{"title":"Grazing the Commons: Global Carbon Emissions Forever?","authors":"B. Melenberg, H. Vollebergh, E. Dijkgraaf","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1774823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1774823","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents the results from our investigation of the per-capita, long- term relation between carbon dioxide emissions and gross domestic product (GDP) for the world, obtained with the use of a new, exible estimator. Consistent with simple economic growth models, we find that regional, population-weighted per- capita emissions systematically increase with income (scale effect) and usually de- cline over time (composition and technology effect). Both our in-sample results and out-of-sample scenarios indicate that this negative time effect is unlikely to compen- sate for the upward-income effect at a global level, in the near future. In particular, even if China's specialization in carbon-intensive industrial sectors would come to a halt, recent trends outside China make a reversal of the overall global trend very unlikely.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124148608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Strategic Environmental Policy Under Free Trade with Transboundary Pollution","authors":"Harvey E. Lapan, Shiva Sikdar","doi":"10.1111/j.1467-9361.2010.00589.x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9361.2010.00589.x","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze the effects of trade liberalization on environmental policies in a strategic setting when there is transboundary pollution. Trade liberalization can result in a race to the bottom in environmental taxes, which makes both countries worse off. This is not due to the terms of trade motive, but rather the incentive, in a strategic setting, to reduce the incidence of transboundary pollution. With command and control policies (emission quotas), countries are unable to influence foreign emissions by strategic choice of domestic policy; hence, there is no race to the bottom. However, with internationally tradable quotas, unless pollution is a pure global public bad, there is a race to the bottom in environmental policy. Under free trade, internationally nontradable quotas result in the lowest pollution level and strictly welfare-dominate taxes. The ordering of internationally tradable quotas and pollution taxes depends, among other things, on the degree of international pollution spillovers.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124535835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Problem of the Commons: Still Unsettled after 100 Years","authors":"Robert Stavins","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1679114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1679114","url":null,"abstract":"The problem of the commons is more important to our lives and thus more central to economics than a century ago when Katharine Coman led off the first issue of the American Economic Review. As the U.S. and other economies have grown, the carrying-capacity of the planet - in regard to natural resources and environmental quality — has become a greater concern, particularly for common-property and open-access resources. The focus of this article is on some important, unsettled problems of the commons. Within the realm of natural resources, there are special challenges associated with renewable resources, which are frequently characterized by open access. An important example is the degradation of open-access fisheries. Critical commons problems are also associated with environmental quality. A key contribution of economics has been the development of market-based approaches to environmental protection. These instruments are key to addressing the ultimate commons problem of the twenty-first century - global climate change.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"104 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132695227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voluntary Provision of a Public Good in a Strategic Market Game","authors":"S. Lahiri","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1603794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1603794","url":null,"abstract":"The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mutual compatibility of voluntary provision of public good and strategic behavior of consumers in the market for private goods. We study the existence of equilibrium private provision of a public good within general strategic equilibrium framework with a finite number of players. The mechanism for the provision of public good follows the one due to Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986) and the trading mechanism for private goods follows the strategic market game with wash sales due to Dubey and Shubik (1986). The new result of the paper is the demonstration of existence of an equilibrium point in pure strategies for finite number of players. Due to the existence of trivial equilibria at which all markets are closed, equilibrium points are constructed as limits of sequences of ε- equilibria of perturbed games.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126838526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Endogenous Growth in a Model with Heterogeneous Agents and Voting on Public Goods","authors":"K. Borissov, A. Surkov","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1628420","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1628420","url":null,"abstract":"We consider a Barro-type endogenous growth model in which the government's purchases of goods and services enter into the production function. The provision of government services is financed by flat-rate (linear) income or lump-sum taxes. It is assumed that individuals differing in their discount factors vote on the tax rates. We propose a concept of voting equilibrium leading to some versions of the median voter theorem for steady-state equilibria, fully characterize steady-state equilibria and show that if the median voter discount factor is sufficiently low, the long-run rate of growth in the case of flat-rate income taxation is higher than that in the case of lump-sum taxation.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114737241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Empirical Relationship between Fluctuation and Equilibrium in Public Goods Game","authors":"Bin Xu, Liangcong Fan, Zhijian Wang, F. Tang","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1481086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1481086","url":null,"abstract":"This is the first study on the relationship between fluctuation and equilibrium in repeated game experiment. We define fluctuation as the strategy movements. In public goods game, for example, fluctuation of an individual is the abstract value of the difference of contribution between one period and its previous period. Similarly, fluctuation of a population is the summary of the fluctuation over the whole subject population of an experimental session, and fluctuation of a group is the summary over a group, and so on. Therefore, it is natural to suppose that there must be a certain relationship between magnitude of fluctuation and deviation from equilibrium, namely, the more deviation from equilibrium, the more fluctuation; and vice versa. Employing data from two previous studies (Nikiforakis and Normann [Exp Econ, 2008] and Chen and Tang [JPE, 1998]), we examine whether there exists such a relationship from several perspectives. Our results show that, (1) at the experimental level, the average magnitude of fluctuation per round is positively related to the deviation from equilibrium; (2) both at the group level and at the individual level, the average magnitude of fluctuation is weakly positively related to deviation from equilibrium; (3) the relationship still holds when Nash Equilibrium moves to the interior of the set of feasible contributions. Briefly, we have identifies certain positive relation between fluctuation and deviation from equilibrium. This relationship might turn out to be a useful tool for examining equilibrium conditions in experiments.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127223568","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ourania Karakosta, Christos Kotsogiannis, M. Lopez-Garcia
{"title":"Does Indirect Tax Harmonization Deliver Pareto Improvements in the Presence of Global Public Goods?","authors":"Ourania Karakosta, Christos Kotsogiannis, M. Lopez-Garcia","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.1423729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1423729","url":null,"abstract":"This paper identifies conditions under which, starting from any tax distorting equilibrium, destination- and origin-based indirect tax-harmonizing reforms are potentially Pareto improving in the presence of global public goods. The first condition (unrequited transfers between governments) requires that transfers are designed in such a way that the marginal valuations of the global public goods are equalized, whereas the second (conditional revenue changes) requires that the change in global tax revenues, as a consequence of tax harmonization, is consistent with the direction of inefficiency in global public good provision relative to the (modified) Samuelson rule. Under these conditions, tax harmonization results in redistributing the gains from a reduction in global deadweight loss and any changes in global tax revenues according to the Pareto principle. And this is the case independently of the tax principle in place (destination or origin).","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115507168","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Collectively Incentive Compatible Tax Systems","authors":"Felix J. Bierbrauer","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.933588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.933588","url":null,"abstract":"This paper assumes that individuals possess private information both about their abilities and about their valuation of a public good. Individuals can undertake collective actions on order to manipulate the tax system and the decision on public good provision. Consequently, an implementable scheme of taxation has to be collectively incentive compatible. If preferences are additively separable, then an implementable tax systems has the following properties: (i) tax payments do not depend on public goods preferences and (ii) there is no scope for a collective manipulation of public goods preferences. For a quasilinear economy, the optimal tax system is explicitly characterized.","PeriodicalId":222232,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Public Goods & International Public Goods (Topic)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2006-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116030807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}