Three Essays In Environmental Values and Externalities PDF Download

Author: Hermine N. Vedogbeton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Econometrics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Author: Justin R. Roush
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education, Higher
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Maximizing welfare in the economy requires effective policies that mitigate negative externalities and incentivize positive externalities. My first paper concerns emissions at manufacturing plants in the US, a major source of negative externalities. Globalization has created concerns that pollution can move across country boarders. Therefore, I study the environmental performance of foreign manufacturing establishments in the US to test if foreign establishments in pollution intensive industries are heavy emitters. I find that foreign firms are not dirtier than domestic establishments on average. However, they are significantly cleaner in industries with high fixed costs and dirtier in industries with low fixed costs. This is because only the most productive establishments find it profitable to produce abroad in high fixed cost industries and high productivity establishments are generally cleaner. The next two papers focus on higher education, which bears large positive externalities. In the second paper in this dissertation I study the response of student charges to the Post-9/11 GI Bill at 2- and 4-Year public, private, and for-profit institutions. If institutions of higher education increase their student charges in response to increases in student aid, the goals of student aid policies are undermined. I test for supply side responses to the Post-9/11 GI Bill and find statistically significant increases in fees and tuition rates at 4-year public and 2-year private colleges. These increases reduce the effective benefit that students receive which harms their ability to access higher education. The third paper recognizes that the US currently has a shortage of STEM majors and tests whether major contingent loans can incentivize students to select into these fields. That is, if we only offer low interest loans to students studying majors that society values most, do students respond by choosing those majors? Using a natural experiment created by the National Defense Student Loan Program in 1959, which had a provision that teaching, foreign language, science, technology, and math fields receive priority in loan allocation, I find little evidence that students select qualifying majors in response to low-interest loans.

Author: ANTONIO. NICITA
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138703193
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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This title was first published in 2001. The essays in this volume examine the questions of evaluation processes and enforcement with regards to environmental externalities, stressing the role of institutional failures in dealing with the environment. The essays are divided into three sections: 1 - the complexity of evaluation processes; 2 - the complexity of institutional arrangements; and 3 - evaluation processes and political choice. Overall, the essays argue that the effectiveness of environmental policy depends on the role played by economic institutions in affording and implementing policy objectives. The studies investigates the role played by institutions in affecting and implementing environmental policy. Institutions, in the wider sense, are typically shaped by a complex set of economic and political interests, culture and values which require detailed interdisciplinary analysis.

Author: Elamin H. Elbasha
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Author: Andrew Dobson
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191522384
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Fairness and Futurity: Essays on Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice brings together leading international figures in political theory and sociology, as well as representatives from the political community, to consider the normative issues at stake in the relationship between environmental sustainability and social justice. It raises important questions and sets out to provide the answers. If future generations are owed justice, what should we bequeath them? Is `sustainability' an appropriate medium for environmentalists to express their demands? Is environmental protection compatible with intra-generational justice? Is environmental sustainability a luxury when social peace has broken down? These essays emerged from three intensive seminars that involved participants in constant re-evaluations of their work, and which bought three distinct groups—environmental theorists, `mainstream' political theorists, and policy community members—into fruitful contact. In particular, the attempt to involve `mainstream' theorists in environmental questions, and to encourage environmentalists to use intellectual resources of political theory, should be highlighted.

Author: Lawrence Geest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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% !TEX root = ../degeest2017dissertation.tex Environmental protection often relies on cooperation between individuals in uncoordinated groups. In cases such as the management of common-pool resources, individuals must not only monitor and enforce behavior within their group to prevent over-exploitation. They must also contend with external threats on the resource like poaching. This dissertation studies how individuals cooperate to manage shared resources and deter shared threats. The first chapter, "Deterring poaching of a common-pool resource", considers the problem of deterring a threat that cannot be perfectly observed. I present results from common pool resource experiments designed to examine the ability of a group of resource users, called insiders, to simultaneously manage their own exploitation and defend their resource from encroachment by outsiders. The insiders can use communication, peer monitoring and sanctions to coordinate their decisions. In addition, they can sanction any outsiders they observe. I vary the insiders' ability to observe and sanction the outsiders from no observability to partial and full observability. I find a striking non-monotonicity between observability of the outsiders and levels of poaching. Poaching was higher under partial monitoring than zero monitoring, and was lower and more stable under full monitoring. Although full observability allowed the insiders to better coordinate their own harvests, they were unable to fully deter poaching because their sanctions were far too low and they were unwilling to punish low levels of poaching. The second chapter, "Defending public goods and common-pool resources", studies cooperation and deterrence of a shared threat in different strategic environments. In many real-world social dilemmas, groups of individuals must cooperate to create surplus and defend it from theft. Theft can either foster or discourage collective action. On the one hand, a shared threat can align individual incentives. On the other hand, surplus creation may decrease if individuals are unsure how group members will contribute towards defense. Moreover, there is literature that suggests cooperation is sensitive to whether individual actions confer positive externalities (public goods, PG) or negative externalities (common-pool resources, CPR) on group members -- the "cooperation divergence". To examine the relationship between cooperation and defense in different externality settings, I conduct an experiment in which a group of insiders providing a public good or conserving a common-pool resource must coordinate to deter outsiders from stealing the value of their surplus. Our theory predicts that theft will have no different effect on behavior across externality settings. However, I find that it does. Surplus creation is significantly higher in the CPR treatment, while surplus defense is significantly higher in the PG treatment. Across both treatments, I find that the shared threat increases variation within groups, but the effect is more dramatic in the PG treatment. Finally, the third chaper, "Enforcement networks in social dilemmas", studies how enforcement emerges and evolves in the first chapter. Sanctions can increase cooperation in social dilemmas, but they impose a high social cost until a credible threat to non-cooperative behavior is established. Moreover, credible threats depend on enforcement structure. For example, small sanctions implemented by many subjects may have a different impact on behavior than the same volume of sanctions meted out by a single subject. In order to understand how credible threats to deviant behavior emerge, it is therefore necessary to study how enforcement structure emerges and evolves in groups. I study enforcement structure by taking a network approach to data from a social dilemma experiment with peer punishment. The exchange of sanctions between subjects can be framed as a directed, weighted network that evolves, enabling us to use tools from network structure to summarize, predict and simulate behavior. I first visualize and summarize the structure of these networks and show that enforcement structure is non-random and tends to cluster around a few individuals. I then model network formation and network efficiency using an empirical framework that separately considers edge formation (a binary sanctioning event) from edge weight (sanction size) and find that subjects respond more to the act of being sanctioned rather than the volume of sanctions. Finally, I recover the underlying Markov process governing enforcement structure and simulate expected long-run behavior. I conclude with a discussion of how my approach can be used to study generalized exchange networks.

Author: Rachel Frattarola
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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This dissertation is a collection of three essays that examine household and market behavior in the presence of missing markets and negative externalities. In the first chapter, I study the motives for the sustained operation of unprofitable grocery stores in developing countries. I use fixed effects estimation and find that store ownership increases the value of yearly per capita food consumption by 9 to 18 percent. I also show that all households are able to smooth consumption fairly well, but the effect of income on consumption is approximately 50 to 80 percent less for store-owning households, suggesting that households who own stores are better insured. These findings indicate that the operation of stores provides Nicaraguan households with a consumption benefit by increasing food consumption and informal insurance through improved consumption smoothing. In the second chapter, I combine household and historical weather data to analyze technology adoption dynamics in Kenya. Farmers' switching between improved and traditional technologies in multiple periods suggests that households benefit from these technologies but face constraints that impede permanent adoption. I test whether negative income shocks preclude households from making the investment needed to sustain the usage of hybrid seed and inorganic fertilizer, thereby explaining the inconsistent adoption. Probit estimates show that the death of a household member increases the probability of discontinuation of hybrid seed and of inorganic fertilizer, while favorable weather in the previous season decreases the probability of discontinuation. The third chapter examines the effect of power plant closures on local housing prices. The difference-in-differences analysis shows that the closure of a power plant leads to an increase in housing prices of 6 percent for fossil fuels, with heterogeneity by fuel type. Housing prices increase following the retirement of gas- and petroleum-fired plants and decrease by 7 to 8 percent when a coal plant closes. Prices may remain lower for the sample of retired coal plants because home buyers are uncertain about the future prospects of mitigating this pollution.

Author: Koji Kotani
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Author: Daniel W. Bromley
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401174261
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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When approached by Warren Samuels, the series editor, about organizing a volume on natural resource economics, I was at a loss as to how one might possibly capture in "several major essays plus several shorter comments thereon" all of the diverse activities that fall within this exciting discipline. I was further asked to have the book take an "affirmative but constructively critical look at its subject. " The volume was to be interpretative, it was to be reasonably comprehensive, and yet it was to attempt to present divergent views on the "development, tensions, present status, and, especially, possible lines of development of each field. " Upon reflection, I decided to have the book focus on natural resource economics as a distinctly applied policy science. Hence the title: Natural Resource Economics: Policy Problems and Contemporary Analysis. While this allowed clarification of a particular sort, it did little to narrow the range of policy issues that ought to be considered candidates for inclu sion. But it did seem, after some thought, that three broad issues persist at center stage in natural resource policy.

Author: Sherman Lewis
Publisher: Hayward Area Planning Association
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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These essays are for Americans concerned about the future of our country and for policy wonks. By and large, the political process is controlled by those who take an intertest in politics, large in number but small as a percent of population. Are you a member of the political class? Membership is voluntary. Our first 800 years of thinking: science culture and empathy from the Enlightenment ~1600 to ~ 2400 The Crisis of the Anthropocene: The most comprehensive description of all issues of the crisis in less than 100 pages. For the purpose of going through your mind to influence your brain. Musings on our Present Discontent: America, not advanced, not a democracy. Right to life for baby; right to choose for mom. Taxation. The security of a free state. Issues not discussed. The threat from within, Trumpism. The threat from without: Putinism. How to participate. Renewal.