Market Effects of Voluntary Climate Action by Firms: Evidence from the Chicago Climate Exchange

Are private voluntary environmental actions by firms a sign of mismanagement, or a profitable “win-win” replacement for regulation? Empirical evidence is decidedly mixed. In this study, we use 19 years of monthly stock price returns, from 1991 to 2009, to examine the profitability of participation in CCX, a large voluntary greenhouse gas mitigation program. After controlling for systemic market risk as well as industry-specific shocks, we find statistically significant and positive excess returns for firms that announce their decision to join CCX. In addition, the progress of proposed greenhouse gas legislation (the Waxman–Markey bill) had a positive and large impact on excess returns for CCX member firms, suggesting that a major incentive for firms to join CCX may be to prepare for future regulation. Marginal abatement costs (proxied by the carbon price), on the other hand, were unrelated to excess returns. Our results imply that voluntary approaches should play a role in combating climate change, but that relying on them alone is not enough.     

气候变化视野中的自愿环境协议

气候变化问题的综合性和广泛性决定整个社会每一分子都直接或间接地对气候变化有不可分割的作用。传统环境治理思想过多地将环境管理和提高义务置于诸如政府、环保团体等公共利益卫道士之手,单纯依靠公共利益团体的力量在气候变化背景下已不足以形成有效的社会约束机制,许多高瞻远瞩的企业已意识到自身环境责任与社会形象的重要性,通过自我约束行为为缓解气候变化添砖加瓦,自愿环境协议为此提供了制度平台。国际上早已有将自愿环境协议作为气候变化应对战略的一项重要措施的实践,我国的相关试点工作也已悄然铺开。因此,如何正视自愿环境协议的柔性治理功能,以及如何促进其在我国气候变化应对机制中发挥正面作用,成为我国环境治理面临的新问题。     

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.     

Voluntary Participation and Spite in Public Good Provision Experiments: An International Comparison

This paper studies voluntary public good provision in the laboratory, in a cross-cultural experiment conducted in the United States and Japan. Our environment differs from the standard voluntary contribution mechanism because subjects first decide whether or not to participate in providing this non-excludable public good. This participation decision is conveyed to the other subject prior to the subjects' contribution decisions. We find that only the American data are consistent with the evolutionary-stable-strategy Nash equilibrium predictions, and that behavior is significantly different across countries. Japanese subjects are more likely to act spitefully in the early periods of the experiment, even though our design changes subject pairings each period so that no two subjects ever interact twice. Surprisingly, this spiteful behavior eventually leads to more efficient public good contributions for Japanese subjects than for American subjects.     

Willingness to Pay for Voluntary Climate Action and Its Determinants: Field-Experimental Evidence

The determinants of individual, voluntary climate action (VCA) in combating climate change and its potential scale are frequently debated in public but largely underresearched. We provide estimates of the willingness to individually reduce EU greenhouse gas emissions by one ton, using the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Estimates are derived from an online field experiment with a large, highly heterogenous, and Internet-representative sample of voting-aged Germans. Jointly estimating willingness to pay (WTP), non-indifference to VCA, and prior knowledge, we uncover important determinants of preferences for VCA, such as education, the information structure among the population, and exogenous environmental conditions.     

Voluntary Participation and Provision of Public Goods in Large Finite Economies

We consider a public good provision game with voluntary participation. Agents participating in the game provide a public good and pay the fees according to a mechanism (allocation rule), while nonparticipants can free‐ride on the participants. We examine how the equilibrium public good provision level is affected by enlarging the population of an economy. We introduce a condition for an allocation rule, the asymptotic uniform continuity in replication (AUCR), which requires that small changes in the population must yield only small changes in the public good provision and which is satisfied by many mechanisms. We show that under AUCR, the equilibrium level of the public good converges to zero as the economy is replicated in the sense of Milleron.     

加拿大应对气候变化下的防灾减灾战略

随着气候变化的加剧,极端天气越来越多,越来越激烈,与气象相关的灾难越来越多。不少国家已经或开始制定应对气候变化下的防灾减灾战略。有专家认为,加拿大的应急反应和灾后恢复是世界上做得最好的。本文试图从立法、防灾减灾国家战略、应急准备计划、政府职能、应急管理、国家灾害管理系统、气候变化及防灾减灾研究、基础设施应对气候变化下的标准与规范、灾害风险与薄弱环节评估、突发事件应急反应的气象预警、应急管理教育与培训、全国性防灾减灾网络等多个方面,深入研究分析加拿大应对气候变化下的防灾减灾战略,供大家参考。     

Renegotiation-Proof Climate Agreements with Full Participation: Conditions for Pareto-Efficiency

Recent contributions show that climate agreements with broad participation can be implemented as weakly renegotiation-proof equilibria in simple models of greenhouse gas abatement where each country has a binary choice between cooperating (i.e., abate emissions) or defecting (no abatement). Here we show that this result carries over to a model where countries have a continuum of emission choices. Indeed, a Pareto-efficient climate agreement can always be implemented as a weakly renegotiation-proof equilibrium, for a sufficiently high discount factor. This means that one need not trade-off a “narrow but deep” treaty with a “broad but shallow” treaty.     

人力资源管理：全球化趋势下的挑战与对策

本文简要分析了人力资源管理理论的发展和人力资源管理理论的贡献。在此基础上，分析了在全球化趋势下人力资源管理面临的挑战，提出了迎接人力资源全球化的对策。     

Voluntary Participation in International Environmental Agreements and Authority Structures in a Federation: A Note

Environmental and Resource Economics - We examine how a voluntary participation decision in international environmental negotiations affects the endogenous authority structure in a federation. In...     

自愿参与型环境规制与企业技术创新——公众关注度和市场进程的调节作用

“波特假说”有效性一直是学术界颇具争议的话题,然而现有文献对于自愿参与型环境规制与企业技术创新的关系讨论较少,也缺乏对其作用情景因素的关注。基于2011—2019年730家沪深A股上市企业面板数据,采用负二项回归模型和倾向得分匹配法,分析我国上市企业在市场化进程影响下,自愿参与型环境规制、公众关注度对企业技术创新的影响。结果发现,自愿参与型环境规制对企业技术创新具有正向影响;公众关注度在自愿参与型环境规制对企业技术创新的影响过程中起正向调节作用;自愿参与型环境规制、公众关注度和市场化进程交互项结果表明,企业位于市场化程度较高地区时,公众关注度对自愿参与型环境规制与企业技术创新的调节作用更显著。结论不仅丰富了“波特假说”相关研究,还为我国企业提高信息共享意识以及政府优化市场环境提供了微观证据。     

Improving Environmental Performance: A Challenge for Romania

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of pollution abatement and control expenditure at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a multilevel regression model. Our findings suggest that, although Romania has improved its environmental performance, formal and informal regulations are still only partially developed owing to the difficulties of economic transition, and heterogeneity across regions remains considerable.     

Valuing Climate Change Effects Upon UK Agricultural GHG Emissions: Spatial Analysis of a Regulating Ecosystem Service

This article provides estimates of the physical and economic value of changes in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions projected to arise from climate change induced shifts in UK agricultural land use during the period 2004–2060. In physical terms, significant regional differences are predicted with the intensity of agricultural GHG emissions increasing in the upland north and western parts of the UK and decreasing in the lowland south and east of the country. Overall these imply relative modest increases in the physical quantity of emissions. However, rapid rises in the expected marginal value of such emissions translate these trends into major increases in their economic costs over the period considered.     

Asian Participation and Performance at the Olympic Games

This paper examines Asian exceptionalism at the Olympics. Northeast Asian countries conform to the statistical norm, whereas the rest of Asia lags, but this result obscures underlying distinctions. Asian women do better than men. Non‐Northeast Asia's relative underperformance is due to the men. Asian performance is uneven across events, finding more success in culturally connected and weight‐stratified contests. The models imply that China, Japan, and South Korea will place among the top 10 medaling countries at the 2016 Games, whereas China will continue to close the medal gap with the United States.     

支持卓越研究的加拿大发现资助计划及其启示

本文研究分析了加拿大自然科学与工程研究理事会的发现资助计划,研究了发现资助计划的特色、预算、遴选标准。通过它对世界级最好研究人员的支持、设立“发现加速器奖”和它资助研究产生的国际影响三个方面,重点研究了该计划对卓越研究的支持。希望对我国研究计划的设立有一些启示。     

Climate Policy Under Fat-Tailed Risk: An Application of Dice

Uncertainty plays a significant role in evaluating climate policy, and fat-tailed uncertainty may dominate policy advice. Should we make our utmost effort to prevent the arbitrarily large impacts of climate change under deep uncertainty? In order to answer to this question, we propose a new way of investigating the impact of (fat-tailed) uncertainty on optimal climate policy: the curvature of the optimal carbon tax against the uncertainty. We find that the optimal carbon tax increases as the uncertainty about climate sensitivity increases, but it does not accelerate as implied by Weitzman’s Dismal Theorem. We find the same result in a wide variety of sensitivity analyses. These results emphasize the importance of balancing the costs of climate change against its benefits, also under deep uncertainty.     

加拿大应对重大气候灾害的经验和措施

加拿大大部分地区地处北美寒冷地带,在漫长的冬季,寒冷时间较长,且暴风雪较多,十分恶劣的冰雪天气给加拿大带来了巨大的损失,也使加拿大积累了很多应对严重自然灾害的经验,逐步摸索了很多有效的措施。 本文重点介绍一些加拿大在应对严重自然灾害和突发事件方面的经验和措施,如：通过立法规范重大自然灾害和突发事件的管理工作,建立全社会的防灾减灾责任机制和服务体系,充分做好灾害前准备工作,重视气候变化和防灾减灾领域的研究、加强防灾减灾科研投入,政府的正确引导和全民教育,先进的气候预报预警,全方位的信息服务,有组织的统一行动等,供有关方面参考。     

Climate Policy with Tied Hands: Optimal Resource Taxation Under Implementation Lags

In this paper we present a Stackelberg differential game to study the dynamic interaction between a polluting firm and a regulator who sets pollution limits overtime. At each time, the firm settles emissions taking into account the fine for non-compliance with the pollution limit, and balances current costs of investments in a capital stock which allows for future emission reductions. We derive two main results. First, we show that the optimal pollution limit decreases as the capital stock increases, while both emissions and the level of non-compliance decrease. Second, we find that offering fine discounts in exchange for firm’s capital investment is socially desirable. We numerically obtain the optimal value of such discount, which crucially depends on the severity of the fine. In the limiting scenario with a very large severity of the fine, the optimal discount implies that no penalties are levied, since the firm shows adequate adaptation progress through capital investment.