Do technology externalities justify restrictions on emission permit trading?

International emission trading is an important flexibility mechanism, but its use has been often restricted on the ground that access to international carbon credits can undermine the domestic abatement effort reducing the incentive to innovate and, eventually, lowering the pace of climate policy-induced technological change. This paper examines the economics that is behind these concerns by studying how a cap to the trade of carbon offsets influences innovation, technological change, and welfare. By using a standard game of abatement and R&D, we investigate the main mechanisms that shape these relationships. We also use a numerical integrated assessment model that features environmental and technology externalities to quantify how limits to the volume, the timing, and the regional allocation of carbon offsets affect climate policy costs and the incentive to invest in innovation and low-carbon technologies.Results indicate that, for moderate caps on the amount tradable emissions permits and sufficiently high technology spillovers, global innovation and technical change would increase and that this additional innovative effort could lead to economic efficiency gains. The numerical analysis confirms that when constraints are close to 15% of domestic abatement, efficiency losses are small because they are partly compensated by more technological spillovers and lower energy prices. Under a broad range of parameters, restrictions are costly for the constrained countries, but always beneficial for unconstrained ones.     

Monitoring Banking Sector Fragility: A Multivariate Logit Approach

This article explores how a multivariate logit model of theprobability of a banking crisis can be used to monitor bankingsector fragility. The proposed approach relies on readily availabledata, and the fragility assessment has a clear interpretationbased on in-sample statistics. The model has better in-sampleperformance than currently available alternatives, and the monitoringsystem can be tailored to fit the preferences of decisionmakersregarding type I and type II errors. The framework can be usefulas a preliminary screen to economize on precautionary costs.     

Positional learning with noise

We propose (and test experimentally) a model of observational learning in which players have social preferences. To this end, we design an experiment–based on a classic parlor game known as the Chinos Game–in which we vary (by way of an exogenous iid stochastic process) the probability of getting the prize in the event of a correct guess. By this design, we are able to estimate more efficiently players’ sensitivity to difference in payoffs (and how this sensitivity affects information decoding along the sequence). We also condition our estimates upon additional information on subjects’ socio-demographics, risk attitudes and cognitive reflection by way of a questionnaire that we collect at the end of each session.     

Basel Core Principles and bank soundness: Does compliance matter?

This paper studies whether compliance with the Basel Core Principles for effective banking supervision (BCPs) is associated with bank soundness. Using data for over 3000 banks in 86 countries, we find that neither the overall index of BCP compliance nor its individual components are robustly associated with bank risk measured by individual bank Z-scores. We also fail to find a relationship between BCP compliance and systemic risk measured by a system-wide Z-score.     

A comparison of the estimates of expected utility and non-expected-utility preference functionals

This paper extends the literature on the estimation of expected utility and non-expected-utility preference functionals (and the consequent exploration of the superiority of non-expected-utility over expected utility preference functionals) to a comparison of two different ways (pairwise choice and complete ranking) of experimentally obtaining data on such preferences. What is revealed is that the magnitude of the subject error is clearly conditional on the elicitation method used and, rather alarmingly, that the preference functional apparently employed by the subject may also be conditional on the elicitation method.     

The effect of traditionally marginalized groups in advertising on consumer response

Increasingly, national brands have cast people from marginalized groups in advertising. It is important to understand the elements that influence consumers’ responses to advertisements featuring groups who have been traditionally excluded from advertising campaigns. Although consumers may wish to buy brands that support their own views on human rights and equality, we propose that consumers in the target market may be uncomfortable if the group portrayal contradicts their beliefs about the topic, concept, or social groups in the ad. Across two studies, we show that when an ad creates this type of internal contradiction within consumers, it may elicit a more negative response than an ad portraying a more traditional model. However, we also find preliminary evidence that using models from marginalized groups can be more effective than using more traditional models—as long as such portrayals do not violate certain target consumers’ schemas. The implications of these results will be discussed.     

¿Hacia dónde evoluciona el tejido social contemporáneo? Nuevas tecnologías y viejas tendencias socioeconómicas

En este artículo se investiga si las sociedades asisten a una nueva revolución industrial, y cuál es la repercusión del cambio tecnológico en el tejido socioeconómico, principalmente con respecto al empleo, la distribución de la renta, las condiciones de trabajo y las relaciones laborales. Los autores sostienen que los procesos de innovación y la expansión de lo que denominan «automatización inteligente» tienden a exacerbar los actuales patrones de desigualdad de poder y de renta, que ya estaban presentes mucho antes la aparición de las tecnologías en cuestión. A tenor de esos procesos, proponen algunas recomendaciones para la formulación de políticas.     

Banking on the principles: Compliance with Basel Core Principles and bank soundness

This study finds that banks receive more favorable Moody's financial strength ratings in countries with better compliance with Basel Core Principles related to information provision. The results are robust to controlling for broad indexes of institutional quality, macroeconomic variables, sovereign ratings, and reverse causality. Compliance with other Core Principles does not affect ratings robustly. Measuring bank soundness through Z-scores yields broadly similar results for advanced and emerging markets. Countries aiming to upgrade banking regulation and supervision should consider giving priority to information provision over other elements of the core principles.     

Eliciting,Applying And Exploring Multidimensional Welfare Weights: Evidence From The Field

By combining primary data on dimension importance collected in the field from three different samples and nationally representative survey data from the Dominican Republic, we offer a twofold contribution. The first one comes from an unincentivized questionnaire experiment, where the significance of the treatment effect shows that life domains are valued differently in a poverty vs a well‐being framework. This poses important questions on the anatomy of dimension importance and on the use of weights in empirical analyses, and opens the door to what we call a “concordance paradox” related to the very essence of the constructs of poverty and well‐being. As a second contribution, we employ the sets of weights collected in the field to assess the trend of multidimensional poverty and well‐being in the country. We find that the picking one set of weights or another is not a trivial choice, as they lead to opposite assessment results.     

Understanding intertemporal choices

Previous experimental results show clearly that many subjects do not optimize when solving a life-cycle consumption problem. What do they do? This paper attempts to resolve this question, looking at the discounting, hyperbolic and rolling models as possible explanations. Data from two experiments (one an experiment with a typical subject pool and the second an experiment with subjects from the CentER panel) is used, and the advantage of having experimental data is exploited, which means that one can actually estimate the hyperbolic model. It is shown that the (exponential) discounting model appears to give the best explanation – suggesting that subjects do look ahead (as they should) but increasingly less as time passes (as they should not in the context of these experiments).