct and indirect emissions at each income level the value of the direct footprint income elasticity decreases from 1 32 first quintile to 0 69 fourth quintile the value of the indirect footprint income elasticity is always below unity and decreases from 0 89 to 0 62 the results in general reveal a relative decoupling effect the share of the top income group in income 45 is much larger than its share in the carbon footprint 37 and vice versa for the bottom income group 6 in income and 8 in footprint

relief for the environment the importance of an increasingly unimportant industrial sector deindustrialization stagnant real incomes of production workers and increasing inequality are latter day features of many economies it is common to assume that such developments pressure policymakers to relax environmental standards however when heavily polluting industries become less important economically their political importance also tends to diminish consequently a regulator may increase the stringency of environmental policies like some other studies we find that declining industrial employment translates into stricter environmental standards in contrast to previous studies but consistent with our argument we find that greater income inequality is associated with policies that promote a cleaner environment jel q58 p16 j31 c23