Does Disclosure Reduce Pollution? Evidence from India’s Green Rating Project

Public disclosure programs that collect and disseminate information about firms’ environmental performance are increasingly popular in both developed and developing countries. Yet little is known about whether they actually improve environmental performance, particularly in the latter setting. We use detailed plant-level survey data to evaluate the impact of India’s Green Rating Project (GRP) on the environmental performance of the country’s largest pulp and paper plants. We find that the GRP drove significant reductions in pollution loadings among dirty plants but not among cleaner ones. This result comports with statistical and anecdotal evaluations of similar disclosure programs. We also find that plants located in wealthier communities were more responsive to GRP ratings, as were single-plant firms.     

Flight Delays and Passenger Preferences: An Axiomatic Approach

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) defines a flight as “delayed” if it arrives 15+ minutes late. The DOT “flight counting” delay definition is used to rank airline/airport service quality. An obvious caveat of counting flight delays is that the duration of delay plays no role in the delay count. The purpose of this article is to propose an aggregate delay measure that is sensitive to the distribution of time delayed among passengers. The importance of this work is that our derived delay measure reflects passenger preferences rather than the arbitrary delay cutoff established by the DOT. We model passengers' preference ordering using the criteria that passengers prefer fewer, shorter, and more equal delay times.     

Impact of copula choice on the modeling of crop yield basis risk

A number of problems in agricultural economics involve modeling joint distributions for which the assumption of multivariate normality may not be warranted. Yet, very little work has been conducted evaluating competing methods for modeling joint dependence. We develop a simulation framework to evaluate the bias and efficiency impacts of copula choice in the context of evaluating county‐to‐farm basis risk. The results suggest significant differences in performance across various copulas and approaches. The findings have important implications for risk analysis, insurance, and policy modeling problems in agriculture regarding the selection of method to model dependence among random variables.     

British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition

This paper examines the role of competition in British productivity performance over the period from the late-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. A detailed review of the evidence suggests that the weakness of competition from the 1930s to the 1970s undermined productivity growth but since the 1970s stronger competition has been a key ingredient in ending relative economic decline. The productivity implications of the retreat from competition resulted in large part from interactions with idiosyncratic British institutional structures in terms of corporate governance and industrial relations. This account extends familiar insights from cliometrics both analytically and chronologically.     

Trade openness and government size of small developing countries

This paper examines the causal effect that trade openness has on government size in small developing countries (SDCs). We use the construction of the trade cost variables based on Baltic Dry Index in primary goods as instruments of trade openness to address the endogeneity issue. We find that the increase in trade openness leads to an increase in government size: a 1 percent expansion in trade openness (trade GDP ratio) raises government consumption over GDP ratio by approximately 0.1–0.2 percentage points on average. Its quantitative significance emphasizes the importance of rethinking the costs and benefits of trade openness for SDCs.     

Strategic Research Partnerships: A Managerial Perspective

Private sector incentives to participate in research partnerships can be grouped roughly into two categories: cost-economizing incentives and strategic incentives. This paper summarizes the argument in two streams of thought that are often identified with these two sides: the transaction-cost/incomplete contracts approach and the strategic management approach. The paper recounts business motives to engage in research partnerships in each and points out that differentiating between more traditional economic perspectives (transaction costs, incomplete contracts) and strategic management/organizational theory perspectives (strategic networks, resource-dependent view, dynamic capabilities, knowledge-based view, organizational learning, options approach) may not be as sharp as one might suppose at first. The complementary nature of these perspectives should be encouraging for theoreticians looking for a more integrated model of collaboration.     

Gibbs posterior inference on value-at-risk

ABSTRACT

Accurate estimation of value-at-risk (VaR) and assessment of associated uncertainty is crucial for both insurers and regulators, particularly in Europe. Existing approaches link data and VaR indirectly by first linking data to the parameter of a probability model, and then expressing VaR as a function of that parameter. This indirect approach exposes the insurer to model misspecification bias or estimation inefficiency, depending on whether the parameter is finite- or infinite-dimensional. In this paper, we link data and VaR directly via what we call a discrepancy function, and this leads naturally to a Gibbs posterior distribution for VaR that does not suffer from the aforementioned biases and inefficiencies. Asymptotic consistency and root-n concentration rate of the Gibbs posterior are established, and simulations highlight its superior finite-sample performance compared to other approaches.     

Disaggregated Earnings and Stock Prices: Evidence from International Listed Shipping Firms

The goal of this study is to investigate the impact of earnings from vessel sales on stock prices for international listed shipping firms. The empirical findings show that operating income from vessel sales has a higher power in explaining stock prices than operating earnings only as a sole piece of accounting information for future profitability, investment opportunities, and firm valuation. The testing period is from 2000 to 2009. The methodologies are those of panel cointegration and panel causality tests. The implications are very crucial, since managers may manipulate annual earnings by such non-operating activities.     

Old Wine in a New Bottle: Growth Convergence Dynamics in the EU

In this paper, we explore convergence of real per capita output across the European Union (EU) countries, as well as the transitional behavior of possible underlying factors that are responsible for any convergence or divergence pattern. The new panel convergence methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (2007) is employed in a production function growth accounting approach and data from the Total Economy Database and the Total Economy Growth Accounting Database. The empirical findings suggest that the EU countries form two distinct convergent clubs, exhibiting considerable heterogeneity in the underlying growth factors. These findings should help policy makers in designing appropriate growth-oriented programs as well as in setting priorities in their implementation.