green taxes in a post paris world are millions of nays inevitable turning the paris agreement s greenhouse gas emissions pledges into domestic policies is the next challenge for governments we address the question of the acceptability of cost effective climate policy in a real voting setting first we analyze voting behavior in a large ballot on energy taxes rejected in switzerland in 2015 by more than 2 million people energy taxes were aimed at completely replacing the current value added tax we examine the determinants of voting and find that distributional and competitiveness concerns reduced the acceptability of energy taxes along with the perception of ineffectiveness most people would have preferred tax revenues to be allocated for environmental purposes second at the same time of the ballot we tested the acceptability of alternative designs of a carbon tax with a choice experiment survey on a representative sample of the swiss population survey respondents are informed about environmental distributional and competitiveness effects of each carbon tax design these impacts are estimated with a computable general equilibrium model this original setting generates a series of novel results providing information on the expected environmental effectiveness of carbon taxes reduces the demand for environmental earmarking making distributional effects salient generates an important demand for progressive designs e g social cushioning or recycling via lump sum transfers the case of lump sum recycling is particularly striking it is sufficient to show its desirable distributional properties to make it one of the most preferred designs which corresponds to a completely novel result in the literature we show that providing detailed information on the functioning of environmental taxes may contribute to close both the gap between acceptability ex ante and ex post and the gap between economists prescriptions and the preferences of the general public

attitudes towards carbon taxes across europe the role of perceived uncertainty and self interest abstract while using carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may well be effective this has recently proved too unpopular to put into practice in a number of countries yet at a time when governments across the world are preparing their nationally determined contributions to the paris agreement our knowledge of whether and why people oppose these taxes originates from a single or small number of cases drawing on the european social survey n 44 387 this article provides evidence on public attitudes towards increasing taxes on fossil fuels to reduce climate change from 23 countries most of which have never featured in the literature before the results point to a widespread aversion to carbon taxes on the one hand this worsens with the perceived costs of taxes such as the case among consumers who depend highly on energy on the other it improves with political trust and external political efficacy factors that help ease the uncertainty around policy proposals our estimations suggest that the effect of changes in these factors alone would be large enough to reverse the public resistance to carbon taxes in some countries these results are robust to a number of alternative specifications and various checks

how to make a carbon tax reform progressive the role of subsistence consumption this letter analyzes the distributional effects of a carbon tax reform when households must consume carbon intensive goods above a subsistence level the reform is progressive if revenues are recycled as uniform lump sum transfers in other cases it is regressive

the optimal allocation of prizes in contests we study a contest with multiple not necessarily equal prizes contestants have private information about an ability parameter that affects their costs of bidding the contestant with the highest bid wins the first prize the contestant with the second highest bid wins the second prize and so on until all the prizes are allocated all contestants incur their respective costs of bidding the contest s designer maximizes the expected sum of bids our main results are 1 we display bidding equlibria for any number of contestants having linear convex or concave cost functions and for any distribution of abilities 2 if the cost functions are linear or concave then no matter what the distribution of abilities is it is optimal for the designer to allocate the entire prize sum to a single first prize 3 we give a necessary and sufficient conditions ensuring that several prizes are optimal if contestants have a convex cost function

the other side of the trade off the impact of risk on executive compensation the principal agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance yet the exiting empirical evidence supporting it is quite wea

auctionin entry into tournaments a research tournament model with heterogeneous contestants is presented for a large class of contests the optimal number of competitors is two this insight makes designing the tournament easier and highlights the importance of selecting highly qualified contestants while customary uniform price and discriminatory price auctions are intuitively appealing mechanisms for solving this adverse selection problem in practice they generally will not be efficient mechanism for selecting contestants instead we propose an alternative auction format that is equally simple to implement and efficiently selects the most qualified contestants to compete regardless of the form of contestant heterogeneity

firms choice of method of pay using data from the bls industry wage survey the author tests the theory that firms choose their methods of pay by balancing the gains from more precise links between performance and pay against m

what determines urban households willingness to pay for co2 emission reductions in turkey a contingent valuation survey abstract this paper explores turkish urban households willingness to pay wtp for co2 emission reductions expected to result from improvements in power production a face to face questionnaire with a contingent valuation cv module prepared using the double bounded dichotomous choice elicitation framework was administered to 2422 respondents representative of urban turkey a developing country with low but rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions the determinants of wtp were identified by considering not only the impact of standard socio economic factors but also the effects of environmental knowledge attitudes and behaviour the relevance of the identity of the collection agent national versus international institutions in terms of trust people have towards them and the degree of perceived participation of others in the realization of the project our study confirms the existing literature in demonstrating that wtp figures reported by young and educated people that are active on environmental issues and who also possess material security and environmental knowledge are more likely to be high however their willingness to make contributions is hampered significantly by their belief that their fellow citizens will not contribute and the general lack of trust in institutions overall this study may be taken as a call to eliminate governance related uncertainties in climate change deals

what factors drive inequalities in carbon tax incidence decomposing socioeconomic inequalities in carbon tax incidence in ireland abstract carbon taxes increase the cost of necessary household energy expenditures in many developed countries carbon taxes are regressive as they comprise a greater proportion of a poorer household s income certain socioeconomic groups are more negatively affected by these impacts than others while inequality of incidence by income group has received great attention in the literature a gap exists to quantify the inequality associated with socioeconomic characteristics this information is policy relevant as it may inform the most effective means to offset negative welfare impacts through changes to taxes and or social transfers this paper provides this contribution first the inequality of carbon tax incidence across the income spectrum is quantified using the concentration index methodology a subsequent multivariate decomposition quantifies the contribution each socioeconomic factor makes towards this inequality of incidence this is carried out for electricity motor fuel and all other home fuels to elicit variation of socioeconomic incidence by source while income contributes a great deal towards inequality of incidence for other home fuels other socioeconomic characteristics are the primary determinants of electricity and motor fuel related carbon tax incidence the relative importance of each characteristic in determining regressive impacts is quantified and this varies by carbon tax source

a choice experiment on fuel taxation and earmarking in norway abstract pigouvian taxes are efficient but unpopular among voters and hence often politically infeasible earmarking of revenues has been widely reported to increase public support for taxes but earmarking is generally not the most efficient use of the revenues this trade off between efficiency and political feasibility is the motivation for our primary research objective to quantify the effect of earmarking on support for fuel tax rises our secondary research objective is to investigate why earmarking increases support using data from a representative sample of the norwegian voter population n 1147 we estimate models of voter preferences for fuel taxes using logistic regression models our results show that in the absence of earmarking the majority of voters would like to reduce fuel taxes but earmarking the revenues for environmental measures has a substantial effect on voter support for fuel tax increases garnering a majority for increases of up to 15 above present levels further analysis indicates that a prime reason why earmarking for environmental measures is popular is that it increases the perceived environmental effectiveness of the tax and hence its legitimacy as an environmental rather than a fiscal policy instrument

rent seeking for pure public goods in this paper we present a formal analysis of rent seeking for public goods by two or more groups with different numbers of individuals we begin by considering equally wealthy groups under risk neutrality a case which constitutes our basic model several surprising and interesting results emerge from the analysis of this basic case the problem is then extended to deal with a groups with different wealth levels and b risk aversion this last extension brings about a further crop of interesting and useful results

measuring wellbeing performance of carbon emissions using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques empirical tests for g20 countries and implications for china abstract a quantitative measure of performance that integrates national level carbon emission profiles with key parameters of social and economic wellbeing can provide an effective management tool for policy interventions this paper constructs non parametric evaluation and decomposition models using hybrid measure and meta frontier techniques the proposed models are employed to estimate the wellbeing performance of carbon emissions wpce and identify the sources of wpce inefficiency empirical analyses based on the group 20 g20 countries for the 2000 2015 period shows the worst performance is in the brics country group i e brazil russia india china and south africa known for rapid growth whereas the developed and the developing economies of the g20 group show positive trajectories of performance as for china its performance measure of wpce was the lowest among the g20 indicating significant potential for further improvement the analysis also highlights the role of managerial failure as the primary driver of inefficiency more important than technological inefficiency in explaining efficiency loss within the g20 countries this critical finding the relevance and importance of managerial capability suggests the need for a high level of attention to governance and managerial capacity to ensure continued improvements in performance on carbon emissions and human wellbeing a lesson to be drawn from this study is that china s policies to promote a low carbon economy can benefit from increased priority given to low carbon technological innovation for the energy system transition and enhancement of environmental governance and managerial capacity to achieve a long term sustainability

executive compensation and tournament theory empirical tests on danish data this article adds to the empirical literature on tournament theory as a theory of executive compensation i test several propositions of tournament models on a rich data set containing information about 2 600 executives in 210 danish firms during a 4 year period i ask are pay differentials between job levels consistent with relative compensation is pay dispersion between levels higher in noisy environments is the dispersion affected by the number of tournament participants is average pay lower in firms with more compressed pay structures does wider pay dispersion enhance firm performance most of the predictions gain support in the data

the ponds dilemma is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond to find out we study self selection into contests our simple model predicts that 1 entry into the big pond in terms of show up fees number or value of prizes is non monotonic in ability 2 entry into the more meritocratic pond is likewise non monotonic exhibiting two interior extrema and disproportionately attracting very low ability types and 3 changes in rewards can produce unexpected effects e g higher show up fees may lower entry while higher prizes or more meritocracy may lower the average ability of entrants this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

using discrete choice models with experimental design data to forecast consumer demand for a unique cultural event an approach is developed to forecast participation in unique events with long gestation periods experimental observations of choice are derived for conjoint measurement type multiattribute alternatives that describe possible event configurations the choice data are analyzed by means of discrete choice econometric models a multinomial logit choice model is applied to forecast the choice of attendance at various types of international expositions the empirical work was part of the planning efforts undertaken to investigate the potential demand for an international exposition to be held in eastern australia in conjunction with the australian 1988 bicentennial celebrations

incentives versus competitive balance abstract when players compete repeatedly prizes won in earlier contests may improve the players abilities in later contests this paper determines the allocation of prizes within and across contests that maximizes the weighted sum of aggregate efforts

an analysis of the war of attrition and the all pay auction we study the war of attrition and the all pay auction when players signals are affiliated and symmetrically distributed we a find sufficient conditions for the existence of symmetric monotonic equilibrium bidding strategies and b examine the performance of these auction forms in terms of the expected revenue accruing to the seller under our conditions the war of attrition raises greater expected revenue than all other known sealed bid auction forms journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 d82 1997 academic press

fuel poverty and energy efficiency obligations a critical assessment of the supplier obligation in the uk energy efficiency obligations or white certificates are increasingly used to reduce carbon emissions while the energy efficiency obligations were originally intended as carbon reduction and not fuel poverty policies due to recognition of the potential for regressive outcomes they often include provisions for vulnerable and low income customers intuitively reducing carbon emissions and alleviating fuel poverty seem to be two sides of the same coin there are however considerable tensions between the two when addressed through energy efficiency obligations particularly arising from the potentially regressive impacts of rising energy prices resulting from such obligations but also the complexity of targeting fuel poor households and the implications for deliverability despite those tensions the uk government decided to use energy efficiency obligations the supplier obligation as the main policy for reducing fuel poverty in light of the proposals this paper provides an analysis of the main tensions between carbon reduction and fuel poverty alleviation within energy efficiency obligations outlines the fuel poverty provisions of the british supplier obligation assesses its rules for identifying the fuel poor and provides a critical analysis of the planned policy changes based on this analysis alternative approaches to targeting fuel poverty within future supplier obligations are proposed

comparative statics of contests and rent seeking games this paper develops the comparative statics properties of a contest encountered in patent races and rent seeking games the author shows that symmetric equilibrium expenditure and profit per player decrease with the number of competitors and the discount rate but increase with the value of the prize a fundamental lemma established in the paper shows that a stability condition usually imposed on the model is automatically satisfied the author identifies a class of likelihood or hazard rate functions for which aggregate expenditure increases with the number of competitors and total profits converge to zero copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

environmental taxation inequality and engel s law the double dividend of redistribution empirical evidence shows that low income households spend a high share of their income on pollution intensive goods this fuels the concern that an environmental tax reform could be regressive we employ a framework which accounts for the distributional effect of environmental taxes and the recycling of the revenues on both households and firms to quantify changes in the optimal tax structure and the equity impacts of an environmental tax reform we characterize when an optimal environmental tax reform does not increase inequality even if the tax system before the reform is optimal from a non environmental point of view if the tax system before the reform is calibrated to stylized data and is thus non optimal we find that there is a large scope for inequality reduction even if the government is restricted in its recycling options

the causal impact of medals on wine producers prices and the gains from participating in contests the main objective of this article is to estimate the causal effect of wine medals on producers prices our data set combines information on transactions between wine producers and wholesale traders these data are registered by a wine broker who acts as a middleman in this market with records from eleven important wine competitions our identification strategy exploits a particularity in our data namely that medals are not only awarded before transaction dates but sometimes also thereafter regressing price on dummies indicating past and future medals plus controls allows under weak restrictions to consistently estimate causal effects of medals by simply calculating differences in the two types of dummy estimates in addition the estimates of future medal coefficients can be interpreted as partial correlations between unobserved quality and medal indicators our preferred estimate indicates that producers having earned a medal at a competition can increase their price by 13 the impact for gold is much larger than for silver and bronze but we cannot reject that the correlation with quality is the same across the three colors we then calculate expected profits obtained by producers from participating in competitions and find that the incentives to participate are high finally we investigate the efficiency of contests by measuring to what extent attributed awards are good quality indicators only a minority of competitions attribute medals that are significantly correlated with quality primarily the ones founded a long time ago and whose judges are required to evaluate relatively few wines per day

public acceptance for environmental taxes self interest environmental and distributional concerns abstract while strongly recommended by economists it has often been politically difficult to impose taxes on externalities there is a substantial literature on public attitudes towards environmental taxes there has however been few comprehensive attempts to understand attitudes towards environmental taxes the main research question in this paper is which factors influence support for fuel taxation we propose a model of attitudes towards fuel taxation and test this model as well as more specific hypotheses using data from a representative survey of the adult norwegian population our results suggest that support for fuel taxation is best predicted by beliefs about environmental consequences followed by beliefs about consequences to others beliefs about consequences to self self interest is the factor that explains the least variation in support for fuel taxation the academically interesting result that support cannot be well explained without capturing a broad range of motivational factors is also highly policy relevant it implies that there is no magic formula for increasing public support for environmental taxes there are however some issues which can be addressed trust in how well the government spends the revenue and the perception that taxation does very little to change behaviour and thus to reduce environmental problems

what do we know about carbon taxes an inquiry into their impacts on competitiveness and distribution of income abstract the kyoto protocol to the united nations framework convention on climate change unfccc has set legally binding emissions targets for a basket of six greenhouse gases and timetables for industrialised countries it has also incorporated three international flexibility mechanisms however the articles defining the flexibility mechanisms carry wording that their use must be supplemental to domestic actions this has led to the open debates on interpretations of these supplementarity provisions such debates ended at the resumed sixth conference of the parties cop to the unfccc held in bonn july 2001 and at the subsequent cop 7 in marrakesh november 2001 the final wording in the bonn agreement reaffirmed in the marrakesh accords at least indicates that domestic policies will have an important role to play in meeting annex b countries emissions commitments carbon taxes have long been advocated because of their cost effectiveness in achieving a given emissions reduction in this paper the main economic impacts of carbon taxes are assessed based on a review of empirical studies on existing carbon energy taxes it is concluded that competitive losses and distributive impacts are generally not significant and definitely less than often perceived however given the ultimate objective of the framework convention future carbon taxes could have higher rates than those already imposed and thus the resulting economic impacts could be more acute in this context it has been shown that how to use the generated fiscal revenues will be of fundamental importance in determining the final economic impacts of carbon taxes finally we briefly discuss carbon taxes in combination with other domestic and international instruments

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

contest theory and sport contrary to most sports fans economists tend to view tournaments not only as a mechanism to identify the most able and most talented athlete s but also as an instrument to increase the athletes effort levels by designing an adequate compensation system that takes into account the specificities of the contest under consideration the paper proceeds in two different steps first it reviews the available evidence on sports contests and identifies some puzzles that have not yet been resolved in the literature the empirical separation of selection and incentive effects and the impact of incentive pay in team settings second it addresses these puzzles and offers some new evidence supporting the basic assumptions offered by economic theory copyright 2003 oxford university press

who emits most associations between socio economic factors and uk households home energy transport indirect and total co2 emissions abstract does the association between household characteristics and household co2 emissions differ for areas such as home energy transport and indirect emissions this question is policy relevant because distributional implications of mitigation policies may vary depending on the area of emissions that is targeted if specific types of households are likely to have higher emissions in some areas than in others so far this issue has not been examined in depth in the literature on household co2 emissions using a representative uk expenditure survey this paper compares how household characteristics like income household size education gender worklessness and rural or urban location differ in their association with all three areas as well as total emissions we find that these associations vary considerably across emission domains in particular whilst all types of emissions rise with income low income workless and elderly households are more likely to have high emissions from home energy than from other domains suggesting that they may be less affected by carbon taxes on transport or total emissions this demonstrates that fairness implications related to mitigation policies need to be examined for separate emission domains

the sports business as a labor market laboratory with superior data on compensation and productivity as well as the occurrence of abrupt dramatic market structure and player allocation rules changes sports labor markets offer an excellent setting in which to test economic hypotheses this paper reviews evidence from sports in four areas employer monopsony discrimination the coase theorem and incentive contracts supervision and performance there is considerable evidence of monopsony as well as for the existence of some forms of discrimination against minority athletes incentive contracts have strong effects on player performance and behavior and there is mixed evidence on the predictions of the coase theorem

a future for carbon taxes abstract carbon taxes have been frequently advocated as a cost effective instrument for reducing emissions however in the practice of environmental policies only six countries have implemented taxes based on the carbon content of the energy products in this paper we evaluate carbon taxes with regard to their competitiveness distributional and environmental impacts the evidence shows that carbon taxes may be an interesting policy option and that their main negative impacts may be compensated through the design of the tax and the use of the generated fiscal revenues

prices versus quantities with incomplete enforcement abstract i study whether incomplete enforcement of a regulation has any impact on the choice between price e g taxes and quantity e g tradeable quotas instruments results indicate that a second best design accounting for incomplete enforcement can be implemented equally well with either instrument as long as the benefit and cost curves are known with certainty if these curves are uncertain to the regulator however the quantity instrument performs relatively better than the price instrument the reason is that the effective amount of control under the quantity instrument is no longer fixed which makes this instrument come closer to a non linear instrument

on self interested preferences for burden sharing rules an econometric analysis for the costs of energy policy measures abstract this paper examines the acceptance of burden sharing rules that refer to the costs of the german energy transition which is one of the most challenging and disputed national climate and energy policy measures based on data from a comprehensive survey of more than 2200 citizens the empirical analysis reveals that the polluter pays rule has by far the highest support compared with the ability to pay rule and especially compared with the equal pay rule which is widely refused in the sample since the distribution of the costs of the german energy transition is largely in line with a polluter pays rule its strong support seems to contribute to the high acceptance of the energy transition at all the main result of our econometric analysis with multivariate binary and ordered probit models is that not only some attitudinal factors like environmental values and political identification but especially economic self interest is relevant since equivalent energy expenditures have a significantly negative effect on the support of the polluter pays rule and especially equivalent income has a significantly negative effect on the preference for the ability to pay rule these results suggest that the use of distributional arguments for the criticism of energy policy measures is not necessarily value driven on the basis of real perceptions of distributive justice but can also be strategically motivated to prevent and combat economically unfavorable measures together with the strong general support of the polluter pays rule these results suggest that a sharp reorientation of the german energy transition due to distributional arguments is not very useful

poverty and distributional effects of carbon pricing in low and middle income countries a global comparative analysis abstract even though concerns about adverse distributional implications for the poor are one of the most important political challenges for carbon pricing the existing literature reveals ambiguous results for this reason we assess the expected incidence of moderate carbon price increases for different income groups in 87 mostly low and middle income countries building on a consistent dataset and method we find that for countries with per capita incomes of below usd 15 000 per year at ppp adjusted 2011 usd carbon pricing has on average progressive distributional effects we also develop a novel decomposition technique to show that distributional outcomes are primarily determined by differences among income groups in consumption patterns of energy rather than of food goods or services we argue that an inverse u shape relationship between energy expenditure shares and income explains why carbon pricing tends to be regressive in countries with relatively higher income since these countries are likely to have more financial resources and institutional capacities to deal with distributional issues our findings suggest that mitigating climate change raising domestic revenue and reducing economic inequality are not mutually exclusive even in low and middle income countries

the distributional implications of a carbon tax in ireland we study the effects of carbon tax and revenue recycling across the income distribution in the republic of ireland in absolute terms a carbon tax of 20 tco2 would cost the poorest households less than 3 week and the richest households more than 4 week a carbon tax is regressive therefore however if the tax revenue is used to increase social benefits and tax credits households across the income distribution can be made better off without exhausting the total carbon tax revenue

contests with an unknown number of contestants this paper studies rent seeking contests where the contestants do not know the number of actively competing contestants two models are compared in the first all players are risk neutral in the second all have constant absolute risk aversion if the expected fraction of active contestants is low an increase in the number of potential contestants increases individual rent seeking efforts this effect is in contrast to the complete information case where individual rent seeking efforts decrease in the number of contestants the effect is more likely under risk neutrality but also possible under risk aversion equilibrium rent seeking efforts are lower under risk aversion if and only if the expected fraction of active contestants is low

modeling preference heterogeneity in stated choice data an analysis for public goods generated by agriculture stated choice models based on the random utility framework are becoming increasingly popular in the applied economics literature the need to account for respondents preference heterogeneity in such models has motivated researchers in agricultural environmental health and transport economics to apply random parameter logit and latent class models in most of the published literature these models incorporate heterogeneity in preferences through the systematic component of utility an alternative approach is to investigate heterogeneity through the random component of utility and covariance heterogeneity models are one means of doing this in this article we compare these alternative ways of incorporating preference heterogeneity in stated choice models and evaluate the sensitivity of estimated welfare measures to which approach is selected we find that a latent class approach fits our data best but all the models perform well in terms of out of sample predictions finally we discuss what criteria a researcher can use to decide which approach is most appropriate for a given data set

energy use and appliance ownership in ireland abstract this paper examines household energy use and appliance ownership in ireland logit regression analyses on a large micro dataset reveal how household characteristics can help explain the ownership of energy using appliances using ols regression models we explore the factors affecting residential energy demand conditional on appliance ownership results suggest that the methods of space and water heating employed by a household are even more important than electrical appliances in explaining domestic energy usage however the stock of appliances must be included in such models so that results will not be biased the methods employed in this paper can be easily adopted for studies of household energy use in other countries where household expenditure survey data are available

taxation of multiple greenhouse gases and the effects on income distribution a case study of the netherlands current economic instruments aimed at climate change mitigation focus on co2 emissions only but the kyoto protocol refers to other greenhouse gases ghg as well as co2 these are ch4 n2o hfcs pfcs and sf6 taxation of multiple greenhouse gases improves the cost effectiveness of climate change mitigation it is not yet clear however what the effect is of multigas taxation on the distribution of the tax burden across income groups this paper examines and compares distributional effects of a co2 tax and a comprehensive tax that covers all six ghg of the kyoto protocol the study concentrates on the netherlands in the year 2000 we established tax rates on the basis of marginal abatement cost curves and the dutch policy target the distributional effects have been determined by means of environmentally extended input output analysis and data on consumer expenditures our results show that taxation of multiple ghg improves not only the cost effectiveness of climate change mitigation but also distributes the tax burden more equally across income groups as compared to a co2 tax these findings are relevant for the debate on the role of non co2 ghg in climate change mitigation

carbon control policies competitiveness and border tax adjustments abstract several propositions have recently been made to use border tax adjustments btas to address the loss of competitiveness induced by unilateral stringent domestic pollution control policies this paper explores in a general equilibrium framework the sectoral and welfare implications of a unilateral domestic ghg control policy combined with a bta scheme using the canadian economy as an illustration we assess the extent to which btas achieve their objectives and analyze the impacts of different methods of recycling the bta proceeds to support domestic industries our simulation results suggest that imposing btas on the imports of non fossil and energy intensive products reduces or removes completely the negative competitiveness impacts that domestic industries suffer from the use of the proceeds of the btas to support domestic energy intensive industries improves their competitiveness and more importantly in some cases overprotects them as it allows them to even increase their output in comparison to the benchmark without emissions control our results also shed light on the existence of heterogeneity in the composition of energy intensive industries as far as the recycling method of the bta proceeds is concerned energy intensive industries that are more oriented toward the domestic market are better off with the recycling of the bta proceeds towards gross output than towards exports alone finally abstracting from the environmental benefits of reduced emissions we find that a bta entails a higher welfare cost to households

motor fuel prices in turkey the world s most expensive motor fuel gasoline diesel and lpg is sold most likely in the republic of turkey this paper investigates the key issues related to the motor fuel prices in turkey first of all the paper analyses the main reason behind high prices namely motor fuel taxes in turkey then it estimates the elasticity of motor fuel demand in turkey using an econometric analysis the findings indicate that motor fuel demand in turkey is quite inelastic and therefore not responsive to price increases caused by an increase in either pre tax prices or taxes therefore fuel market in turkey is open to opportunistic behaviour by firms through excessive profits and the government through excessive taxes besides the paper focuses on the impact of high motor fuel prices on road transport associated activities including the pattern of passenger transportation motorization rate fuel use total kilometers travelled and co2 emissions from road transportation the impact of motor fuel prices on income distribution in turkey and turkish public opinion about high motor fuel prices are also among the subjects investigated in the course of the study

from regressive pollution taxes to progressive environmental tax reforms european countries have increased their use of environmental tax instruments by designing new tax bases but many countries face opposition from public opinion for fear of the distributive consequences of these environmental tax reforms this paper sheds light on the distributive consequences of environmental tax policies when households are heterogeneous the objective is to assess whether an environmental tax reform could be pareto improving when the revenue of the pollution tax is recycled by a change in labor tax properties we show that whatever the degree of regressivity of the environmental tax alone it is possible to design a recycling mechanism that renders the tax reform more pareto efficient by simultaneously decreasing the wage tax and increasing its progressivity

social and political responses to ecological tax reform in europe an introduction to the special issue this paper introduces the special issue on the policies for ecological tax reform assessment of social responses petras project about responses to ecological tax reform etr in europe although etr is widely accepted to be a policy with desirable effects its implementation has been limited by problems of political acceptability the project aimed to address the question of how to make such a policy more acceptable it is the first study to examine in depth the thinking of members of the general public about the etr policies and is also the first international comparative study of the thinking of ordinary business people about etr policies the petras project methodology was based around the use of interviews and focus groups to inform the assessment of social responses to etr policies and the development of improved designs for them a number of issues emerged relating to awareness trust understanding of the purpose visibility incentives regressivity levels of taxation terminology communication about etr and the use of alternative instruments together with these similarities a pattern of differences between the countries can also be seen the final section of this paper introduces the national studies described in the following papers

rethinking inequality decomposition with evidence from rural china we examine inequality decompositions by income source and describe a general regression based approach for decomposing inequality the approach provides an efficient and flexible way to quantify the roles of variables like education and age in a multivariate context we illustrate the method using survey data from china the empirical results demonstrate how sharply different conclusions can emerge for different decomposition rules we explain how these differences reflect the treatment of equally distributed sources of income and we discuss implications for how results from inequality decomposition are interpreted a renewed interest in economic growth political economy and the distribution of income has again placed the economics of income inequality firmly on the academic research agenda relatively poor performances in latin america have been contrasted with success stories in east asia and recent evidence on the changing income distributions of emerging economic giants like china has

carbon tax simulations using a household demand model abstract the main objective of this paper is to analyse consumer response and welfare effects due to changes in energy or environmental policy to achieve this objective we formulate and estimate an econometric model for non durable consumer demand in sweden that utilises micro and macro data in the simulations we consider two revenue neutral scenarios that both imply a doubling of the co2 tax one that returns the revenues in the form of a lower vat and one that subsidise public transport one conclusion from the simulations is that the co2 tax has regional distribution effects in the sense that household living in sparsely populated areas carry a larger share of the tax burden

the relevance of attitudinal factors for the acceptance of energy policy measures a micro econometric analysis abstract this paper empirically examines the individual support of the german energy transition in total and especially of six single energy policy measures which are components of the energy transition our micro econometric analysis with binary and ordered probit models on the basis of data from a broad survey of citizens reveals the important role of several attitudinal factors with respect to our indicators for perceived personal costs of the energy transition the estimation results point to a weak evidence for economic self interest due to some negative correlations between expected energy price increases due to the energy transition and the support of single energy policy measures interestingly however the concern that the energy transition alone causes strong energy price increases is not shared by the majority of the respondents the estimation results also suggest that the support of several energy policy measures is strongly correlated with environmental values however the most important attitudinal factor is obviously political identification the econometric analysis suggests that an overall left green policy identification is positively correlated with the support of the energy transition in total and an identification with ecological policy is positively correlated with the acceptance of several single energy policy measures the econometric analysis especially supports the more sophisticated categorization of political orientation since for example a liberal conservative policy orientation is not significantly correlated with the support of the energy transition in total

a conjoint analysis of corporate preferences for the sectoral crediting mechanism a case study of shanxi province in china it is crucial to understand corporate preferences in designing and planning new market based instruments using the method of conjoint analysis this paper evaluates corporate preferences for policy alternatives of the sectoral crediting mechanism aiming at supporting its discussions and development data were collected from 94 companies in all 11 prefecture level cities of shanxi province china the results confirm that companies are most concerned about three policy attributes domestic policy instruments the relationship with the clean developing mechanism and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities from the viewpoint of the chinese businesses surveyed the ideal policy alternative has a domestic policy instrument in which installations with voluntary targets receive tradable units while co existing with the clean developing mechanism and providing opportunities to get financial and technical assistance from developed countries meanwhile the coverage of the sectoral crediting mechanism could be expanded to small companies that are the most inefficient and thus have the lowest abatement costs in some sectors the results of this study are important in light of ongoing discussions and developments of the sectoral crediting mechanism in china

imperfect competition in auction designs we study the competition between two owners of identical goods who wish to sell them to a pool of potential buyers the sellers compete simultaneously setting reserve prices for their second price sealed bid auctions upon observing the set reserve prices the buyers decide simultaneously in which auction to bid we show that this game has at least one equilibrium and that all equilibria are inefficient reserve prices are not driven to zero cost we also discuss where and why the parallel between optimal auction design and optimal pricing in the case of monopoly breaks down for oligopoly

the implications for households of environmental tax reform etr in europe abstract the paper discusses the distributional implications of environmental tax reform etr for households and presents new results from modelling the impacts of a major etr for the european union the distributional effects arise from the new environmental taxes any tax reductions made as part of the etr the wider macroeconomic impacts from the etr any special provisions in the etr and the environmental benefits from the etr the paper s literature review makes clear that while the impacts from taxes on the household use of energy are very often regressive transport taxes tend not to be although the impacts differ between urban and rural households moreover the net distributional impact is often less regressive or not at all once the wider distributional effects are taken into account residual regressive effects can in principle be removed by further adjustments in the tax or benefits system the modelling results suggest that an etr in europe will actually increase real incomes across the eu as a whole and will not be generally regressive although the results differ by country and for different socio economic groups the political acceptability of etr may depend on the worst effects on these groups being mitigated in some way

the assessment the economics of sport the study of sports economics has expanded rapidly in recent years in response to significantly increased demand for sport itself for economic analysis relevant to commercial litigation in sport for lively teaching material in schools and universities and for research into the incentive properties of sporting contests while much of the literature has focused on the issue of competitive balance and how to achieve it there have still been relatively few studies that apply the lessons of the economic theory of contests to the analysis of sports there remain huge opportunities both to develop our theoretical understanding of incentive mechanisms in sport and to conduct empirical research in the operation of incentives in sporting contests copyright 2003 oxford university press

optimal favoritism in all pay auctions and lottery contests abstract we analyze the revenue enhancing potential of favoring specific contestants in complete information all pay auctions and lottery contests with several heterogeneous contestants two instruments of favoritism are considered head starts that are added to the bids of specific contestants and multiplicative biases that give idiosyncratic weights to the bids in the all pay auction head starts are more effective than biases while optimally combining both instruments even yields first best revenue in the lottery contest head starts are less effective than biases and combining both instruments cannot further increase revenue as all pay auctions revenue dominate lottery contests under optimal biases we thus obtain an unambiguous revenue ranking of all six combinations of contest formats and instruments

mechanism design by competing sellers a dynamic model with many sellers and buyers is constructed agents failing to trade may trade in the next period an equilibrium is found where sellers hold identical auctions and buyers randomize over the sellers they visit the distribution of buyer valuations is endogenous an auction with efficient reserve is an optimal mechanism from each seller s point of view in spite of the ability of any seller to alter the distribution of buyer types participating in the seller s mechanism by altering the mechanism copyright 1993 by the econometric society

the distribution of talent across contests do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants to what extent do contestants avoid competition in this paper we show theoretically and empirically that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice complete sorting exists only when the proportion of high ability contestants is sufficiently small as this proportion increases high ability contestants shy away from competition and sorting decreases such that reverse sorting becomes a possibility we test our theoretical predictions with a large panel data set containing contest choice over twenty years we use exogenous variation in the participation of highly able competitors to provide empirical evidence for the relationship among prizes competition and sorting

distributional impacts of carbon pricing a general equilibrium approach with micro data for households article i nfo many policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions have at their core efforts to put a price on carbon emissions carbon pricing impacts households both by raising the cost of carbon intensive products and by changing factor prices a complete analysis requires taking both effects into account the impact of carbon pricing is determined by heterogeneity in household spending patterns across income groups as well as heterogeneity in factor income patterns across income groups it is also affected by precise formulation of the policy how is the revenue from carbon pricing distributed as well as the treatment of other government policies e g the treatment of transfer payments what is often neglected in analyses of policy is the heterogeneity of impacts across households even within income or regional groups in this paper we incorporate 15 588 households from the u s consumer and expenditure survey data as individual agents in a comparative static general equilibrium framework these households are represented within the mit usrep model a detailed general equilibrium model of the u s economy in particular we categorize households by full household income factor income as well as transfer income and apply various measures of lifetime income to distinguish households that are temporarily low income e g retired households drawing down their financial assets from permanently low income households we also provide detailed within group distributional measures of burden impacts from various policy scenarios

conflict and rent seeking success functions ratio vs difference models of relative success the rent seeking competitions studied by economists fall within a much broader category of conflict interactions that also includes military combats election campaigns industrial disputes lawsuits and sibling rivalries in the rent seeking literature each party s success pi which can be interpreted either as the probability of victory or as the proportion of the prize won has usually been taken to be a function of the ratio of the respective resource commitments alternatively however pi may instead be a function of the difference between the parties commitments to the contest the contest success function csf for the difference from is a logistic curve in which as is consistent with military experience increasing returns apply up to an inflection point at equal resource commitments a crucial flaw of the traditional ratio model is that neither onesided submission nor two sided peace between the parties can ever occur as a cournot equilibrium in contrast both of these outcomes are entirely consistent with a model in which success is a function of the difference between the parties resource commitments

competition among sellers who offer auctions instead of prices abstract in this paper we study a large market in which sellers compete by offering auctions to buyers instead of simple fixed price contracts two variants of the model are studied one extends a model first analyzed by wolinsky rev econ stud 55 1988 71 84 in which buyers learn their valuations only after meeting sellers the other variant extends the model of mcafee econometrica61 1993 1281 1312 in which buyers know their valuations before they choose among available auctions the equilibrium array of auctions is characterized for each case and the efficiency properties of the equilibria are analyzed journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d41 d44 d82

the strategic choice of managerial incentives do firms with separate owners and managers maximize profits we address this question for an oligopoly where managers compete in quantities or prices as in the cournot or bertrand models and owners choose their managers incentives we find that there is a strategic aspect in the problem of selecting incentives and that profit maximizing behavior does not result in particular in the oligopoly we study the behavior of firms competing in quantity price more closely resembles perfectly competitive collusive behavior than cournot bertrand behavior

are co2 taxes regressive evidence from the danish experience abstract denmark today carries one of the heaviest environmental tax burdens in the world bringing in around 10 of public revenues while evaluations have shown that the danish co 2 and other environmental taxes work as an effective measure to reduce emissions a considerable barrier to increased use of these instruments today seems to be a widespread perception of their socially adverse effects in this article it is demonstrated that co 2 taxes imposed on energy consumption in households as well as in industry do in fact tend to be regressive and therefore have undesirable distributional effects this holds especially for taxes imposed directly on households to analyze this we apply national consumer survey statistics in combination with input output tables

sequential teamwork in competitive environments theory and evidence from swimming data abstract many tasks require the input by more than one person very often with members of the team contributing sequentially however team production is plagued by disincentive problems we investigate individual incentives to team production with sequential contributions and competing teams we show that earlier contributors free ride on team members contributing later on we test our predictions on sports data using an athlete s performance in the individual race as a natural control for his relay performance our empirical findings strongly support the theoretical claims

how not to run auctions the european 3g telecom auctions abstract there were enormous differences in the revenues from the european third generation 3g or umts mobile phone license auctions from 20 euros per capita in switzerland to 650 euros per capita in the uk though the values of the licenses sold were similar poor auction designs in some countries facilitated collusion between firms and failed to attract entrants the sequencing of the auctions was also crucial we discuss the auctions in the uk netherlands germany italy austria switzerland belgium greece and denmark

can carbon taxes be progressive abstract most studies have assessed the distributional impact of carbon taxes through their effects on commodity prices alone while ignoring their impact on individual welfare brought about by changes in factor prices yet the remunerations of capital and labor are not affected by these taxes similarly and their shares in earned incomes are not uniform across households this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the incidence of carbon taxes on inequality by considering simultaneously the commodity and the income channels we propose a decomposition of the change in individual welfare metrics then we develop a general equilibrium model to assess the impact of carbon taxes on factor and commodity prices and subsequently their distributional impact on households using the lorenz and concentration curves and the gini index our results suggest that changes in factor prices and changes in commodity prices especially those of energy commodities have opposing effects on inequality carbon taxes tend to reduce inequality through the changes in factor prices and tend to increase inequality through the changes in commodity prices hence we find a non monotonic u shaped relationship between carbon taxes and inequality our results suggest that the traditional approach of assessing the impact of carbon taxes on inequality through changes in commodity prices alone may be misleading the findings cast light on the desirability of using both channels in the assessment of carbon taxes on inequality

how wrong can you be implications of incorrect utility function specification for welfare measurement in choice experiments despite the vital role of the utility function in welfare measurement the implications of working with incorrect utility specifications have been largely neglected in the choice experiments literature this paper addresses the importance of specification with a special emphasis on the effects of mistaken assumptions about the marginal utility of income monte carlo experiments were conducted using different functional forms of utility to generate simulated choices multi nomial logit and mixed logit models were then estimated on these choices under correct and incorrect assumptions about the true underlying utility function estimated willingness to pay measures from these choice modeling results are then compared with the equivalent measures directly calculated from the true utility specifications results show that for the parameter values and functional forms considered a continuous quadratic or a discrete linear attribute specification is a good option regardless of the true effects the attribute has on utility we also find that mistaken assumptions about preferences over costs magnify attribute mis specification effects

digging for golden carrots an analysis of research tournaments contracting for research is often infeasible because research inputs are unobservable and research outcomes cannot be verified by a court sponsoring a research tournament can resolve these problems a model is presented in which contestants compete to find the innovation of highest value to the tournament sponsor the winner receives a prespecified prize the tournament game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium free entry is not optimal because equilibrium effort by each researcher decreases in the number of contestants an optimally designed research tournament balances the probability of overshooting the first best quality level against the probability of falling short copyright 1995 by american economic association

optimal incentive schemes with many agents the grossman hart principal agent model of moral hazard is extended to the multiple agent case to explore the use of relative performance in optimal incentive contracting under the assumption that the principal chooses incentive schemes to implement agent actions as nash equilibria necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the optimality of independent contracts of rank order tournaments and for attainability of the first best in this context the relation of the principal s welfare to the correlation between the underlying randomness in outputs of different agents is also investigated finally some problems with the nash equilibrium implementation assumption are discussed in this paper we extend the grossman hart analysis of the principal agent problem to a multiple agent setting in this version of the problem a risk neutral principal is assumed to observe the output or a performance index for each risk averse agent the output of any agent depends on a privately observable action chosen by the agent and an exogenous random variable the realization of which is not observed either by the principal or by the agent before choosing its action we especially focus attention on the role of relative performance evaluation in optimal incentive contracts and the way this depends on properties of the underlying production technology and the joint distribution of the random variables affecting the outputs of different agents in section 2 of the paper we consider the principal s problem of finding an optimal incentive scheme and an action tuple for agents subject to the constraint that the latter be implemented as a nash equilibrium between agents by the chosen incentive scheme where agents must attain at least their reservation utilities a characterization of optimal incentive schemes is derived analogous to the grossman hart characterization for the single agent problem this characterization is then utilized to find sufficient and generically necessary conditions for a optimal contracts for any agent to be independent of the performance of other agents and b optimality of rank order tournaments where payments depend solely on ordinal comparisons of output across agents we then describe a necessary and sufficient condition for the principal to extract maximum advantage from relative performance clauses i e achieve the first best level of expected utility in the multiagent situation an implication of this result is that under fairly weak conditions perfect correlation in the underlying production uncertainties for different agents enables the principal to attain the first best if and only if sufficiently heavy penalties can be inflicted on agents we then enquire what happens in intermediate cases of non perfect correlation it turns out that while in general the principal s welfare is a continuous function of the correlation coefficient it is not always nondecreasing in the latter because the correlation coefficient is not a general measure of association between two random variables but rather a measure of linear association between them

design and analysis of simulated consumer choice or allocation experiments an approach based on aggregate data the authors integrate concepts in conjoint analysis and discrete choice theory in econometrics to develop a new approach to the design and analysis of controlled consumer choice or resource allocat

rent seeking and the provision of public goods in this short paper i adopt the public choice school paradigm of modeling a government in order to compare its performance with that of the market in the standard model of the provision of public goods private provision is represented by the cournot nash equilibrium in individual contributions public provision incorporates rent seeking whereby some of the aspects of the allocation are determined indirectly by influence activities of the interested parties thus both allocation procedures yield inefficiency and the question is which procedure results in a greater amount of inefficiency private provision with its free riding incentives or public provision with its rent seeking incentives the results indicate that public provision may well be preferred to private provision of public goods thus superiority of private provision is not guaranteed even in the case of a non benevolent government copyright 1993 by royal economic society

competition among contests when several contests compete for the participation of a common set of players a contest s allocation of prizes not only induces incentive effects but also participation effects our model predicts that an increase in the sensitivity with which contest outcomes depend on players efforts makes flatter prize structures more attractive to participants in equilibrium contests that aim to maximize the number of participants will award multiple prizes if and only if this sensitivity is sufficiently high moreover the prize awarded to the winner is decreasing in the contests sensitivity we provide empirical evidence from professional road running using race distance as a measure of sensitivity we show that steeper prize structures are more attractive to top ranked runners in longer that is less sensitive races in line with our theory longer races do in fact offer steeper prize structures

do tournaments have incentive effects much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual s payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors academic interest derives from the fact that under certain sets of assumptions tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses we focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure prize distribution and measures of individual output players scores are both available we find strong support for the proposition that the level and structure of prizes in pga tournaments influence players performance

monetary valuation of the social cost of co2 emissions a critical survey an expanding branch of research has estimated the potential costs of climate change which are often expressed as the social cost of carbon scc or the costs of an additional ton of co2 emissions estimates of the scc can be used by policy makers to evaluate climate change policies and greenhouse gas emission reduction projects by means of cost benefit analyses cbas such analyses are complicated by the wide range of scc values that have been reported in the literature and the large uncertainties involved in estimating the potential economic impacts and related costs of climate change this study presents a critical review of the reported scc estimates by examining some neglected consequences of climate change uncertain and extreme scenarios of climate change the discounting of future climate change effects the treatment of individual risk aversion and assumptions about social welfare in view of the many uncertainties and omissions in conventional cost benefit analyses of climate impacts and the scc alternative approaches to decision making should be considered for climate policy

the incentive effects of tournaments revisited evidence from the european pga tour this analysis of data from the 1987 european men s professional golf association pga tour strongly supports the hypothesis that the level and structure of prizes in pga tournaments influence players performance specifically players performance appears to vary positively with both the total money prizes awarded in a tournament and the marginal return to effort in the final round of play a value that varies among players largely depending on how the prize money is allocated among finishers of different ranks the authors suggest that these results together with the similar results of their earlier study of the 1984 u s men s pga tour may have implications for the design of compensation systems for certain groups of workers such as corporate executives college professors and salespeople

paying for mitigation a multiple country study a contingent valuation study conducted in china sweden and the united states was used to investigate citizens willingness to pay wtp for reducing co2 emissions we find that a majority of the respondents in all three countries believe that the mean global temperature has increased over the last 100 years and that humans are responsible for the increase the share of americans that believes these statements is smaller and a relatively larger share of americans also believes that nothing can be done to stop climate change sweden has the highest wtp while china has the lowest jel q51 q54

executive compensation and principal agent theory the empirical literature on executive compensation generally fails to specify a model of executive pay on which to base and test hypotheses regarding its determinants in contrast this paper analy

salaries and piece rates compensation can take many forms remuneration can come as pecuniary payments as fringes such as health and pension benefits or as a nonpecuniary reward such as plush office furniture that costs the firm less than it benefits the worker a significant literature has examined the trade offs between pecuniary and nonpecuniary compensation the modern work having been pioneered by rosen 1974 more recently another body of literature has examined the selection of method of total compensation ignoring the distinction between pecuniary and nonpecuniary payment this work has focused on risk and incentive factors it has resulted in comparisons of compensation based on absolute output levels to that based on relative performance it has also led to explorations of the relation of compensation to experience over the work life 2 little attention has been paid to what may be among the most important and obvious distinction in methods of compensation namely the choice between a fixed salary for some period of time that is paying on the basis of input and some workers receive compensation that is specified in advance and not directly contingent on performance instead it depends on an input measure such as hours worked for others compensation is directly related to output this essay is an attempt to predict a firm s choice of compensation method piece rates are defined more rigorously among the more important factors discussed are worker heterogeneity incentives sorting considerations monitoring costs and asymmetric information one result is that salary workers tend to be of lower quality and more homogeneous than are their piece rate counterparts numerous additional results are provided helpful comments by victoria lazear and yoram weiss are gratefully acknowledged support was provided by the department of labor and the national science foundation 1 see lazear and rosen 1981 stiglitz 1981 holmstrom 1982 green and stokey 1983 2 see lazear 1979 1981 and harris and holmstrom in press

public acceptability of personal carbon trading and carbon tax abstract climate change is one of the greatest challenges confronting the international community requiring action to achieve deep cuts in carbon emissions the implementation of potentially uncomfortable but necessary policy measures is though critically dependent upon public acceptability this paper reports a novel application of stated preference techniques to explore the influence of key design attributes on the acceptability of a personal carbon trading scheme in isolation and when compared to a carbon tax illustrative forecasts from the models developed indicate the importance of design attributes especially the basis of the initial permit allocation for personal carbon trading and the use to which revenues are put for carbon tax results indicate that the best scheme designs could be acceptable to a majority of respondents

public preferences for carbon tax attributes the impacts of climate change are already visible throughout the world recognizing the threats posed by climate change the durban platform the 17th session of the conference of parties cop 17 underscores that the global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation and ambitious action by all countries a crucial starting point for the design of effective and publicly acceptable policies is to explore public preferences for climate policy instruments using a choice experiment this study investigates public preferences for carbon tax attributes in a developing country context the results account for heterogeneity in preferences and show that turkish people prefer a carbon tax with a progressive cost distribution rather than one with a regressive cost distribution the private cost has a negative effect on the probability of choosing the tax earmarking carbon tax revenues increases the public acceptability of the tax moreover there is a preference for a carbon tax that promotes public awareness of climate change

targets for global climate policy an overview a survey of the economic impact of climate change and the marginal damage costs shows that carbon dioxide emissions are a negative externality the estimated pigou tax and its growth rate are too low to justify the climate policy targets set by political leaders a lower discount rate or greater concern for the global distribution of income would justify more stringent climate policy but would imply an overhaul of other public policies catastrophic risk justifies more stringent climate policy but only to a limited extent

does improved environmental quality prevent a growing economy abstract a major concern for sustainable development is how countries can lower pollution while avoiding adverse output and energy shocks since economic activities change with time we develop a dynamic applied equilibrium model to study the dynamics of co2 emissions and evaluate how the pursuit of environmental policy objectives can influence output and productivity in a surrogate country in transition under an optimal environmental policy which ensures mitigation between 38 and 50 we show that productivity projected towards the year 2075 increases slightly from between 3 8 and 6 2 to between 5 7 and 7 6 respectively the required carbon tax begins from 5 29 ton in 2020 and grows on average by 3 5 reaching up to 35 83 per ton carbon towards the year 2075 even though these tax rates ensure huge benefits for mitigation they represent marginal productivity growth and substantial output and consumption costs in other words improved environmental quality presents opportunities for multifactor productivity mfp but this productivity improvement is too marginal to offset the compliance costs of the carbon tax thereby causing output to decline hence to ensure maximum economic dividend from carbon pricing especially in transitional economies measures are required to improve the innovation benefits of carbon taxes towards levels that offset the compliance costs of environmental regulations otherwise caution should be taken by developing countries in their environmental policy designs especially when boosting consumption and economic growth is a major priority

the demand for earmarking results from a focus group study abstract environmental taxes might be efficient but plans to impose new taxes are often met with fierce public resistance in order to design environmental taxes that are both efficient and acceptable to the public so that they can be politically feasible it is important to understand public attitudes towards environmental taxes we conduct a focus group study in norway to extend the current knowledge on this issue we find less general resistance to taxation as a policy instrument and seemingly more trust in government than what has been reported in similar studies from other countries the participants are however very skeptical and do not see the point of using the revenues from an environmental tax to reduce other taxes such as the payroll tax instead they express a very strong preference for earmarking the revenues for environmental purposes they also call for more information about environmental taxes in particular on how the revenues are spent providing more information including what the revenues are spent on irrespective of whether they are earmarked or not would seem to provide a relatively cheap and possibly effective way to increase the public acceptability of new or increased environmental taxes

recreation demand models with taste differences over people we estimate random parameter logit models of anglers choice of fishing site the models generalize logit by allowing coefficients to vary randomly over anglers rather than being fixed the models do not exhibit the restrictive independence from irrelevant alternatives property of logit and can represent any substitution pattern estimation explicitly accounts for the fact that the variation in coefficients over anglers induces correlation in unobserved utility over trips by the same angler willingness to pay for improved fish stock and the value to anglers of specific sites are calculated from the models and compared with the estimates obtained from a standard logit model

citizens preferences on nuclear and renewable energy sources evidence from turkey abstract based on data from a face to face survey of 2422 residents from urban turkey this paper presents an analysis of citizens preferences in turkey on nuclear and renewable energy sources findings indicate that opposition to nuclear power was strong and only a small number of respondents endorsed it by listing it in their top two choices conversely almost two thirds of the sample endorsed investment in renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and only a small minority was opposed to it econometric analyses revealed that knowledge of the climate change problem was a common factor that explained endorsement of both nuclear and renewables yet high levels of concern for the environment and a negative perception regarding its future differentiated the endorsers of renewables from those of nuclear energy endorsers of nuclear energy were found to be males who were knowledgeable about climate change and engaged in environmental issues but less concerned about the environment and optimistic about its future nuclear opponents on the other hand were found to be concerned about the environment pessimistic about its future and not fully relying on technology