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.     

The Construction of Risk Management Credibility Within Corporate Boardrooms

Despite various corporate collapses over the last decades, risk management is increasingly influential across organizations worldwide, as if the apparatus’ credibility was impermeable to scandals that, from critical angles, cast doubt on its efficacy. Relying on a cultural perspective of analysis highlighting the range of social processes that protect prevailing institutions’ legitimacy from aberrations, we examined the sense-making approaches employed by corporate boardroom actors to maintain their confidence in the credibility of the risk management apparatus despite being exposed to a continuous flow of corporate failures pointing to risk management efficacy limitations. Specifically, we conducted 35 interviews with corporate board stakeholders, mostly board members and corporate consultants. Our analysis indicates that actors involved in risk management processes tend to interpret aberration cases through perspectives that put the blame on some implementation deficiency, thereby ensuring that risk management's core assumptions are not questioned. These perspectives point to a defensive system of thought grounded in the director and consultancy communities, whose main referents are subject to intense work and re-conceptualization in the aftermath of aberrations, thereby providing community members with the means to make sense of the frictions of organizational life in ways that maintain the legitimacy of the risk management apparatus.     

Virtual research universes and research management

The analysis of large research production, such as universities, towns, cities or even countries, can be performed in several ways. These various approaches can range from the experts′ feeling to a more precise analysis of co-authors′ productivity. The various results obtained introduce the concept of ‘virtual research universes’ where the global perception of the production hides the sharp reality of objectives and subjects. The ability to apply the various methodologies and tools to make such analysis can reduce misunderstanding and misleading positions, especially in funding, planning and project evaluation. This paper takes as an example the production of physics laboratories in Marseille (from the INSPEC databae), and shows how the various levels of analysis can move from virtual to real research universes, thus helping the experts in their decision process.     

Hybrid Cat Bonds

Natural catastrophes attract regularly the media attention and have become a source of public concern. From a financial viewpoint, they represent idiosyncratic risks, diversifiable at the world level. But for various reasons, reinsurance markets are unable to cope with this risk completely. Insurance-linked securities, such as catastrophe (cat) bonds, have been issued to complete the international risk transfer process, but their development is disappointing so far. This article argues that downside risk aversion and ambiguity aversion explain their limited success. Hybrid cat bonds, combining the transfer of cat risk with protection against a stock market crash, are proposed to complete the market. The article shows that replacing simple cat bonds with hybrid cat bonds would lead to an increase in market volume.     

How efficiency shapes market impact

We develop a theory for the market impact of large trading orders, which we call metaorders because they are typically split into small pieces and executed incrementally. Market impact is empirically observed to be a concave function of metaorder size, i.e. the impact per share of large metaorders is smaller than that of small metaorders. We formulate a stylized model of an algorithmic execution service and derive a fair pricing condition, which says that the average transaction price of the metaorder is equal to the price after trading is completed. We show that at equilibrium the distribution of trading volume adjusts to reflect information, and dictates the shape of the impact function. The resulting theory makes empirically testable predictions for the functional form of both the temporary and permanent components of market impact. Based on the commonly observed asymptotic distribution for the volume of large trades, it says that market impact should increase asymptotically roughly as the square root of metaorder size, with average permanent impact relaxing to about two-thirds of peak impact.     

Regional clusters of innovative activity in Europe: are social capital and geographical proximity key determinants?

Finding proper policy instruments to promote productivity growth features prominently in the Europe 2020 strategy and is central in many national as well as European policy debates. In view of the increased mobility of high-skilled workers in Europe, ongoing globalization and increased interregional and international co-operation, location patterns of innovative activity may be subject to drastic changes. A proper understanding of location patterns of innovative outputs can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of national and European placed-based innovation policies. Building on the literature on the knowledge production function, the aim of this article is to explain the observed differences in the production of innovative outputs across European regions. Our main research question is whether geographical proximity and social capital are important vehicles of knowledge transmission in Europe. Several other variables are used to control for structural differences across European regions. We find support for the hypothesis that both social capital and geographical proximity are important factors in explaining the observed differences in the production of innovative output across European regions.     

Does education promote social capital? Evidence from IV analysis and nonparametric-bound analysis

This study uses the British National Child Development Study to examine the effect of educational attainment on social capital at the individual level. Social trust and membership of voluntary groups are considered as two basic indicators of social capital. We employ the IV analysis and nonparametric bound analysis to tackle the problem of education endogeneity. Both the approaches reveal that the OLS estimator of the educational effect suffers from an upward bias in the study of group membership. We do not observe any significant bias in the educational effect on social trust. Our empirical findings indicate that education has a positive influence in promoting social trust and membership of voluntary groups.