Coalitions, agreements and efficiency

If agents negotiate openly and form coalitions, can they reach efficient agreements? We address this issue within a class of coalition formation games with externalities where agents’ preferences depend solely on the coalition structure they are associated with. We derive Ray and Vohra's [Equilibrium binding agreements, J. Econ. Theory 73 (1997) 30-78] notion of equilibrium binding agreements using von Neumann and Morgenstern [Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1944] abstract stable set and then extend it to allow for arbitrary coalitional deviations (as opposed to nested deviations assumed originally). We show that, while the extended notion facilitates the attainment of efficient agreements, inefficient agreements can nevertheless arise, even if utility transfers are possible.     

Climate Change and the Stability of Water Allocation Agreements

We analyse agreements on river water allocation between riparian countries. Besides being efficient, water allocation agreements need to be stable in order to be effective in increasing the efficiency of water use. In this paper we assess the stability of water allocation agreements using a game theoretic model. We consider the effects of climate change and the choice of a sharing rule on stability. Our results show that a decrease in mean river flow decreases the stability of an agreement, while an increased variance can have a positive or a negative effect on stability. An agreement where the downstream country is allocated a fixed amount of water has the lowest stability compared to other sharing rules. These results hold for both constant and flexible non-water transfers.     

Redistribution and Small Coalitions of Friends

When side marketing trade is perfect, linear taxation of retradeable commodities is the only scheme that survives attempts to arbitrage. In this paper, I discuss tax schemes when side trading is imperfect in the sense that commodities can only be re-exchanged within coalitions no larger than two people. In the framework of a two-class economy, I identify coalitions which might have an incentive to form and provide a characterisation for the Pareto-efficient tax scheme. The tax formula has a very simple form and strongly resembles the formula for the no-side-trade case. In a numerical exercise, the constraints imposed on policy by an imperfect side trading process are found to be almost as tough as those imposed by perfect side trading.     

Rivalry, Exclusion, and Coalitions

This paper analyzes a model where groups can attain exclusive ownership of a resource by means of a contest. We show that more concave production technologies and more egalitarianism within groups induce higher levels of social conflict. We then study endogenous coalition formation. Under cooperative exploitation of the resource, the grand coalition is the efficient partition but there exists a strong tendency toward bipartisan conflicts. Under noncooperative exploitation, conflict can ex ante Pareto dominate peaceful access and it becomes more difficult to support the grand coalition as a stable structure.     

基于稳定发展视角的银行监管效果分析

结合全球101个国家银行发展和67个国家银行稳定的数据,以实现银行业的稳定可持续发展为银行监管目标,根据收入水平和IMF原则将样本国家分为五类,分析了代表性监管措施对不同收入水平国家和地区的监管效果。实证研究表明,中高收入国家的银行业务活动监管、外部治理和资本监管同时可以实现银行业稳定可持续发展;中低收入国家过高的业务活动限制和资本监管不利于银行业发展,金融集团控制和监管独立性反而会增加不稳定性;低收入国家过高的业务活动限制和资本监管水平不利于银行业稳定发展,外部治理和官方监管权力更有利于实现银行监管目标。     

Climate Change,Heterogeneities, and Stability of International Fiscal Harmonization

This paper analyzes the instability introduced into multilateral agreements by two types of heterogeneity: heterogeneity of countries (size and number of producing members) and heterogeneity of lobbies (asymmetric influence at the national versus the international level). The work extends theoretical prospective analyses on environmental taxation, as illustrated by the harmonization of fuel taxes. We show that the acceptability of the tax set at the multilateral level depends on the type of coalitions that participate in the multilateral negotiation (size and number of producing countries) and the asymmetry in the local (state-level) power of lobbies during negotiations.     

Endogenous Formation of Coalitions in Noncooperative Games

In this paper we extend the definitions of coalition-proof Nash equilibrium and communication-proof equilibrium to situations of partial communication. Then we use the model of endogenous formation of coalitions of Aumann and Myerson to find that one of these situations in which the corresponding equilibrium exists will be endogenously determined by the players in the game.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C70, C72.     

An Enforcement-Coalition Model: Fishermen and Authorities Forming Coalitions

The paper sets up a four-stage enforcement model of fish quotas. The purpose of the paper is to show how the level of enforcement set by the authorities affects the way fishermen form coalitions. We show that a high level of control effort yields less co-operation among fishermen, while in the case of low control effort, coalitions are somewhat self-enforcing. The paper further discusses how the optimal enforcement level changes when the coalition formation among authorities changes: centralised, partly centralised and decentralised authorities. We show that decentralised authorities set a lower level of control effort compared to the centralised authorities. The theoretical results are illustrated by simulations of the Baltic Sea cod fishery.The authors acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions from Frank Jensen and Niels Vestergaard.     

European Climate Policy Effectiveness: Convergence Analysis for per Capita CO2 Emissions

International Advances in Economic Research -     

The Challenges of Climate Policy

Climate policy planners and the public should be aware of both economic challenges and arguments that may influence the intensity of the climate policies with which they have to cope. This article examines six economic challenges: cap‐and‐trade versus taxes, non‐price regulations, energy efficiency policies, mitigation versus adaptation, trade effects, and transmission planning. Three additional challenges affect the end itself: ‘fat tails’, discount rates, and whether environmental protection should be evaluated by willingness to pay. If future generations cannot compensate the present for climate policy costs, climate policy is inherently redistributive and cannot be evaluated through cost–benefit analysis alone.     

会计制度的框架与有效性评价--基于制度经济学和系统论的视角

会计不是天然存在的,从制度经济学和系统论的角度来看,它是人们为了达到降低交易成本的目的而赋予了较多期望职能、人为制造的一种信息系统.但是,会计的期望职能往往不能自发实现,它需要会计制度提供保证,这就构成了会计制度的动因.从而,会计制度就不再是一般意义上会计的具体操作指南,而是基于会计的期望职能和动因基础之上,由正式的规则、规则的实施机制和非正式约束构成的一系列制度安排.政府对企业会计信息的生成、发布、传递等所制定的规则、规范、监督实施机制以及会计行业的自律等机制共同构成了会计制度(accountinginstitution).从结构上来看,会计制度包含三个要素,形成了一个相互影响和相互作用的框架,各要素的有效性及协同作用的有效性共同决定了会计制度的有效性.     

公众集聚度与政府审计质量——基于公共选择理论的分析

公众参与能否在政府审计工作中发挥积极作用,是政府审计研究领域值得关注的问题。本文运用公共选择理论,分析我国社会公众参与政府审计的经济动因及实现路径,并以2002~2006年我国省级政府审计机关为样本,从经济集聚度、地域集聚度、教育集聚度和信息集聚度等4个维度衡量公众集聚度,研究发现:公众集聚度与政府审计质量显著正相关,公众在地域集聚度、教育集聚度和信息集聚度方面的增强,有利于公众降低监督成本、增加监督收益,从而激发公众的审计需求并推动政府审计质量提升。因此,政府应改进政府审计结果公告实践,从制度上引导公众参与政府审计并完善公众诉求的传导机制,以便充分发挥公众的监督合力在提升政府审计质量中的作用。     

气候变化的经济分析

气候变化在经济学上提出了独一无二的挑战,这是迄今为止范围最大、规模最大的市场失灵现象。文章探讨了经济发展与气候变化之间的互动关系：从市场失灵的角度切入,通过阐述气候变化对经济发展的影响,探讨政府和企业对气候变化所产生的影响做出的反应,从而提出中国应对这种“市场失灵”现象应采取的措施。     

The Influence of Climate on Migration

This paper provides an overview of research into the phenomenon of whether climatic factors, such as temperature and weather‐related disasters, affect the decision to migrate. As an example, we examine migration flows from 198 countries to Australia for the time span from 1980 to 2015. Our results show that temperature does not have a robust, significant effect on migration flows, while weather‐related disasters do significantly affect flows to Australia.     

The Socio-scientific Construction of Global Climate Crisis

This article adapts and applies a securitisation framework to produce an analytical explanation for the heightened geopolitical status of climate change over the past decade, as demonstrated by the breakthrough Paris Agreement of 2015. Rather than speech acts invoking security, the focus of this analysis is on the socio-scientific discourse of global climate crisis that emerged in the several year period leading to the 2009 COP 15 conference in Copenhagen. Two types of experts—contributory and interactional—are identified as the essential and interdependent actors that engaged in ‘crisification’, a novel crisis-based perspective on political agenda setting, in which climate crisis served as a primary discursive device employed by prominent advocates of urgent action. Contributory experts, that is, authoritative climate scientists and their institutions, together with interactional experts—non-scientist social actors who appropriated and mediated scientific data and knowledge in framing climate change as a global crisis—constituted an extended epistemic community of climate advocates. Through an array of speech acts, this extended community effectively co-constructed a convincing climate crisis discourse that consisted of quantitative data artefacts based on CO₂ concentration and global mean temperature, and qualitative invocations of existential threat to human civilisation, which contributed to the ascent of climate change on the global political agenda. In proposing crisification as a complement to securitisation, the article offers a theoretical innovation that facilitates constructivist analysis of issues framed as crises, including geopolitical problems in certain non-military sectors where crisis is a favoured label for perceived threats to core values.     

Climate Policy Under Uncertain and Heterogeneous Climate Damages

We highlight that uncertainty about climate damages and the fact that damages will be distributed heterogeneously across the global population can jointly be an argument for substantially stricter climate policy even if uncertainty and heterogeneity in isolation are not. The reason is that a given climate risk borne by fewer people implies greater welfare losses. However, these losses turn out to be significant only if society is both risk and inequality averse and if climate damages are highly heterogeneous. We discuss how insurance and self-insurance of climate risk could theoretically mitigate this joint effect of uncertainty and heterogeneity and thus admit weaker climate policy. Insurance provides more efficient risk sharing and self-insurance allows strongly impacted individuals to compensate damages by increasing savings. We first use a simple analytical model to introduce the different concepts and then provide more realistic results from the integrated assessment model DICE.     

内幕交易监管效率与上市公司高管薪酬-一个理论模型

本文从公司管理层和外部投资者之间的信息不对称出发,在一般均衡框架下建立同时考虑上市公司高管薪酬、股票价格、内幕交易监管行为的模型。模型表明:如果内部交易者本身是上市公司CEO,除非给予CEO某种形式的额外补偿,否则对于此类型的内幕交易不论怎样加强监管,都不会是有效率的,市场将不存在均衡。我们证明了使市场存在均衡的CEO补偿计划的存在性。对模型的模拟计算表明:内幕交易监管行动与CEO补偿计划的结合,可以提升市场的效率。考虑监管行为的成本后,本文给出最优内幕交易监管行动的数量形式。     

Climate Change and Adaptation: The Case of Nigerian Agriculture

The present research offers an economic assessment of climate change impacts on the four major crop families characterizing Nigerian agriculture. The evaluation is performed by shocking land productivity in a computable general equilibrium model tailored to replicate Nigerian economic development up to 2050. The detail of land uses in the model has been increased by differentiating land types per agro-ecological zones. Uncertainty about future climate is captured, using, as inputs, yield changes computed by a crop model under ten general circulation models runs. Climate change turns out to be negative for Nigeria in the medium term, with production losses and increase in crop prices, higher food dependency on foreign imports, and GDP losses in all the simulations after 2025. In a second part of the paper, a cost effectiveness analysis of adaptation in Nigerian agriculture is conducted. The adaptation practices considered are a mix of cheaper “soft measures” and more costly “hard” irrigation expansion. The main result is that the cost effectiveness of the whole package depends crucially on the possibility of implementing adaptation by exploiting low-cost opportunities which show a benefit-cost ratio larger than one in all the climate regimes.